Preliminary Class Business

• course evaluations
  
  
• make-up exam for students who missed the reading exam:
  • Thur. March 14th, 11:00-11:50
  • Pick up exam from Janet Mallen in English Dept. office at 11; exam will be taken in South Hall 2716; return exam to Janet at 11:50
    
    
• 8-page essay due in class on Friday (sample topics)

Layer 1: Califia is about the history of building California (LA)

It is appropriate to use the word "pilgrimage" in regard to the Califia because, put one way the novel is about the vision-quest, the dream-quest that built California and Los Angeles—or "Paradise":

• California, according to the novel, arose as an act of imagination
  
  
• California was the dream of the Seekers , Players , and Builders
  
  
• California is the land of gold, water, energy, media—and, most recently—silicon, all empires built half on reality and half on dream (i.e., the crazy mix of illusion and desire and addiction that was the Spanish and American grab for land, the gold rush, the oil rush, the water wars, the newspaper and Hollywood empires, etc.)

Layer 2: Califia is about the history of media, and history as media

Given the fact that so much of California is made out of the stuff of dream and imagination, one of the empires upon which the state was built is especially important to Califia: media. Ultimately, the novel is less interested in gold than it is in the media that tell us about the rush for gold (and for "Paradise" in general) that built California. It is media that is the real treasure trove that the novel seeks. We might even say that in the novel it is the history of media that enacts the history of California:

Ancestral Environment of Signs   landmarks Oral Culture   oral culture Numeracy and Early Literacy   accounts and deeds, etc.   genealogical lists and charts Manuscript Culture   manuscripts, letters, journals, etc. Print Culture   newspaper clippings, legal documents, etc. Audiovisual Culture   photos   film   music (e.g., Grateful Dead) Digital Culture   digital media (e.g., GIS maps) Calvin's "docudramas"

How does one read Califia? A typical pattern of reading:

Press on the "follow me" or page number at the lower right corner of each screen to accept the default, linear reading order:

• Journeys: South East North West
  
  
• Paths within each journey: Augusta Kaye Calvin
  
  
• Within each narration: stay with the linear reading? digress into the historical media?

One experiences a build-up of tension and frustration when reading:

• Either one follows discipline and stays with the linear reading order, therefore feeling the frustration of passing by all those tempting links
  
  
• Or one strays into the links and feels the frustration of not "progressing" in the story
  
  
• In both cases, the relation between the "story line" and the historical media seems antithetical: the media blocks or distracts one from the story

But then a realization:

• The "story line" related to the three foreground characters (Augusta, Kaye, Calvin) is actually the thinnest and least interesting aspect of the work—at least as the characters are developed in the early journeys. The timing of the characterization and plot is such that the characters do not become really interesting until later (e.g., Augusta's tears for her dad and mourning for her mother; Calvin's piercing discovery of his identity and his mother; Kaye and Calvin's budding love affair)
  
  
• In fact, what Califia really asks is that we surrender our hold on the foreground or surface story line and commit ourselves to the bottomless depths of the historical documents. (This is the quintessentially hypertextual moment in the work: the point where it diverges from print narrative.)
  
  
• Because of the way the material is timed in Califia (i.e., the timing of our encounter with various materials), the thick historical documentation is actually more compelling earlier
  
  
  
• In short, to read Califia successfully, one has to be able to make the mental turn that allows for what might be called the "epiphany of the documents":
  
  

  Espen J. Aarseth on "Aporia" and "Epiphany," Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, pp. 91-21: [On the "epiphany" moment in hypertext fictions] This is the sudden revelation that replaces the aporia, a seeming detail with an unexpected, salvaging effect: the link out. The hypertext epiphany, unlike James Joyce's "sudden spiritual manifestation" (Abrams 1981, 54), is immanent: a planned construct rather than an unplanned contingency. Together, this pair of master tropes constitutes the dynamic of hypertext discourse: the dialectic between searching and finding typical of games in general. The aporia-epiphany pair is thus not a narrative structure but constitutes a more fundamental layer of human experience, from which narratives are spun. Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (pp. 161-62): [referring to a student hypertext story] The act of navigating from one consciousness to the other reinforces the separateness of the three fragile creatures and reenacts the gesture of connection. We are in the apartment with them; we see them with the exterior clarity of a film and the interiority of a novel. Such an expressive moment marks the emergence of a new narrative convention, which we might call a panoramic close-up (building on film techniques) or a composite epiphany (building on short-story aesthetics). By rotating our point of view at a single moment of dramatic illumination, we capture both the shared reality and the separate experiences that compose it.        The kaleidoscopic power of the computer allows us to tell stories that more truly reflect our turn-of-the-century sensibility. We no longer believe in a single reality, a single integrating view of the world, or even the reliability of a single angle of perception. Yet we retain the core human desire to fix reality on one canvas, to express all of what we see in an integrated and shapely manner. The solution is the kaleidoscopic canvas that can capture the world as it looks from many perspectives—complex and perhaps ultimately unknowable but still coherent.

Layer 3: What We Learn About History in Califia

The experience of history in the documents: a history of history itself:

• Superficial layer: history as narrative (e.g., Augusta's chronological narrative, genealogical lists)
  
  
• Deeper: history as annals (related to early literacy)
  
  
• Deeper yet: history as myth (related to oral culture)
  
  
• Deepest: "no gold", but history as instability and change:
  
  
  • The displacement of the Chumash people (the "Diggers")
    
    
  • The migration of the "Seekers," "Players," and "Builders" to California (from Samuel Walker ultimately to Augusta "digging" in her backyard)
    
    
  • The "floating" of property boundaries, contracts, and other great California scams
    
    
  • The contemporary California of the "drive-in"
    
    
  • Underlying all the stories of displacement and instability: the "geological certainties" of the land itself: earthquake, fire, wind, water
    
    
• Califia is about the mobility of the two great human "uncertainties": memory ("Keeper") and desire ("Seeker"). Somewhere between memory and desire in the work lies that great uncertainty, historical Truth

Putting It All Together: From the Past Back to the Present

The pathos of Califia lies in the way the full development of the characters and stories of the three protagonists (Augusta, Kaye, Calvin) does not occur until we are well into understanding the pathos of the history of California in the background.

The measure of the novel's success—one that each reader must evaluate for him or herself—is whether it can tap into the great reserves of historical pathos (like digging a gold mine or drilling an oil field) in such a way as to bring the past into the present, to infuse the stories of the foreground characters with the deep feeling of the background history.

In this regard, we must consider the role of the one kind of history we have no so far discussed: family history:

• Augusta's mourning for her dad and mother
• Calvin's piercing discovery of his identity and his mother
• Kaye and Calvin's budding love affair (the seeking goes on)

Example of Early "Annals" Form of History Writing

Excerpt from the Anglo-Saxon era Annals of Saint Gall:

      709.    Hard winter.  Duke Gottfried died.
      710.    Hard year and deficient in crops.
      711.
      712.    Flood everywhere.
      713.
      714.    Pippin, mayor of the palace, died.
      715.    716.  717.
      718.    Charles devastated the Saxon with great 
               destruction.
      719.
      720.    Charles fought against the Saxons.
      721.    Theudo drove the Saracens out of Aquitaine.
      722.    Great crops.
      723.
      724.
      725.    Saracens came for the first time.
      726.
      727.
      728.
      729.
      730.
      731.    Blessed Bede, the presbyter, died.
      732.    Charles fought against the Saracens at 
               Poitiers on Saturday.
      733.
      734.

"Myth"

Claude Lévi-Strauss, "The Structural Study of Myth," Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), pp. 206-31:

        "The [Oedipus] myth will be treated as an orchestra score would be if it were unwittingly considered as a unilinear series; our task is to reestablish the correct arrangement. Say, for instance, we were confronted with a sequence of the type: 1, 2, 4, 7, 8, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 1, 2, 5, 7, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8 . . . , the assignment being to put all the 1's together, all the 2's, the 3's, etc.; the result is a chart:

        We shall attempt to perform the same kind of operation on the Oedipus myth, trying out several arrangments of the mythemes until we find one which is in harmony with the principlies enumerated above. Let us supposed, for the sake of argument, that the best arrangement is the following (although it might certainly be improved with the help of a specialist in Greek mythology):

        We thus find ourselves confronted with four vertical columns, each of which includes several relations belonging to the same bundle. Were we to tell the myth, we would disregard the columns and read the rows from left to right and from top to bottom. But if we want to understand the myth, then we will have to disregard one half of the diachronic dimension (top to bottom) and read from left to right, column after column, each one being considered as a unit.

        All the relations belonging to the same column exhibit one common feature which it is our task to discover. For instance, all the events grouped in the first column on the left have something to do with blood relations which are overemphasized, that is, are more intimate than they should be. Let us say, then, that the first column has as its common feature the overrating of blood relations. It is obvious that the second column expresses the same thing, but inverted: underrating of blood relations. The third column refers to monsters being slain. As to the fourth, a few words of clarification are needed. The remarkable connotation of the surnames in Oedipus father-line has often been noticed. However, linguists usually disregard it, since to them the only way to define the meaning of a term is to investigate all the contexts in which it appears, and. personal names, precisely because they are used as such, are not accompanied by any context. With the method we propose to follow the objection disappears, since the myth itself provides its own context. The significance is no longer to be sought in the eventual meaning of each name, but in the fact that all the names 'have a common feature: All the hypothetical meanings (which may well remain hypothetical) refer to difficulties in walking straight and standing upright.

        What then is the relationship between the two columns on the right? Column three refers to monsters. The dragon is a chthonian being which has to be killed in order that mankind be born from the Earth; the Sphinx is a monster unwilling to permit men to live. The last unit reproduces the first one, which has to do with the autochthonous origin, of mankind. Since the monsters are overcome by men, we may thus say that the common feature of the third column is denial of the autochthonous origin of man.

        This immediately helps us to understand the meaning of the fourth column. In mythology it is a universal characteristic of men born from the Earth that at the moment they emerge from the depth they either cannot walk or they walk clumsily. This is the case of the chthonian beings in the mythology of the Pueblo: Muyingwu, who leads the emergence, and the chthonian Shumaikoli are lame ("bleeding-foot," "sore-foot"). The same happens to the Koskimo of the Kwakiutl after they have been swallowed by the chthonian monster, Tsiakish: When they returned to the surface of the earth "they limped forward or tripped side ways." Thus the common feature of the fourth column is the persistence of the autochthonous origin of man. It follows that column four is to column three as column one is to column two. The inability to connect two kinds of relationships is overcome (or rather replaced) by the assertion that contradictory relationships are identical inasmuch as they are both self-contradictory in a similar way. Although this is still a provisional formulation of the structure of mythical thought, it is sufficient at this stage.

        Turning back to the Oedipus myth, we may now see what it means. The myth has to do with the inability, for a culture which holds the belief that mankind is autochthonous (see, for instance, Pausanias, VIII, xxix, 4: plants provide a model for humans), to find a satisfactory transition between this theory and the knowledge that human beings are actually born from the union of man and woman. Although the problem obviously cannot be solved, the Oedipus myth provides a kind of logical tool which relates the original problem—born from one or born from two?—to the derivative problem: born from different or born from same? By a correlation of this type, the overrating of blood relations is to the underrating of blood relations as the attempt to escape autochthony is to the impossibility to succeed in it. Although experience contradicts theory, social life validates cosmology by its similarity of structure. Hence cosmology is true."

References