LITERARY ECOLOGY AND POSTMODERNITY IN THOMAS SANCHEZ'S _MILE ZERO_ AND THOMAS PYNCHON'S _VINELAND_ by DANIEL R. WHITE University of Central Florida _Postmodern Culture_ v.2 n.1 (September, 1991) Copyright (c) 1991 by Daniel R. White, all rights reserved. This text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. Images are more real than anyone could have supposed. And just because they are an unlimited resource, one that cannot be exhausted by consumerist waste, there is all the more reason to apply the conservationist remedy. If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well. --Susan Sontag, _On Photography_ (180) [1] Renaissance humanist Giordano Bruno argued in the persona of the god Momus that "the gods have given intellect and hands to man and have made him similar to them, giving him power over other animals. This consists in his being able not only to operate according to his nature and to what is usual, but also to operate outside the laws of nature, in order that by forming or being able to form other natures, other paths, other categories, with his intelligence, by means of that liberty without which he would not have the above-mentioned similarity, he would succeed in preserving himself as god of the earth" (205). It was in the spirit of this quest to become "god of the earth" that the Father of Francis Bacon's utopian Salomon's house explains, "The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and the secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of the human empire, to the effecting of all things possible" (_New Atlantis_ 210). The epistemology of the new human empire was to be founded on a combination of Cartesian rationality seated in the individual human reason--the %cogito%--and Baconian empiricism. The %cogito% is the unit of mind, the subject, which endeavors to understand and control the supposedly material and mechanistic realm of nature. But is this definition of mind correct and is the Modern project stemming from the Renaissance--for the technological domination of nature--taking us where we want to go? The modernist project has been challenged by two important bodies of theory, which I have elsewhere argued (White 1991) are intrinsically related: postmodernity and ecology. Here I intend to argue that there is a new, literary contender. [2] The literary challenge to the modernist view of man and nature comes in the form of what I would like to define as a new genre: literary ecology.^1^ It is a species, or perhaps I should say with Deleuze and Guattari a %rhizomic% offshoot, of that broad critique of modernism known as postmodernity. (Postmodern-"ism" sounds hopelessly modernist.) It is a "literature" that fundamentally undermines the premises of modernity at their foundation-- the subject of power--and by implication would tumble the entire domain circumscribed by the Enlightened entrepreneur of the West. It is a literature of guerilla warfare amidst the Thousand Plateaus of the ecological mind, whose textual strategies, like those of the Viet Cong, threaten at least the self-image, the simulacrum, of the great American technological utopia, the one which is reflected in Baudrillard's sunglasses at Disney World. Thomas Pynchon probably defines the genre best by his work in _Vineland_, just as he exemplified postmodernity in _Gravity's Rainbow_ (1973) after which the sensitive "reader" gleaned, if she or he were still sufficiently undecentered to navigate, with Pynchon's %imago% of Dorothy: "Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas any more . . . " (279). Now with _Vineland_ and Thomas Sanchez's _Mile Zero_, another originary work in the genre, we are entering a new post. WHAT IS LITERARY ECOLOGY? [3] Literary ecological theory stands, like Pynchon's work itself according to some critics, with one foot on traditional metaphysical ground and one in the postmodern void.^2^ What is traditional in literary ecology is the acceptance of a value hierarchy, namely the Great Chain of Being, stemming from the classical and medieval worlds. The most salient feature of the Chain for the human condition, Dwight Eddins argues following Eric Voegelin, is that it represents a %metaxic% tension between spiritual order and material chaos: Divine--Nous Psyche--Noetic Psyche--Passions Animal Nature Vegetative Nature Apeiron--Depth [the limitless] The Divine Nous represents the upper limit of the human quest for spiritual fulfillment, not attainable in the flesh but a necessary %eschaton% or goal for human striving. "The substitution of a finite, purely 'human' %eschaton% for the infinitely receding %nous% means the negation of the spiritual (noetic) quest that produces the real order of the human," Eddins explains. "The metaxic tension collapses, and man is pulled by apeirontic vectors through lower and lower levels of his being . . . " (22). The Gnostic quest is to appropriate the Nous to attain the all-too-human goals of power and control, on the part of an elite--THEM in Pynchon--possessed of Gnosis, over lower orders of being, the Preterite--US. The quest to become a noetic power elite sets up a paranoid cycle of oppression: For the gnostic elite . . . the alien world is a thing to be "overcome" . . . the elite experience, ironically, a preterite paranoia that drives them to seek mastery through their elite gnosis; but in so doing they define a new preterite in those who are not privy to this plexus of knowledge and power, but are pawns to be manipulated in its service. This preterity, in turn, can escape preterition only by adopting the power techniques of their masters; but in the very act they naturally tend to become--in Wordsworth's phrase--"Oppressors in their turn." (23) Eddins' discussion is too early to have included _Vineland_, but what better description of the relationship between its oppressor and oppressed, Brock Vond and Frenesi Gates, and their victims? [4] What is new in literary ecology's appropriation of the old paradigm is that this description of the traditional hierarchy and its demise is also employed, even while it foregrounds human beings and their immediate concerns, as a paradigmatic description of an ecological crisis: of what communication theorist Anthony Wilden, commenting on the emerging Cartesian and Lockean ideas of the individual, calls "splitting the ecosystem"^3^: One of the truly representative characteristics of the Lockean individual, as of the Cartesian one, is that it replicates in its own organization that SPLITTING OF THE ECOSYSTEM . . . with which the Age of Discovery opened the world to colonialism and to the specifically modern domination of nature. . . . It is a splitting of the subject in this world in which the supposedly dominant part--mind--not only 'controls' the rest (it is believed)--i.e., the body--but mind actually OWNS the body. (xli) Capitalism, Wilden argues, splits the ecosystem not only by bifurcating the individual into mind and body, the one controller and the other to be controlled, but also by dividing society into bourgeoisie and proletariat, the modern social and economic form of owner and owned. Furthermore, Wilden argues, the traditional hierarchic relation between "nature" and "culture" or "nature" and "society" is as follows: Land (Photosynthesis) Labor Potential (Creative Capacity) Capital. Land precedes and makes possible labor potential which precedes and makes possible the extraction of capital. But capitalism through "commoditization" inverts the hierarchy: Capital Labor Potential Land. (xxxv) Capital is used to control labor potential which is used to exploit land. Underlying this system is the entrepreneurial persona, the new "god of the earth" envisioned by Bruno, and perhaps even more vividly by Francis Bacon: "I am come in very truth leading Nature to you, with all her children, to bind her to your service and to make her your slave . . . . So may I succeed in my only earthly wish, namely to stretch the deplorably narrow limits of man's dominion over the universe to their promised bounds . . . " (from _The Masculine Birth of Time, or the Great Instauration of the Domination of Man over the Universe_ [1603], cited in Wilden xxxv-xxxvi). Nature is, of course, female and her children are the proletariat, the third world, whatever can be bought. Luckily, preterite like St. Cloud in _Mile Zero_ and Zoyd in _Vineland_ stubbornly resist: thus the socialist ecological stance of literary ecologists, evident both in Pynchon and Sanchez. [5] The gnostic, entrepreneurial splitting of the hierarchy of being also breaks down the %metaxy%, in ecological terms the dynamic equilibrium, of the Great Chain. In cybernetic language ecosystems may be viewed as hierarchies, or heterarchies, which exhibit tendencies toward both homeostasis and runaway. As Gregory Bateson explains, All biological and evolving systems (i.e., individual organisms, animal and human societies, ecosystems, and the like) consist of complex cybernetic networks, and all such systems share certain formal characteristics. Each system contains subsystems which are potentially regenerative, i.e., which would go into exponential "runaway" if uncorrected. (Examples of such regenerative components are Malthusian characteristics of population, schismogenic changes of personal interaction, armaments races, etc.). (447) Consider population, for example. Prey, unconstrained by traditional predators, will increase in population until limited by some other factor, perhaps disastrously by overpopulation which can decimate the population. So too, if man sprinkles his produce with DDT and kills off the bird population, the insects which were the original target of the poison will increase all the more rapidly unconstrained by their original predator and have to be "exterminated" by more toxin. [6] This kind of degenerative cycle is what Eddins calls, in language which echoes cybernetics, "modes of slippage inherent in the noetic distortions of gnosticism [which] are peculiarly relevant to the metaphysical force fields of Pynchon's cosmos: the instability of the elite-preterite dichotomy and the distinction between secular and religious constructs" (23). In other words, Brock and Frenesi and those that he, then she, betrays are caught in the logic of ecological runaway, what Joseph Slade (_Thomas Pynchon_ 125) has called "excluded middles and bad shit" in reference to the plight of Oedipa Maas in _The Crying of Lot 49_: under the Reagan-Bush version of the Entrepreneurial New World Order, you must either become a pawn of the new gnostic elite or sink more deeply into preterition. And if you want to fight back, you must also become like the gnostic elite: you must split the mental/cultural/social/natural ecosystem for the sake of power, to switch roles from Oppressed to Oppressor so that the original split in the human ecology escalates in what Bateson called the Romano-Palestinian System.^4^ This is the %koan% with which many of Pynchon's worthy characters are presented. [7] What is postmodern in literary ecology is that its strategy for escaping from the impossible polarities of the koan is to step out of the traditional ego of the West and into an expanded and more fluid definition of "mind." This new definition of mind, explicit in the texts of Bateson, is what in effect gives literary ecology its deep-ecological dimension. [8] Bateson developed mental ecology in part as a critique both of Darwin and of the premises of the Western %episteme% mentioned at the outset. His argument is that if we accept the cybernetic theory of "self-correctiveness as the criterion of thought," and the information-theoretical notion that an idea is definable as a "difference," then these criteria are not limited to the human individual. Consider a man with a computer, Bateson argues. What "thinks" and engages in "trial and error" is the man _plus_ the computer _plus_ the environment. And the lines between man, computer and environment are purely artificial, fictitious lines. They are lines _across_ the pathways along which information or difference is transmitted. (491) The result of this critique is a fundamental redefinition of the unit of mind: If, now, we correct the Darwinian unit of survival to include the environment and the interaction between organism and environment, a very strange and surprising identity emerges: %the unit of evolutionary survival turns out to be identical with the unit of mind%. (491) If this is true, Bateson concludes, then we are faced with a number of important changes in our thinking, especially in ethics. It means, for instance, that mind--the Nous of the Great Chain--becomes immanent in the entire ecological and evolutionary structure (466)^5^ and that, "Ecology, in the widest sense, turns out to be the study of the interaction and survival of ideas and programs (i.e. differences, complexes of differences, etc.) in circuits" (491).^6^ It also turns out that epistemological error is ecological error: When you narrow down your epistemology and act on the premise "What interests me is me, or my organization, or my species," you chop off consideration of other loops of the loop structure. You decide that you want to get rid of the by-products of human life and that Lake Erie will be a good place to put them. You forget that Lake Erie is part of _your_ wider eco-mental system--and that if Lake Erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated in the larger system of _your_ thought and experience. (492) In other words epistemological and ecological error are identical with the modernist paradigm and its industrial project. The literary-ecological correction of the error in _Vineland_ is arguably an extension of what Eddins calls "Orphic Naturalism" in _Gravity's Rainbow_: "a counterreligion to the worship of mechanism, power, and-- ultimately--death" (5). [9] Plumwood (1991) criticizes deep ecology from an ecofeminist perspective in terms reminiscent of those I have used to characterize the literary ecological attack on the Cartesian %cogito%. She argues that In inferiorizing such particular, emotional, and kinship-based attachments [e.g. those emphasized by Pynchon and Sanchez], deep ecology gives us another variant on the superiority of reason and the inferiority of its contrasts, failing to grasp yet again the role of reason and incompletely critiquing its influence . . . . we must move toward the sort of ethics feminist theory has suggested, which can allow for both continuity and difference and for ties to nature which are expressive of the rich, caring relationships of kinship and friendship rather than increasing abstraction and detachment from relationship. (16) Literary ecology arguably provides exactly this rich sense of connectedness and particularity, as the texts discussed below suggest. [10] Bateson's language reveals the instrumental bias of Western science, as he describes nature in terms of a computer metaphor involving "circuits," "units" and "system." Yet he suggests what is fundamental to a more viable, ecological philosophy based on a genuine recognition and respect for the ecological other: the attribution of mind to nature. As Plumwood argues, "Humans have both biological and mental characteristics, but the mental rather than the biological have been taken to be characteristic of the human and to give what is 'fully and authentically' human. The term 'human' is, of course, not merely descriptive but very much an evaluative term setting out an ideal: it is what is essential or worthwhile in the human that excludes the natural" (17). This attribution of "mind" to "man" and materiality to "nature," characteristic of the Cartesian dualism of %res cogitans% as the human %cogito% and %res extensa% as the objective world, and further expressed in the masculine subject of power dominating "mother" nature, as it is in the entrepreneurial persona who owns the world as his "real estate," is arguably one of the principal targets of the literary ecological critique. Thus literary ecology embodies a synthesis of ecosocialist, deep ecological and ecofeminist concerns, but approaches them in terms of a postmodern ecological rubric which steps past the traditional either-or of the Oppressor and Oppressed, Elite and Preterite, Sacred and Secular, as deftly as Pynchon's Ninjette DL (Darryl Louise Chastain) slips past Brock Vond's guards. THE ORIGINS OF LITERARY ECOLOGY^7^ [11] "The Age of Ecology began on the desert outside Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945, with a dazzling fireball of light and a swelling mushroom cloud of radioactive gasses," argues Donald Worster in _Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas_. The genesis of literary ecology is part of the larger history of ecological ideas, and will require a separate discussion. Here let me at least make of few suggestions about its origins. The Ecological idea stems from the 18th century, as Worster has demonstrated, but it rose into popular consciousness startled by the perception, evoked by the Bomb, that nature itself is vulnerable like the frail human beings within it. Worster continues, "As that first nuclear fission bomb went off and the color of the early morning sky changed abruptly from pale blue to blinding white, physicist and project leader J. Robert Oppenheimer felt at first a surge of elated reverence; then a somber phrase from the Bhagavad-Gita flashed into his mind: 'I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds'" (339). Popular ecology, as Worster also demonstrates, has roots in Romanticism and, indeed, the intuition of the Romantic writers formed the basis upon which the clearer outlines of ecological science would be patterned. As Goethe wrote, in the character of Young Werther, When the mists in my beloved valley steam all around me; when the sun rests on the surface of the impenetrable depths of my forest at noon and only single rays steal into the inner sanctum; when I lie in the tall grass beside a rushing brook and become aware of the remarkable diversity of a thousand little growing things on the ground, with all their peculiarities; when I can feel the teeming of a minute world amid the blades of grass and the innumerable, unfathomable shapes of worm and insect closer to my heart . . . ah, my dear friend . . . but I am ruined by it. I succumb to its magnificence. (24) This is not unlike the feeling which drew the "flower children" back to nature in the 1960's, articulated and sustained in the writings of Edward Abbey and Annie Dillard. Romantic writing was in direct response to the urbanization and mechanization of life effected by the Industrial Revolution, just as popular ecology is largely a response to what Mumford called the Megamachine of modern technology, economy, society and polity which has destroyed and displaced much of the human lifeworld, of "Earth House Hold" in the words of poet Gary Snyder. An incipient ecological sensibility is also evident in the "persistent _modernist_ nostalgia for vanished axiological foundations in the midst of vividly experienced anomie" which Eddins finds in the work of Pynchon and is perhaps most vividly expressed, virtually in ecological dimension, by T.S. Eliot in _The Waste Land_. Here images of a fouled, poisoned environment merge with those of human spiritual and physical demise-- Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A Crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. A rat crept softly through the vegetation Dragging its slimy belly on the bank While I was fishing in the dull canal The river sweats Oil and tar . . . --amidst a culture which is shattered but whose very shards inspire hope of renewal: "These fragments I have shored against my ruins." Additionally, the fusion of human imagination with nature's images, as well as the adamant leftist politics, characteristic of Magical Realism, for example in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's _Autumn of the Patriarch_, is arguably an important forebear, and Carlos Fuentes' recent _Christopher Unborn_ I might well have included with _Mile Zero_ and _Vineland_ as an example of literary ecology, except for its problematic representation of gender. African literature is also a likely ancestor of the genre, for example Chinua Achebe's _Things Fall Apart_ where the fragmentation of tribal society under the impact of European colonialism is explored, as it is in American literature by Peter Matthiessen, with regard to South American Indians, in another likely progenitor, _At Play in the Fields of the Lord_. Doris Lessing's _Briefing for a Descent into Hell_ presents a profound fusion of the human mind with nature's, as her _Golden Notebook_ reflects on feminist and socialist alternatives, both dimensions of which come together and are uplifted and transformed (%Aufhebung%) in her Canopus in _Argos: Archives_, especially _Shikasta_. Vonnegut's _Breakfast of Champions_ and _Galapagos_ should not be overlooked in the search for LitEcol ancestors and, particularly where Pynchon is concerned, I would look up from these printed artifacts and seriously review the adventures of Tweety and Sylvester (_Vineland_ 22). [12] More broadly, however, I suggest that the genealogy of literary ecology includes photography, film, painting, architecture and other arts, especially video, as well as the sciences, especially information theory and cybernetics. I suggest that this is true because literary ecology is a new communicational form, a new language practice, which has evolved or leapt into being through the postmodern "trialectic" of ecology, neomarxism, and feminism in the context of what Mark Poster has defined as The Mode of Information. Going beyond Marshall McLuhan's axiom that "the medium is the message," which he argues is based on Locke's "'sensorium' of the receiving subject," Poster contends, What the mode of information puts in question, however, is not simply the sensory apparatus but the very shape of subjectivity: its relation to the world of objects, its perspective on that world, its location in that world. We are confronted not so much by a change from a "hot" to a "cool" communications medium, or by a reshuffling of the sensoria, as McLuhan thought, but by a generalized destabilization of the subject. (15) In this new mode the modernist Cartesian rationalist subject, as well as his empiricist Lockean conterpart, is, like Tyrone Slothrop, dispersed into more dynamic, nomadic kind of mind, the very one animating literary ecology. As Poster continues, In the mode of information the subject is no longer located in a point in absolute time/space, enjoying a physical, fixed vantage point from which rationally to calculate its options. Instead it is multiplied by databases, dispersed by computer messaging and conferencing, decontextualized and redefined by TV ads, dissolved and materialized continuously in the electronic transmission of symbols. In the perspective of Deleuze and Guattari, we are being changed from "arborial" beings, rooted in time and space, to "rhizomic" nomads who daily wander at will (whose will remains a question) across the globe . . . . (15) LITERARY ECOLOGY IN _MILE ZERO_ & _Vineland_ [13] Postmodern, as Charles Jencks defines it in relation to architecture but with clear ramifications for the other arts, refers to %double coding: the combination of Modern techniques with something else (usually traditional building) in order for architecture to communicate with the public and a concerned minority, usually other architects% (14, Jencks' emphasis). Certainly _Gravity's Rainbow_ is at least doubly coded, employing multiple genres and styles, tragedy and comedy, narrative and song, even a character Tyrone Slothrop who does not win or lose or live or die in the end but is, like the subject of the mode of information, _dispersed_; a plot which is superimposed on the trajectory of a V2 rocket; chapter headings which are fitted with (pictures of) sprocket holes; and a closing apocalyptic poem over which we, suddenly transformed from solitary readers to a crowd of movie-goers, are supposed to envision a bouncing ball. [14] Literary ecologists, as postmodernists, use traditional literary forms in new ways. Both Sanchez and Pynchon employ regional realism, for instance, through their sense of place particularizing and enriching their larger ecological sensibility. Sanchez focuses on the rich biotic and human community of Key West and the Caribbean; his book is peopled with human folkways and natural life forms which are depicted sympathetically and in careful detail. The invaders from the North are also present, the focus of Sanchez's historical, social, cultural and ultimately ecological critique. "It is about water," his novel begins: It was about water in the beginning, it will be in the end. The ocean mothered us all. Water and darkness awaiting light. Night gives birth. An inkling of life over distant sea swells toward brilliance. Dawn emerges from Africa, strikes light between worlds, over misting mountains of Haiti, beyond the Great Bahama Bank, touching cane fields of Cuba, across the Tropic of Cancer to the sleeping island of Key West, farther to the Gold Coast of Florida, its great wall of condominiums demarcating mainland America. (3) [15] Characterization is also given significant human- ecological dimension. Consider Sanchez's representation of Justo--the African-Cuban cop who is Sanchez's best candidate for heroism--typical of the literary-ecological concern not only with nature but also with human history and genealogy. Like Pynchon in _Vineland_, Sanchez gives his character dimension by tracing his connections over the generations of an _extended_ family. This family connects Justo, not only socially, but also politically, with the oppressed, and ecologically, with the environment which has meant their livelihood. As Justo makes his way down Olivia street in Key West, the sight of a vanished Cuban %groceria% prompts him to reminisce about his boyhood, his grandfather, Abuelo, and grandmother Pearl, and her father: "Pearl's father was an Ibu, brought to the Bahamas as a boy in chains from West Africa and freed fifteen years later in 1838 by the British. Freed by the very ones who had enslaved him, given a dowry of no money and a new name in a white man's world, John Coe" (69). Sanchez characterizes Coe in part by his livelihood: John Coe became a student of the sea when freed. The sea became John's new master. Turtles attracted him first, their gliding nonchalance, so few flipper strokes needed to navigate through a watery universe, an economy of effort worth emulating, which bespoke ancient liberation from the here and now. John felt kinship with his marine creature's abiding sense of ease, its deep breadth of freedom. John was as simple man who knew not the turtle's source of symbolic power, he understood only the animal's daily inspiration. John learned the ways of the thousand-pound leatherback and loggerhead turtles . . . . He studied eight- hundred-fifty-pound gentle greens . . . . He gained respect for the small fifty-pound hawksbill . . . . (69) [16] Coe's sense of loving "familiarity," in the original sense of this term, with the sea and its creatures overlaps with his love and respect for his wife, Brenda Bee. John chances upon her as she is being sold at a slave auction. When "The Well-dressed gentlemen in the crowd from Charleston and Mobile didn't see anything of value in Brenda" because she is ill and half starved, "John Coe bought himself a wife in a town where a man of dark skin was not allowed to walk the streets after the nine-thirty ringing of the night bell, unless he bore a pass from his owner or employer, or was accompanied by a white person" (74). And he plays the role of healer and nurturer for her: As John bathed Brenda's bony body with the humped softness of his favorite sheepswool sponge he vowed to treat this woman with kindness, drive the unspeakable terror from her eyes. John spoke to Brenda in a tongue she could understand, touched her only in a healing way. John brought Brenda red cotton dresses, strolled with her hand in hand on saturday eves down the rutted dirt length of Crawfish Alley, stopping to tip his cap to folks cooling themselves on the front wooden steps of their shacks. John planted a papaya tree behind his shack and a mango in front, for on sundays the preacher man swayed in the stone church before the congregation tall as an eluthera palm in a high wind, shouting his clear message that the Bible teaches to plant the fruiting tree. (74) The "particular, emotional, and kinship-based attachments" which Plumwood (above) argues are "inferiorized" by Cartesian rationality are cultivated here and carefully interwoven with images of nature and of the sacred. Remember that all of this is, furthermore, in the memory of Justo, giving the character full human-ecological dimension. [17] Women are not always the needy recipients of male nurture in _Mile Zero_. Another of Sanchez's major characters, St. Cloud, a Vietnam veteran who begins and ends his days imbibing "Jamaica's finest" rum, and who at one time "was still a happily married and cheating husband" (112), now must contend with being cuckolded by a woman who has clearly replaced him in his wife, Evelyn's, affections. He also turns voyeur, watching like a latter-day Adam deserted by Eve, from _her_ garden: He leaned against the smoothed trunk of a banyan, deep in shadow. Through the open shutters of Evelyn's bedroom a ladder of light was cast into the garden, its last bright step falling at St. Cloud's feet . . . Images of two women inside flickered insistent as a silent movie through slatted shutters. (98) The erotica in this "cinematic" display are empowered with speech, however, and the ability to shatter St. Cloud's filmic illusions. The shutters flew open in the rainy breeze, scorpions slithered up bedroom walls. Evelyn rose from the swell of a female sea. Intruding rain mixed with sweat of exposed skin. She leaned forward to claim the banging shutters, arms outstretched from the swing of her breasts. She paused. Her words cast into rain hissing across the garden before the shutters enclosed her. "Good night, St. Cloud." (99) [18] Sanchez repeatedly identifies women with the _powers_ of nature, not with passive real estate to be exploited. In this regard, both Evelyn and Angelica, another prominent character, have significant tattoos: St. Cloud followed the heave of Evelyn's breathing. The green and red bloom of a tattooed rose blossomed at the top of her breast in dawn light stabbing through the salt-streaked glass porthole above the narrow berth." (5) Angelica moved her body in a single fluid motion, unassuming as a woman stepping from a bath, an improbable Aphrodite rising from a quivering sea of light in high heels. The octopus tattoo on her right breast spread its tentacles as she exhaled a slight breath. (112) What, in addition to kinship between women and the living beings of the natural world--the rose, the octopus--do these tattooed breasts signify? Angelica is modeling for an artist who admits, in response to his homosexual son, Renoir's, request in their discussion of women, "'Why don't you ask Angelica what she feels?'": "I don't have to ask her anything. I know what women think about me. They teach me in history of Women's art. College after college they hold me up as the enemy. Because I know their secret they stalk me through seminars, eviscerate my virility, study the fetid male entrails." (115) St. Cloud, also present at this transformation of the female body into art, is not so sure that the artist knows the "secret" at all, and sees something quite different in the figure: In the glittering bedroom light Angelica's breasts held the naked thrust of challenge St Cloud witnessed years before in the submarine pen. It was an unsettling recognition of sexual origins, when civilizations were controlled by women. Watching Angelica turn slowly in the room, totally exposed within a circle of men, St. Cloud groped for meaning through the alcoholic swamp of his steaming brain. Maybe it was man's desire never to let woman rise again. Keep her under heel and thumb. Never allow Pandora to release the awesome power from the box. (114) The power of femininity is combined, as the images in the foregoing passages suggest, with that of nature, and both are conjoined with the political cause of the oppressed. St. Cloud, by the way, as his feminist epiphany above suggests, is a respectable schlemiel, like Zoyd in _Vineland_, who finds a way out of self-pity by working as a translator for Haitian refugees. [19] Pynchon's regional realism is set in the Pacific Northwest, the great redwood forests of Northern California, in Vineland, and in the varied culture of the local inhabitants, most of whom are victims and refugees, ex- hippies, Thanatoids, the North American tribe who attempted to get back to the land and ended up on a kind of political reservation sandwiched between suburbs and overshadowed by government surveillance. His specific focus is on the remnants of the American radical tradition, those elements of the great European Invasion of North America who--from Thoreau to Bob Dylan--more or less sided with the Indians and wanted to call the whole thing off. Now they watch T.V. Vineland, the name given to the North American wilderness by the Vikings, is a place of very special significance, a territory upon which different stages of civilization have imposed their maps, but which holds a primitive mystery resistant to interpretation or translation into urban sprawl.^8^ Someday this would be all part of Eureka--Crescent City--Vineland megalopolis, but for now the primary sea coast, forest, riverbanks and bay were still not much different from what early visitors in Spanish and Russian Ships had seen . . . log keepers not known for their psychic gifts had remembered to write down, more than once, the sense that they had of some invisible boundary, met when approaching from the sea, past capes of somber evergreen, the stands of redwood with their perfect trunks and cloudy foliage, too high, too red to be literal trees--carrying therefore another intention, which the Indians might have know about but did not share. (317) [20] Both novelists use traditional literary devices in new ways which constitute double coding. By far the most interesting of these is narrative. Both Sanchez and Pynchon reframe the perspective of traditional human narrators to include what Gregory Bateson would call the mind of nature. Sanchez speaks explicitly from the standpoint of a persona, almost like the deep self of Hinduism, Atman, identical with the unmanifest spiritual power underlying the manifest world, Brahman, except with a this-worldly ecological twist. (Pynchon's character Weed Atman, mathematics professor and circumstantial radical leader, similarly adds a transcendental dimension, satirically drawn, in _Vineland_.) For the narrator employs a host of images and apocalyptic forebodings as if spoken directly from the person of the earth which not only condemns American civilization but also, paradoxically, turns out to be none other than you and I. Thus we are also telling the story, both reader and author, both critic and castigated, finding the natural diversity of our larger selves in the variegated patterns of human, plant, animal, amphibian, and fish life while at the same time finding the mirror of ourselves in their destruction. But is this a transcendence of self which ultimately identifies "man" and "nature" in an overarching holism, or rather, what Plumwood calls for, a feminization of the human sensibility connected empathetically with and respectful of the variegated "other" of nature? Literary ecology, clearly opting for the latter alternative, differs from deep ecology in its regional realism and heterological sense of connectedness not only with nature but also with the social and political concerns of human life. * * * * * [Continued in WHITE-2 991, available from PMC-LIST@NCSUVM or PMC-LIST@NCSUVM.CC.NCSU.EDU]