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Jonathan Lethem's Genre Evolutions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2009

JAMES PEACOCK
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Abstract

This article proceeds from the observation that all of Lethem's novels subvert traditional genres in some way, and argues that the way genres mutate or evolve reflects one of his central ethical concerns – evolution itself. Many of the characters in Gun, with Occasional Music (1994) are “evolved animals” that have undergone “evolution therapy” and can now talk, walk upright, and carry weapons. As the narrator Metcalf observes, these animals are characteristically reluctant to acknowledge their animal lineage. Here one sees evolution's contradiction: it purports to be progress, but is also a melancholic forgetting of origins. In a world where a drug called Forgettol abstracts people from their own memories, it is the detective's job, though he is despised for it, to continue asking questions and remind people of shared culpability and connected narratives. Metcalf, this paper suggests, is engaged in a struggle to maintain the novel as detective fiction, to resist the encroaching sci-fi elements which symbolize the death of community through increasing dependence on an unethical science of forgetting. Amnesia Moon (1995) depicts a postapocalyptic America in which the typical “evolutionary” reaction to the unspecified catastrophe is a retreat into a blinkered regionalism which, like Forgettol or evolution therapy, encourages the individual to forget any sense of wider responsibility. The article concludes with reflections on literary influence and the evolution of Lethem's own work in subsequent novels.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 43 , Issue 3 , December 2009 , pp. 425 - 440
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

1 Jonathan Lethem, “Light and the Sufferer,” in idem, The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye, 1996 (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), 94.

2 Gaffney, Elizabeth, “Jonathan Lethem: Breaking the Boundaries Between Genres,” Publishers Weekly, 30 (March 1998), 50–51, 50.Google Scholar Andrew Hoberek, in his recent introduction to the special number of Twentieth-Century Literature entitled “After Postmodernism,” argues that Lethem does not indulge in postmodern “appropriation of popular genres” by more “literary” forms, but treats genres as serious literature in themselves. Thus he also breaks down the categories of “high” and “low” art. Twentieth-Century Literature, 53, 3 (Fall 2007), 238.

3 Cohen, Margaret, “Traveling Genres,” New Literary History, 34, 3 (2003), 481–99, 481, 484.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: BFI Publishing, 1999), 16, 12.

5 Ibid., 19, 9.

6 Another example would be the constant references to detective clichés made by Lionel Essrog in Motherless Brooklyn. In a 1998 interview with Fiona Kelleghan, Lethem elaborates on this self-consciousness: “I think that I have a propensity or weakness for writing meta-fictionally about genre. All of my stories tend to be, at one level, interrogations of the genre they inhabit. Since most of my work is fantastic in some sense, I'm usually asking questions at some level, often subconsciously or automatically, about what happens to a given story when a fantastic element intrudes into it, and this becomes a parallel interrogation into the question of what happens to human existence when fantastic elements intrude.” “Private Hells and Radical Doubts: An Interview with Jonathan Lethem,” Science Fiction Studies, 25, 2 (July 1998), available at http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/letheminterview.htm.

7 Jonathan Lethem, Gun, with Occasional Music (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), 57. Subsequent references are by page number in the text.

8 Joseph Carroll, Evolution and Literary Theory (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1995), 387.

9 Altman, 6.

10 Although the fantastic technological and scientific developments depicted in Lethem's stories tend to have a negative, stultifying effect, it is true that they also create a space for the narrative to emerge. This is especially true of As She Climbed across the Table, in which a group of physicists at a California university create a negative space, nicknamed “Lack,” through which an alternative universe is created. Various academics, including the quite wonderfully parodic Georges De Tooth, the deconstructionist, compete to forge narratives that capture the true meaning of Lack. The narrator's girlfriend, Alice, ends up falling in love with it. In manufacturing a parallel campus universe (note the microcosmic provinciality of it all) comprised “only of the elements Alice found charming or harmless,” Lack becomes merely a vessel for subjective, paranoid impositions of narrative. Jonathan Lethem, As She Climbed across the Table (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), 177. It is clear that this is Lethem's revisiting (or evolution) of Alice through the Looking Glass.

11 Carroll, 31.

12 See, for example, Lois A. Cuddy and Claire M. Roche, eds., Evolution and Eugenics in American Literature and Culture, 1880–1940: Essays on Ideological Conflict and Complicity (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2003), 11.

13 Carroll, 250–51.

14 Ibid., 5.

15 Ibid., 166.

16 Lethem, As She Climbed, 80.

17 Chris Colby, “Introduction to Evolutionary Biology,” Talk Origins, 16 Sept. 2006, available at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-intro-to-biology.html.

18 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, ed. Joseph Carroll (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2003), 219.

19 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 1, 35.

20 Darwin, Origin, 397.

21 Kelleghan, “Private Hells.”

22 Ibid.

23 Jonathan Lethem, Amnesia Moon (Orlando: Harvest, 1995), 30. Subsequent references are by page number in the text.

24 The hero of Pollen (1995), for example, is a black cab driver called Coyote – half man, half Dalmatian, but all cool. Jeff Noon, Pollen (London: Fourth Estate, 1995); idem, Vurt (Manchester: Ringpull Press, 1993).

25 Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in Richard W. Etulain, ed., Does the Frontier Experience Make America Exceptional? (Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1999), 40.

26 Tom Lutz, Cosmopolitan Vistas: American Regionalism and Literary Value (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2004), 192.

27 Much of the work has been on Motherless Brooklyn. See, for example, Kravitz, Bennett, “The Culture of Disease or the Dis-ease of Culture in Motherless Brooklyn and Eve's Apple,” Journal of American Culture, 26, 2 (June 2003), 171–79.CrossRefGoogle ScholarScience Fiction Studies has published a number of interviews and articles, which is ironic given Lethem's feelings about genre pigeonholing. See, for example, Carl Abbott's “Homesteading on the Extraterrestrial Frontier,” Science Fiction Studies, 32, 3 (July 2005), 240–64, which looks at Girl in Landscape. For links between Philip K. Dick and Lethem see Rossi, Umberto, “From Dick to Lethem: The Dickian Legacy, Postmodernism, and Avant-Pop in Jonathan Lethem's Amnesia Moon,” Science Fiction Studies, 29, 1 (March 2002), 15–33.Google Scholar

28 Steven Zeitchik, “A Brooklyn of the Soul,” interview with Jonathan Lethem, Publishers Weekly, 15 Sept. 2003, 37–38, 37.

29 Robert Birnbaum, “Birnbaum v. Jonathan Lethem,” Morning News, 7 Jan. 2004, available at http://www.themorningnews.com/archives/personalities/birnbaum_v_jonathan_lethem.php.

30 Lethem's 2007 novel You Don't Love Me Yet bears out this assessment. It returns to California to satirize, among other areas of cultural endeavour, the indie music scene and conceptual art happenings. Its narrative, centring on a band which enjoys momentary success and then splits up due to internal relationship issues, is less about the importance of community than its inevitable breakdown in a society based on shallow, cannibalized, disposable culture. In a wry intertextual reference to Lethem's first California novel, there is a subplot involving a kangaroo suffering from ennui, which is rescued from the zoo by the band's lead singer and kept in his bath for several weeks.

31 Lisa Hopkins, Giants of the Past: Popular Fictions and the Idea of Evolution (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2004), 35.

32 “Jonathan Lethem Takes the Long Way Home,” interview with Jonathan Lethem, Powells, 23 Sept. 2003, avcailable at http://www.powells.com/authors/lethem.html. Lethem's openness is taken to extremes in his article “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism,” Harpers Magazine, 314, 1881 (1 Feb. 2007), 59–71, in which he extols the virtues of creative stealing from other artists. Almost the entire article, it transpires, is itself constructed from a series of cleverly assembled plagriarisms.

33 This adumbrates a certain conservatism which occasionally surfaces elsewhere in Lethem's novels: in The Fortress of Solitude, for example, the pivotal friendship between the dual-heritage Mingus Rude and the white Dylan Ebdus culminates in troubling divisions enacted at the formal level. Without wishing to provide too many spoilers, it is crucial to note that Dylan ends up as a successful music journalist and occasional first-person narrator of the novel itself, whereas Mingus ends up in prison, referred to only in the third person and by his graffiti tag, “DOSE.” Thus the two forms of “writing” – journalism/the novel and graffiti – only serve to exacerbate the racial delineations in operation.

34 Kelleghan, “Private Hells.”