Canadian vs. American Ideology of Women

A scene I felt shed a lot of light on the novel was the exchange between Remy Marathe and Kate Gompert.   From the description of how Remy Marathe met his wife, and the story that actually cheers the anhedonic Kate Gompert up I am thinking that Canada has found a much more important and respected role for woman than Americans.

American Ideology

“Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human…One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia” (695).

Remy Marathe describes similar internal pain to Kate Gompert; “The more pain in my self, the more I am inside the self, cannot will my death, I think. I feel I am chained in a cage of the self, from the pain. Unable to care or choose anything outside it. Unable to see anything or feel anything outside my pain” (777).  In response, Kate says, “I am so totally Identifying it’s not even funny,” (777) and why shouldn’t she, she is American, and a woman, and she suffers from the same delusions of the ratio of pleasure to pain that Hal does, because she has grown up in the patriarchal American setting of Infinite Jest.

Canadian Ideology?

It is very interesting to me then, how Remy gets himself out of this anhedonic funk in that it is the same way he meets his wife/love of his life/woman worthy of betraying Canada.  Remy preeches the love of the nation above the love of the self to Steeply, however, Remy was lifted from his anhedonia by the love of a woman.  “She [was] standing transfixed with horror…-identically as I had been motionless and tranfixed by horror inside me, unable to move…I [did] not know this woman or love her, but without thinking I released my brake…she with one blow broke the chains of the cage of pain at my half a body and nation” (778).  Remy explains that it was not his love for the woman, for she was without a skull, but the choice that saved his life.  “Without her to choose over myself, there was only pain and not choosing, rolling drunkenly and making fantasies of death” (780).  So then, Remy’s loyalty to his nation comes from his loyalty to choice.  Because of the encounter with his wife, Remy has realized the importance of choosing your own temple of worship, your own pleasure over seething pain.  Unlike the Americans depicted in the novel, who are stuck in an inner stasis because of their inability to make choices, Remy has found a loophole in the design of nationalism.

Again, I go back to my theory that America is going to be stuck in a closed circuit of anhedonia, because of the lack of choice.  The perspective that the people in power employ is a patriarchal one definitely, and also functions by way of eliminating choice, therefore it becomes a vicious unstoppable cycle.  One of things that sets America apart from Canada, at least in terms of Remy’s metaphor for relief from anhedonic pain is America’s blaming of the woman as a figure of death.  Molly Notkin finally describes what is on the ill-fated cartridge to her AFR captures.    We learn that the deadly cartridge shows a naked Joelle as “some kind of maternal instantiation of the archetypal figure Death…goregous…hugely pregnant, her hideously deformed face..veiled…explaining in very simple childlike language…that. Death is always female, and that the female is always maternal…The woman who kills you is always your next life’s mother” (my emphasis, 788).  So, need I explain that if one of the most intellectual American men created a deadly cartridge that is so pleasuring the viewer goes comatose, than the problem with American Ideology is clear.  American Ideology remains cyclical, trapping its inhabitants in this anhedonic stasis, to which there is no escape but to addiction, depression, etc.

Many of the young characters of the novel play with this power, or control over American’s emotions.  The boys at ETA play Eschaton, playing both God and political leader of their own imagined world.  Surprisingly Orin, a notorious womanizer, almost gets it right.  He seems like he’s on the track to understanding Remy’s epiphany, however Remy’s ephiphany came from love, and love comes with choice.  Orin’s understanding comes from hope, “an immense, wide-as-the-sky hope of finding a something in each Subject’s fluttering face…the need to be assured that for a moment he has her, now has won her…something other than he…for that one second she loves him too much to stand it…that all else is gone; that her sense of humor is gone, her petty griefs, trumphs, memories, hands, career, betrayals, the deaths of pets—that there is now inside her a vividness vacuumed of all but his name: O., O” (566).  Need I even say that Orin’s view of women too propogates the ideal of patriarchy.  Orin wishes to annihilate the woman in order to achieve happiness.  He wishes to replace her identity with his, in order to satisfy his own sick need for internal peace.  Orin wants to experience the same ephiphanic moment of choice that Remy did, however his perspective is all wrong.  Again I ask, Is Orin the cause of his troubles or yet another sick symptom of the American Ideology that he is surrounded by?

 

 

~ by daniellesely on November 10, 2009.