Through the Arc of the Rainforest Easy Bib

Front Left Gang entered How Writers Read, a course in the Department of Writing Arts at Rowan University, in September of 2016. According to the course description:
This sophomore-level course introduces students to theoretical methods of reading complex and sophisticated texts. Students will study theories of reading and writing that concern structure, register, genre, intertextuality, and rhetorical concerns. The course presents these theories and correlative methods through readings, and students then practice applying these methods during class discussions and in writing using a series of self-selected texts as the objects of study.

But like…in a good way?

Sure. That stuff happened. It happened a lot. How Writers Read also introduces students to the possibility that who they think they are is a lie. It destabilizes the self and insists that we open our ears to the other. It asks you to see in a dimension you didn't know existed and then isn't surprised or disappointed when you fail to do so. In fact, recognizing and accepting that failure is part of the fun.

The final assignment I have been tasked with is to create a sort of Frankenstein's monster of the methods we've learned and worked with in class, along with our group's semester-long discussions of those methods, specifically through a close reading of Karen Tei Yamashita's Through the Arc of the Rain Forest. But before I turn to our primary source, I'd first like to raise a complaint that has been needling me all semester and, fittingly, it comes from our very first reading for this course. In "Story and Structure," a chapter from Robert McKee's Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting, the author articulates the tension that motivates narrative. He begins first, though, by defining our terms, defining exactly what we mean when we say "story." For McKee, how we experience life and how we experience art are two different things. He writes, "In life, experiences become meaningful with reflection in time. In art, they are meaningful now, at the instant they happen" (McKee 111). This is what delineates our regular old emotion from aesthetic emotion. My real gripe with McKee comes from the paragraph that directly follows the above statement:

In this sense, story is, at heart, nonintellectual. It does not express ideas in the dry, intellectual arguments of an essay. But this is not to say that story is anti-intellectual. We pray that the writer has ideas of import and insight. Rather, the exchange between artist and audience expresses ideas directly through the senses and perceptions, intuition and emotion. It requires no mediator, no critic to rationalize the transaction, to replace the ineffable and the sentient with explanation and abstraction. Scholarly acumen sharpens taste and judgment but we must never mistake criticism for art. Intellectual analysis, however heady, will not nourish the soul. (111)

When I first encountered this claim, I bristled instinctively, but I don't think I really knew why. I knew I felt personally attacked and that my little English major feelings had been hurt. In terms of my "Reading For," I am always reading to understand my place in the conversation. To have that conversation undermined by McKee was frustrating. As a lit student, being told that "scholarly acumen" might not be the most important thing was annoying. It also made me aware of a writerly vulnerability of mine. Chiefly, I consider myself an academic writer. My way into a project is to consider the extant intellectual analysis and figure out where I think my voice belongs in the conversation. Reading McKee made me feel like, in How Writers Read at least, to approach the work this way would be a failure…I've gotten over that fear, but I'm no less defensive of the ability of intellectual analysis to "nourish the soul." In fact, as I began work on this annotated bibliography, the first thing I did was a database search to see what scholarship has been published on Through the Arc of the Rain Forest. The first article I found has certainly been soul nourishing. But we'll get to that eventually. McKee goes on:

A well-told story neither expresses the clockwork reasonings of a thesis nor vents raging inchoate emotions. It triumphs in the marriage of the rational with the irrational. For a work that's either essentially emotional or essentially intellectual cannot have the validity of one that calls upon our subtler faculties of sympathy, empathy, premonition, discernment…our innate sensitivity to the truth. (112)

But I don't think we do have an innate sensitivity to the truth. Or at least, truth itself, has no innate…trueness. And I think that's the whole point of Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, and I think that might be the whole point of How Writers Read.

Yamashita, Karen Tei. Through the Arc of the Rain Forest. Coffee House, 1990. Digital.
Karen Tei Yamashita's Through the Arc of the Rain Forest was Front Left Gang's fourth and final book. It is a work of magical realism, set primarily in Brazil, but also Japan and parts of North America. It features, primarily, a Japanese railroad technician, Kazumasa Ishimaru, who, in childhood, comes in contact with what is basically a small round satellite from outer space. The whirling ball orbits Kazumasa's head and narrates our story. Through the narrator (who is neither named nor gendered), we also meet Mané Pena, the feather healer; Chico Paco, a young man who makes a pilgrimage to the mysterious land–the Matacão–and builds a controversial altar to St. George there; J. B. Tweep, a three armed business man working in New York who has commercial interest in commodifying the Matacão; and Batista Aparecida Djapan, Kazumasa's neighbor in Brazil, who trains carrier pigeons to bring messages across the country, the prophetic power of which not even he understands. These characters move in and out of one another's lives, slowly uncovering the mystery of the Matacão, which requires a journey for all of them that, while bringing fame and fortune (at least temporarily) also ends in small and large scale devastation.

We specifically chose to save Through the Arc of the Rain Forest for last because we'd assumed it would be the most challenging read. It was the most unfamiliar to us, in terms of form, plot, genre, point of view, etc. As Justina explained in her response to our first blog, we "had formed an idea that this would be confusing and difficult to traverse through," admitting that maybe we were "a little pessimistic." This is the work most outside what each one of us typically "reads for." I'm looking now at our original reading list proposal, where we had to make some projections and think about the possibilities a text we hadn't yet read might present to us. Since Through the Arc was my selection, it was my job to defend its place on the list. I wrote about its classification as a novela and its insistence upon defying our understanding of genre. I explained that this book might be "interesting and useful to think about how the conventions of that genre are adapted and/or invoked here" and that I thought we could stand to learn from Yamishita's non-traditional narrator. I write all of this for

Kazumasa and our narrator, probably.

two reasons. First, in an attempt to show just how far we've come in a few short months. I really didn't have the vocabulary to articulate why I thought this text might be a challenge or what I hoped to gain from it. I had to guess at reasoning and explanations before I even had the words to describe them, really–words like inauthentic submission, hermeneutics, and interpellation, all of which have helped me better clarify what exactly I'm reading for. And how and why. Second, is the connection I'd argue exists between that undertaking and the chapter, "Story and Discourse in the Analysis of Narrative," from structuralist and literary theorist Jonathan Culler's The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. In this chapter, Culler suggests a kind of meaning-making that challenges our general understanding of how/why we tell our stories in the way that we do. According to Culler, although we often conceive of story–"a sequence of actions or events, conceived as independent of their manifestation in discourse"–as occurring separate from and prior to discourse–"the discursive presentation or narration of events"–doing so ignores the fluid, atemporal, non-linear possibilities of cause and effect; that is, we should not argue story comes before discourse OR that discourse comes before story, but we must instead set both possibilities as equal and simultaneous. This made me reconsider how we built our reading list because doing so required us to predict possible effects before we could ever know the cause. I wrote that Through the Arc of the Rain Forest would encourage me to think about genre–specifically, if Through the Arc is structured like a novela or telenovela, basically, a South American soap opera, then I would attempt to read it as such, and try to understand how the work was influenced by its embodiment or rejection of those generic conventions.

Just like the creators of the American comedy, Telenovela, Yamashita relies on her audience's understanding of the genre and expectations thereof, which allows confirmation and/or surprise.

My assumed effect had informed my "reading for," or my cause. I read Through the Arc of the Rain Forest differently because I had already created an ending to the experience for myself. Culler's argument is much more nuanced and sophisticated than my example, but reading this specific book directly alongside Culler has made me even more cognizant of how his dialectic approach to story and discourse operates in the stories we read and write.Through the Arc of the Rain Forest features an omniscient narrator, a "small…buzzing thing…a tiny sphere whirling on its axis" that attaches itself to a young boy's head (Yamashita). Our narrator is atypical though, because while it is technically a character in the story, it does not act directly or with real agency. Instead, "brought back by a memory," it explains, "I have become a memory, and as such, am commissioned to become for you a memory" (Yamashita). The whirling ball has access to everything that has happened or is going to happen in Through the Arc of the Rain Forest so, in a practical sense, it is able to shape the story's structures of signification before the story itself occurs. On the other hand, that the buzzing sphere comes from a memory, has become a memory, and will be, for us, a memory, implies that all of the action is occurring in the relative past, and in that case, discourse would, as we often assume it does, follow story. Neither one of these readings is more correct than the other. Or maybe even, as Culler insists, neither of these readings can be correct without the other. He urges readers "in the absence of the possibility of synthesis" that we must "be willing to shift from one perspective to the other, from story to discourse and back again" (Culler 187). This may be a difficult undertaking, especially in a narrative that is not necessarily linear to begin with, blurring our more typical understanding of cause and effect, of story and discourse; however, if we hope to learn to successfully read–our texts and our world–dialectically, then, undertake it we must.

Our narrator is explicit about its own anomalous nature, encouraging us to recognize the role it plays as storyteller and to consider its motivations for taking on that role in the first place. In our first discussions of this text, Dom asked us to look at this directly. He wrote, "Our narrator…does have agency, but not in the sense of the story itself. Our narrator directly controls how we receive and understand the story. It is the sphere that provides the discourse, therefore it controls our perception entirely." Because of this, Dom suggested, we must question what the narrator hopes to gain from this exchange. What, Dom asked, "can this narrator WANT or NEED?" It's easy to assume an all-knowing, inhuman, and technically–as we learn in the novel's last pages–incorporeal outsider object may not have wants or needs, but to do so gives that narrator undue power over its audience. Our narrator has total control over the discourse, even if it had very little ability to interact with the story as it occurred. Even this is complicated though. We know Kazumasa tends to follow where it leads and we don't know how much of Kazumasa's magical intuition comes from his relationship with the ball. It is telling that, even as we learn that the ball is narrating from beyond the grave, inasmuch as death is possible for the ball, its story ends shortly after its direct involvement does, as well. That is, we know that the ball could choose to tell more about the lives of Kazumasa and the rest into eternity if it chose, but instead, when the enigmatic Matacão is finally destroyed, the ball decides "the memory is complete," and leaves his readers to question whose memory we've shared. Throughout this interaction between the narrator and its audience, we are reminded over and over again that this story is one being told to us. We are forced to think about it as such. In Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration, James Phelan describes this register, the synthetic, for us. He writes, "Responses to the synthetic component involve an audience's interest in and attention to the characters and to the larger narrative as artificial constructs. The synthetic component is always present because any character is constructed and has a specific role to play within the larger construction of the narrative, but the synthetic may be more or less foregrounded" (Phelan 20). Our narrator is explicit about the fact that it is a construct; of course, all narrators are constructs, but not all narrators are so self-aware. On its origin, the ball recounts:

That I should have been reborn like any other dead spirit in the Afro-Brazilian syncretistic religious rite of Candomblé is humorous to me. But then I could have been reincarnated, if such things are possible, into the severed head of that dead chicken or some other useless object–the smutty statuette of Saint George or those plastic roses. Instead, brought back by a memory, I have become a memory, and as such, am commissioned to become for you a memory." (Yamashita)

I may have already used this GIF elsewhere on FLG's blog. So sue me. (Don't sue me.)

We're zooming in here because there is a lot to unpack in our narrator's short introduction of itself. We are not, in the text, given any explanation as to what exactly Candomblé is. We know that it is of Afro-Brazilian origin and that its religion is syncretic. You'd have to know a little about colonial Brazil to recognize the implications here. Native peoples of Brazil and the African slaves who were pulled from their own land and forced into slavery there saw much of their religious and cultural beliefs combined, and in an act of preservation, allowed Roman Catholicism to make its way in, as well (An example of what Bhabha defines for us as hybridity). We see this at play in Through the Arc, as the altar built on the Matacão is to St. George, the Patron Saint of England. In Candomblé we see one of the major networks of controlling values in not just the text but our world symbolized: those at play between imperial forces and colonial subjects. In Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, we see the modern version of this–the globalized world and those upon whose backs that world is built.

Donatello's St. George. In Italy, not Brazil.

Candomblé is important for the purposes of our discussion not just in what it symbolizes, but in what its practitioners believe. It is an oral tradition. Candomblé is a religion that must be shared through telling. It is, we might say, a living memory, passed among and across its believers. Additionally, it is believed that each person who practices Candomblé has their very own Orisha, a sort of junior deity whose job it is to help protect their charge and help them fulfill their destiny. If this sounds familiar, then you've been paying attention. This is not to say that Yamashita did or didn't expect her readers to recognize in her narrator's explanation of its own origin, the polyvalent register, only that, if we are able to do so, distinguishing the narrator's significance in the text becomes an increasingly productive exercise. For example, in our first reading, Front Left Gang was particularly taken by the fact the narrator finds humor in its reincarnation. The story it tells is whimsical, certainly, but its conclusion is tragic. Yet, the whirling ball finds humor in its existence. It is almost as if the narrator is having fun with us. We're playing a game of follow the bouncing ball, and it is up to us to keep up. Paying attention to the various intertextual codes is one way to attempt to do so. For instance, we might attribute its humor to its connection to Candomblé, which places no value on good or evil, only in the fulfilling of destiny. Thus, the ball does not have to read the events as good or bad; there need not be winners or losers. It has been "commissioned" to recount the events, and therefore, it must fulfill its destiny. This story, for our narrator, just is. Or was. Or both. Because another definition of "syncretistic" describes the process in language wherein one word carries with it more than one syntactic meaning. For example, "I bet you ten pounds," free of context, exists in both the past and the present (Glottpedia). Just like our narrator.

"An Afro-Brazilian syncretistic religious rite of Candomble"

We are, on the opening page, introduced to several of the questions this text raises for its readers, questions that Roland Barthes describes, in the hermeneutic code, as "enigmas."
Some of these questions might be:
1. What is so strange about this quirk of fate?
2. What is up with this religious rite? How did it bring our narrator into being?
3. Why does the narrator think there is humor in his reincarnation?
4. Who commissioned this memory?
5. What is the Matacãoa? Where did it go?
6. Who is our narrator? From where/when is this story being told?
Throughout the text, we get only one of these answers plainly; the Matacãoa is an unimaginably strong substance formed by toxic runoff as a result of the intense, insistent overproduction of the natural resources of the land. Although it was treated as magic, revered for its properties, it was also destroyed for that very reason.

The other questions though, resist simple answers. At least, our narrator resists supplying them. Reading the text hermeneutically, we might call the narrator's habit of saying things like, "But, of me you will learn by and by," as its providing of partial answers (Yamashita). It is also an equivocation, though, because while we do learn of the narrator, we do not necessarily learn what we might expect to from it. If the question proposed is "who commissioned this memory" or "from where is it telling us this story," then no, we really learn nothing. It might be natural for us to be frustrated by our narrator's withholding nature. It introduces us to fantastic possibilities, and then, with something as simple as "But I am getting ahead of myself" takes them away (Yamashita).

As an all-knowing vibrating memory from outer space reincarnated through an Afro-Brazilian religious rite, our narrator understands everything that has and will happen, and as such it is easier for the ball to see the events as simply fulfilling our world's destiny. It is able, like Culler, to look at cause and effect dialectically. This viewpoint also allows the ball to move more ethically in and out of various cultures, as it is a sort of blank slate on which to project those cultures' own ethics and values. And it does so without first filtering those ethics and values through its own. Our attention to the way our narrator moves through various cultures plays a significant role in our understanding (or attempt to understand) the various cultural codes present in this text. It's easy to forget that cultural codes vary culture to culture, more specifically, person to person (look at the way various subcultures in the United States read this past election if you're looking for proof of this). We tend to separate the "how we read' and the "why we read" from the "what we read." Obviously, our main project for this course has been to pay careful attention to all of those questions simultaneously, but I think this book, with its time/space hopping and strange little narrator, draws our attention to it consistently. We move from continent to continent, city to city, village to village, and back. Yamashita often references the camera crews recording events so that viewers in other countries can witness those events as well. It's as if she is reminding us that stories are meant to be told and shared and can only be interpreted. This becomes especially clear when we think of our narrator as a memory. Even though it is our first-person eye in the sky, we cannot trust its account to be objectively true, if it already only exists as a memory. I do not think, though, that this should cause us to question its reliability any more than we question our own. Yamashita's insistence that we recognize the ways in which stories are interpreted and the effects those interpretations have on the stories, their tellers, and their listeners is crucial. Yamashita is not even particularly implicit here. For example, we are reminded more than once of the fact that when Batista attaches a message to his prized pigeon's leg, he has no idea what the significance of that message will be until it is read by the receiver. In fact, "it always amazed him that what he had taken a few minutes to conjure and write should have such significance on its arrival" (Yamashita). I love Batista's amazement, in terms of our course, because it supports one of our major claims: that there is no central location where meaning-making happens. It's almost as if it occurs somewhere in the air, between the sender and receiver.

If we are refused any concrete answers to our questions in the story our narrator tells us, we must look elsewhere. The narrator seems to consider the telling of this story as imperative. It is a job that must be fulfilled. Its destiny. Since the existence of a narrator necessitates the existence of an audience, it becomes our destiny to have the story told to us. As such, we might benefit from a closer look at the various roles we play, between us and our narrator. In "Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences" Peter J. Rabinowitz outlines the four types of audiences through which we might gain some more understanding of our narrator, the story it tells, and our role(s) as reader. In the first of four, the actual audience is the flesh-and-blood reader, holding the physical book in their hands. In How Writers Read, this was Front Left Gang:

Actual Audience

four students and our reading group leader. All of us have at least passing knowledge of the Global South and magical realism, the two things of which, I think, the reader must have an understanding in order to be able to play along with Yamashita and her whirly ball narrator. The distance, then, between the actual audience–me, Alyson, Bob, Dom, and Justina, and the authorial audience–20th century readers, most likely North American, who would recognize Latin America and Japan most specifically as globalized nations separate from the "western world" and who understand the conventions of magical realism, is fairly short. My guess that, although this novel is set mostly in Japan and Brazil and is more often than not focalized through either Kazumasa or one of the Brazilian characters, its authorial audience is made up of North American readers, comes from several points of fact. To begin with, Yamashita opens her novel with a note explaining the structure, function and significance of the novela. If Yamashita's insistence of the novela's ubiquity in Brazil is to be trusted, readers there would not need this lesson. It is, instead, for the benefit of English speaking readers, likely from the US, due to her portrayal of J. P. Tweep and GGG. Tweep is a distinctly American businessman. His three arms reach out to colonize and commodify. He is efficiency personified. In the company itself, it seems we are meant to recognize the women Tweep meets in his first interview there, the Dallas clones, as oddly familiar. He hands his résumé to "a short, curly-red-haired receptionist with long red nails that matched the color of her hair and a voice like a Dallas telephone operator;" and then "the same voice, a pitch higher, call[s] out his name." He then "follow[s] this second woman who look[s] strangely like the receptionist but [is] not…she too [is] a curly redhead with matching red nails and a Dallas telephone operator's voice yet another notch higher" (Yamashita). What is eerie about the clones is their clone-ness. We recognize them as a familiar stereotype; it's hard not to hear that "Dallas telephone operator's voice" as we read, which would be difficult for readers outside of the United States, who might not even be able to place Dallas firmly in the southern half of the country.

Before we move on to the third and fourth audiences, I want to spend some time with the clones. They get little attention in the novel, but their presence is important. There seems to be a small army of them, almost–but just not quite–exactly alike. They are a kind of symbolic representation of the qualitative-progressive form Kenneth Burke describes in the chapter from Counter-Statement, "Lexicon Rhetoricae." In the qualitative-progressive form, we see a unit repeated, each time with a variation that puts us "into a state of mind which another state of mind can appropriately follow" (Burke 125). In these clones, we are given a concrete example of one possible effect of this type of repetition. There is something unsettling about the clones, not specifically in their similarity, but in the differences across their sameness. The clones' incrementally raising pitch, their slight difference of location, Tweep's increasing anxiety and confusion as he encounters each one in succession, offers them as something to fear, even if we are unsure as to why. The Dallas clones are the very definition of uncanny. Yamashita has read her Freud.

I'm sure she's also read her Bhabha. Even if she hasn't, his relevance here cannot be overstated. In "The World and the Home," Homi K. Bhabha takes Freud's uncanny and runs it through a postcolonial filter. For Bhabha, the postcolonial world is one that sees "the deep stirring of the 'unhomely' (141). The unhomely, Bhabha tells us, is "the estranging sense of the relocation of the home and the world in an unhallowed place. To be unhomed is not to be homeless, nor can the 'unhomely' be easily accommodated in that familiar division of social life into private and the public spheres" (141). I think it is that estrangement that Yamashita seeks to replicate in her text. Readers in the United States are used to being the center of the world. In Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, we are pushed to the outside. Tweep is the only North American character that receives any real character space on the page, and he is a mutant and the closest thing we have to a villain in the text. The Dallas clones are flattened into nearly identical stereotypes. In this way, it is the other whose story is privileged. We are forced to live on the ground (or a few feet above; I picture the whirly ball hovering about as he talks to us) with the people whose lives have been consistently marginalized and whose voice in the narrative of the globalized world has been silenced in favor of our own.

By giving us a narrator, however, who is part of neither narrative explicitly, Yamashita makes it difficult for the audience to uncover and settle into our role as reader. This becomes clear when we consider the third and fourth audiences Rabinowitz describes. The narrative audience is the audience that exists inside of the text. It is the audience to which the narrator, different from the author, tells its story. The narrative audience "is truly a fiction; the author not only knows that the narrative audience is different from the actual audience and authorial audiences, but he rejoices in this fact and expects his actual audience to rejoice with him. For it is this difference which makes fiction fiction, and makes the double-leveled aesthetic experience possible" (Rabinowitz 131). Rabinowitz

Ideal Narrative Audience

claims that, in order to be successful readers, we must "pretend to be a member of the imaginary narrative audience for which [the] narrator is writing (Rabinowitz 127). To do so in Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, we must ask what that audience looks like. We must ask, "What sort of person would I have to pretend to be–what would I have to know and believe–if I wanted to take this work of fiction as real" (Rabinowitz 128)? First and foremost, we must believe in whirling balls from outer space, and we must believe that whirling balls from outer space have interiority and subjectivity. We must also believe in reincarnation. And that whirling balls from outer space are subject to that reincarnation, if only "by a strange quirk of fate," through syncretistic religious rites (Yamashita). We must, for three quarters of the novel, believe in the magic possibilities associated with the Matacão, and even after that, we must believe in the commercial possibilities. The gap then, between the actual and authorial audience and the narrative audience, is fairly wide. Magical realism especially makes traversing this distance difficult because, unlike science fiction or pure fantasy, the fictional reality is not defined for us as something separate from our real world. We must just accept that our world as we understand it has magic in it. In some way, this is Bhabha's unhomely. A world familiar, but not entirely. It is our world, our home, but it is also decidedly not. And according to Bhabha:

In that displacement the border between home and world becomes confused; and, uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting. In the stirrings of the unhomely, another world becomes visible. It has less to do with forcible eviction and more to do with the uncanny literary and social effects of enforced social accommodation, or historical migrations and cultural relocations. The home does not remain the domain of domestic life, nor does the world simply become its social or historical counterpart. The unhomely is the shock of recognition of the world-in-the home, the home-in-the-word. (141)

Bhabha isn't talking about Through the Arc of the Rain Forest specifically, or even magical realism generally. But he may as well be. Front Left Gang's resistance to this text had so much to do with our uncomfortability with the world it describes and with the genre in which it is situated. And, like our Dallas Telephone Operators, not chiefly because it is so unlike our world, but because in its difference, we recognize our similarity to it. Because of this simultaneous recognition and estrangement, we are caught in a constant back and forth of submitting to and resisting our role as narrative audience. The second we find ourselves believing our narrator and its story we are reminded of how fantastic it is to do so. And then we settle back in for a little while. Only to be unsettled again. An additional wrinkle makes itself known if we try to ascertain the difference, in Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, between the narrative audience and the ideal narrative audience, which, Rabinowitz explains is "the audience for which the narrator wishes he were writing …This final audience believes the narrator, accepts his judgments, sympathizes with his plight, laughs at his jokes even when they are bad" (134). One of our narrator's defining characteristics is its lack of judgment. It, like the Candomblé practitioners whose reincarnation rite brings it back into existence, does not place value on measurements of good and bad. Yet, according to Rabinowitz, "the distance between the narrative audience and the ideal narrative audience tends to lie along an axis of ethics or interpretation. The ideal narrative audience agrees with the narrator that certain events are good or that a particular analysis is correct, while the narrative audience is called upon to judge him" (135). That agreement and/or judgement is complicated in Through the Arc because our narrator refuses to operate in terms that allow for it. We might judge our narrator's refusal to judge, which says plenty about our own desire to judge in the first place, but doing so is an unproductive act of inauthentic resistance. That is, "The degree to which the controlling value of the narrator diverges from the rhetorical stance of the actual reader determines to what degree the reader will likely be either submissive or resistant to the text" (Kopp). If our narrator's controlling value is one motivated by the refusal to place value in the first place, then we can only consider our own rhetorical stance in relation to that refusal. In some way, we can't just submit to the text because we aren't given any real guidelines to follow. We also can't really resist because our narrator isn't trying to force us into one particular way of reading, so we don't have anything concrete to push against. This is another instance where Through the Arc of the Rain Forest's refusal to be nailed down leaves the audience struggling to define its own readerly role.

                                                          A Network of Controlling Values

While it may be difficult to distinguish a network of controlling values for our narrator, there are plenty of other networks at play throughout the novel. For our original network, which we developed through a reading of Kazumasa's meeting of our narrator and their early life together working for the Japanese rail system, we came up with:

As the events of the novel progress, this network is continually reaffirmed, in terms of Kazumasa, Batista and the rest. Each character finds him/her/itself simultaneously enriched and exploited by their increased interaction with the rest of the world. This network also makes itself known throughout Through the Arc of the Rain Forest as it helps articulate the debate and competition between technology and magic (here, I mean anything that cannot be explained by our "rational," scientific understanding of the world). This is one of–if not the–major themes that propels the narrative in this text. Our narrator is a shorthand for this debate, a whirling space ball straight out of a science fiction novel, brought back through a sort of mystical religious rite. The Matacãoa, too, is caught in this tension. At first, it is treated as miraculous. Pilgrimages are made to it. It is ascribed with healing properties (channeled through Mané Pena's feathers) and the various characters through whom our story is focalized are drawn to it by varying degrees. Unsurprisingly, it does not take long for the industrialized world to find a way to cash in on the "magic" of the land. J. B. Tweep and GGG begin using the substance that makes up the the Matacão to produce everything from parachutes to hamburgers. It is commodified in every way possible. The people of the Matacão, too, become a resource to be exploited. Even its cultural significance becomes a product for profit. People begin carrying feathers, sold by Tweep's company, as a way to show their connection to the land, and a theme park, Chicolandia, is built nearby.

When it is revealed that the Matacão is really just a buildup of toxic waste–a result of the over processing and exploitation of the land in Brazil, and not the supernatural, miraculous phenomenon it has thus far been treated as–simultaneously, the substance begins to erode, due to that same overprocessing and introduction of bacteria that the land has not evolved to combat. We learn that the bacteria is carried by birds, not specifically, but especially pigeons–which, due to Batista's success with his own, have become a hot commodity in Brazil. At this point, J.B. Tweep and his wife have what Yamashita writes is "a last irreparable argument about nature vs. technology." Tweep and GGG cover the land in a powerful pesticide, one that kills all of the birds in the area, but not the bacteria. His wife, an ornithologist, fights to stop this, but is unsuccessful. The land is destroyed. The birds die. The rain forest is more than decimated. Even Kazumasa's beloved whirling ball dies (it has a concrete connection to the Matacão; as the land breaks down, so does the narrator). It seems that technology has won out. But then. Our narrator, after its death but before the "memory is complete" presents its audience with the following:

Maybe, then, with this image, the sides are not so cut and dry. It seems that the forest is slowly reclaiming its space, that the "crumbling remains" of "once-modern high rises" have been taken over by the land that was once destroyed by their presence (Yamashita). And yet, as the ball tells us, this is only a memory. Commissioned and completed, but the world in which it found itself goes on.

What I want to draw attention to here, is that while this specific story is novel, the issues and tensions underlying it are not. The Matacão is an invented place. The three-armed Tweep and his three-breasted wife (really!) are unbelievable. Our narrator's existence is impossible by the standards of our physical world. But the narrative, the battle of "nature versus technology," is recognizable and familiar. We recognize this story because it is one that concerns our world and it is one we tell over and over with a different setting and a different cast of characters. It is what Phelan describes as a cultural narrative. We know this because "rather than being a clearly identified individual," the ball is, itself, a memory, a reincarnation, a disembodied voice, a kind of vocalization of our collective unconscious and because Through the Arc of the Rain Forest "fulfill[s] the important function of identifying key issues and values within the culture or subculture that tells [it], even as [it] provide[s] grooves for our understanding of new experiences" (Phelan 9). In this case, these key issues and values are those related to engagement and exploitation, magic and technology, local culture and the globalized world.

Phelan also provides us with an approach to narrative that I think is crucial to informing our understanding of Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, How Writers Read, and our place in the world. He writes, "The central construct in my approach is position, a concept that combines being placed in and acting from an ethical location. At any given point in a narrative, our ethical position results from the dynamic interaction of four ethical situations:
1. That of characters within the story world…
2. that of the narrator in relation to the telling, to the told, and to the audience…
3. that of the implied author in relation to the telling, the told and the authorial audience
4. that of the flesh-and-blood reader in relation to the set of values, beliefs, and locations operating in situations 1-3. (Phelan 23)
This attention to one's own ethical position reminds us that our own ethics are inextricably tied up with others'. Whether we like it or not.
When I registered for How Writers Read, I did not anticipate that the course would be a lesson in ethics. Yet, so many of our readings begin by claiming to offer a way of reading and end with a call for ethical responsibility. Phelan obviously ends up there. So, too, does Seitz who argues that his way of reading "suggests a conception of rhetoric as not only a strategy of persuasion but also as an orientation towards the other, an attitudinal 'stance' based on what we value at the time A rhetoric of reading, in other words, includes the reader's ethos, which we might begin to locate along a continuum of submission and resistance" (149). Our second reading for the course was Jane Gallop's "Ethics of Reading: Close Encounters." It is a piece I have read multiple times in my college career, and it has, in minor and major ways, made its way into pretty much everything I've written since, but more importantly, it's made its way into my worldview. Gallop offers several pieces of advice for reading a text carefully and critically. These are practical suggestions: look, for example, for surprising or repetitive language; pay attention to images, metaphors, italicized text, and especially long footnotes (Gallop 7). Through this meticulous and sustained close reading, we become better able to read and evaluate texts, and in so doing, we become less able to judge a text, whole cloth, as either good or bad. Instead, we must read a text more ethically, allowing it to speak its intention, without our readerly projections getting in the way. This is all well and good, but more importantly, as Gallop tells us, she has "more ambitious goals" (9). What I find most compelling about "Ethics of Reading: Close Encounters" is located in the essay's final paragraphs. Gallop writes:

By "reading" here, I mean of course close reading, learning to hear what's really on the page, listening closely to the other, and being willing to catch what the other actually says, and able to hear what we didn't expect him to say. If we can learn to do that with books, we might learn to do that with people. Reading, by which I now mean close reading, can school us for all our close encounters. And then maybe, just maybe, we could learn not only to read better but to fight and love more fairly. To hear a little better what our enemy or our beloved might actually be saying. To resist demonizing and idolizing, but instead to fight and love other humans.

I can't think of a single thing more important than learning to read others–the other–ethically. Additionally, I'd argue, to do so, we must learn to read ourselves with equal care and attention. In general, I tend to shy away from speaking in absolutes, but self-awareness and empathy are the two most crucial characteristics we can actively seek to improve within ourselves–this is true on a local and global level. I think of both as muscles that we have to exercise, which is why reading is such an important practice.

I'm taking a little detour here, but I think it's important. Front Left Gang's reading directly preceding Through the Arc of the Rain Forest was Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and as much as I'd like to say we planned it that way, it was by pure coincidence that the books we chose lined up so perfectly (for a discussion of Heart of Darkness, click). I bring up Heart of Darkness because, while the novella itself is remarkable, the scholarship that has grown up around it is really something else altogether. I'm not sure how, for example, one might read Chinua Achebe's (in)famous polemic against Conrad's work "An Image of Africa: Two Visions of Heart of Darkness" and not feel their soul nourished. His frustration with Conrad's defenders and his rage at Conrad himself is energizing. And if our job is, as Gallop asserts, to learn to read ourselves and one another more ethically, how better to accomplish this than in engaging, intellectually, in these conversations?

Conrad tried his best, but our own ideologies run strong and deep; even if we might recognize injustice, imagining a way out of that injustice–especially when firmly rooted power structures depend on that injustice to remain in power–can be near impossible (I'm lifting that from Edward Said). Which is where the ethics of close reading come in. We can't unsettle our own comfortable place if we can only conceive of a world in which our own views and values are non-negotiable and everyone else's are up for debate. I think this is one of the places where Through the Arc of the Rain Forest and Heart of Darkness intersect. I'm going to add one more voice to this critical conversation. It is one, that, although not expressly, is directly in conversation with Gallop and with Heart of Darkness. It is also expressly and directly in conversation with Through the Arc of the Rain Forest. In "Dialoguing with Bakhtin over Our Ethical Responsibility to Anothers," Patrick D. Murphy writes:

[O]ur starting point from within our own existence need not be our ending point in ethical decision making. We need not be anthropocentric: 'to live from within oneself does not mean to live for oneself, but means to be an answerable participant from within oneself…Understanding generates obligation and also enables a person to practice an orientation not always of I-for-myself, or even I-for-humanity, but an "I-for-the-other," with that other encompassing entire ecologies from one's locale to the entire biosphere." (160)

Murphy reminds us that our own subjectivity is not dependent upon the repression of anyone else's. Further, rather than attempting to draw a distinction between our self and the other, we must work to move beyond placing these two constructs at odds. According to Murphy, understanding that every being has interiority to the exact same degree that "I," a being with something called "self" that is unique and belongs to "me," have interiority, is an ability that must be tended to and viewed as a practice. Although, almost reflexively, we tend to engage in an orientation of "I-for-myself," Murphy posits that an orientation toward Bakhtin's "I-for-the-other" is not just possible but imperative.

This guy gets it.

Works Cited
Achebe, Chinua. "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness ." The Massachusetts Review , vol. 57 no. 1, 2016, pp. 14-27.
Bhabha, Homi. "The World and the Home." Social Text , vol. 31-32, no. 31/32, 1992. pp. 141-153.
Burke, Kenneth. Counter-Statement . "Lexicon Rhetoricae." U California P, 1968.
Culler, Jonathan. "Story and Discourse in the Analysis of Narrative." The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. Cornell UP, 1981.
Gallop, Jane. "Ethics of Reading: Close Encounters." Journal of Curriculum Theorizing , Fall, 2000. Pp. 7-17.
McKee, Robert. "Story and Structure." S tory: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting . Harper, 1997.
Murphy, Patrick D. "Dialoguing with Bakhtin over Our Ethical Responsibility to Anothers." Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches , Edited by Axel Goodbody and Kate Rigby, U Virginia P, 2011, pp. 155–167.
Phelan, James. Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration . Cornell UP, 2006.
Rabinowitz, Peter J. "Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences." Critical Inquiry , vol. 4, No. 1, 1977. pp. 121 141

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Source: https://frontleftgang.wordpress.com/through-the-arc-of-the-rain-forest/