Influenced by the mass cultural songs of the 1960s, Oates in Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? transforms the traditional, young adult 'coming-of-age' story. Written in 1967 and dedicated, as the title suggests, to Bob Dylan, the story poses crucial questions about female sexuality and gender inequalities in the relatively 'safe' suburbs of upper-state New York, and, at the same time, gives us a powerful critique of our electronically mass-mediated cultural songs.
The story begins by describing Connie, a young woman dreamily at ease in the world of adolescent romance culture: fan magazines, platonic high school crushes, and so on. Her sense of sexual desire, however, has been shaped by whitemale 'light' rock music and the movies. Connie, indeed, has learned everything from 'the way it was in the movies and promised in songs.' Like the rest of her white, middle-class peers, she is destined, or so it seems, to a solid bourgeois existence. But Oates radically undermines Connie's security by showing us how many women are seduced by the romantic 'promises' in our pop songs: her young protagonist in fact becomes a victim of Arnold Friend, who, in the end, is not very friendly at all. Oates's short story is, therefore, fascinated with male violence (both psychological and physical) against women, for, as she says about her prodigious work in general, 'I sense it around me, both the fear and the desire, and perhaps I simply have appropriated it from other people.'
Like Islas's and Viramontes's narratives, Robert Stone's work, which we may call postmodernist meditative realism, concentrates on stories that are already embedded in an inter- American, hemispheric, and global dimension. Dog Soldiers (1975), a novel about heroin and drug dealers, for instance, travels globally between Saigon, San Francisco, and a middle-class retreat near the United States-Mexico borderlands. Stone's hard-nosed language and lurid scenes of sexual violence bring him clearly within the orbits of K Mart realism. A Flag for Sunrise (1981), however, places itself at the intersection between North and Central America. Stone's archaeology of the Americas allegorizes for us the persistence of an antithetical geographical space in the New World landscape. His novel, indeed, uncovers many layers of American identity by demonstrating how the United States government tries constantly to project its structures outward, creating -537- and recreating its North-South dichotomy in order to render the South as 'primitive' and victim.
Frank Holliwell, a burned-out anthropologist, at the request of his Vietnam army friends who are now running the C.I.A., travels to the mythical Central American country Tenecan to spy on a Catholic liberation theologian, Justin Feeney, who is suspected of Marxist revolutionary activities. Our postmodern ethnographer soon becomes a double-agent who falls madly in love with a nun, and who is caught in Stone's postcontemporary dialectics of romance: Marxist revolutionaries are depicted as 'children of light' and the Central American death squads are described as being farted out of the devil's ass. At worst, Stone's postmodern romance appropriates Central America by turning it into a sexual and religious playground for the hip norteamericanos; at best, he can be seen, through the wondrous dialectical transformation of romance, to be breaking hold of a 'Real' that seems unshakably set in place.
In contrast, E. L. Doctorow's narratives — from his award-winning Book of Daniel (1971) to his most recent novel, Billy Bathgate (1989) — in some ways do the inverse of what I have been arguing above. More precisely, the 'ragged edges of Real' have entirely disappeared. Doctorow's work thus reveals a new spatial historiography that has unique things to tell us about what has happened to the postmodern sense of history.
Read collectively, Doctorow's major novels map out generational 'moments' in the epic of American history: Ragtime (1975), in its collagelike production of real-life characters and events among whom appear imaginary WASP and ethnic characters (Morgan, Ford, Younger Brother, Coalhouse Walker, and so on), sets itself, like World's Fair (1985), in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Billy Bathgate, like Loon Lake (1980), reconstructs the Great Depression, while The Book of Daniel juxtaposes, without apologies, the Old and New Left Marxisms in America — thirties communism and sixties student radicalism.
In a blistering review of Doctorow's American 'epic,' in his influential essay Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1984), Fredric Jameson argues that the author's novels not only resist our political interpretations but also are precisely organized to 'short-circuit an older type of social and historical interpre-538- tation which [they] perpetually hold out and withdraw.' Jameson is, of course, absolutely right in his reading of Doctorow's simple, declarative sentences (especially in Ragtime), for unlike, say, the dialectical sentences of Gabriel García Márquez or Maxine Hong Kingston, he only allows himself to write in the digestible, best-seller style. While Doctorow's novels are splendid in their own right, and, perhaps, the author has merely decided to convey his great theme — the disappearance of our homemade radical past — formally, through the glossy surface style of the postmodern itself, the sharp edges of the Real have entirely disappeared, substituted by pop images and the simulacra of that history.
One of the most hybrid interventions in our postcontemporary narrative traditions comes from Jaime and Gilbert Hernández, whose fotonovela realist Chicano writings are a postmodern blend of comic books, science fiction, southern Californiacholola (Chicano youth culture), signifyin[g] magic realist storytelling, and subaltern theorizing. In the late 1970s the Hernández brothers became deeply involved in the musical signifiers of punk, and this postmodern phenomenon opened their eyes to the possibilities of expressing themselves in the fotonovela realist novel. Their literary productions are in many ways aligned with the incorporation of habits of 'futurology' into our everyday life and the magic realism of García Márquez's Macondo, but they also repeat the deterritorializing gestures of borderland theorists such as Renato Rosaldo, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Néstor García Canclini, who see in their postmodern ethnographies and feminist theories of the United States- Mexico border a laboratory for the postmodern condition, where migrant workers smuggle into their new baroque homelands regional art and medicinal herbs from the South and send back from the North contraband VCRs and CD players.
In their Love and Rockets (1982 — present) fotonovela, Jaime and Gilbert Hernández extend the borderlands to Los Angeles by interspersing in their work tongue-in- cheek science fiction stories (the 'Mechanics' series) with postmodern realist tales set in a barrio they call 'Hoppers 13.' More recently, Gilbert Hernández, like Robert Stone, has moved his texts in utopian directions by creating a series of stories based in the mythical Central American town of Palomar.
Love and Rockets was the first United Statesfotonovela to adopt -539- the European method of 'album collection' after magazine serialization. Despite representation in a West Coast bimonthly magazine of relatively modest circulation (it sells between 18,000 and 19,000 copies), the Hernández brothers are arguably the most widely read Chicano writers in America today. Since 1982, the Hernández brothers have produced thirty issues of the regular magazine and several album collections of their work: Music for Mechanics (Book 1); Chelo's Burden (Book 2); Las Mujeres Perdidas (Book 3); House of Raging Women (Book 4); Heartbreak Soup (Book 5); The Reticent Heart (Book 6); and Locas (Book 7). Their texts, read collectively, are a dizzying mix of polyglot love comics and super-hero, reckless adventure; their virtuoso drawings, moreover, represent derealized characters of intelligence, wit, and human frailty.
For Jaime and Gilbert Hernández, whitemale superiority has had its chance, and they now see their postmodern narratives as engaged with the dynamics of the articulate ascendance of others. These new dynamics may be what many commentators mean when they speak about a 'crisis' in the humanities, but as Houston Baker notes, 'one man's crisis can always be an-Other's fields of dream, ladder of ascent, or moment of ethical recognition and ethnic identification.'
To conclude on a personal note, when I recently asked my literature students at the University of California, Santa Cruz what the phrase 'narrative for the next society' meant, many of them said that the fotonovelas of Jaime and Gilbert Hernández are the narratives for the next society. My students' thinking about these postmodern f otonovela historiographies seems characteristic of the turn-of-thecentury human moments when we seek new definitions and utopian designs to resist the despair of things on many of our contested college campuses.
What their answer suggests to me is that many students in California (the Baudrillardean site of the postmodern) believe the function of narrative belongs to a fotonovela, popular space in
