Of Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things and Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men
“The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n”
(“Paradise Lost” Book 1 l. 254-255)
John Milton’s proposition of the mind—as a foundational [1] mechanism—that constructs the existential realities of “Heaven” or “Hell” finds its resonance in T.S Eliot’s suggestion that the “Dantean Hell is not a place but a state” (Eliot qtd from Dr Ang’s “Essay Questions” Qns 1). Analogising the concepts “Heaven” and “Hell” to “Utopia” and “Dystopia” respectively, this essay argues that Milton’s and Eliot’s insights gesture towards a notion that any existential experience of a topos—be it dystopia or utopia—is conceived and shaped by the dialectical interaction of one’s state of mind, or I posit, ontology with his or her material landscape. In both the quotes of Milton and Eliot, “place” appears to be contrasted to “state”. The Online Oxford English Dictionarydefines “state” as “a particular process or mode of consciousness” while a “place” refers to “a physical locality”. Unlike a physical topos and its corollary corporeal conditions that are rooted in a locale, the mind and its ontology are thought of as metaphysical processes, a “nature of being” in flux (O.E.D “ontology”).
However, this paper argues in both Auster’s In the Country of Last Things(CoLT) and Cuaron’s Children of Men (CoM), the ontos of their respective protagonists, Anna Blume and Theo Farron, are never entirely divorced from their dystopic wastelands. Rather, their “nature of being(s)” (Ibid.) are always oriented and transformed vis-à-vis their embodied interactions with their material dystopias. This essay subsequently postulates that “hope arises in the dialectical negotiation between communal and individual discourses” (qtd from Tan et al. presentation “Negotiating the Communal and Individual in Auster’s In the Country of Last Things”). These narrative threads enter a dialogue with each other, contributing to the positive trajectory of spiritual growth that “shores [the characters] against [their] ruins” (Eliot TWL V “What the Thunder Said”). In this essay, I propose a paradoxical idea: “utopian pockets” (term qtd from Lu et al. presentation “In the Country of Lasting Lusting”) of hope and rejuvenation, are to be found in the very processual confrontation with the arid nature of one’s wasteland and communal ethos.
Although both Auster and Cuaron begin their stories with jaded narrators who choose to isolate themselves from the dystopian societies they live in, both book and film ultimately end with their characters in an ou(t)-topia [2]—a boundless no-where yet a now-here—attesting to the values of consolation and compassion. The outopos in both authors’ texts are elucidated through the trope of the transitional and indeterminate journey: Anna and her gang drive out of the city near the end of CoLT, and the stateless bodies of Kee and her child in a dinghy boat out at sea waiting for the arrival of an ever-shifting sanctuary, the liner Tomorrowat the close of CoM. These mercurial images break free of the delimitating boundaries of any physical dystopia, the same time they exemplify the characters’ ongoing spiritual growth, and the hopeful and necessary vision of “keep[ing oneself] going” against one’s dystopic present(Auster 1). Both texts are also readerly “odysseys” for their audience. We are immersed in and swept along with the tides of struggle the characters experience in their dystopias. The result of which is to re-cognise the characters’ “transitioning” as being just as “mentally utopian” as their (intimated) utopian destination.
Reclamation of Waste
The material dystopias in Auster’s and Cuaron’s texts can be considered in terms of what Veronique Bragard deems as ‘wastescapes’:“landscapes where nature has disappeared and is crammed with the waste and ruins of the past” (481). The unknown city in which Anna Blume is trapped in CoLT is a physical locale littered with waste where objects are gradually “disappear[ing] and never com[ing] back” (Auster 1). Waste or refuse refers to “unserviceable material remaining over from any process of manufacture; the useless by-products of any industrial process; material or manufactured articles so damaged as to be useless or unsaleable” (O.E.D “waste”). Yet in Auster’s city, the concept of waste is re-positioned as a valuable resource since they are the elementary materials needed in the city’s production of energy (Auster 26). Marooned in the city and with her initial purpose of finding her brother eroded as days pass (Auster 34), Anna retreats into her own psychical shell and isolates herself from everyone (Auster 31). In order to ensure her survival, she imbibes the utilitarian ethos of the community and becomes an object-hunter. Yet Auster portrays Anna’s new “telos” of a bare life as a form of wasted or useless existence, since such a mode of living is devoid of any ontological purpose and orientation. “The term waste, as many critics point out, emerged from the latin vastus (empty) and gave words such as “devastation” (Jensen and McBay 9 qtd in Bragard 479), something that connects waste with destruction and apocalypse” (Bragard 479). However, I contend that the material topos in CoLT is existentiallyexperienced as apocalyptic because attending Anna’s embodied confrontation with her empirical wastescape is also a gradual attrition, an emptying out of her essence of being.
There is a deadly equation buried in all this. Since the work brings in so little, you rarely have a chance to put anything aside— and if you do, that usually means you are depriving yourself of something essential: food, for example, without which you will not have the strength to do the work necessary to earn the money to buy the cart. You see the problem. The harder you work, the weaker you become; the weaker you are, the more draining the work. But that is only the beginning. (Auster 28).
Her labour requires her to tie an “umbilical cord”—a parody of selfless maternal bond—to a cart. She indeed becomes self-less, becoming a “symbol of the consumer consumed” (Ang 16). It is not just her physical body that is rendered indistinct from the tool of her trade, but her mind which also breaks down and is pared in the very process of performing that gruelling labour. The job is “deadly” since it is more than a lose-lose situation that expects total bodily commitment, without any promise of ontological satisfaction. Besides that, it is not just a vicious cycle wearing the body down with hard work, but it is also spiritually draining. Anna concedes much later that such kind of living makes her “so miserable that [her] mind seemed to stop working. [She] became dull inside, all instinct and selfishness” (Auster 37).
However, the hopeful trajectory for Anna’s spiritual growth, or, more specifically, a utopian mode of ontology directed by telos, is launched when she decides to live ethically in relation to her spiritually-arid wastescape. She soon “makes the shift from being an object hunter to an objective hunter” (Ang 16). In order to rescue Isabel, she severs the cord to her cart and rushes to push Isabel out of harm’s way in time. Isabel is hence the “symbolic child she acquires” (Ibid.), succeeding this “irrational” (Auster 38) act of kindness. Soon after, Isabel becomes for Anna a newly-retrieved sense of telos, an Eliotian “shore” to ward her ontology against the entropic utilitarian tides threatening to consume her.
In Cuaron’s CoM, the audience is introduced to another city-wastescape—London in 2027. Yet Cuaron’s imagining of a futuristic London blighted with global infertility is one that is not unfamiliar to his contemporary audience. The pared-down physical and moral climate in CoM bear much uncanny resonance to our reality. Like Cuaron’s London, our current world is gripped by catastrophes both man-made and natural, we see and experience ongoing wars (in Middle East), terrorism, refugee crises, increasing militarism, decreasing biodiversity and global warming. Theo begins, like Anna, as a jaded citizen living listlessly. However, Theo is soon inspired into acts of altruism and activism upon his embodied interaction with a refuse-like subject and his community’s morally wasted ethos. I pun on the word “refuse” because Kee—as an unwanted “fugee”— is considered as a form of defilement threatening the bounded “purity” and unity of the United Kingdom’s national borders and discourse. Thus, Kee exists like a dis-member refused by and unable to be re-fused into another country’s narrative and political body.
On this footing, I expound on the waste-like status of Kee using the “dirt-y” theories of Mary Douglas and Julia Kristeva, in a bid to recuperate Kee’s “filthiness” as something paradoxically essential to the engendering of hope in CoM. According to Douglas in Purity and Danger(1966),
Dirt is a matter out of place. […] This implies two conditions: a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order. Dirt then, is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt there is system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements (36).
Therefore, dirt is a “relative notion” (Douglas 36-37). In the eyes of UK’s “Homeland Security”, their policing of refugees and citizens represents a utopian attempt to “organise the environment” (Douglas 2) so as to “create unity in experience” (Ibid.) for their citizens. Contained within the “Us-versus-They” discourse, Kee and her fellow refugees are thus regarded as “polluting” influences because they “contravene …that order” (Douglas 36) imposed by the totalitarian state in UK. However, I argue that Kee is not merely a waste empty and useless in manifestation. Rather, Theo, brought into an interaction with this waste-like-figure through his ex-wife Julian, is consequently motivated to altruism and activism, by the hope Kee literally embodies. Kee’s child symbolises a hope for a future re-generation of Mankind, keeping our extinction at bay. As the narrative proceeds, Theo becomes a “waste-collector” (pardon this crude term), adopting Kee, and by extension, her unborn child too, using all means to ensure the safe transit of mother and child to the liner, Tomorrow. In this light, Kee is thus re-conceptualised as not just a “void, but […] [a] multifaceted matter— [an] “irreducible otherness” (Iovino and Oppermann 458 qtd in Bragard 480)—that can be reshaped and has power to build meaning” (Bragard 480).
Moreover, I also read Kee as “abject” waste in a Kristevean sense. According to Kristeva, the abject is the “most sickening of wastes” (qtd from Mei Yin in “NYT Ghosts” presentation quoting Kristeva) which threatens the boundaries between inside/outside, thereby threatening the integrity of the clean, bounded self of the UK nation, or as the film depicts, the last vestige of civilisation “untainted” with chaos.
Here, I postulate that Theo’s embodied confrontation of what is “abjection”—first in the figure of Kee, and then in the treacherous journey into the exilic space of Bexhill refugee camp—is paradoxically vital in order to push at the “closed-off” borders of Theo’s ontology, with the result that those borders are opened up. This constant “encroach[ing]” (Kristeva 3) would then lift Theo’s ontology out of its stasis and emptiness, and proffers Theo a forward-looking thrust. Such a “forward-looking” trajectory is also my working definition of hope. According to the OED: “[a] person or thing that gives hope or promise for the future, or in which hopes are centred” (emphases mine) and/or “[t]o expect with desire, or to desire with expectation; to look forward to (something desired)” (qtd from Tan et al. presentation “Negotiating the Communal and Individual in Auster’s In the Country of Last Things”). The trialectical negotiation between Theo’s personal narrative (his capacity for activism), the totalitarian narrative of his community and Kee’s abject status results in endowing Theo’s ontology with renewed telos as he takes it upon himself to deliver Kee and her baby to safety bystruggling against the very containment logic espoused by his community.
Spar/ring Sentiments
Scarcity bends your mind toward novel solutions, and you discover yourself willing to entertain ideas that never would have occurred to you before (Auster 25).
The redemptive notions in struggling against one’s spiritually sparse mental and physical topos, so as to find rejuvenation in near ruins, are also elucidated in how Cuaron’s camera functions somewhat like an “incursive” and “contagious” actor. [3] The camera, with its fluid strategies, resists and transforms CoM’s physical poverty and chaos into a form of mental and spiritual plenitude on both the parts of characters and audience. I use the term “contagious” to invoke Julia Domingo’s concept of “liquid cinematography” (139). I suggest it is “incursive” because it is the “contagious” and protean qualities of Cuaron’s camera that allow it to resist being contained by any codified parameters. Instead, its fluidity subverts both the “ordering” impulses witnessed in Theo’s communal narrative as well as Hollywood conventions. [4] As delineated in her essay, “liquid cinematography” refers to the combination of mobile long shots and the compression of time and space through the conglomeration of intertextual references that endow the film with a fluid imaginary condition” (139). Cuaron’s camera is conceived as a fluid actor because it participates in the process of tracking the narrative development on its own terms. Domingo corroborates this idea when he explains, “[Cuaron’s] camera seems to move freely around the film space, showing everything within it” (142), divorced from any obligation to share Theo’s point-of-view. The independent and docu-realist dimensions of the shots in fact serve an ethical purpose: they narrate Theo’s transformation at the same time they encourage their spectators to reflect on and hopefully realise their (potential) complicity in the mindless suffering gripping our present reality. To begin, we are symbolically birthed into this dystopian world as Cuaron opens his film with a black screen and the voiceover of TV reporters announcing the latest news. One of the news includes the “ratification of a Homeland Security Bill” in order to protect the citizens from the “contagious” pollutants symbolised by the refugees. The sense of dystopian doom is reinforced by the gritty mise-en-scene of the movie, which repeatedly shows rather claustrophobic spaces littered with waste and cages, posters and news-reporting reminding British citizens not to house and protect any illegal immigrant, as well as armed police with barking hounds , cornering hungry and vulnerable refugees. This suggests that keeping the borders intact is the most dominant concern as part of UK’s ratification strategy, and the way to ward off any dystopian influences is to incarcerate and expel the “polluting” outsiders. As it is noted in Cuaron’s filmic universe, the UK nation survives and “soldiers on” in the cataclysmic tide that has engulfed other parts of the world, on the grounds that it has enclosed its borders, keeping its people safely in.
However, I contend that the Homeland Security’s attempt to contain dystopia is only at best desperate and curtailed. Dystopia is already existentially experienced within Britain homeland. The following “lead news” evinces such a notion: it narrates the death of the youngest person on Earth, Baby Diego. Cuaron succeeds this series of uncanny news reports— audience identifies the allusion to America’s Homeland Security, topics of human rights abuses and its controversies during recent Syrian refugee crises—with a scene of people mourning for Baby Diego’s death. Although it appears that the people in the café are mourning for the loss of Baby Diego, who is adored by many and regarded as a celebrity, I propose that their mourning stems from a subliminal frustration of their hope for any kind of re-births. What faces them in the aftermath of Baby Diego’s death is the inevitable and irremediable future of extinction.
At its outset, the film unfolds like a documentary. The handheld camera tracks the footsteps of its protagonist as Theo embodies the ennui characterising his dystopian condition, walking listlessly out of the cafe. Theo is unaffected by the death of Baby Diego; rather he appears to be more concerned with pouring alcohol into his morning coffee. The camera and our eyes follow him out into the busy metropolitan street in a single long take. “The long takes with its supposed correspondence between fictional and real time duration and the presentation of an uncut space” (Domingo 142) create a sense of docu-realism as it matches the diegetic sounds and sights of the London street to our real time of reception. It is only when a bomb goes off in the café that Theo has just left that the camera leaves Theo behind and trudges towards the café to take in the chaos. The “self-conscious shaky movement” (Ibid.) of the camera at this point renders the chaotic scene all the more realistic and riveting. Corpses are seen strewn among the ruins, and a traumatised lady goes near the camera, crying out in shock. The audience’s affective response is at once elicited at this instance of utter confusion, yet that response is abruptly cut short when Cuaron blacks out the scene the next moment, flashing the film’s title accompanied with a high-pitched ringing sound. The ringing sound is, according to William Whittington, the consequence of our auditory nerves receiving some sort of trauma (6). [5] The incursive and fluid qualities of the camera consistently disturb and unsettle the characters and the audience, leaving all of us grappling for a foothold. In a way, the audience’s mind parallels the disorienting status of Theo’s ontology given that the film refuses to establish any stable point of view that the audience can identify with, yet draws us into a world that is uncannily like ours.
Inherent in Cuaron’s defamiliarising aesthetics is also the appeal to the audience to consider and confront their complicity in contributing to the actual ruins of our civilisation. Our apathy could have perpetuated the injustice and suffering during conflicts and wars. By virtue of its “mechanical qualities—unimpeded as it were by anthropocentric horror or any sense of shame—[the camera] represents for the viewer what we might otherwise not see. In this way, the camera’s non-human qualities contribute to its elaboration of a humanist perspective” (Amago 221) by bringing both the images in the background and the foreground into a dialogue. For instance, placed within the same space of Theo’s meeting with Jasper, are cages of “illegal immigrants who, in the background, wait to be deported or sent to the refugee camp at Bexhill” (Amago 220). “These images simultaneously evoke some of the iconic photographs of the Nazis’ genocidal campaigns of the last century while also referencing the tragic realities of the present” (Ibid.). In another long take towards the end of the film, where Theo and Kee are depicted to be entrapped in the crossfire between the UK troops and the anti-government forces, the camera becomes our surrogate eyes as it becomes splattered with blood and shakes as if it was a person being shot, emphasising the realism and pathos stemming from an unmediated violence and chaos. This visual representation could very well be a part of our reality.
CoM’s “Ark of Arts”
Theo’s cousin, Nigel, introduces Theo to the government-sponsored project—an initiative he is involved in—as the “Ark of Arts”. Nigel’s endeavour to “rescue” the remaining pieces of great art in the world parodies the Biblical story of regeneration understood in “Noah’s Ark”. Unlike the obedient Noah who acts on God’s order, building a massive ark to prevent each species from becoming extinct, Nigel does not really care about the near-apocalyptic situation outside his well-equipped abode. He is more vested with the self-aggrandising prospect of amassing all those statements of art in his house, than to feel the keen pathos of real-lived suffering outside his “ivory tower” (Amago 222). Contrary to Noah’s project which ensured a fruitful regeneration of biodiversity on Earth again (Genesis 8:16-17 qtd in “Christian Bible Reference”), Nigel’s “Ark” does not attempt to rescue his country from its spiritual and physical malady through art. Instead, I suggest it is Cuaron’s collage of references to contemporary lived terror and religious myth that enacts a Noah-like’s rescue of CoM’s beleaguered city-wastescape and totalitarian narrative, on the level of cinematic reception.
Here, I posit that Cuaron’s “Art of Arks” imbues his thematic wasteland with new ethical meanings. The invoking of Michelangelo’s La Pietà in a scene exemplifies Cuaron’s desire for his audience to re-cognise the potential of a spiritual awakening attending apocalyptic ruins. In the final run towards the open waters of Bexhill, the camera acts independently once again, deserting the main characters to capture the scene of a traumatised mother crying and cradling her dead son in her arms (Amago 221). This scene of pathos and unjust suffering also brings to mind another art piece, Picasso’s painting Guernica, which frames Theo during his meal with Nigel (Ibid.). By associating Theo with Picasso’s political indictment against the mindless suffering of war, Cuaron portends Theo’s later transformation into an ethical waste-collector. Framed by this massive art piece, Theo becomes symbolically embedded within a narrative of pathos, war and suffering (Amago 223). Guernica“has since become the twentieth century’s most powerful indictment against war, a painting that still feels intensely relevant today” (Robinson “Guernica”). “In the DVD commentary, cultural critic Slavoj Zizek claims that the content of CoM‘s background has more relevance than the protagonist’s journey itself, arguing that “the fate of the individual hero remains a kind of a prism through which you see the background even more sharply” (2006), instead of the other way around” (Zizek qtd in Domingo 144). While I agree with Zizek’s proposition that the audience— via Cuaron’s defamiliarising liquid cinematography— is compelled to re-cognise the echoing of ethical and socio-political injustice in the Homeland Security’s supposedly “utopian” attempt, I suggest that Theo’s narrative transformation from a jaded individual to an ethical agent is just as essential in “rejuvenating” incumbent literary conceptions of dystopia and utopia.
The Exilic Condition
As the narrative proceeds, it appears that Theo’s existential experience of his ever-shifting topos—from the relatively safe terrain of London to the conflict-riven areas of Bexhill Camp—is conceived and shaped vis-à-vis his dialectical interaction with Kee and his (ex) personal narrative of compassion. Therefore, any dystopian or utopian condition is never determined solely by the material conditions rooted in a particular topos. The bleak and monotonous narrative assumes a hopeful tone as Theo trudges forward selflessly in his quest to bring Kee and her child into the hands of the vanguard of human rights, the “Human Project”. I put forth a paradoxical notion here—it is only in Theo’s ongoing struggle against the “utopian” though merciless containment strategy of his nation that he finds a purpose in his life. Stasis does not reward him ontologically even if it fulfils his material well-being, as in the case of Anna at the outset of CoLT. His country’s utter lack of moral fibre is contrasted with the selflessness of Jasper, Miriam and Marichka. I read the trio’s altruism as the key “utopian moments” that awaken the capacity for charity and compassion in Theo. Therefore, it is in embodying compassion and in struggling against containment that he ironically becomes ever-more ontologically oriented and purposeful. This sense of increasing purposefulness in Theo’s ontology is suggested by the increasing pace of the film’s narrative as he exiles himself and travels into the liminal space of Bexhill. In that very process, Kee experiences the first of birthing pangs, Mariam is ruthlessly rounded up for execution and Theo witlessly turns into the last guardian of Kee, becoming almost waste-like, dispossessed of valuables and nationality as he enters a starkly grittier world.
As opposed to his earlier weary and half-drunken walk on London streets, Theo seems to know where he has to go in this exilic place. His ontology, driven by hope, becomes the foundational mechanism that treks and steers his physical movement across the Bexhill topos. Accompanying Theo’s transformation is also, as Whittington proposes in “Sound design for a found future: Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men”, a critical use of music to exemplify his renewed sense of hope.
[Whittington posits that the film’s use of John Tavener’s music helps] evoke a sense of transformation and transcendence within the character. The sound design further supports this goal through the use of a blend of Zen-like sound effects that are primarily related to motifs from nature, which underscore Theo’s new awareness and sense of purpose. (5)
This “zen-like sound” replaces the high-pitched ringing sound of tinnitus, a condition usually associated with trauma and death (Julian hears a ringing in her ears during the last moments of her life). Hence, Cuaron’s “sound design recuperates Theo’s sense of loss and despair through the introduction of a musical score that connects with various spiritual traditions from around the world, including Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism” (Whittington 5). Also consider the cry of Kee’s baby that penetrates through the crumbling building, powerful enough to engage everyone in the building and halt a battle in its midst.
Ontologically directed, Theo delivers Kee’s child, going against all odds to ensure the safety of both mother and child by bringing them safety off-shores. The notion that safety is to be sought off-shores is already a rewriting of The Odyssey. Unlike Odysseus whose heroic quest terminates upon a physical homecoming, Theo’s quest ends in the midst of the sea, off the treacherous terrains of the UK-wasteland, and into the metaphorical “arms” of the ever-sailing sanctuary-Liner, Tomorrow. The term “exile” has its roots in “classical Latin exilium”, referring to a “fact or condition of banishment, in post-classical Latin also waste, ruin, and destruction” (O.E.D “exile” “n”). As phenomena, “[e]xile,” “diaspora,” and “refugee” are generally considered to be terms related to forced dislocations” (McClennen 15). “All of these words have their roots in the Latin “migrare” (“to transport, move, depart, remove”), and emigrate’s prefix originates in the Latin “ex” meaning “out”” (Ibid.). While an exilic condition often takes on connotations of loss, despair, and lack of rootedness, since an exile is barred from returning to the land that nursed him, I would like to read against the grain by proposing a notion of “rhizomatic” movements in the (con)texts of Cuaron and Auster. Deleuze and Guattari introduce the concept of the “rhizome” in A Thousand Plateaus (1980):
A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles. As is the potato, or any structure in which each point is necessarily connected to each other point, in which no location may become a beginning or an end, yet the whole is heterogeneous […] Deleuze labels the rhizome as a “multiplicity,” rather than a “multiple,” wresting it from any relation to “the One” (Deleuze and Guattari 7-8 qtd by Clinton n.p.).
The “One” written in the aforementioned block quote refers to the teleological concept of “trees”. According to Deleuze, ““[a]rborescent” is a dirty word” (Deleuze qtd in Clinton n.p.) since trees with its beginnings in roots constitute a structure, where ends can causally link and explain their beginnings. As Clinton quotes Deleuze and Guattari, “the tree encompasses the whole of dualistic logic through its branching patterns, through its definitions of set pathways between root and branch. As opposed to trees, “the rhizome is an anti-genealogy”” (Deleuze and Guattari 21 qtd in Clinton n.p.). Teetering the explication of the concept of “rhizome” to my segment on exilic spaces, I argue that in the context of the UK’s compulsion to sanitise its country’s body-politic, the exilic condition, characterised by perpetual movement, is preferred over remaining in UK’s treacherous topos that threatens to consume Kee’s physical body and Theo’s spirituality anytime. Moreover, the rhizomatic structure of the boundless sea parallels the ontological status of Theo, as both are states epitomising flux and the resistance towards stasis, and by virtue of being so, empowers continual innovation and hope.
The Austerian Odyssey
In this light, Auster echoes Cuaron’s preoccupation with the trope of the transitional. Auster rewrites Homer’s epic in some ways, privileging the epistemological process of an ongoing struggle, over any utopian outcome in corporeal manifestation. In other words, his characters come to acknowledge that the process of an ontological “odyssey-ing” is just as utopian as their (suggested) utopian destination. I posit Auster’s “rhizomatic” aesthetics “shores against” (Eliot, TWL) his story’s Babel-esque phenomenon by compelling his readers to see how “utter despair can exist side by side with the most dazzling invention; entropy and efflorescence merge” (Auster 25). Indeed, we see this oxymoronic conception of “entropy” attending “efflorescence” playing out in Anna’s next refuge. Evicted from Isabel’s house, she finds sanctuary in the library with Sam and describes her days with Sam as “the best days for [her]” (Auster 86). These days are conceived as utopian even though Anna and Sam are running out of the bare necessities to survive: proper nutrition for Anna’s baby, fuel and glots. Nevertheless she is not “hungry” for she feels spiritually fulfilled, her family and Sam’s book have become yet another new-found sense of telos for her. At this point, Anna also begins to narrate her domestic life with Sam with more intricate details, elaborating on their shared moments of reminiscing about their past, their delight in smoking which “helped to keep [their] spirits up” (Auster 88). Indeed, Auster’s “rhizomatic” narrative pattern—his reluctance to stabilise any terminal or stable direction for his readers, the fact that all houses, like the library and Victoria’s Woburn House, are ultimately destabilised and crumble into ruins—reinforces the sense of untenability attached to any semblance or construction of stability. Rather, both Cuaron and Auster seem to valorise a pattern of metaphysical utopia in the mind, which manages loss and re-discovery, and more loss and more innovation, very well.
While security may be considered the ideal in the dystopian wastelands of New York City and London, this security that “feeds” the body sadly leads to mental stasis and an emptying out of one’s capacity to care and share. Consider the difficult questions Anna asks with regards to the utopian space of the Woburn House (Ang 17):
What is better—to help large numbers of people a little bit or small numbers of people a lot? I don’t really think there is an answer to this question. Dr. Woburn had started the enterprise in a certain way, and Victoria was determined to stick with it to the end. That did not necessarily make it right. But it did not make it wrong either. The problem did not lie in the method so much as in the nature of the problem itself. There were too many people to be helped and not enough people to help them. The arithmetic was overpowering, inexorable in the havoc it produced. No matter how hard you worked, there was no chance you were not going to fail. That was the long and the short of it. Unless you were willing to accept the utter futility of the job, there was no point in going on with it. (Auster 112)
Anna’s epiphany attests to the importance of subjecting one’s ontology to flux. Flux, in this case, does not cause one to be uncertain. Rather, being rooted in flux enables one to stay flexible and adapt to any sudden changes in life. In a paradoxical sense, this “rooted flux”, which is a state of mind, is also a way to stabilise one’s ontology against the entropic tides of forgetting, emotional loss and inhumanity in CoLT’s wasteland. Therefore, it is no wonder that we find ourselves swept along a similar kind of flux, feeling lost and uncertain as to what happens to Anna and her gang at the end of the novel. Like the “rhizomatic” structure connecting narratives “to each other [such that] no location may become a beginning or an end” (Deleuze and Guattari qtd in Clinton n.p.), Anna’s quest functions more like a pilgrimage with no end, an “ending” that is always journeying. Such pilgrimage also encompasses an ontological “odyssey-ing”.
“Shantih, Shantih, Shantih”
These Sanskrit words are chanted twice in CoM, the first, when Miriam buries Julian and the second time comes from Jasper when he realises that Kee is carrying the seed of hope for humankind in her body. Amago explains for his readers that the words, ““Shantih, Shantih, Shantih” come from a formal ending to the Upanishads, defined by Eliot as “The Peace which passeth understanding.””(Amago 219). For Eliot, these incantations represent “an exhortation to self-control, charity and compassion and most importantly, peace” (Amago 218). Concomitant with this appeal to Mankind’s benign virtues is also the conclusion of The Waste Land “in the sacred waters of Ganges River” (Ibid.). In this aspect, the ending of CoM mirrors Eliot’s hope of rejuvenation in the open and boundless space of the sea even if the sense of mercurial uncertainty prevents us from having closure. Theo, and the stateless bodies of Kee and her child wait out in a rocking dinghy boat in the midst of the sea waiting for the arrival of Tomorrow. In the outopos of the sea, we witness one of the most poignant scenes in the film, consolidating the significance of “self-control, charity and compassion” (Amago 218) as ethical and necessary “shores” against the tides of ontological devastation. In this last scene, Kee decides to name her daughter “Dylan”, the name of Theo’s dead son in honour of Theo’s selflessness. Theo hearing Dylan wailing, channels sincere fatherly instincts, by teaching Kee how to comfort a crying child before succumbing to his wounds in a peaceful, contented manner. Unlike the beginning of the film which features a voiceover depicting a state of crisis, CoM ends in a somewhat hopeful manner. Cuaron intimates at a rejuvenated future by letting the audience hear a voiceover of children’s laughter at the conclusion of his film.
Therefore even if both Auster and Cuaron begin their stories with jaded narrators who choose to isolate themselves from the dystopic societies they live in, both book and film ultimately end with their characters in an outopos—a no-where yet a now-here—affirming the values of consolation and compassion. Indeed, the act of burying Frick, instead of recycling the body, though regarded as a heinous crime against the state, is wilfully executed out of compassion – Victoria wants to offer condolences to a distraught Willie. Theo and Victoria’s acts stem from the outopos of the mind, and “serve as testaments that human relations are worth more than” the fear of any physical dystopia (qtd from Sally’s part in presentation “Negotiating the Communal and Individual in Auster’s In the Country of Last Things” Auster 135).
Concluding, the “outopos” in both authors’ texts are not to be contained by the delimitating boundaries of any physical wastescape and discourse. Rather, in their emphasis on the intermediate, the existential experience of a utopian “outopos” in material dystopia exemplifies the notion that it is the characters’ ongoing ontological growth that determines whether a place is truly dystopian or utopian. Moreover, in both texts, the readers come out of an equivalent kind of (readerly) odyssey. We re-cognise that any existential phenomenon of a “‘utopia’ is possibly a no-place, the outopos” (Ang 22) of the mind as well. Auster and Cuaron’s creation of a utopian, “heavenly” frame of existence amid the backdrop of physical devastation, knows no bounds and resides “in [an ongoing] commitment to the urgent but provisional, (and urgent because provisional), here and now” (Ang 22).
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[1] I chose the word “foundational” because it is a synonym of “place”, and it connotes something unchanging.
[2] Outopos, as Dr Ang delineates in her lecture essay, “recognis[es] the limitations of the boundary [associated with any dystopia or utopia]” (19).
[3] Domingo shares similar notion of the camera becoming an actor when he suggests that “the camera becomes almost an individual entity, as if it (and hence, we) were another character roaming around the film space. It usually follows Theo from behind or moves around him […]” (142-143).
[4] James Udden comments that CoM‘s “defiant” style, its disposition towards the use of long takes, goes against Hollywood conventions (Udden qtd in Amago 141). Deborah Shaw supports Udden’s proposition by picking up on the auteristic tones of Cuaron’s aesthetics, suggesting that “CoM navigates between commercial cinema and independent filmmaking” (Shaw qtd in Amago 141).
[5] William Whittington explains the medical reason behind the condition of tinnitus in his essay “Sound design for a found future: Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men”: “medically, this type of ringing results from the brain attempting to rewrite the pathways around the damage and the hyper activation of sensory nerves to compensate for the loss. It is the result of the auditory system attempting to heal itself” (6).
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