Comprising confrontations in _GR_

[hraudask at sun3.oulu.fi]

In _A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American 
Literature_, Richard Poirier insists that American 
writers have, in resistance to social and natural 
forces, tried to bring about environments of freedom by 
the power of words. In distinction from their European 
colleagues, whose works tend to "mirror an environment 
already accredited by history and society", American 
writers have tried to "create through language an 
essentially imaginative environment for the hero." In 
other words, the romantic line in American literature 
has strived to overcome all restrictive borders 
established by dominant social-historical forces. 
Poirier stresses that it has been possible to carry out 
these transgressions through style only, "as if only 
language can create the liberated place."

Proponents of the romantic line like Emerson, Melville, 
and the later James differ from realistic/naturalistic 
writers like Howells, Dreiser, and Wharton, "who", 
according to Poirier, "can only reproduce the effect
of environment as force." Perhaps more intensely than 
any other novel, _GR_ comprises both of these lines. 
The text becomes a field of confrontation between 
oppressive social-historical forces and characters' 
thrusts at freedom. In both stylistic and generic terms 
_GR_ contains an unsettled tension between historically 
accurate, "realistic" mimeticism so typical of the 
European novel, and genres as romance, fantasy, and 
science fiction, which resist the European tendency to 
mirror history and society.

At the same time, however, the novel takes place mostly 
within the borders of Europe. It sets out from the 
rather traditionally European London, only to find 
the "alternative environment", the German Zone 
immediately after WWII, right in the middle of the Old 
World. In this way _GR_ tries to dramatize the relation 
between the West and its others without any Orientalist 
recourse to romanticized realms outside the borders of 
the West. As Derrida writes in "The Ends of 
Man",  "every relation to the outside is very complex 
and surprising." It is not enough to remain in one's 
terrain, to apply "against the edifice the instruments 
or stones available in the house." [~Heidegger] Yet it 
is equally insufficient "to change terrain --- by 
brutally placing oneself outside, and by affirming an 
absolute break and difference." [~Nietzsche] Used alone 
each strategy only confirms the inside which one tries 
to transgress. Instead, "a new writing must weave and 
interlace these two motifs of deconstruction. Which 
amounts to saying that one must speak several languages 
and produce several texts at once." This is what _GR_ 
arguably sets out doing, through its plural styles.