The Socio-Spatial Dynamics of Theme Parks in Contemporary Transatlantic Fiction

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes I use “situational” to mean that there were no public spaces who bore this function full-time, given the scarcity of leisure time during this period, though sites like the village square could be transformed on occasion to meet this need at, say, the time of a major festival. To draw on Baudrillard's much-abused critical term, hyperreality is the experiential domain of the postindustrial developed world, one in which such successive degrees of the virtual and the simulation permeate our social space that the ontological and epistemological distinction between the real and the copy has become inextricably muddled. Or, as Miodrag Mitrainovic defines it, the “theatrical” staging of a “narrative that links together the domain of … a great variety of attractions” (114). Though in a slightly different register, these efforts were anticipated by such works of speculative fiction as Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park (1990), which dramatizes the resistance of nature and happenstance to humanity's hubristic attempts at environmental engineering, and Larry Niven and Steven Barnes's Dream Park (1981). In a review of one of his collections, Stephen Amidon describes Saunders's America as “half theme park, half television advert” (65). Whereas the Situationist International called for spaces on unending carnivalesque (in the Bakhtinian sense) possibility, the postindustrial theme park came to offer a mild variation on the consumption patterns, ruling corporatist ideologies, and entertainment figures already ruling late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century existence. Historian David Blight chronicles the strategic negotiations involved in the Civil War's entry into popular memory in his groundbreaking study Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. The unifying themes of Saunders's fictional theme parks are rife with implications for collective identity formation through historical consciousness—for instance, the American Civil War, in “Civilwarland in Bad Decline” is commonly seen as one of the defining moments of American history. In “Pastoralia,” the primitavistic envisioning of Neanderthal life testifies to how our imagining of our origins has all sorts of implications for how we culturally define ourselves as a species. This catering is often carried out in a particularly dehumanizing and poorly remunerated manner, as Barbara Ehrenreich illustrates in her magisterial participant investigative report, Nickel and Dimed (2001). In Bounty the gap between rich clients and poor workers is emphasized by the fact that the former devour lavish feasts while the latter subsist on black bean soup and little to no meat. Derivé, from the French verb “to drift,” is to actively reclaim urban environments through the act of wandering in search of what is novel, captivating, and personally useful. The flaneur is an idle urban wanderer who takes in and processes the sensations of the city and of losing him or herself in its crowds in a particularly artful manner. Additional informationNotes on contributorsMichael K. WalonenMichael K. Walonen is a specialist in transatlantic modern and contemporary cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and world literature. He is the author of the book Writing Tangier in the Postcolonial Transition: Space and Power in Expatriate and North African Literature.