Loving With a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women, and: Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, and: Playland (review)

122 the minnesota review through which substantive, culturally different and other spaces are perceived. Our optic is one of separation, suspension, rather than ontic or perceptual immersion—jetliners versus the Parthenon: "He wanted to know about my travels. I told him I was a traveler only in the sense that I covered distances. I travelled between places, never in them" (143). This is clearly DeLillo's solution to the formal dilemma raised at the beginning of these notes: if a totalized world is finally unavailable for perception (not even in the most delirious computer-paranoia vision), then it seems best to hold to the fragments of place, but to mark those with a peculiar structural absence, to arrange the camera in such a way as to underscore its own vacancy, the placelessness of this peculiar multinational (American) subject as it wanders across such clusters of full space, clusters still vaguely warm from the evanescent presence of the sacred. We conclude with one of those moments, an interesting wrap-up on the relations between names, space and storytelling: I'd last seen Hassan in Lahore. . . . Case had come from Nairobi. ... AU these places were one-sentence stories to us. Someone would turn up, utter a sentence about footlong lizards in his hotel room in Niamey, and this became the solid matter ofthe place, the means we used to fix it in our minds. The sentence was effective, overshadowing deeper fears, hesitancies, a rife disquiet. There was around us almost nothing we knew as familiar and safe. . . . The one-sentence stories dealt with our passing grievances or small embarrassments. (94) FREDRIC JAMESON Tania Modleski. Loving With a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women. Hamden, Connecticut: Shoe String Press, 1982. 140 pp. $15 (cloth). Mario Vargas Llosa. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. Translated by Helen R. Lane. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982. 374 pp. $16.50 (cloth). Thomas Zigal. Playland. Austin, Texas: Thorp Springs Press, 1982. 216 pp. $10 (cloth). Each of the books treated in this review reflects, in its own way, on mass culture, examining the production of public images and collective fantasies, both as a highly profitable industry and as an effective means of social control, by which a society divided on the basis of class, race, and gender is reproduced. These books— Modleski's Marxist-Feminist cultural analysis of mass art intended for women, Vargas Llosa's parodie and autobiographical novel about his early career and love life in Lima during the 50's, and Zigal's political allegory and satire of post-Hiroshima America—collectively illuminate the nature and function of signifying practices in the service of capitalist and patriarchal ideology. Additionally , particularly in the case ofthe first two, they call into question the traditional sharp bifurcation of cultural production into "mass" and "high" or "elite" art with the attendant privileged place accorded to the latter. And all three, but especially Modleski, engage at times in a cultural anaylsis which, going beyond a negative hermeneutic of démystification, recuperates the Utopian elements in mass culture. An effective syntheses of Marxism, feminism, and psychoanalysis, Loving With a Vengeance investigates the sources of narrative pleasure for women in three distinctly different popular narrative forms: Harlequin Romances, Gothic novels for women, and television soap operas. While noting that these feminine texts display a psychology of selfabasement and self-subversion in contrast to the mode of self-aggrandizement typical of male texts, Tania Modleski avoids the usual ridicule and condemnation of feminine texts and readers. She argues, much more productively I think, that mass-cultural texts for women speak to the real problems and conflicts in their lives, employing narrative strategies which simultaneously challenge and support women's oppression under patriarchy. Explicitly rejecting the Frankfurt School's assumptions about the nature of mass art and high reviews 123 art, with its dismissal of mass art as simply imposing "false consciousness," she endorses the Athusserianism of Pierre Macherey, searching in her analysis of various texts for the "defects" or "absences" which articulate the contradictions that women experience in everyday life. And to the common charge of "escapism" levelled at feminine texts, Modleski partly agrees—but with the extended notion of escapism...