Abstract

At one level, American Light is meant to simply be a good time--a comic novel of and about globally cross-fertilized culture. Beyond this, though, the novel deals with the problems that an individual faces in trying to find his or her freedom in a world that is becoming increasingly defining. American Light postulates that this definition comes primarily from the images that we are linked to via popular culture. That is, television and shopping malls, a 3-D version of TV, shape our consciousness much as the wilderness shapes the conditions under which characters struggle in a Jack London novel. Unlike one of London's characters, though, the characters in American Light may not be aware of what they are struggling against or even that they are in a struggle. Several twists in this double-plotted novel take the characters through issues of child birth, industrial collapse, celebrity, nationalism, TV, terrorism, consumerism, Being.... ;Though the novel uses pop-culture to talk about pop-culture, it does so in a way that will be transparent to some readers and construed by others as high art--a fusion of the high and low. That is, the style of the novel reflects the bombardment of pop culture that the characters undergo: it is fragmented--cartoonish. It contains a simplified imagery, a logic of surprise. Visual images are integrated with the text to break up the relatively smooth narrative surface of television, which is always present in the novel as undertow, subtext. This is a dynamic development, though: Klu, one main character, begins life as a person who is transformed into a cartoon while Gorgo, his antithesis, is drawn cartoonishly at the beginning and as the novel progresses, becomes and is thus rendered human. This transformation is brought about by Wendy: a catalyst in the novel; though Wendy is only present as an unseen force in the beginning, by the end of the novel, American Light has become her story