History is written by the victors, the dominant nation, the ruling class and subaltern voices are subdued and ignored. Jean-François Lyotard, in his work The Postmodern Condition, criticizes the historical master-narrative, the vision of history as a totalizing narrative schema which reflects a singular perspective: “I define postmodernism as incredulity towards metanarratives… The narrative function loses its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great journeys, its great objective. »[1] The overarching, goal-oriented master narrative is just a means of legitimizing a subjective view as truth. Instead, postmodernists argue, we must hear marginalized, localized, and subaltern histories.[2] Jacques Poulin's Volkswagen Blues reflects the postmodern condition in its unraveling of the traditional, colonial, and white supremacist representation of American history, opening with "We are no longer the heroes of history" (Poulin). In their experience of Diego Rivera's Detroit Industry mural, Jack and The Great Grasshopper find themselves both creators and victims of a great master-narrative to reveal the insufficiency of a totalizing and determinate vision of history. Say no to plagiarism. Get a custom essay on "Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned"? Get an original essay Vehement opposition to Rivera's depiction of race in Detroit industry murals reflects whites' fear of see his singular vision of history called into question. Edsel Ford, son of Henry Ford, commissioned Rivera in 1930 to paint 27 panels on the courtyard walls of the Detroit Institute of Arts depicting the spirit of Detroit (Goodall 457). Rivera set out to describe the industrial production and assembly of Ford's V8 engine, from extracting the ore from the ground to the completed automobile that rides off into the sunset. Rivera topped his mural with large depictions of the four component races of the American continent: black, white, red and yellow. His reasoning was to connect today's America to the source of its wealth, its aboriginal roots, and the multiple races that contribute to its industry. As Alex Goodall explains, "Rivera saw one of the primary functions of his work as contributing to a grand vision of Western continental unity, an attempt to grapple with the idea of ​​Americanism and 'remove from it what he considered to be encrustations of European culture' (473). ). Yet white middle and upper classes attacked the painting as “un-American” (473) because it did not reflect their vision of a superior European heritage. As Rivera's biographer explains: "People were looking for the statuesque woman in classical drapery... holding a small automobile in one hand and a burning torch in the other" (469). Goodall observed, “Underlying all this was the fear expressed by European elites that nonwhite culture might eclipse the Western European heritage in the United States” (473). Rivera attacked his critics' narrow view of history, saying: "What they denounce as an 'anti-American invasion,' [is] the pictorial representation of the basis of their existence city ​​and the source of its wealth, painted by a direct artist. descendant of aboriginal American stock! » (473). In essence, the negative reaction to Rivera's work reflects two competing visions of history: the dominant white and his vision of his own European supremacy and the marginalized minority who want to be heardhis contribution. Rivera saw Americanism in its Aboriginal roots while white Americans wanted to see it in its Western European and Greco-Roman origins. Jacques Poulin also reflects the white rejection of America's aboriginal roots in favor of a Eurocentric vision. The legend of Eldorado, of the "chief of an Indian tribe" who "stripped off all his clothes, coated his body with a resinous substance and rolled himself in gold powder" then dove with his "body "in the water" (Poulin 17) reappears when Jack and The Great Grasshopper arrive at the "Royal Bank Plaza" with its "glass panels sprinkled with gold" and "two golden prisms": "The building had the air as bright and warm as honey. , and they could not help but think of the gold of the Incas and the legend of El Dorado” (55). Eldorado's echo in the present reflects Rivera's depiction of America's contemporary richness stemming from an indigenous past. At the same time, the Spanish European ring of "Royal Plaza" evokes the age of exploration, so that the image of the bank represents the clash of European and indigenous boundaries. What once belonged to the Indians has now been transferred, so that white culture is indebted to the indigenous origin of its wealth. However, even as he realizes this historical debt, Jack still reveals his desire to maintain a master narrative of the history of white supremacy: “It felt like all dreams were still possible. And for Jack, deep in his heart, it was as if all the heroes of his past were still heroes” (55). Jack cannot simultaneously exalt an Indian legend while calling white explorers and conquerors heroes. As La Grande Sauterelle tells him: “When we talk about the discoverers and explorers of America… I have nothing in common with these people who came looking for gold, spices and a passage to Asia. I am on the side of the people who have been deprived of their land and their way of life” (16-7). The conflict of points of view reveals the historical use of a singular totalizing master narrative as a means by those in power to assert and justify their domination, to create heroes from murderers and to stifle the voices of conquered and vanquished. Rivera's inclusion of four races also undermines the historical narrative by promoting racial integration and miscegenation. The selection of the four specific races comes from José Vasconcelos' theory of the cosmic race. Vasconcelos was Mexico's Minister of Education from 1921 to 1924, who launched the Mexican mural movement and was thus responsible for Rivera's fame (Jaén xxiii). In his work The Cosmic Race, Vasconcelos disrupted the colonial mentality of miscegenation, or mixed race, as degenerate and inferior, writing: "We thus have the four stages and the four racial trunks: the Black, the Indian, the Mongol and the White. The latter, after having organized itself in Europe, became the invader of the world and considered itself destined to rule, as each of the preceding races did in the era of power. It is clear that so will white domination. temporary, but their mission is to serve as a bridge. The white race has brought the world to a state in which all human types and cultures can merge with one another. lay the moral and material foundations for the union of all men in a fifth universal race, fruit of all the previous ones and improvement of all the past (9)... The Yankees will end up building the last great empire of a single race, the final empire of white supremacy… What will emerge there is the definitive race, the synthetic race, the integral race, composed of the genius and the blood of all peoples (20)… We, inAmerica, we will arrive, before any other part of the world, at the creation of a new race fashioned from the treasures of all the previous ones: the final race, the cosmic race (40). Mary Coffrey explains that Vasconcelos "elevated racial miscegenation to the status of a transcendent eugenic principle." (Coffrey 46). By transforming racial impurity from a "sign of shame into a sign of pride," Vasconcelos " attacked the colonial heritage of inferiority attributed to mixed populations” (46). The colonial hierarchy of the subject and the subjugated is born from racial differentiation, which will end with the cosmic race because it will be the race “in which all the others”. races disappear” (Jaén xvi). Indian nor white, but something in between and that in the end, she was nothing at all,” believes the white supremacist vision of the degradation of an impure race (Poulin 169). echoing Vasconcelos' revolutionary sentiments by saying: "You say you are 'something in between'... Well, I don't agree with you at all. I think you are something new, something that is beginning. You are something that has never been seen before. And that’s it” (169). It expresses revolutionary hope, a fusion that suggests a new world order, much like Vasconcelos's notions of a final cosmic race of mixed identity. Jack falls asleep thinking that The Great Grasshopper was "an alien" not rooted in the earth and therefore not bound by superficial territorial boundaries that separate nations and lead to discrimination, conquest, and suppression (170). The fact that she never had a home before the Volkswagen further highlights her transcendence of national boundaries that entrench colonial notions of domination. The four racial figures in Rivera's mural are furthermore all female but with androgynous features; Rivera thus undermines another element of the Western historical narrative: patriarchal domination. Critic George Derry wrote harshly: "Will the women of Detroit feel flattered when they realize that they are embodied in the hard-faced, masculine, unsexed woman, looking ecstatically for hope and help to through the panel to the languid and crudely sensual Asian sister. to the right” (Wolfe 349)? Derry encapsulates female stereotypes and implicitly expresses the male desire for women to be delicate, effeminate, servile, and modest. Critic Edmund Wilson reinforces the gender discrimination, denouncing the female workers in the mural as "rows of pale, sexless virgins excising the glands of animals", thus emphasizing his patriarchal view of the inadequacy of women in the industry.[3] . The Great Grasshopper also challenges the patriarchal perspective. of history. The persistence of a male-dominated historical perspective first becomes apparent when The Great Grasshopper stops at the grave of Chief Thayendanegea. “The women of the Six Nations confederacy, of which the Mohawks were part” played an “important role” (Poulin 56-7) yet the name of Thayendanegea’s wife is absent from the cemetery: “her name was not indicated” (57). The woman's role in history is dominated by her submission to her male counterpart. However, The Great Grasshopper, by wearing Jack's clothes not only looks "exactly like a boy" (46), she also undoes traditional male ownership of women: Jack tells her "You are free and you don't belong to me" (91). She also plays the role of a man when she approaches aggressivelyof Jack at the Continental Divide and utters lines suggestive of sexual assault and mocks his emasculation: “You could have said: BE CAREFUL! or STOP! or NO! It doesn't take long. Or you could have said HELP!...Or MOM! (167). But if The Great Grasshopper and Jack appear as victims of the historical tradition of a master narrative, they also appear as perpetuators of this rationalized and totalizing mode of history, creating their own simplifications that ignore subaltern voices. Inside the Detroit Institute of Arts, they describe Rivera's mural as having had "an overall effect [that] was one of heaviness, sadness, and exhaustion" (65). However, from the start, they imagine a rationally distorted story: “They agreed that the red car was a symbol of happiness and that Rivera had wanted to express something very simple: happiness is rare and obtaining it requires a lot of effort. pain, fatigue and effort” (68-9). Red most directly evokes the Ford March Against Hunger organized by the working class a month before Rivera arrived in Detroit. Five thousand unemployed auto workers demonstrated with red flags at the River Rouge factory that later served as the model factory for Rivera's mural. Violence broke out when Dearborn police attempted to stop the uprising. One observer said that "the police chased them, brandishing batons to force them back, and the demonstrators responded with whatever was within reach: stones, pieces of slag, fence posts" (Lee 210). Hundreds of people were injured and four workers died in the conflict. During the funeral march, "the coffins of the four were draped in red, the procession of fifteen thousand mourners wore red armbands or red flags, and the orchestra played the Internationale and the funeral march of the Russian revolutionaries" ( 210). . Following the tradition of creating history as a master narrative with heroes, goals, logical causality, and deterministic endings, Jack and The Great Grasshopper rationalizes the tragic story of the workers and thereby disempowers them by denying them any the extent of their suffering. The main narrative of another historically deprived revolutionary group is found in the song Le Temps des Cerises, which The Great Grasshopper sings when she and Jack tire of country music on the road. Cherry Time is the sentimental name for the Paris Commune, the short-lived French working-class democratic republic of 1871. La Tribue de Genève explains the red use of cherry symbolism: “Cherries evoke different things. On the one hand, they recall, by their color, blood and the red flag, linked among others to the Commune, which means that the song remains associated with the idea of ​​freedom, solidarity, and resistance in the face of violence. 'oppression.'[4] (The cherries evoke different things. On the one hand, they recall the Commune through their color, their blood and their red flag, so that the song always remains associated with the idea of ​​freedom, of solidarity and resistance against oppression.) But the reduction of the bloody memory, during which more than 10,000 people died in Paris, to a romantic song denies the power of the Communards by oppressing them under a trivialized history[5]. Ultimately, the resolution of Rivera's Detroit Industry Murals controversy reflects the acceptance of the postmodern pluralist view of history over the traditional master narrative. Opposition to the murals wanted them acid washed or torn down, but the controversy subsided when Edsel Ford affirmed his approval of the worksprovocative: “I admire Rivera’s spirit. I really believe he was trying to express his idea of ​​the spirit of Detroit. »[6] In expressing that Rivera's work reflects an individual perspective of a time separate and different from the views of everyone else and does not at all reflect his own, American or any other totalizing and correct perspective, Ford essentially argues that history is subject to personal interpretation. He therefore denies the authority of a singular and great story. The Great Grasshopper manifests the same reversal of the master narrative through an affirmation of a pluralist history. She expresses her attachment to pluralist narratives in her judgment on the books: “We should not judge the books one by one. I mean, you shouldn't see them as independent objects. A book is never complete in itself; to understand it, you have to relate it to other books, not only books by the same author, but also books written by other people. What we think of as a book most of the time is just a part of another, larger book that a number of authors have contributed to. without knowing it." (Poulin 124-5) The book represents a microcosm of written history, so its final statement can be read as follows: "What we think of as history most of the time is not is that part of another larger story that a number of leaders/authors/historians have unknowingly collaborated on. Furthermore, history should never be considered "complete in itself", but must. be "in relation to other" stories. Jack's European explorer heroes are one and the same destroyer of The Great Grasshopper's past. History is subject to personal interpretation. There is no single historical truth. Just as Rivera's murals challenged the master narrative of white supremacy through their depiction of racial miscegenation, reversed gender roles, and the contribution of minorities, The Great Grasshopper also shatters recognition. of Jack's story as a tale of heroic, masculine white conquerors. Jack finally abandons his traditional view of history, exclaiming: “Don't talk to me about heroes! » (213) But even if La Grande Sauterelle and Jack recognize the plurality of perspectives in historical representation, Poulin describes them as oblivious to their own trivialization of history into platitudes and popular songs. Ultimately, they are both creators and victims of the traditional view of history as a master narrative with purpose and direction, even as they realize its fictional character. Works Cited: Coffey, Mary. “The “Mexican Problem”: Nation and “Indigenous” in Mexican Muralism and Cultural Discourse.” » The social and the real: political art of the 1930s in the Western hemisphere. Ed. Anreus, Alejandro, Diana Linden and Jonathan Weinberg. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. Print. Goodall, Alex. Battle of Detroit and Depression-Era Anticommunism. The Historical Journal June 2008: 457-480. American History and Life Web November 15, 2009. “Jean-François Lyotard: Introduction to the Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.” » Idehist.uu.se. Uppsala University. December 5, 2009. “Cherry Time.” Tdg.Ch. Geneva Tribune. November 10, 2009. Lee, Anthony. “Workers and Painters: Social Realism and Race in the Detroit Murals of Diego Rivera.” » The social and the real: political art of the 1930s in the Western hemisphere. Ed. Anreus, Alejandro, Diana Linden and Jonathan Weinberg. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. 201-220. Print.Pastan, Amy. Diego Rivera: murals of the industry>.