University of Hawai'i Press

Chapter Title: Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange and Chaos Theory: Angels and a
Motley Crew
Chapter Author(s): Ruth Y. Hsu

Book Title: Karen Tei Yamashita

Book Subtitle: Fictions of Magic and Memory
Book Editor(s): A. Robert Lee
Published by: University of Hawai'i Press. (2018)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvvn076.11

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 Karen Tei Yamashita’s •
C H A P T E R

Tropic of Orange and Chaos Theory

S E V E N

Angels and a Motley Crew

Ruth Y. Hsu

[C]haos is a science of process rather than state, of becoming

rather than being.
In the mind’s eye, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.
—James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

I am a nomad Mexican artist/writer. . . . My journey . . . goes

from . . . a state of identity to a repertoire of multiple identities. . . .
How to function as a fluid border-crosser, intellectual “coyote,” and
intercultural diplomat . . . this book is a disnarrative ode to hybrid
America.
—Guillermo Gómez-Peña, The New World Border

Reading Tropic of Orange through some of the principles of chaos theory—

the science of nonlinear and dynamic systems—can offer new insights
into the diegesis and themes of the novel. N. Katherine Hayles notes in
her pioneering work on the intersection of literature and chaos theory
that a novel with elements of chaotics is not simply assumed to be identi-
cal to a physics treatise on strange attractors.1 Nor was the point to elevate
literature into the presumably Olympian sphere of science, as one scholar
argues (Kellert, 14–16). Rather, the interest falls within the tradition of the
history of ideas, including the problematic of accounting for the cross-
fertilization of ideas among disparate ontologies.2 Congruently, authors
like John Barth and members of the Paris-based Oulipo group (Workshop
of Potential Literature) have commented extensively on their use of math-
ematics-based structures and principles of chaos theory.3 The term “cha-
otics” first occurs in relation to literature in a sustained manner, as an

105

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106 Chapter Seven

­ rganizing principle, in Joseph Conte’s monograph on American post-

o
modernist novels. Conte defines chaotics as “[p]ostmodern fiction [that]
enacts the interrelation of order and disorder in its world-making and in
the inventive form of the novel.”4
This chapter argues that certain principles of chaos theory both struc-
ture the way that Tropic of Orange unfolds as a narrative and act as meta-
phors for the radically transgressive human experiences and behavior it
depicts; in this approach chaotics and magic realism, with which Ya-
mashita’s writing is frequently associated, work in partnership. This anal-
ysis departs from previous interpretations in several consequential ways:
(1) the chaotics in the narration reveal a thematic landscape of humans as
always-becoming, a landscape that is beyond binary identity politics, and
one in which functioning communities are rhizomatic collectivities;
(2) this interpretation aims to provide a more nuanced understanding of
Yamashita’s restructured postmodernist poetics; this poetics on the one
hand allows a reader to plot this book among the postmodernist genera-
tion and writings of Barth, Calvino, or Coover; on the other hand, aspects
of Tropic of Orange likely anticipate relatively contemporary novels such as
David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks or number9dream.5 Yamashita’s writings
hybridize multiple genres in ironical ways that refuse seamless assimila-
tion and deploy varied cultural allusions in productive diegetic contesta-
tion. Often, narratives achieve the effect of a linguistic palimpsest—
“recombinant poetics” is the term that consistently comes to mind. To
include Yamashita’s writing among this group of postmodernist writers
does not detract from the significant place of her writing in Asian Ameri-
can literature.

CHAOTICS
The word “structure” may seem incongruous used in relation to chaos
theory; actually this cluster of scientific principles is not, as it is popu-
larly taken to mean, chaos as anarchy of an anything-goes variety. Since
the early stage of chaos theory in the 1880s, this body of concepts has
developed into the study of dynamical systems that present seemingly
regular or deterministic patterns but that become unpredictable at a cer-
tain point or threshold of repetition.6 Orderly systems contain the pat-
terns whereby disorder occurs. John Barth, paraphrasing Hayles, writes
in Further Fridays, “one branch of the field sees chaos as the precursor
and partner of order rather than as its opposite and adversary, and fo-
cuses on the spontaneous emergence of self-organization from a chaos
that in itself approaches pure randomness. . . . The other branch of the

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 Hsu 107

field—‘the strange attractor’ branch—concerns itself with finding the

hidden order within chaotic systems” (334). At what point disruption
emerges is a matter of probability, not certainty. Besides orderly disorder
and unpredictability, other, related chaos theory discussed in this chap-
ter includes fractals, or the notion of self-similarity across varying scales
(fractals like the Mandelbrot set are used to study coastlines), and but-
terfly effect, otherwise called sensitive dependence on initial conditions
(Edward Lorenz).7

LOS ANGELES IN TROPIC OF ORANGE

In certain respects, the Los Angeles (L.A.) depicted in Tropic of Orange
echoes Mike Davis’ assessment of that metropolis. Yamashita’s L.A. is in-
deed densely populated yet impersonal, frenetic and always on edge,
dangerous, hard, and saturated with noise and (mis)information, the
“white noise” in the ears of Buzzworm. Its iconic freeway system only ap-
pears to connect disparate points of the sprawling southland: it segregates
as well, in that the freeway system allows the financial and governmental
offices to fill up with white- and blue-collar workers during the day and
this labor to empty out in the evenings. Yet, there is seldom any stopping
on the way home; no one walks on the freeways; very few people walk on
the streets. In Davis’ words, Downtown is “fragmented and desolate,” en-
meshed in a “massively reproduced spatial apartheid.”8 The freeways
function as levees that separate neighborhoods and that prevent people
from interacting with each other beyond the most basic and fleeting ex-
changes. The constraining nature of these so-called thoroughfares is cam-
ouflaged by the routine of the linear Gregorian calendar and of clock
time; they are a normalized aspect of modern urban topography (archi-
tecture, streets, malls, graffiti, zoning laws) that trains bodies to submit to
the striations and disciplines of capitalism.9 Henri Lefebvre writes in
Rhythmanalysis: “To enter into a society, group or nationality is to accept
values (that are taught) . . . also to bend oneself (to be bent) to its ways. . . .
Humans break themselves in [le dressent] like animals. Dressage can go a
long way: as far as breathing, movements, sex. It bases itself on repeti-
tion.”10 Manzanar’s existence, from that perspective, can be interpreted as
working against dressage, standing as a silent yet transgressive witness
to the dehumanizing, multimodal disciplining of thought and behavior
in this epicenter of capitalism.11 Interestingly enough, it is the freeway un-
derpasses—the underbelly—that the homeless have reappropriated and
from where they advance and disrupt the normative rhythms of this
megacity.

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108 Chapter Seven

Except for Arcangel, fictional characters in Tropic of Orange are self-

absorbed, especially couples like Emi and Gabriel. Indeed, the city of
dreams (“Junkyard Dreams” in City of Quartz) figures as the arena of suc-
cessive phases of colonial ambitions and capitalistic greed, drawing
waves of the global dispossessed who, once there, struggle for a contin-
gent piece of the southern California sunshine. Bobby Ngu is the latest
iteration of countless hardscrabble immigrants who traverse the city’s in-
nards; but Rafaela is a refusenik. Manzanar is Bobby’s (apparent) future
and his past because the Japanese American surgeon opted out of the
model minority treadmill that all immigrants and offspring of immi-
grants are inculcated to desire. Ironically, given Bobby’s multiple changes
of identity, his linguistic virtuosity, and his unwavering attitude of eyes
front and center, locked on the future, he also represents the contempo-
rary American Adam, with serially disposable and self-invented pasts.12
Metaphorically and literally, the future belongs to the likes of Bobby, Ra-
faela, and their son, Sol.13

CHAOS AND RHIZOMES

Yamashita reenvisions the “spatial apartheid” of L.A. by using chaotics to
reveal invisible individual and collective agency and power, enabled in
transpersonal relationships and dynamic biopolitics. The two tables of
contents—reminiscent of the recursive “proceduralism” in Barth—are
crucial to the role of chaotics in developing the themes of Tropic of Orange.
“Contents”—the first of two tables of contents—appears conventionally
linear and list-y, promising to lead the reader directly from page one to
the last page of the story. The list begins with a Monday, with each day of
the week as the title of a section that is subdivided again into seven short
chapters, one each for the seven characters. Each section is given a phrase
that functions as a theme or a geographical location—for example, “mon-
day | summer solstice,” “tuesday | diamond lane.” Each character gets a
chapter for each day of the week. The second table of contents, “Hyper-
Contexts,” lays out the same information but in the form of a horizontal
spreadsheet or grid. The structure resembles an XY line chart, with the
names placed along the y-axis and the days of the week (representing the
passage of linear time) constituting the x-axis. The portmanteau term for
this chart calls to mind “hypertext.”14
“HyperContexts” is not presented in opposition to the conventional
list of contents. Rather, the two charts complement each other. As Fou-
cault would have it, the act of categorizing is not so much about the re-
sulting categories of objects as it is about the naturalized assumptions

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 Hsu 109

that arrange the order of things.15 In terms of Tropic of Orange, the conven-
tional “Contents” offers readers the comfort of habit and predictability:
page numbers go in ascending order; Monday starts the workweek, fol-
lowed by Tuesday, and so on. Actually, the chronological predictability
of the list is disturbed by the productively fractured experience of read-
ing the book from chapters 1 to 49. In terms of chaos theory, irregulari-
ties seem to be built into its regular patterns. For instance, each chapter
in a section is a small part of a character’s day: “monday | summer sol-
stice” consists of a brief portion of Rafaela’s Monday (chap. 1), then it’s
Bobby’s day in Koreatown (chap. 2), followed by a snippet of Emi’s Mon-
day (chap. 3), and so on. What at first appears to be an orderly narrative
gradually takes on an episodic effect. The sensation for this reader was
one of being repeatedly in medias res. This is an instance of the chaotics
of orderly disorder, for the list of contents promises predictability. How-
ever, at some point in the actual reading of the contents, perturbation
sets in, until the experience of uncertainty and irregularity becomes al-
most the “norm.” The emerging disorder built into the narrative illus-
trates the universal human need for safety believed to exist in the famil-
iar. But routines in Tropic of Orange are often disrupted by unforeseen
occurrences, not simply in nature (unexpected rain in “Weather Report-
Westside,” 25), but sometimes initiated by a character’s own disruptive
and uncharacteristic behavior. When or how perturbations and disrup-
tions arise in longstanding patterns is unpredictable; disorder is con-
tained within nonlinear yet deterministic systems.
Ironically, the unusual “HyperContexts” offers a more coherent appre-
hension of a character’s makeup. A reader might run through all the
chapters in order, Monday through Sunday, on Manzanar, for example, to
realize that he is not one of the many mentally unhinged, homeless per-
sons in L.A. Buzzworm believes that Manzanar was born towards the
end of World War II in one of the Japanese American concentration camps.
He overcame that stigmatization to become a respected surgeon, only to
shock everyone when he walked out of the hospital after performing a
surgery to become this strange, shaggy conductor of symphonies in his
mind.16 Manzanar inhabits a liminal space in Emi’s awareness: her memo-
ries of him are fragmented. And yet, Emi’s path—one realizes by reread-
ing her chapters using “HyperContexts”—is to take Manzanar out of that
semiconscious region of her memory and to confront her half-submerged
feelings of anger and hurt over his abandoning his family, a reconciliation
and a self-release that Emi fails to embrace.
Another function of Manzanar is to critique the conditioned lives of
the vast majority of people in metropolises like L.A. This critique is

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110 Chapter Seven

­ eveloped through the “magical” elements in Manzanar’s characteriza-

d
tion, which also connect Manzanar, Rafaela, and Arcangel to the larger
hypercontext of the past five hundred years and more. Like Arcangel and,
to a degree, Rafaela, Manzanar is a transcendental figure in that he can
see beyond physical reality to hidden, invisible forces and past existences
in the land across eons. He describes his vision thus:

[A]ll of them at once . . . they began with the very geology of the land, the
artesian rivers running beneath the surface, connected and divergent,
shifting and swelling. . . . Yet, below the surface, there was the man-made
grid of civil utilities: Southern California pipelines of natural gas . . . the
prehistoric grid of plant and fauna and human behavior . . . the great
overlays of transport . . . a thousand natural and man-made divisions,
variations both dynamic and stagnant, patterns and connections by every
conceivable definition from the distribution of wealth to race, from pat-
terns of climate to the curious blueprint of the skies. (56–57)

The diachronic, palimpsestic maps in Manzanar’s mind envision an

ancient land that will endure the latest of many imperial instantiations.
Manzanar also apprehends another, synchronic reality in terms of
sounds, music, and their harmony. The narrator describes him on the
freeway overpass in this manner: “Those in vehicles who hurried past
under Manzanar’s concrete podium most likely never noticed him. . . .
And yet, standing there, he bore and raised each note, joined them, united
families, created a community, a great society, an entire civilization of
sound. The great flow of humanity ran below and beyond his feet in ev-
ery direction, pumping and pulsating, that blood connection, the great
heartbeat of a great city” (35).
Manzanar perceives the freeway to be “a great root system, an organic
living entity. It was nothing more than a great writhing concrete dinosaur
and nothing less than the greatest orchestra on Earth” (37). Just as sound
emanates from its source in all directions, root systems, the kind that De-
leuze and Guattari prefer, “are taproots with a more multiple, lateral, and
circular system of ramification, rather than a dichotomous one” (1). The
authors continue: “A system of this kind can be called a rhizome. A rhi-
zome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles.
Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes” (6–7). Rhizomes radiate out in indeter-
minable ways—upwards, outwards, downwards—simply reaching out in
life-affirming directions. They burrow under concrete walls, between the
cracks in brick and mortar; they expand in circumference and eventually
bring down the wall. Roads and freeways, to Manzanar, are not simply
produced by and for capitalism, for they teem with the unassuming and

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 Hsu 111

the marginalized, whose voices and vitality nonetheless are part of the
lifeblood of the metropolis. Roots, like blood, convey essential nutrients.
Whereas Emi sees the freeway pileup as sound effects in a Hollywood
disaster movie, Manzanar “concentrated on a noise that sounded like a
mix of an elephant and the wail of a whale” (121). The eruption and anar-
chic cascade of the homeless onto the freeways surprised even him, “who
knew the dense hidden community living in the no-man’s-land of public
property. . . . Men, women, and children, their dogs and even cats . . .
moved into public view” (119).
Order begins to materialize from the disorder as, “[i]n a matter of min-
utes, life filled a vacuum, reorganizing itself in predictable and unpre-
dictable ways” (119–121). The homeless claim the abandoned vehicles as
well as emptying a moving van of “washing machines, refrigerators, ov-
ens, chairs” and taking from another van “Wonder Bread, Cacique torti-
llas, and Trader Joe’s fresh pasta” (121–122). Home. This event can be read
through chaotics as the “spontaneous emergence of self-organization
from a chaos that in itself at least approaches pure randomness” (Barth,
“41/2 Lectures,” 334). Manzanar’s reality is that lived experience is fluid,
mutable, and woven into a fabric, a context, of eons, across different di-
mensions and cosmic scales. Even from a linear, mechanistic perspective,
the uprising need not be cast as an isolated and futile acting-up of the
poor and powerless. Rather, it is one insurrection among multitudinous
such events.
The wider import of the multi-car collision (one unpredictable result
being the uprising) becomes apparent if it is framed in terms of the but-
terfly effect, or sensitivity to initial conditions: an initially minor disrup-
tion may “multiply, cascading upward through a chain of turbulent fea-
tures, from dust devils and squalls up to continent-size eddies that only
satellites see” (Gleick, Chaos, 19). In Tropic of Orange a moment of inatten-
tion leads to a traffic “accident” between two vehicles, which then in-
volves more cars, which leads to the shooting of Emi, whose repetitively
televised dying in turn emotionally traumatizes and fascinates hundreds
of thousands of television viewers.17 It is the height of irony that Emi, the
broadcaster, watches simulacra of her own dying as her physical life ebbs
away. Notably, the escalating police violence against the homeless ends
unpredictably, in the unprecedented and breathtaking blossoming of
peace in “the inflation of thousands upon thousands of automotive air-
bags, bursting simultaneously everywhere from their pouches in steering
wheels . . . like white poppies in sudden bloom. All the airbags in L.A.
ruptured forth, unfurling their white powdered wings against the bar-
rage of bullets, and stunned the war to a dead stop” (Tropic, 258).

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112 Chapter Seven

The homeless in Tropic of Orange are leaderless yet remain incontro-

vertibly linked to each other; they act in concert even though they are not
a mob; they are a collectivity of unique individuals; they offer a glimpse
of future multitudes, as envisioned in the work of Negri and Hardt.18 De-
leuze and Guattari also suggest that “[p]acks, bands, are groups of the
rhizome type, as opposed to the arborescent type that centers around or-
gans of power” (A Thousand Plateaus, 358). Even the everyday lives of the
nomads of L.A. resist the “dressage” of late capitalist subjectivities: they
have no address or forms of identification by which they can be tracked;
they strain and drain the capitalist machine; they disrupt the status quo
in terms of dress, speech, and other mundane habits. The daily lives of
the homeless “pose the production of life as an act of resistance, innova-
tion, and freedom” (Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 61). And now, as
they are ejected from their encampment, they fan out in tandem across
the roads and freeways like water flowing over a levee. Moreover, they
manage magically to extend their anti-hegemonic rhythms to include
L.A. inhabitants who are not homeless. In a vatic ping in line with the re-
cent work of Marcus Rediker, Manzanar calls “the homeless and helpless
and the well-intentioned” the “motley community,” who before they had
to run from the “percussion of war” (Tropic, 241) were becoming

a new kind of grid, this one defined not by inanimate structures . . . but by
himself and others like him. He found himself at the heart of an expand-
ing symphony. . . . On a distant overpass, he made out the odd mirror of
his figure, waving a baton. And across the city, on overpasses and street
corners, from balconies and park benches, people held branches and pen-
cils, toothbrushes and carrot sticks, and conducted. Strange and wonder-
ful elements had been added . . . lutes and lyres, harmonicas, accordions,
sitars, hand organs, nose flutes. . . . The entire City of Angels seemed to
have opened its singular voice to herald a naked old man [Arcangel] and
little boy [Sol] with an orange followed by a motley parade approaching
from the south. Once again, the grid was changing. (239)

Capitalism, in Tropic of Orange as in City of Quartz, signifies its impe-

rium by writing over whatever was on or part of the landscape prior to its
invasion.19 Yet, how is space produced but in the imagining of it and in
living as we imagine? Even as capitalism’s discourse seeks to constitute
reality and our sense of self in its own image, it is repeatedly disrupted.
Hardt and Negri, for instance, write in Empire, “What Foucault con-
structed implicitly (and Deleuze and Guattari made explicit) is therefore
the paradox of a power that, while it unifies and envelops within itself
every element of social life . . . at that very moment reveals a new context,

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 Hsu 113

a new milieu of maximum plurality and uncontainable singularization”

(25). And, in Multitude, they argue that “[h]istory develops in contradic-
tory and aleatory ways, constantly subject to chance and accident. The
moments of struggle and resistance can emerge in unforeseen and un-
foreseeable ways” (93). Where Tropic of Orange differs from the inescap-
able bleakness of City of Quartz is in the way the novel exposes the hidden,
liberatory potential of the “motley community”—in their liquid resilience,
their disruptive potential, and their spontaneous, adaptive capacity. This
image of the motley community finds an echo in Gleick’s description of
the chaotics of fluid dynamics as “walking through a maze whose walls
rearrange themselves with each step you take” (Chaos, 23).

“HEAL L.A. OR HEEL L.A.”

The grid of “HyperContexts” structures the multidimensional congruity
of Manzanar, Rafaela, and Arcangel in the cosmic scale of their cultural
and historical contexts, in their magical or supernatural properties, and in
their ability to perceive hidden spatial dimensions and forces. The depic-
tion of Arcangel is a mischievous homage to Gabriel García Márquez’ “A
Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.” The intertextual link underlines
the element of sacrifice in Arcangel who, like García Márquez’ caged an-
gel, is belittled and humiliated. Both fictional creations echo the example
of Christ, whose Passion exemplifies the selfless act of standing in, of sac-
rificing oneself, for the community, and doing so not for self-aggrandize-
ment. Arcangel is both supernatural and human and, like Manzanar, he
takes his cue from the land: Arcangel awoke Monday “to all the meta-
phors that come from the land. He had followed a path across the conti-
nent that was crooked, but always heading north. . . . He had had a dream.
And when he awoke he could still see the dream like a miniature Aleph
reflected from his mind to an indefinite point on his visual horizon” (51).
His meandering unpredictably gathers power and force, like a river or a
weather system transforming into a turbulent phase. Barth could have
been referring to Arcangel when he wrote this about turbulence: “the lo-
cal motion may be in any direction, even retrograde, but the net global
narrative motion is forward though far from straightforward” (“41/2 Lec-
tures,” 337–338). Furthermore, Arcangel has “an ancient body, a gnarled
and twisted tree, tortured and serene, wise and innocent all at once. . . .
more like a bamboo than birch, more like birch than oak . . . more like
cactus—was the secret of his youth and the secret of his age” (Tropic, 47).
He is a force of nature, made from nutrients from many soils in all lati-
tudes and climates. He is a troubadour, a trickster, a showman, and

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114 Chapter Seven

e­ veryman. He is an Aleph—“the only place on earth where all things

are—seen from every angle”20 and, “in the Aleph I saw the earth and in
the earth I saw the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth” (Borges, 28). He took
the orange and the dynamic thread—the Tropic of Cancer—north with
him in his suitcase. This act and his Monday morning vision symbolize
his role as the avenging angel of the dispossessed across the ages. At the
same time, Arcangel/El Gran Mojado says: “Noble people, I speak to you
from the heart, / there is no future or past. /  . . . / There is no aging. There
is only changing” (260). The only certainty, says Arcangel, is that “I de-
fend my title for life and death. / The life of our people or the death of our
people” (262). Everything between birth and death—the only human cer-
tainties—is dynamical and unpredictable in spite of our every effort to
define, determine, and overpower.
Of all the characters Rafaela is most like Arcangel: she too perceives
the curving, shifting thread that grows out of the orange and the dynamic
aspect of space and time (“Had she never noticed? This elasticity of the
land and of time. This sensation of timelessness, of yawning distances, of
haunting fear, of danger”).21 When Rafaela happens on Arcangel dozing
while waiting for his bus north she notices that “a snake coiled itself like
a cat at his side” (151). A snake symbolizes wisdom in ancient, non-West-
ern traditions. Moreover, Rafaela sees that the magical thread “wound
about him gracefully, tenderly, like strands of silk hair” (151) or like the
silken threads of corn.22
Like Arcangel, this nomadic patron of the world’s dispossessed, Rafa-
ela also undertakes an epic battle with evil embodied in Dona Maria’s
son. Her transformation during the battle encodes the narrative functions
of Rafaela in both the Mesoamerican and Western Christian traditions.
The black Jaguar (automobile) into which she was thrust became “sud-
denly a great yawning universe in the night” and, “Springing upon her
writhing body, he clawed her throat and pawed her breasts, tearing
her soft skin. Her writhing twisted her body into a muscular serpent. . . .
Her mouth gaped a torch of fire, scorching his black fur. Two tremendous
beasts wailed and moaned, momentarily stunned by their transforma-
tions, yet poised for war” (221).
Rafaela’s name reminds the reader of Raphael, the archangel; then, as
Rafaela fights the black beast, she is also figured as a serpent, evoking
Quetzalcoatl, the “plumed serpent,” one of the most ancient (possibly dat-
ing back to the middle of the second millennium, BC)23 and powerful
gods in Mesoamerican tradition.24 Brundage writes: “even more than the
other Mesoamerican gods known to us, Quetzalcoatl kept vanishing into
the images of the other gods, and those gods into others . . . the concentric

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 Hsu 115

circles of godhead forming and reforming outward from Quetzalcoatl

were in toto the picture of a complete religion and . . . the Feathered Ser-
pent was a center point” (10). In the new space-time of this “great yawn-
ing universe in the night,” Rafaela transmutes into the latest incarnation
of the plumed serpent, one that traverses both the Mesoamerican and Eu-
ropean Christian ontologies. More specifically, she is a god of the Ameri-
cas, emerging, like Arcangel, from the multigenerational multitudes of
the North and the South.
Indications are that Quetzalcoatl was initially portrayed as a dragon
that flies due to its feathers (Brundage, 20). Brundage explains, “Two ani-
mals, bird and serpent, were basic to the sky dragons’ ultimate design,
both being epitomes of motion, but of the two the serpent was probably
the fundamental one” (20). As the dragon, then the snake, accrued through
the centuries additional layers of symbolism, the plumed serpent god
came to mark renewal (22), the fluid force of the wind (71–78), and as-
sumed many other polymorphic reincarnations in Mesoamerican history
and culture. David Johnson, in his introduction to Rudolfo Anaya’s Lord of
the Dawn, a modern, fictional retelling of the myth of Quetzalcoatl, notes
that “ancient Mexicans had discovered a composite figure that combined
spirit and matter, or mediated between them, reconciling the two realms
of heaven and earth” (4). Most significantly, in terms of Tropic of Orange,
Johnson states that “Each age was sustained by a delicate balance between
opposing forces, dramatized in the myths as a titanic struggle between
the gods Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca. It was not, however, a struggle
between good and evil, such as we might find in a . . . Christian version of
history, but a question of harmonizing or balancing the antithetical pow-
ers of light and dark, day and night . . . (as in the . . . conception of yin and
yang)” (5).25
In other words, Quetzalcoatl is transformed in his being, function, or
purpose by the historical, cultural, and political environments of differ-
ent times and places. Ironically, it is the seemingly unending protean ca-
pacity of Quetzalcoatl that is his most enduring trait. The multifaceted
nature of the feathered serpent is part of the hypercontext of Rafaela, for
she also represents a protean quality, as well as a complementary duality
of both destroyer and creator, which is suggested in this passage narrat-
ing the penultimate stage of the battle: “As night fell, they began their
horrific dance with death, gutting and searing the tissue of their exis-
tence, copulating in rage, destroying and creating at once—the apocalyp-
tic fulfillment of a prophecy—blood and semen commingling among
shredded serpent and feline remains” (Tropic, 261). In the Aztec era

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116 Chapter Seven

(­fourteenth to sixteenth centuries), Quetzalcoatl came to be identified as

both death and resurrection.
With respect to the linking of Rafaela to the archangel Raphael, the
latter is considered a healer in Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. That Ra-
faela in Tropic of Orange is a healer can be seen in the effect she has on
Bobby, who is one of the victims of a capitalistic worldview in which ob-
jects are considered more valuable than persons. His wife and child have
worth in his eyes mainly because they provide the alibi for his addiction
to money, the currency that fuels his addiction to more money, goods,
status, and so on. However, the chapters on Bobby read via “HyperCon-
texts” provide background to his current state and lead readers to find
him a sympathetic character. Rafaela’s leaving him jolted him from his
constrained viewpoint in which in the words of El Gran Mojada, “The
myth of the first world is that / development is wealth and technology
progress. / It is all rubbish. It means that you are no longer human be-
ings / but only labor” (269). However, in “Sunday, chapter 49: American
Express—Mi Casa/Su Casa,” it is a transformed Bobby who acts on the
spur of the moment to save his family, “So he grabs the two ends. Is he
some kind of fool? Maybe so. But he’s hanging on. . . . Making the connec-
tion. Pretty soon he’s sweating it. Lines ripping through the palms. How
long can he hold on?” (270) He notices that Rafaela is “beat up bad, but . . .
she’s [n]ever looked so beautiful. Spent so much time worrying about her
and the boy. Trying to lock . . . out the bad elements. Then it happens any-
way. . . . Fragile. His little family. . . . Anybody looking sees his arms open
wide like he’s flying. Like he’s flying forward to embrace. . . . That’s when
he lets go. . . . Go figure. Embrace. That’s it” (256).
Indeed, how to interpret that thread at this phase in the narrative? In
chapter “45: Midnight—The Line,” Rafaela has a vision in her delirium
after the epic battle: “Rafaela pulled the silken thread around them
[Bobby and her] until they were both covered in a soft blanket of space
and midnight, their proximity to everything both immediate and infi-
nitely distant” (256). She casts aside Bobby’s clothing and possessions,
and they “straddled the line—a slender endless serpent of a line—one
peering into a private world of dreams and metaphysics, the other into a
public space of politics and power. . . . the line in the dust became again as
wide as an entire culture and as deep as the social and economic con-
struct that no one knew how to change” (256). Radical change can come
from avoiding earthly snares and in the wisdom found in dreams and
magical dimensions, not only by manipulating the “real” world of politics
and power. Bobby’s leap of faith is also part of the process of “how to
change” (256). His gesture embraces his family as well as the unpredict-

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 Hsu 117

able future. From that perspective, the title of chapter 49, “American Ex-
press,” has been undercut, from a reference to a business corporation, an
avatar of global capitalism, to a reference to the path forward for the
United States, namely, to embrace others, especially in their rhizomatic,
motley potential. It is important to note that in chapter “47—To Die, Pacific
Rim Auditorium,” SUPERNAFTA overheats from within himself and im-
plodes. Arcangel, on the other hand, lives on at the very least in song and
epic poetry, which he composes for himself.
The narrative development gradually linking Arcangel, Rafaela, and
Manzanar unfolds one of the main themes of Tropic of Orange. Their link-
age is a fractal formation that is repeated on ever-larger scales to include
other characters in Tropic of Orange. The most vital aspect of their connec-
tion is effective via an intuitive and otherworldly level in which linear
logic and static states have no place. And it is their traits—sensitivity to
invisible forces, self-awareness, and attention to intuition—that exercise
the most impact on linear reality. Their relationship can be imagined as a
spiral of three arcs connected at one end, with each arc angled at different
degrees in relation to the point of contact in the center. The tables of con-
tents are the scaffolding that reveals this relationship. In addition, this
fractal unit cascades outward, leading to the joining of other characters
eventually into a motley community. For instance, on a strictly linear real-
ity, it is Gabriel’s link to Buzzworm that leads Gabriel to Manzanar, which
eventually results in a reunion of sorts between Manzanar and Emi. Also,
Gabriel’s association with Rafaela exposes the nefarious organ trafficking,
and from Buzzworm he learns of the poisoning of the oranges. Bobby
“meets” Arcangel/El Gran Mojada at the match where he has gone in
search of his family.
Unpacking Rafaela’s journey is particularly instructive in terms of the
butterfly effect and orderly disorder. On the spur of the moment she
opens the refrigerator door, then spontaneously snatches the small cooler
she spots inside. Taking the cooler leads to the cosmic-scale confrontation
with Dona Maria’s son. At the bus station, she happens on Arcangel. Her
vision after surviving the battle reveals to her the irrevocable nature of
her relationship to Bobby (chap. 45). Her deep connection to Sol’s father is
realized in chapter 49 when Bobby fulfills a part of Rafaela’s vision by
grabbing the threads of the orange. It is because Rafaela decides to follow
Arcangel to his wrestling match that she—the other angelic being in the
book—is present to administer the “last rites” (or so it seemed to Bobby)
to Arcangel (“47: American Express—Mi Casa/Su Casa”). Rafaela’s unpre-
dictable path illustrates several recurring ideas in Tropic of Orange: small
acts may have unintended and ever-widening impact; the linear,

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118 Chapter Seven

­ redictable orderliness in life is temporary, but so are anarchic ruptures;

p
there are hypercontexts to every existence, and what can be observed
with the naked eye is not the sole reality. The narrative design in which
other characters gradually become connected to the otherworldly fractal
unit is mirrored in the bursting airbags, first a few, then more, blossoming
outward like an arabesque generated by the Mandelbrot equation in frac-
tal geometry. “HyperContexts,” then, represents a sliver of the space-time
of seven characters; its dimensions can include additional weeks, months,
and more individuals across time and place, interwoven in explicit and
invisible yet essential modes.
In conclusion, an implication of interpreting Tropic of Orange through
postmodernist chaotics enacts a significant revisioning of the prevailing
cultural construct of identity. The principles of chaos theory that struc-
ture the diegesis and support the themes of this book offer radically dif-
ferent realities from the linear and static dressage of human identification
and subject formation undergirded by the paradigm of binarism and es-
sentialism. This is not to say that the book is simplistically opposed to
identity categories. It is to say that the narrative arc is weighted towards
the proposition that identity constructs are conventionally accepted to be
an essential truth but are in fact contingent, temporary, partial, and deeply
flawed means of dressage. It is by design, perhaps, that Rafaela trans-
forms through multiple dimensions, just as Bobby is a shape shifter in his
own right, in his Newtonian, migrant cartography. In contrast, Emi and
Gabriel’s static relationship bears no issue and is fatally ended with Emi’s
death. Eventually, even Manzanar has to change from being the detached
witness into his next form; when he takes the lifeless body of his grand-
daughter in his arms does he also embrace a belief in the world?26 Los
Angeles is the most suitable site for the whirling, turbulent, rhizomatic,
orderly/disorderly cosmo-cosmic-politics of Tropic of Orange.

NOTES
1. N. Katherine Hayles, The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in
the Twentieth Century (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1984). For additional
perspectives on the intersections of scientific models and literary analysis, see Joseph
Conte, Design and Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fiction (Tuscaloosa: University
of Alabama Press, 2002); Gordon E. Slethaug, Beautiful Chaos: Chaos Theory and Metachaotics
in Recent American Fiction, The SUNY Series in Postmodern Culture, ed. Joseph Natali (Al-
bany: State University of New York Press, 2000).
2. N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Sci-
ence (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990). Hayles writes: “The metaphor of
the triangle implies, of course, that there are connections and relationships among the
three sides. One of the challenges in literature and science is to develop methodologies that

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 Hsu 119

can illuminate convergences between disciplines, while still acknowledging the very real
differences that exist” (3).
3. John Barth, “41/2 Lectures: The Stuttgart Seminars on Postmodernism, Chaos The-
ory, and the Romantic Arabesque,” in Further Fridays: Essays, Lectures, and Other Nonfiction,
1984–94 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1995), 275–348. Oulipo includes Calvino,
Perec, and Raymond Queneau; founded in 1960 by writers and mathematicians (fr. Conte,
27–28).
4. (Jules) Henri Poincare is usually credited with introducing the concept in his 1890
essay in the journal, Acta Mathematica.
5. The Bone Clocks, 2014; number9dream, 2001.
6. James Gleick, who is typically credited with writing the book that made chaos theory
accessible to the layperson, writes: “simple deterministic models could produce what
looked like random behavior. The behavior actually had an exquisite fine structure, yet any
piece of it seemed indistinguishable from noise” (Chaos, 77).
7. Barth’s helpful discussion of five characteristics of chaotic or complex systems (“41/2
Lectures,” 331–334) is based on Hayles’ more extended analysis in Chaos Bound, 11–15.
8. Quoted from Edward W. Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Mal-
den, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 311.
9. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian
Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). Deleuze and Guattari posit
that in state or striated space “movement is gridded . . . confined as by gravity to a horizon-
tal plane, and limited by the order of that plane to preset paths between fixed and identifi-
able points” (2:xiii). See also ibid., “1440: The Smooth and the Striated” (474–500).
10. Mike Davis, writing about a similar kind of dressage or training of the body, de-
scribes Los Angeles’ Downtown as having a “fortress effect . . . deliberate socio-spatial
strategy . . . [the] goal can be summarized as a double repression: to raze all association
with Downtown’s past and to prevent any articulation with the non-Anglo urbanity of the
future” (City of Quartz, 229–230).
11. Manzanar represents an anti-panopticon consciousness in that a predominant as-
pect of his subjectivity is no longer the internalized and naturalized, self-disciplining sub-
ject produced by master narratives.
12. Bobby Ngu/new: “Hey . . . Real name’s Li Kwan Yu. But don’t tell nobody. Go fig-
ure. Bobby’s Chinese . . . from Singapore with a Vietnam name speaking like a Mexican
living in Koreatown” (“Benefits-Koreatown,” 15). Bobby has acquired a “repertoire of mul-
tiple identities” (Goméz-Peña, “Introduction,” 70). However, Li Kwan Yu is unlikely to be
Bobby’s real name. (Henry) Lee Kuan Yew founded modern Singapore.
13. According to the US Census Bureau, “Quick Facts,” 2013, white Anglos will be a
minority demographic by the mid-2010s.
14. Merriam-Webster defines “hyper” as “over,” as in overactive, high-strung. http://
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hyper.
15. Foucault, in The Order of Things, begins his “Preface” with a reference to one of Ya-
mashita’s significant literary influences: “This book first arose out of a passage in Borges,
out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my
thought. . . . This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopedia’ in which it is written that
‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed. . . .’ In the wonder-
ment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means
of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limita-
tion of our own” (xv).
16. In another sense, Manzanar’s rejection of the most American of nationalistic perfor-
mances—the pursuit of the American Dream—makes him ironically a “true” American.
He reminds one of Thoreau’s sojourn at Walden Pond, where he reflected that man “had

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120 Chapter Seven

no time to be anything but a machine” and “that the greater part of what my neighbors call
good I know in my heart to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my
good behavior” (“Economy”). https://americanliterature.com/author/henry-david-thoreau
/book/walden-pond/summary (accessed Oct. 30, 2014).
17. Hardt and Negri write, in “De Corpore 1: Biopolitics as Event” in Commonwealth,
that “The biopolitical event that poses the production of life as an act of resistance, innova-
tion, and freedom leads us back to the figure of the multitude as political strategy. Con-
sider . . . how Luciano Bolis, an Italian antifacist partisan, poses in his memoir the relation
between grains of sand and the resistance of the multitude (in terms reminiscent of Walt
Whitman’s democratic leaves of grass). . . . Deleuze casts the biopolitical production of life,
in a similarly partisan way, as believing ‘in the world.’. . . ‘If you believe in the world you
precipitate events, however inconspicuous, that elude control, you engender new space-
times, however small their surface or volume” (61).
18. In Hardt and Negri’s “The Multitude of the Poor,” in Commonwealth, they point out
that in seventeenth-century England “the same set of basic laws [physics] were [sic] thought
to apply equally to physical and political bodies. Robert Boyle, for example, challenges the
dominant view that all existing bodies are compounds of homogenous, simple elements by
arguing instead that multiplicity and mixture are primary in nature. . . . ‘Multitudes’ of
corpuscles are ‘driven to associate themselves, now with one Body, and presently with an-
other’” (42). In Multitude, Negri and Hardt write, “The multitude is composed of a set of
singularities . . . by singularity here we mean a social subject whose difference cannot be
reduced to sameness, a difference that remains different” (99). For an extended definition,
refer to pages 99–101.
19. Harvey later quotes Henri Lefebvre: “capitalism has survived in the twentieth cen-
tury by one and only one means—‘by occupying space, by producing space.’” According to
Harvey, “Capitalism thereby builds and rebuilds a geography in its own image. It con-
structs a distinctive geographical landscape, a produced space of transport and communi-
cations, of infrastructures and territorial organizations, that facilitates capital accumula-
tion” (Spaces of Hope, 54).
20. Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories, 1933–1969, trans. Norman Thomas di
Giovanni (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970), 23.
21. Notably, Manzanar perceives the same aspect of time and space as Rafaela; during
the pileup, “he considered . . . an uncanny sense of the elasticity of the moment, of time and
space, forced his hands and arms to continue. He was facing south . . . and the entire event
was being moved, stretched” (Tropic of Orange, 123).
22. Varieties of maize were cultivated during the Archaic period of Mesoamerica, from
8000 to 2000 BC. Quetzalcoatl is credited with discovering maize.
23. Brundage, The Phoenix and the Western World, 11.
24. Jacques Lafaye, Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National Con-
sciousness, 1531–1813; Rudolfo A. Anaya, Lord of the Dawn: The Legend of Quetzalcoatl.
25. The yin and yang halves of the circle are complementary to each other; and each
half contains its opposite element. Neither element is complete without the other. Further-
more, the attributes of the yin and yang circle are in ongoing dynamic relation, one attri-
bute morphing into the other; in this respect, the symbolism of yin and yang echoes the
ancient concept of the cyclical nature of life, represented as a serpent biting its own tail.
26. Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 61. Hardt and Negri quote Deleuze: “If you believe
in the world, you precipitate events, however inconspicuous, that elude control, you engender
new space-times, however small their surface or volume. . . . Our ability to resist control, or
our submission to it, has to be assessed at the level of our every move” (Negotiations, 176).

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 Hsu 121

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