Therefore, the metanarrative of consumerism becomes a key driving force behind supposed happiness. Jameson, in his book Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism exhibits a skepticism for metanarratives on the grounds that they are produced by the very late capitalist environment that initiates and propagates them, or in other words commonly held values are self-propagated by a group. These self-propagated values then become a cultural movement to keep order, to prevent chaos from occurring. Going back to the piece, we read the lines “The dead devour what still lives even as we eat the recycled remains / of what is planted in the field, delivered to supermarket spouting / forth freshly sprayed.” Consumption becomes an image of irony for Zlomislic as he describes what is in essence the metanarrative of eco-stewardship and healthy eating habits. Eco-stewardship comes in the image of recycling, yet this image is subverted; the living do not eat the recycled dead, as horrible an image as this even conjures. Instead the dead–the long deceased, the memories of the past, history itself–come back to feed us, regardless of our so-called good intentions. The supermarket, a historically-based image of the American notion of health, bounty and nourishment (although lately it has become an image for corporate control over American’s eating habits), becomes a simulacrum of the “freshly sprayed,” and problem-solving arrogance that the mettanarrative of eco-stewardship espouses.

Zlomislic brings this point home as he conjures the image of Prometheus, the anti-tyrant, the archetypal giver of technology (fire) to the mortals, stealing it from the gods. Again, Zlomislic turns a culturally conceived positive image into one that stands for a metaphor that shrouds what Jameson would call “reality.” Modern humanity becomes the “scar tissue” of Prometheus’ liver, a symbol of his resulting punishment from the gods, but the scar tissue has not healed or become a solace just as contemporary humans’ condition remains inevitably in stasis and conflict. The next stanza throws more irony into the reader’s field of view. We get scar tissue, then images of the cyclical work that chains most people in America today: “a / million daily commuters, mute and unthinking, blind to the little / pleasures as they search for the nuclear fusion of the orgasm / afterglow.” Chasing careers and their next paycheck in hopes of getting the big orgasm of success, people are content with being automatons in traffic. Yes, the scar tissue remains, hard and obvious, and Prometheus’ parable seems to not have sunk into the contemporary American metanarrative of consumerism.

Later Zlomislic describes the notion that people can change their view of the world quite simply, that they can remake it to their liking using the tools of capitalism: photo editing software made by Adobe can aid someone in revising his or her image in finding a lover. Zlomislic might have added Facebook or Myspace to this line. Tied to the question of “where and when will we meet?” is the quelling of disorder, which shows a continued agitation contemporary humans feel towards the unknowing and the upheaval they fear may happen. Bakhtin, as does Jameson some 40 years later, identifies spheres of dialogue, the heteroglossia that make up the many competing dialects, thought systems, vernaculars, and cultural centers of modern consciousness (you can find more information on dialogics and heteroglossia in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics). Key to these spheres are those that subject a hegemonic rein over others. Capitalism becomes a heteroglot that places its adherents in subjection to its systems and dialects of control. Zlomislic makes this point when he writes, “We seek order where chaos rules. The bits are packaged: salad, porn, / apples, cuts of meat, coffee spoons.” Food and its commercialist paraphernalia, some of the most intimate things a person can utilize and imbibe become something mediated by commerce, by capitalism, and breaking from this commericalist cycle, seeing the ridiculousness of it, laughing at its seriousness, embodying Bakhtin’s carnivalistic behavior is exactly what capitalism hopes consumers not do. To revolt and overturn a system that’s only a system as long as they buy into it, even for a moment, becomes an event that subverts systems of power to cataclysmic extent.

Zlomislic provides more keys to subversion that Bakhtin would identify as carnivalistic: “The light enters when the illusion becomes tired. The cliche, ‘I / love you’ should be returned with silence. The echo you seek is an / old repetition.” The illusion is that of bought happiness, of bought safety, of bought and consumed love. Zlomislic’s commentary on love in contemporary society, then, argues that love has turned to an illusion of completeness and happiness just as the birthday celebration becomes a structured practice of quelling people’s doubt for the disquieting aspects of life. Love, like other normative forms of culture (ie, religion, politics, etc) is safety, collusion, and togetherness with another individual or group, making the individual no longer an individual, but an agent of the body of thought, and in the case that Zlomislic describes, feeding and bolstering the structure of capitalism. But to fit with Bakthin’s notion of capitalism, we must find the upheavel, the overthrow of “natural” order that’s replaced with grotesque order.

Zlomislic peppers the element of upheavel in interesting ways, by using images of death and chaos juxtuposed with images of commercialized order. And to understand how these elemements work I call to Julia Kristeva. Much of Kristeva’s post-structuralist work deals with issues of horror and abjection, and one idea she develops, that of “the Real,” can be used to understand the capitalist/grotesque structure Zlomislic is illustrating (for more of “the Real,” refer to Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection). Zlomislic says, “Left on the doorstep…a dead mouse; …brought as a gift,” then later “It is a fun house ride with death hitching on your admission ticket.” In each of these lines the reader gets the image of death paired with bought things–gifts, rides, tickets–causing the reader a considerable amount of fear, confusion, and dissalusionment as the images rush past. Kristeva’s notion of the real describes how we humans deal with the horrific inevitability of our own deaths. Death is real and cannot be explained away. But also, Kristeva makes a distinction between how we humans deal with knowledge of death, and how we view the symbolism of death. The symbol of the dead mouse on the doorstep is a symbol of quaint gratitude (I am thinking of your mouser dropping it there in exchange for praise), but the dead mouse becomes a symbol of un-quenched appetite, looking back to American culture’s assumed solace in the quenching of consumerist appetite. Although the dead mouse does not “satisfy your hunger,” it is offered as a solution as such, denoting the possibility that it might. Death then, as Kristeva would read it in this piece, becomes an unsettling symbolic image that points towards people’s the inability to buy themselves out of death and also their inability to construct a symbolic meaning for it outside of a commercialized understanding.

Keeping in mind Bakhtin’s notions of subverting power structures, and Kristeva’s notions of human’s attempts at dealing with death we must review the piece’s final lines: “The knock on the door, the ringing of the telephone are all / reminders to stop eating the remainder.” Notifiers of guests, new conversations, and new information, along with the opening of doors, and the creating of human connection is followed by an admonition to become conservative. Odd and aporetic, this paradoxical statement is one Derrida would relish. However, the reminder to stop eating the remainder refers to stopping culture’s robotic and blind forward fall of production and blind consumption. The remainder signifies the largess of consumerism that American’s simply excuse, not as largess, but as the insignificant curlings of the trinkets and baubles that make us happy. (Please remember to throw away all your myriad of wrappers, packaging, tags, bags, and bottles.) And as the piece closes, it is Death that propels the machine, empowering the American goal to prosper and leave a mark on the world, good or bad, destructive or creative. The real of death becomes nothing more than a will and trust fund I suppose. The “this” in the line refers to American’s accepted reality that happiness can be bought and that true feelings can be based on buying and consuming. It’s a good question, one that no one can easily answer. The statement hangs on the presumption that all humans do not need to live a materialistic lifestyle to be really happy.

Zlomislic’s use of satire and irony would make Derrida chuckle with glee as Zlomislic reconstitutes Derrida’s theories on deconstructing culture. Interestingly, many do and have derided this method because of its nihilistic conclusions. Well, sure, that’s a pretty easy gripe. But why are people afraid of a little nihilism? Really, will the world come to a halt if everyone gave up hope in a system of reality that spirals beyond their tolerance for grotesquerie? Yeah, maybe for a few constructive moments. Actually, pulling oneself from the notion that life is set, that humans are static in an irreversible structure of culturally derived and limiting perception that prevents psychic and intellectual thought to move forward, is probably one of the most important exercises humans can do, especially as we humans live in an over-commercialized and individualist-centered existence of hedonism and solipsism. Why not participate in thinking hedonism and social defiance rather than be a taste-bud, a simple receiving mechanism, in the capitalist-driven and controlled form of existence humans unabashadly operate in now?