42.1.hsu metaphor and metonymy

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Fatal Contiguities: Metonymy and Environmental Justice

Hsuan L. Hsu

New Literary History, Volume 42, Number 1, Winter 2011, pp. 147-168

(Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2011.0007

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new literary history148

relations between literary orm and environmental injustice are lessfrmly established.

I relations o spatial contiguity are historically conditioned, unevenlydistributed, and politically contested through processes o disinvestmentand redevelopment, then metonymyor linguistic association accordingto contiguitymay be a crucial fgure or environmental-justice literature.

While nature writing oten privileges environmental metaphors that as-sociate human and natural phenomena, environmental metonymieshighlight already existing, historically contingent interaces betweenpeople and their surroundings. Environmental metonymy was frstdeployed extensively over a century ago by naturalist writers interested

in the animal aspects o human nature, environmental deterministperspectives on urban inequities, and distanced narrative perspectives.However, metonymic relations between bodies and spaces remain crucialtoday insoar as they make visible the invisible risk actors associated withdeindustrialization, transportation inequality, and environmental toxicity.

This essay will revisit the theoretical distinction between metaphor andmetonymy rom an environmental-justice perspective, considering howeach trope envisions relations between nature and society. Throughout,I draw examples rom the novels o Helena Mara Viramontes, which

deploy both metaphor and metonymy to dramatize the racially uneveneects o environmental harm. The frst section provides an overviewo critics reservations about environmental metaphors, and suggeststhat metaphorwhich is oten conceptualized as a fgure based on thesubstitution o ideasmay also register perceptual habits and expecta-tions that are environmentally conditioned (that is, conditioned by con-tiguity). The second section considers how metonymic language makes

visible the mundane, cumulative eects o environmental racismaswell as potential alliances that might arise to redress themthrough an

extended reading o Their Dogs Came With Them (2007), Viramontessnovel about young women coming o age during the peak decades oEast Los Angeles reeway construction.

I. Two Aspects o Environmental Language

In his classic study, Two Aspects o Language and Two Types o Apha-sic Disturbances (1956), Roman Jakobson argues that the fgures o

metaphor and metonymy express two distinct linguistic predilections.Metaphor makes vertical substitutions based on analogy or similarity,

while metonymy highlights relations along a horizontal axis o contiguity.


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149fatal contiguities

The development o a discourse may take place along two dierent semanticlines: one topic may lead to another either through their similarity or throughtheir contiguity. The metaphoric way would be the most appropriate term or

the frst case and the metonymic way or the second, since they fnd their mostcondensed expression in metaphor and metonymy respectively. . . . In normalverbal behavior both processes are continually operative, but careul observationwill reveal that under the inuence o a cultural pattern, personality, and verbalstyle, preerence is given to one o the two processes over the other.4

Jakobson suggestively rames metaphor and metonymy not as exceptionalpoetic devices, but as modes o expression or discursive processes withproound implications or everyday patterns o speech, perception, eel-

ing, and thought.5 Yet, as Barbara Johnson notes, metaphor has always,in the Western tradition, had the privilege o revealing unexpectedtruth, as opposed to metonymy.6 This association with truth has some-times resulted in the dangerous and politically charged naturalizationo metaphors, as when racial dierence is quantifed and pathologizedthrough the language o blood, when the nation is represented as aamily, or when racialized groups are stereotypically depicted as animals.7In the context o urban planning, developers have requently invokedthe arboreal metaphor o urban blight to naturalize and pathologize

poverty, and to justiy the renewal o areas with high black and Chi-cano populations.8

Environmental writing oten gravitates towards metaphorical thinkingthat likens human and social processes to natural ones. For instance,Ursula Heise has shown that contemporary novels o multicultural ortransnational scope oten rely on a metaphoric equation o human di-

versity with ecological diversity. Recent novels by Karen Tei Yamashita,Barbara Kingsolver, and Ruth Ozeki all suggest that the establishmento existential ties with cultural others through romance and amily canmetaphorically substitute or . . . solutions [to scenarios o ecological crisisaround the world].9 Mitchum Huehls has also noted the requency with

which environmental authors and critics assume an Aristotelian concep-tion o metaphor in which one object replaces another because o theirshared properties.10 When taken out o context, such environmentalmetaphors run the risk o reinscribing the notion o an unbridgeabledistance between culture and nature.11 I metaphors assist in reducingthe unamiliar to the amiliar,12 then uncritical environmental metaphorsmay eectively naturalize nature itsel when they draw on it as a sourceo unchanging and supposedly universal materials.

Given these limitations o environmental metaphor, Viramontessfrst novel, Under the Feet of Jesus(1995), would appear to be excessive in

what its publisher calls its haunting use o image and metaphor.13 A


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Bildungsromanchronicling the lives o Estrella, her amily, and a youngman named Alejo on the migrant-arming circuit, Under the Feetreliesheavily on metaphorical language to give meaning to the girls experi-ences o dislocation and environmental injustice. Huehls counts 216similes in the 176-page novel,14 most o which liken human experienceto characteristics o animals, plants, or landscape. Even the title reer-ences a metaphorical relation between human, natural, and divine laws:Estrellas mother Petra tells her that i the immigration police attemptto detain her, you tell them the birth certifcates are under the eeto Jesus.15 While Petra has literally hidden her childrens birth certif-cates under her sculpted fgurine o Jesus, her statement also suggests,

metaphorically, that her children have both a religious and an earthlyright to citizenship.The novels concluding scene stages a vertical ascent rom literal,

everyday contacts to metaphorical insight. Estrella, worn down roma long day o travel and rom having to leave her riend Alejo at thehospital, elt flthy, the coils o her neck etched with dirt and sweat.Estrella took o the muddied dress as i she wanted to discard the wholeday like dirty laundry (UFJ170). Ater removing the stained dress in ametaphorical act o purifcation, she climbs up into the tower o the barn

as i she were climbing out o a box. The birds pumped their wings . . .like debris whirling in a tornado . . . the stars like silver pomegranatesglimmered beore an infnity o darkness. . . . Estrella remained im-mobile as an angel standing on the verge o aith. Like the chimingbells o the great cathedrals, she believed her heart powerul enoughto summon home all those who strayed (UFJ17576). Estrellas verticalascent transorms the barnthe last architectural relic o a smaller-scaleagrarian landscape that preceded the onset o large-scale monocropagricultureinto a cathedral, her heart into a bell, her character into

an angel. Time stops as the immobile Estrella looks upon a landscapesaturated with metaphorical associations. While this experience o thetranscendence and insight oered by metaphor is compelling, Viramon-tes quietly qualifes it by underlining Estrellas aith and belie: willher vision actually sufce to undo the crushing experiences o loss anddisplacement documented in the novelto summon home all those

who strayed? Likewise, this novels upliting ending is overshadowed bythe act that Estrella will probably soon assist in tearing down this verybarn in exchange or extra pay.

However, as Johnson observes, It is oten very hard to tell [metaphorand metonymy] apart.16 On closer inspection, many o the similes inUnder the Feetturn out to reerence not universal natural images butlandscapes that have been produced and confgured by human labor


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and technology. Christa Grewe-Volpp has noted numerous metaphorsand similes that illustrate the extent to which the working environmento Viramontess migrant armers conditions their perception o the

world: Estrella sees clouds ready to burst like cotton plants (3); hermothers varicose veins remind her o vines choking the movement oher legs (61). When Perecto Flores dreams o illness, his veins appearto him like irrigation canals clogged with dying insects, twitching ontheir backs, their little twig legs jerking (100). And Petra thinks o herbabys growing etus as the lima bean in her . . . bursting a root witheach breath (125).17 Grewe-Volpp suggests that such examples ramethe natural environment as a socially, economically, and culturally de-

termined realm into which human beings are embedded. Their mate-rial and their psychological existence, even their visual perceptions, areshaped by their work in the felds, by the ruit that they harvest, and byculturally inherited values.18 Viramontess metaphors and similes evokethe embeddedness o her characters within environments that are bothsocially produced and agriculturally productive: they perceive veins asirrigation canals and etuses as lima beans because these are aspects otheir everyday environmentan environment that, ar rom appear-ing natural, regenerative, or universal, is exposed as exploitative and

chemically toxic to those who labor in it daily. In addition to emphasizingsimilarities between terms, these metaphoric connections expose rela-tions o contiguity by conveying the psychological and perceptual habitso characters who have become part o the agricultural landscape. Theyinternalize the landscape as extensivelyi not as atallyas Alejo does

when, exposed to a concentrated dose o pesticide spray, He thoughtfrst o his eet sinking, sinking to his knee joints, swallowing his waistand torso, the pressure o tar squeezing his chest and crushing his ribs.Engulfng his skin up to his chin, his mouth, his nose, bubbled air. Black

bubbles erasing him. Finally the eyes. Blankness (UFJ78).Alejos loss o sel in this climactic scene is mediated by the metaphoro the tar pita metaphor that both alludes to his own longstandingascination with the La Brea Tar Pits and draws attention to an inanimatesubstance that has its origins in organic (in Alejos case, human) matter.

Alejos engulment by tar evokes the perils o contiguity in landscapesproduced under the logic o environmental racism. For his exposureis merely a concentrated dose o the everyday, cumulative permeationo armers bodies by toxic pesticidesa permeation that is reerenced

throughout the novel by passing allusions to dierent characters ill-nesses, ranging rom sore muscles and watery eyes to cancer, miscar-riages, and unexplained chest pains.19 Alejos eeling o sinking into theearth allegorizes the ways in which toxic agricultural landscapes aect


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the physical, psychological, and social health o migrant workers. In thelandscapes o racialized migrant labor, contiguity kills.

II. Fatal Contiguities

Viramontess writings cumulatively build on the tradition o Chicanaliterature that, according to Mary Pat Brady, has, rom its inception,contested the terms o capitalist spatial ormation, including the at-tempts to regulate the meanings and uses o spaces, especially the use ospace to naturalize violent racial, gender, sexual, and class ideologies.20

In Their Dogs Came With Them,Viramontes extends her treatment oenvironmental racism to the urban context o East Los Angeles. TheirDogswhich Viramontes began drating in 199121shares with Underthe Feet an overarching concern with how social and physical harm isunevenly distributed across spatial and racial boundaries. Their Dogs,however, shits its rhetorical emphasis rom the vertical axis o metaphorto oreground lateral relations o contiguity between persons, things, andspaces. While both novels employ metaphor and metonymy in varyingdegrees, their dierences exempliy Jakobsons argument that under

the inuence o a cultural pattern, personality, and verbal style, preer-ence is given to one o the two processes over the other22 This shit inrhetorical pattern appears, or example, in the prepositions eatured inthe two novels titles: under the feet, as we have seen, highlights a verticalmetaphoric relation (even i it also invokes the ground as a synechdocheor the entire Earth); by contrast, their dogs came with thememphasizescontiguity even as it also raises questions (which the novel never quiteanswers) about just what these dogs symbolize.23

Whereas Viramontess earlier novel was constrained primarily to

the lives o Estrellas amily and, or the most part, to its protagonistsdeveloping point o view, Their Dogsencompasses multiple contiguousstorylines without privileging any one o its loosely interrelated charac-ters. The novel recounts the daily lives o several young people comingo age during the 1960s and 1970s: Ermila, an orphan living with hergrandparents and dating a gang member named Alonso; her artisticallyinclined cousin Nacho, sent by his amily fve months ago to comelive up north and help out since Grandather had been disabled24;Turtle, an androgynous young woman who becomes involved with the

McBride Boys gang; Ana, a sel-sacrifcing young woman who looks aterher brother Ben (who has been mentally ill since he was hit by a car asa child); and Tranquilina, who helps her parents run a local church.

As the novel progresses, these subplots begin to intersect like reeway


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interchanges:25 Nacho, who has allen in love with Ermila, jumps herboyriend and locks him in a lieguard booth; the McBride Boys, withTurtle in tow, take revenge on Nacho; Ana and Tranquilina, who areon the streets searching or Ben at night, witness the ensuing assault, in

which Turtle murders Nacho with a screwdriver to assert her masculinity.In addition to interweaving these subplots in the novels climactic

scene, Viramontes also unifes her characters through dynamic descrip-tions o the spaces they inhabit and traverse. The demolition o housesand construction o new roads and reeways in East L.A. permeatesthe novel with a (literal) atmosphere o abandonment. Their Dogsis setduring the period when deindustrialization, suburban sprawl, and the

rapid spread o automobiles led toand were in turn intensifed bythe construction o reeways through low-income neighborhoods suchas Watts, South Central, Compton, and East L.A.26 Despite decades ocomplaints, protests, and lawsuits by local residents, East L.A. becamehome to more reeways than any place in the country in the decadesollowing the 1956 Interstate and Deense Highway Act.27 In his introduc-tion to Highway Robbery: Transportation, Racism and New Routes to Equity,environmental-justice scholar Robert Bullard summarizes the social andenvironmental consequences o transportation apartheid:

Many ederally subsidized transportation construction and inrastructure projectscut wide paths through low-income and people o color neighborhoods. Theyphysically isolate residents rom their institutions and businesses, disrupt once-stable communities, displace thriving businesses, contribute to urban sprawl,subsidize inrastructure decline, create trafc gridlock, and subject residentsto elevated risks rom accidents, spills, and explosions rom vehicles carryinghazardous chemicals and other dangerous materials. Adding insult to injury,cutbacks in mass transit subsidies have the potential to urther isolate the poorin inner-city neighborhoods rom areas experiencing job growthcompromising

what little they already have. So while some communities receive transportationbenefts, others pay the costs.28

Their Dogsrequently registers the psychological, social, and physical e-ects o the seven reeways and one massive interchange that emergedin East L.A. between 1953 and 1972.29 The reeways devastation ocommunity and collective memory are evoked, or example, whenTranquilinas mother contrasts the present space with the spatially andracially integrated neighborhood she recalls rom an earlier time: Thestreets Mama remembered had once connected to other arteries o thecity, rolling up and down hills, and in and out o neighborhoods whereneighbors o dierent nationalities intersected with one another. . . . Butnow the reeways amputated the streets into stumped dead ends (TD33).


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The reeways eects on health are apparent on several occasions whenTurtle (whose name reerences the slowdown or time-space expansion thatreeways imposed on inner-city residents who lacked automobiles30) eelsa physical exhaustion directly precipitated by carbon exhaust: [T]hethick, chocking stench o blackened diesel smoke rose rom the dumptrucks, and bulldozers blew carbon exhaust into a haze. Her eyes wereso tired, they squeaked as she rubbed them; the groan, thump, andburr noise o the constant motors [o earthmovers] would weave intothe sound o her own breath whistling the blackened umes o dust andcrumble in her nasal cavities (TD27, 168). These airborne interweavingso noise, exhaust, and bodies pose a representational problem insoar

as they are invisible, transient, difcult to document, and uncertain intheir eects. Such environmental risk actors partake in the temporalityo slow violence that critic Rob Nixon has associated with chemical andradioactive pollutants, whose slow and indeterminate eects challengenarrative conventions: such invisible, mutagenic theater is slow-pacedbut open-ended, eluding the tidy closure, the narrative containment,imposed by visual orthodoxies o victory and deeat.31 Bens accident,in which he and another boy are struck by a speeding cement truck,more directly illustrates the risks posed by increased automobile tra-

fc: as Nancy Jakowitsch and Michelle Ernst note in a commentary onJust Transportation, people o color are . . . disproportionately thevictims o pedestrian atalities.32 Such passages rame the setting oViramontess novel not as a fxed place, but as an ongoing process ospatial transormation.

Aside rom the noise and soot o home demolition and reewayconstruction, Their Dogs draws attention to several other instances oenvironmental injustice. Viramontes notes, or example, how the L.A.riverbedonce a public agricultural and aesthetic resourcehas been

rechannelled into a huge straight artifcial river naked o water, bothor ood control and to make room or real-estate and reeway develop-ment (TD225).33 The enclosed river contrasts with the artifcial pondo colored, treated, toxic water at Belvedere Park, in which Ana isbaptized (TD28182). The novel also depicts a smog alert on a schoolplayground and several instances o occupational health hazards thatrange rom Ermila stomach[ing] the heavy smell o Pennzoil while

working at a used car shop to her riend Lollie helping her mother ata garment actory while wats o lint dried her throat like cheap-brand

cigarettes (TD151). These encounters with environmental contaminantsoreground relations o trans-corporeality in which human bodies andtheir surroundings interpenetrate and continually reshape one another.34

In a urther satirical, surreal twist, Viramontess East L.A. is also placed


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under a quarantine to protect residents rom rabid dogs that overrunthe barrio:

From First Street to Boyle to Whittier and back to Pacifc Boulevard, the road-blocks enorced a quarantine to contain a potential outbreak o rabies. Back inearly February, a pamphlet delivered by the postman read: Rising cases of rabiesreported in the neighborhood (see shaded area) have forced Health ofcials to approve,

for limited time only, the aerial observation and shooting of undomesticated mammals.Unchained and/or unlicensed mammals will not be exempt. (TD54)

As Viramontes has noted, this fctional public health quarantine looselyparallels the actual public saety curews imposed during the Chicano

Moratorium o 196971.35 Like the historical curews, the emergingreeway system, and racist policing techniques,36 the rabies quarantinerestricts the movements o residents while segregating them rom moreauent, healthier neighborhoods: as the historian Rodolo Acua putsit, East L.A. in this period was a community under siege.37 Viramon-tess selection o rabiesa term that derives rom the Sanskrit rabhas(to do violence)as the pretext or the quarantine raises criticalquestions about whether the roots o street violence lie in stray dogs,gangs o unemployed and stigmatized Chicano youths, or Quarantine

Authority snipers who indiscriminately shoot stray mammals romtheir helicopters. When Ermila conjectures that her grandmother hasplaced a vicious dog in her bedroom to prevent her rom sneaking outo the house at night, it becomes apparent that the young women inthe novel (with the exception o the cross-dressed turtle) are doublyquarantinedalternately shut up in their homes and blockaded out otheir neighborhood.

The novels title and epigraph also connect the rabies quarantine

with the long history o New World colonialism by invoking a passagerom Miguel Leon-Portillas The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of theConquest of Mexico. The epigraph, which describes the approach othe conquistadors, suggestively describes conquest not just in terms o

weapons and soldiers, but as the onset o an invasive, militarized mi-lieu38an assemblage o humans, accoutrements, animals, noise, dust,and drool: The dust rose in whirlwinds on the roads. . . . They made aloud clamor as they marched. . . . Their dogs came with them, runningahead o the column. They raised their muzzles high; they lited their

muzzles to the wind. They raced on beore with saliva dripping romtheir jaws (TD, epigraph).In the novel, a similarly violent environment has been imposed on East

L.A. By rearranging and policing urban space, reeway construction andthe Quarantine Authority collude to impose experiences o constrained


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and space (interrelations between large-scale urban planning, highwayconstruction, and the Zumayas immediate neighborhood). When thechild [swings] her tar eet under the vinyl chair at Chavelas house,the street itsel has in a sense entered the house, tracked onto the oorand distributed through the air by the childs swinging eet (TD5). Bythe end o the chapter, Chavelas house, along with all the other homesand residents on its side o the street, would disappear orever as bull-dozers raze them to be paved over with tar (TD12).

Just as Under the Feetwas flled with similes, Their Dogsconsistently ea-tures metonymic human-environment relationships patterned ater thedescription o the Zumaya childs soot-blackened eet. The second page,

or example, describes a chair stuck to the childs thighs, Chavelastobacco-tarnished hand, and the Gamboa boys tar-smudged ace (TD6). The novel is flled with passing reerences to scummy fngernails,sooty skin, paint-stained clothes, fngers smudged with pollen, body-shaped indentations on cushions, and other interaces between bodiesand environmental elements. While the novels pervasive smudges andstains resonate with the symbolic ritual o Ash Wednesday41in which ashis smudged on the orehead to temporarily signiy penitence, mortality,and membership in a community o believersthey also bear witness to

the ways in which characters and their surroundings unavoidably leavemarks on one another. Stains are doubly metonymic, partaking not onlyo the environment that they materialize but also the suraces and bodiesstained. They are materialized traces o soot, tar, oil, mud, and the blackumes o the bulldozer exhaust hovering over the new pavements o FirstStreetexhaust that paved the way or still more harmul automobileemissions rom the reeways on which ew o the novels characters everget to drive (TD8). Viramontes persistently deploys stains to make visiblethe human eects o ambient (oten imperceptible) environmental harm

concentrated in low-income neighborhoods such as East L.A.Jacques Lacans theorization o the gaze provides a useul rameworkor understanding how visibility and invisibility are conditioned by socialand environmental actors. Implicitly drawing on Jakobson,42 Lacan de-scribes the unction o the stain and o the gaze in the feld o vision interms o metonymic slippage: In our relation to things, in so ar as thisrelation is constituted by the way o vision, and ordered in the fgureso representation, something slips, passes, is transmitted, rom stage tostage, and is always to some degree eluded in itthat is what we call the

gaze.43 While Lacans concept o the gaze has been brought to bear onquestions o race and gender by thinkers like Frantz Fanon and KajaSilverman, its environmental undertones have largely gone unnoticed.Nature and landscapewhether in the eye-shaped stains that appear


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on insect wings or Sartres discussion o the sound o rustling leaves,suddenly heard while out hunting (FFC74, 84)44fgure prominentlyamong Lacans examples o the gaze, and they are nowhere more strik-ing than in the amous autobiographical passage describing a vacationtaken while he was in his twenties. Attempting to throw mysel intosomething practical, something physical, in the country say, or at thesea, the young Lacan ends up on a boat with a amily o fshermen inBrittany (FFC95). In this anecdote, the gaze appears when one o thefshermenan individual known as Petit-Jean, thats what we calledhimdraws attention to the social and geographical distance separatingthe vacationer rom the fshermen by pointing out a glittering sardine

can oating in the water: You see that can? Do you see it? Well, it doesntsee you! (FFC95).Lacans ironic sel-portrait as a young intellectual playing at manual

labor is grounded in serious issues o class, risk, and environmentallyinduced predispositions to death. In an aside (whose digressive insertionin the text discursively echoes the gaze embodied in the anamorphicskull o Hans Holbeins painting The Ambassadors), Lacan notes that likeall his amily, [Petit-Jean] died very young rom tuberculosis, which atthat time was a constant threat to the whole o that social class (FFC95).

The vacationing intellectual may momentarily share the fshermensrisk o shipwreck or accidental drowning, but his daily lie is protectedrom the environmental risks associated with poverty and poor work-ing conditions that made Petit-Jeans amily vulnerable to diseases liketuberculosis. The anecdote is intended to illustrate how Lacan lookedlike nothing on earth to fshermen habituated to the struggle with

what to them was a pitiless nature. However, Lacans own invisibility inthe social picture composed by the fshermen and the sardine can iscounterbalanced by the amilys disappearance (Lacan writes o Petit-

Jean, il est, comme tout sa famille, disparu).45 This exemplary maniesta-tion o the gaze emerges rom geographical inequalities that were onlyexacerbated by the industrialization o Brittany (At that time, Brittany

was not industrialized as it is now. There were no trawlers . . .) and itsgrowing canning industry (FFC 95). Instead o simply illustrating theelusive, ungraspable nature o the point o gaze, this anecdote alsoregisters the invisibility o social actors such as class, labor, and envi-ronmental risk. (Lacan may be hinting at the metonymic nature o thepicture he describes when he insists, I am not speaking metaphorically

[FFC95].) In this anecdote, the glimmering sardine can perorms theunction o . . . the stain by mark[ing] the pre-existence to the seeno a given-to-be-seen (FFC74). However, instead o occurring naturally(like the markings on the wings o insects, or like the designs on rocks


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encounters a man building a shelter in a parking lota man who hadrisen rom the ash o neglect, the smog o passing cars, and now he hadappeared. . . . Sometimes he disappeared behind a sheet o aluminumsiding, only his two hands and two bare eet visible, and sometimes hedisappeared altogether under a newound board. In the renzy o hisactivity, it seemed the ropes o his beard oten caught in the splinters ornails o the board (TD204). Perceiving these evictees and vagabondsrequires that viewers physically approach their abandoned spaces andattend to the makeshit objects with which they are enmeshed. Ias thegeographer Paul Robbins has arguedsuburban lawns can interpellatepeople to become ecological subjects who water, mow, and dispense

pesticides, the socially orsaken landscapes in Viramontess novels maysolicit suburban commuters away rom such practices. Perceiving theanonymous woman and Ben-like people along with the environmentsthey inhabit might call orth dierent kinds o political and economicsubjects who acknowledge the spatially occluded connections betweenthe urban poor and the benefciaries o white ight. 47

These scenes in which characters perceive the relations between bodies,environments, and the viewers own subject position oreground relationso contiguity that have been eloquently described by the Indian poet and

critic A. K. Ramanujan. Commenting on the classic Tamil poem Whatthe Concubine Said, Ramanujan draws on the concept o metonymyto describe landscape representations that attend to reciprocal relationsbetween natural and human elements. The poems speaker describesher lover as ollows: You know he comes rom/ where the resh-watershark in the pools/ catch with their mouths/ the mangoes as they all,ripe/ rom the trees on the edge o the feld.48 Ramanujan observesthat the poem does not use a metaphor. The human agents are simply

placedin the scene. Both parts o the comparison (the man and shark)

are part o one scene, one syntagm; they exist separately, yet simulateeach other. . . . In such a metonymic view o man in natureman incontexthe is continuous with the context he is in.49

Viramontes similarly highlights the continuities between her charactersand the urban environment. However, unlike the idyllic scene describedin Ramanujans example, East L.A. is a heterogeneous space shot through

with contradictions. In addition to visualizing environmental pollutants,stains also unction as traces o a characters varied movements and con-tacts, as when objects begin to rub o on Ermilas bandaged hand: First

there were the bluish and yam colors rom Jans car, which remainedsteadast on the bandage rom this aternoon. Then Ermila had pressedher palm on a crinkled, weatherworn billboard to slip o her shoes andthe ass-colored peachy akes o the Coppertone girl smudged Ermilasbandage as well. The second she saw her hand on the little girls bare


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ass, Ermila attempted to erase the colors, to eliminate the ass sensationby rubbing her palm against her Levis (TD237).

Despite her attempts to eace these stains and her inability to em-pathize with the white Coppertone girls shame at having her swimsuittugged o by a dog, an account o todays experiences including thegirls ass had been deposited all over her bandage (TD245). Here, therelation between body and environment is not idyllic or natural but awk-

ward and conicted: socially distanced rom the modesty and peachyskin that characterize the Coppertone girl, Ermila nevertheless passes inclose proximity to the billboard that, intended or light-skinned viewersenclosed in automobiles, was not designed to be approached so closely.

In addition to documenting mundane interactions between charactersand the conceptually incongruous (yet physically contiguous) traces onearby reeways (billboards, car seats, umes), Viramontes also describesthe McBride Homeboys resistance to reeway construction: Searchingout the reshly laid cement o the reeway bridges and sidewalks in orderto record their names, solidiy their bond, to proclaim eternal allegianceto one another (TD163). Although Their Dogsmakes passing reerencesto the presence o grafti, the narrator points out the limitations osuch attempts to mark the reeway. I, in the short term, reeway tags

were the Caltrans contractors worst nightmare, in the long term theymerely became part o the transormed landscape:

The boys would never know that in thirty years rom tonight, the tags wouldcrack rom the earthquakes, the weight o vehicles, the orce o muscular treeroots, rom the trampling o passersby, become as aded as ancient engravings,as old as the concrete itsel, as cold and clammy as a morgue table. And in thosethirty years the cracks would be repaired here and there with newer patchingcement, making the boys eternal bonds look worn and orgotten. Not evenconcrete engravings would guarantee immortality, though tonight they wouldall eel immortal. (TD164)

As they are cracked, patched, and aded, and as the grafti artists them-selves disappear (or are made to disappear) rom the streets, the tagstransition rom active metaphors into more passive metonymies. Insteado registering the nicknames, relations, and rivalries o the Homeboys,thirty years later they merely register physical interactions between newlylaid concrete and orgotten youths.

Instead o valorizing the counterstains represented by reeway grafti,Viramontes dwells on the ethical and intersubjective relations inherentin stains. In addition to materializing a metonymic interace betweenbodies and environment, the stain also raises questions o contagion.

When Ermila attempts to eliminate the ass sensation by rubbing herpalm against her Levis, or example, she merely redistributes the skin-


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colored paint rom her bandage to her pants. The brutal climax oTheirDogs is ocalized through a Japanese American shop owner obsessedwith the notion o contagion. A member o a minority group with itsown history o repression, Ray fnds himsel in an ambivalent position.On the one hand, his daily car commute rom Monterey Park alls intothe pattern o selective disinvestment rom urban centers characteristico white ight. On the other hand, Rays own past as an internee atManzanar lays the groundwork or suggestive parallels: the charcoalrising up to his throat and making his mouth powdery like dust in L.A.recalls the internment camp where he ate [dust] at every meal, slept

with it between sheets, had breathed in the dust storms like smoke;

similarly, to him the Quarantine Authority sounded just like the WarRelocation Authority (TD256, 260). Nevertheless, Rays paranoid re-action to touching Turtles hand disavows these commonalities. WhenTurtle (dressed as a boy) steps into his store in search o ood, Raybriey empathizes with her, oering her a job and shaking her hand.

Aterwards, however, Ray repeatedly attempts to wipe the sweat rom hispalms . . . the sticky press o the boys handshake. . . . Whatever objectRay had touched ater that, be it the steering wheel o his Rambler orthe knob o his ront door, Ray embossed the boys microbes and germ

contagion on everything. No matter how much Ray washed his hands,no matter how hard he wiped and rubbed the sweat o his palms, hishands couldnt orget the boys lingering stink, like owers let waytoo long in a vase o putrid water (TD26162). Rays anxieties aboutcontagion eectively deny the act o contiguity, insoar as both wordsshare an etymological sense o touching together. By shrinking romTurtles touch and implicitly blaming her or her stink, he disavowshis own complicity, as a regular reeway commuter and a local businessowner, in the confguration o her environment. The metaphor o ow-

ers let in a vase o putrid water represents a bourgeois, domesticatedversion o the pathologizing metaphor o urban blight. Such paranoidand stigmatizing responses to biological and social contagion disavowits basis in social interconnectedness: contagious disease, writes Priscilla

Wald, illustrates the logic o social responsibility: the mandate to livewith a consciousness o the eects o ones actions on others.50 Raysparanoia is especially worrisome when we learn that, as one o the lastpeople to have seen Turtle beore she assaulted Nacho, he may be theonly ofcial witness to the crime.

Whereas Ray ends up disavowing his economic and environmental tiesto Turtle, Tranquilina vividly perceives the implications o contiguity inthe novels concluding scene. Ater witnessing the McBride Boys assaulton Nacho, she runs to the scene, arranges Nachos body, and attempts to


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protect Turtle when Quarantine Authority snipers in helicopters shoother down. At this point, Tranquilina sheds her eponymous calm, roaringWerrrre not doggggs! and turning on the sharpshooters.51 Absolutelydrenched in the black waters o blood and torrents o rain, Tranquilinacouldnt delineate hersel rom the murdered souls because these tearsand blood and rain and bullet wounds belonged to her as well (TD32425). The contrast between Tranquilinas enmeshed perception andRays inadequate witnessing o the event eectively reiterates Lacansanalysis o the gaze. There can be no transcendent view o the novelsclimactic event, because its only ull witness is a woman stained by all thebodies involved: Except or Tranquilina, no one, not the sharpshooters,

the cabdrivers, the travelers dashing out to the depot, the bareoot orslipper-clad spectators in robes, not one o them, in all their glorioushallucinatory gawking, knew who the victims were, who the perpetrators

were (TD325).The novel ends with a small act o resistance as Tranquilina, ordered

not to move by the sharpshooters, advances with clenched fsts. In apassage that echoes an earlier description o Tranquilinas athera vi-sionary who once had a spiritual experience o liberating ritual ight thateliminated the borders between the human and inhumanTranquilina

rides the wind beyond the borders, past the cesarean scars o the earth,out to limitless space where everything was possible i she believed (TD4748, 325). This abstract description o centriugal ight towards limit-less space inverts the concluding scene oUnder the Feet, where Estrellaremoves her muddied dress, climbs up towards numerous metaphoricalperceptions, and stands immobile as an angel on the verge o aith.Instead o shedding her bloodstained clothing, Tranquilina becomesa part o the scene she has just witnessed. Her defance o the sharp-shooters is narrated as an apotheosis in which she ironically transcends

spatial limitations and borders by advancing towards death. By contrast,an earlier drat o the novels ending eatures an unambiguous miracleas the character Remedios (an earlier version o Tranquilina) awes thesharpshooters by ying around the crowd, promis[ing] her peopleshe would return to them with a piece o cloud, and vanishing intothe sky.52 Physically blocked by the helicopters overhead, Tranquilinasambiguous attempt at ight in the revised novel both reprises the roleo the voladora mythical intermediary between humans and the godo ertility who enacts a productive reconfguration o human relations

with nature53and exposes that or East L.A.s residents the mobility andenvironmental integrity embodied by the voladorcould be achieved onlythrough a direct conrontation with state violence.54 For it is the statethat guarantees the reproduction o the atal environments conrontingEast L.A.s population in and beyond the decades covered byTheir Dogs.


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Grassroots environmental-justice movements have drawn critical atten-tion to the ways anthropogenic actors in environmental change intersect

with political and economic orces to produce dierentiated spaces andpopulations. The oregoing analysis oTheir Dogs Came With Themsug-gests that metonymy may play a productive role in aesthetic attempts torepresent local instances o environmental injustice. Insistently local andmaterial in scope, metonymy makes visible the atal contiguitiestheeects o environmental risk actors on bodies, minds, social relations,and lived spaceexperienced in places that have been abandoned ordeliberately blighted by deindustrialization, urban redevelopment, andother reconfgurations o social space.

University of CaliforniaDavis

NOTES

1 Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and LiteraryImagination(Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005), 21. Recent eorts to place environmen-tal justice perspectives in dialogue with environmental criticism include Lawrence Buell,Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2001); Joni Adamson, American Indian Literature,Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism: The Middle Place (Tucson: Univ. o Arizona Press,2001); Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein, eds., The Environmental JusticeReader: Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy(Tucson: Univ. o Arizona Press, 2002); Jerey Myers,Converging Stories: Race, Ecology, and Environmental Justice in American Literature(Athens: Univ.o Georgia Press, 2005); a special issue oDiscourse29, no. 23 (2007) on Race, Environment,and Representation, coedited by Mark Feldman and Hsuan L. Hsu; and a special issue oMELUS34, no. 2 (2009) onEthnicity and Ecocriticism, coedited by Joni Adamson and ScottSlovic.2 Julie Sze, Not By Politics Alone: Gender and Environmental Justice in Karen TeiYamashitas Tropic of Orange, Bucknell Review44, no. 1 (2000): 33.3 See Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter (London:

Sage, 1992); on intangible points o everyday contact decimated by urban renewal, seeRal Homero Villa, Barrio-Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture(Austin: Univ. o Texas Press, 2000), 12.4 Roman Jakobson, Two Aspects o Language and Two Types o Aphasic Disturbances,in Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language(The Hague: Mouton,1975), 90.5 See George Lako and Mark Johnson: Metonymic concepts allow us to conceptualizeone thing by means o its relation to something else. . . . Thus, like metaphors, metonymicconcepts structure not just our language but our thoughts, attitudes, and actions. GeorgeLako and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By(Chicago: Univ. o Chicago Press, 1980),239.6 Barbara Johnson, A World of Difference(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1988),157. See also Paul de Man: The inerence o identity and totality that is constitutive ometaphor is lacking in the purely relational metonymic contact: an element o truth isinvolved in taking Achilles or a lion but none in taking Mr. Ford or a motor car. Paulde Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust(NewHaven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), 14.


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7 Monkeys, bats, rats, and ants have each been likened to various racial groups inAmerican history, setting a cultural precedent or postwar understandings o the afnitybetween nonhuman and nonwhite. Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight:

Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles(Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. o CaliorniaPress, 2004), 98. On the fguration o race as blood, see Shawn Salvant, Writing Race inFigures of Blood(PhD diss., Univ. o Caliornia, Berkeley, 2003).8 See Villa, Barrio-Logos, 7172.9 Ursula Heise, Ecocriticism and the Transnational Turn in American Studies, AmericanLiterary History20, no. 12 (2008): 394.10 Mitchum Huehls, Ostention, Simile, Catachresis: Misusing Helena Viramontess Underthe Feet of Jesusto Rethink the Globalization Environmentalism Relation,Discourse29, no.23 (2007): 351.11 On the assertion o otherness implicit in metaphorical associations, see Neil Smith,Contours o a Spatialized Politics: Homeless Vehicles and the Production o Geographical

Scale, Social Text33 (1992): 6364.12 Neil Smith and Cindi Katz, Grounding Metaphor: Towards a Spatialized Politics,in Place and the Politics of Identity, ed. Michael Keith and Steve Pile (London: Routledge,1993), 69. Smith and Katzs critique o spatial metaphors that ail to treat space materi-ally pertains to some environmental metaphors; however, this by no means entails thatall metaphorical treatments o the environment are misguided.13 Helena Mara Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus (New York: Penguin, 1995), backcover.14 [T]he novels 176 pages contain, by my count, 216 similes, which are made all themore conspicuous by the complete absence o metaphor (Huehls, Ostention, Simile,

Catachresis, 357). Similes, however, unction on Jakobsons vertical, metaphoric axis;moreover, there do seem to be quite a ew examples o metaphors in Under the Feet.15 Helena Mara Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus(New York: Penguin, 1995), 63 (here-ater cited as as UFJ).16 Johnson, World of Difference,157.17 Christa Grewe-Volpp, The Oil was Made rom Their Bones: Environmental(In)justice in Helena Mara Viramontess Under the Feet of Jesus, Interdisciplinary Studies inLiterature and Environment12, no. 1 (2005): 66.18 Grewe-Volpp, The Oil was Made, 67. C. Johnson: The material or this metaphoris drawn rom the narrative world o contiguity . . . (Johnson, A World of Difference, 163).19 These pervasive health conditions are exacerbated by the migrants lack o access to

health care and medicationa problem that inorms a climactic scene in an inadequatemedical clinic, as well as several descriptions o Petras unsuccessul attempts to heal herseland Alejo with garlic, egg, and homemade elixirs.20 Mary Pat Brady,Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgencyof Space(Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2002), 6.21 Daniel Olivas, Interview with Helena Mara Viramontes, La Bloga(April 2, 2007),http://labloga.blogspot.com/2007/04/interview-with-helena-mara-viramontes.html.22 Jakobson,Fundamentals, 90.23 This is not to suggest that there are no similes in Their Dogs, or metonymies in Underthe Feet; instead, I am arguing that each o the novels, respectively, privileges relations ocontiguity and substitution at the levels o style, imagery, and plot.24 Helena Mara Viramontes, Their Dogs Came With Them(New York: Washington Square,2007), 71 (hereater cited as TD).25 The list o characters kept increasing and with this increase, the stories multipliedlike reeway interchanges. Having this Eureka moment, I realized that the structure othe novel began to resemble the reeway intersections (Olivas, Interview).


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26 For statistics establishing the extent o environmental racism, see Robert Bullardand Glenn Johnson: Arican-Americans and Latinos live in these Los Angeles communi-ties with the dirtiest air; the South Coast Air Quality Management District estimates 71

percent o Arican-Americans and 50 percent o Latinos live in areas with the most pol-luted air, compared to 34 percent o white people. Robert Bullard and Glenn Johnson,Just Transportation, in Just Transportation: Dismantling Race and Class Barriers to Mobility(Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 1997), 18.27 Bullard and Johnson, Just Transportation, 18. On the contested process o reewayconstruction in Los Angeles, see Avila, Popular Culture, 185223; Gilbert Estrada, IYou Build it, They Will Move: The Los Angeles Freeway System and the Displacemento Mexican East Los Angeles, 19441972, Southern California Quarterly87, no. 3 (2005):287315; Villa, Barrio-Logos, 11155; Norman Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles andthe Erasure of Memory(London: Verso, 1997), 3850. For an analysis o an earlier story inwhich Viramontess thematizes the dissolution o community and place-based collective

memory brought about by reeways in East Los Angeles, see Villa, Barrio-Logos, 11534.28 Robert Bullard, introduction to Highway Robbery: Transportation, Racism and New Routesto Equity, ed. Robert Bullard, Glenn S. Johnson, and Angel O. Torres (Boston: South End,2004), 4.29 Eric Avila, East Side Stories: Freeways and Their Portraits in Chicano Los Angeles,Landscape Journal26, no. 1 (2007): 83.30 See Cindi Katz, On the Grounds o Globalization: A Topography or Feminist Politi-cal Engagement, Signs26, no. 4 (2001): 1224.31 Rob Nixon, Neoliberalism, Slow Violence, and the Environmental Picaresque, ModernFiction Studies55, no. 3 (2009): 445.

32 Nancy Jakowitsch and Michelle Ernst, Just Transportation, in Highway Robbery:Transportation Racism and New Routes to Equity, ed. Robert D. Bullard, Glenn S. Johnson,and Angel O. Torres (Cambridge, MA: South End, 2004), 16869.33 See Blake Gumprecht, The Los Angeles River: Its Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth (Balti-more: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2001).34 See Alaimos discussion o trans-corporeality, which uses Multiple Chemical Sensi-tivity and toxic bodies to rethink eminist theorists tendency to essentialize categorieslike nature and the body: by underscoring that trans indicates movement acrossdierent sites, trans-corporeality opens up an epistemological space that acknowledgesthe oten unpredictable and unwanted actions o human bodies, non-human creatures,ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors. Stacy Alaimo, Trans-Corporeal

Feminisms and the Ethical Space o Nature, in Material Feminisms, ed. Stacy Alaimo andSusan Hekman (Indianapolis: Indiana Univ. Press, 2008), 238. Similarly, Tuana argues oran interactionist ontology that attends to various relations o viscous porosity betweenbodies and environments. Nancy Tuana, Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina, in MaterialFeminisms, ed. Alaimo and Hekman, 188213.35 Interview with Michael Silverblatt. Bookworm(audio interview, KCRW, Aug 16, 2007),http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw070816helena_maria_viramon.36 Dating to the Zoot Suit riots o 1943, racist policing techniques included roadblocks,unwarranted searches, mass arrests, and the padding o statistical gang fles with nameso youth (Villa, Barrio-Logos, 68). Villa writes, The intensifed spatial vigilance and con-tainment o the barrios were eective border-patrolling practices o particular strategicvalue to police agencies as Chicanos increasingly became automobile owners, with greateracility to move out o their barrios and potentially into the segregated enclaves o theAnglo-American majority (Barrio-Logos, 68).37 Rodolo Acua, A Community Under Siege: A Chronicle of Chicanos East of the Los AngelesRiver, 19451975(Los Angeles: Chicano Studies Resource Center, UCLA, 1984).


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38 See Peter Sloterdijks discussion o the problematization o human dwelling in gasand radiological milieus during the decades between the frst gas attacks o WWI andcurrent U.S. military research on using climactic alteration in warare in Terror from the Air,

trans. Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), 63. RebeccaHarding Daviss Life in the Iron Mills, an important precursor o literary naturalism, openswith paragraphs about smoke that are highly resonant with Viramontess descriptions obodies interacting with smog, soot, and exhaust: Smoke on the wharves, smoke on thedingy boats, on the yellow river,clinging in a coating o greasy soot to the house-ront,the two aded poplars, the aces o the passers-by. The long train o mules, dragging masseso pig-iron through the narrow street, have a oul vapor hanging to their reeking sides(Rebecca Harding Davis, Lie in the Iron-Mills, The Atlantic Monthly 7, no. 42 [April,1861]: 430).39 See Buells discussion o deterministic attitudes in works o urban fction in Discourseso Determinism, in Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in

the U.S. and Beyond(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2003), 12966.40 Bridget Kevane and Juanita Heredia, Praying or Knowledge: An Interview with HelenaMara Viramontes, in Latina Self-Portraits: Interviews with Contemporary Women Writers, ed.Bridget Kevane and Juanita Heredia (Albuquerque: Univ. o New Mexico Press, 2000),154.41 Other examples o Viramontess blending o Catholic and environmental justicethemes include W. Eugene Smithspieta-inspired photograph o a mercury-poisoned childin Minamata, Japan (which inspired Viramontess story The Moths) and the Jesus statuein Under the Feet(Praying or Knowledge 145).42 Lacan engages Jakobsons distinction between metaphor and metonymy more directly

in Jacques Lacan, The Agency o the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud,trans. Alan Sheridan, incrits: A Selection(New York: Norton, 1977), 14678.43 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller,trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1981), 74, 73 (hereater cited as FFC).44 On the concept o environmental blending in relation to Lacans conceptualizationo the gaze, see Hsuan L. Hsu, Mimicry, Spatial Captation, and Feng Shui, Modern FictionStudies52, no. 3 (2006): 675704.45 Lacan, Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris:Seuil, 1973), 110.46 Viramontes has stated that she elt a real desire to portray the lives o those who dis-appeared in the wake o reeway construction, when whole city blocks were abandoned,

then chewed up, our neighbors disappeared (Olivas, Interview).47 Paul Robbins, Lawn People: How Grasses, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are(Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 2007), 15.48 Quoted in A. K. Ramanujan, Is There an Indian Way o Thinking? An Inormal Es-say, Contributions to Indian Sociology23, no. 1 (1989): 49.49 Ramanujan, Is There, 50.50 Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative(Durham, NC:Duke Univ. Press, 2008), 22.51 A comparison with Viramontess early drats shows her increasing attentiveness to therole o spatial ordering and state violence in conditioning the murder: initially, Remedios(who was renamed Tranquilina) utters the phrase Were not dogs immediately ater ar-riving at the scene o the murder, as i to reprimand the killer or a lack o sel-discipline.Viramontes, DOGS: A Novela unpublished drat at University o Caliornia, Santa Barbara,Helena Mara Viramontes papers Box 20 Folder 16 (1992), 21.52 Viramontes, Their Dogs Came With Them: A Novella, second drat 10/12/92,


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unpublished drat at University o Caliornia, Santa Barbara, Helena Mara Viramontespapers Box 20 Folder 16 (1992), 63.53 In the ceremonystill practiced in parts o Mexico and Guatemalaup to fve In-

dians attached to ropes soar in circles around a straight tree trunk installed in an openspace (oten the town square). In a twentieth-centuryvoladorceremony in the state oPuebla, or example, the Indians thought that by renewing the voladorthe spirits o theearth and maize would be satisfed and again give them good crops, as they put it. HelgaLarsen, Notes on the Volador and its Associated Ceremonies and Superstitions,Ethnos2, no. 4 (1937): 182. Larsen provides an extensive account o the ceremony and theoriesconcerning its origins.54 State violence and the assault on East Los Angeles inrastructure by sharpshooters,helicopters, and bulldozers have their counterparts in the Vietnam Warwhich aectsmany o the novels amiliesand the two wars waged in Iraq, which Viramontes hasacknowledged as indirect inuences during the novels composition. Helena Mara Vira-

montes, Interview, in La Bloga.

42.1.hsu metaphor and metonymy

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