IAFOR Journal of Literature & Librarianship
Volume 10 – Issue 1 – 2021
the mice – as a parody of Disney’s iconic figure of Mickey Mouse. On a more somber note, and in an attempt to broach the questions raised by the fascinating yet mutated lifeforms that populate Yamashita’s (1990) “rain forest parking lot” (p. 100), the constructive transdifferentiation here can be interpreted as being on the verge of, even no longer distinguishable from, the destructive plasticity brought on by environmental damage. Elaborating on these negative forms of plasticity, which, in their most extreme forms, may lead to annihilation. Malabou (2012) states that “wounds – traumas or catastrophes – [which] are not ‘creators of form’ in the positive sense of the term … ultimately remai[n] an adventure of form” (p. 17). Yamashita’s jungle junkyard, then, represents such an adventurous form of plasticity brought on by an environmental wound, or worse, trauma, a form that already contains the terrors of annihilation. Such constructive and destructive forms of plasticity and their transdifferentiations also reveal themselves in the interactions of Yamashita’s protagonists with their social and economic environments, which – like their physical and ecological environments – become ever more entangled with and defined by Matacão plastic. Analogously to the “great decaying and rejuvenating ecology of the Amazon Forest,” human life also “adapt[s] itself” in “unexpected” and “expected” ways to the Matacão’s “vast plastic mantle” (Yamashita, 1990 p. 101), which increasingly stands out as a vibrant node of a larger network of local and global intersections. To probe deeper into the nature of these intersections, specifically into diverse self-adaptations of Yamashita’s protagonists to their plastic environment in social and economic terms, Malabou’s concept of plasticity proves particularly fruitful, as it is based on a connectionist model “of relations without any centrality” (Silverman, 2010, p. 94). Yamashita’s reference to Udo Keppler’s well-remembered caricature of Big Business as all-embracing and domineering top-down business model ought not to be mistaken with the novel’s general understanding of the operations of social and economic forces. In fact, scholars like Chuh (2006), Heise (2008), Chen (2010) or De Loughry (2017) have stressed the aspects of social and economic interconnections and networks. As Marc Jeannerod (2008) explains, Malabou’s concept of plasticity needs to be placed in the context of a radically modified “economic and social environment” (p. xii), that is, an environment which has become plastic in the sense of being capable to self-adapt to new circumstances. Quoting Malabou, Jeannerod (2008) further explains that such a plastic environment “rests on a plurality of mobile and atomistic centers deployed according to a connectionist model” (p. xii) as opposed to a top-down economic model “managed from above and overseen by a central authority” (p. xii). Specifically, the Brazil-based businesses in Yamashita’s (1990) Through the Arc of the Rain Forest actively and creatively shape the socioeconomic environment of the Matacão despite GGG’s corporate power and dominance. Tania and Batista successfully launch an international communication business with their own breed of pigeons; Mané Pena founds “Featherology” (p. 150) as a new discipline at colleges and universities at home and across the world; and Chico Paco launches “Radio Chico,” a radioempire for the spiritual needs of evangelicals across Brazil and worldwide. Ironically, the protagonists’ means of shaping – transdifferentiating – their plastic socioeconomic environment hardly ever include the use of computers, the Internet, cellphones, the social networks, or any other of the digital media that revolutionized the decades in which Through the Arc of the Rain Forest was written and published. Gordon (2020) notes that, in doing so, Yamashita “keeps the Matacão firmly tied to the material world of geology, ecology, and extraction” (p. 179). Only the plastic credit cards with their “wealth of data” (Yamashita, 1990, p. 141) and the hint at digital money allude to the media revolution that was underway,
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