New Historicism and Jurassic Park
Consider the word “pastime.” It’s a word with connotations of triviality, harmlessness, and ephemerality. No doubt the word has its origins in a conflation of the words “pass the time,” but to our postmodern ears it sounds unmistakably like the words “past time.” From the perspective of New Historicism, at least one of the connotations of “pastime” carry over to “past time.” New Historicism does not claim that history is trivial or harmless — quite the contrary. But New Historicism does emphasize something of the ephemerality of History, juxtaposing its flexibility and plurality with our traditional assumptions of its fixity and permanence. For New Historicists, history is less important than “historiography”: in other words, the events in the past are less important, or at least less accessible, than the texts we have about those events. It is only from these fragments of dug-up bones that we can construct entire skeletons.
Michael Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park offers unexpected opportunities for teachers to introduce students to key elements of New Historicism. To begin at the beginning, the entrepreneur John Hammond hires the promising young geneticist, Henry Wu, to do much more than construct skeletons from bone fragments. Hammond wants the actual dinosaurs. Hammond is not content to speculate about the past — he doesn’t want a theory, he doesn’t want a model, and he doesn’t want alternate interpretations. He wants to bring back actual past time and turn it into an actual pastime: history as an amusement park. Wu says to Hammond:
“I don’t think we should kid ourselves. We haven’t re-created the past here. The past is gone. It can never be re-created. What we’ve done is reconstruct the past — or at least a version of the past. And I’m saying we can make a better version.”
“Better than real?”
“Why not?” Wu said. . . . “But I’m just saying, why stop there? Why not push ahead to make exactly the kind of dinosaur we’d like to see? One that is more acceptable to visitors, and one that is easier for us to handle? A slower, more docile version for our park?”
Hammond frowned. “But then the dinosaurs wouldn’t be real.”
“But they’re not real now,” Wu said. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. There isn’t any reality here.” He shrugged helplessly. He could see he wasn’t getting through. Hammond had never been interested in technical details, and the essence of the argument was technical. How could he explain to Hammond about the reality of DNA dropouts, the patches, the gaps in the sequence that Wu had been obliged to fill in, making the best guesses he could, but still, making guesses. (122)
New Historicism is a bracing caution against the tendency to relegate the “technical stuff” of history to the pedants. We don’t like to be reminded, as New Historicists insist that we must be, of how much of our history is speculation, even as we simultaneously proclaim that we want it all to be “real.” The dinosaurs here are a fine metaphor for much of our postmodern predicament as the simulacrum meets the millennium. Add to this chaos theory, and the New Historicist perspective on Historiography becomes very clear — once we add our new strands of narrative DNA to the historical chain of events, the results will not always predictable.
Hammond is of course punished for his tragic hubris, but his hubris takes on an interesting dimension when seen from a New Historicist perspective. In Crichton’s scheme, Hammond’s fatal flaw is not that he tried to make money or that he relied upon technology (two things Chrichton himself wholly endorses), it is that has no sense of irony. It is important that he is 75 years old, a fossil himself from an older generation that actually believed in reality. He fails to see the motives that bring people to their pastimes and away from their past times. People go to amusement parks to avoid reality, not find it. The trendy mathematician Ian Malcolm, as played by Jeff Goldblum in the film version, puts it perfectly when he responds to Hammond’s defense that all amusement parks have their technical glitches: “Yes, but if something goes wrong with ‘Pirates of the Caribbean,’ the Pirates don’t eat the tourists.” Tourists don’t want real pirates. They prefer robots to reality, the more eerily lifelike the better, with serious implications for the health of reality. Early in the novel Alan Grant is speaking to Ellie Sattler about an EPA agent’s suspicions that something is going wrong on Isla Nublar: “’You like the part where John Hammond is the evil arch villain?’ Grant laughed. “John Hammond’s about as sinister as Walt Disney’” (42). My point exactly. And the Disney corporation was once rebuffed in their attempt to build a historical theme park over the grounds of an actual historical landmark in Virginia, a rare moment when Americans opted for historical reality over the high-gloss simulacrum of that same reality.
It is a nice touch that Hammond in the movie is played by Sir Richard Attenborough, a film director and peer of Steven Spielberg himself for big-budget, full-scale cinematic pastimes. Here, a movie director in real life plays John Hammond in the movie version of a novel where the character desperately wants to replace flea circus imitations with something “real.” Better to stick to the flea circus, where we can see what we will ourselves to see, and nothing will “go wrong.” In the meantime, we’ll marvel at the life-like reality of Spielberg’s imitations of Hammond’s real imitation dinosaurs. [At the London premiere of the film, the well-known broadcaster Gloria Hunniford told an interviewer that the special effects were so convincing that she couldn’t tell which monsters were fakes and which “were real dinosaurs” (Hawkins 56).]
If this kind of cynical but playful intertextuality sounds similar to Postmodernism, I believe it is no coincidence. Both New Historicism and Postmodernism share a suspicion of master narratives, of sweeping statements about coherent cultural identities, and of textuality alone as a basis for truth. Both movements, along with other dominant contemporary critical theories, also share other ideas: all are committed to re-telling history from the more marginal points of view, from multiple rather than from single perspectives, and from the angle of those who were not necessarily the winners of the wars or the beneficiaries of economic trends. Like Feminism and Postmodernism, New Historicism is not really a concrete, consistent movement, but instead is more like a shared set of assumptions that different people have used to different ends. In “Towards a Poetics of Culture,” a serviceable manifesto of New Historicism, Stephen Greenblat claims that the question of how art and society are interrelated cannot and should not be answered from a single theoretical stance. New Historicism is a set of reading practices that studies the way texts enter into a dialectic with one another and perpetuate or challenge their culture’s dominant codes.
Where I believe Jurassic Park most effectively does this kind of challenge is in the troublesome relationship between fact, fiction, and textuality that is a characteristic of all of Crichton’s Science Fiction. Crichton is famous for doing his homework and introducing popular audiences to complex concepts such as chaos theory and advanced biochemistry. But science, as Ian Malcolm insists, is hardly a stable foundation for truth. What matters more than the facts themselves is the model for interpreting those facts, as in the “paradigm shifts” that Malcolm explains to an unimpressed Hammond. Using precisely the kind of sweeping historical generalizations that New Historicism studiously avoids, Malcolm proceeds to proclaim the conquest of chaos theory as a new and more truthful paradigm and announces the end of the scientific era:
And so the grand vision of science, hundreds of years old — the dream of total control — has died, in our century. And with it much of the justification, the rationale for science to do what it does. And for us to listen to it. Science has always said that it may not know everything now but it will know, eventually. But now we see that isn’t true. It is an idle boast. (313)
Science is for Malcolm what traditional history is for the New Historicists — a master narrative that conceals its inadequacies in arrogance. The “truth,” for Malcolm and for New Historicists, seems to have more to do with internal power struggles over interpretation than it does with any accountability to an impartial jury. After all, as New Historicists often claim, the truth is something that is created rather than “discovered,” and creation is never an unbiased process. For example, in The Lost World, much of the intellectual friction (totally written out of the movie version) is between Malcolm and his academic rival, the naturalist Richard Levine. Inexplicably, Malcolm plays along with Levine’s goal of locating a theoretical “lost world” where the dinosaurs have survived off the coast of Costa Rica. Malcolm knows all along of Hammond’s genetic experiments on the nearby Jurassic Park, of course, but never mentions it as he fully participates in Levine’s earnest research. The master narrative of evolutionary truth, perhaps the most profound secret in human history and the Holy Grail of science, religion, and philosophy, takes a back seat to a personal political struggle without a trace of regret or irony. Malcolm, and perhaps Crichton, too, is not exempt from the charge of being locked into only what his paradigm allows him to see.
I would like to argue that literary criticism is at its best when it resists being locked into a similar tunnel vision of its own paradigms. It is good when a literary theory can illuminate new areas of study in a text, but it is even better when the text can simultaneously illuminate new areas of study in the theory. I hope to have suggested several ways in which New Historicism can open up Jurassic Park, but in conclusion, I would like to also suggest several ways in which I believe Jurassic Park can open up New Historicism.
Since Jurassic Park is to date our most familiar and significant morality tale of cutting-edge science, a novel for its generation what Frankenstein was for Mary Shelley’s, it is useful as a touchstone for how chaos theory can offer new areas of New Historicist research. The first step is to recognize chaos theory as the new interdisciplinary Existentialism — it claims that there is emphatically no fate, no luck, no master plan. We are in control our own actions, but the results of those actions are impossible to predict. Hammond attempts to turn back the clock to a pre-lapsarian time when he can control the jungle like some distant God in a control booth. In the garden of Eden, however, Eve took a single bite from a certain apple — the ultimate “resonant yaw” — and the act had implications far into the future that no one could predict.
Literature is inherently a similar kind of non-linear system, and even slight variations in reader response can grow into wildly different interpretations and uses for literature. Perhaps the same can be said for history as well. History is certainly a complex system, full of patterns, the absence of patterns, and paradigms waiting for us to build and deconstruct. Since New Historicists such as Greenblat often take fragments of a text and extrapolate from them to uncover large-scale cultural theories (much like sketching an entire dinosaur from only a few bone fragments), perhaps we can begin an interdisciplinary dialogue across the sciences and humanities by recognizing these fragments as literary and historical fractals. If Greenblat can find the conflicts and unities of the entire Renaissance in a single lyric poem, then perhaps we can take the cue to look for the way the structure and themes of a novel can be seen in a single chapter, how that chapter can be seen in a single paragraph, and how that paragraph can perhaps even be seen in a single sentence.
In an earlier critical paradigm these recursions used to be called micocosms and macrocosms. What is missing from that older model, however, is the notion of sudden and unpredictable change, which both literature and history undeniably have at their very core. What it also misses is their pleasures. As Harriett Hawkins writes,
In the long run, the survival of a complex literary ‘fractal’ may result from the fact that it continuously resonates, on multiple scales — imaginative, aesthetic, intellectual, orderly and disorderly — in the minds and memories of individual readers of successive generations, in very much the same way it continues to resonate in the artistic tradition. (103)
With our new Postmodern paradigm, including New Historicist criticism, chaos theory, and a fine novel that illustrates both of them, perhaps now is a good time to find new, cascading patterns of the DNA strands common to both literature and history.
Bibliography
Crichton, Michael. Jurassic Park. New York: Ballantine, 1990.
Greenblatt, Stephen. “Towards a Poetics of Culture.” In The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram
Veeser. New York: Routledge, 1989. 1–13.
Hawkins, Harriett. Strange Attractors: Literature, Culture and Chaos Theory. New York:
Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1995.
Originally Published in “New Historicism and Jurassic Park.” NOTE: Notes on the Teaching of English 25:1 (December 1997), 15–22. Reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism 452, ed. Jennifer Stock (Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2020), 8–11.
