ABSTRACT
The title of this study, and this chapter, finds its genesis in the discursive nature of perceptive reality, of time and space, and the divisions between urban, rural, and wilderness found in civilization, divisions which enforce a perceptive, and false, lack of connectedness. Definition through a binary system of classification and division can lead one to ignore the connections between that which is divided and classified, between the one doing the dividing and classifying and the object. It most specifically has led to ethnic and cultural hierarchies that helped form the ideological basis for imperial expansion and colonialism, for the subordination and effacement of cultures and the enslavement of humans. In the urban context, cities, as human constructions, generally have been separated from what it considered natural, the natural environment and wilderness; only relatively recently have researchers and academics begun to consider cities as possessing natural environments, or ecosystems, in the same way that, say, a wetland has its own ecosystem. The analogy carries beyond the sense of self-contained ecosystems; each small ecosystem, no matter how self-contained, is a part of larger systems, like circles within circles. The same holds true for a city; it has connections to the world outside its borders, stretching to the wilderness and beyond. The decade of the 60s has the unfortunate quality of either being idealized or demonized when the truth, as usual, lies somewhere in between. One of the positive aspects of the decade is that many of those muted voices such as Pynchon uses as the basis for The Crying of Lot 49 began to be heard. These voices of ethnic identities different, for the most part, than those studied so far came to prominence in American literature, and in so doing, have added other perspectives of the urban time-space continuum to those in existence. With this, they have questioned the power structures which, figuratively, are always represented through spatial and temporal metaphors, the hierarchies of American society.
