Tropes and Topoi in Postmodern American Fiction (and Theory)

Dangerous Communication.
The Book of Daniel. Doctorow, E.L. (1971):
"Susan had communicated with me; just that; at if now in our lives only extreme and dangerous communication was possible, nevertheless the signal had been sent, discharged even, from the spasm of soul that was required--and that was the sense of summons I felt sneaking up over the afternoon like a blanket of burned space around my ears. And all my life I have been trying to escape from my relatives and I have been intricate in my run, but one way or another they are what you come upon around the corner, and the Lord God who is so frantic for recognition says you have to ask how they are and would they like something cool to drink, and what is it you can do for them this time" (30).

This passage concerns the imperative to act that Daniel Isaacson Lewin feels in the aftermath of his sister's suicide attempt. Indeed, Susan's suicide attempt is precisely the "dangerous communication" being alluded to in this passage. Daniel has just come upon the package of "Gillette Super Stainless blades" (29) in Susan's Volvo. This tableau triggers a kind of perverse epiphany for Daniel, prompting him to recognition of sorts. At this moment, "Daniel got the picture," that is, he experiences a sense "of being summoned." Doctorow leaves it up to his readers to figure out what exactly this summoning entails and whether or not the breakthrough or epiphany that Daniel experiences is productive. I would argue that the fact that moments later Daniel will be tormenting his wife in the Volvo, possibly branding her ass, suggests that we should be skeptical of the entire premise of "dangerous communication," even though the text we are reading, Daniel's book, is being presented as something of an outgrowth of Daniel's sense that he must communicate.

The way I prefer to read this passage is to regard it as a scene of political interpellation. Daniel is hailed by Susan to acknowledge his connectedness to the relatives from whom he has "been trying to escape" (30). What makes the interpellation political is that Daniel's parents are the Isaacsons, internationally infamous Communists who were executed as atomic spies. At this moment in the novel, Daniel realizes that he cannot deny or run from his parent's political legacy, which others will always associate him with. What Daniel must confront is the fact that because he is 'always already' identified with the Isaacsons, he must choose how he will position himself in relation to their political beliefs. This confrontation is traumatic and both Susan and Daniel respond to it with violence. Susan attempts suicide and Daniel torments Phyllis, his wife. This is all to suggest, I think, that "dangerous communication" is a shorthand way of equating violence with the transmission of meaning, or, more generally, of equating force with understanding (an equation common to postmodern fiction and theory). Ultimately, I think Doctorow would have us recognize the falsity of the novel's "vicious eroticism," that is, the sadistic sex scenes in which Daniel attempts to teach Phyllis by testing her bodily limits are intended to demonstrate the error in construing learning as the transmission of experience. (See also: fantasy of transmitted experience).

Dissemination, communication as.
The Book of Daniel. Doctorow, E.L. (1971):
“Susan had communicated with me; just that; and if now in our lives only extreme and dangerous communication was possible, nevertheless the signal had been sent, discharged even, from the spasm of the soul that was required—and that was the sense of summons I felt sneaking up over the afternoon like a blanket of burned space around my ears” (30, italics mine).

This passage is one of the most important in the entire novel as it (1) establishes a link between the text’s vicious eroticism and what I take to be a typically postmodern of communication as a material act of (bodily) transmission and (2) imagines this communicative act to be foundational to a character’s sense of self-identity. The point of Daniel’s epiphany in the parking lot is not simply that he recognizes Susan’s suicide attempt to be a specific type of communication (extreme and dangerous) but also that now this is the only possible mode of communication available to the Isaacson children. By italicizing some of the peculiar words Daniel uses to describe Susan’s suicide, I’ve tried to foreground the abject, erotic and material manner in which imagines communication as dissemination. Daniel does not speak here of, say, what Susan might have meant by her suicide or the beliefs that could have contributed to her decision to take her own life. Instead, of the message, Daniel focuses on the signal, which he figures using a blatanly sexual image—it is a load of semen being ejaculated from a spasming body. (See also: dangerous communication).

End of History (or post-historicism)
Revolution at the Gates. Zizek, Slavoj.
"...the First World and the Third World can no longer be simply opposed as distinct political unities: they are developing more and more within each political unity (state, city)? So when, a decade ago, Francis Fukuyama launched his pseudo-Hegelian thesis on the 'end of history', he was right, although not in the way he thought: in so far as the proper opposite of history is nature, the 'end of history' means that the social process itself is more and more 'naturalized', experienced as a new form of 'fate', as a blind uncontrollable force" (Zizek, Revolution at the Gates).

Vineland. Pynchon, Thomas. (1990):
Frenesi and Flash living in the witness protection program in Vineland: “They had both been content to leave it that way, to go along in a government-defined history without consequences, never imagining it could end, turn out to be only another Reaganite dream on the cheap, some snoozy fantasy about kindly character actors in FBI suits staked out all night long watching over every poor scraggly sheep in the herd it was their job to run, the destined losers whose only redemption would have to come through their usefulness to the State law-enforcement apparatus, which was calling itself “America,” although somebody must have known better” (Vineland 354).

Kurt Vonnegut Remembers Nelson Algren

I just wrote and then lost a fairly lenghty post about this poignant essay, excerpted from the latest edition of The Man With the Golden Arm, in which Kurt Vonnegut remembers his friend Nelson Algren. I've got to get back to work, so, rather than rewrite it, I'll simply provide a sample quote that gives a sense of what Vonnegut finds notable about Algren's writing:

While he was only 13 years my senior, so close to my own age that we were enlisted men in Europe in the same world war, he was a pioneering ancestor of mine in the compressed history of American literature. He broke new ground by depicting persons said to be dehumanised by poverty and ignorance and injustice as being genuinely dehumanised, and dehumanised quite permanently. Contrast, if you will, the poor people in The Man with the Golden Arm with those in the works of social reformers like Charles Dickens and George Bernard Shaw, and particularly with those in Shaw's Pygmalion, with their very promising wit and resourcefulness and courage.

I was struck by the cruel irony surrounding Algren's death. He died on May 9, 1981, the day he was to host a cocktail party in honor of finally being admitted to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a group that had hitherto either snubbed or overlooked him, despite having awarded Algren its Medel for Literature. Vonnegut was invited to the gathering and planned to take a young writer who admired Algren and told Vonnegut that Algren had written the most intelligent review of his new novel. The young novelist was Salman Rushdie, and the novel was Midnight's Children. When Vonnegut phoned Algren's number to inform him of his plans to bring a guest, the police answered and Vonnegut learned his friend was dead.

'An Excess of Language': American Fiction After Beckett

Bill Gray, the reclusive novelist in Don DeLillo’s Mao II, asserts, “Beckett is the last writer to shape the way we think and see. After him, the major work involves midair explosions and crumbled buildings.” In Mao II DeLillo asks readers to consider the possibility that the literary and artistic avant-garde has failed, and that terrorists, not writers or artists, wield the power to defamiliarize reality on a grand scale. While critics have commented extensively on the alleged obsolescence of the literary avant-garde and the notion that today—in the postmodern West, a cynical culture excessively influenced by the simulations circulating in its electronic media—terrorism trumps art, they have remained relatively silent about Gray’s assessment of Beckett’s oeuvre as being tragically successful. My paper, then, takes Gray’s remark seriously by raising several interrelated questions: How did Beckett shape the way we think? How did Beckett shape the way we see? Was Beckett truly the last writer to alter the way we conceptualize and perceive reality? More significantly, why might another writer (either the fictional Bill Gray or the real Don DeLillo) make such a hyperbolic claim? In the process of answering these deceptively straightforward questions, I aim to situate Beckett’s work in relation to recent postmodern American fiction and theory, writing that foregrounds the materiality of communication and in so doing ontologizes experience.

Focusing primarily on The Trilogy and to a lesser extent on Krapp’s Last Tape, I will explain how Beckett’s treatment of three interrelated topics—(1) the linguistic basis of communicative failure (2) the self/subject as a product of communicative failure and (3) the attempt to use language and other communications technologies to integrate a divided self—presents an enormous challenge for subsequent literary writers who aspire to narrate the aporias attendant to the process of subjectivization. My claim is that a paradigmatic ‘postmodern’ understanding of language as nonrepresentational, affective force can be traced back to Beckett’s texts. I extrapolate it from a remark that Jacques Moran makes in Molloy: “It seemed to me that all language was an excess of language.” But while the validity of Moran’s comment seems to be corroborated by the plethora of failures recounted in Beckett’s Trilogy, what are the aesthetic and ethical implications of the communicative model of language as performance that it implies? What does it mean to suggest that language is inherently excessive? Does this excessiveness effectively render meaning irrelevant? These are the sorts of questions raised by Beckett’s staging of the dialectical process of subjectivization, that is, the process by which Molloy, Moran and Krapp retroactively try to reintegrate themselves through their respective narratives of failure. Whether they are aware of it or not, those who aspire to write serious fiction after Beckett must struggle with these failures which, as DeLillo clearly recognizes, have contributed to the ‘excessive’ form and content of much postmodern fiction.

Reforming the Requirements for the Humanities PhD

Reading this article about an MLA panel on reforming the requirements for humanities doctorates made me sick, as it reminded me just how grim the job prospects are for English PhDs. After spending an average of eight years earning a doctorate, which requires those who are not from wealthy families to go into serious debt, only about half of us can expect to land tenure-track jobs.

The title of the article--Are State Troopers Models for Professors?--puts things into perspective. A state trooper needs only 1-year of training and makes as much as a nontenure-track instructor. As Louis Menand noted "Students are being way over-trained for the jobs available. The argument that they need the training to teach undergraduates is belied by the fact that they are already teaching undergraduates. And the idea that the doctoral thesis is a rigorous requirement is belied by the quality of most doctoral theses." The article contains a few interesting proposals for improving the higher-education training system. I particularly like the one about requiring one published (peer-reviewed) journal article, rather than a book-length dissertation, for the PhD.

A New Publication for Academics: Inside Higher Ed

I've been taking a breather from blogging as the holiday has been flying by way too quickly. Aside from doing a lot of reading (finished Infinite Jest, Hegel's Introduction to the Philosophy of History, Amy Hungerford's The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification and am working on The Public Burning) and writing, and taking longish walks with Ira around Gävle, I've been working on improving my cooking skills. Our Swedish kitchen is larger and much better equipped (more counter space and a dishwasher!) than our cramped Chicago kitchen, so we've been doing a lot more ambitious cooking here. Anyone for some moose enchiladas? Last night we had lobster to usher in 2005, and for dinner a tenderloin in a fantastic red-wine sauce made with tangerine juice (we didn't have any lemons to use and it turned out great) and honey. Yum.

I've got a conference proposal that I must send out today, but want to draw attention to a promising new online publication called Inside Higher Ed. The publication features news and editorials about issues concerning, surprise, surprise, higher education. It will officially debut sometime in early 2005, though they've already published some material in time for the MLA Convention. I get the impression that it's going to be a sort of looser, less staid version of The Chronicle of Higher Education, which is not surprising considering that several of its founders were previously affiliated with that journal. The fact that the editor is Scott Jaschik bodes well for Inside Higher Ed. Jaschik was previously the editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education and has a great track record when it comes to reporting on and covering higher education issues.