Rereading Feminism and Postmodernism By

Faceting: Rereading Feminism and Postmodernism by Kathryn Fleishman A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English and the Designated Emphasis in Film Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in Charge: Professor Namwali Serpell, Chair Professor Linda Williams Professor Stephen Best Summer 2019 Abstract Faceting: Rereading Feminism and Postmodernism by Kathryn Fleishman Doctor of Philosophy in English and Designated Emphasis in Film Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor Namwali Serpell, Chair This project offers a feminist reconsideration of the postmodern aesthetic across a set of American fictions since 1945. From our current perspective, postmodernism is both overdetermined and undervalued; we limit our readings by equating its sheen and sparkle with irony, paranoia, and superficiality. I present an alternative to two longstanding default modes of interpreting the postmodern: the excavatory, hermeneutic model inaugurated by Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, and the poststructuralist model, which celebrates a seemingly infinite profusion of references and surfaces. My project’s impact is threefold: I demonstrate how feminism refashions the postmodern aesthetic, I reanimate a quintessentially postmodern language of surface and depth in terms of our current crisis of reading, and I show how feminism is uniquely equipped to supersede, though not erase, that binary. Drawing together new debates in feminist, postcritical, and film theory, I present another approach to novels by Sylvia Plath, Christopher Isherwood, Thomas Pynchon, Vladimir Nabokov, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Leslie Marmon Silko, as well as several films and the television series Mad Men. Feminist theory has a vexed relationship with postmodernism, both as an aesthetic category and in relation to its two major interpretive frameworks. For Jameson, the postmodern resists interpretation because of its baroque excesses, which he alternately compares to “heaps of fragments” and to “the distorting and fragmenting reflections of one enormous glass surface.” Jameson’s imagery emphasizes postmodernism’s illegibility, whether by profusion or impenetrability; while poststructuralist readings distinguish themselves by ennobling and elaborating upon these assumptions, they do not fundamentally unseat them. I argue that postmodernism’s aesthetic, supremely fragmented but also flatly reflective, actually invites the reader to make sense of the text in a pleasurable act of construction. This calls for a method of reading I term faceting, from the Latin facere, “to make or do,” a word that connotes reflection, refraction, and repositioning. To constellate meanings in a postmodern text is to negotiate a plural but limited set of interrelations from its vast networks of data and its myriad surfaces. The reader fastens shifting, tessellated planes into a provisional, dimensional, if hollow, narrative whole. If, in Rita Felski’s terms, intersectional feminism is always a “reworking,” an essentially “purposeful and hopeful” project of improvement, its history brings much to bear on the recent disciplinary turn to the postcritical, which is rooted in feminist and queer theory and eudaimonic in its aims. The pleasures of postmodernism, I maintain, lie precisely at its jagged seams and shifting juxtapositions, which the reader herself 1 is constantly in the process of remaking. Rather than a readerly pose of ironic detachment or paranoid suspicion, faceting entails attachment, effort, and desire. Faceting seizes specifically on metonymy as an alternative, feminist form of figuration that is both prominent in and amenable to the aims of postmodernism. Unlike metaphor, which encourages a binary reading, whereby the reader searches for significance behind a surface, metonymy enables the reader to perceive the postmodern aesthetic as a severalty of surfaces – as, in a word, multifaceted. In each chapter, I analyze a seemingly binary mode of representation that faceting transforms into a limited plurality. I begin by using The Bell Jar and A Single Man to counter Jameson’s claims in Postmodernism, as figures that appear to be dual yield greater complexity when viewed via faceting. I go on to trace the implications of narrative eversion – the process by which a shape is pulled inside out – in The Crying of Lot 49 and Ada, or Ardor. I consider how projections into the past and future in The Woman Warrior disrupt narrative teleology, building on those observations in an analysis of the later Almanac of the Dead and Mason & Dixon. The project is bracketed by analyses of film and television, which offer insight into the visual aspects of faceting, evident in its relationship to terms like face and façade. The introduction reviews the literature that contributed to faceting as a concept, as well as the hollow pleasures of two mid-century films, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Imitation of Life; the epilogue addresses the contemporary nostalgia for the postmodern in the tension between photographic and moving images in Mad Men. 2 With gratitude – for my parents, for Jeff, & for Isa i TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Faceting iii Chapter 1 “Maybe I Ought To Spill A Little Blood”: Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar 1 Chapter “So You May Think of A Rock Pool”: Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man 24 Chapter 3 “Let It Unfurl”: Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 43 Chapter 4 “Disaster Would Come Today or Tomorrow”: Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor 67 Chapter 5 “It Could Very Well Have Been”: Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, with notes on Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of The Dead and Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon 98 Epilogue “Watching Her Stories”: Mad Men After Postmodernity 127 References 153 Bibliography 161 ii INTRODUCTION: FACETING Everybody knows it’s fiction, but then everybody knows the whole thing is fiction. – A.S. Byatt1 ⁠ We apprehend the postmodern by its excesses of gloss and glitter, its sprawling, decentralized casts, its paranoid and melodramatic plotlines, and its parade of sexualized objects and commodified bodies. By apprehend, I intend both recognition and arrest; in categorizing postmodernism as impenetrable surface or illegible profusion, we limit the scope and kind of our interpretations. In this book, I will cast reading as an act of perpetual assemblage, engaging feminist theory to expand the available pleasures and meanings of a set of American fictions from the 1950s to the present. In turn, I posit a feminist rereading of postmodernism’s distinctive aesthetic that is germane to the ongoing debate about how we read now. Rooted in the Latin facere, “to make or do,” faceting foregrounds the reader as constructor of text, accounting for the movements of reflection, refraction, and repositioning that inhere in the reading and rereading experience. The term is also related to face, façade, and surface, connoting planes of a multidimensional object. Through faceting, the reader arrays postmodernism’s excesses dimensionally, producing textured meaning and subjectivity between, beside, and among the surfaces of the text and creating a richly embodied, if illusory, sense of narrative depth. Faceting intercedes to build alongside, rather than to reconcile, two longstanding methods of reading postmodernism: a hermeneutic model, as delineated in Fredric Jameson’s iii Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (where an emphasis on metaphor encodes a search for significance behind appearance), and a poststructuralist approach, as in Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia (which revels in the endless, rhizomatic possibilities of textual meaning, but does not distill them). In drawing out how these two interpretive modes operate along the lines of gender and sexuality, I highlight the textured seams on which the ‘gloss’ or ‘heap’ of American postmodern aesthetic production depends. Against their interpretive detachment and irony, and in concert with Rita Felski’s concept of the ‘postcritical,’ I propose faceting as a feminist mode of reading, pushing critique into the realm of attachment, effort, and desire. Jameson’s hermeneutic model posits postmodern artistic production not only as embedded in consumer capitalism, but as an inveterate consumer itself, subsuming the stuff of history into its ‘heap.’ If modernist art “quoted” from the culture in order to critique it, postmodern works “incorporate” it “into their very substance.”⁠2 This is one sign Jameson offers for the supposed loss of historicity in postmodernism, characterized by a “libidinal historicism” that seeks to assimilate “a vast collection of images, a multitudinous photographic simulacrum” consisting of “nothing but texts.”⁠3 For Jameson, this untethering from time also encodes the depersonalization of affect, since “the waning of the great high modernist thematics of time and temporality, the elegiac mysteries of durée and memory” signals “a liberation from anxiety, but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well.”4⁠ Jameson explores the potential significance, if not the value, of this shift: “We now inhabit the synchronic rather than the diachronic… our daily life, our psychic experience, our cultural languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time, as in the preceding period of high modernism.”5 While Jameson names this erasure of artistic depth, along with its excavatory forms of interpretation, as a loss, poststructuralism

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