Intertextual Masculinities and the Struggle for Self-Reflexivity: A Quixotic Investigation of the Novels of J. M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera, Philip Roth and Mario Vargas Llosa Stefano Rossoni UCL PhD 1 ‘I, Stefano Rossoni, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis.' 2 ABSTRACT Intertextual Masculinities and the Struggle for Self-Reflexivity: A Quixotic Investigation of the Novels of J. M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera, Philip Roth and Mario Vargas Llosa My thesis studies the struggle for self-discovery of heterosexual masculinities in the self-reflexive novels of J. M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera, Philip Roth and Mario Vargas Llosa. The theoretical context is provided by the literary studies of Middleton (1992) and Schwenger (1984), who emphasise men’s difficulties in writing self-consciously about their gender, and the lack of language for such a reflection. Interpreting the textual practices that Coetzee, Kundera, Roth and Vargas Llosa adopt as a (direct or indirect) response to the legacy of Don Quixote, I argue that their intratextual interplay and intertextual references convert the traditions of the self-reflexive novel into a space through which to express the limits of male self-reflexivity and men’s struggle with emotion. Chapter One focuses on Coetzee’s Disgrace and its protagonist, Lurie, a delusional seducer inspired by Byron’s life. I discuss how Lurie is defined by an inability to read his of emotion, and examine his opera, Byron in Italy, as an attempt to overcome the opacity of his desire. Chapter Two examines the coming of age in Kundera’s Life is Elsewhere and Roth’s The Professor of Desire in the light of Gombrowicz and his notions of form and immaturity. Chapter Three investigates heterosexual masculinity as an attempt to claim authorship in Kundera’s Slowness, Vargas Llosa’s Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter and Roth’s My Life as a Man. Chapter Four addresses how the affective crises of JC and Rigoberto, the ageing protagonists of Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year and Vargas Llosa’s The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, inform their essayistic writing and its hybrid relation to fiction. 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Prof. Timothy Mathews, for his guidance during the past four years. He did not only encourage and support my PhD study, but also my other research activities. My sincere thanks also go to Prof. Stephen Hart, my secondary supervisor at UCL, and Prof Margaret Homans, my supervisor during my time as a Visitant Assistant at Yale University, for their crucial feedback at different stages of my work. This thesis is dedicated to the memory of my father. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 10 Chapter One Masculine Striving for Self-Consciousness: Mediated Desire and Creative Impulse in Coetzee’s Disgrace 19 1. Disgrace 19 (i) “Where does the play of writing start?” 19 (ii) Knights and seducers 23 (iii) Don Quixote in South Africa: a novelistic antithesis 27 (iv) Rapes and archetypes 32 (v) Mediation and incestuous desire: the limits of self-reflexivity 36 (vi) Byron in Italy: self-consciousness and writing 42 (vii) Byron in Italy: the creative impulse and dialogism 48 Chapter Two The Limits of Masculine Introspection: Intertextual Desires and the Urge for Form in Kundera and Roth 53 1. Life is Elsewhere 53 (i) Gendered inflections of the estrangement from the body 53 (ii) Masculine anxiety and the denial of the female body in poetry 58 (iii) Interrupting self-consciousness: the interaction between ideology and poetry 63 (iv) To be absolutely modern, to be absolutely pure: the urge for form 67 2. The Professor of Desire 73 (i) Immaturity and donjuanism 73 (ii) Contrasting fantasies: “unmediated desire” and the 77 Chekhovian dimension (iii) Reading Kafka: self-referential masculinity 84 (iv) The search for form and the limits of introspection 91 Chapter Three Authorial Masculinities: Writing and Self-Reflection in Kundera, Roth and Vargas Llosa 100 1. Slowness 100 (i) Nostalgia and masculine archetypes in Kundera and Roth 100 (ii) Ridiculous men and imagined women 104 (iii) The Don Juan of form 113 2. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter 118 (i) Of masculine sentimental education 118 (ii) Masculinity and discursive authority 124 5 3. My Life as a Man 132 (i) Discrepancy and identification: literary masculinity and heteronormative discourse 132 (ii) ‘To be a man’: an unfulfilled tragedy 139 (iii) Aesthetic detachment: Flaubert’s impersonality as a masculine inheritance 147 Chapter Four Masculine Search for Emotional Reciprocity: Affective Crisis and Textual Fragmentation in Coetzee and Vargas Llosa 155 1. Prelude: desire and rebellion in Vargas Llosa’s essayistic writing 155 2. Diary of a Bad Year 157 (i) A “revenge on the world for declining to conform to my 157 fantasies” (ii) Bodily deterioration and writing 165 (iii) Pound and the Troubadours in Diary of a Bad Year 168 (iv) Emotion and investigation: writing between diary and essay 176 (v) A disturbing proximity: ideal love and hegemonic heterosexual discourse 180 3. The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto 187 (i) The struggle against hegemonic masculinity in Rigoberto’s essay-letters 187 (ii) Eroticism and Borges’s erudition in Rigoberto’s fantasies 193 (iii) Mirrors of masculine desire 203 (iv) Masculinity and self-reflexivity in Rigoberto’s reading of Onetti’s A Brief Life 209 Conclusions: Novelistic Practices and Emotional Repertoires 222 List of Cited Works 230 6 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS The following abbreviation appears parenthetically in the text to identify references respectively to the following novels. The exact number of page is indicated after each quote. Coetzee’s Works: D Disgrace DBY Diary of a Bad Year Kundera’s works: LE Life is Elsewhere S Slowness Roth’s works: MLM My Life as a Man PD Professor of Desire Vargas Llosa’s works: AJS Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter NDR The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto 7 NOTE ON THE TEXT The words ‘Quixotic’ and ‘Troubadours’ appear with a capital letter except when they are quoted from other works which use the lower case. American English forms have been left as they appear in the primary texts or in their translations. 8 How do I ever get to be what is described in the literature as a man? Philip Roth 9 Introduction Virility has now become self-conscious Virginia Woolf The aim of this study is to investigate the representations of heterosexual masculinity and the male struggle for self-discovery in the novels of J. M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera, Philip Roth and Mario Vargas Llosa. Interpreting the textual practices that these authors adopt as a (direct or indirect) response to the legacy of Don Quixote, I argue that their intratextual interplay and intertextual references convert the traditions of the self- reflexive novel into a space through which to express men’s struggle with emotion and the limits of male self-reflexivity. Early examples of studies of male relationships in literature can be tracked back to Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel (1965), which describes the impossibility of adult heterosexual love for male characters, a theme that contributes to shaping the canon of the American novel; and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), which focuses on male homosocial relationships and the structures of patriarchy. The literary focus on masculinity has gained much impetus from sociological studies of masculinity in response to the intellectual challenges of feminism.1 In The Making of Masculinities (1987) Harry Brod underlines that “[w]hile women have been obscured from our vision by being too much in the background, men have been obscured by being too much in the foreground”.2 The unmarked quality of the ethnic and gendered specificity of white men has conflated with normativity.3 Raewyn Connell introduces the concept of hegemonic masculinity and describes it as “the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy”.4 Sociological studies have stressed that masculinity is not an expression of anatomical or biological features, but “a set of fluid social and cultural performances”.5 1 For a review of the critical contributions to the study of masculinity see Alex Hobbs, “Masculinity Studies and Literature”, Literature Compass 10/4 (2013), pp. 383-395. 2 Harry Brod, The Making of Masculinities: The New Men’s Studies, Boston, Allen & Unwin, 1987, pp. 40-41. 3 Sally Robinson, Marked Men. White Masculinity in Crisis, New York, Columbia University Press, 2000. 4 R. W. Connell, Masculinities, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1995, p. 77. 5 Stephen Whitehead, Frank Barrett, “The Sociology of Masculinity”, in The Masculinities Reader, eds. Stephen Whitehead, Frank Barrett, Cambridge, Polity, 2001, p. 16. 10 Literary investigations have focused specifically on these performative and cultural dimensions of masculinity. For instance, Natalya Lusty describes “masculinity as an unstable horizon of gendered ideologies, subjectivities and representational practices”.6 Literary studies explore the ways in which engendering processes generate fictions of femininity and masculinity (“masculinity, like femininity, is a fictional construction”),7 and set the “dominant fiction” – in the words of Kaja Silverman – of heteronormative masculinity in contradistinction to femininity and “subversive” masculinities.8 My interest lies in a segment of this