The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts NECESSARY FICTIONS: THE U.S. NOVEL IN THE END OF IDEOLOGY A Dissertation in English by Jeffrey Gonzalez © 2011 Jeffrey Gonzalez Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2011 ii The dissertation of Jeffrey Gonzalez was reviewed and approved* by the following: Kathryn Hume Edwin Earle Sparks Professor of English Dissertation Adviser Chair of Committee Benjamin Schreier Malvin and Lea Bank Assistant Professor of English and Jewish Studies and Malvin and Lea Bank Early Career Professor of Jewish Studies Claire Colebrook Professor of English Eric Hayot Director of the Asian Studies Program and Professor of Comparative Literature Mark Morrisson Professor of English and Science, Technology, and Society Graduate Studies Director *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School. iii ABSTRACT: NECESSARY FICTIONS: THE U.S. NOVEL IN THE END OF IDEOLOGY My dissertation attempts to trace developments in U.S. literary production over the last two decades. I posit that the fall of the Berlin Will and the rise to dominance of neoliberal globalization caused a shift in the structure of feeling that has characterized the educated U.S. classes. While the Cold War produced a certain apocalyptic anxiety, the hegemony of global capital engenders uneasiness precisely because the problems it produces seem endless and intractable without anything to oppose it. Consumerism, corporatism, atomizing individualisms, gentrification, legacies of violence and inequality abetted by neoliberalism: the contemporary U.S. intellectual has no answer to these issues. In bringing together a group of authors usually considered separately, I demonstrate how these anxieties are reflected in this literature‘s consistent use of the tragic view. I borrow this term from Lucien Goldmann, who used it to describe the outlook that produced Pascal‘s wager. Each author that the dissertation analyzes makes wagers that hope to return meaning, hope, or possibility to a life that seems utterly overdetermined. I call these ―fictions‖ because these writers, aware that postructuralism has undermined the humanism these texts espouse, emphasize the use-value rather than the truth-value of their claims. What makes them ―necessary‖ is that these writers see life dominated by nihilism and relativism without them. In readings of major contemporary novels by David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, Marilynne Robinson, Dinaw Mengestu, and Junot Díaz, my dissertation provides a much-needed political and economic context absent from other criticism on contemporary fiction. The study disputes the charge that contemporary literature lacks political content and has little regard for traditional humanistic concerns. In discerning the consistent ideological underpinnings across a disparate group of writers, Necessary Fictions takes an important step toward defining the literature that appears to be succeeding postmodernism. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………………………..v Preface: ―The Trouble With Foundations‖…………………………………………………………… vii Chapter 1: ―Globalization and the U.S. Liberal: A Reading of the Present‖ …………………………1 Chapter 2: ―Consumption that Consumes: David Foster Wallace‘s Infinite Jest………………..…….46 Chapter 3: ―Corporatism and its Discontents: Richard Powers‘ Gain‖………………...….............. ...100 Chapter 4: ―Condemnation, the Sacred, and Health Care: The Works of Marilynne Robinson‖…. …136 Chapter 5: ―Curses and the Question of Agency: The Tragic View in Junot Díaz and Dinaw Mengestu‖ ……………………………………………………..183 Conclusion: ―Fiction and Humans‖……………………………………………………………………241 List of Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………….……250 v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My gratitude for the village it took to get this dissertation conceived, written, and concluded extends far and wide. First, I need to thank Kathryn Hume. From my first seminar with Kit, she has pressed me for greater rigor in my thinking and more clarity in my writing. Luckily, she has unfathomable reserves of patience. This document is far more readable and coherent than it was in draft form, and much of the credit for the revision belongs to her. Her tireless work on my behalf demonstrates a level of generosity and ethical concern that should be a pedagogic model for all teachers and mentors. I also need to thank the rest of my committee for their contributions. Ben Schreier was profoundly charitable with his time and his challenging commentary. His refusal to accept sloppy argumentation tightened the text‘s organization and its logic, though we both know more work remains to be done. Clare Colebrook‘s outstanding, provocative insights widened the horizons of my thinking, and Eric Hayot has taught me at least half the things I know—not the least of which is the importance of having a thick skin. The spectral presence on my committee of Jeffrey Nealon, whose name I cite regularly in the work, is no accident: my reading of contemporary America is largely Jeff‘s, and I suspect all of ours will soon be, too. Let me also thank the English department for providing students with reasonable funding—including summer work—and for the Sparks fellowship that allowed me a year off teaching. This time allowed me space and time to nurture and develop as a literary critic, a maturation that I hope is reflected in the work. The support and love of my colleagues Lynne Feeley, Adam Haley, and Geffrey Davis went a long way in making this process livable. Their confidence in this work and in my abilities has helped me navigate some very lonely and difficult passages. On this note, I must give credit to the great Daniel Hutchins, whom I will always look up to and whose life has been an vi inspiration for mine. My most brilliant friends should never doubt themselves. I owe more to them than I can say. Following the lead of my friend Shawna Ross, let me give thanks to Mike, Cat, Derek, and the rest of the staff of the Starbucks in Glen Ridge, who made me feel comfortable and welcome every afternoon as I worked on chapters 2, 3, and 4. I also have to credit Ali and the yogis at Garden State Yoga for rescuing my lower back and teaching me ouija breathing, which kept me from passing out during the defense. My parents, Lynette and Manuel Gonzalez, have been extremely kind and supportive. I am lucky to have had them and my sister Nicole in my life. And finally, my relationship with Alixandra Gould has meant everything. She has been the breathtaking element in my life that makes me believe in grace. vii Necessary Fictions: The U.S. Novel in the End of Ideology Preface: The Trouble with Foundations ―The true course is not to wager at all. ‗Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then?‖—Blaise Pascal, Pensées I begin with a generalization. Since Melville and Hawthorne (if not earlier), serious U.S. fiction has been critical of the status quo. By and large, the critiques these texts launched were rooted in positions that tended toward the political left.1 Authors of and audiences for innovative, complicated novels have tended to share at least a putatively progressive bent. A certain strand of U.S. white male writers—your Hemingways and Updikes, among others—may not be championed by the current academic left, but we ought not forget Hemingway‘s work in the Spanish Civil War or Updike‘s role in legitimizing frank depictions of sexuality. They looked progressive then, even if they may not now. These two writers and other acclaimed, important novelists are traditionally reviewed in left-leaning publications like the New York Times, the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and Harper’s. They are discussed on left-leaning media outlets like PBS and NPR. Readers are first exposed to them by left-leaning professors. While conservative novelists like Michael Crichton 1 Readers deeply invested in left politics might be angered by my conflation of liberalism and leftism, which in the minds of denizens of either are far disparate. My excuse for this integration, also admittedly a generalization, is that all leftisms have been conflated in the public imagination. While academics might tussle over gradations in political ideology, the mainstream vision of what politics means is determined by what happens at the level of policy. The far end of the left has had little impact at this level, except for its usefulness as part of a caricature deployed by the right. viii sell well and ones like Walker Percy merit critical applause, the awards, reverence, and lasting impact generally belong to their more liberal brethren. What does serious U.S. fiction do, then, when U.S. liberalism is in shambles? The last two decades have made the notion of a U.S. left laughable to Europeans. Barack Obama‘s first year in office, with a super-majority in the Senate and a democratic House, failed to produce anything that might plausibly be called liberal reform. Bill Clinton, who remains very popular with those who self-identify as liberal, pushed for significant reductions in welfare—the social program perhaps most closely identified with twentieth century liberal politics. The decade after Reagan pulled the nation right (so far right that left became center) saw no correction of the shift, and a decade after that, the U.S. left has yet to recover the territory it ceded. In these decades, as U.S. liberalism‘s decline became more markedly clear, notable literary critics were discerning a strand of serious fiction that, while clearly influenced by the high postmodern template, seemed intent on diverging from it. Near the start of Clinton‘s second term, Tom LeClair published an article proclaiming William Vollmann, Richard Powers, and David Foster Wallace as inventors of a new kind of fiction, one that advanced the systems paradigm that LeClair influentially indentified in The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary Fiction (1989).2 Stephen J.