American Cinematic Novels and Their Media Environments, 1925 – 2000

American Cinematic Novels and their Media Environments, 1925 – 2000 Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Paul Douglas McCormick, M.A. Graduate Program in English The Ohio State University 2012 Dissertation Committee Professor Jim Phelan, Advisor Professor Jared Gardner Professor Brian McHale Copyright by Paul Douglas McCormick 2012 Abstract Cinematic American Novels and their Media Environments, 1925-2000 shows that a famous group of twentieth-century American novels asserted their cultural relevance through their responses to transitional moments in Hollywood film history. I select five well-known novels that engage with different transitional moments, including Hollywood’s transition to sound cinema and its response to New Hollywood: The Great Gatsby, The Day of the Locust, Lolita, Gravity’s Rainbow, and Underworld. By using narrative theory to analyze the content and form of such cinematic novels and by attending to the evolution of Hollywood cinema itself, I reveal the synergistic relations between film history, media history, and narrative techniques. Because I also grant considerable attention to how the larger “media environment” (including such forms as radio, television, video recorders, and the internet) afforded routes of exchange between cinema and the novel, my dissertation takes a new approach to the task of combining American media history with literary criticism and film history. Based on this evidence, I also intervene in recent debates about the fate of the American novel in new media environments. I argue that even if aggregate sales of print novels continue to fall in the future, influential American novelists will win both readers and cultural prestige by shaping our understanding of new media environments and the novel’s evolving positions in them. ii Dedication To Heather, with gratitude for your sacrifices, support, and love. And to baby McCormick, sight unseen. iii Acknowledgments This dissertation has been supported by a Presidential Fellowship by the Graduate School at Ohio State University. Under the auspices of Ohio State’s English Department, Project Narrative regularly hosted invited talks by narrative theorists of international renown and provided me several opportunities to present various forms of my work. Project Narrative also hosted visiting scholars who helped my research in various ways: Henrik Nielsen, Jan Alber, and Sarah Copland. I feel fortunate to have been a part of this vibrant community, and I enjoyed some terrific discussions and arguments with my fellow graduate students, including Aaron McKain, Danielle Dadras, Anne Langendorfer, Julie Green, John Nees, Brian Hauser, Matt Bolton, and many others. I owe special thanks to Suhaan Mehta for his friendship and for our many conversations over the years. Characteristically, Brian McHale asked just the right questions, and offered many important insights and criticisms besides. Jared Gardner sparked my interest in film and media history with his terrific teaching, and then sustained it with his many contributions to this project. David Herman inspired me to draw upon the rich traditions of narrative theory through his teaching and his example. Jim Phelan provided crucial guidance throughout my graduate career as well as this particular project. iv Vita 2002...............................................A.S. Owens Community College 2004...............................................B.A. with Honors in English Literature, University of Toledo 2006...............................................M.A. English Literature, The Ohio State University 2004 – 2010 .................................Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of English, The Ohio State University 2011 - 2012....................................Presidential Fellowship, The Ohio State University Publications "Claims of Stable Identity and (Un)reliability in Dissonant Narration." Poetics Today. 30.2 (Summer 2009): 317 – 52. Print. “Houses of Leaves, Cinema, and the New Affordances of Old Media.” Mark Z. Danielewski. Ed. Joe Bray and Alison Gibbons. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011. 52 – 67. Print. “Narrator.” The Encyclopedia of the Novel. Eds. Peter Logan, George Olakunle, Susan Hegeman, and Efraín Kristal. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Vol. 2, 553 – 62. Print. Fields of Study Major Field: English v Table of Contents Abstract...................................................................................................................................................ii Dedication.............................................................................................................................................iii Acknowledgments................................................................................................................................iv Vita...........................................................................................................................................................v Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter 1: Hollywood Celebrity Culture and “Ocular Confusions” in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby...........................................................................................19 Chapter 2: Mediated Noises and Narrative Voices in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust.........................................................................................55 Chapter 3: Immersive Narratives and Reel Worlds in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.............................................................................................................94 Chapter 4: Filmic “Belatedness” in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.........................................................................................139 Chapter 5: Divinity and “You”: Moving Images, Cinema, and the Novelist-Priest in Don DeLillo’s Underworld...........................................................................................................182 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………234 References……………………………………………………………………………….249 vi Introduction: American Cinematic Novels and their Media Environments, 1925 – 2000 In 1899, early forms of American cinema were beginning to appear in the form of one-person viewings at kinetoscope parlors or group viewings as one act within a variety show. The year 1899 also marked the publication of Frank Norris’s McTeague, an American novel which briefly represents the latter kind of cinematic exhibition. In the novel’s sixth chapter, the protagonist McTeague decides to take his girlfriend, Trina Stieppe, along with her mother and young brother, Auguste, to the variety show at the Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco. At the show, McTeague and the Stieppes will see several acts, including an overture by the orchestra, a minstrel performance, acrobatics, ventriloquism, and a series of film shorts projected on a screen. Even before McTeague enters the theater, his actions demonstrate his inchoate desires for Culture, which he unconsciously recognizes as his portal to improved social status. When McTeague first tries to buy tickets to the variety show, he stammers “I want – I want”; when pressed by the clerk for his order, he responds “I don’ know, I don’ know”; and when finally insulted by the clerk he shakes his fist and tries to threaten him, but can’t spit out any words but “I will—I will—I will—yes, I will” (56 – 57). McTeague’s stammerings exemplify the narrator’s previous explanation that “No people have a keener eye for the amenities than those whose social position is not assured” (55). McTeague vaguely feels that he “wants” Culture, but soon discovers he “don’ know” what it is. The very scorn of what he perceives as culture’s gatekeepers makes him that much more 1 determined to consume it, whatever “it” is. Norris uses this scene as a preface to explain why McTeague and the Stieppes will gain tremendous pleasure from the variety show once they see it: their cultural inexperience and bourgeois desires motivate their poor aesthetic judgments. Once the show begins, Norris sharply contrasts the prosaic quality of its various acts with McTeague’s erroneously high evaluations of their aesthetic and cultural worth. For example, the narrator describes “two men extravagantly made up as negro minstrels, with immense shoes and plaid vests. They seemed to be able to wrestle a tune out of almost anything—glass bottles, cigar-box fiddles, strings of sleigh-bells, even graduated brass tubes, which they rubbed with resined fingers” (60). After his spoken dialogue, McTeague’s over- evaluation of their performance quickly follows: “ ‘That’s what you call musicians,’ ” he announced gravely. ‘Home, Sweet Home,’ played on a trombone. Think of that! Art could go no farther” (60). I suggest that if we recognize the obvious in this passage—that Norris and McTeague have wildly different judgments of what constitutes good “Art”—this is partly due to our conscious recognition that we are reading Norris’s novel. To enjoy the irony as Norris intends, contemporary readers must do more than just repress the racist intimations of the minstrel scene. We also have to recognize Norris’s self-referential gesture, to provisionally agree that McTeague has some legitimate claim to art or craftsmanship that the trombone tune does not. As this scene suggests, aesthetic judgments in novels are particularly amenable to self-referential gestures about novels, particularly about the novel

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