In the American Vein: 1945-1975 a Dissertation SUBMITTED to THE
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In the American Vein: 1945-1975 A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Andrew Marzoni IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Siobhan S. Craig, Maria Damon May 2015 © Andrew Marzoni 2015 i Acknowledgements I am foremost grateful to the Department of English and the Graduate School at the University of Minnesota for academic and financial support. Special thanks are due to my committee members: Shevvy Craig, Maria Damon, Paula Rabinowitz, Charlie Sugnet, and Christophe Wall-Romana. I am thankful to my colleagues at the University of Minnesota, and especially those involved in the Theory Reading Group: Joe Hughes, Robb St. Lawrence, Wes Burdine, Mike Rowe, Stephen McCulloch, Hyeryung Hwang, and Valerie Bherer. Poet-friends like Aaron Apps, Carrie Lorig, Mary Chen, and Elisabeth Workman cannot go without mention, nor can Cultural Studies frenemies and members of the Moving Image Studies Interdisciplinary Graduate Group: Brendan McGillicuddy, Andrea Gyenge, Stacy Douglas, and Sara Saljoughi. Other past-and- present graduate students and faculty members at the University of Minnesota such as Rembert Hueser, Verena Mund, Nuruddin Farah, Tony Brown, Katherine Scheil, Laurie Ouellette, Elaine Auyoung, Eric Daigre, Isaac Butler, Dan Hassoun, Annemarie Lawless, Eric Brownell, Ben Utter, Dana Meade Cason, Will Kanyusik, Adam Schrag, and Sara Jo Cohen have all proved influential to the ongoing consolidation of my ideas, as have friends in New York (David Comer Kidd, especially) and New Orleans. Thanks to Alys George, Sue Richardson, Rebecca Housel, and Adrian Switzer for inviting me to present my research at various conferences, and thanks to S.E. Gontarski, Laci Mattison, and Paul Ardoin for accepting it for publication. I appreciate all of the guidance I have received from various editors I have worked with along the way, including Mike Miller, Eric Lorberer, Jeffrey Zuckerman, Kelli Marshall, Gabrielle Malcolm, Madeleine LaRue, Molly Lewis, Angela Walsh, Alison Hugill, and Houman Barekat. I cannot say enough about the enthusiasm and intelligence of all of my students at the University of Minnesota and Rasmussen College. This dissertation would not have been completed without the practical support and assistance of the English Department staff (Mary Barfield, Terri Sutton, Karen Frederickson, Heather McNeff, Rose Hendrickson, Pamela Leszczynski, Samantha Morris, Judith Katz, and Jess Jordan), David Bernstein and the Department of Theatre Arts & Dance, the New Orleans Public Library, Anne Garner and Rebecca Filner at the Harold W. and Alfred A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library, and Nancy Goldman at the Pacific Film Archive at the Berkeley Art Museum. Additional funding was provided by Student Unions and Activities, the Graduate and Professional Student Association, and the Council of Graduate Students at the University of Minnesota, as well as the Modern Language Association. Thanks and love go out to Giff & Shelby, Justine, Zack, Brigitte, and Mike Marzoni, the Schaaps, the Quinlans, the Zeccardis, Dave Mead, and Seth Wellens. I would be amiss to not mention my cats, Monkey and Nietzsche. None of this would have been worth it, perhaps, were it not for Adriane Quinlan. A version of Chapter 1 previously appeared in Understanding Deleuze, Understanding Modernism, eds. Paul Ardoin, S.E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014). ii Dedicated to Laura Zeccardi (1985-2013) iii Abstract This dissertation shows how twentieth-century advances in media technology have contributed to a surge of formal experimentation in postwar American literature and film. Scholars have identified a pervasive influence of mass media on avant-garde art in the postwar era, as can be readily witnessed in the celebrity-obsession of Frank O’Hara’s poems or Andy Warhol’s films. But more than providing mere subject matter, the technological instruments of popular culture presented artists with new ways to work, challenging the traditional relationship between the artist and the work of art. Much of twentieth-century literary and critical theory has argued that human perception is endlessly mediated, revealing the concepts of “reality,” “the self,” and “the author” to be constructs. I demonstrate that this postmodern conception of what it means to be an author––and even, to be human––is a direct result of the ways that electronic media such as radio and television have reframed perception. I consider how postwar American writers and filmmakers contemplated the aesthetic possibilities of newer media by adopting those technologies for their own use, constructing “literary machines”–– technological assemblages that subsume the author’s body into the creative process. My project defines “technology” in Marshall McLuhan’s sense of “extensions of man” in order to show how postwar, pre-digital American literature and film implicated the human body in their understandings of the literary, the cinematic, and the technological. For example, I treat narcotics as a media technology in their own right, provoking users with new ways to see, hear, and experience time. I trace the various roles that drugs have played in twentieth-century theories of literature, media, and human embodiment as well as American literary and film history. Because drugs are a technology literally consumed by the human body, the texts and films that Henry Miller, Terry Southern, John Cassavetes, and William S. Burroughs produced about and under the influence of drugs suggest that the aesthetic and conceptual problems posed by new media technologies are in fact inherent to human experience. iv Table of Contents List of Figures v Introduction: In the American Vein 1 Chapter 1: An American Surrealist in Paris, or, Henry Miller Gets Drunk on Water 17 Chapter 2: Media Anxiety and Literature-on-Drugs 60 Chapter 3: Cinema, Cigarettes, Bodies, and Time 108 Chapter 4: Revolution 23 158 Epilogue: Another Country 207 Bibliography 231 v List of Figures Figure 1: Lynn Carlin as Maria Forst in Faces 139 Figure 2: Gena Rowlands as Jeannie Rapp in Faces 139 Figure 3: Val Avery as Jim McCarthy in Faces 140 Figure 4: Jeannie and Richard Forst (John Marley) in Faces 140 Figure 5: Richard, Jeannie, and Freddie Draper (Fred Draper) in Faces 141 Figure 6: Maria and Chet (Seymour Cassel) in Faces 141 Figure 7: Richard smoking in Faces 142 Figure 8: Maria as Joan of Arc in Faces 151 Figure 9: A strange choreography in Faces 152 Figure 10: Chet as the “Mechanical Man” in Faces 155 Figure 11: Diagram of a mathematical function 206 Figure 12: The lecture hall in Spring Breakers 226 Figure 13: The robbery in Spring Breakers 227 1 Introduction In the American Vein They strike one, above all, as giving no account of themselves in any terms already consecrated by human use; to this inarticulate state they probably form, collectively, the most unprecedented of monuments; abysmal, the mystery of what they think, what they feel, what they want, what they suppose themselves to be saying. ––Henry James, by means of James Baldwin1 I was once hailed outside of a used bookstore in San Diego, California, by a man in a cowboy hat. A friend and I had been wandering up and down Adams Avenue on an otherwise unremarkable Saturday afternoon, picking through record stores, when we came upon Budget Books. The sign on the door read “Closed,” but before we had made it back to the sidewalk, a gruff “Hey!” turned our heads, only to be followed by, “You fuckers like Kerouac?” I was a college student at the time, and my hesitant nod to the question belied a depth of adoration. We followed the man inside and were immediately taken aback by piles of unsorted books, the reek of cigarette smoke, emptied beer cans everywhere. We knew the man was a character even before he showed us an inscription inside of a worn copy of Big Sur (1962). The inscription was made out to Marlon—so named, we later found out, because his mother saw it on the marquee of a theatre playing The Men (1950) while she was in the back of the taxi, en route to the delivery ward––and 1 See Baldwin, Another Country (London: Michael Joseph, 1963) 5. Baldwin borrows this epigraph from James’s “Preface” to Vol. 14 of the New York Edition (New York: Scribner’s, 1908), containing Lady Barbarina, The Siege of London, An International Episode, The Pension Beaurepas, A Bundle of Letters, and The Point of View. 2 signed “Tom.” “I’m the guy who turned Tom Waits on to Jack Kerouac,” he told us. It was plausible enough: Waits had grown up in Chula Vista and gone to Hilltop High School (the father of the manager of the movie theatre I worked at had been Waits’s Spanish teacher there); he was born in 1949, leaving him just a little older than Marlon. There was ample evidence to suggest that Marlon was pulling our chain; still, we suspended disbelief. A few days later, we came back. Marlon pretended not to remember us at first, but before long, he was bumming our cigarettes and urging us to peruse his “secret stash”: his personal book collection, which he kept behind the cash register. He told us that these books were not for sale; he told us many things. We returned several times. He tried to convince us that one of Charles Bukowski’s columns for the Los Angeles Free Press was about his relentless late-night phone calls to the writer toward the end of the 1960s (his girlfriend at the time had found Bukowski’s number in the phone book). He told us about how Hollywood was supposed to have been built in Normal Heights, the San Diego neighborhood where Budget Books was located, but the scouts tasked with relocating the film industry from New York stumbled upon Los Angeles first.