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Occupational Violence and the Crisis in White Masculinity

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Occupational Violence and the Crisis in White Masculinity Occupational Violence and the Crisis in White Masculinity in Turn-of-the-Millennium American Fiction by Daniel Adleman B.A., The University of Manitoba, 1997 M.A., The University of British Columbia, 2010 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (English) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) August 2016 © Dan Adleman, 2016 Abstract My dissertation examines white masculine anxieties compelled by death and violence in Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991), Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996), and Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (1997). A close reading of the four novels in tandem reveals important dynamics of a subgenre of American masculinist fiction in a period of rapid technological change. The novels represent the travails of white male protagonists whose "occupational spheres," comprising jobs, domestic spaces and recreational pursuits, are meant to protect them from undesirable threats and the dread of death. I argue that these protagonists, who are immersed in their respective occupational spheres, do not comprehend the complex violence in which their occupations implicate them, nor do they appreciate the impossibility of insulating their “interior” simulated habitats from the supposedly toxic “outside” worlds that surround them. In the first chapter, I analyze Don DeLillo’s White Noise, which I claim inaugurates the subgenre of American fiction to which all four novels belong, and conclude that the protagonist, Jack Gladney, is caught up in a cycle of "re-mediation." His efforts to remedy his ills are only remediated into a medial milieu that further undermines his agency. In the second chapter, I track Patrick Bateman’s occupational sphere in American Psycho that manifests the classed, raced, and sexualized systemic violence of Wall Street finance itself. The third chapter on Fight Club explores the anonymous narrator’s violent occupation as an actuarial risk analyst for a major automotive manufacturer. The last chapter, on American Pastoral, analyzes the insidious violence ii of the protagonist Seymour Levov’s occupation as a glove-manufacturing entrepreneur and seeming-apogee of the Jewish American dream of white assimilation. This dissertation project is partly an intervention in DeLillo, Easton Ellis, Palahniuk, and Roth criticism, much of which is still atavistically stuck in a pre-digital moment. By and large, the existing criticism, I contend, does not pay enough attention to the densely-mediated environments inhabited by the novels’ protagonists. My engagement with these novels draws upon rhetorical analysis, genre theory, psychoanalysis, critical race theory, gender theory, and new media studies. iii Preface This dissertation emerged out of a course of study and extensive dialogues with my committee members—Glenn Deer, Bo Earle, and Mike Zeitlin—as well as conversations with Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Robert Brain whose classes on German media studies and media archeology I have taken or audited at UBC. The following work is my original and independent research. A yet-to-be titled essay on J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace that was originally meant to be a chapter of this dissertation project will now instead appear as a chapter in a forthcoming Palgrave MacMillan book entitled Performing Utopias in the Contemporary Americas. iv Table of Contents Abstract.........................................................................................................................................................ii Preface..........................................................................................................................................................iv Table of Contents..........................................................................................................................................v Chapter One: Introduction…………………..….…......................................................................................1 1.1 Preliminary Remarks: Masculine Death Anxiety and Mediated Occupational Spheres..................1 1.2 Deadlocks and Drives: Surveying Death in American Literature……………………..………......4 1.3 Concepts of the Occupation……………………………………………………………..…..........10 1.4 Critical Constructions of Violence…………………………………………………..……………17 1.4.1 White Collar Occupational Identities and Violence...........................................................25 1.4.2 White Male Privilege and Violence……………………………………………………...30 1.5 Closing Remarks: Genre Trouble…………………………………………………………...........37 Chapter Two: Gladney’s Echosystem: White Noise and What it Signifies.................................................44 2.1 American Domestic Media Environments…………….………………………………………….49 2.1.1 Televisual Brain Fade…………………………………………………………………....57 2.2 The Invisible Waves of the Market.…………………….………………………………………...60 2.3 Occupational Führerbunker............................................................................................................63 2.3.1 Channeling the Führer…………………………………………………………………...69 2.3.2 Violently Mediating Life and Death into Credit…………………………………………71 2.3.3 Zumwalt…………………………………………………………………………….........74 2.4 Plotting Pixels Deathward…………………………………………………………………….......76 2.5 Narrative Death Drive…………………………………………………………………………….81 2.6 Accessing the Network of Meanings……………………………………………………………..85 v Chapter Three: The Medium is the Massacre: Smash Cuts and Stereo Types in American Psycho...........91 3.1 Who Speaks for Patrick Bateman?.................................................................................................94 3.2 Cracked Mirrors and TV Sets………………………………………………………….…………99 3.3 Disavowing Death………………………………………………………………….…………....104 3.4 A Taste for Violence………………………………………………………………….…………108 3.5 Extreme Perceptibility………………………………………………………………….……….110 3.6 Uncommon Ground……………………………………………………………………………..118 3.7 Mimetic Contagion and Auto(mated)immunity………………………………………………...129 3.8 Ontogeny Recapitulates Reagonomy……………………………………………………….......139 Chapter Four: Fight Club: Tyler Durden’s Reign of Error………………………………………………143 4.1 Homegrown Error……………………………………………………………………………….146 4.2 Consumption: Uncoordinated Occupations……………………………………………………..149 4.3 Twelve-Step Remediations……………………………………………………………………...154 4.4 Après-coup: Spliced Frames of Reference……………………………………………………...159 4.5 Remanning Men Apart…………………………………………………………………………..161 4.6 Invisible Fist of the Market……………………………………………………………………...163 4.7 Occupy Wall Street: Drone Warfare…………………………………………………………….166 4.8 Revillusions……………………………………………………………………………………...172 4.9 God’s Medial Children: Law of the Fodder…………………………………………………….174 4.10 Re-mediating Terror…………………………………………………………………….............177 4.11 Passion for the Reel………………………………………………………………………..........179 vi Chapter Five: American Pastoral: Twilight of the Idylls……………………………………………......183 5.1 Framing the Frame of Reference………………………………………………………………..185 5.2 Fearful Semitry and All-American Occupations………………………………………………..188 5.3 Iron Fist, Latex Gloves………………………………………………………………………….198 5.4 Rock of Castration……………………………………………………………………................203 5.5 Habitat for Inhumanity: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property……………………………..206 5.6 Death and the Newark Maidens…………………………………………………………............216 5.7 Counterpastoral Ob-scenery: Putting an End to Civil Lies……………………………………...227 Chapter Six: Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………233 Endnotes………………………………………………………………………………………………….243 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………………………....254 vii Chapter One: Introduction 1.1 Preliminary Remarks: Masculine Death Anxiety and Mediated Occupational Spheres It is a commonplace that rapid technological changes have altered our working lives in profound ways. Contemporary American writers have responded to this situation through imaginative novels that often feature anxious male protagonists who attempt to navigate their way through their bewildering media environments. This dissertation argues that Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996), and Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (1997) participate in a subgenre of American masculinist fiction that interrogates the vital role of the occupational sphere in this rapidly changing American environment. In each of the four novels, what I refer to as the protagonist’s “occupational sphere,” an insular network comprising work, home, and recreation, is figured as a sophisticated medial lifeworld or organizing matrix of the world. These protagonists, who are immersed in their respective occupational spheres, do not comprehend the complex violence in which their occupations implicate them, nor do they appreciate the impossibility of insulating their “interior” simulated habitats from the supposedly toxic “outside” worlds that contain them. To take one example of this dynamic, in American Pastoral, Seymour Levov’s glove manufacturing business is persistently figured as an integral component of the occupational “castle” (Pastoral 86) meant to hygienically protect him from the violent incursion of 1960’s America. On closer inspection, however, his business that materially envelopes hands in protective leather gloves is bound up with layers of systemic violence, ranging from the subordination of racial minorities and women to the murderous rendering of animals. Moreover, 1 what he conceptualizes as “the plague America” (86) infiltrates
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