“Until the Thousand and First Generation”: Generational Consciousness in the Contemporary Novel by Gavin G. Spence A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Auburn University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Auburn, Alabama May 9, 2011 Keywords: Generations, tropes, phenomenology, historicism, contemporary novel Copyright 2011 by Gavin Gregory Spence Approved by Marc Silverstein, Chair, Professor of English Miriam Marty Clark, Professor of English Sunny Stalter, Assistant Professor of English Charles Israel, Associate Professor of History Abstract Generations, by their nature, stand at the crossroads of broad, collective experience (dividing national history into distinct decades) and personal experience (separating an entire lifespan into life phases). More than merely a commonplace phenomenon, each successive generation offers a dynamic structure that connects self to other, family to nation-state, and collective experience to historical time. This study examines the role that generations play in four contemporary novels and one novella: Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Hema and Kaushik, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Despite evident stylistic and structural differences, each work foregrounds generational members who confront profound crises of historical disruption and existential dislocation. Collectively, these works are cast against the backdrop of three national contexts shaped by the legacies of post- imperialism—America, England, and India—all of which have endured profound demographic changes from within and without their established borders. This requires a closer consideration of the particular communities out of which authors emerge and the specific issues of cultural conflict and adaptation that these authors address in their works. The overarching scope of this study reflects an archetypal pattern that structures generations according to four dominant tropes: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. In each chapter, I reconfigure these tropes in terms of generational consciousness according to the following four areas: representational perspective (metaphor), allegory (metonymy), intentionality (synecdoche), and objectification (irony). ii Acknowledgements Thanks to Marc Silverstein, Miriam Marty Clark, and Sunny Stalter for their assistance as members of my advisory committee. More thanks to Marc Silverstein, whose tireless dedication extends from my first semester as a doctoral student until the final submission of this project; in various contexts—class seminars, office visits, coffee breaks, and email correspondences—he offered incisive, thoughtful comments and suggestions. Thanks to Dan Rose, whose insights into the fields of psychoanalysis and objects-relations theory proved invaluable to my chapter on Don DeLillo. Thanks also to Ben Lisle, whose feedback on my introduction helped me adjust my approach to generations, and Matt Thiel, whose technical advice proved helpful. I am grateful to my parents, Gavin and Gerry, for their boundless support over the past several years. Finally, my deepest love and gratitude to Anna Head, who saw me through the final stages of this project. iii Table of Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgments ....................................................................................................................... iii Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 1 Chapter 1: “The New Regime”: The Crisis of Generational Perspective in Ian McEwan’s Atonement ..................................................................................................................... 25 Chapter 2: “State of Emergency”: Generational History in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children…………………………………………………………………….53 Chapter 3: “On the Other Side of the World”: Generational Intentionality in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Hema and Kaushik .......................................................................................................... 84 Chapter 4: “The Inner Divisions of People and Systems”: Generational Objects in Don DeLillo’s Underworld ................................................................................................................... 116 Conclusion (Chapter 5): “After the End”: Generational Dialogues in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road ....................................................................................................................... 157 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………..….180 iv Introduction After the arrival of 2010, reporters and staff writers looked back on the previous decade and shared an inability to characterize it in any coherent or satisfactory form. In a flourish of overstatement, Time magazine’s Andy Serwer called it “The Decade from Hell”: “the most dispiriting and disillusioning” ten years that Americans had experienced during the postwar period. To underscore this short-sighted perspective, tailored to fiduciary calamities alone, his article featured self-promotional tie-ins: Time videos, “cover-shoots,” a photo-essay on Bernie Madoff, a top-ten list of crooked CEO’s, and links to previous articles.1Adopting a more reasonable tone in The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead lamented the lack of consensus on what to call the last decade. Even after critics grudgingly settled on “the aughts,” this proved to be, at best, a tentative compromise that “please[d] no one”: The oh’s? The double-oh’s? The zeroes? The zips? The nadas? The naughties?...the aughts? The naughts? The decade just gone by remains unnamed and unclaimed, an orphaned era that no one quite wants to own, or own up to—or, truth be told, to have aught else to do with at all (17-18). Despite their differences of opinion, all of the journalists above express our collective aim to come to terms (literally) with “the aughts.” Slate’s Christopher Beam echoed their sentiment when he pointed out a similar terminological crisis that occurred at the beginning of the last century.2 Most notably, Timothy Noah (also in Slate) observed that through our chronic struggle to name our times, “society has created a serious rhetorical problem that spills over into the 1Serwer’s article culminates in a pitch for his book (published by Time Books): “Starting Over: Why the Last Decade was So Damn Rotten and Why the Next One Will Surely Be Better” (8). 2 Eschewing the word “aughts” until 1933, journalists instead referred to this period as “turn of the century” or “first decade.” 1 social sciences.” Discourses of sociology, history, politics, and literary studies divide time into decades as the smallest intelligible units of collective experience. Although often reductive, a consensus term allows us to collate events of a single decade (innovations, crises, catastrophes) into a chronological framework. Without one, it would be virtually impossible to define distinguishing features which set one historiographic period apart from another. But there is a deeper crisis underlying our epistemic quest to define our times. The decade is only a shadow of another object: the generation that seeks to name it. Each generation that comes of age also locates itself—or is located—in relation to cultural history. Just as painstakingly as decades are named, generations are constructed, contested, and packaged for public consumption. Each generation, rooted in family experiences, can be defined as the temporal span between the birth of parents and the birth of children (roughly 20-25 years). Indeed, in mainstream vernacular, there is an explicit, widely accepted correspondence between generational configurations and periodic divisions. One emblematic taxonomy breaks the past century into generations spanning roughly twenty year intervals: World War I (1886-1905), World War II (1906-1925), Silent (1926-1945), Baby Boomers (1946-1965), Generation X (1966-1985), and Millennials (1986-present).3 Each of these categories indicates that a generation’s name, like a decade’s consensus term, is a provisional synthesis of historical time, cultural upheaval, and collective disposition. Each classification can be identified a posteriori, after the span of at least another decade and at most another generation. As a tacit guideline, then, a generation’s name always arrives too late for its own time; generational labels are applied to past historical periods, the horizon of which can only be grasped from a present perspective. 3These indicate birth years. Daniel E. Lee adopts these generational categories, although (as he admits) classifying population groups by dominant experiences is “somewhat artificial. Nevertheless, for reasons of convenience, it is useful to do so” (xv). These categories are by no means definitive or absolute. 2 As Saleem Sinai, the narrator of Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children reminds us, “reality is a question of perspective: the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems—but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible” (189). From a similar vantage point, I will reexamine five literary texts written on the cusp of the past millennium: Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001), Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), Jhumpa Lahiri’s Hema and Kaushik (2007)4, Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), and