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Schizoanalysis and Postmodern American Fiction 1 A Poetics of Chaos: Schizoanalysis and Postmodern American Fiction Kiki Benzon University College London Ph.D. UMI Number: U591B03 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U591303 Published by ProQuest LLC 2013. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 2 Declaration This thesis represents original work by the undersigned. All references to outside sources are included in the text in accordance with citation rules defined by the Modern Language Association. This document has not been submitted to any other university toward the requirements of a doctoral degree. nzon 16 August 2006 3 For my parents—Axel and Susan 4 Thanks Thomas Adair, Anthony Barale, Hanjo Barressem, Barbara Bergin, Blade, Kasia Boddy, The British Association for American Studies, The Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals of the Universities of the United Kingdom, Joseph Conte, Mark Ford, Allan Hepburn, Danny Karlin, Marius Kociejowski, The Philip Martineau Trust, The J.W. McConnell Foundation, Elizabeth Rosen, Jeff Watson, The Wrigley Company, Ltd., Frank Zappa and Michael Zeitlin. 5 Abstract In “A Poetics of Chaos: Schizoanalysis and Postmodern American Fiction.” I use theories from physics and psychoanalysis together to explore narrative structures in recent American fiction. Chaos theory, which emerged in mathematical and biological discourses in the 1960s, postulates the intrinsic instability and unpredictability of many natural and physical phenomena. Theorists like Bertalanffy, Mandelbrot and Lorenz produced a vocabulary to account for these pervasive systems. In assessing historical, economic and, indeed, literary systems, we may draw terms from chaotic inquiry: bifurcation, fractal, moebial, reiteration, complexity, butterfly effect, strange attractors, and sensitive dependence upon initial conditions. “Chaotic narratives" may explicitly deploy (Barth, Pynchon, Gibson) or inadvertently express (Coover, Ondaatje, Powers) the structural features of chaotic systems. Such writing is characterized by a diffusion of linear chronology, as well as ontological and narrative fracture, repetition and variation. Literary theorists N. Katherine Hayles, Joseph Conte, Llanjo Berressem and others have discussed how chaotic scientific and psycho-social systems are not only invoked in contemporary literature, but are themselves the structural and philosophical underpinnings of postmodern culture. My thesis builds upon chaotic-literary criticism by investigating the psychological implications of “chaotic narratives.’* Drawing from the anti-deterministic “schizoanalysis” of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, I explain how writings by Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, David Foster Wallace and Mark Z. Danielewski perform and reflect the “orderly disorder” of psychic development. I advance the term “psychochaotics” to describe a theoretical approach that uses principles from chaos theory to reveal the psychodynamic systems in postmodern fiction. 6 Index Introduction: Literary Psychochaotics......................................................................................... 7 /'. Postmodernism ........................................................................................................... 10 ii. Chaos ............................................................................................................................15 Hi. Sch izo analysis .............................................................................................................28 iv. Fiction ..........................................................................................................................44 Chapter 1: Self and the City: Ontological Chaos in Paul Auster's City o f Glass...............52 i. Diffuse detection ..........................................................................................................55 ii. Bifurcation and compossihilities .............................................................................. 59 Hi. The implicated observer.............................................................................................69 iv. “Membranous Porosity " ........................................................................................... 7 8 Chapter 2: American Rhizomes: Don DeLillo's Underworld and Cosmopolis ................. 84 i. Aggregate, perspective, event .................................................................................. 88 ii. Linear diffusion ......................................................................................................... 103 iii. Psychochaotics 1 .......................................................................................................112 iv. Visual media, rhizomatic nodes.............................................................................. 119 v. Narrative geometry.................................................................................................. 128 Chapter 3: ‘‘Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders": Oedipal Chaotics in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ......................................................... 138 i. Realism, metafiction and “radical realism ......................................................." 141 ii. Tennis, drugs, waste ................................................................................................ 149 iii. Narrative reverberation.......................................................................................... 162 iv. Psychochaotics II. .................................................................................................... 172 v. Mediated fractals..................................................................................................... 184 Chapter 4: Psychological Orders and Disorders in Mark Z. Danielewski's House o f Leaves............................................................................................................................................ 195 i. Composition and the absence of origin ................................................................ 197 ii. Media and the extensions of the unconscious ......................................................207 iii. Psychic architecture .................................................................................................222 iv. Schizoanalysis and the house ................................................................................. 231 Conclusions, Irresolutions ......................................................................................................... 241 Appendices i. Lorenz A1 tract or ..........................................................................................247 ii. Bifurcation ....................................................................................................248 iii. Julia Set ...................................................................................................... 249 iv. House of Leaves pp. 431 and 438......... 250 v. House of Leaves pp. 121 and 122............................................................252 Works Cited ..................................................................................................................................254 7 Introduction: Literary Psychochaotics Isn't the destiny of American literature that of crossing limits and frontiers, causing deterritorialized flows of desire to circulate, but also making these flows transport fascisizing, moralizing, Puritan, and familialist territorialities? - Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus , 277-8 I open with this quotation because it expresses the central duality—some might say paradox—in American literature that I will be exploring in the following pages. The remarks occur in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972) at a moment when Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari extrapolate their political and psychoanalytic concerns into the literary domain. Of course, anything sweepingly said about “American literature”—or, for that matter, any national product as a whole— is going to make even the most dedicated generalist narrow her or his eyes. But the alternate and sometimes simultaneous denial and perpetuation of structurally rigid conditions—what Deleuze and Guattari call “territorialities”—does appear to be a prevalent impulse throughout the American canon, whether this impulse be manifest in the delimited fluidity of the Mississippi River navigated by Twain’s heroes, the reiterative, evolving prose of Stein, or the skewed quest novels of Kerouac, McCarthy and Pynchon. Inasmuch as American fiction reflects the culture’s reigning values of expansion and self-determination, encoded in these drives are commensurate pressures to advance new forms of organization, which are inevitably anchored in (though, perhaps, strung taut from resistance to) pre­ revolutionary modes of fascism, morality, Puritanism and familialism (to use Deleuze and Guattari’s terms). These foundational precepts are a blueprint upon which successive 8 cultural patterns, or "flows of desire."
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