THE PROJECTOR RESTS ON A PILE OF BOOKS: VOID AND MEDIUM IN POSTWAR U.S. CULTURE By Matthew Allen Tierney A.B., Cornell University, 2000 M.A., University of California—Santa Cruz, 2006 A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. Providence, Rhode Island 2012 © Copyright 2012 by Matthew Allen Tierney ii This dissertation by Matthew Allen Tierney is accepted in its present form by the Department of Modern Culture and Media as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date Ellen Rooney, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date Rey Chow, Reader Date Daniel Kim, Reader Date Michael Silverman, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date Peter M. Weber, Dean of the Graduate School iii MATTHEW ALLEN TIERNEY EDUCATION Ph.D., Modern Culture & Media, Brown University (Providence, RI)—2012 M.A., Literature, University of California (Santa Cruz, CA)—2006 A.B. Cum Laude, American Studies, Cornell University (Ithaca, NY)—1999 PUBLICATIONS “Oh no, not again!: Representability and a Repetitive Remark.” Image & Narrative 11:2 (2010) Review of Jonathan Auerbach, Dark Borders: Film Noir & American Citizenship. Film Criticism 36:2 (2012) SELECTED PRESENTATIONS: “A Breath of Dissent: Novel Histories and Political Denarration” Society for Novel Studies, 2012 “Breathing, Talking Politics: Disastrous Liberalism and the Prose of Mere Dissent” American Comparative Literature Association, 2012 “Unreasonable Preference and Critical Poiesis” Modern Language Association, 2012 “The Medium of Power and the Gaping Wounds of Empire” American Comparative Literature Association, 2011 Nominated for the Horst Frenz Prize “The Present Is a Void: Van Wyck Brooks and the Contingent Literary Past” Modern Language Association, 2011 “Dumb Blankness Full of Meaning” World Picture Conference, 2010 “The Projector Rests on a Pile of Books: Cultural Studies, Cinema, and Literariness” Cultural Studies Association, 2010 FELLOWSHIPS Graduate fellowship, Pembroke Center, Brown University Graduate fellowship, Graduate School, Brown University Dissertation completion fellowship, Graduate School, Brown University LANGUAGE French PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS Cultural Studies Association Modern Language Association Society for Novel Studies American Comparative Literature Association Society for Cinema and Media Studies iv Acknowledgements From two patient teachers, Anita Starosta and Ellen Rooney, I have learned the bulk of what I know. To conclude any more about either one would be to say too much too soon, so instead I dedicate the dissertation to them. As well, Rey Chow has been a model of scholarship, mentorship, and friendship. Old, necessary conversations with Michael Silverman and Daniel Kim continue to murmur along with me. I owe further thanks to my department’s chair, Philip Rosen, and its office staff, Susan McNeil and Liza Hebert. And I could have done very little without Descha Daemgen, David Bering-Porter, Sarah Osment, Cheryl Beredo, Hong-An Tran, and others at my shoulder. These last “others” are too numerous to name, but most of them gave their support in one or more institutional spaces that I can humbly list: Brown’s department of Modern Culture and Media, as well as the Brown Graduate School and the departments of English and Comparative Literature; the Modern Culture Workshop; the World Picture Conference and Journal; the Society for Novel Studies; the Division of Criticism of the Modern Language Association; the Literature Division of the Cultural Studies Association; my faculties and thesis committees at Cornell and Santa Cruz; my family; Anita’s family; and the seminar of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. v CONTENTS INTRODUCTION The Medium and Void of National Culture 1 CHAPTER 1—VOID PART I: The Present is a Void, or, Recreating a Usable Past 25 PART II: Unfinished and Already Half in Ruin EXEMPLUM: Talking Politics in the Void (“Our Meeting, 1948”) 55 EXEMPLUM: Voids of Race and Colonialism (Sangre Negra) 64 CHAPTER 2—MEDIUM PART I: From the Society for Cinematologists to the Romantics 79 PART II: Without Medium upon Matter EXEMPLUM: Sirk’s Blind Style 107 EXEMPLUM: Film Poetry and the Beat Explosion (Guns of the Trees) 118 CHAPTER 3—THE VOID AS A MEDIUM PART I: Melvillean Aesthetics and Postwar “Post-Politics” 126 PART II: A Dumb Blankness Full of Meaning: EXEMPLUM: Intellectual Bogartism (“Radicalism Today”) 160 EXEMPLUM: Welles’s Blank Verse 172 EXEMPLUM: Human Skin of Narrative (Invisible Man) 186 CHAPTER 4—THE MEDIUM AS VOID The Terror That Makes One Whatever One Is: Sterling Hayden’s Emotional Testimony 197 CONCLUSION 237 WORKS CITED 244 vi INTRODUCTION: THE MEDIUM AND VOID OF NATIONAL CULTURE “Why did he choose to plunge into nothingness, into the void of faceless faces, of soundless voices, lying outside history?” —Ralph Ellison (1952) “He who leaps into the void owes no explanation to those who watch.” —Jean-Luc Godard (1958) 1. Nation This dissertation is a study of political formalisms and literary and film aesthetics in the United States during the two decades that followed the Second World War. I am especially concerned with what was often called “the void”: a principle of rhetorical and technical negativity in postwar cultural practices that pried at the cracks in early Cold War ideology and that lodged there as the possibility of as-yet-unimagined forms of social and aesthetic life. I am interested as well in how the void impacted and distorted the concept of “medium,” a principle of culture’s material form that was highly contentious during the same period. By tracing the path taken by voids as they travel through media, I mean to describe some of the negative and loose textural properties of postwar culture that have been overlooked in contrast and contradistinction to their positive and technical properties. What results of this description is a spatial modeling, or formalism, of the political entanglements, cultural production, and critical intellectual writing of the United States during the period between World War II and the rise of Sixties social movements. During those years, the void was not a negativity in any pure, unitary, or transcendental sense. In any case, mine is not an ontological approach to void and has little to say about the being of categories of political otherness, or about their exclusion from procedures of political deliberation. Rather, I focus on the void as a variegated text, and as a hollowed-out site of contestation residing within literary, cinematic, and political cultures of the postwar: a rhetorical and poetic figure for exclusion, death, or absence, rather than what might be called exclusion, death, or 1 absence “as such.” The void was a symbolic site, in other words, where fleeting contact could occur among political identities, or between media, that had not yet cohered into their present institutional and ideological forms, and yet that had already begun to degrade. The void takes many legible forms. Thus, for example, the void was a place where the very concept of “race” begins to come apart just as new forms of Black radicalism begin to come together. For another example, the void was where political fear, over the threat of the bomb or the risk of complicity, becomes indistinguishable from political conviction. And at last, for present purposes anyway, the void was where literature and film could battle one another for expressive territory. In all instances, what is at stake is the openness or closedness of national (as well as subnational) identities in their constitution of national (as well as transnational and postnational) communities. The postwar period itself is often considered as the sum of attributes that are fully and positively expressed, even when such attributes are also fraught and dynamic. Anxiety about sexuality and gender roles; protestation among American races; tension between conservatives and liberals, as between liberals and radicals; strain between federal and state governments, as between U.S. and Soviet governments; unease about both the communicative and the destructive potential of emergent technologies: all of these are phenomena that are positively expressed, fully visible across the representational modes of U.S. culture. Moreover, in general, these phenomena also contributed to the shifts toward cultural consensus and containment in the United States during those years. What licenses consensus is thus its capacity to produce and accommodate even what would seem to exceed it. So it is that the social phenomena—anxiety, protest, tension, strain, unease—should exert themselves in the dissensual terms of contestation, disidentification, and break, rather than in contained or consensual terms, and yet still be reducible to consensus politics. In an ever-narrowing field, consensus converts the languages of negation and 2 conflict into a language of placid, positive stance-taking. Objections thus get included within the frame of consensus, while opposition becomes just another position and the constitutive fact of exclusion is itself excluded. The void is thus not a kind of dissent, but rather a point within the consensual field where consensus is shown to be incomplete, faulty, non-totalizing, and yet perhaps always in the process of being made. A model for this way of looking at consensus in the postwar period might be seen in one of the first book-length studies of the period’s literature, Tony Tanner’s 1971 book City of Words: American Fiction 1950-1970. For Tanner, postwar culture was characterized by a struggle between formal rigidity and formal looseness, as between closed and open forms of language and national identity. He cites images of fluidity and disaggregation in fiction of the period and offers them in contradistinction to images of constraint and convention, thus restating the bind: Clay, jelly, jelly-fish—what this image cluster suggests [in its guidance of postwar fiction] is the dread of utter formlessness, of being a soft vulnerable, endlessly manipulable blob, of not being a distinct self.