UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Myth of Writer's Block: Imagining American Moral Realism Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/50t6h6kd Author Moore, Kevin Christopher Publication Date 2013 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles The Myth of Writer’s Block: Imagining American Moral Realism A dissertation filed in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Kevin Christopher Moore 2013 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The Myth of Writer’s Block: Imagining American Moral Realism by Kevin Christopher Moore Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Los Angeles 2013 Professor Eric Sundquist, Chair The Myth of Writer’s Block takes the prominent postwar cultural myth of the “blocked” writer and reexamines it as an objective historical phenomenon. Modern literary texts often emerge from psychological crises, or seek to capture fictional crises, but once a writer’s reputation is marked by a block myth —a negative formulation that a writer has somehow failed to live up to popular or critical standards of production—literary and philosophical problems can take on the appearance of psychological calamity. Block myths take flight because they are marketable; an established author’s work increases in cultural value when it is perceived to be scarce. Such myths rarely represent reality, however, and most American authors who are perceived to have encountered a significant block, including Joseph Mitchell, Henry Roth, and Ralph Ellison, published a considerable amount of influential work in their lifetimes. These writers moreover shared an uncanny interest in documenting precarious matters of social and political morality, often disregarding conventions of craft and narrative coherence. This is no thematic coincidence. While all of these writers struggled ii independently through personal and intellectual crises, explaining the complex works they produced as specimens of mounting, monolithic block evades the unresolved moral questions—especially of race, ethnicity, class, and progress—they each confronted, however incompletely, in boldly realistic fictions and other accounts. A block myth represents a transfer of the burden of social and political morality from society to the individual writer in crisis. This study identifies this phenomenon as a modern critical problem, resists it where necessary, and documents the specific American moral emergencies that block myths conceal. Part One tracks the history of block as a philosophical placeholder, tracing the concept in American literary history from William James’s The Principles of Psychology (1890) through the midcentury psychoanalytic vogue and the rise of psychological realism as a dominant genre. Part Two provides a series of case studies or production profiles of three writers who have supposedly been blocked, Mitchell, Roth, and Ellison, examining how block myths frequently conceal or evade morally realistic literary gestures. iii The dissertation of Kevin Christopher Moore is approved. Michael Cohen Michael Colacurcio Mark McGurl Anna More Eric Sundquist, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2013 iv For My Parents v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS viii VITA x PART ONE : WRITER ’S BLOCK SINCE 1890 I. Mythos 2 II. Kairos: Writer’s Block in 1890 16 III. Method: No Secret Miracles 45 IV. Realism 76 PART TWO : CASE STUDIES IN AMERICAN MORAL REALISM I. Disclosures: Profiling Production 101 II. Unblocking Henry Roth: Not Calling It Sleep 110 III. Unblocking Joseph Mitchell: Joe Gould’s Secret ’s Secret 145 IV. Unblocking Ralph Ellison: In ‘Trouble’ with Huck 179 EPILOGUE : THE RETIREMENT OF PHILIP ROTH 236 WORKS CITED 242 STRUCTURAL NOTE : This study is broken into two major parts, which pursue two distinct critical projects within the study’s larger goal of explaining writer’s block as a cultural myth. “Part One: Writer’s Block since 1890” provides a general theoretical account of block as a critical and philosophical problem, and is made up of four major sections (some of which contain additional subsections, which are marked in the text as they occur). These major sectional divisions reflect movements in an accumulating argument rather than autonomous chapters, and my decision to refer vi to them as “sections” rather than as chapters within the text is deliberate. “Part Two: Profiling Production: Case Studies in American Moral Realism” provides specific case studies, examining in depth three writers whose careers have been marked by block myths. Although the individual components of Part Two are more autonomous than those contained in Part One, for consistency I also call them “sections.” They include a brief methodological note (“I. Disclosures”) followed by the case studies themselves on Joseph Mitchell, Henry Roth, and Ralph Ellison respectively. Section numbering restarts in Part Two, and throughout the study I generally cross-reference various subunits as “Part One, Section I,” “Part Two, Section IV,” etc. The Epilogue, “The Retirement of Philip Roth,” is an autonomous component. vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many people and institutions have contributed to the making of this dissertation, more than I can possibly cite here. The project’s origins lie at the University of Arizona, where the idea of writer’s block as a cultural myth first came to me through the discovery of Joseph Mitchell in a remarkable graduate seminar in 2005 led by Charlie Bertsch. In Tucson, the faith of Charlie, Edgar Dryden, and Greg Jackson gave me the confidence to pursue my own critical voice. Once at UCLA, the guidance of Eric Sundquist, Mark McGurl, and Michael Colacurcio brought the study into maturity. These three mentors, each in his own way, taught me how to read historically without losing sight of literary texts themselves. Together their intelligence, humanity, and vast learning made UCLA an incredible place to study American literature and culture. Michael Cohen and Anna More joined the project later, adding rich, new dimensions to my method and vision, and demonstrating by example how to negotiate complex archives. Both are models of scholarly rigor and generosity. Two important conversations—one with Sianne Ngai, the other with Mike Rose— helped me refine my topic as one focused specifically on writer’s block rather than literary silence in general. A decade of cheese-sandwich lunches with Rabbi Norman Hirsh in Seattle taught me how and why to ground the intellect in moral reality. And although he doesn’t know it, the lucky discovery of a digital lecture by Leroy Searle, my earliest mentor from my undergraduate days at the University of Washington, gave me the momentum to push through the rigors of William James in pursuit of the origins of mental blocking as a philosophical problem. The Myth of Writer’s Block benefitted enormously from feedback offered in the settings of two working groups at UCLA: Brian Kim Stefans’s Modernist/Experimental Literature and Text-Art (M/ELT) reading group, and especially Christopher Looby’s Americanist Research Colloquium. In these and other contexts within the UCLA English Department, interactions with colleagues including Jack Caughey, Taly Ravid, Jacquelyn Ardam, Allan Borst, Elisa Harkness, and especially viii Christian Reed left significant marks on the project’s evolution. Conversations with Jan Frodesen, Dan Wuebben, and Chris Dean at UC Santa Barbara, and K.J. Peters at Loyola Marymount University helped guide me toward composition studies and cognitive psychology as essential fields to explore in a study on block. The friendship of Andrea Modarres, whose academic journey has fortunately followed an uncannily parallel course to my own, has for almost a decade kept me grounded and hopeful. Financial support for the project was given in the form of a series of research fellowships from the UCLA/Mellon Program on the Holocaust in American Literature and Culture, travel and fellowship funding from the UCLA Department of English, as well as fellowship support from the UCLA Graduate Division. The staff of the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies, and especially Jeanette Gilkison in the English Department, provided extraordinary practical support. Without the help of staff members at the Center for Jewish History, the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Reading Room, and Special Collections at UC San Diego’s Mandeville Library, I would have been adrift in the papers of Henry Roth, Ralph Ellison, Ernest Hemingway, and George Oppen. For his gracious permission to cite unpublished materials from the archives of Henry Roth, I wish to thank Lawrence Fox. I thank John F. Callahan and Adam Bradley for their assistance with the Ellison archive. I also thank Ezra Cappell for an illuminating conversation about Henry Roth in the unlikely setting of Snowbird, Utah. Most of all I thank the smartest reader of culture I know, Deborah Harris-Moore, who makes it impossible to believe in writer’s block. ix VITA EDUCATION C.Phil. University of California, Los Angeles. 2010. M.A. English. University of Arizona, Tucson. 2007. B.A. English. University of Washington, Seattle. 2003. PUBLICATIONS “Parting at the Windmills: Malamud’s ‘The Fixer’ as Historical Metafiction.” Arizona Quarterly 69.1 (Spring 2013). 91-118. Review of Leaving the Atocha Station , by Ben Lerner. MAKE Productions . 3 Aug. 2012. <www.makemag.com/blog/review-leaving-the-atocha-station-by-ben-lerner/>.