©2020 William G. Welty ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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©2020 William G. Welty ALL RIGHTS RESERVED “FOLLOWING A STRANGE COURSE”: READING, RACE, AND THE ANACHRONISTIC HISTORIES OF POSTWAR AMAERICAN FICTION By WILLIAM G. WELTY A dissertation submitted to the School of Graduate Studies Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Literatures in English Written under the direction of David Kurnick and Michelle Stephens And approved by _____________________________________ _____________________________________ _____________________________________ _____________________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey May 2020 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION “Following A Strange Course”: Reading, Race, and the Anachronistic Histories of Postwar American Fiction by William G. Welty Dissertation Directors: David Kurnick and Michelle Stephens This dissertation retells a story of the American postwar period as a debate about what it means to be contemporary: a story made legible by tracing out an ongoing confluence of depictions of reading, anachronistic temporalities, and theorizations of race. Specifically, it tells the story of an ongoing argument about how the present is related to both the past and the future, and how the activity of reading has been a central, though often unremarked upon, aspect of that debate. The notion that the past is causally linked to the present is the foundation of any sense of historicism; this project, however, shows how that relationship was far from inevitable or desirable to the writers of the last half of the twentieth century. Their frequent pairings of descriptions of reading and an anachronistic imagination demonstrate their attempts to imagine other relationships to history, and the resulting perspectives that could help them reconcile seemingly contradictory ideas about race, politics, and literary innovation. The unique temporal connections embodied in reading activate that sense of anachronism and help them conceptualize what that perspective might look like: where the present is already history. These writers use anachronism to insist both on connecting to the material past in order to recover a usable sense of it and imagining historical distance from that past in order to see it in new ways. In working through that dual insistence in their scenes of reading, these authors provide a means for understanding their ii historical moment alongside our shifting present, since we now inhabit the future perspective they sought to imagine. This dissertation is deeply immersed in the two major literary histories of the late twentieth century: of postmodernity as an aesthetic form and of racial recovery work based in historicism Furthermore, tracing out the ongoing confluence of anachronism and reading complicates the assumptions of what Stephen Best has called “the archival turn” in recent literary criticism. By reconsidering the way we interpret history and race in novels, this project allows us to bring together two discourses associated with the postwar period but often thought to be mutually exclusive: ironic, experimental, and abstract writing on the one hand, and earnest, historically grounded, politically engaged writing on the other. Rather than choosing sides between an allegedly apolitical, ahistorical textual innovation and a sincere, ethical commitment to recovering racial histories, the writers in this study seek a perspective that can merge the two. Building on the work of scholars like Kwame Anthony Appiah, Brian McHale, Saidiya Hartman, and Fred Moten, this project reads these novelists as combining and expanding the differing understandings of history associated with each discourse. The main contribution, then, is viewing these literary texts and the debates around them through the lens of the imagined future; in other words, thinking anachronistically, just as this group of novelists strives to do. In looking forwards rather than back, the project attempts to view the present as if it were already history. iii Dedication For all those who taught me to read, especially my parents iv Acknowledgements So many people were so absolutely essential to the completion of this project that it would be impossible to name them all. To put it simply: thank you to my team of "faithful readers." Just as Tyrone Slothrop reads trashy magazines in Gravity's Rainbow, you suffered through my messy early drafts and helped transform them into the somewhat less messy version you are now reading. First and foremost, thanks to Michelle Stephens, David Kurnick, and Jeffrey Lawrence. Your support was much more than the line edits, thoughtful discussion, and extensive comments on rough drafts, though those were invaluable too. You helped me to keep believing in the project and in myself, even when things looked grim. Thanks also to Kinohi Nishikawa, my fourth reader, who generously gave his time and energy to help this project succeed. And thanks to Lynn Festa, whose dissertation workshops were essential in shaping this project into its current form; you should probably be listed as a co-author for chapter two. Thank you to my colleagues who read and commented on my drafts and in general made me a better scholar, particularly Moyang Li, Elizabeth Greeniaus, Caro Pirri, Margarita Castroman, Gabrielle Everett, Lech Harris, Sean Hughes, Alexander Mazzaferro, Brian Pietras, Jennifer Lalli, Tara Gilldea, Danielle Allor, Scott Challener, and Bakary Diaby. I could not have asked for a better cohort with which to share my graduate school experience. And in terms of institutional support, I could not have asked for two better people than Cheryl Robinson and Courtney Borack. Thank you to my parents, who I wish could still be here to see this; you always supported me even when I had to start supporting you. v And last but certainly not least, thank you to my wife Valerie. When you went out and bought a copy of Gravity's Rainbow after our first date, little did you know what you were in for. Thanks for following this strange course with me. vi And when you read about your reading in the time of your reading, mediacy is experienced immediately. -Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station vii Table of Contents Abstract ii Dedication iv Acknowledgements v Introduction. "The Hidden After-Hours of America" 1 *** Part I. “We Will Make Our Own Future Text” Chapter 1. Learning to Reed: History, Anachronism, and Race in Mumbo Jumbo 24 Chapter 2. Missed Connections: Imagining the Future in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow 63 *** Part II. "We Got More Yesterday Than Anybody" Chapter 3. "He Wants To Put His Story Next To Hers": Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the Problems With Anachronism 116 Chapter 4. From Anachronism to Sacred Time: Reading the Dead in Leslie Marmon Silko 166 *** Coda. "All our fevered history" 213 Bibliography 219 viii 1 Introduction. "The Hidden After-Hours of America” "A preface frequently saves us from the labor of reading the book it introduces. Perhaps not exactly from reading the book (although a really 'good' preface can even do that), but from the work, what can be the pain of reading." -Leo Bersani, Thoughts and Things "History is what hurts." -Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious I. How Soon Is Now? When I first read Ishmael Reed's 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo, I thought that it began with this line: "With the astonishing rapidity of Booker T. Washington's Grapevine Telegraph Jes Grew spreads through America following a strange course."1 An honest mistake, since this is the first line after the bibliographic information, the epigraphs, and the dedication page, which I had skipped over in my haste to begin the book. (I was preparing for my comprehensive exam.) However, the novel actually begins ten pages (and thirty years) earlier. Thus, the "strange course" followed by Jes Grew is modeled by the strange course of the novel's temporality, with its two beginnings. A few pages after this second beginning, the novel frames its sense of its narrative present, the 1920s, as "That 1 decade which doesn't seem so much a part of American history as the hidden After-Hours of America struggling to jam. To get through" (16). For Reed, history seems to run along multiple temporalities. It moves with "astonishing rapidity." And yet, it is also characterized by repetition, either in the novel's multiple openings, its sense of the 1920s repeating the 1890s, and the implied repetition of the time of its writing repeating the 1920s again. Finally, these historical moments, layered on top of each other, only exist "after" some other regularly scheduled 1 Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo (New York: Scribner, 1996), 13. Additional citations as "MJ" with page number in parentheses. 2 "hours," as a "hidden" late night "jam" session characterized by both "struggle" and improvisation. Central to the novel's understanding of all of those temporalities is a secret text, The Work, and the attempts of various characters to read it. Reed's thinking is that reading, both in his novel and in the real world, is essential to understanding the multiple beginnings, repetitions, and improvisations of the temporality of history. This dissertation retells a story of the American postwar period as a debate about what it means to be contemporary: a story made legible by tracing out an ongoing confluence of depictions of reading, anachronistic temporalities, and theorizations of race.2 Specifically, it tells the story of an ongoing argument about how the present is related to both the past and the future, and how the activity of reading has been a central, though often 2 This debate is broadly characterized by what Stephen Best has called the archival turn. See None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life (Durham: Duke UP, 2018). Best's work has been a guiding force throughout the completion of this dissertation. For him, the archival turn is based on the twin realizations that recovery is a fundamental imperative and also an impossibility.