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Allegories of American Authorship in the Age of Terrorism

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Allegories of American Authorship in the Age of Terrorism DEATH THREAT LETTERS: ALLEGORIES OF AMERICAN AUTHORSHIP IN THE AGE OF TERRORISM by JONATHAN ROSS MCKAY A thesis submitted to the Department of English In conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Queen‘s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada (April, 2011) Copyright © Jonathan Ross McKay, 2011 Abstract This dissertation examines novels that use terrorism to allegorize the threatened position of the literary author in contemporary culture. Allegory is a term that has been differently understood over time, but which has consistently been used by writers to articulate and construct their roles as authors. In the novels I look at, the terrorist challenge to authorship results in multiple deployments of allegory, each differently illustrating the way that allegory is used and authorship constructed in the contemporary American novel. Don DeLillo‘s Mao II (1991), first puts terrorists and authors in an oppositional pairing. The terrorist‘s ability to traffic in spectacle is presented as indicative of the author‘s fading importance in contemporary culture and it is one way that terrorism allegorizes threats to authorship. In Philip Roth‘s Operation Shylock (1993), the allegorical pairing is between the text of the novel and outside texts – newspaper reports, legal cases, etc. – that the novel references and adapts in order to bolster its own narrative authority. Richard Powers‘s Plowing the Dark (1999) pairs the story of an imprisoned hostage, craving a single book, with employees of a tech firm who are creating interactive, virtual reality artworks. Focusing on the reader‘s experience, Powers‘s novel posits a form of authorship that the reader can take into consideration, but which does not seek to control the experience of the text. Finally, I look at two of Paul Auster‘s twenty- first century novels, Travels in the Scriptorium (2007) and Man in the Dark (2008), to suggest that the relationship between representations of authors and terrorists changed after 9/11. Auster‘s author-figures forward an ethics of authorship whereby novels can use narrative to buffer readers against the portrayal of violent acts in a culture that is suffused with traumatizing imagery. ii Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank my dissertation committee, particularly my supervisor, Professor Asha Varadharajan, for her willingness to meet in whichever town we both ended up in and for working through early drafts until they had the sound of sense. Thanks to my second reader, Professor Molly Wallace, for always being ready with excellent, engaging contributions whenever I would send too much writing all at once. I would also like to thank everyone in the homes of couches and futons I lived on during the commuting months from Megabus Kingston arrivals to Megabus Toronto departures. Thanks to everyone I met through Queen‘s (you know who you are without making this look like a high school yearbook quote). You all made graduate school an excellent decision, if not a sound financial one, and ensured that the years this degree took would have been wasted without the times we were. Finally, this project is dedicated to Andrew, my partner of going on ten years, whose tireless work ethic shamed me into getting this dissertation finished in good time. I‘ve always had the sense that I‘m catching up to him. I still am. iii Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................................ ii Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... iii List of Figures ................................................................................................................................. vi Chapter 1 Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 1 1.1 The End of Postmodernism? .................................................................................................. 1 1.2 How American Authorship is Studied ................................................................................... 6 1.2.1 Authorship as a Profession .............................................................................................. 7 1.2.2 Authorship‘s Poststructuralist Inheritance .................................................................... 10 1.3 A History of Allegory and Authorship ................................................................................ 14 1.4 The Terrorist Novel.............................................................................................................. 27 1.5 What ―Terrorism‖ Means in Theory .................................................................................... 31 1.6 From 1991 to 9/11: Terror and Authorship .......................................................................... 36 1.7 Chapter Summaries .............................................................................................................. 48 Chapter 2 Definitions: From Don DeLillo‘s Mao II to Falling Man ............................................ 54 2.1 Coming to the Terms of the Terrorist Novel: Mao II........................................................... 55 2.2 Personality (―great men‖/crowd) ......................................................................................... 61 2.3 Publication (celebrity/recluse) ............................................................................................. 63 2.4 Aura: The Currency of Authorship ...................................................................................... 66 2.5 Author as Terrorist: ―raids on human consciousness‖ ......................................................... 69 2.6 Words and Deeds ................................................................................................................. 75 2.7 Preservation and Posterity: Archives and Bodies ................................................................ 83 2.8 From Mao II to 9/11: Falling Man ..................................................................................... 86 2.9 Not Too Political .................................................................................................................. 92 Chapter 3 Philip Roth‘s Operation Shylock: A Confession and the Construction of Authorship . 96 3.1 Contextualizing Philip Roth and ―Philip Roth‖ ................................................................... 99 3.2 ―So there he was. Or wasn‘t.‖: Allegory and the Construction of Authorship .................. 102 3.3 The Language of Terror ..................................................................................................... 107 3.4 ―between the shtetl born and the Newark-born‖: Negotiating American Authorship ....... 116 3.5 Thinking Back on the 1990s .............................................................................................. 128 iv Chapter 4 The Barred Window: Technology, Terrorism and the Limits of Transcendence in Richard Powers‘s Plowing the Dark ............................................................................................ 131 4.1 Plowing the Dark: Richard Powers‘s Retrospection ......................................................... 131 4.2 Contextualizing Richard Powers ........................................................................................ 136 4.3 ―Being and Seeming‖ ......................................................................................................... 138 4.4 Reality and Virtual Spaces: Plowing the Dark‘s Many Rooms ........................................ 140 4.5 Adie Klarpol: Used by the World Machine ....................................................................... 143 4.6 Taimur Martin: The Locked Room‘s Prisoner ................................................................... 148 4.7 Hypertext and the Author‘s ―Virtual Presence‖ ................................................................. 155 4.7.1 Virtual Presence .......................................................................................................... 160 4.8 Phenomenology and the Technology of the Book ............................................................. 163 4.9 Transcendent Gestures ....................................................................................................... 166 4.10 Locked In ......................................................................................................................... 169 4.11 Looking Out For Us ......................................................................................................... 171 Chapter 5 Paul Auster‘s Ethics of Authorship in the Post 9/11 Novel ........................................ 174 5.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 174 5.1.1 Leviathan (1992) ......................................................................................................... 179 5.2 Travels in the Scriptorium (2007) ...................................................................................... 181 5.2.1 Watching Mr. Blank .................................................................................................... 183 5.2.2 Reading and Writing Sigmund Graf ........................................................................... 186 5.2.3 Mr. Blank‘s Punishment ............................................................................................
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