THE LACK OF A FUTURE: UTOPIAN ABSENCE AND LONGING IN TWENTIETH- AND TWENTY-FIRST- CENTURY AMERICAN FICTION A dissertation submitted to Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Geoffrey Moses May, 2013 Dissertation written by Geoffrey Moses Ph.D., Kent State University, USA, 2013 M.A., Carnegie Mellon University, USA, 2005 B.A., Sarah Lawrence College, USA, 2002 Approved by Kevin Floyd, Associate Professor of English, Chair, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Tammy Clewell, Professor of English, Member, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Robert Trogdon, Professor of English, Member, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Kenneth Bindas, Professor of History, Member, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Richard Serpe, Professor of Sociology, Member, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Accepted by Robert W. Trogdon, Chair, Department of Computer Science Raymond A. Craig, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences ii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1 UPTON SINCLAIR'S ANTI-UTOPIAN METHODS......................................33 CHAPTER 2 TOTALITY, POTENTIALITY, AND HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS IN DOS PASSOS' U.S.A.................................................................................................... 75 CHAPTER 3 ROBERT COOVER, RICHARD NIXON, AND THE SEARCH FOR AN APOLITICAL UTOPIA....................................................................................115 CHAPTER 4 THOMAS PYNCHON, AGAINST THE DAY, AND UTOPIAN POTENTIALITY...............................................................................................155 CODA..............................................................................................................................201 BIBLIOGRAPHY..........................................................................................................206 iii DEDICATION To my parents, without whom, for better or worse, I would never have accomplished this. iv Introduction This dissertation is about utopia. Specifically, it is about utopia as conceptualized in twentieth-century American literature. I first became interested in this topic when I saw that Thomas Pynchon's novel Against the Day was covering much the same time period and thus much of the same political terrain as Upton Sinclair's advocacy novels from the first several decades of the century. Naturally, the tone and general philosophy of Pynchon's novel is worlds apart from Sinclair's work, but I became interested in the way the two represent different ways of thinking about both politics and utopia. How does a novel's sociopolitical milieu determine the terms in which it is possible to conceptualize utopia? How do purely personal ideals and political aspiration interact in utopian terms? For that matter, is “political utopia” even possible? To try to answer these questions, I have chosen four texts to examine. The first is a pair of novels by Upton Sinclair, King Coal (1917) and The Coal War (1976; published posthumously). These represent an earnest effort to expose the exploitive living conditions of miners and agitate for a redress of the situation. The second is John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy, consisting of the novels The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936). Dos Passos' politics in these books are similar to those of Sinclair, but the tone is considerably more pessimistic. They could easily be read as a rebuttal to the latter's work. Jumping forty years forward, the third book is Robert Coover's novel The Public Burning (1977), about the days in June 1953 leading up to the 1 2 executions of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. This novel is part of a postmodern milieu, and therefore qualitatively different than either of the examples to come before it. From it, we can see that the relationship between the political and utopian has become radically altered, as indeed has the meaning of both of those terms. Finally, there is Against the Day (2006) itself—a novel that, while identifiably in the same postmodern tradition as The Public Burning, is distinct from it—as, indeed, distinct from Pynchon's own previous work—in that it conceptualizes utopia in a different, somewhat more optimistic way. The central point of commonality between these novels is that their approaches to utopia all consist of elaborate mechanisms that, explicitly or implicitly, show that the strains of utopia that they are fumbling towards are in fact impossible. The only one to insist otherwise—to present utopia as anything other than a brief, transient moment, present only to ultimately emphasize its absence—is Against the Day, and as I show, that novel does so in a completely different vein than any of the others under consideration. What I am most interested in as regards utopia, then, is not so much the thing itself as it is the utopia-shaped absence that we see in these works, an absence which informs them all in different ways. It is often taken for granted that utopia has become difficult or impossible to achieve in a postmodern milieu, due to various factors having to do with the fragmentation of historical continuities and a general loss of any teleological context in which to frame them. But in this dissertation, I go beyond this conventional wisdom to consider more specifically the factors that lead to this state of affairs. In that 3 sense, my work here is a narrative, explicating the specific mechanisms that seem to make utopia so difficult, and not just in a postmodern era. The Personal and the Political Another important aspect of this work is the question of how the political and personal interact. When I refer to the “personal,” I am talking about the pursuit of relationships, romantic or otherwise, that do not, in and of themselves, appear to contribute to political goals. The personal can be utopian in its own right, but it has to contend with of whether, if political utopia cannot be achieved, this other version is actually valuable, or whether it is nothing more than a hollow consolation. All of the writers I investigate here are concerned, in one way or another, with the question of the political and personal. As will become apparent, another part of the argument I am making here is that there is a problem, which is that these two factors are out of balance in these novels. The authors do have the idea that there is some connection between the two; that the political cannot be very effective if people are not able to form substantial relationships with one another—but they do not as a rule pursue this analysis further. In the first and second chapters, neither Sinclair nor Dos Passos ask whether there is any way that relationships could, even if they do not seem to be providing any concrete political advantage, be useful nonetheless; for them, the answer 4 would obviously be that there is not. In the third and fourth chapters, there is a sense in both Coover and Pynchon that politics as it exists is so divorced from actual socioeconomic reality that the only viable option is to pursue personal utopias—though this, as I argue, proves highly problematic in its own right, as it is not so easy, or necessarily desirable, to try to separate personal and political. Taxonomies of Utopia Fredric Jameson suggests that the essential problem with the notion of “utopia” in a postmodern setting comes from the idea that “postmodernism is . at one with the definitive 'end of ideologies,” and that “'ideology in this sense meant Marxism, and its 'end' went hand-in-hand with the end of Utopia” (Postmodernism 159). Jameson disputes the idea that this is a wholly accurate summation, but argues that it's true inasmuch as the nature of utopia has changed: The utopian impulses of the sixties did not . coalesce in that way [the way typified by earlier works like Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward], but rather produced a vital range of micropolitical movements . whose common denominator is the resurgent problematic of nature in a variety of (often anticapitalist) forms. (160). 5 In other words, “utopia” becomes a synchronic, or spatial form; rather than a diachronic, or temporal one: it thinks in terms of structures or geographies rather than histories or teleologies. This is a mixed blessing: on the one hand, “it may take away . the capacity to think time and History;” on the other, it “also opens a door onto a whole new domain for libidinal investment of the Utopian and even the protopolitical type” (160). I do not dispute the validity of this narrative, but I want to suggest another. Utopia of a certain sort—i.e., that which can be a synonym for Marxism or, more broadly, any radical leftist reconfiguring of society—was, for writers like Sinclair and Dos Passos, highly problematic well before postmodernity became ascendent. However, the move to postmodernity does affect the ways in which we can think about utopia or its absence, and I wish to build upon the disappointment that it can engender and ask: if the idea of a temporal utopia is dead in postmodern terms, then in what ways do we register its absence? What strategies do writers and characters use to attempt to enact it in spite of everything? I do not think it is adequate to simply accept that this type of utopia simply vanishes. As I argue, it was always felt more by its absence than its presence, which means that when it seems to be absent in a different way, we should consider this way, rather than assuming that it has simply become an irrelevant consideration. Each of the books I discuss can be read as a particular reaction to the impossibility of utopia, and these reactions are highly revealing of the landscapes in which they were written. King Coal is agitating for utopia, and even believes to some degree that this utopia is possible, but as I argue, it is actually, however consciously, a self-defeating argument: the novel is constructed such that actual utopia is precluded. 6 U.S.A. has definitively decided that utopia is impossible, and shows in quite some detail why this is the case. I, however, show that, while Dos Passos makes a compelling case, his devotion to a particular sort of utopia blinds him to other possibilities; that is, to the possibility of a utopia that does not accord with the sort that he is searching for.