Existential Suburbia: the Influence of Sartrean Existentialism on US Fiction of the Suburbs from the 1960S to the End of the Twentieth Century
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Existential Suburbia: The influence of Sartrean existentialism on US fiction of the suburbs from the 1960s to the end of the twentieth century by Peter Latham University College London A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Declaration I, Peter Latham, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. Signature……………...Peter Latham Date……………………26/08/16 2 Abstract American suburban fiction is often viewed as satirical social commentary, critiquing its affluent, dull, and conformist cultural environment. In this thesis, however, I argue that a significant strand of such fiction, published between the early 1960s and the beginning of the twenty-first century, was concerned with broader existential themes, and was strongly influenced by European existentialism, particularly by Sartre’s philosophy. While this influence is apparent in American urban fiction of the 1950s, for example in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and Richard Wright’s The Outsider (1953), it is far more fully developed, and ‘Americanized’, in the suburban fiction of the 1960s – in John Updike’s Rabbit, Run (1960), Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road (1961), and Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer (1962), all of which, I argue, are fundamentally concerned with the notion of existential authenticity. I suggest that existentialist, and specifically Sartrean, themes are developed in subsequent fiction – from a concern with existential contingency in an increasingly threatening and violent suburban environment, apparent in such novels as Joyce Carol Oates’ Expensive People (1968), John Cheever’s Bullet Park (1969), Updike’s Rabbit Redux (1971), and Ann Beattie’s Falling in Place (1980), to an obsession with entropy, emblematic of the desire to escape existential freedom through stasis, in Joseph Heller’s Something Happened (1974), Updike’s Rabbit is Rich (1981), and the stories of Raymond Carver; and a retreat into solipsism portrayed in later twentieth-century fiction, in Heller’s novel, but also Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe novels, published between 1986 and 2014 (The Sportswriter, Independence Day, The Lay of the Land, and Let Me Be Frank with You), and Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life (1999) and Aloft (2004). I argue that the spatial and conceptual indeterminacy of the suburbs, their liminality, engenders existential anguish and unease, thus making them an especially conducive cultural environment for these authors’ thematic concerns, one in which they are able to explore the ideas central to Sartre’s existentialism. Existential Suburbia traces the influence of Sartre’s philosophy, developed primarily in Being and Nothingness (1943), on the authors of suburban fiction in this period, both directly and indirectly, and provides a thematic (rather than chronologically based) analysis of the novels and stories based on key Sartrean concepts. Finally, the thesis discusses the revisionist TV series Mad Men (2007-2015), set in the 1960s and heavily influenced by the stories of John Cheever, considering its concern with existential authenticity and gender relations. 3 Acknowledgements I would like to thank Michael Sayeau for graciously agreeing to be my supervisor when Kasia Boddy left UCL in 2012, and for his advice and guidance on all aspects of this thesis over the last four years. I am also grateful to Kasia, my supervisor for almost two years, for being so generous with her time and for helping me develop and clarify the thematic focus of my research. In addition, I would like to express my gratitude to Sarah Richmond, in the UCL Department of Philosophy, who has helped me greatly in developing my understanding of key concepts in Sartre’s philosophy, and who recommended some excellent commentaries on Sartre. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to Philippa Kennedy and Simon Pate, colleagues and friends, who have been supportive throughout my research and the writing of this thesis. 4 CONTENTS Declaration ………………………………………………………………….……………...2 Abstract ……………………………………………………………………………………..3 Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………....4 Introduction: Existential Suburbia……………………………………………………...6 Chapter One: Entropic Suburbia…….…. .............................................................. 37 The concept of entropy ............................................................................................ 37 Entropy as an existentialist concept and the Sartrean concept of bad faith .............. 38 The literary treatment of entropy ............................................................................. 41 Suburbia as entropic ................................................................................................ 44 “More and more things seem to be slipping into a state of dissolution”: Informational, physical and existential entropy in Something Happened .................. 44 “Running out of gas”: Environmental, physical and metaphysical entropy in Rabbit is Rich………………...50 “Everything Goes”: Entropy and death in the stories of Raymond Carver ................ 56 Chapter Two: Suburban Solipsism ...................................................................... 70 Solipsism and existentialism ................................................................................... 70 Solipsism and literature ........................................................................................... 73 Solipsistic suburbia ................................................................................................. 76 Something Happened: “The consolations of unreachable inwardness” .................... 76 The Bascombe novels: “Disappearing into your own life” ......................................... 81 A Gesture Life and Aloft: “Modes of consciousness” ................................................ 94 Chapter Three: Existential Contingency and Suburban Violence .................... 104 Decade of nightmares ............................................................................................ 105 The ‘vulgar existentialist’ suburban novel ............................................................... 107 Violence and existentialism.................................................................................... 111 Violent suburbia ..................................................................................................... 113 Expensive People: “Dreaming the dream” ............................................................. 113 Bullet Park: “A terrible kind of darkness” ................................................................ 124 Rabbit Redux: “Spinning in the void” ...................................................................... 130 Falling in Place: “You disappear but can still be seen” ........................................... 137 Chapter Four: Suburban Inauthenticity……………………………………………..144 The concept of authenticity………………………………………………………………144 The post-war concept of authenticity .................................................................... 144 The Sartrean concept of authenticity .................................................................... 149 Suburbia as inauthentic ......................................................................................... 154 Rabbit, Run: “A pure open space in the middle of a dense net” ............................. 154 Revolutionary Road: “An enormous, obscene delusion” ........................................ 161 The Moviegoer: “The worst kind of self-deception” ................................................ 168 Mad Men, suburbia and (in)authentic identity: “And who are you supposed to be?” ...................................................................... 175 Conclusion: America’s influence on Sartre and the Americanisation of existentialism ...... 200 Bibliography ........................................................................................................ 217 5 Introduction: Existential Suburbia When the French philosopher and playwright Gabriel Marcel described Jean-Paul Sartre as an existentialist in 1945, Sartre replied curtly, “My philosophy is a philosophy of existence; existentialism – I don’t know what it is,” despite having written an article entitled 'A More Precise Definition of Existentialism’ several months earlier for Action magazine.1 The following year, in response to criticism of his play The Respectful Prostitute, depicting racism in the American south, he stated, “I am not anti-American. I don’t even know what the word means.”2 Yet in the same year, despite his disavowals and professed incomprehension, Sartre propounded a philosophy he called existentialism, with which his name would become virtually synonymous, and was often (and increasingly in the late 1940s) vociferously anti-American in his views.3 The conception of existentialism as somehow antithetical to American culture became established during this period, and then became entrenched – so much so that ‘American existentialism’ is sometimes considered an oxymoron: Americans, supposedly, lack the European sensibilities that have produced great existentialist writers. Sartre famously commented that “there is no pessimism in America regarding human nature and social organisation.”4 Camus commented that America was a “country where everything is done to prove that life isn’t tragic,” and was disparaging of American materialism and its superficiality.5 Simone de Beauvoir, meanwhile, wrote that