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West, Mark Peter (2014) Between times: 21st century American fiction and the long sixties. PhD thesis. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5621/ Copyright and moral rights for this work are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This work cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Enlighten:Theses http://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] Between Times: 21st Century American Fiction and the Long Sixties Mark Peter West B.A., MLitt. Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Critical Studies College of Arts University of Glasgow May 2014 © Mark West 2014 Abstract This thesis examines conceptions of time and history in five American novels published between 1995 and 2012 which take as their subject matter events associated with the counterculture and New Left of the 1960s and 1970s. The thesis is organized around close readings of five novels. The first chapter focuses on Jennifer Egan‘s The Invisible Circus (1995) and argues that it incorporates a number of problematic temporal experiences which have the effect of establishing a key tension of all the novels considered here: the concern with contextualizing and historicizing particular events and cultural atmospheres while remaining faithful to utopian ideas of radical change. Chapter two argues that Dana Spiotta‘s Eat the Document (2006) is oriented both structurally and thematically towards a future in which the relationship between the 1960s and 1990s will more clearly understandable. The third chapter examines the way Christopher Sorrentino‘s Trance (2005) explores the multiplicitous nature of historical narratives, and how he distinguishes between those narratives and a conception of the bare events beneath them. The focus of chapter four is Lauren Groff‘s Arcadia (2012) and examines how conceptions of the relationship between humans and nature influence theories of time, mythic histories and post-apocalyptic narratives. The final chapter on David Foster Wallace‘s The Pale King (2011) argues that the tension between continuation and change found in the conversion narrative is partly reconciled by a conception of time that allows the moment of radical utopian change (the moment of conversion) to be one of re-entrance into history. At stake throughout is the way these novels‘ interpretation of particular events and larger cultural tendencies reveals and makes manifest various processes of historicization. I maintain a dual focus on the way these novels present historicization as something undertaken by individuals and societies and the ways in which these novels themselves not only engage in historicizations of the period but are in various ways self-conscious about doing so. If contemporary scholarship on the emergence of what has been called post- postmodern literature (Stephen J. Burn, Andrew Hoberek, Adam Kelly, Caren Irr) identifies a return to temporal concerns in recent fiction, the readings that comprise my thesis also make use of conceptions of time and history by Mark Currie, Jacques Derrida, Reinhold Niebuhr, Norman Mailer, Christopher Lasch, and Robert N. Bellah (among others) in order to ask: what are the particular material contours of the experiences of time and history manifested in these recent examples of the ‗sixties novel‘? ii Contents Acknowledgements iv List of Abbreviations v Introduction: Between Times 1 1. The Problems of History: Jennifer Egan‘s The Invisible Circus 11 2. Is It Time Yet?: Dana Spiotta‘s Eat the Document 39 3. The ‗Problems‘ of Multiplicity: Christopher Sorrentino‘s Trance 66 4. Revolutionary Pastoral: Lauren Groff‘s Arcadia 100 5. Called To Account: Time and Reconciliation in David Foster Wallace‘s The Pale King 132 Coda: The Changing Faces of Historicization 184 Bibliography 189 iii Acknowledgements Firstly I would like to thank the department of English Literature at Glasgow, who have encouraged and inspired my love of literature and my commitment to scholarship since I arrived to study on the evergreen MLitt in Modernities. I am appreciative too of the committee who awarded me the Alexander and Dixon Scholarship (Bryce Bequest) for the duration of my studies. I would especially like to thank my supervisors John Coyle and Vassiliki Kolocotroni, who have shown unfailing confidence in my project from day one. They afforded me the time to go down what were sometimes (necessary) dead-ends and their close reading of my work has helped make it what it is. My time at Glasgow has been enriched an untold amount by my friends in the postgraduate community here (particularly by those who have sustained the Theory@Random reading group). They have made it an immensely enjoyable and stimulating four years. In alphabetical order: Cara Berger, Tom Betteridge, Amy Bromley, Tom Coles, Rebecca DeWald, Andrew Eadie, Erik Fuhrer, Kat Hughes, Villy Karagouni, Henry King, Ben Knight, Calum Rodger, Graham Riach, Derek Ryan, Sam Wiseman, Sadia Zulfiqar. I would like to thank Marshall Boswell, Emily Hogg, Adam Kelly, Lee Konstantinou and Kasia Boddy for gracefully engaging in collegiate sharing and discussion of their work, and Stephen Burn for his encouragement. The attendees and speakers at the following conferences have provided eloquent and useful feedback on my work: Work in Process – Reading The Pale King, University of Antwerp, September 2011, the What Happens Now – 21st Century Writing in English conferences at the University of Lincoln, July 2010 and 2012, Invisible Circus: An International Conference on the Work of Jennifer Egan, Birkbeck, March 2014, Scottish Association for the Study of America annual conferences 2012 and 2013. My family instilled in me a love of learning from a very young age, and I want to thank them for ensuring that I was never in doubt about what was important in life. And finally I would like to thank Lil, to whom this thesis is dedicated, for giving me unswerving confidence, encouragement and love; for being there every step of the way. iv List of Abbreviations ETD Dana Spiotta Eat the Document (New York: Scribner, 2006) TPK David Foster Wallace The Pale King (New York, Boston, London: Little, Brown and Company, 2011) SN Stephen Paul Miller The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1999) v Introduction: Between Times In his book Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism, Stephen J. Burn suggests that one of the characteristics of recent American fiction is a return – after postmodernism‘s spatial emphasis – to questions of history and temporal experience. Uneasily using the term ―post-postmodern‖ to distinguish this emerging sensibility, Burn notes that ―[w]here the emphasis on character seems to differ between postmodern and post-postmodern fiction ... is in the degree of personal history dramatized by the author, and this is linked to alternative treatments of time‖ (2008, 24). In postmodern novels, explains Burn, there is often very little character backstory, and it appears only when something happens in the narrative that can only be made sense of through reference to a character‘s history. Time, in the postmodern novel, is a kind of last resort. By contrast, in the works of writers Burn calls post-postmodern, characters‘ personal histories are fuller because writers are happier to analeptically interrupt the passage of time in their narratives to explain things that have happened in the past and how they relate to and influence the present. For Burn, ―[t]his shift … represents a younger generation‘s more fundamental belief in the shaping influence of temporal process – that the things that happen to you in the past make a difference to who you are in the present‖ (2008, 25). Crucially, if these younger writers exhibit a greater confidence in relating and linking the past, the present, and the future, they also feel more able to assert that meaning can be made of those linkages. Peter Boxall, in Twenty-First Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction, has written of a ―new commitment to the materiality of history‖ (12) in contemporary fiction, and while his book focuses mainly on the British and Commonwealth novel we can detect something similar in recent American fiction. The novels considered in this thesis – by Jennifer Egan, Dana Spiotta, Christopher Sorrentino, Lauren Groff, and David Foster Wallace – are all, in varying ways, examples of writing trying to get to grips with the almost tactile reality of history, yet at the same time they place in question quite what we mean when we talk about materiality. In her book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Jane Bennett asks How did Marx‘s notion of materiality – as economic structures and exchanges that provoke many other events – come to stand for the materialist perspective per se? Why is there not a more robust debate between contending philosophies of materiality? (xvi) 1 Bennett asks this in the service of a posthumanist project that seeks to dissolve – or at least destabilize – traditional humanist binaries between human and animal, animate and inanimate, organic and inorganic, and her troubling of the Marxist notion of materiality as equalling economic conditions and structures aims to help articulate a ―vital materiality‖ (vii) comprised of organic and inorganic matter as well as abstract concepts. The writers considered in this thesis ask a similar question, though with less articulated aims and less radical conclusions, remaining in the human realm. The problems and insufficiencies that they find in conceptions of materiality stem from their understanding of their role as explorers and explicators of consciousness; these writers are interested in the materiality of phenomenological experience as much as the materiality of objective historical conditions.

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