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Durham E-Theses The Same Authority as God: The U. S. Presidency and Executive Power in the Works of Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth and Cormac McCarthy ADDINALL-BIDDULPH, CHARLES How to cite: ADDINALL-BIDDULPH, CHARLES (2015) The Same Authority as God: The U. S. Presidency and Executive Power in the Works of Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth and Cormac McCarthy, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/11283/ Use policy This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives 3.0 (CC BY-NC-ND) Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk 2 Charles (Thom) Addinall-Biddulph “The Same Authority as God”: The U. S. Presidency and Executive Power in the Works of Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth and Cormac McCarthy ABSTRACT This thesis aims to interrogate the role and representation of the United States presidency, presidential figures and avatars, and the question of executive power more generally, in the works of Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth and Cormac McCarthy. Observing a gap in current criticism of these authors, and American literature generally, I propose that the presidency/executive provides a new and important way of mapping these authors’ work. In this I seek to build on Sean McCann’s work on this area in A Pinnacle of Feeling. My project situates itself in a historical framework, investigating the extensive network of historical evidence that each author uses in their conception of and dialogue with the presidency and executive power. My argument takes Pynchon’s portrayal of George Washington, the United States’ semi-mythical first president, in Mason & Dixon as its starting point, then proceeds to consider a range of texts before finally discussing the presence of Ronald Reagan and the rise of corporate power in McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. I posit that in each of these authors’ work, the executive power is present simultaneously as an embodied and a “phantom” force, shaping the narrative and subjective individual experiences even when characters are not expressly engaged in political activity. A complex relay between embodied and phantom forces is apparent, with the identity and even physicality of individual presidential figures and avatars substantially affecting the operation of this power, amid a nuanced dialogue with the nation’s historical narrative. This dynamic occurs across these authors’ work, although they have divergent political and literary approaches. This thesis aims finally to establish this framework of executive power as a fundamental aspect of these authors’ writing that is vital to understanding their thinking about the United States, its history, and socio-political context, which could ultimately be extended to many other cultural and literary texts and their producers. 1 “THE SAME AUTHORITY AS GOD”: THE U. S. PRESIDENCY AND EXECUTIVE POWER IN THE WORKS OF THOMAS PYNCHON, PHILIP ROTH, AND CORMAC McCARTHY CHARLES (THOM) ADDINALL-BIDDULPH, BA (Hons), MA Ph.D THESIS DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF DURHAM 2015 2 CONTENTS List of illustrations…5 Acknowledgements…6 INTRODUCTION…8 “I am the President of the United States, clothed in immense power”: the presidency in cultural history…8 Executive power in the United States…12 McCarthy, Pynchon, and Roth: presidential texts and textual presidents…16 Critical contexts…27 The phantom presidency…35 CHAPTER ONE: TWO SIXTIES DECADES: THOMAS PYNCHON’S COUNTER- REVOLUTIONARY PRESIDENTS…45 Washington the myth, Washington the man…46 Washington as eager capitalist…52 Thomas Jefferson’s cameo…57 Failed revolutions: the 1760s and the 1960s…58 Challenging America’s foundations…62 The cost of the 1960s failure: Vineland and Reagan…64 Circular narrative: the novel’s opening and conclusion…66 The presence of Nixon and the misoneistic impulse…70 The authoritarian state…77 It almost happened here: the REX 84 allegations…82 Political engagement and the hope for resistance…86 CHAPTER TWO: THE PUBLIC AND THE PRIVATE: PHILIP ROTH’S PRESIDENTIAL FICTIONS…91 ‘Positive Thinking on Pennsylvania Avenue’: the president as God’s equal…94 Nixonian satires…98 “A HUMAN BEING LIVES HERE”: the private presidential figure in The Human Stain…106 Could it happen here? The Plot Against America’s complicated relationship with presidential democracy…119 Exit Ghost and the departure from political engagement…143 3 CHAPTER THREE: CORMAC McCARTHY: THE “IMP” OF GOVERNMENTAL FORCE AND THE RISE OF CORPORATE POWER…154 Mexican authority and American power…156 Historical context and detail…159 The “imp”: government as legitimising force…162 Textual figures of government…166 “Suzerain of the earth”: the judge…170 Blood Meridian’s Gothicness and the frontier myth…176 No Country for Old Men: executive weakness and corporate power in the new West…189 American anarchy and the role of technology…190 The corporate psychopath…193 The frail executive…195 Bell as elected sheriff/Chigurh as corporate agent…197 The novel’s context: the rise of Reagan, cowboy President…200 Chigurh and the Cold War…202 Reagan’s influence…204 The outlaw, and individual responsibility and power…206 Power over life and death…209 The novel’s other historical contexts…211 Governing ‘the good’ and ‘the bad’…212 George W. Bush: another cowboy president…213 The Western image…214 The border and international contexts…217 Vietnam’s presence in the text…220 Questioning borders…221 No “country” for old men…224 CONCLUSION: “THERE’S ALWAYS A FEDERAL ANGLE”…227 BIBLIOGRAPHY…234 4 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1: Horatio Greenough's widely maligned grandiose statue of Washington…37 Figure 2: Peter H. Burnett, first governor of California…151 Figure 3: Bedtime for Brezhnev poster (1981)…188 Figure 4: Ronald Reagan as a deputy US marshal in Law & Order (1953)…203 Figure 5: Ronald Reagan as president, wearing a cowboy hat…204 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the following people for their support, help, and inspiration in the course of this project. First and foremost, my parents, Jeannine Addinall and Geoffrey Biddulph, without whose support I would not be where I am now in so many ways. Samuel Thomas, who has been an outstanding, patient, understanding, knowledgeable, and genial supervisor, and who is responsible for my discovering Pynchon in the first place. David Varley for many conversations about the world of academia and thesis-writing, and Chris Wright for long discussions about Pynchon and U.S. politics. James McNaughton, Faye Widdowfield, and Nick Wright for being my closest friends and moral support system. Thomas Asch for first inspiring an already-brewing interest in U.S. politics. The University of Durham, and specifically the Department of English Studies, for being such a fantastic community. 6 The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without the author's prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. 7 Introduction “I am the President of the United States, clothed in immense power”: the presidency in cultural history1 The American presidency – both the institution and the individuals who have held the office – has long been a common subject for artistic depiction, to the point of fetishisation, in the United States. In the past three decades, there has been a proliferation of pop culture products relating to the presidency. Televisual depictions have proliferated. These range from the idealistic liberal optimism of The West Wing (NBC, 1999-2006), to the dark machinations of Frank Underwood in House of Cards (Netflix, 2013- ). Veep (HBO, 2012- ) portrays the presidency through the satirical lens of a situation comedy focussing on executive incompetence, while the action series 24 (Fox, 2001-10) displays an obsession with the president, and his or her capacity to act in extremely unethical and even treacherous ways. Films have posited the president as an action hero, such as Harrison Ford in Air Force One (Wolfgang Petersen, 1997); an individual citizen looking for romance like any other ordinary person might, as in The American President (Rob Reiner, 1995); a folksy, intellectual hero, as Steven Spielberg presents Abraham Lincoln in his account of the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment, simply entitled Lincoln (Steven Spielberg, 2012); helpless to the point of absurdity against extraterrestrial invasion in Mars Attacks! (Tim Burton, 1996); or an inspirational figure spurring military pilots on to victory against a different unearthly force in Independence Day (Roland Emmerich, 1996). Earlier depictions, during the Cold War period, range from the exasperated Merkin Muffley in Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, 1964), to Richard Nixon, physically absent but constantly present, in All the President’s Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976), a cinematic portrayal of Bernstein and Woodward’s investigation into the Watergate scandal. Various documentaries and documentary series, such as C-SPAN’s American Presidents: Life Portraits (1999) and PBS’ The American President (2000), both of which covered the lives of each individual president up to that point in American history, have also fed into the cultural consciousness of the presidency and those holding the office. Myron A. Levine’s observation that “in recent decades…Hollywood has shown a renewed interest in a presidency that has assumed new, and sometimes even quite terrifying, policy 1 Lincoln. Dir. Steven Spielberg. 20th Century Fox, 2012. 8 responsibilities” is germane here.2 The power of the presidency has grown substantially since World War II, as has the executive branch, which now sprawls across fifteen federal executive departments employing many thousands of citizens – in 2012, the executive branch employed 2,697,000 civilians.3 The president of the United States is frequently described as the ‘leader of the free world’, and is charged in the global imagination with the defence of the (cultural) West.