The Post-Noir Novel: Pulp Genre, Alienation, and the Turn from Postmodernism in Contemporary American Fiction

THE POST-NOIR NOVEL: PULP GENRE, ALIENATION, AND THE TURN FROM POSTMODERNISM IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN FICTION Kenneth Jude Lota A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Chapel Hill 2020 Approved by: Jennifer Ho Heidi Kim Matthew Taylor Rick Warner Michelle Robinson © 2020 Kenneth Jude Lota ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Kenneth Lota: The Post-Noir Novel: Pulp Genre, Alienation, and the Turn from Postmodernism in Contemporary American Fiction (Under the direction of Jennifer Ho) This dissertation intervenes in critical debates about the aesthetic and ethical character of the contemporary literary moment by providing an in-depth case study of the evolving function of genre in the aftermath of postmodernism. It does so by examining the adoption and reinvention of the style, tropes, and themes of 1930s/40s hard-boiled crime fiction and film noir in a group of contemporary novels published between 1999 and 2013. The crux of the argument is that contemporary, post-postmodern writers turn to the noir tradition because it reflects a widespread sense of social alienation – of the estrangement of the individual from other people, from society as a whole, and even from oneself. In their reworkings of the genre, however, these contemporary authors seek ways of escaping that alienation and producing narratives of re- integration. The dissertation is divided into four chapters, each of which engages a theme appropriated from the classic noir period. The first chapter focuses on Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn and Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist, two quasi-hard-boiled-detective novels that explore their protagonists’ mental states through a focus on the relationship between language and knowledge. The second chapter traces the deconstruction of the hard-boiled male archetype along the lines of sexuality and race in Megan Abbott’s The Song Is You and Mat Johnson’s graphic novel Incognegro. The third chapter analyzes the role of communications technology in Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, comparing classic noir’s technological anxieties to contemporary concerns about the Internet. The fourth iii chapter turns to Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and China Miéville’s The City & the City to explore the significance of the city as a noir environment in contemporary literature. Overall, the dissertation offers one of the first thorough, systematic investigations into just what it means for contemporary writers to inhabit popular genres as a way of moving beyond postmodernism. iv This dissertation is dedicated to the memory of my grandfather, Don Ray Burrow (1934 – 2020). v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many people helped me along the way to completing this dissertation. First and foremost, I must acknowledge the invaluable contributions of my director, Jennifer Ho, who believed in this project from the beginning and whose guidance and consistent feedback have shaped it into what it is. I must also thank my other committee members, including Heidi Kim, Rick Warner, Michelle Robinson, and Matthew Taylor, all of whom offered valuable feedback and insight. Thanks also to Kenneth Hillis, whose teaching on film noir informed the third chapter in particular. A major thank you to Connie Eble, who sponsored the summer research fellowship during which I wrote the third chapter, and to the sponsors of the Frankel Dissertation Fellowship. I want to acknowledge and thank the many, many friends whose companionship enabled me to get through my graduate program, including Ani Govjian, Laura Broom, Katie Walker, Ryan Walker, Hannah Palmer, Bridget Donnelly, Ian Murray, Anneke Schwob, Susan O’Rourke, Mark Collins, Erin Collins, Christina Lee, Rae Yan, Jacob Watson, Mary Learner, Caitlin Berka, Che Sokol, Chloe Hamer, Chelsea Krieg, Sam Krieg, and Jessica Murray. Finally, I could not have accomplished anything without the support of my parents, Kenny and Cindy Lota; my sister, Merritt Lota; and my dog, Maizy Lota. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION..……………………………………………………………………………….1 Noir and the Contemporary Novel Beyond the Postmodern …………………………......1 Genre in the Contemporary Period……………………………………………………......5 A Brief History of Hard-Boiled Fiction and Film Noir………………………………….10 Definitions of Noir…………………………………………………………………….....14 Chapter Breakdown ...……………………………………………………………..…….19 CHAPTER I: ARTICULATING THE SELF IN THE POST-NOIR NOVEL…………………..24 A Brief History of Hard-Boiled Language and Thought………………………………...26 “The Language of Myself”: Speaking through Culture in Motherless Brooklyn…,,,…...34 “Depends on How Your Brain Works”: Thinking the Self in The Intuitionist ………….54 Beginning at the Ending………………………………………………………………….72 CHAPTER II: RACE, SEXUALITY, AND RE-WRITING THE HARD-BOILED MALE …...77 Gumshoes and the KKK: Noir’s Complicated History with Race………………………82 “A Case of Mistaken Identity”: Race and the Hard-Boiled Male in Incognegro………..88 “Jerry Understood Everything…”: Revising Hard-Boiled Heterosexuality in The Song Is You……………………………………………………………………………………...104 CHAPTER III: SORRY, WRONG IP ADDRESS: THE INTERNET IN THE POST-NOIR NOVEL…………………………………………………………………………………………132 Don’t Answer That Phone!..............................................................................................133 The Internet and the Post-Postmodern Family in Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge…137 Social Media and Self-Performance in Gone Girl……………………………………...160 CHAPTER IV: SEARCHING FOR HOME: THE CITY IN THE POST-NOIR NOVEL ……183 vii The Big/Dark/Mean/Sin Streets/Clock/City/Jungle: A Brief History of the Noir City...188 Leaving Home in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union……………………………………..194 “A Threatening Geography”: Learning to Navigate The City & the City………………213 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...228 CONCLUSION: MEM-NOIR……………………………………………………………….....232 viii INTRODUCTION: THE POST-NOIR NOVEL I. Noir and the Contemporary Novel Beyond the Postmodern Noir is everywhere. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, we are still steeped in the themes, narrative conventions, style, iconography, language, and worldview of a tradition that begins in the late 1920s with the hard-boiled detective and crime fiction of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Dorothy B. Hughes, and James M. Cain, among others; grew more popular with films of the 1940s and 50s like Double Indemnity (1944, dir. Wilder), Detour (1945, dir. Ulmer), and Kiss Me Deadly (1955, dir. Aldrich); and soon reemerged from the 1970s onward as the neo-noir in films like Chinatown (1974, dir. Polanski), L.A. Confidential (1997, dir. Hanson), and Sin City (2005, dir. Rodriguez) and in the novels of writers like James Ellroy and Walter Moseley. The noir tradition finds its most popular contemporary manifestations in the films of David Fincher and the Coen brothers and in TV series such as Twin Peaks (1990-91, 2017), True Detective (2014 – present), Fargo (2014 – present), Veronica Mars (2004 – 2007, 2019), and Jessica Jones (2015 – 2019). The Noir City Film Festival has provided a travelling noir-themed film festival in various cities across the United States for over a decade. The cable television channel Turner Classic Movies features a weekly “Noir Alley” slot for broadcasting classic noir films. J.K. Rowling, the author of the blockbuster Harry Potter series, offered her own addition to the hard-boiled detective tradition with her “Cormoran Strike” novels. The enduringly popular sitcom It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia released a noir parody episode titled “The Janitor Always Mops Twice” (a nod to The Postman Always Rings Twice) in October 2019, casting lovable dunderhead Charlie (Charlie Day) in the role of a hard-boiled detective. 1 Noir even appears in children’s culture: “BMO Noire,” a 2012 episode of the animated series Adventure Time, fits the character BMO, an anthropomorphic video game system, into an absurd hard-boiled mystery involving a missing sock and a femme fatale chicken, all portrayed in black- and-white with voiceover narration. Even Calvin, the protagonist of Bill Watterson’s classic newspaper comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, has a noir alter-ego named “Tracer Bullet.” The tradition is so popular that the 2011 video game L.A. Noire was able to put the word “noir” right there in its title. Whatever it was that noir first began to tell Americans about themselves the better part of a century ago, clearly we still need to hear it. Alongside noir’s cultural ubiquity, the contemporary novel is going through its own transformations as the hegemony of postmodernism wanes. A succinct definition of postmodernism is provided by Rachel Adams: literary postmodernism is the “dominant form of avant-garde literary experimentalism during the Cold War, a period marked by the ascendance of transnational corporations, the upheavals of decolonization, fears of nuclear holocaust, and the partitioning of the globe into ideological spheres” (250). In Adams’s reading, as well as my own, the most salient characteristics of literary postmodernism are its “dark humor; themes of paranoia, skepticism, and conspiracy; preoccupation with close reading and textuality; and complex formal experimentation” (250). It is within the context of this dominant postmodernist aesthetic – which, not coincidentally, shares many features with noir – that the contemporary literary novel arises. The exact ways in which

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