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New Media, Transgression, and the Remaking of American Literary Connection, 1975-1999

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New Media, Transgression, and the Remaking of American Literary Connection, 1975-1999 City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 6-2016 Both Into and Out of the Cage: New Media, Transgression, and the Remaking of American Literary Connection, 1975-1999 Casey Henry Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1220 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] BOTH INTO AND OUT OF THE CAGE: NEW MEDIA, TRANSGRESSION, AND THE REMAKING OF AMERICAN LITERARY CONNECTION, 1975-1999 by CASEY MICHAEL HENRY A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2016 ii © 2016 CASEY MICHAEL HENRY All Rights Reserved iii Both Into and Out of the Cage: New Media, Transgression, and the Remaking of American Literary Connection, 1975-1999 by Casey Michael Henry This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iv ABSTRACT Both Into and Out of the Cage: New Media, Transgression, and the Remaking of American Literary Connection, 1975-1999 by Casey Michael Henry Adviser: Wayne Koestenbaum The dissertation addresses an absent history of late twentieth-century postmodern literature. Namely, I trace the shifts between 1980s postmodernism, described by Fredric Jameson as encapsulating a “wan[ed]”“affect,” and the emergence of 1990s post-postmodernism, marked by an exaggeration of affect. My dissertation posits that this reinvention of feeling was due to shifts in communication technologies and new media art during the 1970s and 1980s competing with, and eventually rendering obsolete, avant-garde literary techniques for “connection.” These latter strategies were encapsulated in the postmodern “encyclopedic” novel, a form miming the logic of new media, yet incapable of fully addressing new programmatic shifts, such as the installation-centered apparatuses of new media, the textual depth of digitalism, and posthuman data used for characterization. The strain of this pseudo-computational organization and ethic, however, leads to the pursuit of “feeling” on a more visceral basis. Pursuant with this visceral intention, I posit the genre of transgressive literature, usually misunderstood as employing simple-minded shock tactics, as a hinge point between postmodern and post-postmodern conceptions of “feeling.” Transgressive literature, I argue, offers systematic, new-media-like schemas to explore moments of emotional excess or visceral shock, allowing a further bridge to post-postmodernist writers like David Foster Wallace, who explore affect within complex, maximalist schemas. In essence, the study supplies a media analysis of v American postmodernism’s demise and return long missing. Such a study is integral to any complete history of postmodernism or consideration of the experimental literature that follows it. vi Acknowledgments “‘Sudden Awakening to the Fact That the Mischief Is Irretrievably Done’: Epiphanic Structure in Infinite Jest” from Section Three was published in slightly revised form by Taylor & Francis in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 56.5 (2015): 480-502. doi: 10.1080/00111619.2015.1019402. I would like to thank The University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center for the use of material from the archive of David Foster Wallace. I would also like to thank the David Foster Wallace Literary Trust for granting me permission to use this archival material. This project’s completion was also assisted financially with help from the Martin M. Spiaggia Dissertation Award in Arts & Humanities; my thanks go to its donor. And finally, my deep appreciation goes to Chelsea Randall, whose insightful critiques and incisive questions continually served as my Quo Vadis. vii Table of Contents Introduction: The Inoperable Machine: A Media History of Late Postmodernism…………..……………………………………………………..1 Section One: The Tiny Box Wherein Everything is Solved: New Media Narrative, Communication Technology, and the Conversation Novels of William Gaddis………………………………………………………………10 Introduction: Problems in Two-Dimensions……………………………………………..11 Postmodern Issues / Good Intentions: New Media, New Inscriptions, and the Maturity of Video as Art………....…………………..15 Even Agnostics Have Truth: The Verity of Bill Viola…………………..………………29 Nauman, Burden, Jokes, and Cruelty…………………………………………………….35 Two Sides of a Shadow: Stelarc, Chat Bots, and the Phantom Libido………………......44 Non-attribution: Corporeal Fluidity in William Gaddis’s Conversation Novels……………………………...……………………………...58 Section Two: Grooves on the Feeling Knob: Systematic Transgression in William T. Vollmann’s The Rainbow Stories and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho………………………………………………………………………...81 Organizers of the Orgy: An Introduction to Systematic Transgression………………….82 Sensory Movements: William T. Vollmann, The Rainbow Stories, and “Emotional Calculus”………………....…………….……………………….92 Less Sad The Second Time Around: American Psycho and the viii Selfhood of Repetition…….................................................................................113 Section Three: “Way Closer to the Soul Than Mere Tastelessness Can Get”: David Foster Wallace and Transcendent Extra-Textuality………...……….139 Unforeseen Ruptures: David Foster Wallace’s Big Break, or, The Legacy of Experimentalism…………………………………………………….140 “Sudden Awakening to the Fact That the Mischief Is Irretrievably Done”: Epiphanic Structure in Infinite Jest……………...……………………..152 Old Passion Clothed in New Fire: Textual Relationality in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men…………………………………………………..190 Epilogue……………………….……………………………………………………………….220 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………...………………222 1 Introduction: The Inoperable Machine: A Media History of Late Postmodernism It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at all times, at other times in fits and starts… Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. —Deleuze and Guattari on desire, Anti-Oedipus. About halfway through Woody Allen’s 1977 film Annie Hall, a recently spurned Allen, trying better to understand his own romantic problems, begins soliciting passersby on the street to ask about theirs. He stops one couple; the man is tanned with an open-necked leisure-suit shirt buttoned way down, the woman has white slacks and bobbed blonde hair. They both look like models. “You look like a happy couple. Are you?” Allen asks the woman. “Yeah,” she responds to which Allen presses further, “So, how do you account for it?” “Uh, I’m very shallow and empty, and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say,” she says. “And I’m exactly the same way,” the man supplies. This interaction encapsulates, to me, the central paradoxical question of postmodernism and hence whatever might follow: how to draw out plausible connections and magnetisms between ostensibly flat and superficial characters with “nothing… to say?” Further, how would this operate if these characters were also originally rendered as mere caricatures or ideological sketches? In trying to diagnose postmodernism’s demise and potentially determine what might follow, questions multiply further. Is there a mechanism that might summon forth the liveliness of characters so thin and caricatured as to seem merely programmatic constructs or sterile pawns advancing an aesthetic theory? In this sense of “programming,” might this coming-to-life occur through circulation, crashing one figure against the other like competing logarithms in a Wall Street derivative? Would this be a type, subset, or absence of feeling? Print seems increasingly 2 outmoded; might postmodernism’s problems be in a certain narcissistic two-dimensionality granted by its medium, and would a different, perhaps computerized or cyberspace-friendly venue make this shallowness somehow deeper, more enriched? Conversely, should one instead simply abandon the whole project and return to a simpler realism? Would that even be possible at this point? This panoply of questions, which only skip, divide, and elude explanation when pressed for clarification (and form in part the investigations of the essay collection The Mourning After: Attending the Wake of Postmodernism [2007]), hints at the monumental task of authors seeking to move beyond what postmodernism was or could have been, particularly in the emergent field of post-postmodernism. The underlying issue linking these conceits and the elemental gap in contextualizing the progeny of postmodernism—mirrored in a missing critical step in scholarship—involves “feeling.” As Fredric Jameson claimed in his famous 1984 essay, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” the genre was marked by its pronounced “wan[ed] affect” (61). Jameson mentioned Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes as a paradigmatic work of the era, marked by a glossy accumulation of surfaces at the expense of depth, and skittering mercurial “intensities” rather than transformative identification in the viewer (59-64). Yet, nearly a decade later, post-postmodern works, including those of David Foster Wallace,
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