1960-2007 DISSERTATION Presented in Part
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The Development of the Reimaginative and Reconstructive in Historiographic Metafiction: 1960-2007 DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Christopher B. Smith Graduate Program in English The Ohio State University 2010 Dissertation Committee: Professor Brian J. McHale, Adviser Professor Mark Conroy Professor Jared Gardner Professor Jessica Prinz Copyright by Christopher B. Smith 2010 Abstract This dissertation argues that postmodern American fiction has strategically performed a series of rewritings. These range from a blurring of boundaries between author, narrator, and text that demonstrates the power of fiction (and calls attention to itself as such) to later pastiches of existing texts and styles. Another form of rewriting that occurs is a combination of these methods that also evokes the idea of truth and its conversion into the fictive. Meditations on history, how it is written and processed, and the kinds of narratives that have emerged as reliable, true, and “correct” are important features of this genre. Postmodern writers who deal with the historical past and engage with, rewrite, and subvert the historical fiction genre find themselves navigating boundaries. Concerned with the longing for a tangible and “knowable” history, they write to fill its absence. I am concerned with how these texts use postmodernist and metafictional strategies to explore the past and what it means to us in the present, especially with regard to the textuality of history itself. Each of my chapters seeks out exemplary texts of a stage in the evolution of historiographic metafiction. Chapter 1 reassesses two seminal examples of the genre that date from the 1960s, Thomas Pynchon’s V. and John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor. They present a forked path for postmodern literature’s engagement with history. Pynchon reconstructs where Barth reimagines. Both pioneer an often absurdist, farcical “secret” history. Chapter 2 turns its focus to the innovation of alternate history, which has its ii origins in science fiction. Philip K. Dick’s World War II alternate history The Man in the High Castle serves to illustrate how alternate history has carved out new territory within historiographic metafiction. Two later alternate histories, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine and Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, expand on and revise Dick’s groundbreaking work. Chapter 3 focuses on historiographic metafiction written about the 18th and 19th centuries. Dating roughly from the mid-to-late 1990s, I consider these novels—Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, John Edgar Wideman’s The Cattle Killing, and Diane Glancy’s Stone Heart—to form not only a literary subgenre, but a focused reinterrogation of an era. In Chapter 4, I focus on the presentation of 20th century secret history, which first appears in Ishmael Reed’s anarchic Mumbo Jumbo. In Ragtime E.L. Doctorow provides a template for Don DeLillo’s unlikely collision of historical and pop-cultural figures that creates a parodic secret history ending in the rise of popular culture and the cult of the image. DeLillo, in Underworld and Libra, chronicles the “American magic and dread” of the 20th century’s darkest moments. My coda focuses on the emergence of the historical graphic novel. This explosion of texts both furthers the evolution of historiographic metafiction and recapitulates its progress up to this point. Ultimately, my project offers a significant new answer to the question of how postwar American fiction dealt with the nation’s history, the literary aftershocks of which continue to shape this century’s fiction. iii for Kate, with all my love iv Acknowledgment This dissertation could not have been written without the wisdom, guidance, and support of my dissertation adviser, Brian G. McHale, and my dissertation committee, Jared Gardner, Jessica Prinz, and Mark Conroy. I am truly thankful to have had such a warm and supportive group of mentors. Anne Langendorfer, Kristen Hetrick, and Shannon Thomas not only provided me with invaluable practical advice and feedback, but kindness, humor, and encouragement when I needed it the most. The latter is also true of a close-knit group of fellow dissertators whom I was very fortunate to know over the past two years, and to whom I only hope I was able to give some small part of the support I received from them. My loving parents, Richard and Donna Smith, gave me boundless encouragement throughout the process. My dear wife and partner in all that I do, Kate Hetrick, provided the love, strength, and courage that sustained this project from its origins until its completion. She has my deepest gratitude, and always will. v Vita 2002................................................................B.A. English, University of Delaware 2004................................................................M.A. English, Villanova University 2005-present ...................................................M.A. History, Boise State University 1980 to present ..............................................Graduate Teaching Associate, The Ohio State University Fields of Study Major Field: English vi Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................... ii Dedication .......................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements ..............................................................................................................v Vita ..................................................................................................................................... vi List of Figures...................................................................................................................viii Chapters: 1. Introduction ..............................................................................................................1 2. Chapter 1: Two Seminal Metafictional Secret Histories: Barth and Pynchon.......22 3. Chapter 2: Alternate History: Reimagining the Historically Inevitable ................68 4. Chapter 3: The 1990s’ Romances of Science and Exploration: 18th Century Origins..................................................................................................................113 5. Chapter 4: 20th Century Secret History Revisited: Reed, Doctorow, DeLillo .....160 6. Coda: Directions in Graphic Historical Fiction ...................................................201 7. Conclusion ...........................................................................................................228 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................245 vii List of Figures Figure 6.1 Art from Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell .........................208 Figure 6.2 Jack’s Super-Position ...............................................................................211 Figure 6.3 Koch’s Snowflake ....................................................................................212 Figure 6.4 Cover of James Sturm’s America ............................................................214 Figure 6.5 Art from Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner ..........................................................224 viii Introduction As Julia Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality makes clear, every work of literature in the late 20th century serves as a response to those that have come before it. The timeline of literature urges into production texts that retell and re-engage the literary and historical past. Postmodern American fiction has, in challenging and transgressing literary genres and tropes, strategically performed a series of rewritings. These range from an early, Borgesian blurring of boundaries between author, narrator, and text that demonstrates the power of fiction (and calls attention to itself as such) to later parodies and pastiches of existing texts and styles that receive their power from what is in a sense suppressed on the page—or was in the originals which are incarnated once again—but calls to the reader. In each of these rewritings, metafiction is created in the emergence of a fictional text that calls its own existence into question. In the likeness and unlikeness between original and copy, parody and object of parody, is a self-reflexivity that creates new meanings.1 Another form of rewriting that occurs is a combination of these methods that also evokes the idea of truth and its conversion into the fictive. Meditations on history, how it is written and processed, and the narratives that emerged as reliable, true, 1 Aside from its status as a seminal work of historiographic metafiction and its inclusion in this dissertation, John Barth’s 1960 novel The Sot-Weed Factor is an excellent example of this postmodern form of parody coming into being. While 18th- and 19th-century literary parodies (i.e., the 1744 parody of Pamela, Shamela) lampoon their targets, postmodern parody proceeds in a new direction. In Postmodernism, Jameson states that parody, under late capitalism, “finds itself without a vocation” (Jameson 16), replaced by pastiche’s blankness, that of a “statue with blind eyeballs” (Jameson 16). Yet I take issue with Jameson’s definition of pastiche as purely blank. Sot-Weed, while a pastiche, does lampoon received versions of history and the heroism of