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Verifiable Fictions: Didactic Narrative in the Antirealist American Novel

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Verifiable Fictions: Didactic Narrative in the Antirealist American Novel Verifiable Fictions: Didactic Narrative in the Antirealist American Novel by Glen Paul Stosic A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto © Copyright by Glen Paul Stosic 2013 Verifiable Fictions: Didactic Narrative in the Antirealist American Novel Glen Paul Stosic Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto 2013 Abstract This study examines the revival of didactic narrative in exemplary antirealist American novels of the last forty years. In chapters on Don DeLillo, William H. Gass, William Gaddis, and Richard Powers, I trace the ways in which these writers deploy antirealist literary practices of ontological destabilization, metafictional digression, and deliberate textual difficulty as ways of revisiting the proposition, rejected by many among their cohort, that fiction may have pedagogical value. These novelists attempt to reconcile their commitment to formal innovation with the belief that fiction offers cognitive gains, beholden though it is to humanistic values of the sort that avant-garde principles ostensibly repudiate. As such, these novelists grapple with an ambivalent conception of the novel as both a self-enclosed aesthetic object and a culturally promiscuous text that samples from— and speaks back to—a range of nonfictional discourses. In reading these works, I consider the epistemological potency of literature within a tradition of antirealist experimentation that has typically disavowed any affiliations with the didactic, and in particular its pejorative connotations with rigid, authoritarian moralizing. Drawing upon Jacques Rancière’s model of the ignorant schoolmaster, I argue that these novelists reject the mantle of encyclopedic mastery, deploying instead a “pedagogy of ii failure” that encourages an autodidactic mode of verification among readers. In exploring scenes of failed instruction, these novels reconfigure postmodern authorship in terms of a reluctant teacher addressing an audience of recalcitrant students. These works thus acclimatize readers to a mode of attention that encourages a continual revision of one’s beliefs and attitudes in the wake of failure and misunderstanding. In so doing, these authors attempt—with varying success—to avoid the self-imposed cultural marginalization that comes with adhering to antirealism’s more ludic, oppositional strictures. iii Table of Contents Abstract ii Table of Contents iv Acknowledgements v Introduction Inimical Muses: Antirealist Revolt and The Didactic 1 Imperative in the Postmodern American Novel Chapter One “Readers Strewn Along The Margins”: The Difficult Lessons 36 of Ratner’s Star Chapter Two Hatred’s Knowledge: William Gass’s The Tunnel 78 Chapter Three “Paradox, perversity, opacity, obscurity”: William Gaddis 121 and the Antirealist Syllabus Chapter Four “The Most Reverent Looking”: Epistemic Awe in 154 Richard Powers’s Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance Conclusion 186 Works Consulted 194 ! iv! Acknowledgements I owe many thanks to those who have helped make this dissertation possible. I am especially grateful for the expertise of my supervisor, Professor Greig Henderson, whose patience, good humour, and encouragement were invaluable in guiding this project to completion. I am equally indebted to the members of my committee, Professor Michael Cobb and Professor Victor Li, for their gracious support and well-timed advice. The research of my external appraiser, Professor Joseph Tabbi, was an early source of inspiration for this dissertation. I thank him for his insightful comments and helpful suggestions about ways to shape my future work on this topic. I also want to thank Professor Mark Levene and Professor Heather Murray for serving on my examining committee and helping to make my defence experience such an enjoyable one. My time at The University of Toronto would not have been nearly as rewarding without the company of my peers in the English Department, whose advice and friendship contributed so much to the completion of this dissertation. Thanks go to Marybeth Curtin, Kai Hainer, Adam Hammond, Ceilidh Hart, Alex Hollenberg, Lauren Kirshner, Katherine McLeod, Nick Morwood, Emily Simmons, Laura Stenberg, Alisha Walters, and Ira Wells. Special thanks to Esther de Bruijn, faithful writing companion and model of academic verve. I'm grateful to Andrea Sanche, Dorritta Fong, and Lindsay Zier-Vogel, who read early versions of chapters and provided valuable feedback. Thanks as well to Ryan Edward Miller for demonstrating the value of tenacity, and to Alia Hussey and Peter Sanagan for always making me feel welcome at their table. Generous financial support was provided by the Ontario Graduate Scholarship Program, as well as The Department of English and the School of Graduate Studies at the University of Toronto. My greatest thanks must go to my parents, whose love and unwavering faith in me has meant more than I can express here. I dedicate this dissertation to them. v 1 Introduction Inimical Muses: Antirealist Revolt and The Didactic Imperative in Postmodern American Fiction And to the extent that novels have tried to compete in [the entertainment industry], the two halves of the old imperative “to instruct and delight” have begun to seem inimical programs, whereas they ought to be more or less identical. What greater pleasure could there be than the exploration of where we are? — Richard Powers Can postmodern fiction heed the old imperative to “instruct and delight” while maintaining its commitment to formal innovation and epistemological skepticism? The question itself may seem unwarranted, given the moribund state of the postmodern aesthetic itself. Furthermore, perennial debates about the future of the novel seem little more than rote exercises in hand wringing given that fiction’s cultural centrality as an agent of delight has largely been ceded to television, the internet, and other agents of distraction. Belief in the novel’s instructive function, meanwhile, is upheld most faithfully by a number of readers outside the academy who continue to regard literary texts as a means of self-improvement. Such readers, as Aubry notes, “have not surrendered their piety” towards the novel as a source of nutritive instruction: “Audiences on Oprah, customers on Amazon, professional book reviewers, and authors themselves continue to treat great works of literature as quasi- sacred repositories of wisdom, containing truths about humanity relatively untainted by local 2 prejudices or political biases” (16). For such readers, questions about the varying paths the novel might take in the wake of shopworn postmodern experimentation have little bearing on what motivates them to indulge in a practice that not only offers escapist pleasure but promises, if one affords the text due reverence and attention, to convey salutary knowledge that would otherwise have proved elusive. If one were to use Amazon rankings and Oprah’s reading lists as a casual rubric to evaluate the North American public’s taste for fiction, it would appear that few among Aubrey’s pious audiences remain enthralled by the kind of ambitious experimental American fiction—as practiced by the likes of John Barth, Robert Coover, and Thomas Pynchon—that was once in vogue in the 1960s and 70s. These writers produced ludic, capacious texts which have, varyingly, been classified as encyclopedic, maximalist, and “systems” novels.1 These novels typically spurned realist tenets of mimesis and, just as often, adherence to the conventions of the readable page-turner. Given the typically limited audience for so-called literary, as opposed to genre or “middlebrow” fiction, it appears unlikely that the kind of fiction these writers produced can offer their audience insights about the nature of contemporary life, let alone suggest how one might best navigate its often overwhelming caprices. While a shrinking coterie of committed readers may continue to find such texts a reliable source of delight, they hold little expectation of drawing from them an equal amount of instruction. Avant-garde or otherwise, the waning of the novel’s epistemological authority seems 1 Both Mendelson (1975) and Clark (1990) have proposed various taxonomies of the encyclopedic narrative. In The Art of Excess (1989), LeClair examines the polydisciplinary intertextuality of what, drawing on the theories of biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, he dubs the “systems novel,” arguing that the excessive nature of such texts—typified by their use of information overload and redundancy—both represents and provides a means of critiquing “the master ideologies of American and multinational culture” (15-6). As a way of distinguishing them from other postmodern texts, LeClair suggests that systems novels seek to “deform the conventions of the realistic novel in order to defamiliarlize the world, not just…the text” and, further, to demonstrate how “orders and forms in the world…can arise out of seeming chaos” (21). 3 to have been assured, at least in part, by encyclopedic novelists who cultivated a devil-may- care aesthetic of insular difficulty. Weary of the constraints of conventional realism, and sympathetic to the aims of Robbe-Grillet and the nouveau roman, a more programmatic faction of these writers deliberately eschewed both the tenets of easy readability and conventional characterization. One of them—John Hawkes—infamously decreed that “the true enemies of the novel [are] plot, character, setting and theme” (qtd.
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