Embodied Cognition in the Post 1945 American Novel a Dissertation
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University of Nevada, Reno Narrative Embodiments: Embodied Cognition in the Post 1945 American Novel A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Aaron F. Schneeberger Dr. Ann Keniston/Dissertation Advisor August, 2018 Copyright by Aaron F. Schneeberger 2018 All Rights Reserved THE GRADUATE SCHOOL We recommend that the dissertation prepared under our supervision by AARON F. SCHNEEBERGER Entitled Narrative Embodiments: Embodied Cognition In The Post 1945 American Novel be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Ann Keniston, Ph.D., Advisor Stacy Burton, Ph.D., Committee Member Katherine Fusco, Ph.D., Committee Member Gideon Caplovitz, Ph.D., Committee Member Dennis Dworkin, Ph.D., Graduate School Representative David W. Zeh, Ph. D., Dean, Graduate School August, 2018 i Abstract Drawing on ideas from the increasingly influential field of embodied cognition (including work from neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers of the mind) and formalist theories of the novel, specifically those of Marxist literary critics like Fredric Jameson, my dissertation, “Narrative Embodiments: Embodied Cognition in Post 1945 American Fiction,” argues that embodied theories of the mind provide a compelling tool for innovatively reconsidering how works of mid to late 20th century fiction represent characters and complex social milieus. In bridging these two sets of scholarly conversations, this project differs from most recent criticism applying neuroscientific ideas to literature, which usually avoids extensively engaging with established conversations in literary theory. To this end, my dissertation analyzes representations of embodiment in an eclectic group of American novels: Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Don DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star, E. L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. My analysis emphasizes the ways these novels present a variety of distinct representations of embodiment that range from presenting the body as an object directed by human thought to those which present the body as the source of characters’ intentions and actions. I also assess the tendency of these texts to not only juxtapose but also imbricate such representations of embodiment as a response to the difficulties of fictional mimesis posed by what is often referred to as postmodern culture. ii Table of Contents Abstract………………………………………………………………………i Table of Contents……………………………………………………………ii Introduction………………………………………………………………1-42 Chapter One……………………………………………………………. 43-99 Chapter Two………………………………………………………… 100-157 Chapter Three………………………………………………………...158-215 Chapter Four………………………………………………………….216-265 Conclusion……………………………………………………………266-270 Works Cited…………………………………………………………..271-277 1 Introduction Under my glancing finger tips I felt the minute hairs bristle ever so slightly along her shins. I lost myself in the pungent but healthy heat which like summer haze hung about little Haze. Let her stay, let her stay . As she strained to chuck the core of her abolished apple into the fender, her young weight, her shameless innocent shanks and round bottom, shifted in my tense, tortured, surreptitiously laboring lap; and all of a sudden a mysterious change came over my senses. I entered a plane of being where nothing mattered, save the infusion of joy within my body. (60) --Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov Introduction One of the many striking elements of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is the way in which the novel combines tropes common to a diverse host of literary genres. Here, for example, the text toys with both the heavy-handed symbolism and almost solipsistic attention to individual consciousness of experimental modernism alongside an intense focus on minute physical details more typical of the naturalist novel. Thus, accompanying Humbert Humbert’s usual idiosyncratic lyricism, and the analogical poetry linking Dolores’s body heat to private fantasies about the intoxicating miasma of a summer’s day, is an intense focus on the particularities of bodily movements, positions, and sensations. Of course, there is a great deal more at work in this scene than the narrator’s attention to such details. Indeed, what is perhaps most chilling about this description of Dolores’s and Humbert’s nascent sexual relationship is how it is motivated by the very transgression it describes. Humbert is acutely aware that his desires for Dolores are socially abhorrent and predatory. Thus why Humbert (the narrator) describes his actions as possessing “the cunning of the insane” (58) while Humbert (the character) simultaneously obsesses over Dolores’s impudent childishness and virginal innocence 2 and, perhaps most tellingly, frets that “some act of God might interrupt” him in the “act” (59). This emphasis on cultural mores grounds the narrative in the trappings of a third literary tradition, that of realism with its tendency to contextualize, and thus provide meaning to, a character’s actions by grounding them in a living social milieu which ethically informs—rather than merely determines, as commonly found in naturalism— their decisions. Superficially, such a reading is very much in line with Lolita’s status as an early example of the postmodern novel,1 often defined by a blending of literary conventions, high and low genres, and meta-fictional addresses to the reader that Fredric Jameson famously termed “postmodern pastiche.” According to Jameson, the juxtaposition of literary techniques, and the historically contingent novelistic forms, found in such texts serves to frustrate the reader’s ability to construct cohesive textual meanings. The result is what he describes as a “temporal singularity”: a fundamental a-historicism in postmodern literature wherein discrete textual events are juxtaposed as a series of endless presents in time rather than flowing into one another to produce cohesive linear plots. From the standpoint of such analysis, Lolita’s juxtaposition of a diverse collection of literary techniques and styles should alienate the reader, the conflicting elements of these genres—as Jameson has written in another context—making “it virtually impossible for us to reach and thematize those official ‘subjects’ which float above the text but cannot be integrated into our reading of the sentences” (Postmodernism 23). Similar assessments of postmodern culture—such as Baudrillard’s notion of the simulacrum and the arguably 1 Though Brian McHale argues that Pale Fire is the first of Nabokov’s truly postmodern novels (see McHale 18) other critics have situated Lolita within this tradition (see, for example, Fraysse and Pilińska). 3 relativistic discursive theories of other French philosophers like Foucault,2 Derrida, and Lyotard—have often dominated scholarship on works of later 20th century fiction.3 Postmodern novels in particular are thus often interpreted not as mimetic representations of human experience and development, but rather as a series of simulations or discourses whose juxtapositions serve not to engage the reader in an engrossing literary experience, but to defamiliarize and problematize their contents through what Linda Hutcheon calls the dedoxifying logic of “postmodern irony,” and Brian McHale the collision of different ontologies (or worlds).4 This dissertation presents an alternative to such readings of mid- to late-20th century American fiction. Specifically, I argue that the juxtaposition of different narrative strategies for representing embodiment in the works analyzed herein functions less to alienate readers than to present innovative ways of exploring human subjectivity and the complex interrelationships between minds, bodies, and environment which collectively comprise, enable, and determine human experience. As such, although this dissertation presupposes certain materialist assumptions about the relationship of literary forms to social and economic realities, it tacitly rejects the notion that such forms are only useful for working through the social, political, and material problems of a given cultural moment. Rather, I argue that the conventions associated with past literary 2 My use of Foucault’s ideas in this dissertation draws heavily upon his later work on neoliberalism and biopolitics which I believe—despite their differences—can usefully be put into conversation with Jameson’s theories on postmodern culture. Indeed, Jeffery Nealon claims that the efforts of each of these thinkers to theorize late 20th-century capitalism “might profitably be seen to be asking a similar question: How does one respond to the techniques or practices of the factory or the financial sphere when they mutate from their own specific domain and intensify greatly, coming increasingly to saturate, organize, and canalize much larger sectors of cultural life?” (58). Similarly, the effects of such “mutations” on conceptions of embodiment and bodily practices as depicted in the late-20th century novel is a central interest of this dissertation. 3 See Postmodernism, particularly 37-8; see also Lyotard and Baudrillard. 4 See introductions to McHale and The Politics of Postmodernism; see also Postmodernism, particularly 25. 4 movements, and loosely codified in the form of literary genres, continue to be operative in works of late 20th century literature not just as nostalgic throwbacks to bygone eras and modes of living, but also as tools for addressing the philosophical and social problems of the modern world. Thus, significant for my project is how