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 the Jamesonian reading provided above seems to belie the intensity with which Lolita draws readers into Humbert’s experiences, however unreliable his narration. Furthermore, this (discomforting) appeal to identify with Humbert seems to be produced not despite, but because of the blending of literary tropes described above. That is, rather than a combination of literary forms leading to a distracting juxtaposition of narrative logics—the social and material determinism of naturalism, the detailed descriptions of thoughts and sensations which fail to extend beyond the character’s consciousness found in modernism, and realism’s emphasis on moral decision-making—these elements coalesce to convey Humbert’s heightened sexual excitement to readers, the intensity of which mounts throughout this scene, evoking a particularly captivating, if also disquieting narrative experience. My contention is that this experience is produced by the emphasis Lolita’s narration places upon embodiment, the detailed descriptions of bodily actions—expressive and near imperceptible movements—haptic sensations—the brush of hairs, the weight of bodies—and internal bodily perceptions—Humbert’s tensed muscles—all playing a central role in the novel’s mimesis. Furthermore, this emphasis on embodiment sutures together the otherwise disjunctive narrative and discursive logics found in both Lolita and the other works of post-1950s American fiction analyzed in this dissertation. Thus, it is precisely what poststructuralist and discursive readings of late 20th century fiction tends to overlook, the 5 materiality of bodies and the worlds they inhabit, that I argue is central to understanding how many of these works address the aesthetic and philosophical concerns of what is often termed late-capitalist or postmodern culture.
In order to develop these claims, this dissertation appeals to ideas from the emergent field of embodied cognition as well as affect theory and Michel Foucault’s writings on neoliberalism and biopolitics. Common to all of these areas of study is a problematizing of the humanist urge to locate human thought within the confines of a closed liberal subject whose roots can be traced back to Enlightenment philosophers like Descartes.5
Specifically, such thinkers tended to perpetuate a conceptual divide between the body as a material object and the mind as a transcendent (i.e. disembodied/non-material/idealist) consciousness or soul. In contrast, embodied cognition emphasizes the importance of the body, and the material environment which surrounds it, in the production of higher-level cognitive functions and complex emotions. Such research is thus similar to claims coming out of affect theory—including Brian Massumi’s recent elaborations on
Foucault’s theories of biopolitics—which assert that affects are not contained within individual subjects but rather exchanged within and between communities. This dissertation uses such radical interrogations of humanist notions of subjectivity to consider the contrasting of different literary techniques in four novels, Sylvia Plath’s The
Bell Jar (1963), Don DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star (1976), E. L. Doctorow’s The Book of
Daniel (1971), and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). Having very different relationships to postmodernism as both a cultural moment and mode of literary production, these
5 For an argument about how such western philosophical conceptions of a closed liberal subject exerted undue influences on the sciences see Brennan, particularly the introduction and 74-9. 6 works were chosen for both the breath of perspectives they offer on late 20th century
American society as well as their striking attention to embodiment. Thus, while works like DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star and Doctorow’s Daniel are representative of canonical postmodern texts and authors, Plath’s The Bell Jar offers a compelling depiction of the facile consumer culture and superficial individualist ideologies which often typify assessments of postmodern culture in the form of a novel which nevertheless eschews most of the trappings of postmodern fiction. Similarly, not only was Morrison’s novel
(arguably) written during the tail end of postmodernism era, the text itself also represents the encounter of postmodern ideas about subjectivity and history—associated predominantly with encounters between white masculine subjects and capitalist modernity—with the experiences of non-white individuals and women.
Despite their differences each of these novel share a tendency to juxtapose different narrative strategies for representing embodiment, juxtapositions which I argue coincide with the contrasting of a variety of structural relationships between minds, bodies, environments, and communities implicit in these techniques—for example, naturalism’s underlying premise that preconscious biological processes and desires determine the actions of characters. Beyond simply juxtaposing narrative representations of embodiment, however, I argue that characters’ navigations of these different relationships are central to how the works analyzed in this dissertation represent subjectivity and agency, as well as present the relationships between these characters and the larger social totalities they inhabit. In particular, I argue that the ability to make meaningful decisions in these novels is often presented as a preference for one or more of the different narrative structures I loosely associate with realism, naturalism, and modernism, and 7 therefore between different structural relationships between mind, body, and environment.
My analysis also draws upon more traditional critical conversations about genre and literary periodization. This project thus contrasts much of the recent scholarship applying ideas from the cognitive sciences to literary criticism. Broadly this research is typified by the essays collected by Lisa Zunshine in The Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies.
Such essays tend to focus on how ideas from the cognitive sciences can elucidate individual texts, or literary tropes, while largely ignoring how these topics have been similarly addressed by more traditional forms of literary criticism and theory.6 This dissertation takes a somewhat different approach by applying insights from embodied cognition research to longstanding conversations about literary production, in particular those stemming from Marxist theories of the novel, which compellingly relate the evolution of this literary form to the development of capitalism and the liberal nation state. Indeed, it is a breakdown in the ability of such Marxist theories to compellingly account for more recent developments in literary fiction that in part motivates this dissertation.
1. Marxist theories of the novel and the symbolic or embodied mind
As previously indicated, this dissertation is in part a response to Jameson’s account of what he famously termed the postmodern condition as the aesthetic or cultural effects of late capitalism.7 Such effects are similar to Jameson’s assessment of the postmodern novel described above: generally, a waning sense of history, and a difficulty mapping
6 This tendency also extends to much of the work directly inspired by research on embodied cognition. See Bollinger, Cuddy-Keane, and Kuukonen. 7 Jameson borrows this term from Marxist economist Ernest Mandel: see Postmodernism 3. 8 one’s daily experiences onto the wider social and economic totalities which nevertheless circumscribe them. This assessment of late 20th century society is directly tied to
Jameson’s reworking of Georg Lukacs’s Marxist theories about the development of the novel, which Lukacs also relates to the progress of capital. Central to this thesis is
Lukacs’s conception of the realist novel—for him the privileged incarnation of the genre—as a dialectical tension between “abstract” possibilities (i.e. the actions a character imagines taking) and the actual “concrete” possibilities afforded them by the social and material world in which they exist.8 This dialectic is reformulated in Jameson’s
The Political Unconscious as the tension between desire (i.e. the hopes, dreams, and yearnings of individuals and groups) and necessity: “why what happened (at first received as ‘empirical’ fact) had to happen the way it did” (101). Thus, Jameson understands history—not just in the novel, but as a form of human understanding more generally—primarily in terms of narrative, which he writes is itself “the experience of
Necessity,” not as content but the “inexorable form of events” which can only be
“apprehended through its effects, and never directly as some reified force” (102). In other words, it is only through experiencing the disillusionment of individual and collective human desires and ambitions that the “absent cause” of history9 can be felt as a result of the inherent material limitations which constrain human ambitions and actions. Thus, according to Marxist formalists like Jameson, in the novel historical development is best understood in terms of how certain types of material relations, experienced as necessity, lead to certain types of formal relationships—often loosely organized into literary
8Lukacs borrows these terms from Hegelian philosophy. See “From Realism in Our Time: Literature and the Class Struggle.” 9 See The Political Unconscious 19-21. 9 movements and genres—within individual texts. Finally, it is through the juxtaposition of these different genres that individual texts come to reveal the process of historical change, the coexistence of different genres both corresponding to, and making legible the transition from, one dominant mode of production to the next (98). 10
This idea of the co-existence of different literary forms—some in ascendance, others in decline or emergence—is elaborated in Postmodernism: or the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism where, as we’ve seen, Jameson claims these forms can no longer be thematized into cohesive historical narratives. Importantly, this breakdown in historicity is theorized by Jameson in terms of Jacques Lacan’s structuralist psychoanalysis, which conceptualizes the human unconscious as a linguistic (i.e. symbolic) system, the “real”— i.e. the material, empirically measurable world that surrounds us—only being accessible to the human imagination through these symbol-processing faculties.11 Ultimately, it is to the breakdown of these faculties—or what Lacan terms the “semiotic chain”—that
Jameson attributes the lack of historicity in postmodern culture and art. This emphasis on the linguistic is where this dissertation deviates from not just Jameson’s theories of the subject, but also his assessment of (American) novels from the latter half of the 20th century. In particular I argue that Jameson’s reliance on symbolic theories of the unconscious misses the important role played by the body in how humans understand, conceptualize, and react to the world around them; and, furthermore, that it is this importance of the body that the novels analyzed in this dissertation tend to reveal, in large
10 For Jameson it is the juxtaposition of different forms of material relationships, and their respective manifestations as competing class discourses, that he terms “cultural revolution”: “that moment in which the coexistence of various modes of production becomes visibly antagonistic, their contradictions mobbing to the very center of political, social, and historical life” (The Political Unconscious 95). 11 See The Political Unconscious 34-5. 10 part as a response to the very problems of novelistic representation Jameson describes in symbolic terms. Nevertheless, Marxist accounts of how the development of capitalist economies and institutions are related to the postmodern condition are important to my assessment of many of the novels addressed in this dissertation.
Thus, the effort of this dissertation to connect what Jameson considers periodizing concepts like novelistic genres—however loosely—to different elements of human thought is in itself an effort to better understand how the novels discussed herein address aesthetic problems particular to their historical moment. Such critiques of late 20th century society argue that the development and growth of capitalist institutions, booming populations, and rarefication of both scientific and institutional knowledge12 make it difficult for humans to conceptualize how their world functions13 and thus problematize the process of rational decision-making. Such limitations to reason predictably coincide with what Jameson describes as the reification of the realist novel under postmodern culture, the scope of such novels beginning to narrow as the broader socioeconomic world ostensibly becomes too complex to be satisfyingly rendered through literary mimesis. This is a product of the role thought and decision-making play in such novels: in other words, the novel’s tendency to appeal to the narrative trope of “causality” which, as Jameson points out, has generally been a historically “privileged” form of meaning in most human societies (Political Unconscious 101). Furthermore, if such tropes only
12 See Lyotard. 13 Fredric Jameson’s describes this phenomenon as a postmodern sublime, the complexity of modern economic and state institutions, he claims, inspiring a series of popular novelistic and filmic genres including “high-tech thrillers” and conspiracy-laden science fictions. Accordingly, such cultural “myths” serve as a “representational short hand for grasping a network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp” (Postmodernism 38). 11 become meaningful through the means of Lacan’s symbolic, then the body and bodily experience are inevitably held in abeyance from such forms of meaning making.
Functionally, this means that despite the proclaimed materialism of Marxist thought, minds, bodies, and the socio-material worlds they inhabit tend to be conceptualized as separate substances. The result: decision-making is presented as a semi-autonomous transcendental process which guides bodies in the commission of meaningful (i.e. world- changing) actions.
As the field by which one is capable of coherently conceptualizing a “total world”— and thus making rational decisions—shrinks, however, so too does the scope of the realist novel, whose development is commonly linked to the rise of Enlightenment humanism and the very liberal nation state whose borders have been made porous by the irresistible forces of international capitalism. Modernism is often interpreted as a reaction to this phenomenon, responding to this disjunction between human thought and action in the form of a lamentful celebration of the world-building utopian impulse of human imagination and desire.14 Similarly, the postmodern novel, as Brian McHale notes, transforms this epistemological issue into an ontological one: where once novels presented unified literary worlds, they now depict a series of often competing, if paradoxically interconnected, realities.
As previously mentioned, however, it is not the “ontological” elements of the novel that are of primary interest to this dissertation. Rather, what is of interest is how the novels in question present character and subject formation in the context of the relativism
14 See McHale 8-10. 12 of postmodern culture and, in particular, how representations of embodiment emerge as a primary means of depicting such subjectivities. In doing so, each of the chapters in this dissertation also make use of Foucault’s writings on neoliberalism which, despite
Jameson’s claims of the anti-materialism of Foucault’s work,15 can be thought of as complementing the theories of postmodern social critics like Jameson. Thus, while
Jameson addresses how modern capitalist institutions effect the production of cultural artifacts like novels, films, and architecture, Foucault’s later research is primarily concerned with how neoliberal capitalism effects the production of unique forms of human subjectivity in the modern world, specifically through an emphasis on harnessing the productive capacities of the body itself.16 Thus, despite (neo)liberalism itself being an ideology, one of the primary means by which it molds subjectivity—what Foucault terms biopower— targets not the ideological, and thus symbolic, level of human consciousness but rather is directed at the body whose preconscious habits and desires have become, by the 20th century, the primary sites of socioeconomic control.
Similar interrogations of the central role of conscious (or symbolic) thought in human life also motivates research in embodied cognition, which deviates from more established theories of the mind through its emphasis on the body. Though quite different from
Lacan’s psychoanalysis, traditional models of cognitive science, originating in the 1950s, similarly conceived of the human brain as a symbol-processing machine, taking in symbolic information from sensory apparatuses and processing it much like a computer
15 See The Political Unconscious 77-8. 16 Foucault defines liberalism as a “general style of thought, analysis, and imagination” (Birth of Biopolitics 219) which under neoliberalism takes the form “the strategic programing of individuals’ activity” (223), the subject essentially being conceptualized as an economic enterprise. 13 would lines of code. In contrast, what Laurence Shapiro terms replacement and constitutional theories of embodied cognition argue that non-symbolic cognitive and bodily processes play a much more intimate role in human thought. Similarly, this dissertation argues that the novels in question frequently emphasize the role of bodily sensations, drives, and habits in the thoughts and actions of their characters. Furthermore, it is through this emphasis on embodiment that these novels attempt to redress the representational problems Jameson and other postmodern theorists describe as endemic to postmodern culture and art, and which they frequently account for in terms of structuralist theories of language and/or the subject like Lacan’s psychoanalysis. This is not, however, a dismissal of such theories—or even more radical, the importance of the symbolic in literary works—so much as an alteration or addendum to them. As Shapiro notes, computational and embodied theories of cognition are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Rather, he argues that, instead of being viewed as competing theories, many ideas from embodied cognition can “be welcomed as a new piece of equipment in the cognitive scientist’s toolbox,” computational and embodied theories each providing compelling explanations for different types of cognitive phenomena (207-8). Similarly, I argue that the types of readings explored in this dissertation provide a compelling lens for understanding the works of post-1945 fiction in question, without being incompatible with other forms of literary criticism like Jameson’s.
In order to theorize how the novels analyzed in this dissertation demonstrate the role of embodiment in human thought and subjectivity, this project draws particular inspiration from Tim van Gelder’s dynamic hypothesis, which will function as a foundational metaphor for considering the works of fiction assessed herein. Questioning 14 the explanatory efficacy of computational (i.e. symbolic) models of the mind, van Gelder argues that the functioning of dynamic systems—such as centrifugal heat governors17— presents a better metaphor for considering the complex interrelationships between minds, bodies, and the environments they inhabit, which comprise human thought. Thus, much like heat generators, the mind can be thought of as a non-symbolic dynamic system where “No single component governs the system,” the brain “dynamically interacting with the body . . . [as the body] dynamically interact[s] with an environment” (125; 124
Shappiro). Significantly, these sorts of dynamic models present time in a very different manner from their computational counterparts. According to traditional cognitive models, the brain is thought of as operating in a series of steps like a computer program. From this standpoint the mind is conceptualized in terms of a series of discrete states, which are then altered by inputs (e.g. sensations) from the outside world, causing a jump from one discrete state to the next. In contrast, dynamic systems have a much more nuanced relationship with time, as changes within the system are not seen as jumps from one state to another, but as the product of a—mathematically calculable—process of change, wherein alterations in one part of the system simultaneously initiate and govern changes in other parts, the rates and rhythms of each individual process having an impact on the functioning of the system as a whole and vice versa.
This distinction between traditional and dynamic models of cognition is of interest to my project because, as Jameson notes, cause-and-effect conceptions of the world have long held a privileged position not only in fiction, but also in history, philosophy, and the
17 See Shapiro 119-23. 15 sciences, and thus seem enduringly relevant to how humans conceptualize their world.
Furthermore, despite being challenged in the modern era,18 such cause-and-effect models retain a prominent role in readerly receptions of modern works of fiction, even as such tendencies are challenged by reading contemporary literary novels. Indeed, in Lukacs’s
Marxist narrative theory, the movement from abstract to concrete possibilities is a complex way of thinking about such linear cause-and-effect relationships—i.e. how a character’s individual desires manifest themselves as actions which have (often unanticipated) effects upon their social milieu. In contrast, many modernist and naturalist novels often challenged such conceptions of temporality. Though not doubt reductive, for the purposes of this dissertation these alternative temporalities are roughly categorized into two types of narrative tropes: 1) a modernist tendency to present human thought as abstracted from the material world, and thus what Lukacs terms a-temporal “negative infinities”; and, 2) a naturalist tendency, as Kevin Trumpeter observes, to overdetermine textual events so as to make it difficult or impossible for readers to discern clear cause- and-effect relationships. Alongside what I am also reductively referring to as realist narrative tropes of cause and effect, I argue that a common element of the novels analyzed in this dissertation is a narrative focus on embodiment which takes form by means of the juxtapositions and imbrications of these different narrative tropes.
Specifically, my analysis tends to focus on what I am describing as a sort of “body time” in these works, fostered through the neo-naturalist emphasis on the cyclicality of pre- conscious bodily drives, processes, and habits. Rather than representing a renewed
18 Examples include Hegel’s philosophy and Einstein’s theory of relativity. 16 interest in literary naturalism, however, I argue that this emphasis on the body adds a third component to traditional Marxist conceptions of realist narration as a dialectic between abstract and concrete possibilities—or desire and necessity—body time having what might be described as a dynamic temporal relationship with the other narrative structures which exist alongside it.
It is in terms of this conception of the mind-body unit—as well as the environment which surrounds it—as a non-linear, dynamic system that this dissertation interprets the works of Plath, DeLillo, Doctorow, and Morrison. It is my contention that these novels innovatively mobilize a number of different narrative strategies for representing bodies acting in the world—similar to what Bakhtin termed chronotopes19—which represent different ways of conceptualizing relationships between minds, bodies, and environments
(shorthanded as mind-body complexes throughout this dissertation). As previously mentioned, I argue that these representations of embodiment roughly correspond to the genres of realism (which tends to structure narrative in terms of cause-and-effect relationships), modernism (which structures narrative primarily in terms of the symbol- processing faculties of the human mind), and naturalism (which tends to structure narratives in terms of cyclical processes, such as the biological functions of the human body). As previously mentioned, unlike Marxist theories of the novel which conceptualize these genres as period-specific manifestations of different phases of capitalist development, this dissertation conceptualizes certain representational strategies commonly found in works associated with these periods as non-period-specific “tools”
19 See “Forms of Time and of The Chronotope in the Novel” 85-6. 17 for presenting different types of structural relationships between minds, bodies, and environments. It is the blending of the different temporalities presented by these representations of embodiment—the various forms of linear narration found in realism and modernism, as well as the non-linear temporality of bodily rhythms found in naturalism—that I argue allows each of the texts analyzed in this dissertation to function in a manner metaphorically similar to a dynamic system—a “collection of related entities or processes that stands out from a background as a single whole” and can be represented in terms of “a mathematical model for the way that a system changes or behaves as time passes” (Thompson 39). Finally, I argue that it is through the juxtapositions, imbrications, and general interminglings of such representations that the novels in question attempt to develop innovative solutions to the representational problems which typify postmodern culture and art.
In contrast to Jameson’s claims in The Political Unconscious that events are comprehensible primarily as “narrative" effects, my project argues that in the novel’s analyzed herein the juxtaposition of different representations of embodiment can read as presenting dynamic interrelationships between the minds and bodies of characters and the environments they inhabit. To do so my project, in addition to van Gelder’s dynamic hypothesis, draws upon Suzanne Oosterwijk and Lisa Barrett’s theory of embodied emotion. Specifically, I appeal to their application of a psychological constructivist approach to the production of emotions as a metaphor for considering the types of dynamic readings described above. Oosterwijk and Barret’s claims are based upon experiments which suggest that the complex mental states we are aware of during our waking moments, including “emotions, body states, and thoughts,” are combinations of 18
“three sources of stimulation: sensory stimulation from the world outside the skin . . . sensory signals from within the body . . . and prior experience,” i.e. conceptual knowledge and memory (“The Neural Representation of Typical and Atypical
Experiences of Negative Images” 2111). To demonstrate this idea, Oosterwijk and
Barrett use the example of a near automotive collision, to which an individual’s response, they claim, is a combination of “interoceptive information (e.g. change in heart rate)” about the internal status of bodily functions, “exteroceptive information (e.g. the visual knowledge that a car is too close)” about the surrounding environment, and conceptual/learned information such as who had the right-of-way (“Embodiment in the construction of emotion experience and emotion understanding” 251). Thus, according to
Oosterwijk and Barrett, there is no simple cause-and-effect relationship between situations like the one described above and an individual’s emotionally-driven response to, say, yell at the other driver. Rather they claim that “most relationships between sensorimoter and interoceptive states and discrete emotional experience exist by association. . . Even though the brain contains circuitry for basic behavioral adaptations like freezing, fleeing and fighting, these adaptations are neither necessary nor sufficient for emotion” (254). Instead, these adaptive processes add to the emergent context that defines a given emotional state alongside spatial observations about the environment and culturally-situated knowledge about related situations, concepts, and socially acceptable behavior. Furthermore, from this standpoint the emotional response, and meaning later ascribed, to a given event are a function of not only the combination, but also the prioritization of these stimuli. Thus, what allows for the vast tapestry of human responses to and interpretations of a given experience is not simply the variety of contexts in which 19 we can find ourselves, but also the very different ways in which the bodily processes brought about by these contexts can be organized and prioritized.
The three categories of information described by Oosterwijk and Barrett can be thought of as roughly corresponding to the literary representations of mind-body complexes found in realist, modernist, and naturalist novels. So, for example, the emphasis on linear relationships of cause and effect commonly found in realism can be related to not just the exteroceptive visual information of objects interacting in the world, but also the cognitive processes which allow us to both conceptualize and interpret such interactions. Such tropes tend to define subjects in terms of their choices to act or not to act. As critic Lee Clark Mitchell observes, such decisions are often presented as a “gap” in the narrative, glossing over the decision-making processes of characters, and causing their choices to appear as miraculous acts of self-control or will.20 Bodies are thus presented as Cartesian objects which act—whether to murder another character or embezzle desperately-needed money—at the behest of characters whose minds exist outside, and can thus contravene, the dictates of biological, material, and social necessity.
Nevertheless, it is the bodily actions of these characters, and the consequences of these actions, which often drive plot development in these texts, the ability to interpret such interactions being a function of the same perceptual apparatuses that allow one to judge the trajectory of a speeding car. In contrast, naturalist texts often emphasize the very sorts of social and material determinism resisted in realism. Here the body tends to be represented as either a focal point for a series of outward material and social forces, or as
20 See Mitchell 9-10. 20 a series of habits, biological processes, and libidinal drives which similarly determine the behaviors of the characters they collectively comprise. Naturalist novels thus often present subjects as bodies: the products of the ingrained habits (e.g. muscle memories) and biological impulses that determine human behavior, while concepts like character, psychology, and agency are reduced to the status of mere epiphenomena. Such framing thus implicates the pre-conscious interoceptive information, changes in heart rate, and general homeostatic information about the status of one’s body which Oosterwijk and
Barrett claim influence human decision-making. Finally, the modernist tendency toward introspective rumination and complex use of symbolism is comparable to the conceptual knowledge and memory which are the third contributing element of constructivist theories of emotion. Indeed, the tendency of some modernist texts to abstract action from the novel, emphasizing instead the symbol-processing qualities of the human mind, is what leads Lukacs to describe the genre in terms of “bad infinities,” arguing that in such works narrative effectively becomes an endless play of symbols whose meaning is purely contained in the metaphoric and associational logics which define the relationships between them. Though perhaps not a fair assessment of the genre—or even individual novels—as a whole, such moments in modernist texts can nevertheless be thought of as anticipating the computational theories of cognition used to describe the types of conceptual knowledge which comprise the third component of Oosterwijk and Barrett’s theory of embodied emotion.
Of course, this does not mean that the texts in question exclusively frame their narratives in these terms. Rather, just as variations in the weighting of the different elements of Oosterwijk and Barrett’s theory lead to different reactions from real-world 21 persons, the emphasis on certain types of structural relationships in fiction leads to different interpretations. The main point here is not, however, that different narrative techniques produce different reading experiences—not a particularly revolutionary one from the standpoint of literary criticism—but rather how these different forms interact with one another in the contemporary American novels analyzed in this dissertation. To demonstrate how each of the different ways of presenting mind-body complexes described above can appear alongside one another in a single passage from a novel, I turn again to the scene from Lolita which opens this introduction:
Her legs twitched a little as they lay across my live lap; I stroked them; there she lolled in the right-hand corner, almost a sprawl, Lola the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice, losing her slipper, rubbing the heel of her slipperless foot in its sloppy anklet . . . and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and to improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty—between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock (59).
Here the detachment of object and actions from the broader social world they inhabit implied by Humbert’s narration, as well as its emphasis symbolism and linguistic play, mirrors Lukacs’s descriptions of modernism’s “bad infinities.” So, for example, creative word choices like “shuffle” and “ripple”—atypical for the types of bodily movement described—detach the scene from the concrete meaning of Humbert’s actions, as do his mythological allusions. Thus, Dolores the thirteen-year-old girl becomes an ideal, Lolita the temptress consuming the mythic fruit of an ancient, likely edenic paradise as male genitalia and female body are reconfigured in the symbolic terms of romance, of beauty and beast. As such, at one level it truly seems as if Humbert’s “Lolita [has] been safely solipsized”: ostensibly excised from her 1940s American life and accompanying social conventions, as Dolores’s physical body becomes a term in the symbolic play of 22
Humbert’s fantasy (60). Nevertheless, the scenes narration simultaneously presents readers with a linear narrative, a realist encounter between sexual predator and child victim, ending in precisely the manner the reader expects: Humbert, still too fearful to consummate his desires, masturbates to climax while the unsuspecting Dolores sits across his lap. Thus, Humbert’s sexual desires and abstract fantasies are inevitably dashed upon the necessity of his present circumstances, as Humbert is forced to restrain his bodily desires for fear of his sexual arousal being discovered by Dolores or her mother. These are not the only narrative frameworks, however, at work in this scene. Ultimately what sutures these aspects of the narration together is the text’s emphasis on embodiment: the feeling of heat and softness of hairs, as well as the proprioceptive straining of muscles, which feed into the overly poetic language both symbolizing and dissembling Humbert’s sexual thrill, while also contributing to the reader’s ability to visualize the concrete circumstances of the encounter. Without such details the sudden rush of poetic and romantic imagery would seem out of place, even absurd. Similarly, Humbert’s predatory actions would be interpreted primarily from the standpoint of the social mores readers bring to the text rather than the complex ambivalence produced by the novel’s invitation to “embody” Humbert’s experiences though sensorially evocative language like
“twitched,” “tactile,” “gagged,” and “bursting.” Thus, both the modernist emphasis on symbolic play and the realist navigation of social mores and transgressions derive their particular textual significance from these intimate descriptions of physical sensation, the play of poetic allusions, evocative of a magical plane of existence detached from mundane human existence, gesturing at Humbert’s indescribable feeling of sexual arousal which is nevertheless concretized in the passage’s sense-inducing descriptions of 23 embodiment, made all the more compelling for Humbert, and likely readers, because they are forbidden. The result is a transgressive rush quite different from the alienating attention to bodily positions, actions, and sensations found in naturalism. Both Humbert’s fantasy world and the concrete reality of his actions are superimposed on one another through their grounding in physiological processes and drives, producing a complex intermingling of feelings, motivations, and interpretations in both Humbert and readers.
Embodied description thus becomes a fulcrum between the concrete knowledge of what we know to be occurring and the modernist elision of this meaning which prevents this occurrence from being explicitly described in the text, a blending of genre forms which produces a uniquely captivating textual moment.
2. Affective decision-making and the embodied temporalities of the novel
More than producing a captivating reading experience, however, I argue that this textual moment in Nabokov’s novel also presents human agency and decision-making in a manner very much distinct from the realist, modernist, and naturalist conventions it draws upon. Thus, in contrast to naturalist determinisms, or the removed rationalistic decision-making processes of realism, I argue that Lolita presents decision-making in a form similar to what Massumi calls affective intensities: a field of numerous potential actions superimposed upon one another.21 In essence, Massumi views what we typically term human agency as a process in which all of the exteroceptive and interoceptive information, and all of the cultural conditioning Oosterwijk and Barrett claim feed into emotional states, create what he would term a superposition of incalculable virtual action
21 Generally, this is the meaning of affect intended throughout this dissertation. I have thus avoided using the term as a synonym for emotion wherever possible. 24 potentials: metaphorically, an innumerable series of potential avenues down which the body’s energies might be directed. These affective intensities—too complex and ill- defined to yet be described in terms of discrete thoughts or emotions—then, much like
Jameson’s desire, encounter the “functional limitations” which confine and define their flow into the real. Massumi defines affect in terms of “precisely this two-sidedness, the simultaneous participation of the virtual in the actual and the actual in the virtual, as one arises from the returns to the other” (Parables for the Virtual 35). Decision-making for
Massumi is thus quite different from the capability for restraint demonstrated by many realist characters, choice no longer being about resisting deterministic forces, but rather the direction of virtual affective intensities as they become real actions. Similarly, decision-making in Lolita is presented not as a rationalistic choice to act or not to act, but rather as sort of agitation which then flows into a definitive action.
As both novelistic representations of decision-making and Massumi’s theories on affect concern time, however, it is worth taking a moment to examine how each of the narrative structures outlined above present temporality. Useful here is the distinction between how computationalist and dynamic theories of cognition conceptualize the relationship between perceptions, thoughts, and actions. As previously indicated, under traditional cognitive models, the brain is generally thought of as operating in a series of chronological steps like a computer program, the relationship between perceptions, thoughts, and actions being conceptualized as “the serial or sequential progression of sense->perceive-> think-> act” (Thompson 43). From this standpoint the mind is conceptualized in terms of a series of discrete states, which are then altered by inputs
(e.g. sensations) from the outside world, causing a jump from one discrete state to the 25 next. Similarly, realist novels can reductively, but usefully for my purposes, be thought of as a series of status quos (social and material necessities for Jameson) which are disrupted by the (desire-driven) actions of characters, which in turn produce new world states. Such linear temporality also extends to representations of character, the stimulus-
>thought->response circuitry of computational models of the mind mirroring how characters take in information about a problem in the world, ruminate on possible solutions, and then putting one of those solutions into action.
Alternatively, modernist works commonly de-emphasize such plot-changing actions and events, often focusing primarily on the introspective thoughts of characters, many of whom feel alienated from, rather than intimately connected to, the world around them. As previously mentioned, this divide between what he describes as static subjects and alien worlds leads Lukacs to describe the genre as a “bad infinity” of purely abstract possibilities.22 Thus the supposed impression of a-historicism conveyed by modernist fiction, as the robust sense of history conveyed through meaningful actions in realism, is largely absent from such works. My interest in such claims, however, has less to do with what one might argue is Lukacs’s reductive characterization of modernism as a literary movement and period, than with how some modernist texts present embodiment in discreet scenes—the parts of The Sound and the Fury narrated from Benjy’s perspective, for example, in which his thoughts, feelings, and perceptions of other characters actions are disconnected both from one another and any conception of intentionality. Such disconnects are what is meant when I refer to modernist tropes or representations of
22 Lukacs also associates such an elision of meaning with naturalism, going so far as to state that modernism’s failure to concretize abstract possibilities, and thus present meaningful narratives, “makes a mockery of action and reduces art to naturalistic description” (Realism in Our Time 765). 26 embodiment in this dissertation. Furthering such effects are the various forms of logical and linguistic play frequently found in these novels, gesturing at the tendency of excessive abstractions—including those produced by analogy and metaphor—to burn off the particularities of lived experience. Nevertheless, such narration tends to mirror the linear temporality of computational models of the mind as the movement of signification continues to mirror the step-by-step processing of computers.23 Lacking grounding in the material world, however, this linear series of steps is incapable of becoming historical in the Marxist sense of the term.
Contrasting these linear temporalities, however, is what I’ve previously described as a sort of naturalistic body time. As Mitchell claims, this type of temporality is a product of the particular narrative syntax, and repetitious descriptions of action, that characterize naturalist novels. He describes this effect by appealing to perceptual metaphors: “Seeing double, like hearing an echo, disorients us by not allowing a fixed priority, and until we can assert some sequence, the unsettling effect remains. One of the results of the bewilderment produced by this kind of repetition is that time itself seems suspended”
(Mitchell 25). Such narration, however, does more than disrupt the types of temporality commonly presented in realism. Rather, the rhythmic and cyclical natures of human habits and bodily drives emphasized in naturalism, as Trumpeter observes, also demonstrate how the environment, in the form of characters’ sensory experiences of the outside world, solicits certain behaviors from human actors. Thus, interpreting naturalism through the lens of new materialism, Trumpeter argues that “decision” in such novels “is
23 In The Sound and The Fury, for example, despite the tendency of Benjy’s narration to jump between different biographical events, it nevertheless documents discreet scenes in a plodding, linear fashion. 27 really a term comprising haphazard interactions between competing [biological and non- biological] agencies”—agency loosely defined here as the capacity to affect material relations in the world—which are as responsible for defining the conditions of possibility for free will as they are for constraining them (246). Such moments of decision-making thus preclude the clear progression of perception->thought->action often found in realism, as these competing agencies cannot be linearized into a clear pattern of causation. Instead, a mutually reciprocal relationship between perceiving, thinking, and acting similar to van Gelder’s dynamic theory of cognition is suggested by the text’s depiction of a plethora of both internal and external stimuli which disrupt readerly preferences for causal relationships.24 Such narration, with its emphasis on repetitious descriptions of action and evocations of material environments which seem to solicit involuntary responses from characters, thus collapses the hard-and-fast distinctions between action and thought often found in realism, emphasizing how the often-ignored rhythms of daily life and bodily habits both enable, and to an extent determine, realist decision-making and modernist pontification. This haphazard assembly of agencies thus grounds naturalist narratives in the present moment of textual occurrences, as the rates and rhythms of perceptions, cultural and bodily habits, and biological processes intersect and contrast one another, producing a thick impression of time similar to that theorized by van Gelder.
Nevertheless, it is difficult to ignore that naturalist novels are often disconcerting to readers unfamiliar with their conventions, a complaint often attributed to 19th century
24 In contrast to computational models, dynamic models conceive of human thought as “the continuous co- evolution of acting, perceiving, imagining, feeling, thinking” (Thompson 43), implying a very different temporal relationship between the elements of cognition outlined by Oosterwijk and Barrett. 28 naturalism’s emphasis on “crass” material determinism, and the resulting lack of agency attributed to its representations of character. As Mitchell argues, however, understanding naturalism is as much a matter of understanding how such novels frame the decision- making process as it is the contents which ostensibly determine these decisions. Thus, what defines naturalism is not simply its tendency to present what Trumpeter describes as an “assemblage of agencies” that prevents occurrences from being the effect of a singular
“prime mover” (233). Rather, similar to Oosterwijk and Barrett’s constructivist theory of emotion, it is the manner in which the elements of such assemblages are weighted that affects their reception.25 This is important to the distinction I am making between 19th century naturalism and the emphasis on preconscious bodily drives found in the texts analyzed in this dissertation. Though naturalism demonstrates how human habits, drives, and responses to the material environment (i.e. perceptions) can feed into decisions, it also tends to disallow the possibility of such stimuli being differently prioritized by the subject, such prioritizations being what enables a variety of alternative actions and thus human agency. Thus, it is not that naturalist texts erase thought so much as that thought is so tightly bound to the material world in these novels that readers cannot differentiate between the thoughts, preconscious perceptions, and actions of characters.
Nevertheless, like the naturalisms described above, the novel’s analyzed in this dissertation often present key moments of decision-making and plot development in terms of intersections of material agencies and/or biological processes, the effect of which is to pull readers into the present moment of the decision-making process. Unlike
25 This idea is comparable to Lukcas’s comments on “hierarchies of significance” in realist literature. See “From Realism in Our Time: Literature and the Class Struggle” 764. 29 naturalism, however, such scenes also tend to contain narrative elements which evoke the cause-and-effect temporality of realism and the impression of “timelessness” often associated with modernism. I argue that these contrasting temporalities, at times functioning in a sort of dynamic unison with one another, and in others functioning to contrast one another, open a space for embodied agency within these novels often lacking in their naturalist predecessors. Similar to Oosterwijk’s and Barrett’s arguments about how the vast array of human reactions to a given situation are a function of how different exteroceptive and interoceptive stimuli are weighted, agency in the novels assessed throughout this dissertation is depicted by means of the texts navigation of the different temporalities described above, and ultimately the juxtapositions of the different ways each of these works represent embodiment. Returning again to the same scene from
Lolita, this contrasting of different temporalities is demonstrated in the following passage:
we were fantastically and divinely alone; I watched her, rosy, gold-dusted, beyond the veil of my controlled delight, unaware of it, alien to it, and the sun was on her lips, and her lips were apparently still forming the words of the Carmen-barmen ditty that no longer reached my consciousness. Everything was now ready. The nerves of pleasure had been laid bare. The corpuscles of Krause were entering the phase of frenzy. The least pressure would suffice to set all paradise loose. I had ceased to be Humbert the Hound, the sad-eyed degenerate cur clasping the boot that would presently kick him away. I was above the tribulations of ridicule, beyond the possibilities of retribution. In my self-made seraglio, I was a radiant and robust Turk, deliberately, in the full consciousness of his freedom, postponing the moment of actually enjoying the youngest and frailest of his slaves. Suspended on the brink of that voluptuous abyss (a nicety of physiological equipoise comparable to certain techniques in the arts). (60)
Here again Dolores has “been safely solipsized” (60), as Humbert envisions a modernist divide between his internal experiences and an outside world whose movements continue unabated despite the inward temporal dilation brought about by his approaching climax. 30
Furthermore, Humbert the narrator characterizes Humbert the character’s subjective experience as a quickening profusion of poetic symbolism which burns off the particularities of the scene through a series of vaguely-related analogies. Humbert the sad-eyed hound thus becomes a Turk, a Sultan, and is eventually compared to a monster, while Dolores transforms into Lolita, the youngest and frailest of the collection of lovers/victims/slaves from which such mythic figures can choose to cavort—perhaps a reference to other young girls Humbert has been attracted to over the years. As such, at one level the scene presents time in terms of the abstract movements of signification criticized by Lukacs. Despite this metaphoric play ostensibly collapsing the specificity of
Humbert and Dolores’s situation into a sort of mythological abstraction, however, the scene is never truly removed from the present moment. Both grounding and driving
Humbert’s ruminations are halting descriptions of Dolores’s body listed with near palpable rhythmic force which, alongside the details of Humbert’s haptic and proprioceptive sensations, provide an alternative temporality to the symbolic infinity of
Humbert’s fantasies. Such perceptions—much like the solicitations from the material world Trumpeter describes in naturalism—implore Humbert to consummate the sexual act as the repetitions in narrative syntax described by Mitchell blur the relationship between internal bodily sensations, perceptions of the exterior world, and the actions of characters which seem to occur simultaneously without one leading into the next. In 19th century naturalism, narrated from the external perspective of an anonymous 3rd person narrator, such solicitations would likely lead to rape or attempted rape.26 Here, however,
26 This claim needs some clarification. Worthy of particular note is what critics like Donald Pizer have observed is a conservative streak in American letters at the turn of the 19th century with regard to depictions of sexuality (See Pizer 7-10). Though the novels of Dreiser and Norris are notable exceptions to this 31 the novel’s focus on the perspectives of Humbert the narrator and Humbert the character serves to ascribe an impression of moral ambiguity to Humbert’s actions as he, unbeknownst to an oblivious Dolores, clandestinely “crushes” out an orgasm “against her left buttock” (61).
Such ambiguity is a product of the manner in which the different temporal frames described above are not just presented alongside, but as mutually determining one another along with the third temporality presented in this scene: the realist emphasis on cause and effect.27 Importantly, this temporality is rooted in the narrative sleight-of-hand described by Mitchell, which dictates that between perceptions and actions lies the moment of contemplation wherein moral decision-making and thought take place. For
Jameson—as well as Mitchell—this space is the site of the absent cause, the meeting of desire and necessity which can only be perceived as effect. Here, however, the site is filled with the contents of the modernist and naturalist temporalities which appear alongside it. Furthermore, this relationship becomes perceptible to the reader through the
sentiment, McTeague’s barely restrained animal sexuality in Norris’s novel of the same name being at least superficially comparable to the scene described here (See McTeague 16), even in naturalist works such as these avoided graphic depictions of sexual acts. My point is not, however, that depictions of rape were common place in American naturalism—they weren’t. Rather, I argue that the “logic” guiding character actions and development in such novels—wherein characters frequently give into “bodily” urges with tragic consequences—would often have resulted in such acts of violence if it weren’t for the generally circumspect way in which sex was treated during this period. 27 The importance of this third temporality becomes apparent not only when considering the content bookending Humbert’s arousal—largely devoid of naturalistic and modernist formalisms—which describes Dolores and her mother as moral actors who can decide, for example, not to go to church, but also throughout Humbert’s description of his sexual encounter with Dolores, as readers are continuously reminded of the exterior world of realist cause-and-effect and morality. So, for example, the narrative repeatedly cycles back to Dolores’s singing even as Humbert’s own experiences are abstracted from it, Humbert comments on and kneads a blemish on Dolores’s leg which she dismisses, and the episode concludes with Dolores jumping up to answer a ringing telephone. Such details are presented not in terms of modernism’s symbolic infinity, or naturalism’s time-dilating determinisms, but rather in terms of the predictability of realist cause and effect which continues to play out in the background of Humbert’s internal distraction. 32 careful manner in which Humbert’s culpability is presented in this scene. Such moral ambiguity is first emphasized through Humbert’s metanarrative framing of the event, in which he implores readers to “see for themselves how careful, how chaste, the whole wine-sweet event is if viewed with what my lawyer has called, in a private talk we have had, ‘impartial sympathy’” (57). Such protestations of guilt contrast a similar exculpatory impulse found in naturalist crime novels like Dreiser’s American Tragedy, in which
Clyde’s culpability is thrown into question by the novel’s emphasis on circumstances beyond his control.28 Here, however, Humbert’s legalistic argument reframes the issue of guilt from being a naturalistic question of an inability not to act, to a moralistic demonstration of restraint. Nevertheless, this restraint is far from innocent. It is also an essential component of Humbert’s sexual arousal, which is heightened by his almost ascetic denial of his desires. As such, the naturalist emphasis on deterministic bodies and environments isn’t just forestalled by a realist act of subjective will; these deterministic forces are also circumscribed by such will in a sort of feedback loop—the desire to act and will to restrain do not dampen but rather amplify one another. Thus, the impression of agency produced by realism’s tendency to leave gaps between desire and necessity— the infinite minutia of details that lead from cause to effect smoothed out by the reading mind—amplifies the very rhythmic temporality of bodily drives which is so often considered its opposite effect in naturalism. In much the same way, Humbert’s fantasies cannot be separated from their grounding in the bodily sensations which demand not contemplation but action, nor could the impression of “absolute security, confidence and
28 See Trumpeter 244. 33 reliance” of Humbert’s fantasy world exist if it were not for the threat to this “security” presented by the realist social milieu around him.
This superposition of the various elements which circumscribe Humbert’s actions is precisely what Massumi refers to as the virtual, a build-up of affective intensities which—unlike Jameson’s desire—exist in the moment before the bodily drives, sensations, perceptual faculties, cultural habits and knowledge that make up the human subject manifest themselves in determinate action. This affective intensity is thus not defined by its often-disheartening encounters with necessity but rather, similar to
Oosterwijk and Barrett’s emotional states, awaits only some weighting of its elements so that it might collapse into determinate action. The narration thus presents agency as a function of selecting between the different, yet mutually co-determining, narrative structures of realism, modernism, and naturalism, each suggesting possible outlets for
Humbert’s sexual tension, whether it be a chain of solipsistic fantasies, the aggressive consummation of his sexual desires, or realist restraint and sublimation. This is also what produces the scene’s robust impression of possibility, and therefore agency. Until his anti-climactic climax joltingly returns Humbert to the mundane world of daily life, each of these possibilities seems equally valid as he sits perched upon an aestheticized abyss of potential realities.
3. Agental cuts and the priming of textual meaning
As previously mentioned, this dissertation interprets the emphasis on embodiment found in Nabokov’s novel as a means of addressing what figures like Jameson,
Baudrillard, and Lyotard describe as the postmodern condition. The intersection of different mind-body complexes demonstrated above is thus read in the context of 34
Jameson claims about the inability of late 20th century fiction to compellingly locate complex characters within the broader sociocultural milieus these characters inhabit. The tightly interconnected junctions of bodily representation found in Lolita can thus be interpreted as an alternative means of locating bodies, and thus subjects, within the increasingly opaque world of late 20th century capitalism. Accordingly, the superposition of possible responses to Humbert’s “emotional event” presents choice not as a rationalistic projection of the consequences of potential actions, but rather as something more akin to the emotional complexes described by Oosterwijk and Barrett, which are predicated upon the tight interconnection between mind and body that is the basis of theories of embodied cognition. Reading the novel in this manner means that if agency is to be interpreted as playing a role in Humbert’s story—and I argue that the construction of the scene promotes exactly this interpretation—then such an impression of agency is a function of the ability of his narration to juggle the various bodily, affective, and conceptual contents constitutive of his experiences, agency (or a lack thereof) being presented as the ability (or inability) to differently weight and structure this content.
Such weighting is not, however, a matter of instantaneous choices on the part of characters. Rather, such structures are normalized by the relative frequency of their appearances, in line with the representations of characters’ individual habits, as well as the influence social milieu(s) exert on these characters. Thus, this relationship functions along the lines of what Massumi describes as affective priming, a process wherein “The tendential undertow [of affect] crests into determinate action” and which “depends, on the one hand, on the individual’s susceptibility to their own tendential infra-churnings and, on the other, on its openness to the situation,” i.e. the broader context of the world 35 around the individual (30). In other words, priming is not what induces specific actions, or brings a particular set of material relations into existence, but rather what inclines the individual toward certain types of actions. The general manner in which the literary conventions and tropes analyzed in this dissertation, along with their corresponding representations of embodiment, function is to depict this process in fictional form, changes in narration corresponding to what might be thought of as the general habitus of these characters. Agency, from this standpoint, is thus the willful changing of one’s habits.
4. Chapter summaries
The four chapters of this dissertation are roughly divided into two sections. The first, composed of the chapters “Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar as Neoliberal Bildungsroman” and
“Three Forms of Embodied Subjectivity in Don DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star,” focuses on how the novels in question innovatively rework coming-of-age narratives by locating the tensions that typically define such stories in the relationship between mind and body.
These chapters take particular inspiration from Franco Moretti’s assessment of the bildung novel as a “soul-nation allegory” in which the tension between youthful ambition and the acquiescence to cultural norms mirrors similar tensions between capitalist development and tradition within the liberal nation state. The very particular, ideologically-driven, and well-defined relationship between subjects and nations presented in the bildungsroman thus provides fertile ground for (re)considering how conceptions of such relationships shift under late capitalism. Plath’s and DeLillo’s novels are thus read in the context of the growing “invisibility” or “unintelligibility” of material relations under late-stage capitalism, economic forces which present an ever-widening 36 gulf between the everyday lives of citizens and the complexities of the market. As previously mentioned, Jameson characterizes the resulting postmodern condition as a breakdown in the symbolic meaning which, among other things, grounded the ideologies which comprised national identities, and thus circumscribed plot development in the bildungsroman. In response to this problem I argue that both Plath’s and DeLillo’s novels instead ground symbolic meaning within the body itself, relocating the dramatic tensions which defined plot and character development in earlier iterations of the bildung novel to a conflict between the conscious, symbolic mind and the preconscious, sensorial body.
Thus, rather than presenting the mind and body functioning as a dynamic unity, the various narrative structures at work in The Bell Jar more often serve to deconstruct subjectivity. Nevertheless, the subject as a product of embodied drives and habits is central to how my first chapter assesses the representation of character in Plath’s novel,
Esther frequently evaluating both herself and others in terms of these habits. This equation of bodily habits with identity is thus directly linked to this chapter’s positioning of Plath’s novel as what I am terming a neoliberal bildungsroman. Using Michel
Foucault’s seminal assessment of neoliberalism, this chapter demonstrates how Esther
Greenwood frequently contemplates her own ambitions and potential actions in terms of rationalistic choices about bodily habits and consumption. Furthermore, I argue that it is precisely this sort of neoliberal thinking—conceptualizing decisions in terms of mutually exclusive investment opportunities in bodily habits—which manifests itself in Esther’s
“neurotic” inability to select between different forms of embodied subjectivity. The result is her frequent encounter with rationalistic “bad infinities,” the contemplation of multitudes of choices often paralyzing her ability to act. Contrasting this paralysis are 37 moments of impulsivity where solicitous material environments or unconscious bodily drives seem to circumscribe Esther’s actions, echoing the deterministic narrative structures of naturalism. Ultimately, I argue that these contrasting representations of embodiment take on an important role in structuring The Bell Jar’s plot, the tension between narrative closure and progression being respectively tied to such modernist and naturalist depictions of the body.
Furthermore, this chapter also situates these elements in terms of Jameson’s
(metaphorically) schizophrenic reading of postmodern culture. In contrast to Jameson’s claims that a (schizophrenic) breakdown in symbolic meaning leads to a flattening of bourgeois subjectivity in the postmodern novel, I argue that The Bell Jar instead registers such breakdowns in the form of Esther’s alienation from the broader socio-cultural context of her story. It is in response to such breakdowns that Esther’s narration quickly retreats to its emphasis on the body in the novel’s early chapters as part of an effort to locate a site for the types of dynamic textual meaning and agency discussed throughout this introduction. It is through this retreat that Plath’s novel emphasizes the importance of embodiment to what, for Jameson, is a fundamentally structuralist (i.e. symbolic) subjectivity. Esther’s efforts to reground subjectivity in a neoliberal sense of embodiment, however, prove untenable as the breakdown of the mind-body relationship exacerbated by Esther’s mental illness reveals inherent contradictions within such conceptions of embodied subjectivity, Neoliberalism’s emphasis on individual responsibility eliding how the stability of the embodied subject is rooted, at least in part, in the social world. 38
This backdrop of postmodern culture in even more prominent in Don DeLillo’s
Ratner’s Star, which like most of DeLillo’s novels locates its protagonist, fourteen-year- old math genius and Nobel laureate Billy Twillig, in an alienating, and often paranoia- inducing world of late 20th century capitalism. Like the previous chapter, “Three Forms of Embodied Subjectivity in Don DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star,” argues that DeLillo’s novel depicts character and subject development by means of different representations of embodiment. Unlike The Bell Jar, however, DeLillo’s allegorical novel, chronicling the history of mathematics, presents three competing visions of embodied subjectivity: 1) a sort of idealist subject whose mind, mimicking the disembodied tropes of modernism, seems radically disconnected from the material world around it; 2) a more general exaggeration of realist representations of the subject, which can effect changes upon the world while being seemingly disconnected from it; and 3) what I argue is the novel’s privileged depiction of subjectivity as a dynamic interrelationship between mind, body and environment. The latter, I argue, is also the primary means by which Ratner’s Star depicts the development of Billy’s character, this development coming to stand not as an allegory of national development, but as a synecdoche of human intellectual development more broadly.
In contrast to Esther Greenwood, however, for whom rationalistic evaluations of bodily habits are contrasted to her “innate” bodily impulses or desires, for Billy Twillig such tensions take the form of a juxtaposition of the abstract reason which allows Billy to create elegant mathematical models ostensibly disconnected from the material world, and what I argue is the bodily-grounded intuition from which his considerable mathematical talents nevertheless spring. Specifically, for Billy such intuition takes the form of bodily 39 senses, which the novel frequently depicts as being both deeply imbricated and incommensurable with the functioning of Billy’s conscious mind. Ultimately, it is this simultaneous imbrication and incommensurability of the symbol-processing mind and sensorial body which I argue defines the subject in DeLillo’s novel. Juxtaposed to these depictions of Billy’s intellect, however, is the novel’s presentation of its Lewis Carroll- esque cast of secondary characters. The first of the novel’s two sections, “Adventures:
Field Experiment Number One,” is thus dominated by Billy’s surrealistic encounters with an odd assemblage of scientists, cabalists, and mystics who, as mentioned above, are frequently depicted as exaggerations or parodies of the types of realist and modernist representations of embodiment explored throughout this dissertation.
In contrast to the above focus on embodied subjects, the second half of this dissertation tracks the relationship of representations embodiment to the ethical and political themes of Doctorow’s and Morrison’s novels. Thus, both chapters in this section, “Disciplining the Body in E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel” and “Ghostly
Embodiments in Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” focus less on the development of individual subjects and more on how the mind-body complexes introduced in this introduction depict the influences of social groups, and broader cultural formations, upon the embodied practices and identities of characters. As such, theories of affect challenging liberal notions of subjectivity, like those of Teresa Brennan and in particular Brian
Massumi, are important lenses in my analysis of these novels.29 Such theories pose the idea that the preconscious impulses and drives which stand in for authentic identity in the
29 Similar ideas are expressed by Richardson and Chemero. 40 early chapters of The Bell Jar in particular are rooted not within individual subjects, but rather are fundamentally intersubjective phenomena.
Chapter three, “Disciplining the Body in E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel,” assesses the novel’s depiction of both the 1930s and 40s Old Left as well as the 1960s
New Left, in relation to the dominant American cultures they respectively seek to resist.
Specifically, I argue that the novel traces a transition from what Foucault terms disciplinary power—directed at disciplining the development and habits of individual bodies—to what he terms biopower—directed at developing the aggregate productive capacities of “life” within a nation’s population—not only within American society at large. Furthermore, I claim that such changes manifest themselves not only in the state and capitalist institutions presented by the novel, but also in the radical political moments which seek to disrupt such authority. The representations of embodiment used to assess character development in the previous novels are thus employed in this chapter to demonstrate the different ways in which power is directed at the body in Doctorow’s novel.
Beyond merely describing the similar evolutions of these radical movements and
American society more broadly, however, this chapter also engages with what the novel depicts as the respective failures of the Old and New Lefts. These failures can be summarized as a tendency to pursue political change on the part of the Old Left through appeals to purely rational conceptions of the subject, and on the part of the New, by appealing to subjects as purely spontaneous affective beings capable of making a clean break with the past. Both prove dead ends in the novel. Thus, the Old Left’s faith in the capacity of human reason to create a better world is challenged as it encounters what the 41 novel depicts as the widespread irrationality of cold war hysteria. Alternatively, the New
Left’s emphasis on spontaneous revolutionary action is challenged in the form of Daniel himself, whose own proclivity for abusive behavior is indicative of how (traumatic) histories both inscribe themselves upon and perpetuate themselves from within the affective body itself. Ultimately, I argue that the novel stakes out a tentative solution to these problems in the structure of Daniel’s narration, which presents a possible dynamic intersection between the affective and the rational.
The subject of the final chapter of this dissertation, “Ghostly Embodiments in Toni
Morrison’s Beloved,” is distinct from the rest of the novels assessed in the dissertation, not only because it is set in the 1870s, and thus almost a century before The Bell Jar.
Morrison’s historical novel, addressing the history of slavery from the standpoint of its victims, is also a ghost story, whose supernatural elements add another wrinkle to this dissertation’s exploration of representations of embodiment in works of later 20th century
American fiction. Nevertheless, I argue that these supernatural elements serve as a useful tool for both exploring and challenging many of the presuppositions implicit to American neoliberalism, the trope of the disembodied ghost serving as an effective metaphor for the neoliberal subject whose desires exert themselves on the surrounding world in a manner much like hauntings. Thus, it is as the ghost enters the world of Morrison’s novel as an embodied presence, that Beloved’s narration implicitly begins to challenge such
(neo)liberal conception of the subject, as the irreducible outbursts of this ghostly entity prove to be rooted in the often-conflicting drives of the biological body and its relationship to the surrounding world. Alongside the tendency of the novel to depict slavery as disconnecting its victims from their own bodies in a manner reminiscent of 42
Jameson’s account of postmodernism, such themes suggest that Morrison’s novel is as much a response to the 1980 world in which it was written as it is work of historical fiction.
43
Look what can happen in this country, they’d say. A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for nineteen years, so poor she can’t afford a magazine, and then she gets a scholarship to college and wins a prize here and a prize there and ends up steering New York like her own private car. Only I wasn’t steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolleybus. . . (I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.) (2-3) --Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
“Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar as Neoliberal Bildungsroman”
The opening of The Bell Jar has often been cited for its vivid (and somewhat alienating) descriptions of New York City, its implicit criticisms of American consumer culture, and its setting up of the novel’s “coming-of-age” plot.30 Though each of these themes is addressed in this chapter, a more urgent element of Esther’s opening narration in the context of this dissertation is the way it utilizes embodiment to convey meaning.
The concluding metaphor in particular indicates the extent to which Esther’s description of the city is deeply rooted in both the interoceptive information about the internal status and sensations of one’s body and the exteroceptive information gathered from the outside world, in this case primarily though the sense of vision. In Esther’s tornado metaphor these sensorimotor concepts, including a bodily feeling of stillness and visually evocative descriptions of motion, are juxtaposed to create a vivid portrayal of clinical depression.
This suggestive mobilization of bodily sensations to convey an understanding of a rarified emotional state demonstrates Esther’s intuitive sense of the central role embodiment plays in her mental life and, as this chapter will argue, the central roles the
30 See, for example, Kendall 52. 44 body, embodiment, and bodily habits will play in The Bell Jar’s depiction of Esther’s character development.
More than being an important component of how Plath’s novel conveys emotions like depression, however, I argue embodiment is also central to understanding how the process of socialization both functions and is problematized in the novel. The Bell Jar tells the story of Esther Greenwood, a precocious yet increasingly disaffected nineteen- year-old woman attending an unspecified elite women’s college on the East Coast. As the novel opens she is spending her summer as an intern for a highbrow women’s magazine in New York City. Though this prestigious program presents many unique opportunities for Esther, the experience nevertheless proves a bust. Furthermore, upon returning home to a series of personal disappointments—including an implied engagement to a man she no longer loves—Esther quickly descends into what appears a major depressive episode.
Following unsuccessful clinical treatments, including a terrifying experience with electroshock therapy, Esther attempts suicide. Failure lands her first in a state hospital, and then an upscale mental institution thanks to the intervention of Philomena Guinea, the wealthy benefactress whose scholarship paid for Esther’s education. The novel concludes with Esther’s tentative recovery as she prepares to re-enter the social world from which her mental illness forced her to withdraw. Despite her recovery, however, the problems that originally precipitated Esther’s breakdown, including an enduring dissatisfaction with the personal, professional, and existential opportunities offered by
1950s America, persist.
Noting such ambiguities in The Bell Jar’s conclusion is a common refrain in scholarship on the novel, its awkward resolution frequently being interpreted as form of 45 social critique. Thus, for example, Tim Kendall claims that Esther’s fear of relapse at the close of the novel is justified “because [this conclusion] offers her no form of reconciliation with society” (56). Similarly, Christina Britzolakis argues that The Bell Jar constitutes a wholesale rejection of American individualism and capitalist instrumental rationality. Specifically, she argues that the novel’s “‘abnormal’ perspective of a suicidally depressed narrator” serves “to estrange and parody the ‘normal’ or ‘objective’ techniques of mimetic realism” and thus Esther’s inability to re-enter society at the close of the novel functions as “a vehicle of social critique” (34-5).
It is in conversation with such readings that this chapter frames Esther’s journey from a promising magazine intern and aspiring writer, through clinical depression and attempted suicide, to tentative convalescence, as a neoliberal bildungsroman, in which functional adulthood is equated with becoming a properly rational economic subject. The novel’s ambiguous resolution thus functions as a critique of the society which champions such a subject, and the ideological presuppositions upon which it is based. This chapter differentiates itself from the types of scholarship described above, however, in two important ways. First is its emphasis on the role of embodiment in the novel’s depiction of character, its implicit critique of capitalism, as well as its inconclusive resolution.
Second is my claim that, despite Esther’s dissatisfaction with capitalist America, both
Esther and the novel itself at times seem to buy into elements of the very ideology upon which this culture is based. The first section of this chapter thus pushes back against what
Kendall observes, in the context of Plath’s work more generally, is a critical tendency to emphasize Plath’s rebelliousness while downplaying her need to conform, a tension
“Plath struggled to resolve throughout her life and explored in her work” (49). 46
In reading The Bell Jar as a neoliberal bildungsroman I argue that, in contrast to earlier iterations of the genre, which grounded the acculturation process in concepts like tradition, history, or national identity, social conformity in The Bell Jar instead takes a form evocative of Michel Foucault’s description of neoliberalism, under which the regulation and cultivation of bodily habits are conceptualized in terms of investments in individualistic economic ends. As such, Esther’s first-person narration frequently assesses her own activities, habits, and potential mentors in terms of individual need rather than in the context of inherited cultural values. Contrasting this neoliberal rationality are moments where impulsive actions appear to arise from within Esther’s body itself. This chapter argues that the tension between these distinct forms of decision- making, one concerning the rationalistic development of bodily habits, the other being driven by preconscious bodily impulses and desires, not only circumscribes character development in The Bell Jar, but also connects it to Franco Moretti’s assessment of the bildungsroman as a literary form commonly driven by conflicts between social conformity and individual desires, themselves allegorical of tensions between national identity and rampant capitalist development in the liberal nation state.31
31 My use of Marxist theories of the bildungsroman like Moretti’s significantly contrasts the often-cursory references to this tradition in recent criticism of the novel as well as older criticism which often assesses The Bell Jar’s coming-of-age tropes almost exclusively in terms of plot and character development. See, for example, Wagner. In contrast, Marxist accounts of coming-of-age novels connect these narratives to their capitalist moment. Thus, relying on Marxist accounts is useful for situating The Bell Jar within its own cultural moment of nascent late-stage capitalism. This chapter therefore shares some similarities with Nicholas Donofrio’s recent efforts to situate this novel in the context of the rise of corporate internship culture in 1950s America. It differs from Donofrio’s account, however, by arguing that the novel’s reaction to these economic and cultural forces is to relocate its depiction of subject formation within representations of embodiment.
47
The opening of The Bell Jar conspicuously evokes the tradition Moretti describes.
Thus, in the above epigraph the co-development of Esther Greenwood and 1950s
American society is implied through the ostentatious metaphor of steering New York
City, uniting Esther’s destiny with that of the nation’s most iconic economic and cultural hub. This intermingling of destinies, however, is immediately invalidated in the following paragraph as we learn, contra social expectations and bildung tropes, that rather than gleaning a sense of cultural affiliation and continuity from her proximity to the
“hullabaloo” of the city, Esther instead feels alienated by it. It is in terms of this ostensible inconsistency, The Bell Jar as a coming-of-age story whose protagonist feels acutely alienated from the world she is coming of age in, that this chapter interprets the novel as a neoliberal bildungsroman. As such, in Plath’s novel, the tensions which typically define the bildung plot are relocated from the relationship between subject and nation, to the relationship described above: neoliberal economic rationality directed at the individual’s bodily habits and the desires that arise from within the body itself. In other words, in The Bell Jar what are generally regarded as ideological or discursive cultural phenomena ultimately have less to do with the symbolic mind than the individual habits of material bodies.
This challenge to the centrality of the symbolic in Plath’s novel also serves as a starting point for reconsidering elements of Jameson’s assessment of the postmodern condition, and its effects upon later works 20th century fiction. For Jameson the inability of novels like The Bell Jar to ground their characters in a broader sociohistorical context is a result of the general breakdown in symbolic meaning in late capitalist societies. This leads to flat depictions of both characters and the worlds they occupy in works of 48 postmodern fiction. Rather than presenting such “depthless” characterization, I argue that
The Bell Jar’s emphasis on the body functions as an alternative to representing character in the form of a dialectical relationship between individuals and their socio-historical moment. Instead, retreating from the nascent postmodern world of mid-20th century
American capitalism, as well as the literary tropes born from it, The Bell Jar becomes a novel whose conflicts are thematized first and foremost in terms embodiment.
Furthermore, I ague that it is breakdowns in the functionality of Esther’s body and its fraught relationship with her mental life, which ultimately takes the place of ideological conflict—what Jameson refers to as “cultural revolution—in Plath’s novel.
As such, the tension described above, between economic rationality (in form of habits) and bodily desire, plays a central role in structuring The Bell Jar’s plot. While
Esther assesses both herself and the world around her in neoliberal terms, she is also frequently paralyzed by her inability to select between the choices presented her, such paralysis mirroring the endless ruminations of the symbol-processing mind which fail to manifest themselves in concrete actions. As such, moments of plot progression are the product of either spontaneous acts of subjective will or, increasingly as the novel progresses, the desires and preconscious impulses of a biological body which appear to contravene human agency. This distinction between rationalistic paralysis and the impulsive actions of a biological body also aligns with Moretti’s descriptions of the bildungsroman, the dialectic between youthful ambition and cultural conformity not only commonly defining the thematic tensions of the genre but also what Yuri Lotman terms the classification and transformation principles of textual organization (Moretti 7). That is, the tension between symbolic and narrative meaning, the former inherently stalling 49 plot progression, while the latter moves it forward. This relationship between symbolic and narrative meaning is thus located in the mind-body complexes described in the introduction, as is the novel’s representation of Esther’s mental illness, which takes the form of a similar divide between the rational mind and desiring body.
Moreover, much like the traditional bildungsroman, whose conclusion resolves the tension between narrative progress and symbolic closure at the same time it reconciles the tensions between cultural expectations and youthful impetuousness, The Bell Jar’s plot structure seems to suggest that the reconciliation of neoliberal rationality with bodily desire should coincide with the close of the novel, allowing Esther to re-enter society a functional and inevitably successful adult. Such reconciliation is precisely what this chapter argues the novel denies Esther at the end of The Bell Jar. This is because Esther’s tentative recovery is a product not of individual will—some action which could meaningfully reconcile the contradictions the novel’s plot explores—but rather a result of both care from others and time—or, in other words, the recuperative powers of the biological body itself. Such a resolution thus not only contravenes the fictional impulse towards closure, but also the importance (neo)liberalism places upon an individual’s choices and actions.
1. Rational embodiments: The Bell Jar as neoliberal bildungsroman
In contrast to Nora Sellei, who interprets the biological body in terms of “the production of discourse” (129), or Marilyn Boyer, who reads The Bell Jar’s depiction of
“the disabled body” through the lens of psychoanalysis, this chapter approaches the novel’s representation of the body in terms of its status as a material, as opposed to 50 discursive, object. Nevertheless, as Sellei claims, there is something oddly postmodern about the world Esther describes. A good example is the photo shoot at Ladies Day magazine visited by Esther’s cohort early in the novel. In this scene, Sellei observes, the photos of “lush double-page spreads of Technicolor meals” requiring meticulous staging
(Plath 25) “bear no causal relation whatsoever on reality, reality does not serve as a point of reference, but the images themselves turn into (hyper)reality” (Sellei 135). Much like these Technicolor photos, meticulously produced simulacra of food which looks better than the real thing, the members of Esther’s cohort are similarly presented as products, types circumscribed by the very media images they witness being shot at Ladies Day.32
Of course such observations ultimately reflect back upon their source: Esther herself, whose sense of embodiment, Sellei claims, is so circumscribed by media “discourses” that the idea of an “’authentic’ and ‘natural’ body that can be a genuine ‘core’ of the self” is rendered impossible within the text (130).
Such “hyperreal” moments are unquestionably important to many of The Bell Jar’s early scenes. Rather than erasing the biological body as a site of identity, however, I argue that they tend to reaffirm the importance of embodiment within the text. Thus, although Plath’s novel presents a series of competing representations of identity, many of which concern consumptive practices, I find it more useful to think of these representations in terms of Foucault’s bio-power, a concept closely connected to his theories on neoliberalism, and which is less concerned with the idea of bodies as discursive constructs than with how discourses affect such bodies. Foucault first defines
32 See Sellei 131-38. 51 bio-power in The History of Sexuality as an increasingly subtle form of social power directed at everyday life and, in particular, the body:
[Beginning in the 18th century] For the first time in history, no doubt, biological existence was reflected in political existence . . . Power would no longer be dealing simply with legal subjects over whom the ultimate domain was death, but with living beings, and the mastery it would be able to exercise over them would have to be applied at the level of life itself; it was taking charge of life, more than the threat of death, that gave power its access to the body. If one can apply the term bio-history to the pressures though which the movements of life and processes of history interfere with one another, one would have to speak of bio-power to designate what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge- power an agent of transformation of human life. (142-3)
Thus, according to Foucault, an intensification of the state’s interest in demographic, and inevitably biometric data, for governance is what typifies the institutional power of the modern nation state. Bio-power concerns more, however, than the compiling and cataloging of empirical data about human life.33 It also describes a transition from the forms of disciplinary power first described by Foucault in Discipline and Punish to forms of power which function through the presentation of norms: “Such a power has to qualify, measure, appraise, and hierarchize, rather than display itself in its murderous splendor; it does not have to draw the line that separates the enemies of the sovereign from his obedient subjects; it effects distributions around the norm” (History of Sexuality
144). In short, rather than power emanating from a sovereign source—whether kings, institutions, or traditions which tend to inflict punishments for transgressions—the regulatory functions of society increasingly become the self-regulation of one’s bodily
33 See also The History of Sexuality 140-1. 52 habits categorized in terms of nebulous social standards and policed not in terms of punishment but in terms of a socially prescribed duty to pursue personal betterment.34
As such, elements of what would typically be considered private life—the leisure activities one engages in, the clothing one purchases and wears, the types of food and medicinal products one consumes and, of particular interest to Foucault, the types of sexual practices one engages in—increasingly become sites wherein individuals are expected to police their own behaviors so as to optimize their functionality as social and, in particular, economic actors. This intensification of bio-power in post-war America is the lens through which this chapter reinterprets the “bodily” discourses identified by
Sellei, not as constructing a discursive body with no real-world referent but, rather, as making this material body the locus of an unceasing process of socialization through the regulation of daily habits of work, leisure, and consumption. As such, rather than presenting a series of discourses circulating around an absent or missing subject, The Bell
Jar instead presents the body as the primary site of subject formation.
To understand how bio-power manifests itself within the thematic economy of the text, it is useful to frame Foucault’s ideas in terms of Moretti’s analysis of the late 18th century bildungsroman, which similarly locates the development of characters within a series of quotidian habits—a thematic tendency intensified by The Bell Jar’s focus on the body. According to Moretti, the popularity of early bildungsromans like Goethe’s
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice supplanted that of earlier tragic narratives. As a result, the exceptional events typically found in these
34 What is typically described as the self-help genre, including its inaugural text Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, can thus be seen as popular manifestations of what Foucault argues is a much broader social phenomenon. 53 earlier works, in which judgments were meted out upon characters in the form of punishments, gave way to an emphasis on the slow acculturation process located in the rhythms of daily life found in the bildung novel. The central driving force of plot thus becomes the process of bringing the individualistic desires of the novel’s protagonist in line with the social conventions of the broader community. This observation is similar to
Foucault’s claims about bio-power, which significantly focus on much the same historical period.35 Thus, similar to how the state’s application of biopower focuses less on punishing transgressions than on the production of certain types of subjects through the regulation of habits, in the bildungsroman the primary concern of fiction becomes the journey from youth to adulthood also located in daily life.
Nevertheless, the quotidian elements of these texts exist against a backdrop of the social and cultural systems of value which, as Jed Esty emphasizes in his work on the modernist bildungsroman, is frequently circumscribed by conceptions of national identity. Thus, such backdrops serve not only as a field of possibility against which characters and their development can be defined, but also present limits to such possibilities, allowing these novels to reach definitive conclusions which reconcile individual ambitions with cultural constraint. Such reconciliation, however, became more problematic as this tradition developed, a trend Esty attributes to the erasure of regional and national boarders by capitalist development, ultimately resulting in the rise of modernist novels of “arrested development.” In such works, the inability of the nation to symbolically unify the different experiences and interests of an increasingly diverse
35 See, for example, “Right of Death and Power Over Life.” 54 social milieu causes the ceaseless series of events that comprise quotidian life to no longer find its conceptual limit—or inclination toward narrative closure—in national identity.
In The Bell Jar, this inability to locate a symbolic limit in a shared conception of nationhood becomes even more extreme; as a result, symbols of national identity are no longer capable of setting limits for either character development or the novel’s thematic resolution. So, in contrast to the tendency of characters in modernist novels to feel excluded from, or overwhelmed by, the trappings of national identity, in The Bell Jar, the symbols of nationhood are instead presented as an almost alien or oppositional force.
This is demonstrated in the opening pages of the novel where New York is presented as a hostile landscape: “Mirage-gray at the bottom of their granite canyons, the hot streets wavered in the sun, the car tops sizzled and glittered, and the dry, cindery dust blew into my eyes and down my throat” (1). Here, the city is depicted not only as foreign but as literally assaulting Esther’s body, impairing its ability to properly see or breathe. Such alienation does not just manifest itself in Esther’s hostile descriptions of iconic urban landscapes. It can also be found, for example, in her attitudes toward education. Thus, instead of feeling deprived of or overwhelmed by an education designed to foster a sense of national identity or civic duty,36 Esther reflects—though not without a hint of dissatisfaction—on her tendency to view education as an end in and of itself: “All my life
36 This can be contrasted to Jed Esty’s observations about the relationship between modernist characters and education. So, for example, Virginia Woolf’s Rachel feels alienated due to her lack of “access to a proper education,” whereas Joyce’s Stephan is “paralyzed by the insights of his elite training” (Etsy 31), both of which are in part a result of education being tied to a nationalist intellectual tradition. Though writing in an American context, I argue that Plath’s familiarity with these writings make this connection a fitting one. 55
I’d told myself studying and reading and writing and working like mad was what I wanted to do, and it actually seemed to be true, I did everything well enough and got all
A’s and by the time I made college nobody could stop me” (31). Lacking in such descriptions is any hint of education’s role in developing a sense of national identity—or any other form of broader cultural meaning. In lieu of such identifications, Esther instead laments what now seems the hollowness of the studies which dominated the early years of her life.
In response to this inability to locate a sense of meaning or closure within national identity, Esther’s first-person narration turns inwards, describing herself and the world immediately surrounding her in terms of bodily habits and, as critics like Sellei and
Renee Dowbnia note, consumptive practices; this narrative focus on bodily habits and practices is thus reminiscent of what Foucault describes as (American) neoliberalism.
This ideology is a rooted in a theoretical inability37 of the state or sovereign—let alone the average citizen—to conceptualize relationships between the experiences of individuals and the broader social totalities in which they are imbedded—whether these totalities are the nation as a collection of institutional and cultural relationships or late capitalism as a collection of economic ones.38 The result is a series of social and political discourses focused on the intensification of bio-power, as the regulation of increasingly large and diverse populations ideally becomes a form of individual self-regulation. These discourses, Foucault argues, also lead to the formation of a particular type of subject, homo economicus, “who is not so much defined by his freedom” or transcendental
37 See The Birth of Biopolitics 182-6. 38 Thus, in a sense neoliberalism can be read as the ideological correlative of the late-capitalist economies and postmodern aesthetics analyzed by Jameson. 56 conceptions of subjectivity, but rather by his ability to make “individual [rational] choices which are both irreducible and non-transferable” (Birth of Biopolitics 271-2). In this context, irreducible means that these choices are made based upon the subjective preferences or desires of individuals, and non-transferable, that they concern only the interests of these individuals—primarily pursued through the changing of bodily habits— without regard to the broader socio-economic totality they inhabit. Notably, the irreducibility of desire means that such desires cannot be analyzed or interrogated, only the habitual actions upon which these desires are based. Homo economicus is thus defined by its (economic) choices, not just in terms of consumption, but also in terms of the development of individual skills and bodily habits which themselves become forms of economic consumption.
It is in terms of these qualities of irreducibility and non-transferability that the tensions that define character development in the bildungsroman play themselves out in
The Bell Jar. So, as this section will demonstrate, while on the one hand the body as a series of irreducible, precocious bodily processes and desires ostensibly becomes the source of Esther’s most willful actions and authentic sentiments—what Dowbnia observes is her tendency to binge eat, for example—on the other, the non-transferable assessments of her bodily habits intended not to live up to some abstract moral standard so much as optimize Esther’s movements through the social world immediately around her—for instance, her conscious efforts to “slouch my hips” when walking with shorter men (9)—become the primary means by which social conformity is assessed in the novel.
Ultimately, the results of these neoliberal choices—the amount of money one makes, levels of social status one attains, and one’s own sense of personal fulfillment (within the 57 context of social norms)—that become the primary measure by which social integration is assessed in the capitalist world of The Bell Jar, occupying a position previously held by concepts like morality, tradition and, most importantly, the nation, in earlier coming- of-age stories.
Due to this neoliberal emphasis on cultivating individual habits, it is unsurprising that the inability to choose a specific lifestyle (i.e. career or family life, editor or poet) is one of the central conflicts of the initial chapters of The Bell Jar; an inability rooted in a disjunction between homo economicus’s irreducible bodily desires and non-transferable, habit-regulating reason. Esther’s problem is that while she is frequently capable of recognizing individual investment opportunities—such as the social and economic possibilities that accompany her prestigious internship—she proves debilitatingly incapable of desiring one of these opportunities more than others—or in the case of the internship, any of them, as her depression causes her to contemplate avoiding both work and socializing to lie in bed. From a neoliberal standpoint, this is a fundamental breakdown of the proper functionality of the individual who ideally operates according to near-spontaneous judgments of self-interest, and thus avoids the extended periods of existential worry experienced by Esther. Indeed, Esther herself seems to recognize this problem when discussing her inability to choose between living in the city or living in the country with Buddy: “’Neurotic, ha!’ I let out a scornful laugh. ‘If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell’” (94).
Here, rather than making a quick choice, she expresses a conflicting set of desires which demonstrate how such a subject can be pulled in multiple directions, ostensibly from within—a problem that will be analyzed in detail in section two of this chapter. 58
A good place to begin demonstrating these bio-political forces at work is Esther’s own analysis of the “football romance” she screens early in the novel. Like the magazine images and young women described by Sellei, the film is composed of a series of symbolically unstable cultural referents evocative of Jean Baudrillard’s simulation: symbolic types ostensibly lacking real-world referents.39 What’s interesting about
Esther’s account of the film is not, however, her critiques of its gender stereotypes, saturated colors, and all too picturesque landscapes. Rather it is that she draws causal relationships between bodily habits and narrative closure. Thus, after establishing the setting, Esther initially describes the film in terms of actions and the spaces where they occur: “Most of the action in this picture took place in the football stands, with the two girls waving and cheering. . . or in a ballroom, where the girls swooped across the floor with their dates, in dresses like something out of Gone With the Wind, and then sneaked off into the powder room to say nasty intense things to each other” (42). Finally, her account preemptively concludes—she never finishes the movie—by anticipating the film’s ending: a neat thematic knot in which “the nice girl was going to end up with the nice football hero and the sexy girl was going to end up with nobody, because the man named Gil had only wanted a mistress and not a wife” (42).
What is interesting about this scene, beyond its emphasis on the structural elements of the film’s plot, is how the actions of the characters directly lead Esther to evaluations of their futures. Esther’s description is concerned with the types of actions the girls
39 For example, it features a blond girl who appears to be “June Alison but was really somebody else and a sexy black-haired girl looked like Elizabeth Taylor but was also somebody else,” Alison and Taylor themselves implicitly standing in for types—the light and dark women—without definitive real-world referents (Plath 42). 59 undertake, rather than the specific actions themselves. Evaluations of character are thus not made based upon significant moments of plot development—the nice girl isn’t nice because she lets someone else be lead cheerleader and the sexy girl isn’t sexy because she loses her virginity behind the bleachers. Rather it is the habits which fill in the gaps around such moments that become the standards by which moral evaluations are based.
Esther’s assessment of the film thus recalls how Foucault might interpret its bio-political function: instead of reinforcing essentialized moral categories (good or bad) which supposedly define one’s fate, the movie—or at least Esther’s assessment of it—promotes the subtler neoliberal message that certain types of habits (nice and sexy) tend to lead to certain types of outcomes. Indeed, the action of the film only implicitly makes a moralistic judgment. Acting sexy doesn’t lead to absolute punishment—dying destitute and pregnant for example—or social opprobrium. Rather, being nice and being sexy function more along the lines of smart and poor investments in bodily habits—body language, how one carries oneself, etc.—and dress, the development of smart habits simply leading to more optimal results. Additionally, although Esther is unquestionably critical of the film and its themes, throughout the novel she nevertheless seems to internalize elements of its bio-political message: that fitting in as a productive member of society is a product of the accretion of certain types of habits which themselves can be thought of as investments in one’s future. Thus, for example, the panic-inducing inadequacy Esther frequently feels about the skills and talents she has failed to develop by the age of nineteen.
Indeed, Esther’s problem doesn’t seem to be that she has only two choices—being nice or being sexy—but that life presents her with an intimidating plethora of competing 60 choices. This problem is perhaps most directly addressed in the famous fig-tree analogy:
“One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor . . . I saw myself in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I should choose” (77). As many commentators note, this analogy presents the somewhat limited and ostensibly mutually-exclusive choices confronting the nevertheless increasingly socially mobile lives of mid-century (white) women. Read in biopolitical terms, however, what is interesting about this scene is not only how each fig represents a possible “investment,” but how these investments are presented in terms of bodily habits.
Thus, Esther laments her lack of expertise not only in domestic duties like cooking and professional practicalities like shorthand—representing the choice between pursuing a professional or domestic life—but also a variety of non-vocational activities requiring adept bodily movement: “I was a terrible dancer. I couldn't carry a tune. I had no sense of balance, and when we had to walk down a narrow board with our hands out and a book on our heads in gym class I always fell over” (76). Though Esther’s lament is driven in part by a self-indulgent sense of inadequacy—something like “look at all the things I am bad at”—this scene nevertheless emphasizes the extent to which, for Esther, her place within society has come to be defined not in terms of some ineffable “soul,” or even dedication to a set of abstract traditions and values, but rather the cultural capital of a series of bodily skills that her single minded pursuit of academic excellence—along with her clumsiness perhaps—has prevented her from developing. Indeed, among the items on this list, Esther is most aggrieved by her inability to ski or ride a horse “because they cost 61 too much money,” directly connecting the development of such skills to the economics of investment.
Similarly, Esther isn’t presented with a lack of potential mentors but too many, these figures themselves often being associated with types of bodily habits. For instance, Jay
Cee, who “wanted to teach me something, all the old ladies I ever knew wanted to teach me something” (6), is described in terms of her consumptive and bodily habits: “she slipped a suit jacket over her lilac blouse, pinned a hat of imitation lilacs on the top of her head, powdered her nose briefly and adjusted her thick spectacles” (39). Importantly, such descriptions aren’t simply characterizations; they also allow Esther to imagine inhabiting the being of these figures. Thus, immediately following this encounter Esther ruminates on “what it would be like if I were Ee Gee, the famous editor, in an office full of potted rubber plants and African violets.” Such evaluations imply that, for Esther, contemplating being a magazine editor involves more than imagining reading manuscripts and lunches with authors; it also includes being the type of person who wears too much lilac and decorates her office with exotic plants (39). Similarly, Esther fantasizes about crawling inside the body of a Russian simultaneous interpreter, literally occupying the woman’s skin, and spending “the rest of my life barking out one idiom after another” (75). This association of bodily habits with possible social roles also extends to Esther’s negative assessment of her boyfriend Buddy’s mother. Esther almost exclusively thinks of Mrs. Willard in terms of domestic activities like “braiding a rug out of strips of wool from Mr. Willard's old suits,” special efforts ultimately rendered meaningless as the rug becomes “soiled and dull and indistinguishable from any mat you could buy for under a dollar in the five and ten” (84-5). Such observations are not just 62 reminiscent of feminist arguments about the devaluation of domestic labor. They also demonstrate how Esther privileges activities she sees as possessing some form of enduring and socially recognizable value, just as (potentially useful) activities lacking these qualities are viewed as a waste of time.
This tendency of assessing both potential mentors and possible futures in terms of not just professional habits, but also habits of attire, daily routine, and even leisure further demonstrates how biopolitical thinking is a persistent theme of the 1950s social world
Esther describes. One of the key characteristics of biopower is the importance of categorizing not just types of individuals—nice girls and sexy ones—but also types of bodily and consumptive habits. As such, the body becomes a site of constant rational evaluation, as its habits in work and leisure—how it is decorated, and even the food it consumes—are unceasingly evaluated in terms of standards of personal betterment and individual success gauged primarily through evaluations of those directly around one’s self. In line with this logic, though often critical of the consumerism she observes, Esther tends not so much to change but carefully modulate her behaviors, adapting, for example, to eating more than those around her by doing so quickly so as to not become inconvenient or overly conspicuous.
More than comprising a form of self-regulation, however, such thinking also plays an important economic function: opening up new sites of market activity.40 The consumerism of which Esther is so often critical is thus intimately connected to her own internalized habits of thought, themselves products of the increasingly neoliberal outlook
40 This is because the proliferation of different lifestyle choices creates new sites for economic accumulation as each new category fosters new products and services to go with it. 63 of mid-20th century American culture. What Sellei notes is Esther’s frequent categorization of the other members of her cohort in terms of their behaviors and consumptive habits can therefore be linked to the very sort of biopolitical socialization she otherwise seems to resist. As such, Sellei’s observations about the complex interrelationship of media images and discourses to the economics of consumption remain relevant here. Instead of presenting the simulated nature of daily life in late- capitalist America, however, in which conceptions of embodiment are circumscribed by competing discourses lacking authentic referents, Esther’s descriptions of this media culture demonstrate how it is productive of a particular analytic with very material implications for the subjects who employ it. The careful attenuation of bodily behaviors made possible by the competing collections social and media referents described above thus allows individuals to both internalize social cues from the surrounding world while ostensibly functioning independently from it.
In other words, the media images and nascent neoliberal discourses identified by critics like Sellei function in The Bell Jar as a symbolic order: a set of values that in the ideal bildungsroman “one must internalize” so as to “fuse external compulsion and internal impulse into a new unity until the former is no longer distinguishable from the latter” (Moretti 16). Rather than being a set of abstract values, these codes are transposed into the body as an object of concrete habits and practices of consumption. Thus, fitting into modern society becomes a matter of knowing how to efficiently select between the different investments (i.e. bodily habits) most advantageous to a given context. This reduces the frame of the acculturing social world from the standpoint of the nation— understandable as a set of coherent values and traditions—to the standpoint of the body, 64 where the good functions as the fine-grained process of making smart economic choices about one’s habits. From such a standpoint, closure as both successful integration into society and the resolution of the bildung plot, is the ability to smartly navigate these choices. In line with this logic, it is Esther’s inability to choose that frequently causes her moments of existential crisis: feeling “a deep shock” when she tells Jay Cee that she doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life, for example, and realizing “it was true”
(32), or her near panic attack leading into the fig tree analogy.
As previously mentioned, however, such moments also contrast Esther’s tendency to act on impulse or instinct, the impetus for such actions often ostensibly lying within the very biological body that becomes the primary site of acculturation under neoliberalism.
Additionally, such preconscious impulses frequently contravene the neoliberal cultural forces the novel depicts American society exerting on Esther. The earliest example of this type of impulsivity is Esther’s decision to jump out of a cab along with her fellow intern
Doreen at the urging of Lenny Shepherd, a stranger who approaches their cab while it is stopped in traffic. Here decision-making seems to take the form of subjective inspiration which contravenes Esther’s rational evaluation of the situation, Esther noting that the
“know-it-all snicker” of Lenny’s companions should have warned her off accompanying him into the city (8). Significantly, Esther’s early descriptions of her thoughts and actions such as this often emulate the forms of realist mimesis described in the introduction, her decision to leave the cab coming from a yearning to see “something of New York besides what the people on the magazine had planned out for us” (9). Her narration thus presents the choice to accompany a pair of strange men into unknown parts of the city as a form of subjective agency. As the novel progresses, however, Esther’s descriptions of her actions 65 become far more deterministic. The decision to steal the “woman hating” Marco’s diamond, for example, reads almost like a parody of moments from naturalist novels like
Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, where objects often seem to compel characters to act without thinking: “It dazzled and danced with light like a heavenly ice cube. I slipped it quickly into my imitation jet bead evening bag and looked around. The faces were empty as places, and nobody seemed to be breathing” (105). In such moments, the solicitations of material objects overwhelm Esther’s judgment, contravening not only neoliberal rationality but also her ability to control her own actions. Such actions thus appear rooted in the capacity of the material world to exert an almost magnetic pull on Esther’s preconscious cognitive and bodily processes, her desire for the object not only coming from somewhere other than the rational mind, but also actively conflicting with smart decision-making.
Perhaps the most interesting of these moments comes as Esther ill-advisedly plunges down a hill while learning to ski. This incident, which spans about a dozen paragraphs, begins with Esther poised, “uneasy, with a dry throat,” this description of the physiological reactions of her body symbolizing her anxiety, as “the smooth white path from my feet to [Buddy’s] feet grew blurred” (96). Then, suddenly, the material environment again exerts its pull, the mountaintop visage forcing itself upon Esther’s perceptions, its implicit clarity contrasting the blurry image of Buddy: “The great, grey eye of the sky looked back at me, its mist-shrouded sun focusing all the white and silent dances that poured from every point of the compass, hill after pale hill, to stall at my feet” (96-7). Somehow this pull quiets “The interior voice nagging me not to be a fool,” the “cool” thought that she might kill herself forming in Esther’s mind before she 66 plummets down the hill. This scene thus presents a competing collection of bodily sensations, perceptual responses to the environment, and thoughts that collectively obscure the cause of Esther’s “decision” to leap down the mountain, again echoing the indeterminacy of cause and effect frequently found in naturalist narratives.41
Unlike similar scenes in naturalism, however, this episode also has important implications for the neoliberal subjectivity depicted throughout the novel. So, while
Christina Britzolakis notes that Esther’s plunge down the hill seemingly parodies the ambitions of the self-made-man, it is also of note that this is one of the few times where
Esther seems at one with herself in the novel, thinking “This is what it is to be happy” as she plummets “down past the zigzaggers, the students, the experts, through year after year of doubleness and smiles and compromise, into my own past” (97). Such a past implicitly predates the complexity of aligning one’s desires with cultural norms, and as such the compromises one makes for social advancement. Indeed, Esther seems to have a word for such a felicitous alignment, intuition, which serves as a sort of codeword for authenticity throughout the novel.42 Significantly, The Bell Jar relates such authenticity to the body itself. She first applies the term to Doreen whose intuitive adeptness at navigating the social world, for example, “was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my bones” (7). Similarly, Esther’s family physician, Teresa, is described as possessing a
“gentle, intuitive touch” (126). This sort of intuitive knowhow doesn’t just concern a gentle, attentive touch, however; it also concerns a certain type of neoliberal adaptability.
For instance, Esther’s working- or middle-class “apprehension about what spoons to use”
41 See, for example, Trumpeter’s analysis of the murder scene in Dreiser’s American Tragedy. 42 As explored in Chapter 2, “intuition” is a similarly important trope in Ratner’s Star. 67 at a fancy dinner is overcome when she realizes that “if you do something incorrect at table with a certain arrogance” you seem “original and very witty” rather than ill- mannered (27). In the context of bildungsroman this realization is significant, as it marks a movement away from the ostensibly static traditions which structure the symbolic order of such novels toward neoliberal judgments based upon novelty and efficiency— confidently making incorrect choices requiring a lot less energy, for example, than waiting to see how everyone else behaves.43
Returning to the skiing scene, Esther’s narration presents such elements of neoliberal ideology alongside the first hints of Esther’s suicidal impulses, their ambiguity making such impulses an important part of the novel’s depiction of her agency: does Esther intend to harm herself, or merely not care if she does so? Such questions foreshadow the roles of embodiment and mental illness in Esther’s attempts at suicide later in the novel.
In these later sections—analyzed in part three of this chapter—the bodily impulses which are here presented alongside Esther’s subjective thoughts seem to take on a life of their own independent of her conscious mind. This tension between reason and desire, which is never entirely resolved in the novel, is a problem also evoked by the frequency with which Esther is punished for her more impulsive actions: though not dangerous, the evening with Lenny Shepherd fails to provide the sort of personal fulfillment or self- realization Esther seeks; her night with Marco terrifyingly concludes with him assaulting
43 This devaluation of supposedly static values is further suggested by the source of Esther’s realization, a poet who dinning in fancy New York restaurant “ate his salad with fingers, leaf by leaf while talking to [her] about the antithesis of nature and art” (27). Such a Hegelian understanding art as a product distinct from the immutable laws of nature implicitly breaks the allegorical relationship of human society to higher levels of spiritual or cultural meaning art, like the niceties of high-class table etiquette, becoming a subject of historical development—as contextually meaningful rather than meaningful in and of itself. Like art bodily intuition must too be sensitive to present contexts, the meaning of specific actions no longer being defined by abstract morality but the effect that action has in specific time and place. 68 and nearly raping her, the purloined diamond playing an ambiguous role in their encounter; and her attempt at skiing, one of the few moment where Esther seems truly happy in the novel, concludes with Esther breaking her leg.
Such punishment highlights the dilemma Esther faces, as embracing either bodily desire or rational decision-making on its own leads to less than optimal, and at times even terrifying, results. From this perspective, akin to the bildung tradition it inherits, a harmonious resolution to the novel’s central conflict would take the form of the proper alignment of these conflicting forces. Thus, hypothetically, learning how to properly desire one end over another would prevent Esther’s frequent bouts of existential paralysis and, similarly, desiring smartly could prevent the sorts of disastrous consequences described above. Thus, what is lacking from my analysis of the novel thus far is a description of how the novel attempts to reconcile bodily desires and reason. In most novels, when conflicts exist between individuals and the social milieus they occupy, such conflicts play themselves out between characters, these characters often representing broader social types, values, or institutions. Such conflicts and resolutions are not readily available in The Bell Jar, however, due to the narrator’s retreat from the broader social world. Indeed, Esther’s interpersonal exchanges, when they are depicted at all, are mostly conveyed through Esther’s recollections which, in part because of her compromised mental state, often seem unreliable. As such, the novel’s presentation of its central conflicts, as well as Esther’s efforts to resolve them, necessitates a mode of representing conflict and character development other than interpersonal exchanges. Unsurprisingly, a site for such evaluations manifests itself within the body.
69
2. Embodied meaning and the postmodern schizophrenic
This problem of narrating the conflict between reason and bodily desire concerns what largely stood outside the previous section’s analysis of the text: the topic of subjective meaning which, in line with theories of embodied cognition, I argue The Bell
Jar grounds in bodily experience. Such subjective meaning concerns how meaning is conveyed to readers as they encounter discreet passages and scenes from the novel, rather than textual meaning as it exists at the overarching level of plot or the thematic tensions of the bildungsroman: in other words how Esther’s narration helps produce and develop readerly impressions of her character throughout the novel. These “depth models,” to use
Jameson’s terminology, emphasize precisely what both neoliberalism and Foucault’s genealogies excise by conceptualizing individuals, their decisions, and their habits as both indistinguishable from one another and unconnected to the wider socioeconomic totalities which surround them. Before exploring how the novel grounds subjective meaning in the body, however, it is worth once again contextualizing The Bell Jar within the postmodern, late-capitalist cultural moment which I argue makes such grounding necessary.
As previously mentioned, Jameson’s assessment of the postmodern condition draws heavily upon the types of symbolic models of the mind whose application to literary theory this dissertation seeks to reconsider. In particular, Jacques Lacan’s theory of schizophrenia as a “breakdown in the signifying chain” is central to Jameson’s theory of postmodern aesthetics, which he attributes to the metaphoric schizophrenia of late- capitalist societies more broadly. Thus, it should be noted that Jameson’s understanding of schizophrenia focuses on the supposed effects of this disorder upon the linguistic 70 faculties of the symbol-processing mind, rather than schizophrenia as a disorder which affects embodied subjects. Nevertheless, Jameson’s characterization of postmodern culture as stifling the symbol processing capabilities of individual subjects resonates with both The Bell Jar’s early depictions of Esther’s alienation, as well as her subsequent decent into clinical depression. As such, the relevance of Jameson’s ideas to this chapter concern how the turn to embodiment in Plath’s novel is a result of the very breakdown in the symbolic described in Postmodernism. Jameson writes of Lacan’s schizophrenia:
Lacan describes schizophrenia as a breakdown in the signifying chain, that is, the interlocking syntagmatic series of signifiers which constitutes an utterance or a meaning. . . His conception of the signifying chain essentially presupposes one of the basic principles (and one of the great discoveries) of Saussurean structuralism, namely, the proposition that meaning is not a one-to-one relationship between signifier and signified, between the materiality of language, between a word or a name, and its referent or concept. Meaning on the new view is generated by the movement from signifier to signifier. What we generally call the signified—the meaning or conceptual content of an utterance—is now rather to be seen as a meaning-effect, as that objective mirage of signification generated and projected by the relationship of signifiers among themselves. When that relationship breaks down, when the links of the signifying chain snap, then we have schizophrenia in the form of a rubble of distinct and unrelated signifiers. (Postmodernism 26)
Jameson argues there are two implications of this analysis relevant to postmodern culture and art: the first is that a unified sense of subjectivity is a product of a unified sense of time; the second, that this sense of temporal coherence is intimately linked to the human capacity for language not only at the level of syntax—i.e. how the order in which words are received affects their collective meaning—but also at the level of the sign itself, whose meaning is based upon a similar sort of movement between the symbols and concepts which make up a linguistic system. Accordingly, breakdowns in this signifying chain lead to the dislocation of these symbols from their contexts within these larger systems. The result isn’t that signs lose all significance for the subject, however, but 71 rather that they tend to take on a “life of their own,” imposing themselves on the consciousness as if they were real phenomena.44
Significantly, this sort of disjuncture is a prominent feature of The Bell Jar’s opening,
Esther’s narration presenting a disconcerting and disconnected series of media images, hostile urban landscapes, and vague impressions of affect, which cumulatively fail to coalesce into a linear narrative structure or a firm impression of textual meaning. Thus, for example, despite Esther’s claim that the Rosenbergs had “nothing to do with me,” she is nevertheless constantly confronted by “goggle-eyed headlines” about the executions which she likens to memories of the first time she saw a human corpse: “For weeks afterward, the cadaver’s head—or what was left of it—floated up behind my eggs and bacon at breakfast . . . and pretty soon I felt as though I were carrying that cadaver’s head around with me on a string, like some black, noseless balloon stinking of vinegar” (2). In both cases what makes these images so disconcerting isn’t just Esther’s inability to dismiss them but also the way in which they hover about her consciousness, Esther making no effort to account for their significance other than to note the frequency with which she sees them. Similarly, as Sellei notes, there is a general impression of facileness in Esther’s inaugural descriptions of the images and icons of New York City, including
Madison Avenue, Bloomingdale’s, and magazine models with “all-American bone structures,” (Plath 2): “there is nothing in their representation that could be called
‘natural’” and as such “‘natural Americanness’ turns into an image” published in a
44 Notably Jameson is careful to emphasize that his use of Lacan’s theory of schizophrenia is metaphorical. Thus, although he argues Lacan’s ideas are useful for thinking through aspects of postmodern culture, he refrains from making a judgement of the clinical or scientific validity of these theories, see Postmodernism 26. 72 magazine and then endlessly reproduced (132). This scene, and others like it depicting the burgeoning, media driven consumer culture of 1950s America, are thus very much evocative Jameson’s descriptions of postmodern aesthetics, which primarily function to elicit an impression of facileness rather than “deep” characters or complex histories.
As previously mentioned, however, it is to this postmodern “hullabaloo” that Esther first contrasts the physicality of her own “very still” and “very empty” body. The resulting tornado metaphor, “I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo,” thus provides exactly what the loose, depthless collection of images which comprise the text lacks up until this point: an “ah-ha” moment of firm textual meaning produced by the aptness of the comparison between a bodily understanding of containment and the psychological experience of depression (3). Furthermore, it does so by re-establishing the very depth models—the distinctions between outside forces and inner subjectivity—that Jameson claims postmodern culture disrupts. The metaphor thus plays an interpretive function in the passage, arranging the proceeding flotsam of surrealistic images, depersonalized value judgments, and general impression of depressive malaise into a sharp contrast between an embodied subject and the exterior, alien world of New York. What seems a lack of depth up to this point—the way the sensory overload of the media-saturated city prevents Esther from being able to integrate herself into its totality—is thus reorganized into a cohesive expression of emotional meaning: the relationship of an identifiable subject to the exterior social world she inhabits.
Significantly, in contrast to Jameson’s claim that such relationships between subject and world are primarily conceptualized in symbolic terms, Esther’s depression is made 73 intelligible to the reader by means of concepts rooted in embodiment, as a proprioceptive understanding of motionlessness or sluggishness is contrasted to the visceral movements of the chaotic world surrounding Esther. As such, this metaphor ostensibly derives its intelligibility from what George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in their work on cognitive metaphor theory, term the container metaphor schema—a conceptual tool supposedly rooted in an infant’s earliest bodily experiences of their relationship to the outside world.
Therefore, what re-grounds the interpretability of this passage is not the symbolic—the movement from one signifier to the next in the “symbolic chain”—but what Lakoff and
Johnson theorize language presupposes: embodied experience. The scene thus suggests the complex interrelationship of embodiment and symbolic meaning, the breakdown in the semiotic relationships between the sensory information assaulting Esther as reified images, which she proves incapable of organizing into a coherent totality, instead being grounded by means of the embodied experiences which Lakoff and Johnson argue are the foundations of our most elementary concepts. It is by means of such representations of the complex, and at times conflictual, interrelationships of bodily and symbolic meaning that I argue The Bell Jar re-locates its efforts to depict subjective depth.
This relationship is also demonstrated thematically in terms of Esther’s need to ground real (i.e. empirical) knowledge in embodied experience. A perennially high- achieving student, Esther’s narration nevertheless presents her as often feeling disconnected from her intellectual talents, her faculty for reasoned abstraction belying her preference for embodied forms of knowledge. Thus, while ostensibly gifted in the sciences, disciplines like physics and chemistry make Esther “dizzy” and “sick,” physiological responses the novel seems to attribute to the primarily symbolic nature of 74 these fields—i.e. their lack of connection to embodied experience. In her first physics class, for example, Esther’s mind goes “dead” as Mr. Manzi begins “talking about let a equal acceleration and let t equal time” (34), troubles evocative of the “grounding problem” of cognitive science which problematizes purely symbolic theories of the mind by pointing out that without some sort of relationship to a material world symbols are meaningless—a problem embodied theories of cognition like cognitive metaphor theory seek to resolve. Esther presents these problems as either being entirely meaningless or, more provocatively, producing a sort of vertigo as she strives (unsuccessfully) to connect these ideas to her lived experiences. These themes are reinforced by Esther’s summation of her experience learning physics: “I studied those formulas, I went to class and watched balls roll down slides and listened to bells ring and by the end of the semester most of the other girls had failed and I had a straight A” (35). Here, in contrast to Esther’s tendency to use embodied metaphors and analogies to draw bodily experiences and abstract ideas into a tight unison demonstrated by the tornado metaphor, the drudgery of learning formulas and the observation of experiments appear to have only a perfunctory relationship. This impression is reinforced by the iterative use of “I” and the cursory connection of the first independent clause to the rest of the sentence, both implying a separation between the learning of formulas, the observation of experiments which demonstrate their significance, and academic achievement, as if each of these experiences were attributed to a series of distinct “I”s.45
45 Such aversions to scientific thought and rigor, however, are not universal. Esther’s experiences with physics and chemistry strikingly contrast her accounts of studying botany: “I loved cutting up leaves and putting them under the microscope and drawing diagrams of bread mold and the odd, heart-shaped leaf in the sex cycle of the tern, it seemed so real to me” (34). Though elements of empirical research, the acts of cutting, drawing, and perhaps most importantly, perceiving material objects make botany real for Esther in 75
More than rooting abstract knowledge in the body, however, I would like to suggest that The Bell Jar’s depictions of the relationships between embodied and symbolic meaning also function to re-inject the narrative with the very impression of temporality
Jameson claims is elided by postmodern culture. Such an impression is not, however, the type of linear relationship between past, present, and future Jameson claims is disrupted by breakdowns in the semiotic chain, but rather the dynamic temporality described in the introduction, grounded not just in the movement of thoughts, but their relationship to the body and external environment. Such a moment of dynamic unison takes place early in the novel, as Esther engages in what for her is the personally significant ritual of bathing.
Importantly, this embodied ritual seems to not only provide Esther a moment of emotional stability lacking throughout much of The Bell Jar, as her mind and body ostensibly work in tandem with one another, but also to ground her in time and space. As such, this scene mimics both similar moments of locating one’s self spatially and temporally in the bildungsroman as well as Massumi’s descriptions of affective intensities as a superposition of action potentials, before such potentials collapse into actual structural relationships between minds, bodies, and environments in the form of concrete actions, or what he terms cuts.46 As such, notions like subjectivity, agency, and the subject’s relationship to the world they inhabit aren’t presented through the linear
a way physics and chemistry is not. This sentiment is reinforced by the syntactical structure of this description, which though similar to that of Esther’s experience with physics, relies on only a single use of “I,” repetition instead being reserved for the frequent use of the conjunction “and,” adding a sense breathlessness to the description and implying a much stronger relationship between the expressed actions. Given this ebullience one is lead to question if learning physics would have been a more pleasurable experience for Esther if it had been more “hands-on.” 46 This is suggestive of what Jameson describes as the new forms of cognitive mapping necessary to counter the inability “of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world” under postmodernism, see Postmodernism 44. 76 temporality of the semiotic chain (the relationship of past, present, and future) described by Jameson, but rather in terms of the contrasting of these different structural relationships, and the dynamic temporal relationships which define them.
Each of the narrative structures loosely associated with realist, modernist, and naturalist tropes in my introduction successively appear throughout Esther’s description of her bath, collectively presenting the plurality of structural relationships described above. Rather than being blended together, however, each is presented in succession as
Esther describes her bathing ritual over the course of four paragraphs which present it through different narrative frames. Thus, the first presents the bodily habits of the ritual itself: “The water needs to be very hot, so hot you can barely stand putting your foot in it.
Then you lower yourself, inch by inch, till the water's up to your neck” (19). Here,
Esther’s transition to second-person address suggests an iterative series of identities, not just Esther the narrator who describes the actions of Esther the character, but also a contingent interlocutor (“you”) whose implicit existence is affirmed only through its status as a subject for the predicate of an innumerable series of bodily repetitions. This description is thus evocative of what has previously been described as body-time, emphasizing the rhythmic temporality of bodily habits and biological processes often found in naturalism. This generalized, exterior description of bodily habit is then followed by a paragraph generalizing the cognitive effects of the ritual on Esther. In this paragraph the ritual is described as not just producing a “meditative” state, but also stimulating a particular mental acuity, Esther claiming “I remember the ceiling over every bathtub I’ve stretched out in, I remember the texture of the ceilings and the cracks and the colors and the damp spots and the light fixtures. I remember the tubs too. . . (20). 77
Unlike in the previous paragraph, the narration here returns to the repetitive use of I, marking a subtle narrative shift back to the biographical framework of first-person fictional narration, the content consisting of all the discrete experience of ceilings and tubs Esther has seen over the course of her life. This biographical temporality, however, takes the form not of the sorts of realist mimesis described in the introduction, but rather is more evocative of the symbolic infinities described by Lukacs, these discrete images blending together in an ostensibly never-ending chain of associational rememberings.
The narration then pauses, an isolated declarative sentence “I never feel so much myself as when I'm in a hot bath” pivoting the description back into the subjective present of the story. The third paragraph continues first by locating Esther within her socio-historical moment, “I lay in that tub on the seventieth floor high up over the jazz and push of New York,” and ultimately within the framework of cultural history and tradition: “I don’t believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan . . . but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water” (20). Here the scene reintroduces the sorts of situated narrative frameworks and temporalities typically associated with realism. Most notably, this description achieves precisely what was absent from the opening scenes of the novel: an impression of cultural and historical meaning as Esther for the first time seems to successfully locate herself as an inheritor of a Judeo-Christian cultural tradition which she uses to ground and contextualize her experience. Finally, the last paragraph describes the cumulative effect of these ostensibly disparate accounts of the same event, Esther sloughing off “All that liquor and those sticky kisses I saw and the dirt that settled on my skin” as she chants, referring to her recent companions, "Doreen is dissolving, Lenny Shepherd is dissolving, Frankie is 78 dissolving, New York is dissolving, they are all dissolving away and none of them matter anymore. I don't know them, I have never known them and I am very pure” (20).
This presentation of the same event from a variety of different narrative and temporal standpoints suggests the simultaneity of the differing modes of understanding they represent, as if the same moment in time is being viewed from several perspectives at once. Such an impression is reinforced not only by the division of each description into discrete paragraphs, but also by the scene’s short declarative sentences and parataxis, both contributing to effects similar to those found in Doctorow’s Ragtime which, according to Jameson, “serves to separate events from the present of enunciation and to transform the stream of time and action into so many finished, complete, and isolated punctual event objects which find themselves sundered from any present situation”
(Postmodernism 24). Rather than producing a characteristically postmodern depthlessness, however, as the different elements of Esther’s person are cleaved from her subject, the surrounding narrative and the scene’s near-exclusive use of the deictic “I” in all but the first paragraph serve to ground these descriptions in Esther the narrating and narrated subject whose conceptual unity is enabled not only through immersive and emphatic descriptions of bodily experience, but also the tendency of readers to integrate these descriptions, even in the face of a lack of traditional narrative syntax. Each representation thus maintains its own temporal orientation while nevertheless referring to the same event and individual: just as human consciousness is arguably a dynamic intersection of different cognitive, bodily, and environmental processes, so too is character in this scene visible through the implied intersection of different 79 representational points of view whose “dynamic” interrelationship the reader is called upon to contemplate.
This sort of dynamic temporal relationship is also reinforced thematically. Central to
Esther’s emotional convalescence in the tub, for example, is the embodied metaphor of
“dissolving,” a conceptual tool for doing away with the emotional burden of the night’s events which are washed away like the “sticky kisses” and “the dirt that settled on
[Esther’s] skin” (20). More than just presenting a provocative parallelism, this equation of bathing with mental or spiritual “purification” is also suggestive of a well-documented relationship between problem-solving and bodily experience, abstract conceptual problems often proving easier to solve when accompanied by sensory-motor stimuli that can be metaphorically related to the cognitive task.47 As such, the first paragraph’s description of the intensity of the heat, the slow acclimation of limbs to the steaming water, and prone position of Esther’s body are implicitly linked to the concept of dissolving in the scene’s final paragraph. Similarly, paragraph two implies the central role of preconscious visual processes in Esther’s emotional convalescence. Thus, contrasting the dissolving of memories is the careful attention Esther pays to the textures, cracks, and colors of the ceiling above her, such perceptual information serving as a catalyst for Esther’s meditative state.
47 Participants in one study, for example, were asked to solve a problem requiring a tumor to be destroyed by the convergence of a series of weak lasers, as an individual laser strong enough to destroy the tumor would damage the surrounding tissue. Those participants who were asked to while solving the problem to move their eyes in patterns which mimicked the convergence of the lasers were much more likely to solve the problem than those who were asked to follow different patterns evidence supportive of Lakoff and Johnson’s thesis that abstract ideas are ultimately rooted in bodily experience; see Alibani et al. 80
Esther’s focus on these external stimuli is also suggestive of hierarchical theories of cognition which similarly suggest a constitutive relationship between unmediated, non- symbolic sensorial experience and abstract concepts and thoughts. Such theories claim that perception functions in terms of a relationship between pre-existing top-down conceptual models (often learned from experience) and bottom-up streams of imperfect, what might even be described as confusing, perceptual information.48 Perception is thus conceived as an aesthetic process: the preconscious formation of more and more complex representational models (or concepts) organizing the messy information received from the senses. This sort of pattern-making—which notably focuses Esther’s attention on external stimuli—also ostensibly mirrors the mind’s compulsive patterning, and re- patterning, of the day’s events. Thus, it is significant that the psychological tendency to endlessly replay recent unpleasant memories is precisely what Esther attempts to counteract in this scene as she attempts to forget her disappointing and embarrassing evening.
Furthermore, such mental cleansing seems to be facilitated not only by the relaxing physical sensations of the bath, but also by the focusing of both conscious and pre- conscious cognitive processes on external stimuli. The scene thus presents cognition as a dynamic process not only through its presentation of the same event from a variety of different perspectives, but also in how it replaces a narrative process with a perceptual
48 According to such theories, perception functions by matching the bottom-up stream of imperfect information to the top-down predictive models allowing the brain to fill in whatever information is missing from the incomplete perceptual data, a process which takes place at a variety of different “priming levels” (Krishnan et al 306). As these patterns are recognized at higher levels—which would allow one, for example, to come to identify a newly encountered object as a light fixture—this patterning work is off loaded to lower priming levels, “freeing higher areas for detection of higher level patterns” (307), and thus new predictive models which can account for finer details of the perceptual information being received (i.e. how the fixture casts a particular type of shadow). 81 one—the organization of memories with the organization of sense data— implying their interrelationship. Indeed, Esther’s description of feeling “pure and sweet as a new baby” is more than just a metaphor of rebirth; it is also evocative of the purity of potential that characterizes Massumi’s idea of affective intensity, itself informed by dynamic theories of cognition like those described above. (20). For Massumi, what such affective intensities await is some form of cut, the concretization of the mind’s/body’s relationship to the world in the form of an action. As such, the scene serves as an example of the type of embodied subjectivity described in the introduction of this dissertation: a character for whom agency and subjective depth are presented not in terms of meaningful actions or key moments of plot development, but rather in terms of the superposition of structural relationships between minds, bodies, and environments. Furthermore, it also briefly achieves what the remainder of the novel fails to: a complex representation of the conscious, rational mind working in tandem with the preconscious processes and desires of the biological body, the resulting unity awaiting direction toward some yet-undisclosed purpose.
This unity, however, is not just evocative of the embodied subject described above.
As previously suggested, this purity of potential is also very much akin to neoliberalism’s conception of homo economicus as a consumer constantly ready to plug itself into market relations and opportunities to maximize its value. Similarly, Esther’s obsession, here and elsewhere in the novel, with cultivating some sort of purity of identity or purpose is very much in line with the neoliberal cultivation of bodily and consumptive habits. Through the process of representing such a subject in terms of the above dynamic interrelationship, however, the novel also depicts the precarity of such a subject, who is 82 here demonstrated to be dependent upon not just a carefully cultivated alignment of mind and body, but also the integration of the embodied subject into a very specific type of material environment. Moreover, as Masumi argues, such moments of affective intensity are comprised of superpositions of competing impulses, drives, and ideas which tend to overdetermine neoliberalism’s neat conception of homo economicus as one whose thoughts and desires are fundamentally irreducible and non-transferable.
Indeed, this harmony between body and mind is far from the status quo in The Bell
Jar. As the novel progresses, the body becomes exactly the sort of overdetermined site described above: full of often-competing drives and impulses which not only circumscribe rational thought, but also exceed such thought. Similarly, Esther’s perceptions of her body are frequently, as Brizolakis describes in the context of Plath’s poetry and journals, “linked with moments of spectacular mis- or non-recognition in which the subject [i.e. Esther herself] is encountered as abject, resistant otherness” (16).
In The Bell Jar this otherness most often takes racialized forms—Esther, for example, misidentifying her own image in mirrors as a “smudgy-eyed Chinese women” or “sick
Indian” (18, 112). These moments of invariably ugly racial othering, when assessed alongside Esther’s tendency to feel ill at ease with her tall, boyish frame, present Esther as a character who conceives of her body as an undesirable other or excess with troubling regularity. Thus, it is unsurprising that from the standpoint of moment-to-moment narration—as opposed to the global level of plot—the primary source of conflict in The
Bell Jar often seems to have less to do with reconciling personal drives and interests with the concrete totality of an exterior world, than with Esther’s search for the carefully 83 cultivated sense of purity described in the bath: an implicitly authentic, irreducible identity beneath the nebulous weight of her conflicted bodily self.
Thus, though the novel’s early chapters are evocative of postmodern hyperrealism and Esther’s inability to conceptualize her place within a wider sociohistorical totality, these chapters quickly give way to a psychodrama wherein bodily excess, whether in the form contradictory feelings, desires, and drives, or metonymically excess weight, conflict with Esther’s yearning for some sort of “pure” or authentic self. Ironically, given Esther’s greed for dishes “full of butter and cheese and sour cream” and claims about never gaining weight, this excess is frequently associated with being overly full of food or drink
(24). Traveling to visit Buddy in the tuberculosis hospital under a grey sky “fat with snow,” for example, Esther feels “overstuffed and dull and disappointed the way I always do after Christmas” her bodily discomfort mirroring the emotional discomfort of visiting a sick man for whom she no longer has feelings (87). Similarly, Esther’s uncontrollable need to cry at a photo shoot during the final days of her internship is described, “I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full” (101). The most sustained example of how the novel conflates bodily excess with emotional distress, however, occurs during Esther’s institutionalization, during which inactivity and frequent insulin injections cause her to gain so much weight that she, even more than usual, is incapable of recognizing herself in the mirror. As such, it is unsurprising that Esther comes to consider this weight as a metonymy for her psychological dysfunction, commenting on how she hated receiving visitors from her former life because she felt they were “measuring my fat and stringy hair against what I had been and what they wanted me to be” (202). 84
Such scenes also provide a useful interpretive contrast to the purgative themes and overt religious symbolism of Esther’s bath ritual. Indeed, the bath scene is far from the only example of these themes. After passing out from throwing up in her hotel room, for instance, Esther describes feeling “purged and holy and ready for a new life” (48).
Similarly, after her skiing accident, she describes staring up at “a dispassionate white sun” with fantasies of a sort of violent asceticism: “I wanted to hone myself on it till I grew saintly and thin and essential as the blade of a knife” (98). Like the bath scene, where Esther’s feelings of purity are conflated with the pure potentiality of a new born baby, here such purity is associated with the purposeful creation of a tool meant for some singular end. This search for an authentic self also manifests itself in the form of Esther’s yearning for transformational experiences, which she imagines not only having an almost magically revolutionary effect upon her person—“Instead of the world being divided up into Catholics and Protestants or Republicans and Democrats or white men and black men or even men and women, I saw the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people who hadn't, and this seemed the only really significant difference between one person and another”—but also physically inscribing themselves on her body as she envisions a “doll-size[d] Constantine” being reflected in her eye if she were to sleep with him (82).
Locating this authentic self or inspirational drive, however, proves a persistent problem for Esther. This is not only because of her yearning for mutually exclusive things, the frequency with which she is punished for impulsive decisions, or even the tendency for these elements of the text to rupture the neoliberal subject. Within the novel’s overdetermined constellation of bodily representations, the distinction between 85 the closure of a habitually and biological inscribed identity and the inspiration or impulsivity which could serve as a sort of shorthand not only for the possibility of change, but also for individuation, becomes increasingly ill-defined. This inability to decide whether her own drives and desires are indicative of an “authentic-self” or the
“other” of the material body she so frequently wishes to escape leaves her incapable of deciding the origin of her emotional outburst during the photo-shoot at the close of her internship: “I felt limp and betrayed like the skin shed by some terrible animal . . . It was a relief to be free of the animal, but it seemed to have taken my spirit with it” (102). The unspoken equivocation here is subtle, but clear: is it that Esther’s spirit has fled with her animalistic outburst, or is it that they are one and the same?
3. Rebellious bodies
Until now, this chapter has largely avoided the topic of mental illness as a clinical disorder. This is in part a result of a wish to track a series of related concerns regarding the novel’s structure, neoliberal underpinnings, and representation of embodiment without getting bogged down in a complicated, if related, collection of themes. It is also, however, an effort to sidestep two common interpretive trends in the reception of Plath’s novel: interpreting Esther’s breakdown as a manifestation of something primarily wrong with society, or interpreting it as demonstrative of a flaw in her personality.49 Regardless of the usefulness of these sorts of interpretations, the remainder of this chapter follows a
49 Tim Kendall, for example, states that “From the novel’s opening lines, it is evident that the sickness is located not just in Esther but in her society” (55), and Brikzolakis similarly claims that “Esther’s breakdown can therefore be read, at least in part, as an effect of her socialization. The bell jar is, paradoxically, a trope at once of illness and of diagnosis, signaling an attempt to locate the ills of subjectivity as an aspect of a larger, collective crisis” (33). Nicholas Donofrio interprets her suicide not in terms of mental-illness but professional and artistic frustration: “these additional ‘internships’ only set her literary career further back, as she eventually becomes so distraught that she can no longer read or write . . . all but defeated, Esther swallows a bottle of sleeping pills” (238). 86 somewhat different line of analysis, assessing Esther’s mental illness as an intensification or radicalization of the themes and narrative structures previously demonstrated at work in the novel. Thus, in the latter half of The Bell Jar one finds that the slight misalignment of the narrative structures used to depict the tensions between mind and body in the first half of the novel leads to a breakdown in literary mimesis during the second, just as in subsequent psychoneurological thought an imbalance of neurotransmitters, or the ill effects of inflammation on affect,50 cause the breakdown of an otherwise functional patient. The second half of the novel can therefore be interpreted as a continuation of the exploration of embodied subjectivity initiated in the first.
Here the neoliberal subject, already shown to be divided in novel’s early chapters, is more radically called into question as Esther’s narration depicts a widening gulf between the preconscious impulses of her body and increasingly dysfunctional mind. Such a divide further problematizes homo economicus as a subject whose individual desires and inclinations are commensurate with his or her capacity for reason. More significant, however, is the novel’s presentation of Esther’s recovery not as an act of will or anagnorisis, but rather as a function of psychiatric treatment and care, undermining not only neoliberalism’s understanding of the subject first and foremost as a being capable of choice, but also its demand that such a subject function as a purely autonomous individual.
As such, analysis of The Bell Jar’s representation of mental illness helps to elucidate how the problems of character development and subjectivity gestured at in the first half
50 For a study on the correlation between inflammation and depression see Bollen et al. 87 of the novel ostensibly become insurmountable in the second, destabilizing the text’s ability to reach a conclusive resolution. So, while the first half of The Bell Jar locates the tensions between structure (the nation, the symbolic, adulthood) and change (capitalism, narrative, youth) constitutive of character development in the classic bildungsroman within the body, Esther’s story nevertheless seems to follow the narrative trajectory of such stories up to a point. Despite a circuitous temporality which often makes it difficult for readers to definitively sequence events, narrative in the novel’s early chapters is nevertheless unified by the consistency of Esther’s point of view. In these early scenes,
Esther’s inclination toward rumination and associative remembering not only contributes to a relatively cohesive impression of character but also—despite the simulations and hyperrealities of the novel’s early scenes—an impression of the kind of narrative and character progression found in earlier forms of the bildung novel. This is due in large part to Esther’s proclivity for interpretation, her memories becoming one of the primary ways
Esther attributes meaning to her present—as, for example, when an extended flashback of
Esther duping her academic advisor into exempting her from required courses both interrupts the diegesis of a meeting with Jay Cee while also providing context important to how the scene is received by readers.
In contrast, the latter half of the novel largely jettisons such flashbacks, the text generally presenting a linear series of events. This linearity, however, belies the fact that without Esther’s extended flashbacks contextualizing her frequently disjunctive and often perfunctory social interactions, the novel loses whatever loose impression of narrative coherence and character development it otherwise had. Here events are presented less as scenes which build upon one another than as a series of vignettes, connected by their 88 shared presentation by a suicide-obsessed, paranoid Esther but largely failing to present her as a character capable of development. Furthermore, this arrested development coincides with a shift in the novel’s presentation of Esther’s more impulsive actions.
Here, in contrast to the early parts of the novel, where impulsive or instinctual actions are alternatively indicative of willful subjectivity or a sort of quasi-naturalist determinism, in the second half of the novel these same bodily impulses and instincts seem to arise from within the same abject body hinted at during Esther’s emotional breakdown at the photoshoot: an objectionable excess of impulses, feelings, and flesh of which Esther seeks to rid herself. Furthermore, ostensibly held hostage by this body is Esther’s increasingly dysfunctional mind which, despite her frequent complaints about not being able to think, is ironically presented in the form of her hyper-rational suicidal and prosecutorial thoughts.
This dichotomy is on full display during Esther’s first serious attempt at suicide.
Here, contra complaints of her inability to write or think, Esther’s thoughts take on a keen poetic and intentional focus. Such myopia manifests itself not only in Esther’s macabre mindset, as she ruminates on the beauty of shadows, “the million moving shapes and cul- de-sacs,” and romanticized images of suicide: “I thought it would be easy, lying in the tub and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank to sleep under a surface as gaudy as poppies” (147). It is also demonstrated in the explicit mechanical detail with which she plans her suicide: “It would take two motions. One wrist, then the other wrist. Three motions, if you counted changing the razor from hand to hand. Then I would step into the tub and lie down.”
Despite the cyclical and myopic movements of Esther’s mind, however—she also 89 compulsively repeats criticisms from a creative writing professor, “you’ll never get anywhere like that”—such thoughts fail to lead to definitive actions. Instead, Esther imagines the scene as if she were witnessing another person “paralyzed and too stupid to do a thing” (148). Furthermore, when she ultimately cuts herself the act is presented as barely volitional, lifting her arm and letting “it drop of its own weight, like a guillotine, onto the calf of my leg,” further emphasizing the disconnect between mind and body conveyed throughout these scenes (148). As such, far more than the early instances of indecision, Esther’s suicidal thinking mirrors the “bad infinities” described by Lukacs: ceaseless and self-referential movements of thoughts and emotions which continually fail to be reified into concrete possibilities through decisive actions.51 As such, after these numerous and, as in the scene above, oddly passive attempts on her life, Esther’s near successful suicide—during which she ingests a bottle of pills, and curls up in her mother’s basement—reads less like a volitional act of will and more like a happenstance or inevitability, as if the persistence of her suicidal thoughts had finally leaked into the material world.
Contrasting such single-mindedness are sporadic moments of impulsivity—the knocking over of a box of thermometers, the purposeful dropping of a mirror, the kicking of a black hospital attendant—each of which, unlike Esther’s willful acts in the first half
51 Esther’s obsessive thoughts about suicide not only prevent her from recalling the past in significant detail; due to her mental illness, the future too is placed outside the realm of Esther’s imaginative capabilities: “I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles, threaded together by wires. I counted one, two three . . . nineteen telephone poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn’t see a single pole beyond the nineteenth” (123). The number nineteen is of course a reference to Esther’s age, her inability to see beyond the nineteenth pole indicating her inability to imagine a future for herself. Additionally, the emphasis on the treading together of the poles further suggests the semiotic breaks which characterize Lacan and Jameson’s schizophrenic.
90 of the novel, lack any impression of willed authenticity or agency, and therefore the textual significance to move the plot forward. Indeed, nothing either good or ill seems to come of any of these actions which ostensibly spring from the body itself. It is a “prick” of “heavy naughtiness,” for example, that causes Esther to knock over the box of thermometers in the hospital following her attempted suicide. This impulse, which is described as emanating from within Esther’s “veins” as “irritating and attractive as the hurt of a loose tooth,” emphasizes how such desires arise from somewhere within the materiality of a body whose compulsions and actions no longer seem connected to her conscious mind (182).
Such bodily rebellion is also frequently depicted during Esther’s attempts on her life.
So, for example, while attempting to drown herself, Esther reasons that swimming too close to a rock would cause her body to act of its own volition, taking “that excuse to climb out and lie in the sun, gathering strength to swim back” (160). Instead she tries to exhaust herself by repeatedly diving below the surface of the water only to be “popped up like a cork” each time. Her efforts to hang herself are similarly thwarted: “Then I saw that my body had all sorts of little tricks, such as making my hands go limp at the crucial second, which would save it, time and again, whereas if I had the whole say, I would be dead in a flash” (159). In each of these scenes the body’s natural inclination to maintain homeostasis, to simply go on living, is explicitly contrasted to Esther’s conscious decision to commit suicide; in fact, after failing to drown herself, the machine-like thrum of Esther’s heart beating “I am, I am, I am” taunts her as she swims back to shore. This existential refrain of a heart which refuses to stop beating further blurs the distinction between the impulses and desires which, in the first half of the novel, seem to hint at 91 some authentic self and the (here) seemingly mechanical, deterministic body from which these impulses spring; additionally, regardless of their significance or source, such impulses are clearly disconnected from the symbolic workings of Esther’s computational mind.
Significantly, as Esther’s mental state deteriorates, she describes the biological body she seeks to kill in increasingly indefinite terms: not the “skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb” from which she seems alienated, but something “somewhere deeper, more secret, a whole lot harder to get at” (147). This somewhere is never attributed to a definite or indefinite noun but is rather described in terms of the elusiveness of its location. Such elusiveness thus contrasts both Esther’s suicidal thoughts and the alienated images of her body, both of which are concretely presented in the text.
This somewhere is hinted at, however, in Esther’s description of cutting herself, her delayed sensations harkening back to the “very still and very empty” feeling Esther describes in the opening of the novel: “I felt nothing. Then I felt a small, deep thrill, and a bright seam of red welled up at the lip of the slash” (148). Much like Esther’s tears during the previously mentioned photoshoot, whose wellspring remains vaguely unidentifiable, this small thrill emanates from some place deep within. Thus, these elusive sensations seem the same “site” of precocious sensations and desires which, despite being out of sync with neoliberal decision making throughout the first half of the novel, nevertheless seem to represent the possibility of authentic selfhood in the text. Here, however, this brief moment of feeling is set against the backdrop of nothingness that has become
Esther’s default emotional state, the delay between cut and nearly imperceptible thrill emphasizing not only how such sensations and desires are rooted in preconscious bodily 92 processes, but also the extent to which this affective body has become disconnected from the negative infinity of Esther’s thoughts. In the context of this disconnect, these bodily impulses seem alien.
Of course, as Esther’s condition improves, so too do the above alienating themes and disjunctive formalistic elements recede from her narration. Even in recovery, however, the idea of individual choices or actions having a transformational effect upon plot or subject is subverted. This is perhaps most explicit during Esther’s first sexual encounter, which also symbolizes her recovery. Significantly, Esther initially approaches her conversation with Irwin, a young math professor, as a means “to practice my new, normal personality,” indicating the extent to which she comes to view socialization as a performance by late in the novel (226). Despite these self-referential thoughts, however,
Esther’s decision to seduce Irwin nevertheless demonstrates the transformational powers she continues to ascribe to sex, the novel momentarily reassuming the trappings of the bildungsroman, which often present characters’ inaugural forays into adult sexuality— whether in the form of intercourse or marriage—as key moments of character development and plot. Additionally, in line with the bildung conflation of individual and cultural development, this scene is framed not only as a moment of personal liberation, but as a synecdoche of women’s sexual liberation more generally taking place, for example, just after Esther has been fitted for a diaphragm, granting her “freedom, freedom from fear, freedom from marrying the wrong person . . . freedom from the
Florence Crittenden Homes where all the poor girls go who should have been fitted out like me” (223). Moreover, Esther decides Irwin is a satisfactory sexual partner not only because of his intelligence and presumed sexual experience, but also because of the 93 unlikelihood of them carrying on a long-term romantic relationship: “I wanted somebody
I didn't know and wouldn't go on knowing—a kind of impersonal, priest-like official, as in the tales of tribal rites” (228). Esther thus conceives of sex almost exclusively as a rite of passage, and not a form of interpersonal bonding—or, for that matter, the adoption of a domestic social status. Additionally, though her references to priests and tribal rites— evocative religious iconography associated with transformational purity earlier in the novel—overtly connect the scene to the bildung trope of sexual maturity as a symbol of adulthood, it also presents a distinctly neoliberal take on this theme, both the diaphragm and the anonymity of the encounter allowing Esther to pursue sex, and thus adulthood, purely as an exchange between individual rationalistic actors.
What should be a culminating moment in Esther’s character development is nothing of the sort, however, as her anticipation, and whatever significance which might be ascribed the sexual act, are quickly dispelled via its anti-climax; as she lies “rapt and naked, on Irwin's rough blanket, waiting for the miraculous change” Esther feels “a sharp, startlingly bad pain” and a “little while” later is left to ponder whether she is still a virgin (229). This parody of the epiphanic textual event continues as Esther, despite the unspectacular and selfish sex, realizes she is bleeding, and smiling “into the dark” feels she is now “part of a great tradition,” while also expressing a sudden urge to return to the asylum to “brood over my new condition in perfect peace.” Not only does this vaguely funeral romanticizing parody the bildungsroman’s plot, as Esther’s entry in the great tradition of (not) procreation coincides with an urge to brood in what reads as an almost sepulchral peace, it also conflicts with the medias res opening of the episode. Esther’s description of her encounter with Irwin opens with her exclaiming “It hurts,” before 94 launching into an explanation of how she met Irwin, pre-empting any possibility of rapt readerly involvement in the ensuing “seduction” (225). Finally, the encounter nearly takes a tragic turn, as Esther is rushed to the hospital and the text again pokes fun of the idea of sex as a transformational experience, the doctor telling Esther that her excessive bleeding makes her one in a million, "I mean it's one in a million it happens to like this"
(233).
Ted Hughes has interpreted this scene as a triumph, a movement from “artificial ego to authentic self,” and therefore the moment of authentic character development lacking in the rest of the novel (Kendall 59). Read in this manner, the episode could also be interpreted as leading the novel itself out of the defamiliarizing narrative structures used to depict Esther’s mental illness toward a moment of what might be described as realist textual mimesis. As Kendall compellingly claims of Hughes’s overly optimistic reading of the episode, however, it “seems limiting to argue that sexual freedom, at a literal or symbolic level, is sufficient to solve all of the problems which lie behind [Esther’s] breakdown” (59). Similarly, I argue that that the ostensible achievement of neoliberal subjectivity in this scene—in the form of the rationally-guided pursuit of one’s desires— also fails to present a compelling solution to the problems of narrative and character development presented throughout the novel. Notably, the encounter offers a textbook case of how neoliberal individuality should function: Esther clearly understands what she wants and is thoughtful in the pursuit of her aim without her often hyper-rationalist mind leading to some sort of panic or existential paralysis. And yet the scene, in addition to its dark humor and parodying of the transformative moments commonly found in realist novels, dismantles this neoliberal ideology, the assumption of this healthy subjectivity 95 failing, as Kendall observes, to resolve Esther’s problems—namely her inability to firmly establish who she is and her place in the world. Moreover, whatever symbolic weight the episode might have had is erased as the novel immediately jumps forward an undisclosed period to the events surrounding Joan’s suicide.
Joan’s suicide is unique in The Bell Jar for the distinct impression of the metaphysical which surrounds it. In contrast to earlier moments of foreshadowing—such as the electrocution of the Rosenbergs prefiguring Esther’s electroshock treatment—
Esther’s awareness of Joan’s impending death is sensed first and foremost by Esther the character, Esther the narrator prophesying Joan’s death through the latter’s diegetic thoughts and feelings. When first questioned about Joan’s whereabouts, for example,
Esther describes the dormitory “As quiet as death” (233), and that night she envisions
Joan’s face floating “before me, bodiless and smiling, like the face of a Cheshire cat. I even thought I heard her voice, rustling and hushing through the dark, but then I realized it was only the night wind in the asylum trees. . .” (235). Such thoughts thus imply some sort of precognitive or transcendental knowledge of what is about to occur, themes out of place in a novel concerned first and foremost with the psychology of its narrator. Rather than representing a lapse in textual mimesis, however, these premonitions seem to imply
Esther’s awareness of Joan’s compromised emotional and mental state, and therefore the likelihood of her suicide. Notably, this sort of awareness is situated outside the thematic tensions between rational mind and desiring body explored throughout the rest of the novel. As such, prefiguring the emphasis on affect in the second chapter of this dissertation, I would like to suggest that this episode gestures at a key difference between neoliberal conceptions of the subject and those posed by affect theorists like Massumi, 96 who conceptualizes the subject not as an independent actor who chooses, but rather as a
“transindividual” permeated by the affects of others.
For now, however, the significance of such premonitions is how they inevitably contribute to Esther’s questioning of her own role in Joan’s death, a woman for whom she feels an enduring ambivalence throughout the novel. Prior to the suicide, for example,
Esther alternatively states that, “In spite of my profound reservations, I thought I would always treasure Joan” (225), while also complaining to Doctor Nolan about Joan’s implied homosexuality: “‘What does a woman see in a woman that she can’t see in a man?’ Doctor Nolan paused. Then she said, ‘Tenderness.’ That shut me up”—notably, tenderness is not a quality to which Esther seems inclined (219). These mixed feelings about Joan come to a head just before Esther learns of her suicide, expressing a sudden urge to “dissociate myself from Joan completely” when she is questioned about the latter’s whereabouts by Doctor Nolan, seemingly a preemptive attempt to distance herself from the eventuality of Joan’s death (234). This effort proves insufficient, however, as
Esther inevitably questions Doctor Nolan about Esther’s own culpability in the suicide.
Dr. Nolan’s contradictory response to this inquiry is telling, as she angrily informs
Esther that “Nobody did it. She did it” (240). At face value the first statement means that no one, not even Joan herself, bears responsibility for her death, a conclusion which seems supported by the novel’s earlier presentation of Esther’s own mental illness—and perhaps human agency in general—as inclining her to similar self-destructive thoughts and habits to which she has no recourse. If this is the case, however, what is the role of the mental institution in preventing such eventualities, and what purpose does it serve if they cannot be prevented? As previously mentioned, Esther’s own recovery is brought 97 about by the care of psychiatric professionals like Dr. Nolan. Moreover, Esther’s transfer from a public to a private hospital is presented as an essential element of her recovery, the importance of the type and quality of treatment Esther receives being further reinforced by her dislike for Joan’s psychiatrist, Doctor Quinn, Esther speculating that if she had been assigned to Quinn “I would be still in Caplan or, more probably, Wymark,” references to buildings in the facility that work with particularly difficult or dire cases
(224). The idea of recovery taking place in entirely subjective terms is also called into question by the narration itself, as Esther’s ability to make rational choices (like Irwin) comes as a result of the novel taking on a more traditional narrative structure rather than such a moment of decision-making shocking the story back into a more recognizable structure. As such, if Joan’s suicide was preventable, the novel seems to imply that intervention was if anything more likely to come from outside Joan than from within. The novel’s conclusion thus presents a conflictual account of personal responsibility, contravening neoliberal conceptions of the subject as an actor whose choices are irreducible and non-transferable.
These contradictions are what inspire Doctor Nolan’s anger, as well as her second response which definitively locates blame with Joan herself, a very liberal—and quite practical—unwillingness to accept emotional responsibility for the disquieting acts and events which likely impose themselves on Nolan’s daily life. Nevertheless, these questions pose a problem for Esther, whose own recovery seems in part the product of a salubrious social environment she may have refused to help foster for Joan. These contradictions are presented immediately prior to the novel’s abrupt resolution, which once again evokes marriage as a symbol of adulthood. While waiting to be viewed by the 98 doctors who one assumes will approve her release from the mental hospital—though
Esther the narrator’s earlier comments confirm that she is eventually released, she fails to confirm that this occurs at the end of the novel—Esther ruminates on her attire
“Something old, something new . . . But I wasn’t getting married” (244). Instead of this metaphor for adulthood, which also firmly locates one’s place within society, Esther tries for a more appropriate analogy for her situation: “There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice—patched, retreaded and approved for the road” (244). Beyond emphasizing the materiality of Esther’s material body—her heart, in this scene again drumming, “I am, I am, I am”—this metaphor recalls the contradictions surrounding not only Esther’s illness and recovery, but also Joan’s death: is this recovery an organic/biological rebirth, or a mechanical process (e.g. electroshock treatment), and who here has done the patching? These unanswered questions would seem to have profound implications for the type of subject Esther is to become as she prepares to re-enter the world.
4. Conclusion
The Bell Jar serves as a useful starting point for this dissertation’s exploration of representations of embodiment in the mid- to late-20th century novel because of how its narration connects both plot and character development to its depiction of the body.
Plath’s novel is thus emblematic of how, in fiction from this era, the body becomes a site of not just cultural, economic or biological determinisms implicitly contrasted to a freedom-granting rational mind or soul, but also one intimately intertwined with the latter. Furthermore, as we have seen such interconnections take two general forms throughout Esther Greenwood’s story: a tendency for Esther’s narration to ground 99 abstract ideas and emotions in the body and, relatedly, a habit of making this body the primary object of rational self-evaluation. In the following chapters this economic subject—circumscribed by a compulsive attention to its individual bodily habits and drives—will be increasingly challenged by a collection of works which depict the body as far more permeable to the social and material environments around them than
(neo)liberal ideology can accept. Nevertheless, I argue that each of the novels assessed herein to some extent grounds its depiction of embodiment in such an analytic, one which
The Bell Jar seems to both exemplify and subtly problematize.
100
Three Forms of Embodied Subjectivity in Don DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star
Though The Bell Jar insightfully addresses a number of philosophical themes, Don
DeLillo’s fourth novel, Ratner’s Star, is unquestionably the more philosophically engaged and experimental text. Thus, while Plath’s text compellingly explores subjectivity in terms of the often-conflictual relationship between Esther’s mind and body, Ratner’s Star goes much further in developing what I characterize as a theory of embodied subjectivity. The novel tells the story of fourteen-year-old Billy Twillig, a mathematical genius and recent Nobel Laureate summoned to a secretive research think tank named Field Experiment Number One (FENO) hidden deep in the Chinese desert.
His assignment is to translate what is believed to be a transmission from an extra- terrestrial intelligence originating from the titular Ratner’s Star. What seems like a quirky set up for a first contact novel, however, quickly becomes a Lewis Carroll-esque journey through the otherworldly environs of FENO. Billy’s quest is thus quickly overshadowed by his encounters with the oddball scientists, bureaucrats, cabalists, and mystics who occupy the facility. Collectively, such encounters comprise Ratner’s Star’s core conceit: a text which not only traces the “cult” history of mathematical thought, but which itself strives to be “a piece of mathematics,” the novel’s experimental structure being driven less by the typical logics of character and narrative, than the mathematical ideas allegorized in each of its chapters.52
Such a structure is important to my assessment of the novel because these allegories are also the means by which Ratner’s Star juxtaposes a variety of competing conceptions
52 See LeClair 111-144 and Osteen 61-98. 101 of the subject. Furthermore, each of these conceptions is presented in terms of the mind- body complexes described in the introduction. Thus, what ultimately emerges out of the episodic, and frequently disjunctive encounters of the first of Ratner’s Star’s two sections, “Adventures: Field Experiment Number One,” is a juxtaposition of three general “theories” of the subject, evident in the characterization of both Billy and many of the figures he encounters throughout this part of the novel. Roughly, these take the form of: 1) a sort of idealist subject whose mind, mimicking the disembodied tropes found in some modernist texts, seems radically disconnected from the material world around it; 2) a more general exaggeration of realist representations of the subject, which can effect changes upon the world while being seemingly disconnected from it; and 3) what I argue is the novel’s privileged depiction of subjectivity as a dynamic interrelationship between mind, body and environment.
This final representation of subjectivity is also closely tied to Ratner’s Star’s depiction of Billy’s savant intellect. Indeed, the combination of Billy’s youth, his intellectual capabilities, and Ratner’s Star’s ambitious scope—narrating the
“underground history” of mathematics—suggests what I claim is the novel’s unique place within the bildung tradition explored in the previous chapter, Billy’s development coming to stand not as an allegory of national development, but as a synecdoche of human intellectual development more broadly. Thus, the frequent and prophetically tinged pleas from the novel’s characters for Billy to “join the hemispheres” and bring “logical sequence to delirium” (Ratner’s Star 195) are ultimately brought to fruition in the novel’s second section, “Reflections: Logicon Minus One.” Here Billy’s mentor, Robert Softly, takes his young protégé and a team of elite researchers underneath FENO in order to 102 develop a logicon, a language of pure logic utterly stripped of content. It is from the failure of this project, as well as the mental, physical, and emotional deterioration of many of its participants, that Billy ultimately emerges at the close of novel to embrace the imbrications, and paradoxical incommensurability, of the analytical mind and sensuous body, such liminality ultimately defining what it is to be human in the novel.
Furthermore, I argue that the novel as a whole structures the development of Billy’s character around this juxtaposition, the coming of age in Ratner’s Star being more concerned with the resolution of generalized existential questions about human nature than with locating one’s place within a discrete cultural tradition. Nevertheless, these conflicts between a sensuous body indelibly connected to the material world around it, and an analytical mind which frequently distances itself from this world, mirror the conflicts typically encountered by the bildung protagonist, who must similarly reconcile external social forces with inner desires.
Significantly, this reading of a reconciliation between mind and body bares similarities to Joseph Dewey’s interpretation of Ratner’s Star. This chapter, however, takes a very different stance on the role of embodiment in the novel. Specifically, Dewey claims that the neologism “zorgasm,” which appears in the final paragraph of the novel, symbolizes the entwining of “mind and body, the abstract mathematical symbol (the zorg) with the rinsing (and sweetly terrifying) vulnerability of the orgasm” (Dewey 48).
Thus, according to Dewey, Ratner’s Star juxtaposes the explanatory powers of the human mind with the vulnerability of the clumsy and deformed human body, the latter symbolizing the general existential and physical precarity of the human subject.
Furthermore, he argues that the unwillingness of DeLillo’s early characters to embrace 103 this vulnerability is what inspires them to withdraw from the world in order to embrace the meaning-making faculties of the mind, “a sort of suicide in self-defense” (48). For
Dewey, such self-defeating retreats are the defining tragedy of DeLillo’s first four novels, whose characters fail to recognize the central role of “grief” in the human condition, the zorgasm symbolizing for Dewey Billy’s rejection of this choice, as he opts instead to embrace “the very randomness that mathematics has so long kept at bay.”
In contrast to this reading, and the general trend in scholarship on the novel to interpret the analytical mind and sensuous body as opposites, this chapter argues that mind and body are just as often depicted as being intertwined in Ratner’s Star. Thus, in addition to presenting the body as a site of infirmities synecdochally related to the vulnerability of the human subject more broadly, I argue that, like The Bell Jar, DeLillo’s novel also presents the body—particularly in the form of the senses—as intimately related to human cognition. Such depictions of the preconscious drives, impulses, and senses of the body, however, are more complex in Ratner’s Star and, just as important, the bodies they are associated with far more materially and affectively permeable. As such, the sort of reconciliation between mind and body sought, but never quite achieved, by Esther Greenwood becomes an impossibility for Billy, as the complexities of the body in Ratner’s Star prove fundamentally irreducible to conscious thought. Nevertheless, this incommensurability is precisely what I argue comprises the ultimate mystery of the zorgasm, and thus the subject, at the close of Ratner’s Star: a figure defined by the very irreconcilability of its two constituent parts.
1. Billy’s Embodied Mind 104
Given DeLillo’s current status as one of the giants of postmodern fiction,53 it is unsurprising that much of the criticism on Ratner’s Star interprets the novel through the lens of postmodernism. Tom LeClair, one of the first major scholars to take an interest in
DeLillo’s fiction, for example, holds the novel up as an archetypal example of DeLillo as a “systems” novelist, whose “work, like the mathematician’s, does not claim a common utility or easy referentiality. Working above the tree line, the systems novelist with an abstract bent exposes his imagination to severe scrutiny, especially if his ideas are not the religious, moral, sociological, or aesthetic notions usually treated in novels of ideas”
(115). Thus, for LeClair, Ratner’s Star is indicative of the broader tendency of DeLillo’s fiction to radically challenge and scrutinize the humanist impulses which defined
American fiction until the latter half of the 20th century, and which were inevitably challenged by postmodern genres like the systems novel. Indeed, even as more recent scholarship has questioned such rigid categorizations of DeLillo as a postmodern novelist,54 scholarship on Ratner’s Star has nevertheless tended to position itself in terms of the postmodern themes, particularly those concerning language, of the novel. Thus, for example, Glen Scott Alan assesses Ratner’s Star in terms of its mobilization of the discourses of postmodern paranoia, and Jonathan Little’s claim that it is DeLillo’s penchant for postmodern irony which makes the novel such an interesting exploration of spirituality and mysticism. Similarly, David Cowart, in his monograph Don DeLillo: The
Physics of Language (2004), uses Ratner’s Star as a model for how the theme of language is developed in DeLillo’s corpus more broadly. Specifically, he argues that the
53 See for, example, the intro to Cowart. 54 See, for example, Kavadlo and Lang. 105 novel is thematically structured around two competing visions of language, one associated with the analytic logic of figures like Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege, for whom “language can be grounded in the precision of logic and mathematics,” and the other with the deconstruction of French critical theorists like Jacques Derrida, who conceive of language as “infinite regression, mocking the desire of its users to ‘name’ reality” (158-9).
Though compelling, such interpretations underrepresent what I see as the central role of the body in the development of Ratner’s Star’s more abstract and postmodern themes.
Thus, although I agree that topics like mysticism and paranoia can be usefully understood in terms of the postmodern linguistic impulses of Ratner’s Star, I also argue that such themes are inherently connected to the materialist model of subjectivity the novel develops. Similarly, I argue that while Cowart’s observations are useful for interpreting the novel, his assessment of the dual nature of language in Ratner’s Star misses one of the key elements that makes language such an interesting theme in the text: the notion that language inherently gestures beyond the self-referential logic and play of human thought. Indeed, I argue that throughout DeLillo’s corpus, language is frequently presented in the form of “primitive” and/or guttural utterances ostensibly rooted in desires and bodily impulses irreducible to logic or the postsucturalist play of symbols.
The obsession of many of Ratner’s Star’s characters with “babbling” thus, I argue, has less to do with what Cowart terms “childhood ingenuousness” than with the proximity of children—and thus their language—to pre-rational bodily experience (Cowart 158).
Thus, similar to The Bell Jar’s grounding of neoliberal ideology in bodily habits,
DeLillo’s novel often seems to ground the language, and thus symbol, processing 106 faculties of the mind in the preconscious body. Furthermore, rather than presenting a specific element of human consciousness such as fear, language, or even the body, as the primary interpretive lens through which the novel should be assessed, I argue that
Ratner’s Star’s exploration of these themes is intimately connected to their synthesis in an embodied subject whose very existence is predicated upon the irreducibility of bodily experience to language and reason (i.e. the mind) and vice versa.
Such an embodied subject, however, doesn’t really manifest itself concretely until the latter half of the novel. Rather, I argue that, in “Adventures,” this subject is hinted at by means of the bildungsromanesque development of Billy’s character which, as I mentioned in the introduction, is allegorically related to human intellectual development more broadly. Thus, as Tom LeClair and Mark Osteen have thoroughly documented,
Billy’s explorations of FENO are also explorations of different eras in the development of (mostly western) mathematical and scientific thought, many of the characters he encounters being allegories of famous figures from this history. Aside from these evocations of the “cultural” tradition that Billy inherits and—as a recent Nobel
Laureate—has already begun to insert himself into, the first section of Ratner’s Star also spends a great deal of time exploring the mysterious origins of his extraordinary intellect.
Similar to the character development of Esther Greenwood, these depictions of the inner workings of Billy’s mind are centered around a sort of axiomatic juxtaposition. Unlike
The Bell Jar’s overt contrasting of mind and body, however, what “Adventures” juxtaposes in order to depict the inner workings of Billy’s mind is intuition and logic.
Nevertheless, the former is intimately connected to themes of embodiment. 107
Before elaborating on this connection between intuition and embodiment, however, it is worth taking a moment to address how Ratner’s Star both explores and problematizes the theme of intuition and its complex relationship with logic. Henrik Endor, a colleague of Billy’s driven mad by his inability to translate the star message, nicely sums this relationship half way through the novel, rooting intuition in the primitive development of
“man”:
Remember the savage and what he accomplished in this instinct for pure space and the mathematics of motion. Inventor of the boomerang. Yes, he pulled the string on space itself. The right side of his brain out-processed the left. Intuition and motion and the conquest of time. It’s the object of your labor, lad, to join the hemispheres. Bring logical sequence to delirium, reason to the forager squatting, language and meaning to the wild child’s dream. (Ratner’s Star 195)
This final directive to Billy, imploring him to “unite the hemispheres” connecting right brain and left, and thus the intuitive and logical faculties of the human subject, is frequently echoed throughout the novel. Such superficial evocations of theories of the mind, however, belie what I argue is the philosophical depth of Ratner’s Star’s representation of the origins of mathematical thought. Rather than a simple dichotomy— logic, sequence, and mathematics being rooted in the left brain, creativity and intuition in the right—DeLillo’s novel frequently presents intuition as the “primitive” root of mathematics, instead of its opposite. In the above quote, for example, Henrik Endor suggests that the first human inquiries into mathematics were driven by instinctual—i.e. preconscious and, as I will argue, implicitly embodied—engagements with the physical world. Thus the boomerang, with its seemingly miraculous ability to conquer gravity, stands as a synecdoche for the beginning of human reason’s conquest of nature. Such origins are a recurrent theme in Ratner’s Star, as is the novel’s tendency to present youths 108
(i.e. Billy) as being more in touch which these primitive origins of mathematical thought.
Indeed, Billy entertains similar ideas early in the novel, speculating on the first developments in number theory: “Number as primitive intuition. Number self-generated.
Number developing in the child’s mind spontaneously and nonverbally” (9). This last idea carries special significance for Billy himself, whose development of language, and synecdochally conscious thought, was delayed. In contrast, his talent for mathematics is often described as instinctual, his mind working through computations “with the ease of a coastal bird hunting an updraft” (13).
This manipulation of numbers is so automatic for Billy, however, as to seem mundane, nothing boring him more “than playful calculations” (12). Thus, in contrast to
Esther Greenwood, who strives, often unsuccessfully, to unite bodily drives and instincts with abstract cultural norms and expectations, Billy, in lieu of embracing his instinctual talent for calculation, occupies his mind with proofs and the logical systems they comprise. Similarly, the metaphor of numeration as instinctual, birdlike flight is immediately qualified: “But beauty was mere scenery unless it was severe, adhering strictly to a set of consistent inner codes” (13). For Billy, such coherent systems of thought comprise “the arch-reality of pure mathematics,” the practice of which he appreciates for “its austere disposition, its links to simplicity and permanence. . . the endless disdain of mathematics for what is slack in the character of its practitioners” (13).
The subconscious ease of calculation is therefore contrasted to a conscious, rigidly rationalistic wrangling not just of specific problems, but also the very intuitive, preconscious self from which Billy’s mathematical talents spring. Thus, presented alongside distinctions between conscious faculties (i.e. left brain versus right) is a model 109 of psychological depth, in which conscious thought seeks to control the seemingly subconscious processes from which Billy’s inherent, and often seemingly mystical, talents for numeration spring.55 Additionally, this model of depth is further complicated by a narrative of historical development (i.e. the primitive versus the developed), suggesting yet another story about the inner workings of the human mind.
Such competing depictions of mathematical thought are further complicated by the novel’s conflicting accounts of the interrelationships between numbers, logic, and language. Throughout “Adventures” Billy is quick to assert that he does “pure work. A lot of it so abstract it can’t be put on paper or even talked about. I work with proof and nonproof” (46). Such comments emphasize the logical nature of his scholarship, which relies not on empirical evidence or sensorial experience but on the coherence of “true”
(i.e. proof) and “false” (i.e. nonproof) logical propositions “undertaken solely to advance the art” (33). This equation of logic with pure abstraction, however, contrasts Billy’s own observations about the symbiotic relationship of logic and language. Thus, concerned about the powers of Endor’s oratorical skills and command of logical argumentation to convince him to partake in the elder scientist’s consumption of insect larva—the maddening efforts to decode the star message having caused Endor to flee FENO and take up residence in a hole in the desert—Billy contemplates how “a logical trap was the worst kind. Words could not be separated from their use. The fact made logical traps easy to fall into and hard to get out of” (86). In contrast to this inherent bond of logic and language to their (material) contexts, Billy celebrates the “dual nature of numbers which
55 For commentary on the role of mysticism in Ratner’s Star see Little and Osteen. Osteen, for example, notes that the cultish “Pythagoreans combined a highly developed understanding of geometry with a set of sophisticated spiritual practices and beliefs” (66). 110 existed as themselves, abstractly, and as units for measuring distances and counting objects.” As such, it is not logic but numbers that are presented as having the capacity to exist as purely formal abstractions, avoiding the inherent messiness of logic and language with their tendency to get mixed up in the material world.
Such ambiguities about numbers, logic and language come to a head at the close of
“Adventures” when Softly arrives at FENO, taking Billy and an elite group of researchers beneath the facility in his quest to develop Logicon—a purely logical language stripped of referential content.56 His sudden appearance abruptly interrupting the novel’s plot,
Softly immediately dismisses Billy’s achievements as too computational, claiming that although Billy’s work consists of “Brilliant instinctive skimming,” it lacks the logical
“scrub brush the mathematician uses to keep his work free of impurity” (272). The novel thus again muddies the waters around the question of the origin of Billy’s intelligence and talents, Softly’s comments at the close of “Adventures” emphasizing a series of unanswered questions lying just below the surface of the allegorical history it tells: what is the source—instinctual or logical—of mathematical thought and human invention more generally? What is the relationship of this history to human development, both as a historical phenomenon and a biological process? And finally, more specific to the novel’s plot, why, if intuitive numeration is what makes Billy such a talented mathematician, does Softly believe such qualities must be expunged from his work?
To begin answering these questions, I argue that it is useful to think of intuition, intimately entwined in the novel with the themes of mysticism and the transcendental
56 As LeClair notes, Softly and his Logicon are representative of the work of analytic philosophers like Bertrand Russell, some of the last historical figures allegorized in Ratner’s Star. 111 nature of numbers, in terms of embodiment. Massumi’s theories of affect and Katherine
Hayles’s concept of “non-conscious cognition” prove useful analogues here, as both draw upon embodied cognition research to argue that most human interactions, whether between one another or the environment, take place as preconscious processes involving both body and mind.57 In such theories, what we call conscious thought plays a secondary or corrective role in human “cognition,” organizing and correcting for errors in the largely intuitive—and seemingly mystical—process of experiencing and responding to the world.58 Thinking in such terms helps to straighten out many of the contradictions surrounding the relationship between logic, language, and numbers in Ratner’s Star.
Though thought supposedly plays a corrective role in such theories, for example, it can also confuse and unduly complicate one’s understanding of the world—thus the danger of logical traps which can be purposefully used to produce such confusion. Numbers, on the other hand follow a “logic” to which Billy has intuitive (i.e. preconscious) access and thus implicitly trusts. Nevertheless, human consciousness plays an important role in the development of so-called “pictures” of the universe which comprise not only scientific theories, but also forms of art, and which Ratner’s Star is at least as celebratory of as it is critical.59
Thus, it is not so much that intuition and logic are oppositional terms, but that they play different roles in human consciousness, intuitions grounded in bodily experience constantly challenging the constructions of rational thought and allowing for the
57 See “Cognition Everywhere” and Parables for the Virtual 23-45. 58 See Power at the End of The Economy 97-101. 59 This is one of my major issues with criticism on the novel, which frequently positions the text as unduly hostile to scientific thought. 112 emergence of new ideas and thus, as will be explored later, human agency. Furthermore, from this standpoint the primitive and civilized as historicizing concepts seems a false dichotomy, the tendency of the novel’s characters to adopt extreme states of
“submoronic” (i.e. pre-linguistic) or highly abstracted being suggesting that such forms of existence have more to do with how subjects orientate themselves to the world around them, than hard and fast distinctions about cultural development.
However, although concepts like Massumi’s affect and Hayle’s non-conscious cognition are useful for considering the relationship between intuition and logic in
Ratner’s Star, such theories nevertheless tend to downplay what I see as the importance of human consciousness in the novel. Thus, in order to both account for the importance of human thought in DeLillo’s novel, as well as better conceptualize how intuition and logic relate to one another, it is useful to consider Ratner’s Star’s structuring of embodied subjectivity in the context of what I argue is a similar model found in Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectics. Much like theories of embodied cognition which suggest that non- symbolic sensory information and cognitive processes have a bearing on symbolic thought, according to Adorno’s epistemology, non-conceptual somatic experience plays a central role in the structure of human consciousness. In contrast to such theories, however, Adorno conceives of human consciousness as a distinct class of existence which nevertheless owes its unique being to the materiality of the object world which surrounds it. Thus, for Adorno the ability of consciousness to reflect upon the world, as well as construct worlds of its own, gives it a special status unlike the rest of the material universe to which it owes its existence. However, as without external objects to conceptualize such a consciousness could not exist, the material world nevertheless exists 113 prior to this consciousness and thus has priority over it. It is this complex mutually determining relationship between mind and world that lends Adorno’s epistemology its dynamism, as the experiencing subject’s non-conceptual, non-symbolic impressions of the world are what provide the driving force behind a nevertheless ontologically privileged human thought, the subject’s non-conceptual bodily relationship to the world keeping it attuned to the insufficiencies of its conceptual models, inspiring them to strive to create better, though still imperfect ones.
Thinking in terms of Adorno’s epistemology, the following structural relationship between the mind, the body, and the material world can be drawn with regard to Ratner’s
Star. On the one hand we have the mind, associated with the faculties of logic and language; on the other we have the material world to which this mind has access in the forms of representational models which mimic this world: scientific and philosophical theories, works of art like fiction, and even the visual images consciously processed by the brain. What connects these conceptual models to the world itself, however, is the body in the form of unprocessed sense data, and the preconscious processes used to filter and combine this sensory information prior to its entry into conscious thought. Intuition, I argue, is the name for these preconscious processes in Ratner’s Star: in other words,
Billy’s ability to intuit not just the properties of numbers, but also the solutions to problems which exceed the faculties of his conscious mind.
Thus, for example, despite Billy’s claims about his work having nothing to do with the material, the novel’s third-person narration consistently depicts bodily movement and sensation playing a central role in his thought process. Such depictions are particularly common during scenes in which Billy feels he is making progress in translating the star 114 message, these efforts frequently blending into the narrator’s descriptions of his impulsive, and ostensibly precocious bodily movements: “when he felt his heightened interest coming over him now he got up, as always, and began to pace, trying to order his thoughts, space them to the rhythm of his pacing” (161). Here, for example, the narrator describes Billy’s intellectual process as a feeling, implicitly linking conceptual and non- conceptual knowledge. The narrator also presents this process as being linked to, or enabled by, the sensations of bodily movement. Thus, the narration doesn’t present getting up as a volitional choice so much as an element of Billy’s mental work, the rhythm of his pacing ostensibly facilitating the structuring of his thoughts. Furthermore, the narrator doesn’t present these embodied, non-conceptual elements of Billy’s process as unique occurrences, but rather as a ubiquitous component of his thinking. Such emphasis on the importance of non-conscious bodily processes to Billy’s conscious thought helps explain both the impression of inefinfability surrounding the narrator’s descriptions of Billy’s talents, as well as Billy’s own inability explain what “made his mathematics happen” as such analytical work is inevitably rooted in bodily processes and sensations which presuppose and exceed such thoughts (238).
Such ineffability is similarly evoked just before his first breakthrough on the signal from Ratner’s Star. As the scene opens, Billy fantasizes about the same “submoronic mode of being”—ostensibly one in which the reflective intellectual capacities of language and logic are abandoned—adopted by Endor:
There were times when he felt the lure of a submoronic mode of being. During such periods his mind turned opaque, making it hard for him to perceive the simplest incentive. It would be easy, he believed, to spend a lifetime in this stateless zone. Content to be organic. Content to perform only monotonous tasks. Content to forsake coherent speech. The spirit that informed him would swiftly dwindle, replaced by the 115
soul of a plant. In time he’d dispense with voluntary motion and the natural management of his body. Content to smell himself and dream of downy molds. (237)
Notably, contrasting the common use of terms like clarity and light as metaphors for reason, this passage describes Billy’s mind in the moment just before epiphany in terms of opacity. Similarly, what Billy fantasizes about abandoning here is not so much biological life, as the self-sure transparency typically associated with the volitional control and management of such life; nor is speech, in the sense of vocalizations, given up but rather coherent communication.60 This state, devoid not of being, but rather higher-level cognition and rational communication, is thus suggestive of a more radical version of the “primitivism” adopted by Endor, who spends his days in a hole digging for grubs. Such an existence would be one of pure immanence deprived of the reflective capacity of human thought to create cognitive models of the world, and thus a relief from the pressures involved in the development of such models.
Billy’s urge to embrace this sub-moronic state, however, isn’t shown to be the antithesis of human creativity and invention. Rather, the narrator describes it as occurring whenever “he was on the verge of solving a drawn-out mathematical problem” (238).
This temptation to “abandon all the structural forms, the intersecting perspectives, the entire weightless system of exact relationships,” or in other words the conceptual models and collections of formal proofs which comprise human knowledge, is thus not presented as an impediment to such knowledge. Instead, the novel depicts the temporary abdication of such systems leading to their regeneration: thus, immediately following Billy’s
60 This is reminiscent of the frequent interest of DeLillo’s novels with the origins of human language (See, for example, The Names), as well as Billy’s own captivation with the mad screaming women who lived in his parent’s apartment complex. 116 fantasies of “sub-moronic” being, he realizes that the message he has been working to translate, a series of one hundred and one pulses broken up by two gaps, is interpretable in terms of the base-sixty number system used by civilizations like the Aztecs. This realization, ostensibly rooted in a moment where logical preconceptions are abandoned, thus produces the possibility for a unique interpretation of the message from which an entirely new system for understanding its significance and intent can be derived.
Furthermore, the mystery surrounding the source of Billy’s revelation is depicted by means of the scene’s exploration of the relationship between conceptual and non- conceptual knowledge. Here, as Billy calmly scribbles “oblivious to everything but one emerging thought,” his experiences are “scaled down to noncomplex sensation,” the narrator, again, carefully drawing readerly attention to the role of sensations and preconscious bodily processes in intense thought. Notably, such thought is explicitly described as intractable to linguistic explanation, the narrator describing Billy, despite the tendency of his work “to provide a model of his own mind,” as lacking “an adequate vocabulary for mathematical invention” (238). Although this moment of revelation is accompanied by “an emptying of both modes of consciousness . . . of fact and unorganized reality,”—i.e. rational truth and the mess of information provided by the senses—the narrator nevertheless describes the cognitive events leading up to Billy’s realization in terms of the relationship between words and senses. Thus, in his trancelike state Billy is simultaneously “unaware of sound and color and yet knowing, touching, seeing, hearing, breathing, sheer certainty, feeling it inside him” (238-9). More than just evoking the two levels of consciousness found throughout the novel—the rational mind and the unknown intuitive or primitive self—this passage suggests their indescribable 117 dynamic interrelationship, as collections of simultaneous sensorial processes are described running alongside one another in a conjunction reminiscent of van Gelder’s mutually reciprocal perceiving, thinking, and acting. As such, despite sensations no longer being registered by Billy’s conscious mind, the narrator nevertheless implies their continued existence as preconscious neurological processes, such processes playing an important role in Billy’s approaching certainty. This invocation of a list of sense metaphors to describe the production of abstract conceptual knowledge thus both indicates their inadequacy for describing this event—due to the irreducibility of these senses to conceptual knowledge—while nevertheless gesturing at the role of such non- conceptual information in the development of abstract systems of knowledge.
This simultaneous juxtaposition and imbrication of these two ways of “knowing” is also suggested by the explicit return of Billy’s thoughts to conceptual knowledge just before his epiphany. Here Billy again becomes aware of his senses, “watching his own feet” while also becoming cognizant of the conceptual apparatuses through which we communicate and think. This experience of the slippery relationship between signifier and signified is experienced as its own revelation: “(what a funny word, hearing it, “feet” for the first time)” (238-9). Significantly, Billy’s deconstructive thought, separating the word “feet” from its signifier, does not contrast the logical and deconstructive forms of language described by Cowart, but rather the relationship of the word to the sense objects associated with it—the visual experience of feet and the sonorousness of the vocal utterance. As such, the novel’s interest in language in this moment concerns its status as a conceptual tool inextricably tied to the non-conceptual elements of human cognition. This also relates Billy’s fantasizing about creatures in these scene for whom there is “no 118 intervening substance to transmit their art, able to write with their fingers, laser-paint with eyes alone, creatures such would surely know this feeling, as of nature taking part in thought, the living brain that codes its own development” (238). A sort of apotheosis of the “submoronic” existence described earlier, the novel here conjures the notion of beings whose bodies and thoughts are in complete unison not only with each other, but also with the environment surrounding them; for such beings the act of artistic creation would not take the form of mediating systems of abstract reason and language but rather a pure immanence, wherein there is no distance between mind and world.
Indeed, as previously mentioned, I argue that the novel conceptualizes the dichotomy between the “primitive” and the “civilized” to be less of a historical concept, and more of a distinction between different modes of being: one where the body directly interfaces with and instinctually responds to its environment without attempting to construct rationalistic models of this environment; the other where such models—and thus human consciousness—take on an existence of their own, implicitly disconnected from the body.
As we will see, it is to this latter being, termed “hypothetical ARS extant[s],” that
Ratner’s Star’s penultimate scene is addressed (430). What is significant here, however, is the intersection of these two modes of being, in which the novel’s narration locates the wellspring of many of the themes that dominate DeLillo’s corpus: mystery and mysticism, the paranoia of conspiracies, and the ostensible slipperiness of human conceptions of history. As such I argue that the novel’s depiction of such beings, one ostensibly isolated in humanity’s past, the other in some possible science fiction
“future”—which, as previously mentioned, the novel also positions as a past—conveys more about the possible forms human subjectivity might take than a compelling history 119 of human development itself—the primitive in particular, as demonstrated above, being directly implicated in the production of the forms of knowledge which comprise its opposite.61
Significantly, though it is primarily when the novel’s narration focuses on Billy’s thought processes that the relationship between mind and body described above begins to emerge, the tensions produced by these different aspects of Billy’s being are consistently evoked throughout “Adventures.” Thus, the novel’s flashbacks to Billy’s early childhood narrate moments which emphasize both Billy’s anxiousness about his embodiment and his keen mathematical insights. One episode, for example, involves Billy’s mother Faye mythologizing a drain clogged for weeks in the family’s kitchen as being possessed by a
“vegetoid” monster. The threat posed by this creature is imagined in term of its ingestion of the living bodies of its victims, suggesting the fungibility one’s own body with the body of others: “Absorption by shapeless mass. Total assimilation. They would be incorporated, transformed and metabolized. They would become functions of the inner liquid maintenance of vegetoid” (132). Juxtaposed to this evocation of bodies being digested into a homogenous mass in the same flashback, is Billy’s casual realization that,
“like climbing a ladder,” adding the numbers from one to twenty-four merely requires multiplying twenty-five by twelve: “The number one went with twenty four, two with twenty three, three with twenty-two and so on, each pair totaling twenty five, which was simply to be multiplied by the number pairs” (133-4). As such, it is this distinction between a materially permeable body and a rational mind whose work, Billy frequently
61 Indeed, what Ratner’s Star presents as primitive or “sub-moronic” modes of being are reminiscent of what Katherine Hayles describes as non-conscious cognition: see Hayles, Cognition Everywhere 120 insists, has nothing to do with the “real world,” that structures Billy’s character development throughout “Adventures”—a juxtaposition nevertheless subtly undermined by the association of the embodied metaphor of climbing a ladder with the solution to the math problem. As previously mentioned, however, this is far from the only depiction of subjectivity presented by the novel.
2. Other Subjects
As mentioned in the introduction, the structure of embodied subjectivity detailed above suggests a possible solution to the existential problems of late capitalist societies encountered by Esther Greenwood. Thus it is fitting that, much like how the opening chapters of The Bell Jar depict Esther as being alienated by the burgeoning consumerism of 1950s America, Billy’s experiences in Ratner’s Star are similarly haunted by the alienating effects of the 1970s postmodern world of the novel. Indeed, though frequently obscured by Ratner’s Star’s focus on its allegorical history, gestures to this broader backdrop of postmodern culture are sprinkled throughout “Adventures.” Examples include FENO’s spatially disorientating postmodern architecture62 and Billy’s memories of his mother’s obsession with film, which she describes as “the dreams I never had,” recalling watching moves during her childhood as a form of déjà vu: “it was like something you were remembering” (136).63 The comments of Commander Shrub, an
American military officer visiting FENO, similarly suggest an increasingly tenuous relationship between individuals and their sociohistorical moment: “‘Historical
62 Compare the initial descriptions of FENO (15-6) to Jameson’s comments on postmodern architecture (Postmodernism 97-130). 63 These comments are suggestive of both Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s critique of the culture industry (Dialectic of Enlightenment 94-136) as well as Jameson’s “nostalgia for the present” (see Postmodernism 19-20). 121 inevitability has changed since my day’ Shrub said. ‘There’s no longer any grand sense of sweep to the affairs of men. Where are the complex historical forces, the tides, the currents? What happened to the wide canvas on which we were supposed to play our roles?” (128) Such sentiments about the inability of “the affairs of men” to produce historical change are reminiscent of the claims of 20th century cultural critics like
Jameson and Baudrillard concerning a lost sense of sociohistorical continuity, a facet of contemporary societies also suggested by the relativistic themes and often disjunctive narratives presented throughout “Adventures.” Such moments, and their overt references to the themes and concerns of postmodern culture and art, thus serve to ground the novel in its late 20th century moment, a context which might otherwise be obfuscated by the science fiction environs of FENO.
Significantly, according to critics like Jameson, these phenomena are directly related to changes in the global economic landscape, changes most overtly embodied in Ratner’s
Star by the figure of Elux Troxl, whose Honduran Cartel eventually purchases FENO, firing most of the facilities researchers, at the close of the novel. Such transnational corporate takeovers are also reminiscent of Jameson’s claims about the relationship of postmodern alienation to the development of late-stage, international capitalism, whose increasingly complex webs of economic relations are incomprehensible to the average observer.64 Additionally, as mentioned in the previous chapter, such theories about the relationship of postmodernism to late-stage capitalism can be interpreted as the phenomenological flipside to Foucault’s observations about the development of
64 See Postmodernism 32-8. 122 neoliberalism, with its emphasis on the irreducible and non-transferable desires of homo economicus.
Indeed, the effects of the socioeconomic phenomena described by both Foucault and
Jameson manifest themselves in Ratner’s Star’s depiction of many of its secondary characters. Thus, similar to the mindless consumerism encountered by Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar, the researchers Billy encounters at FENO are not presented as members of a broader scientific community so much as individual actors myopically pursuing their own projects and aims in a manner similar to homo economicus. Though such myopia and isolation is presented in part as an inevitable bi-product of the pursuit of scientific knowledge, I argue it is nevertheless a mistake not to recognize the similarities between the ostensibly self-imposed isolation of many of FENO’s researchers—who seem alone even in crowds—and the broader themes of postmodern alienation present in both
Ratner’s Star and DeLillo’s fiction more broadly. Indeed, according to Adorno this alienation—supposedly endemic to 20th century societies—is directly related to the increasing normalization of the same forms of scientific and philosophical thought whose development is allegorized throughout Ratner’s Star. Specifically, Adorno attributes the prevalence of what he terms instrumental rationality—a form of predatory individualism which could be described as a more atavistic interpretation of Foucault’s homo economicus—to the increasing cultural dominance of scientific positivism and idealism in the Western world.
Thus, it is the same precursors of the instrumental rationality critiqued by Adorno that much of “Adventures” is dedicated to allegorizing in the form of FENO’s scientists.
Furthermore, the novel’s depiction of these characters, who often “embody” the ideas of 123 their historical referents, also presents depictions of subjectivity much like those promoted by the positivist and idealist ideologies critiqued by Adorno. In Ratner’s Star, such subjects are depicted by means of exaggerations of the modernist and realist tropes outlined in the introduction to this dissertation. The novel therefore depicts many of its secondary characters as exaggerations of the sort of mind-body split Lukacs attributed to the modernist novel. These characters, embodying idealist conceptions of the subject, are not only seemingly disconnected from the material world around them but also their own bodies, and thus implicitly the senses through which Billy is granted access to this world.
Alternatively, other characters are presented as parodies of the characters often found in realist fiction, whose thoughts and actions at times contravene social and material constraints. In Ratner’s Star this disconnect is taken to an extreme, characters frequently acting not only as if they were disconnected from their surrounding environments, but also according to an “inner” logic conforming to the mathematical concepts allegorized in the novel. Such inner logics cause the novel to depict these characters as exerting a one- way force on their environments, altering the world around them without being themselves affected by this world. These characters thus emulate Adorno’s critiques of positivist thought which, he argues, despite its ostensible materialism, tends to exclude the thinking subject from its empirical evaluations of a world which is paradoxically rendered an object of manipulation for this missing subject.
Indeed, the significance of these representations of subjectivity is not just that they contrast the more nuanced depictions of Billy’s intellect. It is also the tendency of the characters who embody them to view the material world—including the other human subjects who occupy it—as nothing more than objects for manipulation and thus means 124 to personal satisfaction. This is perhaps why, for a novel about “hidden” intellectual histories and messages from space, Ratner’s Star is surprisingly suffused with forms of violence both implicit and explicit—though no doubt less so for readers familiar with
DeLillo’s other works. Indeed, DeLillo’s corpus is full of examples connecting the sorts of postmodern consumerist malaise found in The Bell Jar to the violent impulses of mid to late 20th century American society,65 themes which Ratner’s Star seems at times to extend to scientific thought.
The character Orang Mohole is a prime example of how certain forms of scientific and philosophical thought are associated with violent and predatory impulses in Ratner’s
Star. In particular, I argue that Mohole, a self-taught astrophysicist most (in)famous for his theories on moholes—phenomena consisting of “a theoretical dimension lacking spatial extent and devoid of time value”—is demonstrative of a certain strand of idealism still prevalent in 20th century thought (182). Indeed, as Billy encounters him in
“Adventures” Mohole is a darkly comic, and obliquely threatening satire of the division between mind and body. Thus, as Mohole engages in an extended disquisition upon his theories which, if valid, would lead to humans “one day witness[ing] events that do not conform to the predispositions of science,” his fidgeting seems to mock the self-sure importance of his claims. Rather than depicting such movements as an integral part of
Mohole’s thought process like Billy’s pacing, the narration presents Mohole’s slapstick bodily movements as utterly disconnected from his speech. As such, each extended paragraph, laden with scientific and pseudo-scientific jargon, is punctuated by single-
65 Representative examples include Americana, White Noise, and Great Jones Street. 125 sentence descriptions of Mohole rubbing “his crotch briefly and then cross[ing] his legs without remembering to remove his hand,” or leaning “to one side, resting his head in his free hand and appearing to be on the verge of sleep” (181). These actions not only seem disconnected from Mohole’s thoughts, but somehow meant to distract from or even mock his speech to Billy. Indeed, as his lecture wraps up Mohole immediately falls asleep, awaking a half-hour later as Billy in the meantime ponders if he is permitted to leave the meeting.
Nevertheless, Mohole’s ideas and odd bodily habits are thematically related to one another. Both his theories and the disconnect between his mind and body are suggestive of Endor’s earlier observation that scientists “deny the senses,” evoking the paradox of empiricism’s concerns with documenting material phenomena while distrusting the primary means by which humans access the world around them. Thus, it seems thematically appropriate that, while Mohole describes his theories, he seems utterly unaware of what his body is doing. Indeed, Mohole’s ideas take this disconnect to an extreme, calling into question not just the ability of the senses to ground universal truth but also the very possibility of such truth. As Osteen observes, Mohole’s theories are suggestive of both Einstein’s relativity and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.
Specifically, they function as an inversion of the former: “the Einsteinian universe is an interconnected whole that lacks an objective frame of reference . . . whereas in Mohole’s universe spacetime is different for everyone,” making the world “a realm of dreams that constantly change according to the dreamer’s needs or desires” (Osteen 78). Accordingly, in the value-dark dimension it is not that phenomena exist in different places in space- time depending on the standpoint of the observer, but that the minds of different 126 observers essentially exist in different universes: “the laws of physics vary from one observer to another” (Ratner’s Star 185). The value-dark dimension thus reverses
Einstein’s vision of a universe that differs based upon one’s point of view (in space-time) but which is nevertheless run by the same set of universal laws, laws which also validate and unify the consistency of the senses. Instead, what is universal in the value-dark dimension is the perspective of the subject who determines the laws of physics—thus providing the logical consistency necessary for theoretical thought—these laws nevertheless being inextricable from the subject, and therefore incapable of grounding objective (or intersubjective) truth. In other words, although such a subject might ostensibly perceive through “the senses,” these senses no longer play the mediating function between mind and world that they do for Billy, and thus are functionally indistinguishable from the analytical mind. As such, Moholean relativity presents a type of solipsistic paradox: the presentation of a scientific theory, the verification of which undermines the possibility of validity.
More than playing with the ontological implications of contemporary scientific thought, however, Ratner’s Star’s exploration of such theories is at least as concerned with how they affect our understanding of the human subjects who are their origin. Thus, useful for assessing Billy’s encounter with Mohole are theories of the subject structured around the very concepts invalidated by Moholean relativity: space and time. Considered in these terms, what one finds in this encounter is a sort of pre-Kantian idealist conception of the subject which is nevertheless framed in terms of Kantian transcendental subjectivity. One of Kant’s key insights is how, in the absence of space and time—and thus a surrounding object world—the subject possesses no content through which to 127 substantiate its existence. This contrasts Cartesian idealism, which grounds subjectivity in pure thought. What is interesting about Mohole’s theories is that they justify a Cartesian vision of the subject—one for whom the only verifiable truth is one’s own thoughts—in terms of the subject theorized by Kant, for whom one’s relationship to a material world
(by means of the senses) is constitutive of subjectivity. Such contradictions are also found in Mohole’s insistence on the linguistic unintelligibility of his theories, his detailed description of moholes demonstrating “more than anything else, the inadequacies of human language in the face of the Mohole phenomenon, since ‘wherever there are moholes’ implies that a mohole occupies space, which it doesn’t” (181). Part of what is gestured at here is the transition from a Newtonian understanding of physics—rooted in a sensuous bodily understanding of the material world—to one based upon quantum physics, and thus mathematical abstractions and proofs which bare no relationship to such bodily experiences and yet, according to Mohole, are paradoxically grounded in the perspective of the observing subject. This subject is thus ostensibly split between two selves, one based upon both a Newtonian understanding of the material world grounded in bodily experience—and from which everyday human language draws its inspiration— and the other, one of pure logical abstraction which, as Osteen points out, exists in a world of pure ideation.
More than presenting the conceptual paradoxes and complications of scientific thought, however, what such through-the-looking-glass moments of pseudo-scientific jargon and theory emphasize is the extent to which such theories—whatever their beauty or truth value—promote what the novel depicts as a fundamentally flawed understanding of the human subject: one which can exist outside the material contexts and constraints of 128 human bodies and communities. Such critiques also bear striking resemblance to
Adorno’s own criticisms of 20th century idealist philosophy. With regard to idealism,
Adorno’s primary critique of Kant’s conception of the subject is that it grounds the universality of concepts like space and time in a transcendental ego which itself exists outside the measurable, phenomenal universe. Thus, much like the moholean relativity described above, according to Adorno, Kant’s transcendental idealism ironically maintains the very element of Cartesian subjectivity it sought to replace: namely a human mind with no direct relationship to the material world which surrounds it. This aporia is not simply a logical contradiction; it also instills in transcendental idealism a tendency to emphasize the primacy of the subject over the object, as human consciousness both gives meaning to the material world, while also in a sense existing beyond it. Moholean relativity inverts this. Rather than the rational mind grounding the subject’s understanding of its place within a phenomenal universe through conceptual knowledge, this mind uses such knowledge to justify its independence from the phenomenal, Mohole averring that “that alternate physics is not designed to cope with physical reality; that is the real world” (183). As such, Mohole’s theory—not unlike its inversion of Einstein’s relativity—enacts at the ontological level what Adorno argues Kant’s does at the level of epistemology: gives the human subject license to both free itself from and define the object world around it.
The novel satirizes such paradoxes in its depiction of Mohole’s odd, and frequently disquieting habits. Additionally, this satire is affected largely through the means of the mind-body complexes outlined in the introduction, taking the form of an absurdly conflictual relationship between Mohole’s mind and body. Thus, as their conversation 129 progresses, the narration depicts Mohole’s body not only as a site of preconscious habits distractingly at odds with his thoughts, but also putatively as the source of threateningly violent impulses over which he ostensibly has no control. He informs Billy, for example, that due to his “psychological value pattern” he has “never been far from snapping,” describing visions of himself “with a high-powered rifle and big boxes of ammo . . . firing wildly. I’m shooting anything that moves” while yelling “‘I’m a snapper! I snapped! It’s not my fault!’” (183, 187). Here the body ostensibly takes revenge upon the rational mind, predisposing Mohole to violent, and supposedly non-volitional, actions in a manner echoing the naturalist tragedies of Norris or Dreiser. The subject is thus, at least superficially, divided into two selves, a linguistic—and implicitly theoretical—subject who declares its lack of responsibility for its counterpart: a material body with a brain whose “neurons misfire,” ostensibly making it home to a congenital, and violence- inducing chemical imbalance (180).
This conflict between mind and body is further complicated by the arbitrary rules
Mohole applies to his fits of rage, accommodating, for example, Billy’s compromise to accept but not swallow a large green pill with undisclosed effects, as being a sufficient palliative to his nerves: “Once it’s out of my hands and in yours, I know you’ve accepted it and I feel less inclined to raise my voice, much less fill the streets with random gunfire”
(187). These rules not only reaffirm Mohole’s belief that his preconscious impulses and habits are somehow disconnected from his rational mind, but also imply that this mind can deceive its bellicose counterpart. Indeed, such manipulations are indicative of
Mohole’s broader habit of projecting his will on both his body and the material world around him. Thus, for example, his habitual use of mind-altering drugs—a trait he shares 130 with Robert Softly—and fascination with sex-toys, Mohole being described by a colleague as famous for promoting “degenerate ceremonies featuring objects and gadgets that mock our bodies” (198). Similarly, Billy observes in his suite a “collection of
“specialty scents”—artificial fragrances packaged in aerosol cans” which rather than reproducing discrete fragrances instead function as olfactory simulations of social experiences, selections including titles like “CHEESE, CRACKERS AND DRINKS.”
“DINNER FOR TWO—SEA FOOD SERIES.” . . . “BED SHEETS AND HAND
LOTION” “NUDE FEMALE BODY (MOIST)—SENSE OF URGENCY” (188).
Beyond expressing a will to control his environment, however, Mohole also evinces a more sinister, and ostensibly related, proclivity for manipulating others. Such tendencies, alongside Mohole’s inclination to manipulate the material world more broadly, seem therefore to confirm Adorno’s claims about the development of instrumental rationality, wherein one’s habit of viewing the material world as a set of objects for manipulation often leads to a similar orientation toward other individuals. Thus, what is unnerving about the elder scientist isn’t just his casual suggestions that he might snap at any moment, but also how the novel depicts him as a subtle—if at times seemingly oblivious—manipulator whose pronouncements have a coercive effect upon his audience.
Such themes are reinforced by the authoritarian references sprinkled throughout his meeting with Billy. Mohole, for example, refers to himself as a theoretical “kingpin”
(183) and his appearance in the novel is foreshadowed by Endor’s earlier warnings of a
“dark side” to FENO (91). Furthermore, Mohole himself describes his presence at the facility as, if not clandestine, at least secretive, cautioning Billy not to tell anyone about the presence of his specially-furnished suite in the facility: “’This used to be the 131 maternity ward’ he said. ‘Once the last baby was born, I had it converted. All very unofficial. Not hush-hush really. Just unofficial. No one knows who shouldn’t know”
(178). Similarly, the décor of these apartments—as well as Mohole’s attire66—is somehow both bureaucratically mundane and ostentatious in a manner seemingly designed to intimidate guests: “Materials were clearly cheap and unembellished, stressing utility. At the same time there was something grand about the setting, a self-importance not associated with motel décor, and this is what accounted for the composite nature of the suite’s appearance” (177). Notably, such hints of bureaucratic authoritarianism can also be found in the final form of subjectivity depicted in “Adventures.”
Though probably the most developed, Mohole is far from the only example of the sort of idealist mind-body split described above. Characters like the facilities worker
Evinrude, whose “brain” doesn’t know how to make his body run (236), and Kidder, the driver who is “not aware of [his] own conversation” (83), are further illustrations of this broader theme within the novel. At least as common, however, are characters that seem to
“embody” the ideas they represent so fully that any distinction between mind and body appears to dissolve. U.F.O Schwartz, for instance, who represents the “positivistic faith of early Renaissance science . . . that spurred Copernicus and Kepler to their historic investigations of planetary orbits” (Osteen 68), appears himself as a planet: “a densely packed individual weighing well over three hundred pounds” (Ratner’s Star 46). Another example is Cyril Kyriakos, a professor of transitional logic, whose research at FENO consists of an attempt to define “science,” a task which proves elusive: “Our current
66 “He wore a gold mohair smoking jacket with padded shoulders, platinum lapels and a bit of drizzly silver saddle-stitching on each pocket” (Ratner’s Star 178). 132 problem seems to be whether or not the definition of science should include such manifestations as herb concoctions, venerated emblems, sand painting . . .” (30). The difficulty of this task unsurprisingly concerns the inherent incommensurability of language with concrete objects, an unsettling aspect of language which Cyril himself emulates through his compulsive need to unnerve others by calling their attention to the messy “unseemliness” of material existence. Thus, during the picnic where Billy meets him, Cyril not only dreams up an imaginary game show called “Abort that Fetus,” but also ostentatiously removes the complex apparatus connecting what turns out to be his artificial arm to his body, casually draping the appendage across his lap—notably, immediately following this scene, Billy is described in his room contemplating the unpleasantness of his own body: holding a moldy sock “he felt something of himself in the material, a corporeal dampness, the faintest sense of coating, of his own rubbed-off yeast” (37). It is Cyril’s wife Myriad, however, who serves as one of the strongest examples of this trope. During their encounter, in which she tries to convince Billy of the mystical “extra mathematical contents of mathematics,” Myriad is strikingly described as a bodily incarnation of dangerously spiritualized and seductive mathematical concepts:
“Tall, a drifting walk, her body all radiant flux. Outside the strict limits of balance, evenness and lines, all body-timed to lure the causal student into erroneous raptures about purely chance perfection” (254).
Such figures are instances of a broader trend in “Adventures,” which doesn’t just present characters as “embodiments” of positivism itself—like U.F.O Schwartz—but also depicts what Adorno notes are the broader ideological implications of such thought.
Although, according to Adorno, positivism rejects the notion of human consciousness 133 being grounded in something outside the phenomenal world, such theories nevertheless tend to promote an individualist conception of subjectivity which neglects the role of the object in human thought. The result is a tendency to erase the viewing subject from both empirical and rational evaluations of the world, such elisions often erasing what Adorno believes is a critical component of human consciousness: its recognition of its own incompleteness. Such a tendency is generally evinced by the types of characters describe above who, in contrast to Mohole’s insistence on relativism, frequently seem myopically attached to the worldviews they represent.
Such “positivist” representations of subjectivity are also suggested by how many of the novel’s characters interact with the world around them. These characters often read as parodies of the realist representations of embodiment described in the introduction, in which the effects of characters’ willed actions are the primary vehicle of character development and plot. This common realist trope of representing human agency in terms of the ability of characters to contravene social, psychological, and/or material constraints is exaggerated in Ratner’s Star, as its characters display a troubling disregard for not only social conventions, but also the very material environment which surround them. Mimsy
Mope Grimmer, for example, an expert in infantile sexuality, exhibits an unsettlingly invasive interest in Billy during a picnic, casually asking him “How’s your genital organization?” (35), and Byron Dyne, the first FENO official Billy meets, is conspicuously unconcerned by a “dark spot” which slowly envelops his office during their meeting (20). Such moments, alongside the tendency of the novel’s characters to speak past one another, create the impression that these figures are governed by ideas 134 which, like positivist conceptions of reason, conspicuously disconnect themselves from a world they nevertheless insist upon both describing and affecting.
Indeed, despite this disconnect from the world of the text, such characters nevertheless guide plot development in “Adventures.” Not only do they abruptly appear and disappear—often while Billy is distracted or deep in thought—in order to dictate
Billy’s movements throughout FENO, they also directly affect his mental states. The comments of a women named Celeste Dessau about the idea of existing in another person’s memory, for example, cause Billy to (dubiously) assume that an anonymous message he receives is her “way of continuing to exist in his mind” (116). Similarly,
Billy becomes progressively more paranoid as he encounters a variety of shady figures who seek to enlist him in their suspicious agendas, often involving experiments on his person. Late in “Adventures,” for example, Billy is pressured into partaking in a pair of ethically questionable procedures, one involving the insertion of a microchip to
“overstimulate the left side of the brain” which will theoretically result in “an overpowering sense of sequence” (244), the other recording his brain waves during
“stage-four primal” sleep in hopes of accessing his “psychic origins, whatever these may have been, however replete with terror, darkness and fetal shrieks” (265). Beyond echoing earlier juxtapositions of the analytic left and intuitive right brain, such quack experiments are representative of a consistent and disturbing tendency of Ratner’s Star’s characters to treat Billy as an object of study or potential profit. Furthermore, even though these characters, and by extension the mathematical and scientific theories they represent, seem disconnected from their social and material environments, they 135 nevertheless exert influence upon the primary narrative constant of this section of the novel: Billy himself.
Significantly, this type of thinking can also be found outside of FENO and its scientists. The first character Billy meets in the novel is Eberhard Fearing, a businessman on his flight to China. Immediately recognizing Billy from a television interview,
Fearing, whose name implies an underlying diffidence to scientific knowledge, expresses both his fascination with and misunderstanding of Billy’s work, exclaiming “I was duly impressed. You demonstrated an absolute mastery as I recall. Mathematicians are a weird breed. I know because I use them in my work.” (6). Ironically, despite Billy’s frequent protestations that his area of research, a theoretical category of numbers called zorgs which “can’t be used for anything except in mathematics” (20), lacks real world applications, Fearing’s comments demonstrate his inclination to think of all theoretical knowledge in terms of application and profit. The scene thus emphasizes not only the extent to which mathematical—and metonymically, scientific—knowledge has become the primary standard of truth in late 20th century societies, but also how the association of these disciplines with a human mastery of the material world bleeds into such societies more broadly. Indeed, Fearing reaffirms his view of the young mathematician as a potential investment at the close of their encounter, reminding Billy that, “I use you people in my work” (13). 67
67 Beyond depicting an instrumentalist understanding of knowledge, this scene also establishes the arcane connotations of such research for the general public. Fearing not only gushes over “technical phraseology” he doesn’t seem to understand, imploring Billy, “Let’s hear some mathematics,” as if he were requesting the carnival trick. He also pontificates on the seemingly miraculous origins of such talents, cautioning the younger man that “Gifts can vanish without waning. Reach sixteen and it’s all gone” (6). This oddly fatalistic perception of scientific knowledge further suggests Fearing’s superstitious conception of Billy’s 136
Such instrumentalization of reason, I argue, also relates to the postmodern backdrop described at the opening of this section. Thus, for example, discussions of “killing in the streets” at MIT over a scientist’s claim about the self-referentiality of language, as well as
Softly’s assertion late in the novel that the Logicon project is necessitated by some unspecified global conflict. One of the most interesting examples, however, comes just prior to Billy’s meeting with Mohole, his escort, a “contingency” (i.e. security) man named Kyzyl, giving an unprompted monologue on the forms of penal torture found throughout the world:
If you ever have to go to jail,” Kyzyl said, “a designated autonomous area is one of the few good places left for that. UN trust territories I rate no better than fair. When we speak of torture, I recommend avoidance of canal zones. This is when we speak of physical torture. Stomping, flaying, bastinado, electric shock. The psychological variety, when we speak of that, you can do a lot worse than enclave republics or gulf protectorates. In protectorates, speaking from personal experience, they use only moderate hooding, they go easy on the monotonous noise, they deprive the body of sleep only in rare instances. Upon release from incarceration you find that you experience only the minimum symptoms. Startle-responses, yes, affirmative. Insomnia, to be expected, but not chronic. Sphincter-spasm, poco poco. Not much heightened anxiety. And very little dread. When we speak of the hooding experience, with or without monotonous noise, and when you’ve gone through this experience and you’re able to function with very little dread, this is when you’re entitled to regard yourself as fortune’s favorite. (177)
This extended disquisition on the different forms of corrective violence found throughout the globe is interesting not only because it seems out of place, but also because of the distinction it makes between physical and psychological forms of violence. Such distinctions are reminiscent of the transition from disciplinary- to bio-power discussed in
intellect, which he nevertheless describes as “hard, cold, and cutting.” Such descriptors evoke a mechanistic impression of the pursuit of knowledge which, despite its ineffable nature, is still assumed to be rooted in the manipulation of real world of objects.
137 chapter one—and explored in detail in chapter three. Thus, similar to Foucault’s observation that bio-power is less concerned with disciplining or punishing individual bodies than with guiding the development and habits of human subjects as bodies, the psychological torture methods of more developed nations are unique not because they are more humane—a claim subtly undermined by the passage—but rather because of their long-lasting effects. Such comments are thus suggestive of the transition from corrections as a form of physical punishment—a payment for social transgressions that, once inflicted, absolves the transgressor of their status as an object of state interest—to forms of punishment designed to guide or alter the individual’s future actions. The novel’s interest in such violence can thus be read in terms of the same burgeoning culture of mid to late 20th century biopolitics navigated by Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar.
3. The failure of logicon and emergence of the affective subject
The final section of Ratner’s Star, “Reflections,” opens with a retreat from this world of postmodern uncertainty, conflict, and violence. “Reflections” thus depicts a collection of characters who disappear into their own thoughts, personal histories, bodily habits, biological inheritances, and even the material environments which surround them, as a palliative to the complications of this postmodern world. Such a withdrawal, however, isn’t an isolated phenomenon. Rather, it is also foreshadowed by Endor’s comments on the retreats and isolations of great thinkers throughout human history, withdrawals from the world which also paradoxically changed it:
The whole history of mathematics is subterranean, taking place beneath history itself misunderstood, ignored, ridiculed, unread, a shadow-world scarcely perceived even by the learned. Of adventure, greatness, insanity and suicide, it is nevertheless a history of nothing happening. Of nothing happening. Magnitudes correspond in terms of proportion. Variables in terms of function. But nothing ever happens. Statements 138
are proved to be neither provable nor disprovable. Nothing has happened, yet everything is changed. (Ratner’s Star 195)
As the above quote depicts, such retreats are not simply tranquil exercises in invention.
Rather, they are also, as Endor observes, periods of “greatness, insanity and suicide,” or as the titular Ratner—a Nobel-winning astronomer—reflects, filled with the urge to punch “the walls with knowledge” (222). Furthermore, such retreats rarely lead to the sorts of predictable results sought by Softly; rather, as “Reflections” ultimately demonstrates, they often result in unanticipated discoveries, along with the failure of their original aims. Discovery in Ratner’s Star is thus closely tied to the negative emotions described above: the frustrations of not just being misunderstood, but misunderstanding, which nevertheless seem to drive an insatiable and often madness-inducing need to pursue truth. More than these emotions, however, as LeClair observes, the pursuit of knowledge in Ratner’s Star is deeply connected to another emotion: fear.
Much like Billy’s father, LeClair claims that for DeLillo “existence tends to be nourished from below, from the fear level, the plane of obsession, the starkest tracks of awareness” (Ratner’s Star 4). Thus, according to LeClair, not only is invention directly tied to such fears—in order “to create [Billy] must experience the very fears that initially drove him to the safe timelessness of Mathematics” (LeClair 140); fear itself is also a biological inheritance of man, “fear in DeLillo’s fiction” being “primal, hardwired, and universal, pulsing up the brain stem” (LeClair 142). The importance of engaging such fear, according to LeClair, is therefore a guiding force in DeLillo’s fiction, literature in effect becoming a medium through which readers and writers can explore fear “as an inherent element of the creative process” (140) 139
In contrast to this emphasis on fear as a biological inheritance, Allen locates such fear in the language itself. Specifically, he compares Ratner’s Star’s mobilization of the trope of paranoia to this trope’s function in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and The Crying of
Lot 49—stand-ins for the postmodern novel more broadly. Thus, Allen links such paranoia to “the abstracted violence of decontextualized and seemingly nonsensical language,” interpreting the violence and instrumental rationality previously analyzed in
“Adventures” as a primarily linguistic phenomenon (Allen). Allen also connects these themes to the fundamental shift in narrative style which accompanies the retreat of
Logicon’s researchers underground. Here the novel abandons its close third-person- omniscient focus on Billy to drift feely among the intersecting thoughts and feelings of its characters. For Allen this shift represents one possible solution to the postmodern paranoia of “Adventures,” as the loss of the stable narrative voice found throughout the first section of the novel inspires readers to “write” their own plot: “He/she must actively engage the terrorism of meaninglessness which seeks to overwhelm the novel” (Allen).
This chapter in a sense tries to bridge these very different readings of what is nevertheless a similar role of fear/paranoia in not just Ratner’s Star, but DeLillo’s fiction more broadly. Rather than the themes of fear and paranoia exclusively concerning either the representational functions of language—and, thus implicitly the computational mind—or the biological “hardwiring” of humans as material beings, I argue that such emotions are best understood in terms of how this mind and body relate to one another.
Indeed, I argue that the fear of the odd assortment of mathematicians, chemists, anthropologists, and writers depicted in “Reflections” generally takes two forms. One group seeks to distance themselves from the material body which the novel presents not 140 only as alien, but also as troublingly permeable—as demonstrated by Billy’s perverse fascination with themes related to bodily contamination like sex, purification, and the unseemly connotations of “old people’s shitpiss” (7). In doing so they embrace the representational mind as a purely self-referential mode of existence which avoids the messiness of material being, Logicon being an apotheosis of this mind in the form of a purely reflexive logic. In contrast, the other group comes to fear such referentiality, seeking instead a form of bodily immanence in which self-reflexive consciousness is abandoned for the “submoronic” states of being Billy fantasizes about in “Adventures.”
Rather than interpreting such psychological phenomena in terms of emotions like like fear or paranoia, this chapter instead considers the role of such sensations in terms of theories of affect, which as previously mentioned, Massumi theorizes as a
“superposition” of different drives, sensorial imputes, and nascent action potentials. It is in terms of Teresa Brennan’s similar theory of affect, however, that I argue Ratner’s
Star’s mobilization of fear is best understood. Specifically, I argue that the subject who ultimately emerges out of Ratner’s Star is one whose moods, sensations, and/or desires originate, to use Brennan’s terminology, not just endogenously (i.e. from within the subject) but exogenously (i.e. from other individuals or the environment) as well:
[Affect is] a process that is social in origin but biological and physical in effect. The origin of transmitted affects is social in that these affects do not only arise within a particular person but also come from without. They come via an interaction with other people and an environment. By the transmission of affect, I mean simply that the emotions or affects of one person, and the enhancing or depressing energies these affects entail, can enter into another. (3)
What makes Brennan’s comments on affect useful is not just the idea that affects are determined by both internal and external stimuli, but also that they blur the distinction 141 between the social and material, distinctions also blurred throughout “Reflections.” Thus, characters like Softly and his “logic mongers” Edna Lown and Lester Bolin not only insist upon rigid forms of social isolation to pursue their research. They also seek freedom from the body which is implicitly imbricated with the material environment surrounding it by the section’s wandering narrational focus and philosophical asides
(286). Characters are thus depicted as being agitated not only by the exogenous affective cues of other characters, but also the surrounding non-human world, such agitations inspiring the fears and paranoias LeClair and Allen claim drive the human pursuit of knowledge in the novel. Alternatively, for archeologist Maurice Wu and writer Jean
Sweet Venable, such agitations spring from an irreducible internal complexity: the ostensible incommensurability of the endogenous elements of the “self” which drives these characters to seek “minimums of specific being” in which self-consciousness is lost through fusion with the very environments Softly seeks to escape.
Such retreats, however, ultimately end in failure. As each group seeks to adopt an existence of pure thought or pure embodiment, they eventually encounter, and in some cases are subsumed by, its alter. The exception to this is Billy, who alternates between fearing not only his own body, but also the purely reflexive consciousness sought by
Softly—symbolized by his refusal to participate in the Logicon project. Thus, similar to
Allen’s assertion that Billy models an “adaptive strategy” for readers in the conclusion of the novel, I argue that Ratner’s Star ultimately presents Billy as the character who best learns to cope with a human existence irrevocably caught between the irreconcilable differences of the rational mind and sensuous body. Indeed, I argue that this distinction between the endogenous and exogenous is not only how Ratner’s Star ultimately 142 structures the human subject, but also how the novel’s conclusion suggests a possible resolution to the coming of age tensions surrounding the development of Billy’s character as a model of human consciousness more broadly. That is, the distinction between internal motivation and external pressures, frequently but not always social in nature, finds a common ground in affect and, in particular, the drives, impulses and anxieties that motivate human behavior and which cannot be reduced to either abstract logic or biochemical processes. As such, I argue that Ratner’s Star’s solution to the problem encountered by Esther Greenwood—specifically a mind which often seems irreconcilably disconnected from the body—concerns the novel’s willingness to conceptualize the human subject as being defined by an, at times terrifying, liminality between a reflective consciousness and the bodily senses which presuppose and exceed such consciousness.
Though joined by Edna and Lester, the officious and abusive Softly is the main proponent of the quest for a disembodied existence implicit in the Logicon project.
Averse to mirrors, presumably due to his being afflicted with an undisclosed form of dwarfism,68 and possessing the “unsettling” habit of using air quotes when naming
“commonplace” objects—a tendency Billy hypothesizes is an effort to “empty an entire system of meaning”—Softly evinces a frequently comical contempt for the material, his desire to perfect Logicon as a purely contentless language being driven as much by his aversion to the materiality of his own body as by the pursuit of knowledge (334). This connection is made explicit toward the end of “Reflections,” as Softly reflects on how phrases like “shit, piss and corruption” cause him to react “as he did to every unbidden
68 Interestingly, Softly conveys radically differing accounts of this affliction to his compatriots, both implying the sense of vulnerability which accompanies his deformities and reinforcing the novel’s depiction of Softly as a Machiavellian manipulator. 143 recollection of childhood and adolescence, with a sense of abomination so pronounced it caused clear physical discomfort, caused him to sweat, to tremble” (421).
Rather than causing Softly to ignore the body entirely, however, such aversions lead to regiments of control much like the biopolitical thinking of Esther Greenwood, his leadership of the project including explicit efforts to regulate the bodies of both himself and his researchers. A sufferer of bipolar disorder, Softly carries with him “bottles, tubes, and packets of stimulants, relaxants, euphoriants, deliriants, sedative-hypnotics, local anesthetics and animal tranquilizers” (327). His frequent and liberal use of these substances is more, however, than an overly ambitious effort to medicate his affliction.
Rather, what Softly seeks is a form of control, in this case of the preconscious affective states which undergird his relationships to the world he strives to disavow. As Softly casually alternates between these substances, for example, his reflections on their effects are conspicuously clinical, demonstrating a tendency to conceptualize his body as an object in need of regulation and maintenance rather than an integral component of selfhood: “He became drowsy at once. His perspiration smelled less tense and septic.
Another ephemeral chemical event, he thought. Opiate receptors functioning nicely.
Sense data less demanding” (327). Here, as in similar scenes, Softly displays the positivist habit of his thought—noting the discrete effects of the undisclosed sedative on his body in mechanistic, cause-and-effect fashion—alongside his casual disregard for bodily health, being “calmly” unconcerned about the extended period of vomiting induced by the drug. He also proves similarly unconcerned about the ill effects of such substances upon others, pushing the use of “synthetic intensifiers” on Maurice Wu and chemist Walter Mainwaring, the drug producing “insights unattainable by other means,” 144 but only after a distressing “initial period of strangely spaced breathing and rambling speech” (402).
Even Softly’s decision to locate the project in FENO’s deep underground atrium, a space where “there’s no day or night,” seems an effort to control the body. Thus, he comments to Billy upon their arrival that time in the atrium will be closely linked to bodily rhythms: “The body makes its own time, usually very different from what we’re accustomed to. Waking time we measure in pangs. Hunger pangs. Sleep time we measure in lobsecs” (286). Though ostensibly an effort to elevate the body’s own rhythms over the temporal contrivances of artificial lights and digital clocks, viewed through the prism of
Logicon and Softly’s distaste for the material, such asceticism reads as yet another effort to bypass the sonorous and exogenously affective qualities of the human body through minimizing and regimenting its contact with solicitous environments and persons.
Indeed, initially at least, such efforts to excise the bodies of himself and his researchers from the outside world have precisely the effect Softly intends, particularly upon Edna and Lester. Both scientists are kindred aspirants of Softly’s vision and the only characters who actively work on Logicon in “Reflections.” Firm adherents to the strict asceticism outlined by their leader, they object even to Softly’s decision to allow
Jean interview accesses to the project’s participants, finding both intellectual invigoration and insouciant calm in the isolation of FENO’s bowels. Edna in particular finds that such seclusion reduces her life “to a process of selection and refinement” mercifully cut off not only from “the atmosphere of horror that so often prevailed in the world outside” where the interpersonal concerns of “ambition, love, [and] friendship]” distract from “holism” or “total absorption,” but also the dangers of the “intuitive reckoning” which seemed to 145 connect Billy’s mathematical genius to the body in “Adventures” (329). Such thoughts even lead Edna to fantasize about the disembodied existence ostensibly striven for by
Softly, imagining bending “her arms into her mouth and swallow[ing] them to the shoulders” until all that was left was “the head balanced on a cushion,” the “abode of the layered brain” possessor of “the universe we’ve made.”
In contrast to Edna’s and Lester’s eagerness to cut themselves off from interpersonal connections, Jean and Maurice seem to dwell on them. Thus, Jean finds herself reminiscing about her former husband and past romances, whereas Maurice, Chinese by birth but Westernized through his education, reflects upon his lifelong sense of alienation.
More than contemplating personal histories however—also reflective products of the conscious mind—the narrator’s account of these characters’ experiences often blends their thoughts with descriptions of their emotional and bodily states.
For Maurice such ruminations often coincide with the themes of contamination carried over from “Adventures,” where Billy is often perversely fascinated by ideas of bodily decay and early childhood memories about the social function and implications of garbage in his Bronx community.69 Such themes manifest themselves, for example, in
Maurice’s fascination with bats, whose use of echolocation mimics the world-mapping tendencies of the human mind, but in a form more akin to those beings with “no intervening substance to transmit their art” fantasized about by Billy, the bats’ own
69 “In street fights, garbage was a weapon to be tossed. In arguments between neighbors it was garbage mounds in flames. Garbage was a source of insult, a proud burden, a fester never ending, a mode and code of conduct (often air-mailed from windows to ease a burdened mind.) The dead were sometimes found in garbage cans.” (Ratner’s Star 25)
146 vocalizations resonating off the material environment allowing them to navigate their world. It is not just bats’ use of echolocation which implies a tight interrelationship between mind, body, and environment however; so too does the mind-altering rabies they transmit not only through bites, but also their “saliva in the air. Or because of the parasitic insects floating around. Or because of the guano. Or because of the ruinous mist surrounding the colony itself” (369-70).
In many ways, however, it is Jean who stands as the most explicit counterpoint to
Softly’s obsession with contentless abstraction, their sexual relationship suggesting what
Brennan theorizes is a common form of affective transmission between subjects: “how the masculine party (a being of any sex) projects his or her unwanted aggression into the feminine other, who experiences this projected aggression as anxiety and depression”
(42). Importantly, according to Brennan, such exchanges—based in part on an evolution of Freud’s psychoanalytic observations—tend to invigorate the masculine figure while enervating their counterpart, the affective states of both in effect becoming part of a mutually determining economy. Such an exchange seems to be at the root of Softly’s and
Jean’s coupling.
Though having near “constant” sex with Softly, Jean’s response to their congress is significantly different from his. For Softly sex epitomizes the contradictions surrounding his sense of selfhood. Believing in the “idea that sex is not what you do but what you are,” sex for Softly reinforces his sense of himself as an immutable essence, one for whom all thoughts, desires, and actions come from within (367). This belief, implicitly rooted in a scientific positivism which, as Brennan notes, also presupposes endogenous conceptions of the subject, is contrasted, however, to his superstitious avoidance of the 147 sight of his own semen—along with other bodily fluids—which stands as an unpleasant reminder of his permeable body. This irony, which Softly avoids contemplating but of which he is nevertheless “all too aware,” causes him to treat sexuality as another perfunctory element of his psyche that, like his rapidly cycling emotional states, must be clinically administered to as a form of self-control—an orientation toward sexuality which seems closely connected to his abusive treatment of Jean. Thus, invigorated after sating his sexual drives, Softly always immediately returns to his work.
Alternatively, for Jean sex doesn’t just fulfill a biological drive immediately forgotten after the act, but rather serves as an “antidote to fantasy” emphasizing the inherently embodied nature of the intercourse sedulously ignored by Softly: “His very dimensions mocked those drowsy episodes she used to devise apart from reality. . . an event that returned sex to those locations she felt it had long abandoned, between the actual legs, in and around the actual mouth, on the breasts and under the testicles and in the hands, on the tongue, in the actual hole” (331). Sex for Jean is thus no longer a rational abstraction of imagined wants and desires, but a sensorial experience which defies rationalistic explanations, causing her “to utter a fabricated babble” which when heard by Billy is associated not with “intensely compiled delight but rather with an obliteration of self- control” (321). Thus, in contrast to Softly, who seems to draw a renewed sense of self- possessed vigor from their encounters, Jean seems increasingly disabused of both agency and self.
As a result, Jean dwells not on the sex so much as the origins of this sensorial, embodied self, “the experimental beginning of it all” (407). Confined first by Softly and later by her own volition in a small apartment in the complex, Jean embraces sensorial 148 experiences—“touch the cloth, smell the fabric, cover my feet with the sheet” (413)—in an effort to achieve a state of liminal self-consciousness in which she might confront “the pain of being self-aware,” the mind being able “to comprehend nothing but its own fear, the unlikelihood of its escape from self-awareness” (396, 398). For Jean such fear takes the form of dishevelment, “the backward glance of a woman in unspeakably soiled rags, collector of shopping bags, victim of spells, mumbling to herself in the stale corner of some cafeteria” (338), concerns rooted less in an aversion to dirt and grime than the possibility of an incommensurability of the self with the self. Rather than just wallowing in these fears, however, Jean’s efforts are also directed at locating what such incommensurability seems to presuppose, “that magnetic dawn of first existence” in which thoughts, sensations, and actions are commensurate with one another—in other words Billy’s submoronic existence (411).
Significantly, Jean connects this exploration of negative affects—previously associated with the rigors of pursuing mathematical and scientific truth—to the artistic process. Her efforts to achieve a state of pure immanence, in which the chaos of “thought, perception, feeling, will, memory, and morbid imagination” (396) are co-terminus with one another, is thus also an effort to locate the wellspring of creative possibility, the memories and experiences she explores yielding “the nuance and the bone earth necessary to make fictional people” (362). Such immanence proves a dead end, however, as this liminal state forecloses the possibility of self-expression. Thus, in an effort to avoid the insanity which accompanies “the friction of an audience,” whose incessant need to understand the works they read opens up the very aporia she strives to transcend, Jean 149 chooses to write “Blank pages. Only I know what’s on those pages. Those pages are intelligible, nonviolent and sane” (411).
Engaging in a similar process of self-exploration, Maurice Wu’s thoughts and experiences at FENO are also drenched in fear. Unlike Jean, however, whose exploration of this affect is an ascetic experience through which she strives to collapse the distinction between thought and feeling, Maurice conceptualizes fear in terms of the relationship of a biological organism to its environment. As he spelunks deep into a bat-filled cave near the atrium, Maurice contemplates the subterranean formations as a “test mechanism for the redevelopment of his animal faculties,” a lack of external stimuli allowing one to,
record the smallest irregularities in the silence and semidarkness with brilliant quickness and clarity . . . [enabling] him to build within himself a separate presence, something unremembered, a receptive mentality that seemed to make him a part of something more than the living cave around him at the same time as it set him adrift from what he could only regard as his distinctness, his Wu-experience casual reality. (381)
Notably, Maurice feels more at ease in such environments than anywhere else. This embrace of an unremembered, animalistic receptivity to his subterranean environment nevertheless inspires him to contemplate the genetic legacy of fear. Though not quite fear itself, the heightened awareness of his surroundings amounts to “something very much like fear, if fear could be called restlessness in expectation of danger.” This comparison of fear to the restlessness which accompanies danger thus implies the cognitive nature of fear, as the ability to reflect upon such agitations is what makes fear a concrete emotion.
The “dreads” and “recurring depressions” of modern humans are nevertheless conceptualized as inheritances of the “swamp terrains of fear” explored by our premammalian ancestors, “not to mention Mr. Mammal as paranoid grandee of the grassy 150 plains, that (limbic) region of emotional disorganization. . . another way to say terror of the veldt itself, its terrifying endlessness, its obliteration of both singularity and pluralism, its lack of soul-cozying nooks.”70 Beyond these evocations of enigmatic genetic lineages, however, and mirroring Brennan’s criticisms of purely genetic explanations of human development and drives, the fear Maurice ruminates on is not exclusively presented as a biological inheritance. Rather, it is also a product of environments, both the sounds, smells, and haptic sensations of the cavern which put
Maurice on edge, as well as the hypothetical planes whose open spaces intersect with our shared biological inheritance to evoke a constant impression of threat. As such, the fear which accompanies, and even drives, human creativity throughout Ratner’s Star is presented as being just as rooted in the relationship of an organism to its environment, as within the organism itself.
This evocation of the implicit dangers of wide open spaces not only suggests the source of Maurice’s own fascination with caves, but also serves as a point of contact between the narration of his ruminations and those of Jean, whose thoughts frequently bleed into Maurice’s narrative. Thus, the extended sentence in which Maurice contemplates the mammalian fear of the veldt eventually leads into Jean sitting with a blank page in her typewriter ruminating on “what it would take to ‘remember through’ one’s individual being out into phylogenic space, that part of us not subject to conscious observation” (381-2). This bleeding of one character’s thoughts and feelings into another’s is not only suggestive of Brennan’s transmission of affect—notably, Billy’s
70 Notably, at the time of DeLillo’s writing this idea of a latent genetic histories would have carried even more enigmatic connotation given the nascent development project to map genomes. 151 experiences make an appearance in these sections as well—but also suggests a common root of their concerns: the overdetermined “syncretism” of histories and consciousnesses
(387), which makes the “state of being one” a seeming impossibility (392). The implication of not just personal histories, but also the complex histories of genetic evolution and the permeability of bodies and consciousnesses, in human experience thus mirrors the problems of postmodern historicism mentioned previously—the idea of being trapped in a system whose complexity belies and frustrates understanding, and often leads to terror. As such, the problems of embodied subjectivity previously explored in
The Bell Jar, wherein the psychic drama of mind and body compensates for withdrawal from the interpersonal drama between individual and nation, takes on a new dimension in
“Reflections.” Here, the subject is returned to the context of history only to be constrained by the “uncheck hysteria” Maurice experiences as his headlamp unexpectedly fails and he, pinned, either by the rock formation he was crawling through or fear itself, is overtaken by “a whirl of (psychic) motion,” in which his thoughts, varied histories, affects, and the impenetrable darkness—a “special presence . . . far from empty”—which surrounds him, overrun and overdetermine his capacity to act as an agental subject (390).
As previously suggested, however, “Reflections” does not stop at contrasting these two conceptions of subjectivity, one a purely logical existence which the novel suggests would ultimately be a sort of “non-existence” or death (432), the other an overdetermined
“animal” being which seems to ironically offer a similar foreclosure of identity. Rather, embracing these radical forms of subjectivity in “Reflections” seems to inevitably lead to its alter. Thus, in the extreme, Softly, fearful of the possibility that the universal system of knowledge he seeks may be impossible, winds up diving into Endor’s hole, taking on 152 the submoronic existence the latter adopts in response to his inability to solve the star message. Similarly, Jean’s explorations of liminality inevitably lead to the sorts of disembodied abstractions sought by Softly. Thus, her ruminations on the relationship between insanity and writing transition mid-sentence from the first person, to a clinical or anthropological third, suggesting the adoption of an objective and implicitly disembodied point of view: “This is the sane way to write if you’re insanity prone and I’ve found it all by myself when Softly entered her from a kneeling position, her lower back and pelvis upcurved from the surface of the bed, his hands at her hips drawing her into him, body
(hers) swollen and bruised, arms (hers) extended back toward the headboard” (411).
Tragically, Jean never seems to escape this disembodied state.
Less radically, Edna’s and Lester’s isolation inevitably leads them to distraction, returning their thoughts and experiences to the body. Thus, Edna becomes obsessed with the “mystical sophistication” of “childlike babbling” ostensibly rooted in “the child’s day-to-day geometry, this grasp of certain principles of space and sequence,” the novel again evoking the materialist origins of so-called primitive languages (366). Furthermore, by the end of the novel she comes to realize that “these investigations, these exercises in connective thought. . . comprised the essence of her scientific intent more than Logicon ever would” (425). Similarly, reflective of the novel’s tendency to depict characters in mind-body pairs, Lester comes to embody the very childlike forms of communication speculated upon by Edna, exhibiting socially inappropriate behavior like “revealing his genitals” and asking to see Jean’s “fuzzy-wuzzy” during an interview (375) and insisting that an uncomfortable Softly observe his lips as he calls him “Bobby” towards the close of the novel (415). Convinced of the “innocent” nature of such actions, a form of “dream 153 like speech,” in these moments Lester need to communicate seems to “regress” to expressive forms which predate socialization (401).
Perhaps the most interesting of these reversals, however, is that of Maurice, whose catatonic fear is overcome not by some volitional act of will, but rather the sudden realization that his hysteric wailing has ceased. Thus, inexplicably out of the
“uncontrollable hurry in his mind” (390) is born a moment of analytical calm in which he resolves “to investigate this silence, to examine it systematically, to measure it in detail”
(393). This calm is followed by an abstract conceptualization of the actions necessary to resolve his predicament: “All he had to do was squirm back out, get a match from his coveralls, light the match, find his way to the backpack, remove a candle from the pack, light the candle, get the extra carbide, refill the lamp” (394). These actions completed “in a matter of minutes,” this resolution to Maurice’s crisis then bleeds into more of Jean’s ruminations on fiction, which she speculates necessarily “takes place at the end of this
[prehistoric] process of crawl, scratch and grasp, this secret memory of death” (394).
Thus, it is out of the genetic history and affective fear of the veldt evoked by Maurice’s journey through the cave, that his ability to in essence narrate a conclusion to his own story is derived, a conclusion which he then proceeds to embody through his actions. As such, salvation comes not, as in realist representations of embodiment, from a discrete act which contravenes the deterministic forces which immobilize him, but rather from an analytic clarity which paradoxically emerges out of such forces: the chaos of his biological inheritances and affective responses to his environment. The novel thus present’s Maurice’s ability to act as an agental subject as existing at the dynamic 154 intersection between his overdetermined embodiment and abstract consciousness, the latter being able narrativize this bodily chaos into a definitive course of action.
This depiction of abstract conceptual models and fictions emerging out of an ostensibly overdetermining chaos also affects how scientific knowledge is represented at the close of the novel. The major discoveries which come out of the logicon project are not the types of abstract universal truths sought by Softly, but rather discoveries which invalidate the paradigms upon which such dreams were based. Thus, the last-minute revelations that human history may be a mirror image of itself, our ancestors at some point devolving to a so-called primitive state before re-emerging as modern humanity, and that Earth appears to have recently “fallen” into a mohole, I argue, serve more as metaphors for the imprecise and unpredictable development of human knowledge than meaningful plot developments in and of themselves. Much like the calm which overcomes Maurice, such advancements in knowledge are unpredictable, seemingly born of the very complexity and chaos to which they supposedly serve as a palliative.
Furthermore, it is as these revelations come to light that Softly’s team is reconnected with the world of the novel. Such contact first takes the form of the appropriation of
FENO by Troxl’s cartel, the broader world of late 20th century international capital finally disrupting the privacy of the underground atrium. This is followed by a news broadcast about an active shooter, implying that Mohole may have finally “snapped,” and an unpredicted eclipse whose time of day in base-sixty notation (14:28:57 GMT) was
(ostensibly) the content of the star message. Finally, the novel switches narrative perspectives once again with a penultimate scene titled “system interbreak.” Addressed to the “hypothetical ARS extant[s],” beings who have “dismantled the handiwork of [their] 155 own perception in order to solve reality” (431), this address opens with a proliferation of concrete nouns and prepositional phrases, emphasizing the materially contextual nature of human experience: "children being sold in Madhya Pradesh, eating rats to live, baring trees of bark and leaves to live, external reality, flies on whitewashed walls, old men in loincloths. . .rows of sandals set around the boarders of a temple courtyard, women in saris drifting though the shops wearing muslin, bone, plastic and glass, saris of handspun cotton (in bare rooms). . .” (429). Narrating the suffering, aspirations, and subtle joys of the peoples over which the eclipse tracks its course, this scene finally connects the novel’s esoteric narrative of mathematical history to the aching generations of human experience proper.
It is following this scene that Ratner’s Star concludes with a renewed interest in
Billy, previously lost in the cacophony of competing voices which comprises
“Reflections.” This image of Billy, the novel’s “radical accelerant,” the “right mind in right body” (85), riding a tricycle “in the white area between the shadow bands” of the eclipse while producing a noise “resembling laughter,” is a symbol of radical liminality
(48). Caught between illumination and darkness, between a concrete material body and the chaos of “particles bouncing in the air around him,” Billy’s “involuntary shrieks” express “vocally what appears to be a compelling emotion.” This appearance of emotion is suggestive of Massumi’s affective joy,71 a radical superposition of contrasting drives, impulses, and ideas which implicates both mind and body in an ongoing process of becoming, and which is irreducible to discrete emotions like “fear.” Finally, this implied
71 Masumi adapts this idea from Spinoza: see Power at the End of the Economy 71-5. 156 chaos of undifferentiated feeling, from which might emerge an identifiable emotion, leads into the final sentence of the novel, in which Billy dissolves into “the reproductive dust of existence,” this chaos of undifferentiated particles similarly prefacing the possible emergence of something new (438).
4. Conclusion
Like The Bell Jar, Ratner’s Star can be read as engaging a series of alienating or even dehumanizing analytics for thinking about the body. Furthermore, like Plath’s text, such engagement takes place not only at the level of theme, but also the formal conventions through which such thematic content is presented in the novel. While Esther’s story presents the body as a site of neoliberal subject formation, however, Billy’s contextualizes such conceptions of embodiment within the broader history of mathematical and scientific thought. Here, many of the same the narrative techniques used to depict Esther’s social alienation and eventual breakdown are deployed to produce a series of caricatures demonstrating both the absurdity, and perhaps necessity, of an intellectual tradition founded upon the abstraction of human thought from the body.
Despite Ratner’s Star’s far-reaching allegorical and historical scope, however, the novel’s narration nevertheless tends to return to the postmodern themes of the 1970s capitalist present in which it was written. Such returns demonstrate the extent to which the novel’s broad-lensed “underground history” ultimately functions as a means of assessing problems inherent to the contemporary world, and the embodied subject’s place within it.
Indeed, the themes of human subjectivity and embodiment developed in Ratner’s Star continue to be felt even as DeLillo’s subsequent novels ostensibly refocus to concentrate 157 on the more “mundane” concerns of contemporary American life. Thus, similar to
LeClair’s claims about Ratner’s Star serving as a model of the “systems” themes which will define DeLillo’s fiction through at least the middle phase of his carrier,72 and
Cowart’s that it presupposes DeLillo’s future treatment of topics like representation and language, I argue that Ratner’s Star plays an important role in how depictions of materiality and embodiment develop throughout DeLillo’s corpus.
72 LeClair made these claims in the late 80s, and thus prior to some of DeLillo’s most celebrated novels, foremost among them Underworld. 158
Disciplining the Body in E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel
Both Plath’s The Bell Jar and DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star can be read as narratives of withdrawal. Though for Esther such withdrawal is in part a result of mental illness, and for Billy the demands of his mathematical profession, both characters are also nevertheless retreating from the increasingly alienating world of mid-century American capitalism. In contrast, the protagonist and titular character of E. L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel struggles with how to productively engage this world. For Danial Lewin, however, finding a place within late 20th century American society is not just a personal problem, but a familial and political one as well. The son of the (in)famous Paul and
Rochelle Isaacson,73 fictional stand-ins for the real-world Saul and Ethel Rosenberg who were tried and executed for smuggling nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union, Daniel has a fraught relationship not only with the state which murdered his parents, but also the radical political commitments he inherited from them. Though much of the novel’s action concerns Daniel’s memories of the events surrounding Paul’s and Rochelle’s arrest, trial, and executions, the novel itself takes place between Memorial Day and Christmas 1967 as Daniel strives to come to terms with this legacy, the attempted suicide and subsequent institutionalization of his sister Susan, and his own wavering commitments to radical politics. Like Plath’s and DeLillo’s novels, the resulting narrative is a pastiche of different genre conventions and tropes. Furthermore, it is by means of the resulting mobilization of contrasting representations of embodiment that I argue the novel’s
73 Both Daniel and his sister take the name of his adoptive parents Robert and Lise Lewin after Paul and Rochelle’s deaths. 159 narration suggests a space wherein the creative insights necessary not only for personal but also political change can be found.
More than just being interpreted as a novel of personal and familial discovery, however, The Book of Daniel is also frequently read as a “meditation on the Old left from the perspective of the New” (Juan-Navarro 80), or as Jameson puts it, a “painful juxtaposition” of “the two great moments” of American left-wing politics: “of thirties and forties communism and the radicalism of the 1960s” (Postmodernism 21). As such, the ostensible failures and disillusionments of these movements—their inability to provide a sustainable platform for a radically progressive or revolutionary politics—is often considered a major theme of the novel. Kenny Chang, for example, attributes these failures respectively to a “lack in the capability of self-preservation” on the part of the
Old Left, and a failure to promote dialectical thinking by the New, without which there is
“no political prospect for social transformation that alone makes political opposition meaningful.” (53). Alternatively, Bimbisar Irom argues that the problem of both movements is “their belief in final vocabularies, whether those are the primacy of class
(Old Left) or the possibility of completely jettisoning the past and the belief in spontaneous revolution (New Left)” (69).
This chapter similarly argues that The Book of Daniel offers critiques of both the Old and New Lefts. In contrast to the tendency to interpret these movements in isolation, however, this chapter assesses them in terms of their similarities to the dominant socio- economic environments they seek to resist, both these dominant cultures, and the radical movements which oppose them, targeting the body as a site of subject formation and thus 160 a means of promoting either social conformity or change. Specifically, I argue that
Daniel’s narrative positions the body as the object of the same forms of “power” explored in previous chapters: i.e. disciplinary power, directed at the conditioning of individual bodies and habits; and, biopower, directed at promoting the aggregate productive capacities of “life” within the bodies of a nation’s population. The Book of Daniel’s depiction of these forms of power, however, diverges in two important ways from those found in Plath’s and DeLillo’s novels. Thus, not only do Doctorow’s characters—unlike those found in The Bell Jar or Ratner’s Star, who seek to retreat from such regimes of social control—actively engage with and promote such forms of power; the novel also conspicuously contrasts these mechanisms. So, while depictions of disciplinary power predominate the sections of the novel set in the 1940s and 50s, descriptions of biopower are much more prominent in scenes set during the 60s. Additionally, both of these forms of power play significant pedagogical roles for characters within the novel, disciplinary power serving to sculpt individual subjects into idealized citizens (or revolutionaries), whereas biopower functions in a manner similar to what Massumi—in his recent elaborations of Foucault’s ideas on biopolitics and neoliberalism—terms “affective priming,” which involves the creation of social and material environments conducive to the production of certain types of affects and behaviors within their inhabitants.74
Interestingly, although Foucault’s books and lectures on disciplinary and bio-power75 were published, and in the former case translated, in the same decade as Doctorow’s
74 See Power at the End of the Economy 29-30. 75 Though Foucault’s lectures series “Security, Territory, Population (1977-8) and “The Birth of Biopolitics” (1978-9) have only recently been published, both Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality Volume 1 (1976) were published in 1977 and 1978 respectively. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel was published in 1971. 161 novel, few have made connections between these works despite some striking similarities. One recent exception is Eric Dean Rasmussen’s article in which he deployes
Massumi’s affect theory to read the novel, and gestures at several scenes in which
Foucault’s ideas prove useful interpretive lenses.76 Though Rasmussen makes interesting observations, this chapter does a much more thorough job of connecting concepts like disciplinary and bio-power to the novel’s depiction of 20th century American society.
Additionally, my reading of the function of affect in The Book of Daniel is significantly different than Rasmussen’s, a distinction which will be addressed in detail in section two of this chapter.
To demonstrate the utility of disciplinary and bio-power as interpretive lenses for
Doctorow’s novel, this chapter is split into three sections. The first addresses the novel’s depiction of the 1940s and 50s era of the Old Left, narrated through Daniel’s attempts as an adult to make sense of the events surrounding his parents’ fates and the ambiguity of their guilt. In these scenes Daniel’s narration, and efforts to reconstruct the voices and perspectives of his family members, function to draw a picture of American society suffuse with forms of disciplinary power. Thus, not only is much of his narration devoted to describing institutions of disciplinary state authority, like schools, halfway homes, and prisons, but also the regimenting of bodily habits found in the Isaacson family itself.
Rather than merely targeting the body, however, this section also addresses how such forms of power are ultimately directed at the production of both rational, and rationally intelligible, forms of subjectivity. The second section switches focus to the 1960s and the
76 In addition to more compelling use of Foucault’s ideas on disciplinary and bio-power, I also feel Rasmussen could better distinguish between these, admitted related, concepts. 162 development of more biopolitical forms of mass cultural control. Specifically, much of this section is dedicated to the analysis of The Book of Daniel’s depictions of mass media and “the image,” which I argue the novel presents as being designed to direct the affective drives (or life-force) of individuals toward neoliberal behaviors: i.e. the tendency to act on irreducible and non-transferable desires critiqued in both The Bell Jar and Ratner’s Star. Much like the previous section, however, such efforts to direct affects can also be found in the 1960s countercultural movements of the New Left.
Finally, the last section of this chapter concerns how the narration of Doctorow’s novel presents a tentative solution to the problems of both the Old and New Lefts. In contrast to Chang’s and Irom’s readings, however, this chapter ultimately locates the failures of these movements in their respective tendencies to conceptualize the subject as either a primarily rational or spontaneously affective being. Furthermore, this section argues that the structure of The Book of Daniel itself—which both juxtaposes and dynamically blends what are described as realist, naturalist, and modernist representations of embodiment throughout this dissertation— provides a means of thinking through the very relationship neglected by these radical movements: that of human reason to bodily affect. Thus, similar to The Bell Jar’s tendency to ground cultural traditions not in ideology or discourse, but rather in the bodily habits which presuppose such forms of knowledge, I argue that the possibility for socio-cultural change in
Doctorow’s novel is ultimately rooted in a similar intersection between mind and body.
As such, this chapter provides an alternative way of thinking about what Jieun Kwan argues is the primary function of The Book of Daniel’s political critique: “to reinvigorate the ideals sustaining the nation’s coherence” by means of a radical critique which 163 nevertheless seeks to reform, rather than fundamentally destroy, the society of which it is critical (85). Though for Kwan such reinvigoration occurs through the ideological encounter of the novel as a textual object with the presuppositions of the broader culture which receives it, I argue that within the world of the text, such revitalization takes a different form. Rather, just as the dominant ideologies depicted in the novel are ultimately rooted in the body, I argue that challenges to such ideologies—whether directed a reform or total revolution—must similarly arise from within the creative potentialities of the affective body itself.
1. The disciplinary regimes of cold war America and the Old Left
Important to assessing the role of disciplinary and bio-powers in The Book of Daniel is how these regimes structure relationships between individuals and communities. Such relationships are also a consistent topic in scholarship on the novel. Naomi Morgenstern, for example, characterizes The Book of Daniel as a “psychopolitical” work due to “its simultaneous fascination with the interdependent fantasies of both the subject and the state” (69-70). As such, she interprets the relationship between individuals and collectives in terms of competing narratives in her psychoanalytic reading of the text
(69-70). Similarly, Irom frames this relationship in terms of the politics of “engagement” and “retreat” as he explores what he sees as the text’s effort to find a middle ground between the rigidly communal politics of the Old Left, and the self-serving individualism of the New. In a slightly different vein, this chapter considers the individual and collective less from the standpoint of how they conflict with one another than how they intersect. Thus, I argue that Foucault’s theories of disciplinary and bio- power are a useful lens for demonstrating how forms of social and ideological 164 conformity promoted at the level of the individual inevitably enable broader forms of social control in Doctorow’s novel. Through this reading, the body as a site of both disciplined habits and affective potentialities emerges as the primary object of state and economic control in The Book of Daniel.
Though, according to Foucault, regimes of disciplinary and biopower often co-existed alongside one another, he argues that one is usually ascendant in a given cultural moment. Furthermore, Foucault argues that Western history has generally been characterized by a drift from disciplinary to biopolitical forms of power. This tendency is reflected in The Book of Daniel’s juxtaposition of the Old and New Lefts, the novel’s portrayal of the 1940s and 50s Old Left era being replete with depictions of the disciplining of bodily habits, whereas the 1960s era of the New Left depicts a distinct shift towards the biopolitical. As such, the first section of this chapter focuses on The
Book of Daniel’s depictions of regimes of disciplinary power in 1940s and 50s
American society. Furthermore, as previously mentioned, despite being targeted at bodily habits, such incarnations of disciplinary power are as much about enforcing conformity of thought in the novel as they are the conformity of bodily behaviors.
As mentioned in previous chapters, according to Foucault, the development of disciplinary power coincides with a shift in the relationship between criminality and the body. Thus, just as the body increasingly becomes the object of disciplinary apparatuses, it simultaneously ceases to be an object of punishment. Rather the object of punishment, or possible rehabilitation, becomes the soul itself—i.e. the rational mind—accessed through the disciplining of the body. As such, the exercise of state authority increasingly concerns the policing of individual behaviors, the development of normative 165 subjectivities and forms of sociality being the primary aim of disciplinary power.
Similarly, the individual’s misdeeds are implicitly linked to the “passions, instincts, anomalies, infirmities, [or] maladjustments” of the soul or, in other words, to the inherent qualities of the subject, which, alongside the acculturing “effects of environment or heredity,” become the primary targets of discipline (D&P 17). Foucault sums this transition: “[criminal subjects] are punished by the ‘security measures’ that accompany the penalty (prohibition of entering certain areas, probation, obligatory medical treatment), and which are intended not to punish the offence, but to supervise the individual, to neutralize his dangerous state of mind, to alter his criminal tendencies, and to continue even when this change has been achieved” (D&P 18). Similarly, the policing of bodily habits by means of institutions like schools, prisons, and medical facilities is a major theme of Daniel’s recollections of the events surrounding his parent’s trial and executions. They are also, however, deeply implicated in his family life, which is similarly regimented around the goal of producing properly Marxist intellectual habits and attitudes in the Isaacson children.
Significantly, this targeting of the habits of the body to cultivate the soul coincides for
Foucault with the development of a juridical conception of subjectivity. According to
Foucault, such a subject is not just defined by its claims to certain inalienable rights, codified for many of The Book of Daniel’s characters in the United States Constitution and the ideals of American democracy—institutions which even for Old Left radicals like
Paul carry with them the utopian promises of Enlightenment humanism. More troublingly, this subject is also defined by the transparency of its habits, thoughts, motivations, and even its body to state and legal institutions. Thus, when such 166 institutions, and their ability to lay bare individual subjects, are threatened, so too are the rights of this subject. Significantly, this facet of juridical subjectivity plays a central role in what Daniel’s narration implies is a miscarriage of justice during the Isaacsons’ trial.
In these scenes the demystifying gaze of the legal system is primarily used not to unveil
Paul’s and Rochelle’s innocence or guilt, but rather to reveal their status as social and political deviants, and thus unintelligible others. Furthermore, Daniel’s meta-narrational comments and reconstructions of his parent’s points of view connect such character attacks to the broader cultural phenomena of Cold War hysteria. As such, their conviction is attributed to an ostensible invasion of reason-based institutions like the legal system by collective forms of emotional irrationality.
Nevertheless, the logics of disciplinary authority and control are very much a part of
Daniel’s childhood world. Thus, it is unsurprising that many of the sites identified by
Foucault as loci of disciplinary control, such as schools, half-way homes, and prisons, are granted prominent places within the novel’s imaginary. An internal monologue attributed to Paul,77 for example, asserts that “all societies indoctrinate their children”—implying that the purpose of adolescent education is the promotion of rigidly ideological points of view—while also implicating the training of the body in such indoctrination (187). Such isomorphisms between ideology and bodily behaviors are concretized in Paul’s memories of the public approbation of Mrs. Goldstein—his fourth-grade teacher—expressed for his
“finest straightest salute”: “The way Paul stands, children, that is the way to stand, nice
77 It’s worth noting that, because the novel as a whole is suggested to be the work of Daniel himself, such internal monologues are implicitly attributable to him. Nevertheless, I argue that this framing doesn’t conflict with my assessment of how displinary power is depicted as a cultural dominant in era of the Old Left. 167 and tall with a straight back when you say the pledge of allegiance” (187). Described alongside Mrs. Goldstein’s “innocent” propaganda about our “glorious history” of
“taming of the barbaric Indians,” the bodily rigidity of a proper pledge is implicitly linked to the rectitude of proper citizenship, this embodied ritual and nationalist narrative of taming the west collectively drawing students into a shared cultural experience.
Similarly, Daniel’s own experiences at the Bronx Children’s Shelter, where he and his sister are relocated following their parents’ arrest, are described in terms of the regimenting of bodily habits. Life in the facility, for example, is organized around weekly fire and bomb drills, the novel having previously established the bodily character and ideological functions of the latter. Thus, not only does Daniel recall students marching
“into the hallways” to sit “hunched against the wall, knees up, arms around knees, head down” (102), but also his father’s interpretation of such rituals, designed to instill in students an imminent sense of war, and thus fear of the Soviet menace.78 As such, for both Daniel and Paul these drills as more than just a safety precaution: they are also a method for instilling in America’s youth a bodily impression of urgency and threat.
Beyond the drills, Daniel’s memories of the children’s shelter are similarly predominated by descriptions of daily routines like the making of one’s army bunk expected “every morning” along with having “your laundry bag. . . tied to the foot of the bed” (161). He also notes the segregation of the facility, not only in terms of gender, but also by the severity of each resident’s case: “All the oddballs were put down at the end of the room” and “at the other end, near the doors, were the transient beds” for those only at
78 These observations, despite Daniel’s ambivalence toward Paul’s relentlessly ideological analysis, nevertheless ring true given Daniel’s own documentation of the lack of respect American political and military leaders had for Soviet military prowess during the late 1940s (102). 168 the shelter for short time, leaving the central beds for the more or less permanent,
“hardcore” members of the community (162). Given this prison-like sorting into distinct
“populations” and the disciplinary apparatuses used to maintain order, such as
“instantaneous clout[s] on the head” and the use of a whistle which “left points of pain in my ears,” it is perhaps unsurprising that Daniel draws comparisons between his parents’ incarceration and his time at the Bronx Children’s Shelter (161, 165), slyly suggesting these similarities to a psychologist during an interview. The doctor’s defensive response,
“there are just too many of us to get by without rules,” seems more telling than he realizes (167). A practitioner and ostensibly firm believer in the need for such disciplinary order, he opts to justify rather than dismiss Daniel’s comparison between the rigid forms of social control used in the center and those found in prisons.
Of course, the children’s facility is not a prison and, unsurprisingly, it is in the novel’s depiction of the latter where the most vivid links between state authority and embodiment can be found. Such relationships are frequently the focus of Daniel’s didactic asides where he notes, for example, the historical role of corporal punishment as a means of maintaining sovereign authority: "loyalty of the masses is maintained only by constant physical intimidation,” explosions of which accompany “times of challenge” to social hegemony or cohesion (130). It is during Paul’s reflections upon the physical effects of incarceration, however, that the most compelling descriptions of disciplinary power can be found. Significantly, the novel presents Paul’s immediate reaction to confinement in physiological terms, “a terror that makes rigid the muscles in your arms, your sphincters, the cords of your sex; your body winds up on itself, it all tightens and begins to radiate this tremendous fearful energy that attaches to nothing” (188). Notably, this bodily 169 experience of fear is implicitly related to a restraining of the body, Paul’s initial evocation in this scene of the “muscles of let me out” being immediately juxtaposed to his habitually reinforced assumption that “the cell door. . . would open if I tried it.” It is through this disconnect between his habituated bodily expectation that doors open when pushed, and the physical realization of his present confinement, that Paul theorizes the disciplinary purpose of incarceration, “contrived to make you realize you are your own enemy: the muscles of let me out will destroy you.” Thus, for both social undesirables and political deviants like Paul, incarceration is a process of conditioning the convict’s own body to sap one’s “confidence so that being with other people in a room without bars is suddenly a terrifying thing” (186). Furthermore, it is this lack of confidence which opens prisoners up to either social reclamation— “turn on your compatriots and go free”—or psychological manipulation.
As previously mentioned, however, The Book of Daniel does not simply depict the disciplinary regimes employed to promote social and ideological conformity in early cold war America. The novel also depicts how the Isaacsons themselves deploy similar forms of disciplinary power in the rearing of their children. Daniel, for example, recalls that most of the time spent with his father consisted of learning “how to be a psychic alien”
(34), training in revolutionary thought that the novel intimately connects to the training of the body. Many of these connections between revolutionary thought and the body concern consumptive habits like refusing to eat bananas “because they were the fruit of some notorious exploitation,” or the way in which Paul and Rochelle “shamelessly” exposed their naked bodies to their children: “one of the theories of aspiring modernity.
Treat the body without shame” (31). More than these daily routines, however, education 170 for the Isaacson family was defined by the idea “of life as training,” leaving little time for personal enjoyment or leisure (31). Thus, Daniel notes the family’s dedication to “the efficient cooperative use of time, by which it is saved like money,” Rochelle often directing “us all like a military commander” (43). Furthermore, such regimenting plays an important ideological function for the family, perhaps best demonstrated in Rochelle’s commitment to cleanliness, a defense “against the vicious double-crossing trick that was life”: “a clean house” was like “a developed political mind,” both functioning as forms of resistance against a capitalist America which inflicts impoverishment upon many of its citizens (41). As a result, Daniel’s formative years were permeated with the impression that his family was special: “We were all training for something. There was some kind of moral, intellectual and physical award that would be available to those who worked for it, and were worthy of it. The State of Perfection Award.” (31).
This sense of exceptionalism is also an important component of Daniel’s depiction of the mid-century regimenting of bodily habits, the disciplinary regimes of both early cold war America and the Isaacson family serving to police social boundaries between in and out groups. Significantly, such disciplinary functions are not only exercised by official emissaries of state authority—the FBI officers, correctional personnel, prosecutors, and judges who treat the Isaacsons as a specific category of social deviant—but also by other citizens. Thus, the epithets, “kike, commie bastard, jew commie. . . Nigger. . . Nigger- lover” (49), hurled at the busses returning the Isaacsons and their fellow socialists home after a Paul Robeson concert. As Daniel observes, these epithets, flung alongside rocks at the concertgoers, were “propelled by the motives of education,” members of the mob yelling “We’ll teach you!” at the occupants of the immobilized vehicles. It is not just 171 these words, however, but also the acts of violence directed at the concertgoers’ bodies that are intended to have a disciplinary effect. Thus, not only are the mob’s smashing of the bus’s windshield, and attempts to topple the vehicle, described as evoking physiological reactions from Rochelle, whose thigh muscle Daniel could feel “twitching under my mouth and chin, quivering in what—fear? rage? exertion?” (50). The incident also concludes with the ritualistic breaking of Paul’s arm as he attempts to call for help from the police officers watching these events unfold. Here, as Paul’s arm is caught in the bus door while he attempts to exit the vehicle, his body becomes the focal point of the mob’s collective longing to inflict ideologically corrective violence: “The patriots have zeroed in on their target. They are all up at the front, outside the door. We stare in silence as my father silently experiences the breaking of his arm” (51).
Significantly, what the mob objects to is not just the perceived ideological commitments of the socialists, but also the very public and bodily display of unity evoked by the concert and caravan. For the “patriots,” being a socialist privately in one’s home is one thing, but collectively displaying progressive sympathies is another, a point reinforced in the novel by the fact that Robison’s concerts were cancelled several times by local authorities prior to the bus incident. Similarly, the variety of insults deployed by the “patriots” implies a conflation of ideological and racialized (and thus bodily) otherness. The “pedagogical” intent of the mob’s words and actions thus demonstrates how in moments of perceived crisis—in this case the beginning of the cold war—the resulting intensifications of disciplinary power paradoxically cause individuals to focus their attentions on others, seeking any outward signification of deviation from the narrow set of norms they themselves rigidly embody. As a result, such deviations coalesce into 172 broad stereotypes which divest these abject others of individuality. Not coincidently, such stereotyping can also be found in the Isaacsons’ unyielding faith in “Marxist-Leninist” modes of analysis, which not only demystify the ideological and coercive functions of cereal advertisements and mainstream radio programs, but also help one to identify the
(perhaps equally nebulously defined) members of the “exploiting” class and their ideological lackeys, which Rochelle mutters are “Murders. Dogs. Scum. . . Fascist scum.
Nazi pigs,” during the attack on the bus (50).
Indeed, this tendency to stereotype based not just on ethnic or religious affiliations, but also types of (bodily) behaviors, is a persistent theme in The Book of Daniel. Thus, the Ohio State Trustee’s knowledge that “there is no qualified difference between the kid who thinks it’s funny to fart in chapel, and Che Guevara” (95), the emergent consensus of the 1940s that “if you cried Peace! And cheered Vito Marcantonio at the Progressive
Party rally in Yankee Stadium” then you were also an enemy of the state (130), or even the conviction of Daniel’s and Susan’s foster parents that “civility is the essence of being human,” its absence being tantamount to “anything from rudeness at a table to suicide. Or genocide” (27).79 In each of these instances, habits become indelible markers of the subject within, making the identification of deviant subjects a matter of identifying not just criminal behavior, but any sort of behavior which deviates from a particular set of norms.
An emphasis on disciplinary modes of power, and their tendency to cause individuals to embody norms, values, and ideas is thus, I argue, related to a fundamental failure of
79 It’s worth noting that this last example comes from the later, 1960 setting in the novel. This really isn’t a problem for my analysis as disciplinary and biopolitical forms of power shouldn’t be considered mutually exclusive, and according to Foucault can often bolster one another. 173 human reason in the novel. This failure is related to what Daniel notes is the inevitable tendency of the revolutionary theorist to “connect everything” until nothing in the world lies outside these connections (134). In early cold war America, this tendency to make connections is explicitly directed at the bodily habits of others, causing what under different circumstance might be dismissed as odd or eccentric behaviors to become the means to peer into the “souls” of one’s fellow citizens and identify who does and does not belong to the collective. As such, in The Book of Daniel the disciplinary modes of power that predominate early cold war America seem intimately related to fundamental limitations of human reason to create a more equitable world.
Indeed, such limitations are frequently presented as an existential problem for the novel’s characters. Thus, Paul’s primary issue with his nation is that “American democracy wasn’t democratic enough. He continued to be astonished, insulted, outraged, that it wasn’t purer, freer, finer, more ideal” (40). Similarly, Asher, the Isaacsons’ defense attorney, finds the perceived injustice of Paul’s and Rochelle’s indictments and executions distressing in part because “He perceived in the law a codification of the religious sense of life” putatively having “worked for years on a still unfinished book demonstrating the contributions of the Old Testament to American law” (119). This connection between Jewish faith—itself intimately connected to a logocentric, and therefore rationalistic, conception of God also inherited by Christianity—can also be found in the person of Daniel’s adoptive father, Robert Lewin, a connection ostensibly born of what he sees as a homology between religious faith and faith in the utopian possibilities of the American legal system: “That is a true blue american puritan idea. In that idea is the Fusion of the Jew and America, both of them heirs of the ancient 174 seafarers: you ride the sea beast with lead in your keel. My lawyer father is no accident, and it is no accident that he loves American Law, an institution that constantly fails and that he constantly loves, like a bad child who someday in his love will not fail, stability with responsibility” (155). Furthermore, in both the novel and the world it seeks to represent, such beliefs were far from exclusive to Jewish humanists. Thus, during this same era an enlightenment faith in the capacity of human reason to create a better world undergirds not only the reforms of the New Deal, and America’s faith in its inevitable triumph over communism, but also the revolutionary beliefs of the popular front, which frequently argued that such forms of radical socialism were the next logical step for
American democracy.80 It is precisely this faith that is shaken by what The Book of
Daniel characterizes as a miscarriage of justice in the Isaacsons’ trial.
In many ways, Daniel’s depiction of the trial presents a critique of the legal system similar to Foucault’s. According to Foucault, the utopian idea that, as under God, all men are equal before the law is inevitably connected to society’s faith in its capacity to govern and direct the behavior of its citizens. Thus, alongside the development of Western democracies’ convictions about the ability of the legal system to create a more equitable world, comes the disciplinary notion that the law and its accompanying institutions— court systems, prisons, mental institutions, police forces, etc.—could pierce the complexities and mysteries of individuals and their bodies, and therefore possibly reclaim them from social deviancy, whether such deviancy was a product of bodily habits or biological inheritances. As such, the juridical subject, “the possessor, among other rights,
80 For a discussion of the relationship between the Popular Front and other Old Left movements and The Book of Daniel, see Juan-Navarro. 175 of the right to exist,” is also inextricably the subject of disciplinary power, as it is by means of such power that this subject becomes “accessible to (judicial) reason”
(Discipline & Punish 21).
As Daniel observes, such juridical conceptions of the subject play an important role in the narratives surrounding the birth of American democracy. Thus, unlike in Europe, treason was depersonalized in the fledgling United States, becoming a crime “only against the nation, not the individual ruler or party” (Doctorow 167). In an effort to make a more egalitarian legal system, crimes like treason became a manifestation of the same juridical conception of the subject described by Foucault: a subject with certain inalienable rights which legal systems must be careful not to tread upon, leading, in this particular instance, to a high bar for capital crimes like treason. As such, treason no longer concerns disloyal “thoughts” about the sovereign, but “actions” which undermine the security and/or sovereignty of the state and its disciplinary authority (Doctorow 167).
Not coincidentally, it is this high bar for capital crimes that is jettisoned during the
Isaacsons’ trial. Though tried for conspiracy—a crime which sets a relatively low bar for the types of evidence which can be presented against defendants—Paul and Rochelle are executed for treason, a crime the standards of proof for which the prosecution was incapable of meeting. As Asher points out to Rochelle, the reason for the discrepancy is the anti-communist mood of the nation: “Emotionally I do not think anyone is capable in the present atmosphere [of cold war paranoia] of understanding” the technical legal distinction between a conspiracy to possibly commit criminal actions, and treason, a specific type of act punishable by death (201). Thus, the collective mood, or affect, of the 176 nation proves capable of overriding the supposedly rationally derived and enforced rules of the American legal system.
This is possible because juridical conceptions of the subject are justified not by reason itself, but rather the rational intelligibility and malleability of such a subject to the state’s disciplinary power. Thus, when such power is threatened by a perceived inability of not just the state, but the culture at large, to read its citizens, to understand communist sympathies and identify to whom these sympathies might belong, the rights of the juridical subject break down. In The Book of Daniel the resulting mass-hysteria does not, however, lead to the dismissal of the disciplinary regimes which undergird the possibility of the juridical subject, but rather their intensification, as disciplinary power and the classificatory function of reason are remobilized to police and ostracize non-normative
(bodily) behaviors. Thus, Daniel’s claim that the “law, in whatever name, protects privilege. . . The sole authority of the law is in its capacity to enforce itself. That capacity expresses itself in Trial. There would be no law without trial. . . And punishment is the point of trial—you can’t try someone until you establish the right to punish him” (184).
According to Daniel, at its heart the law is ultimately about the ability of authority to identify transgressions against itself and punish them, the “civilized” rules for doing so frequently being dismissed during periods of institutional panic. As such, it is unsurprising that, in the wake of the “red scare” and the executions of the Isaacsons, the libratory powers of theory, analysis, and reason might be called into question by a new generation of radicals.
177
2. Biopower and the politics of affect in the era of the New Left
As we have seen, The Book of Daniel’s depictions of the disciplinary regimes of the
1940s and 50s present the development and regimenting of bodily habits not as an end of itself, but rather as a means of producing and maintaining a particular type of reasoning and juridically intelligible subject. In contrast, I argue that the novel’s presentation of the late 60s gestures at the beginning of a subtle transition away from such forms of power in the forms of both dominant American culture and the countercultural movements which seek to subvert or resist this culture. Though themes like police surveillance and institutionalization persist in the novel’s depiction of this later era—mental institutions and hospitals in particular playing a central role in the novel’s plot due to Susan’s mental breakdown and attempted suicide—they are also juxtaposed to The Book of Daniel’s depictions of the emergent postmodern media culture of the 1960s, culminating with
Daniel’s trip to Disneyland near the close of the novel. This episode, analyzed in detail later in this section, in many ways concretizes what Doctorow’s novel in general depicts as a transition from the overt regimes of social conformity and control of early cold war
America, to more diffuse and yet pervasive forms of behavioral engineering. Such forms of control can be likened to what critics of postmodern culture like Jameson and
Baudrillard have characterized as the colonization of the cultural sphere by the capitalist marketplace, in which advertisements and slickly-packaged media images supersede what might be considered more authentic forms of cultural expression.81
81 See, for example, Postmodernism 45-6. 178
Rather than the postmodern theories of Jameson and Bauldrillard, however, I argue that the novel’s focus on media culture, and in particular the observations about the social
(or antisocial) function of images made not only by Daniel, but also the New Left guru
Artie Sternlicht, are best understood in terms of theories of biopolitics. Though, according to Foucault, both disciplinary and biopower target the body, they do so in very different ways. Specifically, in the context of American neoliberalism, biopolitics takes what should now be the familiar form of homo economicus, or in other words the promotion of a subject who orientates itself to the social and material world in terms of economic, rational self-interest. As Massumi argues in his recent elaborations on
Foucault’s nascent theories of biopolitics, however, this rationality—unlike the type of rationality promoted by disciplinary regimes and juridical conceptions of the subject—is functionally indistinguishable from desire.82 Thus, in contrast to disciplinary power’s tendency to promote both rational and rationally intelligible subjects, biopower functions by means of the cultivation and strategic manipulation of affects.
Importantly, Massumi’s conception of affect, much like Brennan’s, is fundamentally rooted in and between bodies. Furthermore, for Massumi the body isn’t just a material, empirically understandable object. Rather it is a form of incorporeal potentiality:
The charge of indeterminacy carried by a body is inseparable from it. lt strictly coincides with it, to the extent that the body is in passage or in process (to the extent that it is dynamic and alive). But the charge is not itself corporeal. Far from regaining a concreteness, to think of the body in movement thus means accepting the paradox that there is an incorporeal dimension of the body. Of it, but not it. Real, material, but incorporeal. Inseparable, coincident, but disjunct. If this is "concrete," the project originally set out on will take some severe twists. (Parables 5)
82 See Power at the End of the Economy 34, 59. 179
It is this indeterminacy, inseparable but distinct from the body as a concrete object, which is the domain of affect for Massmui. Furthermore, for the purposes of this chapter, this affective potentiality can be conceptualized in terms of the preconscious drives and impulses of the biological body, which often seem to drive characters’ behaviors in the narrative tropes of naturalism. As previously mentioned, Massumi claims such affects are also the primary means by which biopower is deployed under neoliberalism, which seeks to prime, or direct, the undifferentiated masses of affective potentials which populate individuals toward what it considers rationalistic economic behaviors and outcomes.
Significantly, in The Book of Daniel a similar form of manipulation of both individual and collective desires is achieved by the means of the image.
Indeed, Daniel’s metanarrative comments on the image bare a great deal of similarity to Massumi’s claims about the relationship between bodily affects and narrative meaning as a linear semiotic or textual process. According to Massumi, such meaning often runs
“counter” to affects, having either an amplificatory or dampening effect on the affective arousal of individuals by media images (Parables for the Virtual 26). Both this capacity of images to arouse and direct affects out of “undifferentiated” emotional states, as well as the image’s complicated relationship with semiotic meaning, are evoked during
Daniel’s ruminations on the conundrum of the image:
Images are what things mean. Take the word image. It connotes soft, sheer flesh shimmering on the air, like the rainbowed slick of a bubble. Image connotes images, the multiplicity being an image. Images break with a small ping, their destruction is as wonderful as their being, they are essentially instruments of torture exploding through the individual's calloused capacity to feel powerful undifferentiated emotions full of longing and dissatisfaction and monumentality. They serve no social purpose. (71)
180
Geoffery Harpham provides a compelling interpretation of this thematically dense passage, arguing that the power of images is their “potentiality,” their capacity to oscillate between promoting “anarchy”—explosions of meaning which spontaneously recede into nothingness—and “totalitarianism”—for examples of which Harpham points to images like the swastika or the crucifix, which “crystallize the thoughts and emotions repressed or dispersed over the course of a narrative, an argument, or a social process and concentrates them into a potent, complex, and undiscussable unity” (83). That is, images function as a synecdoche for the contradictions of narrative itself, constantly alternating between the sequential movement from one “image” to the next in the form of plot or, alternatively, halting such movement in order to construct “images” stable enough to constitute textual meaning—and in extreme cases, absolutizing ideas or discourses. These twin poles of textual meaning, and their relationship to the causal narrative tropes of realism and the temporal suspensions of “modernist” meaning, will be addressed in more detail at the close of this chapter. For now, however, what is important about Harpham’s interpretation is the relationship he posits between images and textual meaning, a tension which he connects to the novel’s interest in epistemology more broadly. As such, for
Harpham, images can be considered “the building blocks” of human thought.
Though I agree with Harpham’s claim that images have a synecdochical relationship to thought in this passage, his assessment downplays what I argue is the most important aspect of images according to Daniel: their ability not only to act as terms in the symbolic play of consciousness, images always connoting other images, but also their ability to in a sense bisect and “explode” the “undifferentiated” masses of affective potentials which comprise the subject. In other words, images aren’t just the contents of thoughts; they are 181 also what “moves” or motivates thought, or in Massumi’s terms, primes the flow of affective potentialities, collapsing them into what can be later identified as concrete motivations and emotions, and therefore actions. Thus, I argue that images in The Book of
Daniel function similarly to Massumi’s or Barad’s cuts, temporarily collapsing an undifferentiated or unqualified mass of affective intensity into a concrete feeling, emotion, or idea.
One such moment of affective collapse manifests itself during the Isaacsons’ trial. As
Paul steels himself for the ordeal like “a soldier having done everything necessary to prepare himself for battle” (187), he receives a note from Rochelle imploring him not to be afraid and informing him that, if he would just look up, “you will see me smiling at you” (188). Doing so, his state of readiness shatters: “at this moment all the fear backs up on him and the treacherous muscles of his smile mean to cause him to cry out. He swallows this dreadful feeling, swallows the terror, tastes it, gulps it” (188). Here the image of his wife’s face momentarily crystalizes for Paul the “meaning” of their situation, causing an outpouring of emotion that significantly results not in an incident of emotional connection between husband and wife, but that, ironically, causes Paul to collapse inward, as he desperately attempts to “ingest” his own fear as the realization dawns that “we are absolutely alone.” This scene is thus suggestive not only of how images can “explode” our emotional landscapes, but also how they might be anti-social in nature, directing one’s affective energies inward and away from the surrounding social and material world.
Images are not, however, the only form of affective priming depicted in The Book of
Daniel. Another example can be found in Daniel’s descriptions of his abusive sexual 182 encounters with his wife. Such scenes have inspired Rasmussen to declare “vicious eroticism” the guiding affect of the novel, arguing that the intent of Daniel’s abuse is the transmission of “impossible knowledge” which cannot be communicated linguistically, but “can be effected affectively and sexually, with human bodies serving as the primary conduit” (190). The novel itself, however, seems to prefer the term “cruelty” and although, as Rasmussen argues, Daniel frequently seems to be communicating—or failing to communicate—something to Phyllis during their sexual encounters, Daniel’s cruelty, I argue, is more about developing in his wife a particular affective orientation to the world than it is about conveying some ineffable truth.
A particularly demonstrative scene occurs when Daniel, irritated by his wife’s hyper sexual-arousal, decides to “teach” her a lesson by purposefully manipulating her progress towards climax: “At this point I did a cruel thing, I pulled back” forcing her “to rise after it . . . She hung from my neck whimpering into my mouth. At the peak of her distraction I slowly sank it back in, and this was the stroke that took her beyond her limits of character and physical integrity” (169). Frustrated by his inability to convey his intentions to
Phyllis, Daniel ruminates on her obliviously contented visage: “But leaning over her sleepy smiling eyes I could not find there the education recorded, no impression of the cruel thing, the cruel thing, and that it is always the cruel thing that mixes the tears of our eyes, the breath of our lungs, the creams of our comes . . .” (169). What Daniel seeks and, here, fails to impart to his wife is the impression that cruelty is the animating force behind human life: not only the bodily drive for sex, but also implicitly the life-sustaining processes of homeostasis which guide the non-conscious actions of our lungs. This is a lesson, I argue, that is less concerned with an idea than it is a certain type of orientation to 183 the world. In contrast to Phyllis’s principled beliefs, “her love of peace is a principle, her long hair, her love for me—all principles,” Daniel seeks to not only access her
“instinctive unprincipled beliefs” which “rise to the surface” when, for instance, Phyllis is
“stoned,” but also to mold them in order to make her, like him, a creature of suffering (6).
Thus, the fact that Phyllis’s pleasure isn’t lessened, but rather ostensibly heightened by
Daniel’s actions is not the problem so much as her lack of recognition of the “cruel” act and its relationship to her gratification. In essence, what Daniel seeks with regard to his wife is a form of affective priming, an effort to direct the flow of emotional energies by guiding the development of those “tiny courses” hung throughout “the electric passages of the tissues” in her body (169).
Such conditioning of affects, however, doesn’t only take place at the individual or intersubjective level in The Book of Daniel. As previously mentioned, it also takes place on a mass scale through the medium of the image. Such mass media effects are first described in The Book of Daniel by Artie, an associate of Susan’s who Daniel tracks down following her suicide attempt. It is during this encounter, and while Artie is being interviewed by a reporter for Cosmopolitan, that he engages in an extended monologue on the pedagogic function of commercials, those ephemeral “learning units” which make
“you laugh” and “your eyes water with nostalgia”: “You see a girl more beautiful than any girl you’ve ever seen. Giants, and midgets, and girls coming in convertibles, and knights and ladies, and love on the beach, jets fucking the sky, and delicious food steaming on the table, and living choices of cool telling you how cool you are, how cool you can be” (139). Artie’s comments suggest that it’s not just the consumerism promoted by these fantastic and flashy images, but also how such self-indulgent fantasies focus 184 one’s attention on primal bodily drives like sex and hunger which characterizes their
(anti)social function. As in The The Bell Jar, such images are depicted as important tools for promoting a neoliberal vision of the subject, one guided primarily by its own
“irreducible” and “non-transferable” desires. Thus, media images in The Book of Daniel could be said to play a biopolitical function, as “methods of power capable of optimizing forces, aptitudes, and life in general without at the same time making [these elements of human life] more difficult to govern” (“Right to Death and Power Over Life” 45). In other words, what the commercial images described by Artie are directed at is the promotion of life itself as a productive force, which under neo-liberalism takes the form of subjects operating as autonomous economic actors attuned, first and foremost, to their own value-generating desires.
Though the topic is first broached by Artie, the most in-depth and insightful commentary on the cultural function of media images comes during Daniel’s trip to
Disneyland at the close of the novel. At the most basic level, the biopolitical function of the park can be found in the novel’s descriptions of how it organizes space. Aside from the rides, Disneyland is described as “mazes of pens” through which the movement of crowds is facilitated by “guards, attendants, guides, and other personnel” a solution to
“the problems of mass ingress and egress” which Daniel comments “would light admiration in the eyes of an SS transport officer” (289-90). The Nazi reference is an interesting choice given that, unlike a concentration camp, the occupants of Disneyland choose to be here. This juxtaposition thus draws attention to the different ways crowds are not only controlled, but also maintained, in this space. Although similar to the disciplinary sites described elsewhere in the novel in its ability to regulate the movements 185 and habits of large groups of people, Disneyland doesn’t operate by means of the overt and rigidly enforced routines foisted upon prisoners, mental patients, or even primary school students. Rather, Disneyland both draws and directs its patrons by offering an intensity of experience, “the simultaneous appeal of a number of attractions at the same time, including not only the fixed rides and exhibits and restaurants and shops but special parades and flag raising and lowering ceremonies, band concerts, and the like” (289).
Notably, unlike the disciplinary practices found in schools, prisons, and familial rituals described earlier in the novel, participation in these displays is not only passive— watching rather than participating in a ceremony—but also optional, Disneyland’s customers being constantly given a wide range of activities to observe or engage in. As such, the mass control and direction of the parks occupants is not achieved through the application of disciplinary force, but rather relies primarily upon the emergent, self- organizing affective potential of the individuals themselves. Here the guides, guards, and security personnel—whose presence is ostensibly to ensure the safety of the patrons themselves—are only necessary to smooth out the rough edges of these self-directed movements, providing advice or guidance to seemingly lost or confused customers, or perhaps intervening in the occasional fight between parkgoers.
This arguably halcyon vision of mass, and ostensibly spontaneous self-organization—
Disneyland here functioning as a microcosm of the neoliberal free market itself—is undercut, however, by the novel’s depiction of how such affects are aroused and directed.
As previously mentioned, this scene continues the development of Daniel’s/Artie’s thesis of the image, Disneyland’s appeal functioning largely on the “symbolic” appropriation and repackaging of “figures or works of [American] literary heritage” (287). As 186 examples, Daniel chooses to focus on Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland83 and Mark Twain’s
Life on the Mississippi, rides reimagining both literary works being popular attractions at the park. Of the former, he observes that even for an “adult who dimly remembers reading the original Alice . . . what is being offered does not suggest the resonance of the original work, but is only a sentimental compression of something that is itself already a lie” (288). Here, rather than evoking the complex collections of feelings readers might associate with the original work, the images associated with Carol’s novel are manipulated to produce vague impressions of sentimental attachment. Daniel also comments on a similar “radical process of reduction” regarding the Twain ride, in which
“the intermediary between us and this actual historical experience, the writer Mark
Twain, author of Life on the Mississippi, is no more than the name of the boat” (288). In both cases, the narratives that the park creates around these cultural “myths” have been stripped of their relationships to their referents, opening them up to be used as biopolitical tools, directing the affects of parkgoers towards proscribed emotions of nostalgia which, when a customer seeks to buy a souvenir “in one of the many junk shops on the premises,” completes “the Pavlovian process of symbolic transference”: “The ideal
Disneyland patron may be said to be one who responds to a process of symbolic manipulation that offers him his culminating and quintessential sentiment at the moment of purchase” (288-9).
Additionally, such experiences are explicitly designed to focus customers’ attentions inward, and away from their relationships to the park’s other patrons. This is why Daniel
83 Though obviously not a work of American fiction, Daniel implies here that Carroll’s novel has nevertheless become an important part of the nation’s cultural imaginary. 187 notes that one of the primary impediments to this process of symbolic transference is the presence of other people in the park: “[in Disneyland] there is a constant feedback of human multiplicity, one’s own efforts of vicarious participation constantly thwarted by the mirror of others’ eyes” (287). Rather than encouraging direct engagement with the artificial world created for its customers’ entertainment, Disneyland functions on the principle of remove, the park’s mobilization of cultural icons and myths encouraging critical engagement with neither its attractions nor the historical referents from which they draw inspiration. Disneyland instead runs on the manipulation of affects, evoking a nebulous collection of “sentiments” that patrons associate with the images of the cultural icons it appropriates. Such attractions are carefully designed to guide the affects, and therefore actions, of parkgoers down circumscribed paths ending, ideally, with the purchase of objects which will symbolize and perpetuate such feelings in a form of
“Pavlovian” association. Finally, as previously mentioned, it is important to note that perhaps the greatest impediment to this process is the presence of other parkgoers, whose mirroring of the self implicitly draws one into an intersubjective relationship with the other, and therefore interrupts the “vicarious” nature of the Disneyland experience.
Useful for analyzing the necessity of Disneyland’s attractions to draw costumer’s attentions away from one another are Massumi’s comments on the function of affect outside of the influences of neoliberal institutions. For Massumi, affect is an essentially intersubjective phenomenon, affective exchanges between what he terms dividuals84 being relational in that they cannot be attributed directly to either the self or the other, but
84 See The Power at the End of the Economy 8-10. 188 rather involve the mutual “actuations” of numerous, often contrasting affective potentials between dividiuals in the form of an affective event. Thus, rather than interactions between persons presupposing two or more discrete beings, Massumi argues that it is the tendency to attribute affective events to others—a result of the others “emit[ting] the sign that triggers” the event (74)—which creates the illusion of such exchanges taking place between discrete individuals, experienced “as the transmission to me of a content of the other’s life” (74). Hedonistic emotions like pleasure or pain, love or hate, are then interpreted by means of one’s rational reflections upon this event, the conscious mind reflecting back on the affective exchanges post-hoc to interpret them as discrete emotions, and along with them “endless ruminations” upon possible actions, “scenarios of conquest and revenge,” in pursuit or avoidance of these emotions (75). Nevertheless, according to Massumi, a residue of the transindividual “sympathetic” relationship which gives rise to this process remains. Thus, encounters with others always carry with them a hint of both the possibilities which exceed one’s tendency to channel affects down predetermined paths, as well as the intersubjective nature of human experience more broadly. It is this residue of the intersubjective nature of experience that seems to disrupt the process of symbolic transference described by Daniel, especially as affective intensities always exceed symbolic meaning.
In contrast, Disneyland’s mobilization of mythic narratives, stripped of the symbolic tensions which might give rise to feelings other than nostalgic sentiment, relies upon the ability of parkgoers to distance themselves from these images, fostering clear boundaries between the observing subject and the object of their appreciation. Patrons are thus conditioned not only to function as autonomous subjects freely choosing among a variety 189 of different, yet similarly comforting voyeuristic experiences, but ultimately to engage in
“endless ruminations” upon what is necessary to reproduce these feelings in a never- ending pursuit of personal satisfaction: the instant gratification, for example, of purchasing a piece of the park itself, or the delayed gratification of saving money for future trips. In other words, what Daniel’s account of Disneyland demonstrates is how the amusement park functions to prime neoliberal economic behavior, patrons being encouraged to conceptualize themselves as subjects of irreducible and non-transferable interest, rather than beings defined in terms of their affective relationships to other beings. Thus, Daniel’s concluding observations about the future role of such symbols as tools of state authority:
Obviously there are political implications [to the park]. What Disneyland proposes is a technique of abbreviated shorthand culture for the masses, a mindless thrill, like an electric shock, that insists at the same time on the recipient’s rich psychic relation to his country’s history and language and literature. In a forthcoming time of highly governed masses in an overpopulated world, this technique may be extremely useful both as a substitute for education and, eventually, as a substitute for experience. (289)
As with the deployment of disciplinary power, however, I argue that this biopolitical turn is mirrored by similar developments in the radical movements which seek to subvert both state and capitalist institutions. Perhaps the most iconic representative of these movements is Artie Sternlicht. Significantly, Artie’s dismissiveness of the revolutionary politics and praxis of Paul and Rochelle is suggested to be one of the disillusionments leading to Susan’s mental breakdown, as she strives to reinvigorate her parents’ brand of left-wing radicalism. During their encounter Artie expresses this same disregard to
Daniel: “You want to know what was wrong with the old American Communists? They were into the system. They wore ties. They held down jobs. They put people up for 190 president. They thought politics was something you do at a meeting. When they got busted they called it tyranny. They were Russian tit suckers” (150). Thus, according to
Artie, the radicalism of the old left was too connected to the conformist culture it claimed to rebel against.
Artie’s repudiation of the Old Left, however, extends beyond its ostensible conformity to social norms. Indeed, as the novel’s scion of 1960 radicalism, many critics have assessed Artie Sternlicht in terms of his rejection of the Old Left’s historical materialism and therefore belief in the ennobling powers of human reason, ostensibly a symptom of a similar a-historicism which dominated the radical politics of the 1960s.
This a-historicism has inspired many scholars to characterize Artie’s politics as a dead end, mirroring the New Left’s own inability to sustain itself as a cohesive political movement. Similarly, Irom associates Artie with a self-aggrandizing “metaphysical” irony, criticizing him as much for his self-elevation to a messiah-like status in the leftist politics of the 1960s as his lack of historical awareness. Though I don’t believe he is representative of a necessarily ascendant politics in The Book of Daniel, my assessment of the text’s depiction of Artie is less critical. Specifically, I argue that, though not entirely unproblematic, Artie’s political commitments gesture at a recognition of not only the failures of the Old Left—i.e. its overly optimistic faith in the powers of reason—but also fundamental changes in the social, political, and economic landscape in which he operates. Thus, much like the neoliberal capitalism he seeks to resist, which functions in
The Book of Daniel largely through the affective priming of images, Artie’s politics is a politics of affect. 191
At its most superficial, such a politics is a rejection of the Old Left’s tendency of
“theorizing about [revolution], dreaming about it, waiting for it, preparing for it,” for a revolutionary practice of constant action, regardless of what such actions might be: “let’s fuck. Let’s fight. Let’s blow up the Pentagon! A revolutionary is someone who makes the revolution” (137). The inclusion of sex as a potentially revolutionary force is worthy of note not only because, as Foucault claims, sex is uniquely positioned at the intersection of disciplinary and bio-power,85 but also because of the explicit way in which Artie’s treatment of sex differs from Paul’s and Rochelle’s. For the Isaacsons, the revolutionary significance of sex concerned its perceived mystification by bourgeois culture. Resistance to the dominant culture thus takes the form of demystification: expose children to sexuality and the naked body early so as to prevent the hang-ups and shame surrounding it. The old left’s treatment of sex is thus directly implicated in the project of Marxist ideological critique more broadly. A real-world example of such demystification is
Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of the films of the 1930s and 40s, which they claimed mobilized a form of prudish titillation—hinting at the possibility of sex without actually depicting it—in order to manipulate the consumptive habits of audiences.86
Unsurprisingly, a similar unpacking of, for example, the hidden messages and assumptions contained in advertising, is depicted as a major element of Daniel’s upbringing in the novel.
In contrast, Artie, whom Daniel envies for his perceived sexual potency, seems to re- mystify sex. This is demonstrated by Artie’s semi-threatening comments on sexual
85 See “Society Must Be Defended!” 86See “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” in The Dialectic of Enlightenment. 192
“liberation” given to the Cosmo writer during their interview: “’The first thing we’re going after is women’s magazines,’ he says. ‘Liberate those girls who write about sex and dating. We’re gonna pull off their pants and place daisies in their genitals’” (134).
Significantly, the magazine writers Artie speaks of are engaged in a similar process of sexual demystification to that of the Isaacsons: bringing sexual practices and desires into a public sphere where they can be critically assessed, even if the intent of such demystification is different. As an alternative to this project Artie doesn’t appeal to some abstract intellectual program, but rather relies on the oddly poetic and violent visual metaphor of “inserting” flowers into women’s genitals in order to demonstrate how his politics orientates itself to sexuality. In other words, what this passage subtly suggests is a transition from what might be described as a politics of ideas to a politics of aesthetics.
For Massumi, aesthetics, and therefore a politics of aesthetics, is concerned first and foremost with affective intensities. Massumi defines art, as an aesthetic form, as “the practice of packing an experience with contrast [specifically, contrasting affective potentialities] and holding [these affective potentialities] in suspense in a composition of signs: contriving the affective wave packet not to collapse, for an intensive interval”
(Power at the End of the Economy, 70; original emphasis). Such a “packing” of different affective responses on top of one another is produced by Artie’s metaphor, which contrasts suggestions of rape—and the affective responses which accompany them—with images of not only flowers but also the more peaceful or spiritual practices of 1960s radical movements in general.
The importance of such affective juxtapositions concerns how they contrast the neoliberal priming of affects. In contrast to neoliberalism’s directing of affects down 193 proscribed paths, art suspends them, opening up the possibility for their
“superposition”—literally, the dynamic juxtaposition of different, often contrasting bodily drives, habits and impulses—to resolve themselves in “creative” ways. Thus, an aesthetic politics would function in a similar fashion, promoting environments where the affective potential of individuals is consistently open to new possibilities rather than being channeled down pre-determined (economic) paths.
Notably, such an aesthetic is a prominent theme in the novel’s depiction of Daniel’s encounter with Artie. The most obvious example is the “art installation” created by
Artie’s “girl” Baby, covered in an eclectic “collage of pictures, movie stills, posters, and real objects” whose juxtaposition of affectively evocative images echoes Artie’s comments about “breaking” the flow of the system with “images” (135). More subtly, however, the novel also describes a perpetual buzz of what reads like affective energy in the air around Artie’s Tompkins Square tenement:
from it emanates a pulse of energy composed of music and shouting and the heat of many people. The world came to America down Avenue B. The bar across the street is crowded and Daniel can see through its window and old polished wood and tarnished mirrors, and the light of the TV screen. He suddenly sees the Lower East Side with Sternlicht’s vision: It is a hatchery, a fish and wildlife preserve. It seems created for him. With the poor people of this earth I want to share my fate. I tried to distinguish the sound from any one radio or record player, near or far. It was impossible. Music came from everywhere, it was like an electrification of the air. A burning up of it. amazing grace, amazing grace, there is still in this evening on the fire escape floating in the potsmoke like an iron cloud over Avenue B someone who knows what he says or does is important With importance his like or self concerned, and the surroundings are suddenly not obscure and the voice is amplified and a million people hear and every paint chip of the rusted fire escape its particular configurations and archeology is truly important. (138-9)
Critics have commented of this scene that the overlapping music of the radios in particular reflects a lack of depth—also found in Baby’s collage—suggestive of the a- 194 historicism of the New Left as well as the superficiality of postmodern aesthetics more broadly. In contrast, I argue that the descriptions of the overlapping of sights, sounds, and even haptic sensations contained in this passage are more evocative of the untapped affective potential of human bodies existing within and between the neighborhood’s inhabitants.87 Thus, what is interesting about this passage is not just its use, for example, of electricity as a metaphor for how the music seems to imbue the tenement with a sort of energy, but also how such metaphors are situated alongside those relating the maintenance of animal populations to Artie’s supposed urge to “share the fate” of the poor, as well as the historically evocative descriptions of the generations of such peoples entering the United States by means of New York’s Avenue B. As such, the passage suggests that what infuses the street is the affective life energy of the residents themselves, a form of bodily energy which Artie wishes to harness not through the disciplinary regimes of classrooms or prisons, but rather through the cultivation and subtle maintenance of life itself. Instead of a disciplined, united, and theoretically guided revolutionary movement, Artie’s dream is to inspire all the “freaks”—the “spics,”
“heads,” members of the “PLP,” the “Diggers like me,” and the “black deconstruct groups”—not to come together but rather to “get it together,” becoming, by means of their own affective potential, or the buzz of untapped energy which pulsates through the neighborhood, a “clear and present danger” to the system (134).
My assessment of Artie’s politics is thus quite different from that of readers like
Irom, who argues that Artie’s messianic egoism is indicative of the metaphysical bent of
87 For a more positive take on Artie and his politics see Lorsch. 195 his ideas. That Artie composes himself as a larger-than-life “celebrity” or “martyr” is unquestionable, as are observations about the overt sexism, homophobia, and perhaps racism of his character. Nor does the novel necessarily depict his politics as a successful direction for revolutionary action, though one could argue it doesn’t entirely dismiss such politics either. Regardless, I would like to suggest that what makes Artie’s political orientation significant is not its status as yet another metanarrative-like religion or the utopian possibilities of the law. Rather, Artie and his ideas present a potential alternative to such metanarratives, an alternative to a biopolitical turn in the very forms of state authority he seeks to resist. Indeed, Artie seems both attuned and receptive to the forms of biopower mobilized by neoliberalism, conceptualizing such authority as “momentum”:
“[in order to break authority] break the momentum. Legitimacy is illegitimate. Make it show its ass. Hit and run. You got forty seconds man. The media need material? Give them material” (139). In essence, what Artie advocates is a form of commercial resistance, revolutionary praxis understood not as a form of high-minded economic or political struggle, but rather as competition for access to affectively priming forty-second television spots. Thus, Artie sums up his politics as an effort to “overthrow the United
States with images!” (139).
Indeed, ironically the greatest problem with Artie’s politics concerns the affective body itself. Similar to the criticisms of lack of historical perspective on the part of Artie, and the New Left more broadly, one of the biggest problems the novel presents for the sort of affective politics described above concerns the histories immanent to the body itself. Throughout the novel, a frequent topic of contemplation for Daniel is the ostensibly self-destructive nature of the Isaacson family, and his own abusive tendencies. 196
In the case of the former, the metaphor of “heart” is commonly used to describe what
Daniel sees as a sort genetic predisposition toward self-inflicted ruin, as demonstrated in his “reading” of a medical diagram: “the meaning of the picture is in the thin, diagrammatic arrow line, colored red, that runs from Grandma’s breast through your mama’s and into your sister’s. The red line describes the process of madness inherited through the heart” (71). In this passage Daniel contemplates the family history of suffering as a form of madness. It is the “heart,” however, which is the most important metaphor, as it unites the materiality of the body not only with the life-force ostensibly animating it but also, relatedly, with the twin inheritances of genetic destiny and familial myth.
Likely more troubling for readers, however, are Daniel’s own depictions of his abusive behavior. Perhaps one of the most interesting examples, from the standpoint of embodiment, is a flashback where Daniel reflects on an incident where he threatens the life of his infant son. This event is prompted by an elderly woman who momentarily stops to admire the family, as Daniel gently tosses Paul into the air and catches him.
Implicitly triggered by the women’s approbation, Daniel suddenly begins to toss “my son higher and higher” until “the baby now shut his mouth, concentrating on his fear, his small face, my Isaacson face, locked in absolute dumb dread of the breath-taking flight into the sky and the even more terrifying fall toward earth” as Phyllis desperately tries to intervene (131). Significantly, in one of the few direct expressions of regret in the novel,
Daniel the narrator reflects of this moment: “I can’t bear to think about this murderous feeling. . . I can’t remember my thoughts. I think his weight, the heft of his little body 197 freaked me. I enjoyed the moment it left my hands and hated the moment it returned, with a shock to all the muscles in my arms.”
What is interesting about this scene from an affective standpoint is not just Daniel’s vague evocation of a “murderous feeling,” or the way his talent for explanatory insight seems to fail in this moment of reflection. It is also how embodiment, the physical weight of his son leaving his arms only to return, is intimately connected to the nebulous collections of motivations which drive Daniel’s behavior. Thus, it is not just what would typically be interpreted as the psychological effect of being observed, or the murderous feeling itself, which seems to compel the event, but also the sensory information of his muscles, dynamically intermingling with the aforementioned psychological and emotional elements, which produce Daniel’s violent actions. Thus, again we find the body inexplicably, but unquestionably connected to the troubling history of the Isaacson family. Indeed, this is not the only instance in the novel of “muscles” playing such a role in thought. After being adopted by the Lewins, for example, Daniel describes how the household is haunted by the “ghosts” surrounding the trial and execution of Daniel’s and
Susan’s parents: “These ghosts were ironies. These ghosts were slips of the tongue. They were the brutal meanings in innocent remarks. They were the necessity to remain sensitive to your own words and gestures. These ghosts clung to the roof of your mouth, and they hovered in your brain like fear, they resided in your muscles like nerves” (75).
Here again, cruel ironies and slips of the tongue are rooted in the material intricacies of the material body itself, its muscle tissues and nerves, which the “ghosts” of the past have ostensibly insinuated themselves into. 198
Significantly, this rooting of affective tendencies in muscle “memories” bears a number of similarities to the affective priming found in Disneyland. Not only do both seem to channel affective potentials down circumscribed paths—whether primed externally or produced by individual experiences of trauma—they also tend to direct the individual’s attentions inward, and away from other individuals either radically, in the form of Daniel’s violent treatment of Paul after being observed by the elderly woman, or more subtly in the form of the ironic and brutal comments which reinforce Daniel’s and
Susan’s isolation in the Lewin household. As such, a major theme of the novel is the tendency of the very affective energies Artie seeks to harness, to in a sense undergird the materiality of history itself: histories of suffering and abuse which seem to inscribe themselves within the body and which, if unchecked, will inevitably cause the mistakes of the past to repeat themselves.
3. Intersections of thought and affect
As the above readings demonstrate, a major theme of The Book of Daniel’s depiction of both the Old and New Lefts is the tendency of these movements to emulate the very forms of state and economic power they seek to resist: the regimenting of bodily habits and reason on the part of the former, and the manipulating of images and affects in the case of the latter. The novel, however, does not necessarily depict this mimicry as a problem in and of itself. Indeed, as Foucault himself comments of such apparatuses of power, “I do not think that it is possible to say that one thing is of the order of liberation and another is of the order of oppression. . . there always remain possibilities of resistance, disobedience, and oppositional groupings. On the other hand, I do not think that there is anything that is functionally – by its very nature – absolutely liberating. 199
Liberty is a practice.” (“Space, Power and Knowledge” 165). Similarly, I argue that, although The Book of Daniel doesn’t refrain from critical assessments of the left-wing political movements it depicts, the novel nevertheless refrains from categorically condemning either the methods or objectives of these movements. Rather, if the novel does present a holistic critique of 20th-century radicalism, I argue that this critique concerns how these movements understand, or perhaps misunderstand, the human subjects whose potential they seek to harness. Thus, the politics of the Old Left was confident in the idea of not just individuals, but the wider communities they comprise, responding to logic immanent within history itself, a dream brought low by the ostensible irrationality of reactionary, cold war America. Alternatively, the New Left’s vision of a radical politics of pure (affective) action, caricatured in the form of Artie Sternlicht, seems to neglect this notion of humans as historical beings altogether, a dismissal that not only consists of a disinterest in the broader history of human development but, perhaps more importantly, also neglects the biological and affective histories of the body itself.
Though Doctorow’s text unquestionably evinces a deep sympathy for such movements, it also seems agnostic about the possibility of a definitive solution to their flaws. Additionally, the novel’s ending seems to reaffirm this agnosticism, concluding with a series of ambiguous resolutions which vaguely gesture at the possibility of personal reconciliation with the past for Daniel, and a continuation of the broader struggles for social justice for which all of his immediate family suffered and died. In line with arguments like those of Irom and Chang, who respectively locate political 200 possibilities in the “ironic” and “literary” qualities of the text itself,88 however, I argue that the structure of The Book of Daniel suggests a productive way of thinking through the problems of subject which plague the novel. Specifically, I argue that the novel’s mobilization of the representations of embodiment appealed to throughout this dissertation serves as a way to conceptualize the relationship between abstract human thought and the bodily drives loosely associated with Massumi’s affect in this chapter. In doing so, I argue that the novel implies a model for how the creative possibilities inherent to the former might be conjoined with the powers of classification and strategic planning of the latter.
To begin doing so, it is worth considering once again Harpham’s arguments about the tension between “monstrous sequence” and “boring repetition” in the novel, as it is by means of this dichotomy that Harpham relates the narrative tensions of the novel to the theme of epistemology. As previously mentioned, for Harpham the root of this tension concerns the inner dynamics of narrative itself, narrative always being split between the forward motion of plot—i.e. “monstrous sequence”—and the need to produce meaning— i.e. the repetition of themes, metaphors, etc.—which fundamentally stalls this process.
Furthermore, Harpham argues that the novel attempts to resolve such tensions through the metaphor of electrical education, a “heuristic device” which serves to unite these concepts. He takes inspiration for this notion from the following passage, in which Daniel ruminates on the “inner workings” of education: “I wish I knew the secret workings in
88 In both cases, Daniel’s narration is presented as an alternative to the failures of these movements, either in the form of what Chang describes as Daniel’s socio-politically engaged literary writing, which “can be seen as a means though which intellectual and emotional modes of social experience are engaged between the writer and reader” (46), or in the form of what Irom claims is the “Daniel’s position can be read as approximating that of Richard Rorty’s ‘liberal ironist’ who also abandons all ‘final vocabularies’” (68). 201 the soul of education. It has nothing to do with time as we measure it. Small secret chemical switches are thrown in the dark. Tiny courses are hung through the electric passages of the tissues” (169). It is through this metaphor of chemical switches that
Harpham argues the novel solves the dilemma of how human experience, as a seemingly unceasing sequence of events, relates to meaning: electrical education unifies “sequence and repetition by reducing them to a single elemental action—the throwing of a switch in the passages of the tissues. At this micro level, we gain new knowledge and understanding through an action that is repeated constantly” (85). As such, for Harpham, the metaphor of electricity serves as a “master principle” of the text (88), an epistemological process which reconciles repetition with sequence, experience with meaning, if at the cost of “dissolving” the subject as an object of narrative representation due to this intense focus on electrochemical reactions.
Ultimately, the effect of this reading is to reduce the issues surrounding the ambiguities of narrative, and the question of a sustainable radical politics, in The Book of
Daniel to an “epistemological” problem: “Under this order narrative is not how institutions justify themselves [i.e. politics]; it is how we know” (86). He supports this argument by appealing to Daniel’s commentary on the limitations of radical thought:
With each cycle of radical thought there is a state of genuine creative excitement during which the connections are made. The radical discovers connections between available data and the root responsibility. Finally he connects everything. At this point he begins to lose his following. It is not that he has incorrectly connected everything, it is that he has connected everything. Nothing is left outside the connections. At this point society becomes bored with the radical. Fully connected in his characterization it has achieved the counterinsurgent rational that allows it to destroy him. The radical is given the occasion for one last discovery—the connection between society and his death. After the radical is dead the early music haunts his persecutors. And the liberals use this to achieve power. I have searched and searched for one story from history that is invulnerable to radical interpretation. (140) 202
As Harpham observes, this passage concerns not just the limitations of radical thought, but human thought in general: at the moment when any complex of connections, any conceptual model of the world, approaches the “fulfillment when everything is connected, [this] perfected system detaches itself from ongoing reality, losing its explanatory power. It becomes ‘boring’” (85). This passage thus presents one of the two poles of Harpham’s sequence/repetition continuum, the repetition of ideas, metaphors, or images reproducing themselves by meaningfully connecting otherwise meaningless sequences of events.
What his analysis of the passage misses, however, is the importance of the initial
“creative” moment of genius. If human cognition merely involved the experiencing of meaningless sequences of events on the one hand, and the process of reaffirming our preconceptions and using them to make connections on the other, then it would be impossible for new ideas to come into existence: a critical problem for a novel which explores the successive failures of radical politics in the United States. I argue, however, that the concept of affective creativity explored in the previous section suggests a potential solution to this problem: the possibility for the preconscious intuitions and instincts grounded in the preconscious affective body to provide moments of insight which, similar to depictions of Billy’s mathematical work in Ratner’s Star, ostensibly bleed into the conscious mind as a sort of epiphany. From this standpoint, it is such an affective body which prevents the theoretical abstractions of the conscious mind from ossifying and becoming “boring” remnants of a bygone era. 203
It is in such a notion of creativity that I argue an intersection between theory and affect, mind and body, can be found in The Book of Daniel. As previously discussed, for
Massumi creativity is fundamentally affective, much of what humans consider new ideas or revolutions in thought occurring at the level of “intuition,” or in other words the preconscious processes of embodied cognition.89 Alternatively, the role of thought for
Massumi is primarily corrective, clarifying, for instance, misidentified sources of affective potential.90 Though analysis arguably plays a far more robust role in The Book of Daniel than in Massumi’s theory of affect, I argue the novel nevertheless posits a similar relationship between bodily affects and conscious thought. Though analysis is indispensable for making connections, and accurately identifying not just the roots of social injustice, but also one’s relationship to such roots and possible avenues for change—work Susan’s “innocence” and idealistic thinking seem to preclude—moments of ostensibly spontaneous intuition or insight are nevertheless necessary to prevent reason’s “pictures” of the world from drifting too far from their referents. More than simply being an idea suggested by a few passages in The Book of Daniel, however, evidence of such a relationship between thought and affect, I argue, presents itself in the structure of the novel itself.
Returning to Harpham’s distinction between “monstrous sequence” and “boring repetition,” I argue that there are three basic forms of narration in The Book of Daniel, two of which correspond to the poles of Harpham’s repetition/meaning continuum. The first might be described as a realist style, in which Daniel reflects upon, and self-
89 See The Power at the End of the Economy 70. 90 See The Power at the End of the Economy 97-101. 204 consciously reconstructs, past experiences for the reader, recreating the monstrous series of events which led to the deaths of his parents. The second consists of what could be characterized as modernist moments of disembodied thought, or Harpham’s “boring repetition.” These take the form of didactic recitations on historical trends and events, or moments of philosophical pontification, which often rely upon the self-referential play of metaphors in order to develop complex systems of meaning. It is the third type of narration, however, that is of the most interest in this section. Such narration is presented from what might be described as the novel’s present moment of articulation—taking place between Memorial Day and Christmas 1967—as it is roughly from this temporal standpoint that Daniel narrates his story. Furthermore, as this period also corresponds to the attempted suicide and eventual death of Daniel’s younger sister Susan, this traumatic experience and the affects it evokes implicitly setting the stage for, or priming, Daniel’s examination of his parents’ executions and their effects upon his own life. Significantly, it is these affects which seem to produce many of The Book of Daniel’s most experimental elements, in particular, a tendency to switch from first-person narration to what might be described as a pseudo-naturalist third-person in which Daniel seems to distance himself from his own actions.
In contrast to this pseudo-naturalist style, most of the events taking place prior to the
1960s are narrated in what might be described as a realist narrative style, in which Daniel reflects upon, and self-consciously reconstructs, his childhood experiences surrounding the arrests, trial, and executions of his parents. Indeed, as expressed in interviews, it was precisely such a fictionalization of the Rosenberg trial that Doctorow initially sought to produce, before reaching the point of frustration with the limitations of this typically 205 historicist plot. It is such frustrations, Doctorow claims, that led to his discovery of
Daniel’s voice. Nevertheless, the realist tropes of this plot remain alongside The Book of
Daniel’s more experimental elements. Thus, in general the novel’s flashbacks to Daniel’s childhood read a lot like a work of social realism, which seeks to recreate both the cultural climate and the causal series of events which “monstrously” led to the executions of his parents. Central here is the mystery of Paul’s and Rochelle’s innocence or guilt.
The latter parts of the novel concern Daniel’s efforts to solve this riddle, humoring theories of another couple—possibly important Soviet spies—whose safety his parents either wittingly or unwittingly ensured through their unwillingness to co-operate with the
FBI. More importantly, such efforts also include tracking down Selig Mindish, whose testimony sealed the fate of Daniel’s parents during the trial. Daniel’s mission is thus very much one of realist demystification, unpacking a series of events and motivations which could lead to a moment of personal and textual anagnorisis.
It is precisely this moment of revelation, however, that the novel denies both Daniel and the reader. Instead of confirming Daniel’s suspicions that either one or both of his parents were innocent, Mindish proves too senile to confirm or deny any of Daniel’s suspicions about the trial. Even more troubling is Daniel’s meeting with Selig’s daughter
Linda, who is both unwilling to entertain what she considers Daniel’s exculpatory flights of fancy and, he realizes, “as locked into her family truths as we are locked into ours”
(275). Such elements of the novel are part of the reason why critics like Bernhard Reitz have argued that in the novel “the reconstruction of the fifties that unfolds in Daniel’s narrative has its counter movement in the deconstruction of those teleolgies of history that shaped the understanding of the western world” (229). In other words, Daniel’s 206
“present” philosophic ruminations on the nature of history and memory, as well as the metanarrative shifts in the first-, second-, and third -person voices throughout his narrative, deconstruct the notion of a recoverable historical past.
Thus, as Harpham suggests, one of the elements of the novel which contrasts the teleological realism of Daniel’s recollections is his metatextual commentaries and philosophical pontifications. Such asides are often intrusively interjected into The Book of
Daniel’s plot, creating moments of not just what Harpham might describe as textual meaning, but also moments of temporal suspension, in which Daniel the narrator considers, as we’ve previously seen, topics like the nature of the image or education in abstract and poetic terms. Such moments can thus be compared to what Lukacs somewhat unfairly characterizes as the tendency of modernist fiction to abstract characters from their social, material, and historical contexts, Daniel’s narrative voice entering a space of what might be described as pure, a-temporal thought. Indeed, as Reitz argues, despite The
Book of Daniel’s trappings of postmodern relativism, the narrating perspective of Daniel nevertheless provides the novel with a “unifying consciousness that mediates its own development” and thus provides a very modernist stabilizing epistemological point of view in the text (232). It is this point of view that comprises the other pole of what
Harpham characterizes as the novel’s depiction of human cognition. Rather than the metaphor of electrical education mediating between such moments of a-temporal thought, and the novel’s more typically realist representations of Daniel’s past, however, I argue that such mediation is achieved through what has previously been described as the pseudo-naturalist representations of Daniel being driven by preconscious, bodily affects. 207
Though I agree with Reitz’s claim that Daniel’s narration frequently provides a consistent epistemological perspective which helps lend the novel an impression of coherence, I disagree with his characterization of this voice being consistent throughout the novel. Rather, during descriptions of moments of intense feeling, Daniel’s conscious narration has a habit of detaching itself from what seem the precocious drives of the biological body in a manner reminiscent of Esther’s descriptions of mental illness in The
Bell Jar. Indeed, as previously demonstrated in the scene describing his compulsive tossing of his infant son Paul, Daniel is frequently at a loss to explain his more violent actions which at times seem to originate from within an almost alien body. A similar scene occurs when Daniel learns that his catatonic sister is to undergo electroshock therapy, a treatment reminiscent for him of his parent’s electrocutions:
He was screaming incompressible, making hoarse guttural sounds of rage, he was really behaving quite poorly . . . Somehow the young man had gotten it in his head that his sister, a patient in the sanitarium, was being considered for shock therapy. A strong electric current is applied by means of electrodes fastened to the scalp earlobes shoulders nipples bellybutton genitals asshole knees toes and soles of feet, to the nervous system of the patient. The patient does a rigid dance. The current is stopped and the patient relaxes. . . The young man was going after one of the doctors with an office in the professional building, a psychiatrist named Duberstein. He was going to kill this doctor Duberstein. In his zeal he forswore the professional directory in the lobby and simply went down the halls, flinging open the doors of the waiting rooms and treatment rooms. . . Had he been a killer he would have moved quietly. But preceded by his shock waves he alerted the supposed victim, sending the signal of the ritualistic nature of his fury. Not that Duberstein picked this up. His chair was warm and a manila folder lay open on his desk and his pipe smoke hung in the air. He was GONE! A lucky thing too, I would have killed him. (206) Like the description of Daniel’s “murderous” urge to harm his infant son, this scene presents a divide between what seem emotional or affective drives, and the relatively cool workings of Daniel’s analytical mind. In contrast to the former scene, however, in which
Daniel’s narration is firmly presented as reflecting on a past event, and is thus thoroughly 208 detached from the action, here these voices are tightly overlaid with one another. Thus, not only is Daniel’s “primitive” or “subhuman” rage described in a past-tense third- person, distancing both the narrator and reader from this “gutturally” driven anger. We also get present tense glimpses into the graphic and what seem involuntarily-produced mental images which, flashing through Daniel’s mind, drive this rage. Similarly, despite
Daniel’s reflective voice claiming that his rage is merely “ritualistic,” these reflections bleed into his present-tense exclamation at Duberstein’s absence from his office, and assurance to himself that “I would have killed him.” Such bleeding thus blurs what might otherwise seem a firm distinction between Daniel’s bodily-driven naturalistic rages, and the narrative voice which describes these incidents.
Such moments demonstrate the extent to which Daniel’s erratic emotional states and impulses provide the force behind The Book of Daniel’s narrative movement. Indeed, as previously mentioned, it is this voice, at times filled with guilt and compassion, but more often with uncontrollable rages or simmering cruel intentions, which Doctorow describes as salvaging the novel from mediocrity. Specifically, Doctorow claims to have discovered Daniel’s voice in a moment of “reckless, irresponsible, almost manic despair” brought about by his inability to compellingly novelize the Rosenberg case (McCaffery
35). According to Doctorow such frustrations are not unique to his experience writing
The Book of Daniel, as he claims that general emotional states of “recklessness or freedom” are a necessary component of his writing process. These moments seem particularly germane to The Book of Daniel, however, as Daniel’s voice, plagued with emotions like frustration, rage, and panic, is itself presented as driving Daniel’s
“composition” of the text—the novel itself implicitly being what Daniel is writing in lieu 209 of his dissertation. Furthermore, it is such affectively infused incidents of narrative voice which frequently seem to suture together the more realist cause and effect elements of the novel, with Daniel’s more “modernist” philosophical pontifications.
Examples of such suturing take many forms in The Book of Daniel, but always seem to involve intense feeling. One such example is an incident which takes place just after
Daniel and his family visit the diner where Susan attempted suicide, and involves Daniel driving his sister’s car at dangerous speeds while coercing Phyllis to remove her pants:
“Daniel pressed down further on the accelerator. Phyllis was sitting straight in the seat now with both feet on the floor her arms folded across her breasts. Daniel quietly explained to her the mechanical problems of the car: there was considerable play in the steering, the front wheels were unaligned, the brakes were worn and the tires slick” (58-
9). Here, not only does the narration switch to a disquieting third person but also, in
Hemingwayesque fashion, requires readers to fill in the motivations for Daniel’s ostensibly self-directed actions—seemingly connected to Susan’s suicide attempt and
Daniel’s ambivalent feelings about his family’s tragic history. This distance between
Daniel the narrator and Daniel the character thus lends an impression of inevitability to the scene, an impression furthered by the narration’s suggestion that the car itself guides
Daniel’s actions: “There was a wobble in the wheels, a small thrump-thrump at sixty- five. There was considerable play in the steering. Also a slight pull to the left when he touched the brakes. There were certain loosenesses in the car. It was a less than well- tuned, well maintained car. . . a reckless car. A car in character reckless” (55). The reckless character of the car, communicating it unreliableness to the driver in the form of physical feedback, thus seems to bleed into Daniel’s own reckless and cruel actions. As 210 such, in naturalistic fashion, the causal elements feeding into Daniel’s actions are overdetermined by the narration in such a way as to lend them an impression of what
Harpham describes as “monstrous sequence”: a series of events which indelibly lead to tragedy.
Though Daniel the character appears chillingly calm in this scene, however, Daniel the narrator is anything but. Eventually losing his cool at narrating these events to his implied reader, the narrator lashes out at this audience, accusingly inquiring “Who are you anyway? Who told you you could read this? Is nothing sacred?” (60). This outburst, once again blurring not only the divide between reader and narrator, but also between narrator and the events he is narrating, then immediately leads into an extended analysis of a scene from Luis Buñuel’s and Salvador Dalí’s film Un Chien Andalou, in which a woman’s eye is supposedly cut on film. 91 In excruciating detail the narrator describes how the film plays with the audience’s anticipation the scene, the moment before the eye is cut, transitioning to a “knifelike cloud . . . gliding across the bright orb of the moon,” only to return to the eye of the women “just as you, the audience, have settled for this symbolic mutilation,” a close-up then showing “the razor slicing into the eyeball” (61).
This device, seemingly inspired by the narrator’s momentary flash of anger, is used to play with the reader’s anticipation of what appears Daniel’s spontaneous decision to burn
Phyllis’s naked bottom with a cigarette lighter, the branding itself being conspicuously absent from the novel, leaving the reader to imagine what ultimately transpired between
Phillis and Daniel. Furthermore, the cut from the narrator’s accusations to the audience to
91 Obviously, the eye that was actually cut for the film was not a human eye. 211 this inventive literary device and the extended monologue used to describe it—which conspicuously floats outside the timeline of the events being narrated—is inspired by the narrator’s affective agitation at the content he describes, as well as his reader’s inferred reactions to this material. Such agitation thus both implicitly leads to a moment of creative insight into how to cruelly manipulate readerly receptions of this episode, as well as provides a bridge between the two types of narration found in the scene: the third- person description of Daniel’s actions and the monologue of the Buñuel film abstracted from it.
Of course, such affectively driven moments don’t just consist of Daniel’s rages, or affectively driven cruelties. While contemplating Susan’s attempted suicide, and their shared past, in his bedroom at their adoptive parents’ house, Daniel the character is described by Daniel the narrator as being overcome by an odd, and seemingly indescribable constellation of emotions:
Daniel tried to leave the window. He stared at the evening skyline, Boston’s lights glowing into the heavy atmosphere like the light of a furnace. It is a feeling with no bottom, no root, of no locus. It pulses out of him like a radio wave, out of all parts of him at once, and it needs. It disseminates, it is diffuse; and one moment he thinks it is something his heart wants the fullness of, and another that his arms want to hold, and for another moment it is something his cock wants to get into. But if he could accommodate any part of his body the feeling wouldn’t leave, it would still be there in all parts of him at once, each cell of his body radiating its passionate need. (218)
This episode seems driven as much by Daniel’s perception of the Boston skyline as by his inner turmoil, as the lights outside, radiating energy like a furnace, mimic the diffusion of sensations throughout his body. Additionally, the narrator doesn’t just describe this experience as an abstract set of emotions, but also connects this moment to the sensations—what Massumi would describe as the potential actions—of specific body 212 parts which both individually and collectively emanate some undisclosed “passionate need.” This surplus of emotions, bodily impulses, and perceptual stimuli thus makes this scene a compelling parallel to Massumi’s descriptions of affective intensities.
Significantly, it is this moment which seemingly inspires Daniel asks his stepfather about the details of his parents’ case, this conversation helping lead to his development of the
“theory of the other couple” and inevitably to his efforts to track down Mindish. Though ultimately failing to answer Daniel’s questions, this encounter, concluding with a kiss on
“the top of [Daniel’s] head” from the “palsied lips” of the man he long believed betrayed he parents, is nevertheless how Daniel comes to terms with the inability to fully know the facts behind his parents’ deaths (293).
Scenes such as these thus implicate affective bodily or intuitive “thinking” in the creative process, producing insights which, as Foucault similarly observes in other contexts, can be both liberatory and oppressive. Thus, I argue that if The Book of Daniel suggests, as Kwon argues, a way of “revitalizing” cultural possibility through the challenging of existing cultural norms, norms which, as this chapter demonstrates, are frequently embodied in the novel, then within the world of the text such revitalization must similarly take the form of the affectively driven insights described above.
Significantly, however, many such moments have negative consequences in the novel.
Thus Daniel the narrator, rationally following through the line of thought inspired by his flash of anger in the car scene, develops a literary device effective at unnerving his reader but which, much like his treatment of Phillis, primarily serves to victimize others— unsurprisingly, it turns out cruel forms of insight tend to lead to cruel systems of knowledge. Similarly, the moment of inspiration Daniel experiences in his childhood 213 room, though causing him to more productively engage with the traumas of his past, nevertheless leads to him developing propositions and theories which range far afield of this embodied moment, such speculative ruminations failing to yield satisfying conclusions. Thus, in both cases the rationalistic spiraling out of what seem precocious moments of insight leads to non-conclusions or ill effects, once again problematizing the capability of reason to create a better world, or even a better life, within the text.
In contrast to these examples, however, I would like to conclude this chapter with a more positive instance of affectively driven insight in The Book of Daniel. Unlike the scenes described above, this moment takes place during Daniel’s reflections on his childhood, specifically the incident of Paul’s arm being broken by the mob of “patriots” following the Robinson concert. Though Daniel later questions whether he was able to see his father in this moment, he nevertheless vividly recalls his father’s actions:
“Calmly, with his right hand, my father removes his glasses, folds them against his chest and hands them up to Mindish. The deliberateness of this act terrifies me. I see something
I don’t recognize, something I never knew with my child’s confidence in my perceptions of my parents” (51). Though the nature of Daniel’s memories of these events are vague,
Daniel’s narration nevertheless conveys that something important was contained in the
“ferocity” of Paul’s calm gestures, and the “commitment in his absurdly naked eyes,” which had a profound effect on not only Daniel, but also upon the socialist community which likely played a part in his reconstruction of the event. Daniel later reflects upon this moment as one of the few memories of his father—whose weak, utopian intellectualism Daniel frequently contrasts to his mother’s much more hardened and common sense radical sensibilities—of which he can be proud. His understanding of this 214 moment in which his father “got up to do something,” however, defies his capacity to for explanation, Daniel stating that “what he did was mysterious and complicated and not anything like what people were saying” (52). This is a mystery which continues to haunt
Daniel into his adult life, and it is in the contemplation of this mystery, despite its seemingly impenetrable complexity, where I argue the novel depicts a productive use of reason: the recognition of a moment in which his father as an embodied subject did the unexpected, and thus in a sense brought some new possibility into the world. Ultimately, it is the probing failures of reason to understand, and perhaps recreate, such moments, that the novel depicts as perhaps our finest inheritance as rational beings.
4. Conclusion
Much like The Bell Jar, and in contrast to Ratner’s Star, The Book of Daniel depicts embodiment by having its characters directly engage with an easily identifiable social world. This parallelism, alongside the similar critiques of American consumer culture offered by both novels’ first-person narrators, however, belies a major difference in how the body functions as a site of social critique in these works. Unlike the novels assessed in the first half of this dissertation, Daniel is concerned first and foremost with the problems of politics and group ethics, topics which are at most peripheral to the existential conundrums experienced by Plath’s and DeLillo’s characters. Furthermore, such differences have important implications for my analysis of representations of embodiment in the late 20th century novel. Thus, while the conclusion of Ratner’s Star gestures at the notion that human experience, as rooted in the body, might be a fundamentally intersubjective phenomenon, the novel nevertheless reads as the sort of high-minded thought experiment implicit in allegorical structure. In contrast, the shifting 215 narrative perspectives Daniel uses to describe his own motivations and actions, alongside the novel’s overarching depiction of how groups, political movements, and institutions differently exert power over individuals through the body, begins to move in the direction of depicting subjectivity in the embodied form suggested in the introduction: as a function of how one habitually orientates oneself to the surrounding social world.
Reading Doctorow’s novel through the lens of embodiment thus in a sense serves to reconceptualize Esther’s problem of how best to regulate one’s own habits, into a question of how and when to integrate oneself into the surrounding social order.
216
Ghostly Embodiments in Toni Morrison’s Beloved
The first three chapters of this dissertation assess novelistic representations of embodiment in terms of how they are employed as responses to the rapidly changing social, cultural, economic, and intellectual landscapes of mid to late 20th century
America. Thus, Plath’s The Bell Jar is read not only in terms of how embodiment serves to ground identity for a young woman coming of age in the increasingly alienating world of 1950s American consumerism, but also how the novel itself grounds the narrative tension between plot development and textual meaning through its contrasting depictions of Esther’s body. Similarly, my readings of DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star and Doctorow’s The
Book of Daniel demonstrate how these novels respectively root the incredible, imaginative world-building capabilities of the human intellect and, relatedly, the always vaguely utopian possibility of creating better societies, in the body. In each case, fictional representations of embodiment become tools for working out a series of social, philosophical, political and, perhaps most importantly, mimetic problems endemic to
American novel of the postmodern era. These problems can thus be usefully—if not exhaustively—understood in terms of Jameson’s critique of the postmodern condition as a breakdown in the ability of more traditional storytelling methods to adequately adapt the complexities of the contemporary world. As such a renewed interest in embodiment in these novels might be thought in terms of Jameson’s “cognitive mapping,”92 or the creation of new intellectual tools for conceptualizing the complex relationships of
92 See Postmodernism 52. 217 fictional characters—and by extension ourselves—to the increasingly complex social and economic world which surrounds them.
The final chapter of this dissertation takes a slightly different approach to addressing the role of embodiment in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. This chapter argues that both the (at times elusive) sense of self Esther Greenwood finds in embodiment, as well as the creative possibilities that Billy and, to an extent, Daniel locate in the intuitive, precognitive, and/or affective body, are shown in Morrison’s novel to be reliant upon the very forms of storytelling whose explanatory powers were called into question under late capitalism. Storytelling in Beloved is not primarily the isolated task undertaken by the alienated writers depicted in Plath’s, DeLillo’s and Doctorow’s novels. Rather, storytelling plays an essential social function in Beloved, taking place between embodied speakers and audiences rather than through the abstracting medium of the written word.
This depiction of storytelling as a fundamentally communal act thus also allows narrative to function as the means by which humans as embodied collections of undefined existential possibilities—what Massumi refers to as affects—enter into the social world around them, becoming subjects with hopes, wants, and ambitions as well as, in other cases, denying such possibilities. In doing so, I argue that Morrison’s novel serves as a refutation of the other major theme of this dissertation: neoliberalism, an ideology which both sees the unintelligibility endemic to Jameson’s postmodern condition as a feature, rather than a problem of contemporary capitalist cultures,93 and whose dissemination and
93 See The Birth of Biopolitics 178-80 218 self-maintenance as a cultural dominant takes, according to Foucault, embodied form in bio-power.
Though set over a century earlier in the 1870s, Morrison’s 1987 Beloved was written in the midst of Reagan’s revolution, and thus arguably neoliberalism’s ascendancy.94
Morrison’s forward to later editions of the novel evokes this very cultural context, claiming that it was her own recent liberation as a writer who could make a living writing
“that drew [her] thoughts to what ‘free’ could possibly mean to women”: “In the eighties, the debate was still roiling: equal pay, equal treatment, access to professions, schools . . . and choice without stigma. To marry or not. To have children or not” (xvii). Choice is of course a loaded term in modern American cultural discourse, echoing not only the reproductive rights slogans of the woman’s movement, but also Milton Freedman’s neoliberal touchstone, Free to Choose. It is thus from the perspective of a culture which not only makes offering “choices” the defining precept of a successful society, but also one that posits that individual choices, down to the minutest details of personal behavior, are the primary means of social and ethical evaluation, that Morrison chose to write about
“the different history of black people in this country—a history in which marriage was discouraged, impossible, or illegal; in which birthing children was required, but “having” them, being responsible for them—being, in other words, their parent—was as out of the question as freedom” (xvii-xviii).
Notably, in considering what it is to be a choosing subject from the standpoint of those invidiously denied the most basic freedoms, Morrison’s novel radically departs
94 The defeat, for example, of New Deal Keynesianism and the welfare-state by Milton Freedmen’s laissez faire economic and fiscal doctrines. 219 from the themes of disciplinary and biopower explored by Foucault, and thus to an extent the theoretical lenses used to assess the other novels assessed in this dissertation. Indeed, as recent commentators have noted, Foucault’s analysis of biopower, and relatedly, concepts of sovereignty, often exclude direct engagement with what Achille Mbembe characterizes as “states of exception”—“Nazism, totalitarianism, and the concentration/extermination camp”—in which the typical “rules” for the exercise of state power are held in abeyance (162). Such exclusions likely have something to do with
Foucault’s efforts to demonstrate how the cultural logics which produce such states of exception are deeply embedded in the “everyday” lifeworld of the contemporary societies which produced them.95 Nevertheless, I argue that in engaging a series of problematics deeply embedded in neoliberal ideology and conceptions of the subject through the lens of slavery, Morrison’s novel provides a challenge to neoliberalism as an ideology which ironically disavows the very forms of cultural affiliation, identity, and history denied
African slaves.
Indeed, much of the scholarship on Beloved relates in some way to its relationship to history, especially the elements of the novel suggestive of the “postmodern” instability of history also found in Ratner’s Star and Daniel. Kimberly Davis, for example, claims that
Morrison’s novel combines many of the elements of Linda Hutcheon’s “historiographic metafiction”96 with a commitment to African-American culture drawing upon “the best from both [to] make us question the more extremist voices asserting that our postmodern
95 See, for example, Foucault’s arguments about how racism is deeply embedded in the biopolitical ideologies and forms of analysis which undergird not only modern capitalist, but also socialist states, in “Society Must be Defended.” 96 See “Historiographic Metafiction.” 220 world is bereft of history” (243). Alternatively, critics like Elizabeth House have used creative readings to dismiss the aspects of Beloved which make it difficult to read as a work of historical realism. Specifically, House argues that the ostensible return of Sethe’s
(the main character) dead daughter should be read not in supernatural terms, but rather as
“a story of two probable instances of mistaken identity,” the young woman who appears to be Sethe’s daughter simply being a traumatized and confused young woman (122). In contrast to such debates, this chapter assesses the relationship of Morrison’s novel to its postmodern writing context terms its depiction of the institution of slavery itself: a collection oppressive social conventions and apparatuses which produced a waning of a sense of self and cultural history in its victims similar to the postmodern cultural critiqued by Jameson.97
Set in 1870s Ohio, much of Beloved concerns the painful memories of former slaves
Sethe and Paul D, whose formative years were spent on a Kentucky plantation called
Sweet Home. Following the death of Mr. Garner, Sweet Home’s relatively benevolent owner, the farm is taken over by the widower of Mrs. Garner’s sister, a man known only as “schoolteacher,” and his two nephews. Ruthless not only in his demands for obedience from Sweet Home’s slaves, but also his dedication to the scientific classification of their
“human” and “subhuman” traits, his arrival precipitates a disastrous attempt to flee
Kentucky to the freedom and relative safety of “free Ohio” and Canada. Though the plan includes all the Sweet Home slaves—including Paul D’s brothers (Pauls A, B and C),
97 This assertion isn’t made without some reservation. Though I think that comparing theories of postmodern culture like Jameson’s to Beloved’s representation of slavery’s effects on its victims is useful for reading key elements of the novel, I in no way intend to argue that life for the average person in late capitalist America is comparable to the experiences of slaves. 221
Sethe’s husband Halle and their children, as well as another man named Sixo—only
Sethe and her children ultimately escape the farm. Taking up residence in the home of
Halle’s mother, Baby Suggs, the freedom of the escapees is quickly challenged as, empowered by the recently passed “Fugitive Slave Act,” schoolteacher comes 28 days after Sethe’s arrival to reclaim them. Desperate to prevent their return to slavery, Sethe attempts to kill her children, injuring her two sons and successfully ending the life of her two-year-old daughter. Beloved’s narrative opens eighteen years after these events as
Sethe, abandoned by her two sons, lives alone as a social pariah with her remaining daughter, Denver, and Paul D unexpectedly arrives at her door. Much of the novel’s plot thus revolves around their efforts to form a heterosexual couple and come to terms with their personal and shared memories of the past.
Rather than presenting these memories, and the characters’ efforts to come to terms with them, in linear narrative form, however, Morrison’s novel relies upon two central conceits in order to thrust readers into the lives of its characters. The first is the novel’s framing of most of the significant events of these lives in terms of memories which not only have a phantasmagoric quality to them but also, as in Doctorow’s Daniel, frequently relate the process of remembering to embodiment. Even more significant to the novel’s depiction of embodiment, however, is the simultaneous framing of its story in terms of the haunting of Sethe’s home by the ghost of her dead daughter whom she posthumously named Beloved. It is by means of Beloved’s depiction of this haunting first as a disembodied “baby” ghost, then, following this ghost’s expulsion from the house by Paul
D, in the form of a body of a nineteen-year-old woman, that I argue the novel implicitly 222 presents a deconstruction of the neoliberal subject as a being of irreducible and non- transferable desires, which presupposes socialization.
To do so, I argue that the novel makes use of epistemological assumptions implicit in modern conceptions of ghosts. Not only do such ghostly tropes present spirits as reified emotions, they also, in a sense, mimic what have been described as realist representations of embodiment throughout this dissertation, such spirits, like many of the characters in
Ratner’s Star, being able to act on the world around them while simultaneously being disconnected from this world. The first section of this chapter thus contrasts the novel’s depiction of the disembodied baby ghost’s haunting of the house, with its depiction of
Beloved as an embodied, but nevertheless supernatural presence within the novel’s plot.
Here I argue that Beloved’s juxtaposition of these entities emphasizes how the novel’s narration roots the emotions and actions of its characters within the biological drives and affective intensities of the body. Thus, what are initially presented as the discrete emotions of the baby ghost—such as anger or sadness—seem far more nebulously defined when they are attributed to the embodied Beloved, in a manner similar to naturalist representations of embodiment. Similarly, as the novel progresses, the supernatural projections of the ghost’s will upon the surrounding world give way to more passive depictions of the effects of Beloved’s presence on the drives, psychologies, and emotions of those around her. Such juxtapositions thus, I argue, allow the novel to subtly deconstruct liberal conceptions of the subject which not only attempt to root human behavior in the sorts of irreducible emotions which the novel’s depiction of Beloved challenges, but also require that such subjects be conceptualized as purely independent actors. 223
Section two of this chapter similarly explores how the novel connects conscious thought to bodily experience in a manner reminiscent of the depictions of Esther
Greenwood and Billy Twillig. Like The Bell Jar in particular, this connection is depicted in part through the novel’s problematizing of its characters’ relationships to their own bodies reminiscent of theories about the effects of postmodern architectural spaces on late capitalist subjects. Thus, similar to Davis’s argument about the relationship of the novel to Hutcheon’s historiographic metafiction, this chapter places Beloved in conversation with postmodern theories of spatiality and its effects on the embodied subjects who occupy it. Specifically, I argue that the novel depicts the institution of slavery, both as a cultural phenomenon but also, importantly, as a form of control frequently enforced by means of punishment and confinement of the body, as producing a disconnect between mind and body comparable to—though obviously quite distinct from—that experienced by Esther Greenwood in Plath’s novel.
In contrast to the first two sections of this chapter, which make claims about
Beloved’s depiction of embodiment similar to those of earlier chapters, the final section argues that the importance of storytelling in the novel adds a layer of inter-subjective depth to its depiction of embodied subjectivity. Specifically, I argue that storytelling in
Morrison’s novel is presented as having two united, yet paradoxical functions within the text. So, while other character’s attentions and interpretations of her presence seem to provide Beloved a form of interpersonal and cultural meaning—as well as implicitly help to maintain her existence within the world of the text—such interpretations nevertheless inherently tend to misidentify or misinterpret elements of her being. Thus, storytelling is presented as having the capacity to both reinforce one’s presence and identity within a 224 community, while also implicitly inflicting a form of violence on this identity.
Furthermore, I argue that this dual aspect of storytelling has implications not only for the novel’s depiction of the history of slavery, which simultaneously must be told and resists telling, but also for its depiction of the existential crises and struggles of its other major characters.
1. Neoliberalism and the spectral metaphor
My reading of Beloved’s ghostly tropes takes inspiration from Erickson’s claims about the function of spectral metaphors in the novel. Specifically, Erickson argues that the status of ghosts as beings that bridge ontological realities serves to concretize the inner works of metaphor whose structural tension between vehicle and tenor similarly connects two radically distinct frames of reference. Applying this framework to
Morrison’s novel, he argues that ghostly metaphors serve three different, but related, analogical purposes within the text. The first is the manifestation of otherworldly presences within the novel, such appearances mimicking Beloved’s filling in of the “gaps and absences in knowledge” surrounding individuals’ experiences of the history of slavery. The second concerns what Derrida notes is the deconstructive nature of metaphor, and therefore language itself, an element of the novel which echoes its engagement with postmodern conceptions of history like Hutcheon’s. In particular,
Erikson argues that the inherently deconstructive tendency of metaphor to erase its vehicle in order to “breathe” conceptual life into its tenor is used by Morrison’s novel to emphasize the “provisional” nature of its historical recovery project, “the novel’s self- reflexive recognition of its metaphorically speculative response to the uncertain and obscured historical reality of slavery” (97). Finally, Erikson argues that the implicit 225 excess of the spectral metaphor, like metaphor itself, always implies some sort of conceptual “excess” or remainder, again mirroring the ambiguities surrounding Beloved’s complex relationship to the histories which it seeks to reproduce, but which always elude its grasp.
For this section, my interest in Erikson’s reading primarily concerns his arguments about how both metaphors and spectral tropes make present absences—though the other elements of his assessment of the spectral metaphor prove useful elsewhere in this chapter. Of particular importance here is how tropes common to ghost stories closely mimic neoliberal conceptions of the subject, conceptions which I argue Morrison’s novel subtly deconstructs as it transitions from depicting Beloved as the disembodied spirit of
Sethe’s deceased baby, to presenting her as an embodied nineteen-year-old woman. As
Erickson notes, in the Victorian era ghosts were reconceptualized from being a sort of emissary from another world who interjects itself into the affairs of men, to being a disembodied emotional presence emblematic of the possibility of life after death and an eternal soul—ideas which were being called into question at the time by a variety of scientifically-grounded materialisms. Thus, A Dictionary of English Folklore describes
Victorian theories of ghosts as “redefining apparitions as not involving the actual presence of dead persons, but merely some kind of mental flash-back whereby the percipient ‘sees’ a past event ‘imprinted’ on the surroundings by the emotional energy it once generated” (143). In other words, hauntings were emotional residues directly tied to past events which took place at the location of the haunting—a concept similar to Sethe’s notion of rememory addressed later in this chapter—events which, despite the inability of 226 such apparitions to directly communicate their motivations, nevertheless implied some sort of narrative motivation for their presence.
This idea of ghosts being a trace of emotional content left behind as an implicit marker of an eternal soul bears striking similarities to neoliberal conceptions of the subject, according to which individuals are first and foremost desiring or emotional beings. As both Massumi and Foucault point out, despite having no relation to spiritualist efforts to prove the soul’s immortality, neoliberal conceptions of the subject are nevertheless predicated upon theorizing emotional drives which both serve as an irreducible monad motivating a subject’s actions, and which are functionally indistinguishable from reason. Thus, like conceptions of ghosts which manifest themselves as emotional responses to events typically lost to the past, neoliberal economic subjects act upon emotions which presuppose a fundamentally unknowable, but nevertheless implicitly rationally motivated subject whose desires are nevertheless similarly inaccessible to external analysis. As such, both neoliberal conceptions of the subject and the spectral metaphor function as conceptual apparatuses that explain or
“make present” an essential kernel of subjectivity; a kernel which both roots human motivations and actions in an essential animating core of existence, while simultaneously excluding this core from rational analysis and thus critique or demystification.98
Furthermore, both the Victorian ghost and the neoliberal subject tend to act upon the world in a manner akin to what are referred to throughout this dissertation as realist tropes of embodiment, in which bodies are conceptualized first and foremost as vehicles
98 Additionally, like the neoliberal subject, such ghosts are ultimately transactional beings, rituals like seances and exorcisms often attempting to appease the desires of such spirits in exchange for silence. 227 for the acting out of subjective desires. Similarly, the ghost which can’t be physically acted upon, and the neoliberal subject who must ideally be free from outside influences or fetters on their behavior, are understood by others primarily in terms of the effects of their emotionally-driven acts upon the world around them.
Unsurprisingly, the baby ghost haunting 124 is depicted as exactly this type of emotional presence. Like the depiction of many of the researchers populating FENO in
DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star, the baby spirit primarily exerts a unidirectional force on the world around her, throwing objects, issuing disembodied cries, and producing sourceless pools of “red and undulating light” (10), suggesting to both readers—who are denied details of the ghost’s history until the latter half of the novel—and outsiders to the house like Paul D, a “story” behind this spiritual presence which both motivates the ghost’s actions while simultaneously eluding rational understanding. Furthermore, even though the motivations for these emotional outbursts are nebulous, they are nevertheless described in terms of concrete emotions by the novel’s characters, or as Massumi would argue, the ossified “emotions” which result from affects being channeled down paths conducive to pre-existing interpretive frameworks—in other words, the assumption that the ghost’s presence presupposes a specific, and to some extent stereotypical, story of human wrongdoing. The narrator thus describes Denver’s habit of approaching 124 not as a house, but as “a person that wept, sighted, trembled and fell into fits” (35). Similarly, the novel opens with the description of the house as full of “spite,” and Sethe initially describes the ghost as “not evil” but “just sad” to Paul D (3, 10).
Such depictions of the ghost begin change, however, after the unexpected appearance of Beloved at 124 early in the novel. While entering Sethe’s household in the bodily form 228 of a 19-year-old woman—and presumed by Sethe and Paul D to be suffering from sort of fugue—Beloved’s interactions with the world appear similarly disembodied, as if calling her status as a corporeal being into question. Not only are her movements frequently depicted as being entirely silent, giving her the ghostly ability to seemingly appear and disappear at will; like the baby ghost, she also seems to possess the ability to project her will upon the world around her. Additionally, like those of her ghostly counterpart, such
“disembodied” acts share an interesting relationship with the realist representations of embodiment described in the introduction. Thus, though she is ostensibly corporeal,
Beloved’s actions manifest themselves as supernatural projections of will. The most overt example of such actions is the scene in which Sethe’s neck is first massaged, then strangled by spectral hands during an outing with Beloved and Denver. This touch, “so light” as to seem “childlike,” is first mistaken by Sethe as belonging to the spirit of Baby
Suggs, come to comfort her, but soon grows “harder” as “the fingers [move] slowly around toward her wind pipe” causing her to lose consciousness (112-3). Following the incident, Denver confronts Beloved about this ostensible attempt on Sethe’s life, “I saw your face. You made her choke” (119), an accusation which the supernatural aspects of the novel incline readers to believe. Beloved is thus, like the ghost, presented as a supernatural actor capable of projecting her will upon the exterior world.
Already, however, this scene begins to complicate such depictions of Beloved as a supernatural presence. Not only does the strangulation begin as a message, implying a competing set of drives guiding her action; afterwards Beloved proceeds to massage
Sethe’s neck to “fix” the damage, thus progressing toward more “embodied” depictions of Beloved as an actor. Additionally, the narration also begins to link such impulses not 229 to the types of discrete emotions implicitly connected to some narratively interpretable event from the past, but rather to the sort of nebulous collections of bodily drives
Massumi describes as affective intensities. As she massages Sethe’s neck, for example,
Beloved grows so immersed in her actions that leans over to kiss “the tenderness under
Sethe’s chin.” Significantly, this action suggests both the idea of nursing—“[Sethe] later believed it was because the girl’s breath was exactly like new milk that she said to her, stern and frowning, “You too old for that”—as well as Sethe’s slitting of Beloved’s throat when she was an infant, implicating a variety of competing desires driving her actions, some of which are unequivocally linked to bodily needs for sustenance and, perhaps just as significant, comforting interpersonal contact (115).
Indeed, as the novel progresses, depictions of Beloved’s actions become increasingly ambiguous in their origins and effects and thus, like the scene above, begin to call into question the cause-and-effect teleology of spectral tropes, which assume that a ghost’s actions are fundamentally grounded in some emotion-inducing event. Such a connection between embodiment and emotion is most superficially evoked by the novel’s depiction of Beloved’s insatiable consumptive needs. Upon her initial appearance at the house, for example, Beloved evinces an insatiable thirst, gulping "water from [a] speckled tin” and holding “it out for more”: “Four times Denver filled it, and four times the woman drank as though she had crossed a desert” (62). Furthermore, following her convalescence from her initial bedridden state, this thirst is immediately replaced by an insatiable hunger for sweets which for the remainder to the novel can always be counted upon to make
Beloved “happy”—indeed, such emphasis on the relationship of food to emotional states 230 also adds another layer to Beloved’s tempestuous shifts in mood and greedy eating habits late in the novel when the text suggests she is pregnant.
More than this emphasis on consumptive needs, however, the connection between
Beloved’s emotions and embodiment is more suggestively reinforced through the novel’s use of synesthetic words and phrases which often blur the distinction between biological drives and abstract desires.99 Shortly after Beloved’s arrival at 124, for example, the narrator describes Sethe being “licked, tasted, eaten by Beloved’s eyes” (68), the latter’s cravings for stories about her mother’s life often being described in terms of “thirst” or
“hunger” (69). Such descriptions suggestively move the novel’s displacement of
Beloved’s need for Sethe away from cultural narratives about vengeful, or tragically abused spirits, to a much more bodily emphasis on the physiological needs of infant children.100
The frequent use of such synthesthetic phrases can also be usefully related to
Massumi’s comments on the relationship of synesthesia to affect in order to consider how they contribute to what I argue is the novel’s depiction of Beloved as an overdetermined confluence of internal and external forces akin to naturalist representations of embodiment. For Massumi, synesthesia provides a context for theorizing philosophical implications of what he terms the virtual, or in essence how a series of contrasting desires, drives, processes etc. can mutually determine one another while simultaneously
99 Though such terms are consistent elements of Beloved’s narration, they are by far most prominent in the novel’s frequent descriptions of Beloved as a desiring being. 100 Sethe thinks to herself, contemplating on these events, “nobody was going to nurse her like me. Nobody was going to get it to her fast enough, or take it away when she had enough and didn’t know it. Nobody knew that she couldn’t pass her air if you held her up on your shoulder, only if she was lying on my knees. Nobody knew that but me and nobody had her milk but me” (19). 231 remaining distinct. In the context of the senses, he describes such intersections of sensorial processes as the “virtual conditions for the senses’ operating separately- together” (283)101 or, in other words, our ability to see, for example, texture:
this ability to see new tactile qualities depends on past touchings of other textures and movements providing continuous visual-tactile feedback. You have to know texture in general already before you can see a specifically new texture. But that doesn’t change the fact that once you can generally see texture, you see a texture directly, with only your eyes, without reaching. Vision has taken up a tactile function. It has arrogated to itself the function of touch. (158)
This notion of past sensorial experiences in a sense infecting subsequent perceptions adds a layer of interpretive depth to Massumi’s theory of affect, as it characterizes what he terms “virtual mixing” or, in other words, how the virtual conditions of possibility for experience become experience, yet are distinct from it: “The notions of superposition and interference together express the idea that the virtual, or conditions of emergence, can neither be separated from nor reduced to the actual, or the conditions of empirical functioning. There is a real difference between them that depends on their coming- together on some level.” (159) In other words, for Massumi, synesthesia serves as a means of conceptualizing how abstract possibilities become concrete occurrences which simultaneously include and exclude these abstract possibilities.
Such theories serve as a useful model for considering how Beloved implicitly structures the relationship between naturalistic representations of bodies as overdetermined excesses of both endogenous and exogenous desires, drives, etc. and
101 In essence, for Massumi the virtual space which comprises the conditions of possibility for perceptual experience, and which consists of a dynamically intersecting series of perceptual potentialities which cannot be reduced to cause-and-effect relationships, can be thought of as bisecting the teleological “world” of concretely identifiable perceptual experience. As such, according to Massumi, perception is the process of directing the chaos of the perceptual field down innately reductive interpretive paths, understandable in terms of discrete cause-and-effect relationships in the material world. 232 more realist representations of embodiment, i.e. depictions of characters possessing discretely identifiable and easily comprehendible motivations within the text. In the novel, Beloved’s desires, implicitly infused with bodily experiences by means of synesthetic words, do not take the form of the sorts of discrete, easily identifiable emotions which previously seemed to typify the baby ghost’s disembodied presence in
124. Instead, such desires tend to be presented as ineffable wells of need explicitly connected to Beloved’s body. Thus, feeling Beloved’s touch upon her shoulder, “no heavier than a feather but loaded, nevertheless, with desire,” for example, Sethe turns to look into Beloved’s eyes: “The longing she saw there was bottomless. Some plea barely in control” (69). This lack of control resembles moments in naturalist fiction which blur the distinctions between characters and environment (or in this case Sethe), and between self-directed behavior and various forms of endo- and exogenous determinism. Out of this chaos of bodily drives, however, a discrete fixation inevitably emerges: Beloved asks
Sethe “where are your diamonds,” initiating a specific form of interchange with the object of her desire, which leads to a narrativizable series of events: Beloved’s inauguration into the world of storytelling which becomes yet another “way to feed her”
(69). The irreducible constellation of desires which inspire Beloved’s visual “tasting” and
“licking” of Sethe is never entirely erased from this particular manifestation of desire, however, as the complex of embodied desires, and related sensorial experiences which feed into the moment of the request, continues to hover about the act of storytelling in the forms of the novel’s persistent use of synesthetic metaphors.
This notion of Beloved being driven by a constellation of complex drives akin to
Massumi’s affect is similarly supported by what Paul D construes as her sexual arousal. 233
Significantly, such arousal isn’t interpreted in terms of interpersonal exchanges or social cues, but rather concerns changes in the physical qualities of Beloved’s skin which Paul
D associates with strawberry plants: “Women did what strawberry plants did before they shot out their thin vines: the quality of the green changed. Then the vine threads came, then the buds. By the time the white petals died and the min-colored berry poked out, the leaf shine was gilded tight and waxy. That’s how Beloved looked—gilded and shining”
(76). This comparison of the vines of reproducing strawberry plants to Beloved’s
“aroused” complexion is particularly suggestive because such plants are one of the living entities least susceptible to andromorphic ascriptions of emotion or agency. The comparison thus emphasizes how Paul D roots sexual attraction in the preconscious physiological processes of the body, rather than presenting it as a discretely identifiable emotion susceptible to conscious reflection—an existentially troubling proposition for
Paul, whose conception of himself as a “man” is tied to his ability to control his sexual urges. Furthermore, the comparison also draws attention to how such responses are closely tied to the surrounding environment, as the reproductive cycles of strawberry plants are intimately connected to changes of the season, a point to which Paul’s detailed attention to the different reproductive stages of strawberry plants calls attention.102 This scene is thus indicative of Beloved’s broader tendency to strategically call the agency, and by extension the humanity, of its characters into question in a manner reminiscent of naturalist determinisms. Additionally, it serves as a demonstration of how the novel tends
102 Also worthy of note is how Beloved’s “arousal” is not associated with the only reproductively eligible male in her presence—notably, he also associated such shining with the “thirty-mile woman” who similarly shines for Sixo—but rather her mother Sethe, further complicating the origins and function of what Paul D nevertheless takes as an unmistakable human emotion. 234 to depict Beloved “acting” upon others, her “shining” having a distinct effect on Paul himself, who takes “to having Sethe on waking, so that later, when he went down the white stairs where [Sethe] made bread under Beloved’s gaze, his head was clear” (76).
Thus, in contrast to both realist representations of character and Victorian-style ghost stories, as the disembodied ghost manifests itself as Beloved and thus a body, descriptions of her evincing discrete emotions like anger or sadness give way to depictions of her being driven by drives more directly connected to the biological needs of the body (10). The spectral trope of the novel therefore functions not only to subvert the realist representational impulse of a text which otherwise reads as “a detailed and relatively faithful engagement with the reality of ninetieth-century African American life” in order to emphasize the ambiguities surrounding historical realism (Erickson 68).
It also subverts what Lee Clark Mitchell observes is the tendency of realist narratives to privilege overt actions—or more often inaction—when ascribing culpability to characters.103 In contrast, as Kevin Trumpeter claims, naturalist novels tend to overdetermine events, calling the possibility of culpability into question altogether, therefore leading to the impression of determinism found in these works. Beloved’s spectral tropes thus allow the novel to conspicuously contrast these different ways of depicting how humans interact with the world around them. Additionally, in doing so I argue the novel’s narration also begins to increasingly challenge not just conceptions of ghosts, but more importantly the idea of a closed liberal subject to which such tropes bear strong resemblance.
103 See Determined Fictions 7, 10-12. 235
Equally important to the ambiguities surrounding Beloved’s motivations, however, are the ambiguities of whether is acting at all. Such ambiguities are perhaps best demonstrated by what Paul D perceives as Beloved’s efforts to remove him from 124 and later seduce him. Significantly, Paul D’s descriptions of these events both decisively attribute his expulsion to Beloved, as well as acknowledge his inability to prove— particularly to himself—her culpability: “She moved him. Not the way he had beat off the baby ghost—all bang and shriek with windows smashed and jelly jars rolled in a heap. But she moved him nonetheless, and Paul D didn’t know how to stop it because it looked like he was moving himself” (134). Here Paul attributes his slowly moving out of
Sethe’s home to Beloved “moving” him, a word whose ambiguity implies both a physical act, as well as an ability to spark an emotional response in others.104 The actual description of Paul’s prolonged exit from the house, however, is narrated as having little to do with Beloved. Thus, in contrast to Paul’s exorcizing display of violence through which he initially expels the “baby ghost” from the house, his own removal from 124 seems to take the form of the very wanderlust which compelled his transient lifestyle prior to his arrival. Thus, at first feeling too comfortable to leave a rocking chair and climb the stairs to Sethe’s bed, Paul begins to sleep there each night before, one evening,
“irritable and longing for rest” he decides to sleep even further away from Sethe in Baby
Suggs’s former bed (135). Eventually taking up residence in the storeroom outbuilding, he reflects on his actions, and how they do not seem driven by the “house-fits, the glassy
104 This ambiguity concerning the word “moving” is also noted by Jean Wyatt, whose reading of this and similar “embodied” metaphors is explored in section two of this chapter. 236 anger men sometimes feel when a women’s house begins to bind them.” Rather, despite his yearning to be with Sethe, he finds himself being moved further and further from her.
As such, similar to the way in which Beloved’s motivations are incapable of being reduced to discrete emotions, the novel’s “deconstruction” of its supernatural elements, and specifically its movement away from depicting Beloved projecting her will upon the world around her, helps to illuminate how its depiction of human agency contrasts
(neo)liberal conceptions of the subject, a subject for whom motivations must come first and foremost from within. Indeed, such a reading is further encouraged by Beloved’s subsequent seduction of Paul. Shortly after he takes up residence in the storeroom,
Beloved approaches Paul in the night asking him “to touch me on the inside part and call my name” (137). This encounter proves to be the culminating event of Paul’s existential crisis, his inability to refuse Beloved’s advances, “Fucking her when he was convinced he didn’t want to” not only making him question if “schoolteacher was right” to dismiss his humanity, but also, unbeknownst to Paul, causing the “flakes of rust” to fall away
“from the seams of his tobacco tin” heart in which he had stored accumulated years of suffering (138). This scene thus concludes a progression over the course of three brief chapters in which Beloved’s ostensibly supernatural power over others transitions from spectral hands choking Sethe, to her supposedly manipulating Paul’s urge to move further and further from Sethe, and finally to the much more mundane “power” of a young woman to sexually entice an older man.
2. The disembodiments of slavery
Though less overt than the mobilization of spectral tropes to subtly connect both
Beloved’s emotions and interactions with the surrounding world to the affective body, I 237 also argue that Morrison’s novel similarly suggests a relationship between the body and the symbol-processing mind. Thus, much like how the narration of the other novel’s assessed in this dissertation frequently depict embodiment as being closely connected to the more abstract elements of human consciousness, in Beloved the body is intimately connected to abstract concepts like characters’ conceptions of self, as well as the novel’s own depiction of history. Such claims about Beloved’s depiction of conceptual knowledge are not, however, unique. Indeed, questions concerning the formation and dissemination of new ideas and forms of cultural knowledge are of central concern to a good deal of criticism on the novel. This is due in part to such themes dovetailing with numerous issues surrounding the history of slavery and discrimination addressed by the novel: how, for example, concepts like universal human rights—central to the foundation of American democracy—are formed, policed, and changed over time. Thus, feminist critics like Drusilla Cornell and Susan Babbitt have explored the topic of concept formation from the standpoint of the epistemological cleavages between myths—in the case of Beloved, specifically what Cornell describes as the myth of the killing mother— and their retelling in new literary and/or fictional forms. Cornell argues that it is in the divergences between these received cultural narratives and their re-telling that new conceptual knowledge can be formed, thus allowing for resistance to the racialized and sexualized prejudices she claims are often embedded in language itself.
In contrast to such readings, this chapter places a great deal more emphasis on the role of the body and bodily experiences in the formation of conceptual knowledge and 238 meaning in Beloved.105 Thus, similar to how the The Bell Jar’s depictions of the
“hullaballoo” of New York and Esther’s bathing suggest an embodied origin to linguistic meaning reminiscent of Lakoff’s and Johnson’s cognitive metaphor theory, I argue that meaning in Morrison’s novel is closely linked to the bodily affects and actions previously explored in this chapter. My assessment of the novel thus in some ways resembles Jean
Wyatt’s Lacanian reading, though I disconnect the relationship between embodiment and conceptual knowledge from the psychoanalytic drama of childhood development. A central component of Wyatt’s argument concerns the novel’s use of metaphor, which she claims suggests a bridge between an infant’s total identification with its mother’s body and its inauguration into the paternal symbolic, which compensates for the loss of this sense of wholeness. Specifically, she argues that when the novel focuses on its spectral themes,
metaphors abandon their symbolic dimension to adhere to a baseline of ‘literal meaning.’ For instance, a figure of speech in which weight usually means "responsibility" turns out to describe only the physical weight of Sethe's breasts (18). A similar "literalization" of spatial metaphors mimics the materializations in the haunted house: the phrase "she moved him" indicates not that Beloved stirred Paul D's emotions but that she physically moved him, from one location to another (114). The continual shift from the abstract to the concrete creates the illusion of words sliding back to a base in the material world, an effect congruent with Morrison's emphasis on embodiment-on both the physical processes of maternity and the concrete presence of the ghost. (Wyatt 475)
According to Wyatt, in addition to providing a set of tools for linguistically tackling the absent elements of the history of slavery, such “materializations” of metaphor allow readers to better understand the development of Beloved’s and Sethe’s relationship.
105 Such a relationship between the body and conceptual knowledge is suggested by Erickson’s observations about the role of metaphor in helping to address ideas, experiences, etc. that one might otherwise lack the linguistic or conceptual tools to adequately express. 239
Specifically, she argues that this relationship takes the form of what she describes as the
“maternal symbolic,” in which there is a “softening” of Lacan’s “opposition between bodily communion and the abstractions of verbal exchange” (484). Thus, for Wyatt the refusal of language to entirely shed its relationship to the body in Morrison’s novel implies a form of linguistic expression which, unlike the paternal symbolic, doesn’t negate the materialistic qualities of the nurturing body which remains as an essential residue of linguistic communication.106
Such claims are thus similar to Lakoff’s and Johnson’s cognitive metaphor theory, in which they argue that abstract concepts are inevitably rooted in bodily experience with an important exception: that the latter does not rely on the psychodrama of the inevitable separation of the infant from the maternal body. Rather, for Lakoff and Johnson, the rooting of symbolic knowledge in the body would happen regardless of whether or not a child was raised by a mother. Similarly, it is Wyatt’s totalizing emphasis on the psychoanalytic drama of subject formation that my reading of Beloved as a ghostly body moves away from. Rather, I interpret the novel’s depictions of a constitutive relationship between bodily experience and abstract or symbolic consciousness in terms of Beloved’s mobilization of postmodern tropes such as Jameson’s claims about breakdowns in
106 This mother-child drama is central to Wyatt’s assessment of the events leading up to Beloved’s climax. In late sections of the novel, Sethe’s recognition of Beloved as her lost daughter allows an almost parasitic relationship to develop between them. Here, Sethe’s desire to give of her self in recompense for Beloved’s murder is matched by Beloved’s bottomless need for bodily sustenance and (maternal) nurture. Wyatt interprets this as a mutual yearning for a sort of pre-symbolic mother-daughter unity. Furthermore, she argues that the implied tragedy of such unity concerns its disavowal of the space between self and other necessary for recognition of the other’s rights and status as an autonomous being. This interpretation explains Beloved’s increasingly abusive treatment of Sethe, a radicalization of the trope of the demanding child and self-effacing mother, a reading of the novel supported by the possessive statements ostensibly attributed to Beloved, as well as Sethe’s own justification of the “selfish” and expansive love which inspires her decision to kill her children rather than letting them be taken into slavery (191).
240 symbolic meaning leading to a lack of subjective depth, ideas which this dissertation previously explored in the context of The Bell Jar.
Thus, as mentioned in the introduction, I argue that how slavery provides a useful way of thinking through, and ultimately challenging postmodern theories of history, can be extended to theories on how postmodern culture affects space and, relatedly, embodiment, in the latter half of the 20th century. In particular, Beloved’s evocation of how the intuitions and apparatuses of slavery in a sense function to disembody its victims is comparable to Jameson’s claims about the alienating architectural spaces of postmodern culture for which he claims, “we do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match” (38). For Jameson such defamiliarizing spaces are very much related to the broader breakdown in the symbolic meaning which characterizes postmodern culture, breakdowns in conceptions of both historical and subjective depth implicitly being connected to the inability of subjects to perceptually orientate themselves to the surrounding world. Similarly, the dehumanization of Beloved’s characters under slavery takes a similar embodied form—though one that is if anything far more alienating and dehumanizing.
One of the most explicit examples of this is the description of the prison camp in
Alfred, Georgia, where Paul D is sent after a failed attempt on his master’s life. Here, not just the physical abuse, but also the isolation of the prisoners, plays an important role in psychologically breaking them. Literally burred in their cells, which take the form of
“five feet deep, five feet wide” wooden boxes sunken into the red Georgia soil, the novel depicts these “grave”-like quarters, which deny any sort of bodily contact between the inmates, as an essential element in the Paul’s deterioration to a sort of sub-human state 241
(125). Specifically, after being left in the box for days on end during a rainstorm, Paul loses all sense of himself as a cohesive bodily being, conceiving his thoughts and actions as being conspicuously detached from one another: “Paul D thought he was screaming; his mouth was open and there was this loud throat-splitting sound—but it may have been somebody else. Then he thought he was crying. Something was running down his cheek”
(125, 129). The tendency of bodily restraint to destroy one’s sense of self is similarly depicted as Sethe ruminates on the effects of muzzling on disobedient slaves, which caused a “wildness” to shoot “up into the eye” of the victim “the moment the lips were yanked back” (84). Significantly, according to Sethe such wildness seems to persist long after the bit is removed, and the raw flesh of the mouth treated with “goose fat” (84). In both cases, physical restrictions on bodily movement are depicted as having radically deleterious effects upon not only what one might describe as an abstract sense of self, but also upon the victim’s ability to coherently reason.
A perhaps more interesting example of how embodiment is connected to both a sense of self and, relatedly, a capacity to reason in the novel is the description of Baby Suggs adapting to life post-slavery. As she crosses over the border between the slave state of
Kentucky and the free-state Ohio, Baby is described as developing a previously unfamiliar form of bodily awareness:
What’s the matter? she asked herself. She didn’t know what she looked like and was not curious. But suddenly she saw her hands and thought with a clarity as simple as it was dazzling, “These hands belong to me. These my hands.” Next she felt a knocking in her chest and discovered something else new: her own heartbeat. Had it been there all along? This pounding thing? She felt like a fool and began to laugh out loud (166).
Despite the ostensibly benevolent form of slavery practiced by the Garners, even in her time at Sweet Home Baby Suggs lived a sort of shadow existence, “for the sadness was at 242 her center, the desolate center where the self that was no self made its home” (165). Thus, it is not only physical implements and bodily punishments which the novel depicts disrupting slaves’ relationships to their own bodies, but also the institution of slavery itself. Upon leaving the confines of this institution, however, Suggs almost miraculously becomes aware of herself as a bodily self, one capable of sensations and forms of self- reflective awareness that, even being in the presence of a “benevolent” master who nevertheless owned her and her labor, Baby was incapable of experiencing. Significantly, this moment of anagnorisis leads Baby to become a sort of unofficial preacher within her community, her sermons extolling the sensory capabilities of “we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass” (103). Thus, Baby’s newly found connection with her own body is explicitly linked to her becoming a voice of counsel and sagacity within the African-American community.
Of course, such connections between embodiment on the one hand, and subjectivity and reason on the other, are most compellingly presented by means of the novel’s depiction of Beloved. Indeed, ostensibly because of her status as a returned “ghost,” and thus a “soul” with a more tentative relationship to the body she inhabits, Beloved is frequently depicted as lacking a coherent sense of self. Indeed, though many of Beloved’s comments indicate that she is in fact Sethe’s dead daughter returned from the grave, others are far more ambiguous:
Beloved accused her [Sethe] of leaving her behind. Of not being nice to her, not smiling at her. She said they were the same, had the same face, how could she have left her? Sethe cried, saying she never did, or meant to—that she had to get them out, away, that she had the milk all the time and had the money too for the stone but not enough. . . Beloved wasn’t interested. She said when she cried there was no one. That dead men lay on top of her. That she had nothing to eat. Ghosts without skin stuck their fingers in her and said beloved in the dark and bitch in the light. (284) 243
As numerous commentators including Wyatt and Erikson have noted, Beloved’s memories and accusations in this and similar passages imply that, in addition to those of
Sethe’s daughter, she also possesses the experiences of those who perished during the middle passage. Thus, it is not coincidental that in this excerpt the only statements carrying discrete references to the novel’s plot are Sethe’s: the breast milk she felt compelled to deliver to her infant daughter and the exchange of sex for the engraving on
Beloved’s gravestone. In contrast, Beloved’s comments are either ambiguous—being left behind, not being smiled at, sharing the same face with those who abandoned her, all of which could be attributed to the experiences of those who endured the middle passage— or imply experiences that Sethe’s infant daughter could never have had—ostensibly starving in the hold of a ship and being periodically raped by the crew. Furthermore, the few insights readers are granted into Beloved’s psyche serve to confuse, rather than clarify her place within the novel’s plot.
The only sustained moments of narration from Beloved’s perspective are two extended monologues late in the novel. Though appearing successively, and supposedly originating from the same character, these passages are quite distinct from one another.
The first depicts a morass of embodied experiences and memories ostensibly disconnected from of the rest of the novel’s plot. Additionally, as Wyatt notes, “The fragmented syntax and absence of punctuation [in the first of these passages] robs the reader of known demarcations, creating a linguistic equivalent to the Africans’ loss of differentiation in an ‘oceanic’ space that ‘unmade’ cultural identities and erased even the lines between male and female, living and dead” (480). In lieu of such demarcations, the 244 novel instead offers a series of different representations of embodiment, including visions of the bodily actions of a woman (presumably Sethe) collecting flowers, “I see her take flowers away from leaves she puts them in a round basket,”107 from which she is precluded from participating because “clouds are in the way”; descriptions of an expansiveness similar to the pre-linguistic Lacanian totality described by Wyatt, wherein
“there is no place where I stop”; and finally, descriptions of what seem the bodily experiences of a woman undergoing the middle passage: “All of it is now it is always now there will never be a time when I am not crouching and watching others who are crouching too I am always crouching” (248).
I argue that the lack of coherence between the ideas and experiences expressed in this passage suggest the inner workings of what might be described as a disembodied computational mind—i.e. one with content (in this case concepts and emotions) but lacking the embodied continuity necessary to unify them into a coherent and thus meaningful whole.108 Such an existence can also be compared to Jameson’s descriptions of postmodern schizophrenia, in which the inability to connect symbols (or ideas) to one another in a teleological fashion leads to a culturally pervasive waning of impressions of subjective depth and historicity, a problem which Jameson’s analysis of postmodern spaces also links to the relationships of subjects to the (alienating) material environments around them. In Beloved’s monologue, this lack of a coherent sense of embodiment is implied not only by complaints of the inability of what seems Sethe’s daughter to access
107 The extra spaces in these passages are from the novel. 108 It is worth noting that despite the lack of a coherent sense of embodiment allowing this content to be presented as a unified whole, most of this content is nevertheless conspicuously embodied, further implying the tight relationship between embodiment and symbolic thought described by Wyatt. 245 the “hot thing” or “face” of the woman she can nevertheless see, implying the disembodied vantage point of a ghost. It is also implied by what nevertheless seem the bodily experiences of an unnamed woman trapped in the hold of a slave ship, whose extended captivity in a dark, disorientating, and confined space, like Paul’s D’s incarceration, elides her sense of a cohesive embodied selfhood. This effect is implied by the broken syntax of these descriptions: “We are not crouching now we are but my legs are like the dead man’s eyes I cannot fall because there is no room to the men without skin are making loud noises I am not dead” (249). Ostensibly because of this lack of a coherent sense of embodiment, the experiences of both figures also fail to convey a unified sense of time, the narration instead producing the impression of a-temporal thought which Lukacs associates with the modernist novel. Additionally, the tendency of this passage’s disjunctive representations of embodiment to blend with one another as the reader constantly tries to make sense of this jumble of images, is suggestive of the deconstructive play of poststructuralist theories of language, again linking this passage to the tropes of postmodern fiction.
This lack of a clear sense of temporality is not, however, exclusive to Beloved. As a result of their mutual need to evade the past, Morrison’s novel also depicts Sethe and
Paul D as each being stuck in a sort of purgatorial present. Unlike the forced incarcerations of slavery, however, the disconnect between mind and body evoked in these scenes is not the product of physical restraint or dehumanizing social institutions, but rather a self-imposed coping mechanism for dealing with their memories of slavery.
For Sethe in particular, this is a way of protecting herself and her only remaining child from a threatening exterior world which she has long believed “Ain’t for me”: “To Sethe, 246 the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay. The ‘better life’ she believed she and
Denver were living was simply not that other one” (215; 51). For much of the novel what motivates Sethe are her memories of the physical and psychological abuse visited upon her by schoolteacher and his nephews at Sweet Home, her only goal in life after their attempts to re-enslave her being to keep her children from experiencing a similar fate.
Significantly, this evasion of the past, and maintenance of the barest of possible futures, is frequently depicted as a conflict between her conscious mind and preconscious body. Similar to Esther Greenwood who, as her psychological state deteriorates, frequently seems trapped within the endless ruminations of the computational mind, this conflict is primarily rooted in what is described as Sethe’s “rebellious brain” for which there was “no misery no regret, no hateful picture too rotten to accept” (83). Most often, such pictures involve elements of her own history which, reminiscent of descriptions of
PTSD, are often triggered by small, seemingly mundane perceptual cues: “The splash of water, the sight of her shoes and stockings awry on the path where she had flung them; or
Here boy lapping in the puddle near her feet, and suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes” (7). Though initiated by preconscious perceptions of the world around her, such moments inevitably take Sethe out of this world, her mind’s hunger for recollecting past traumas leaving her no “room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day. Exactly like that afternoon in the wild onions—when one more step was the most she could see of the future” (83).109 In contrast to Esther, however, Sethe doesn’t characterize this morbid inclination of her mind, which not only
109 This bears similarities to Esther’s description of the line of telephone poles where she can’t see past the 19th pole—her age. 247 calls up recollections from her own past but inclines her to vividly imagine the unpleasant stories of others like Paul D, as a form of mental illness. Rather, she curses her mind for the clarity with which it dredges up images of the past, asking herself if “Other people went crazy, why couldn’t she?” (83).
Though the novel depicts the inclination of Sethe’s mind to replay unpleasant memories as the primary reason for her giving up on planning not only for her own future, but also Denver’s, she is also frequently described as sedulously evading the past, working “hard to remember as close to nothing as was safe” (6). The means by which
Sethe achieves this forgetfulness is hinted at following Paul’s D stories of his own past.
Rubbing Paul’s knee to soothe him, the action is described as “Like kneading bread in the half-light of the restaurant kitchen. . . Working dough. Working, working dough. Nothing better than that to start the day’s serious work of beating back the past” (86). Thus, as a palliative to the tendency of her mind to dwell on hurtful memories, Sethe focuses her attention on the bodily habits of daily labor, the drab routine of her life largely being set prior to Paul’s arrival at 124 Bluestone. This connection between bodily habits and
Sethe’s narrow psychological awareness of the surrounding world is further emphasized by her relationship to color. After burying Beloved beneath a pink headstone, Sethe
“became as color conscious as a hen,” the novel immediately connecting such colorblindness with Sethe’s job as a cook: “Every dawn she worked at fruit pies, potato dishes and vegetables while the cook did the soup, meat and the rest. And she could not remember a molly apple or a yellow squash. Every day she saw the dawn, but never acknowledged or remarked on its color” (46-7). Here, like the novel’s conflation of the physical act of kneading flesh or dough with forgetfulness, the comparison between 248
Sethe’s colorblindness and her job indicates the central role of bodily routine in dulling her responsiveness, and thus vulnerability, to the world outside 124.
Paul D’s avoidance of the past takes a similarly embodied form. As a member of a chain gang at the Alfred prison, for example, coping with the impossible conditions of the camp—which include not only physical, but also sexual abuse—takes the form of the subversive meanings the prisoners imbue in their songs—the only form of language they are permitted—and labor:
They sang out and beat it up, garbling the words so they could not be understood; tricking the words so their syllables yielded up other meanings. They sang the women they knew; the children they had been . . . They sang of bosses and masters and misses; of mules and dogs and the shamelessness of life . . . And they beat. The women for having known them and no more, no more; the children for having been them but never again. They killed a boss so often and so completely they had to bring him back to life to pulp him one more time. . . More than the rest they beat and killed the flirt whom folks called Life for leading them on. (128)
After his escape, such efforts to obliterate the past with the smash of a hammer give way to the wanderlust which defines Paul’s life until his arrival at 124. Thus, much like Sethe,
Paul shuts "down a generous portion of his head, operating on the part that helped him walk, eat, sleep, sing” as anything “more required him to dwell on Halle’s face and Sixo laughing” (49). Thus, again, a homogenized collection of bodily habits and daily routines is depicted as not only a tool for avoiding the past, but also as promoting a very particular way of functioning in the present, which Beloved depicts as a compromised form of being in the world. Though similar to The Bell Jar in that such disconnects between mind and body are emblematic of the inability of Morrison’s characters to function as fully realized subjects, however, in Beloved the sort of unity of mind and body sought be Esther 249
Greenwood is not presented in and of itself as a solution to the existential crises of the novel’s characters.
Indeed, such a union of consciousness and embodiment is depicted in the second of
Beloved’s two monologues which, despite superficially adopting a more typical narrative structure, nevertheless fails to provide a coherent narrative capable of being integrated into the plot of the novel. In contrast to the first monologue, in which a collage of disconnected thoughts and experiences is ostensibly attributable to a disembodied series of voices, the second passage seems to originate from Beloved as an embodied being after her return to 124. One of the elements indicating this shift is the passage’s consistent use of discrete, declarative sentences with regular punctuation which clearly relegate the disembodied and disembodying experiences described in the first passage to the past.
Thus, in addition to lacking the fragmented syntax that Wyatt claims serves to break down “cultural identities,” this passage also conveys a much clearer impression of temporality, as rather than the descriptions from the slave ship being presented as an eternal present—“it always being now”—the past of Sethe picking flowers is instead clearly contrasted to these flowers being “on the quilt now where we sleep” (248, 254).
Additionally, this passage offers much more in the way of concrete detail, as previously mentioned explicitly identifying Sethe as the women who picked flowers and the clouds which obscured this woman in the previous passage as clouds of “gun smoke” (253).
Furthermore, as the passage progresses it ceases to be a monologue and becomes a series of dialogues, whose call-and-response structure and references to the novel’s plot—“I 250 drank your blood110/I brought your milk/You forgot to smile/I loved you/You hurt me”
(256)— imply they are exchanges between Beloved, Denver, and Sethe.
Collectively, such shifts in narration suggest that the clarity and continuity of the preceding monologue is a product of Beloved’s renewed bodily existence in 124. Thus, similar to The Bell Jar, embodiment is implicitly connected to Beloved’s ability to produce the types of teleological narratives Jameson claims are elided under postmodernism, and which I argue Morrison’s novel similarly relates to the disembodying apparatuses and institutions of slavery. Despite this proliferation of concrete details and delimiting punctuation, however, the details of Beloved’s second monologue nevertheless seem even more confused than in the one that preceded it, blending what seem to be the experiences of Sethe’s dead daughter with the experiences of other victims of the slave trade. The result is a passage that reads much more like a coherent narrative, but which proves to be even more incomprehensible from the standpoint of the novel’s overarching plot. Thus, although possessing a body and thus implicitly a more grounded sense of temporality, Beloved is nevertheless presented as being overdetermined by the wealth of symbolic meaning she is imbued with in the text.
As such, it will be left to others—both the readers of the passage and characters in the novel—to give this over-determined mass of thoughts, experiences, and emotions meaning.
110 A reference to Denver nursing at Sethe’s bloodied teat after Sethe slit her other daughter’s throat. 251
3. Embodying stories and gazes
Beloved’s monologues serve to emphasize the extent to which the coherence of
Beloved’s presence in Morrison’s novel, and thus implicitly the African-American communities in which the novel is set, is reliant upon the interpretations of others—the ability, for example, of readers to come up with explanations for how the details of her monologue relate to the plot of the novel from which they seem conspicuously disconnected. More than being a metanarrative element of the novel, however, such themes are a fundamental part of Beloved’s plot. Unlike The Bell Jar, for example,
Morrison’s novel places much more emphasis on the intersubjective nature of linguistic meaning. Specifically, the novel’s emphasis on oral storytelling—along with other forms of communal expression-like song—generally depicts a communal dimension to art lacking not only in Plath’s novel, but the other works assessed throughout this dissertation, in which there is always an implicit distance between artists—who compulsively seek isolation—and their audiences. Significantly, it is such communal forms of narrative—including not just storytelling as a communal ritual act, but also more informal forms of narrative like gossip—which seem to support the continued existence of Beloved as a bodily presence within the novel. Furthermore, I argue that Beloved’s depiction of the social function of storytelling bears similarities to Erikson’s observations about the relationship between metaphor and history, in particular the way in which metaphor’s tendency to deconstruct its vehicle mirrors the inability of historical narratives to fully describe their referents. Similarly, I argue that Beloved’s depiction of embodied metaphors as simultaneously drawing upon embodied experience to articulate abstract ideas, while erasing their embodied origins, mirrors the function of storytelling 252 within the novel. So, while on the one hand, storytelling in Beloved is used to both interpolate individuals into communities, as well as provide these individuals with a necessary sense of personal and cultural continuity, on the other it also tends to do violence to these individuals, exposing their complex identities and experiences to half- truths and misinterpretations.
Indeed, not only does Beloved cause characters like Paul to act involuntarily, her bodily presence also quite literally calls out for interpretation as, for example, when
Stamp Paid, one of the witnesses to the aftermath of Sethe’s “crime,” attempts to apologize to her for telling Paul D about her past. After Stamp fails to gain entry to the house, it is not just the sight of a strange young women as he glances though the windows of 124 that troubles him. So too does the “conflagration of hasty voices” that he encounters as he enters the yard, and which the novel implies are a product of Beloved’s presence within the house (203). As Stamp approaches, these voices are at first undecipherable, “loud, urgent, all speaking at once . . . The speech wasn’t nonsensical, exactly, nor was it tongues. But something was wrong with the order of the words and he couldn’t describe or cipher it.” Read in terms of the broader themes of the novel, these initial voices implicitly include those of the Africans lost to the middle passage. Stamp’s interpretation, however, lies closer to home. He understands this din as the voices of “the black and angry dead,” former African-American slaves who carry with them not “the jungle brought with them to this palace from the other (livable) place” but rather “the jungle white folks planted in them” (234). This doesn’t seem a miss-interpretation, however, so much as an interpretation. For Stamp the surfeit of pain and suffering surrounding the numerous lost histories of slavery leads to the formation of a very 253 particular narrative about the lynchings and discrimination of post-Reconstruction
America. As such, Stamp’s act of interpretation demonstrates an essential aspect of narrative production more broadly: the tendency to filter an excess of content down to a single story which is both reductive yet “true,” erasing essential elements of this history while implicitly carrying a trace of what has been erased.
This is not, however, how Stamp’s encounter with the voices surrounding 124 concludes. Gaining the steps to the house they,
become an occasional mutter—like the interior sounds a woman makes when she believes she is alone and unobserved at her work: sth when she misses the needle’s eye; a soft moan when she sees another chip in her good platter; the low, friendly argument with which she greets the hens. Nothing fierce or startling. Just that eternal, private conversation that takes place between women and their tasks. (203)
Here, the collective din of historical voices gives way to an individual voice, implicitly
Beloved herself. Rather than being a singular, unified identity, however, this voice is similarly presented as a mental self gently at odds with its own habits and actions. Like the rush of historical voices, such inner monologues, and the preconscious bodily impulses they imply, necessitate interpretation to be made sense of in the form of a discrete individual. Thus, this singular voice also calls out for interpretation and the inherent reduction of complexity which accompanies it. Indeed, such acts of interpretation are how the emotions and actions problematized by the novel’s depiction of
Beloved become discrete narrative events. The novel’s depiction of Beloved as a ghostly body makes this process explicit by drawing attention to how, when abstracted from the affective body, such emotions appear supernatural and miraculous. Thus, just like how the structure of metaphor, divided between vehicle and tenor, serves as a model for the efforts of Morrison’s novel to bridge different “worlds” and/or “frames of experience,” I 254 argue that Beloved’s presence within the novel also serves as an allegory for how affective intensities—as constellations of bodily drives, impulses, past experiences, and habituated action potentials—enter into the symbolic, and therefore narrative.
Similarly, I argue that what Wyatt observes is the novel’s tendency to employ embodied metaphors—particularly during scenes where its spectral tropes are most prevalent—demonstrates the role bodily sensations play in conditioning the possibility of symbolic consciousness and thus storytelling in the novel. In these moments, the excess of bodily experiences which presupposes conscious thought feeds into the conceptual knowledge which serves as the building blocks of narrative; the importance, as Wyatt notes, for example, of weight as “a figure of speech” which in the scene in question
“turns out to describe only the physical weight of Sethe’s breasts” (Wyatt 475), or the frequency with which “making space” is used as a metaphor for personal intimacy in the novel (Morrison 55), indicating the importance of embodied experience for conceptualizing what are typically thought of as the more abstract elements of human social life. Both of these metaphors—making space for another, or carrying their weight—implicate complex networks of preconscious bodily experience that they simultaneously cover up: the way in which one’s experiences of the world can be radically altered by the bodily presence of another, and similarly how the presence of too many bodily others can overwhelm or detract from this intimacy. As Wyatt notes, such dynamics are central to the development of Beloved’s plot, the novel’s mobilization of spectral themes drawing attention to the hidden depths of such embodied metaphors.
Indeed, as demonstrated in the first section of this chapter, more than implicating the types of bodily motor experience described above in conscious thought, Morrison’s novel 255 also depicts how the presence of others affects the actions of characters in a manner much like the depictions of affective exchanges explored in previous chapters. Thus, like
Daniel, much of the moment-to-moment narration of Morrison’s novel reads abuzz with affect. Unlike Doctorow’s novel, however, in which such affective intensities primarily concern the interior chaos and ambivalences of the novel’s protagonist, in Beloved these intensities seem to waft inter-subjectively between the residents of 124 Bluestone Road.
Such narration thus bears some resemblance to the blending of different characters’ thoughts and feelings found in Ratner’s Star’s “Reflections.” Here, however, rather than a hyper-focus on characters’ internal monologues obfuscating the narrating voice,
Beloved’s omniscient third-person narrator is an explicit presence within the text. This distinction leads to an important difference in the implied intersubjectivity of Morrison’s characters. Rather than the psychological juxtapositions of “Reflections,” which give the impression that the thoughts and feelings of the novel’s characters are invading the psyches of their peers, in Beloved such mediation is typically achieved through the medium of the narrator. The effect is that the thoughts and sentiments of the novel’s characters often seem to occupy the spaces between them, thus implying what Brennan and Massumi claim is the intersubjective nature of affect which similarly implicates not just the psychological states and bodily drives of individual subjects, but the environments around them. A good example of this phenomenon occurs after Paul D spills a cup of coffee following a cutting remark from Denver about his presence in the household: “In silence [Sethe] wiped the floor and retrieved the cup. Then she poured him another cupful, and set it carefully before him. Paul D touched its rim but didn’t say anything—as though even “thank you” was an obligation he could not meet and the 256 coffee itself a gift he could not take” (53). Rather than explicitly attributing sentiments to either Sethe or Paul, the text instead lets the unease and ambivalence of the characters sit between them, leaving ambiguous which figure—Sethe, Paul, the narrator, or all three— strives to interpret Paul’s inaction.
Another example of how affects seem to travel between characters in the novel occurs after the feast Baby Suggs holds in celebration of the arrival of Sethe and her children at
124. Following this generous display of familial prosperity, Baby awakes to the “scent” of her neighbor’s disapproval in the air: “She was accustomed to the knowledge that nobody prayed for her—but this free-floating repulsion was new. . . And then she knew.
Her friends and neighbors were angry at her because she had overstepped, given too much, offended them with excess” (163). This scene is interesting to consider through the lens of Brennan’s theories not only because of Baby’s ability to detect the disapproval of her neighbors through scent—one of the primary mechanisms Brennan proposes for the transmission of affect111—but also because of how such feelings are depicted as a sort of atmospheric presence within the community, implying that anger is passed and amplified between individuals. Furthermore, it is this inter-subjective mood which sets the stage for the unintended and unanticipated events to come, as this general air of disapproval inclines Baby’s neighbors to ignore the presence of the men hunting Sethe within their community. An unspoken and unconscious, yet nevertheless ostensibly collective decision thus emerges from within the community, one inextricably connected to the central event of the novel: Sethe’s attempt to kill her children.
111 See The Transmission of Affect 95-6. 257
This is far from the only scene in Beloved, however, that suggests that action, or inaction, can originate exogenously of the subject. Another example is Sethe’s ostensibly superstitious belief in the ability of memories to physically occupy the spaces associated with them. She describes the resulting form of intersubjective exchange to Denver, claiming that these memories are later encountered by others, even inspiring the events they are associated with to repeat themselves:
Place, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or know, or saw is still out here. Right in the place where it happened . . . Some day you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to someone else. Where I was before I came here, that place is real. It’s never going away. Even if the whole farm—every tree and grass blade of it dies. The picture is still there and what’s more, if you go there—you who never was there—if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you. (43-4)
Much like the haunting of 124, these pictures floating outside one’s head are not simply some supernatural force. Rather, they are manifestations of evil directly tied to the
“rememories” or pictures, others have left behind. As such, like the haunting of her home,
Sethe conceives of the presence of dangerous or evil places in the world in terms of the psychic residues of those who occupied them. More than simply being a superstition, I argue that such sentiments are indicative of the broader way in which Beloved presents human subjectivity and agency. Thus, Sethe’s comments are suggestive not only of the way in which ideas seem to take on a life of their own within, and even between communities. They also gesture at the notion, contained in both Brennan and Massumi’s 258 theories of affect, that certain types of social and material environments can enable or prime certain types of behaviors, and in a sense cause past events to repeat themselves.
Thus, like Beloved’s supernatural elements, the “superstitions” of the novel’s characters serve in a sense to narrativize the complex exchanges of affect which presuppose what are later conceptualized as discrete events—like Sethe’s tragic encounter with schoolteacher. As poststructuralist philosophers like Derrida observe, however, such narratives also inherently tend to erase these origins, a phenomenon also relevant to efforts to “narrate” others. Thus, like the complexity of a historical event like slavery, the complex “infrachurnings” of the “dividual,” to borrow Massumi’s terminology, are reduced to a concept of the other which belies such complexity. Once again, Beloved’s mobilization of the spectral metaphor serves to elucidate this point.
Following Beloved’s climactic disappearance at the close of the novel—vanishing before a mob of women gathered to excise her from Sethe’s house—not just the specificity of the individual, but her very existence is called into question by the community which rose up to save Sethe from this spectral “invasion” (302). More significant, however, is the forgetfulness of those “who had spoken to her, lived with her, fallen in love with her” who come to realize “they couldn’t remember or repeat a single thing she said, and began to believe that, other than what they themselves were thinking, she hadn’t said anything at all” (323-4). Thus, as with many of the unpleasant elements of the history she represents, the unwillingness of the community to which she belonged to speak of her, or tell stories about her, in a sense erases Beloved from existence.
It is not just Beloved’s existence, however, which seems predicated upon the recognition of others. The sense of identity of the novel’s other major characters is also 259 closely connected to being in another’s presence. Thus, for example, Beloved presents the entry of Sethe and Paul into one another’s lives as the solution to their mutual inability to productively engage with the past or plan for the future. Indeed, Paul’s arrival from out of the past and “into [Sethe’s] bed” is explicitly described as evoking for Sethe “the notion of a future with him, or for that matter without him” (51). Though this renewed sense of possibility accompanying Paul’s arrival plays into what some scholars have fairly observed is the novel’s rigidly heteronormative themes,112 the significance of Paul’s presence nevertheless extends beyond his status as a man in Sethe’s household. What is interesting about the novel’s depiction of Paul is how he is described as enabling certain types of behaviors and/or experiences: “Not even trying to, he had become the kind of man who could walk into a house and make the women cry. Because with him, in his presence, they could” (20). This aura does more than incline women to confession, however; it also has a profound effect upon the way people experience the environments around them. Thus, not only does Paul’s infectious mood soften the attitudes of
Cincinnati’s black population towards Sethe, who has long been a pariah within the community. His company is also described as bringing material aspects of the surrounding world into sensory focus: “[around Paul] things became what they were: drabness looked drab; heat was hot” (48). Suggestively, this capacity is associated primarily with Paul’s face which, despite seeming “immobile,” was amazingly ready “to smile, or blaze or be sorry with you. As though all you had to do was get his attention and right away he produced the feeling you were feeling. With less than a blink, his face
112 See Balon and Nero. 260 seemed to change—underneath it lay the activity.” Such descriptions thus directly implicate Paul’s body in the salubrious effect his presence has on others, this scene’s focus on the face also resonating with Massumi’s comments on the face as a site of affective exchange.113 Furthermore, Paul is far from the only character in the novel to embody an emotionally or physically healing presence. Both Baby Suggs and Amy, the runaway indentured servant who both saves Sethe’s life and assists in Denver’s birth, are similarly described as possessing healing touches.
Significantly, this ability to bring about fuller engagements with the world isn’t just presented as a passive aspect of a character’s presence. Rather, the most evocative scenes of characters having this sort of effect on others concern gazes. Sethe, for example, describes being looked at by Paul D:
Although her eyes were closed, Sethe knew his gaze was on her face, and a paper picture of just how bad she must look raised itself up before her mind’s eye. Still, there was no mockery coming from his gaze. Soft. It felt soft in a waiting kind of way. He was not judging her—or rather he was judging but not comparing. Not since Halle had a man looked at her that way: not loving or passionate, but interested, as though he were examining an ear of corn for quality. (30)
Importantly, Paul’s probing gaze—the gaze of an other who seeks not to possess either emotionally or sexually—not only has a comforting effect upon Sethe, but also inspires her to “visualize” herself from his perspective, in a sense reaffirming Sethe’s sense of her own existence in the world. A similar exchange also occurs between Beloved and
Denver, Denver describing being held by her supposed sister’s looks: “It was lovely. Not to be stared at, not seen, but being pulled into view by the interested, uncritical eyes of the other. Having her hair examined as a part of herself, not as material or style. Having
113 See Power at the End of The Economy 73-4. 261 her lips, nose, chin caressed as they might be if she were a moss rose a gardener paused to admire” (139). Here, even more profoundly than Sethe’s experience of Paul’s gaze,
Denver is “pulled” into the world by Beloved’s glances. Like her mother, this leads to an enhanced awareness not only of her own body parts, but also of her body as a unified self. Such passages thus indicate the extent to which, in Morrison’s novel, being an existential subject in the world involves beginning contemplated, and in a sense, narrated by others, as Sethe and Denver are able to step outside themselves to a third-person observational vantagepoint by means of Paul’s and Beloved’s respective gazes.
However, the novel also presents this ability to narrate or define others as powerfully dehumanizing. Thus, Beloved depicts many of the most lasting effects of not just slavery, but racism in general, as being the product of the ability of some characters to define others. Thus, as long as Mr. Garner was in charge of Sweet Home, Paul D and his brothers, Hallie and Sixo, could consider themselves men. That Garner fancied them men, allowed them to carry firearms, and most importantly allowed them to criticize him when they believed he was in error allowed the Pauls in particular—who had never experienced what it was to be a slave elsewhere—to realize a certain sense of self. This changed with the arrival of schoolteacher who, according to Paul D, not only changed the rules by which life at Sweet Home was governed, but also changed him: “no way I’d ever be Paul D again, living or dead. schoolteacher changed me. I was something else and that something else was less than a chicken sitting in the sun on a tub” (86). Significantly, this ability to change the men of Sweet Home isn’t just connected to schoolteacher’s eagerness to police their habits or punish their bodies. At the most fundamental level it concerns his ability to linguistically define them. This authority over language is cruelly 262 affirmed during a confrontation between Sixo and schoolteacher, in which the former explains why it was in schoolteacher’s interest to let Sixo kill and eat a shoal without permission, as the sustenance would allow Sixo to do more work. Despite the cleverness of this argument, or likely because of it, “Schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers—and not the defined” (225).
The most prominent symbol of schoolteacher’s sovereign right to meaning-making, however, is the book in which he and his nephews categorize the “human” and
“inhuman” qualities of Sweet Home’s Slaves, and in which Sethe bitterly recalls him writing as she is assaulted by his nephews: “two boys with mossy teeth, one sucking on my breast the other holding me down, the book-reading teacher watching and writing it up” (83). More than anything else, for Sethe it is sparing her children the indignity of being defined by schoolteacher which she believes inspires her violent actions when he comes to claim them. Furthermore, as Stamp Paid observes, even when freed from slavery the novel’s characters are never entirely free from the powers of white people to define them: “The more colored people spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside” (234)
Though the novel depicts the “right” to make meaning as one of the primary means by which the novel’s white characters dehumanize their black counterparts, meaning- making in the form of storytelling is nevertheless also a central element of Beloved’s depiction of African-American community. A particularly evocative example comes in the form of Denver telling Beloved the story of her birth, which “she loved […] because 263 it was all about herself; but she hated it too because it made her feel a bill was owing somewhere and she, Denver, had to pay it” (92). The novel’s general depiction of this tale, which is frequently told Denver by Sethe, does a good job of summing up the two social functions of storytelling in the novel, helping to both add to Denver’s sense of her own identity as well as establishing a sense of her broader place in world. As the scene progresses, however, and in part due to the presence of Beloved, the world-building function of the storytelling act takes on an almost supernatural aura:
Denver was seeing it now and feeling it—through Beloved. Feeling how it must have felt to her mother. Seeing how it must have looked. And the more fine points she made, the more details she provided, the more Beloved liked it. So she anticipated the questions by giving blood to the scraps her mother and grandmother had told her— and a heartbeat. The monologue became, in fact, a duet as they lay down together. Denver nursing Beloved’s interest like a lover whose pleasure was to overfeed the loved. The dark quilt with two orange patches was there with them because Beloved wanted it near her when she slept. It was smelling like grass and feeling like hands— the unrested hands of busy women: dry, warm, prickly. Denver spoke, Beloved listened, and the two did the best they could to create what really happened, how it really was, something only Sethe knew because she alone had the mind for it and the time afterward to shape it: the quality of Amy’s voice, her breath like burning wood. (92-3)
Here, in an explicit act of storytelling as a communal folk art, is a culmination of many of the ideas discussed not only in this chapter, but also this dissertation as a whole. Thus, a series of elemental bodily sensations, allowing Denver to see, touch and feel what her mother sensed, and amplified by the eager listening presence of Beloved, feeds into her anticipation of concerns about the development of plot and symbolisms. As such, storytelling is presented as a dynamic act, requiring not only an understanding of characters’ motivations and actions or a faculty for poetic description, but also a robust sense of what it is to be an embodied, sensorial being. Rather than embodiment serving to ground the narrative, as depicted in many of the other works discussed in this 264 dissertation, however, this narrative—much like the gazes described earlier—itself seems to produce a living body, this story of an absent Sethe taking on a life of its own.
Furthermore, this act of making present an absent life is itself demonstrated as producing an enhanced self-awareness in the participants of their own lives, as well as a sense of possibility about what such lives might contain. Indeed, I argue that such depictions of storytelling as a communal act present an even greater challenge to neoliberalism than
Beloved’s deconstruction of the closed subject by means of its naturalistic depictions of human feeling and agency as overdetermined confluences of exogenous and endogenous phenomena. This is because neoliberalism is fundamentally predicated upon the notion that individuals are capable of making meaningful decisions outside the influence of others. Morrison’s novel problematizes this by depicting the act of narrating, and being narrated by others, as the fundamental means by which characters become capable of conceptualizing a variety of lives not just for others but also for themselves, and therefore become the types of subjects capable of choice. As such, Morrison’s novel also stands as a particularly strong example of how the focus on embodiment in the post-1945 novel differs from that of its naturalist counterpart. As Mitchell and Trumpeter note, in naturalism the focusing on the body becomes a means of emptying narratives of any impression of agency. In contrast, for Beloved’s characters, being depicted as bodily subjects—not only in the glances and stories of other characters, but also in the narration of the novel itself—is ultimately what seems to return to these characters an impression of humanity, and thus agency.
265
4. Conclusion
In many ways Morrison’s novel stands as a culmination of one of the implicit goals of this dissertation: demonstrating how the critique of 20th century neoliberalism initiated by Foucault, and continued in the work of scholars like Masumi, finds its parallel in novelistic representations of embodiment from this same era. Thus, in reading
Beloved from the standpoint of embodiment, one discovers a novel which challenges key presuppositions about the fundamental independence and irreducibility of the subject inherent to (neo)liberal thought. Furthermore, as with the other novels discussed in this dissertation, such a challenge takes place not only at the level of theme, but also in the form of the philosophical presuppositions implicit in the structure of the narrative itself.
That said, what is interesting about reading Morrison’s novel from the standpoint of both embodiment and, more specifically, Masumi’s writings on neoliberalism and affect, is the way in which the novel also seems to push back on some of the latter’s presuppositions.
Foremost among these is the implicit idea that narrative, not only in the form of fiction but also cultural narratives and ideologies, stands in opposition to the sorts of affective or bodily possibilities Massumi suggests should be the goal of a progressive or radical politics. Rather, in Morrison’s novel the tendency of narrative—and implicitly rational thought—to inflict a sort of violence on embodied subjects in the form of misunderstandings, misinterpretations, or even outright discrimination, is counter- balanced by the capacity for such narratives to bring the novel’s characters into a shared social world, implying a far more dialectical relationship between possibility and constraint.
266
Conclusion
Theories of embodied cognition, affect, and new materialism present a challenge to the centrality of the concept in human life. This dissertation has sought to examine the implications of this challenge in the context of the novel. Each of the proceeding chapters have addressed works from an era in which the limitations of conceptual knowledge became increasingly apparent not only to cultural critics and theorists but also the artists who dedicate themselves to cultural production and reproduction. As I have argued, one result of these limitations was a renewed focus on the body in certain works from this period. Unlike a similar focus found late 19th and early 20th century naturalism, however, which responded to the increasing mechanization and industrialization of American society by depicting the socially and biologically determining constraints ostensibly brought to light by such institutions, the novels assessed in this dissertation ultimately present the material body—not to mention the world of late 20th century capitalism—as a site of possibility at least as much as an object of deterministic biological, social and economic forces.114 Thus, not only is Billy Twillig’s talent for mathematics intimately connected to the workings of his preconscious body, so too is Ester Greenwood’s sense of authentic selfhood. Similarly, the possibility of a renewed radical politics in Daniel is ultimately as rooted in the intuitive capabilities of the preconscious, affective body as it is
114 Though similar claims have recently been made about naturalism by critics like Trumpeter, I maintain that the novels assessed throughout this dissertation go much further in presenting the body not only as a site of atavistic drives, but also one of “intuitions” and/or preconscious forms of intelligence which are not only intimately connected to, but at times also seems to exceed, the creative capabilities of the human intellect. This contrasts a tendency in naturalist fiction to re-entrench cultural biases privileging the mind over the body. For example, the presence of Mr. Ames in Dreiser’s Carrie, reminds the titular protagonist of scenes she had “seen on the stage—the sorrows and sacrifices that always went with she knew not what,” the novel in this scene implying the transcendence of art and the imagination over the material world (236). 267 the utopian aspirations of the rational mind. If Beloved departs from this paradigm in a meaningful way, it does not do so by reaffirming the elevated status of conceptual knowledge—in the form of storytelling—over the body, so much as by depicting the important role such knowledge plays in constraining and thus making communicable bodily possibilities. As such, in contrast not only to the naturalist tendency to represent a mechanistic body as the analogical counterpart to systemic workings of a monstrous industrial capitalism or even, for example, the modernist habit of Hemmingway of presenting bodily gestures and actions as ciphers for the complex inner psychologies of characters, in these works the body occupies the status of what might be described as the transcendental: the “zone of indistinction” from which language and reason not only seem to emerge, but also where they might co-exist as potentialities that, like Masumi’s synesthesia or Niels Bhor’s subatomic particle,115 co-exist virtually as a series of distinct but mutually determining states. In other words, in Plath’s, DeLillo’s, Doctorow’s, and
Morrison’s novels the body symbolizes not the crassness of material existence, but rather occupies that space usually reserved in earlier fictions for the imagination or the soul.
This has important implications for Marxist formalisms like Jameson’s. Foremost among these is a questioning of the notion that materialist analysis need begin and end with modes of production, translatable into symbolic and thus ideological terms by means of a dialectic of desire and necessity. Rather than emphasizing how juxtapositions of literary forms can be read for the ideological traces of the competing economic systems they supposedly carry, what Jameson calls “cultural revolution,”116 this dissertation has
115 See Barad. 116 See The Political Unconscious 95-8. 268 focused on how such movements can be read for how they orientate themselves to the body. Such readings reveal in these works a body presented not only as a cog in the machine of social or economic systems, but also as a dynamic confluence of endogenic and exogenic forces whose relationships to the broader social world they inhabit is both contingent and frequently in flux. Significantly, this flux is most apparent in these novels when the functionality of individual bodies breakdown, such breakdowns causing characters to explore not only how to integrate themselves into the communities around them, but also how to construct a functional subjectivity out the competing assemblages of senses, desires, and thoughts. As such, one of the implications of this dissertation is that the Marxist concern with the breakdowns and contradictions of historically contingent ideologies in the novel might be productively conceptualized not only semiotic terms, but also in terms of how texts present embodiment.
This dissertation is not, however, a repudiation of the idea that economic conditions help define the fiction of a given cultural moment. Rather, as I have attempted to demonstrate, depictions of such environments play an important role in how the works of fiction assessed in this project present embodiment. Nevertheless, as the theories mobilized throughout this dissertation suggest, the ideological contradictions which have defined and confounded human thought since at least the Greeks in the form of “binary oppositions” like subject and object, male and female, mind and body, may find their synthesis not within the confines of some rational dialectic or the utopian horizons of the imagination, but rather in the dynamic possibilities of the body itself. Furthermore, I would like to suggest that in the novel this translates to a tendency of working thorough the problems of highly alienating social conditions—whether in the form of postmodern 269 culture or slavery—by experimenting with and perhaps reconceptualizing what it is to be an embodied subject.
Indeed, the types of readings demonstrated throughout this dissertation might be productively deployed to assess both how earlier works of fiction and the more recent novels of the digital age depict, or resist depicting, embodiment. Such analysis, for example, could explore how what this dissertation has at times treated as static depictions of embodiment in earlier literary movements can in fact be interpreted as responses to the changing social and economic conditions under which they were written. Obvious candidates for this sort of reading from an American perspective are the realisms, naturalisms and modernisms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries referenced throughout this dissertation, each of which have been the subject of other materialist readings. Earlier works in the American romantic and transcendental traditions, however, and their concerns about the effects of technological advancement on American society also seem fertile sites for analysis. In this context the observations like Leo Marx’s account of the technological sublime in 18th and 19th century American fiction,117 as well as Katherine Hayles’s more general claims about how the intersection of technological advancements and bodily habits coincide with epistemic shifts,118 could prove useful tools for considering how American romanticism navigated questions of embodiment in early American letters. Similarly, analysis of more recent works fiction might consider how both the supposedly disembodying effects of digital medias, as well as the advances in medical science and artificial bodily augmentation, effect representations of
117 See Marx, particularly 195-207. 118 See How We Became Posthuman 205. 270 embodiment during these opening decades of the 21st century. Obvious candidates for such analysis are the works of science and speculative fiction of interest to critics like
Hayles, as well as Jameson.119 Such analysis could easily find more “literary” subjects as well, however, novel’s like Richard Power’s The Eco Maker and David Foster Wallace’s
Infinite Jest are but a few examples of contemporary novels that present interesting takes on embodiment—indeed, the latter’s emphasis on substance abuse suggests another potent theme for reading the body in modern fiction. Finally, of particular interest to me is the more recent fiction of DeLillo, whose Underworld, Cosmopolis, Point Omega, and
Zero K all confront the effects of technology on contemporary conceptions of embodiment.
119 See Archologies of The Future 271
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton. The Seabury Press,
1979.
Alibali, Martha W. et al. “Gesture in Reasoning: An Embodied Perspective” The Routledge
Handbook of Embodied Cognition, edited by Lawrence Shapiro, Routledge, 2014, 150-
9.
Allen, Glen Scott. “Raids on the Conscious: Pynchon’s Legacy of Paranoia and the
Terrorism of Uncertainty in Don DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star.” Postmodern Culture: An
Electronic Journal of Interdisciplinary Criticism, 4, 2, 1994.
Babbitt, Susan E. “Identity, Knowledge, and Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”: Questions
about Understanding Racism.” Hypatia, 9, 3, 1994. 1-18.
Bakhtin, M. M. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel.” The Dialogic
Imagination. Edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael
Holquist. Austen: U of Texas P Austen, 2011.
Balon, Rebecca. “Kinless or Queer: The Unthinkable Queer Slave in Toni Morrison’s
Beloved and Robert
Barad, Katherine. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Durham: Duke UP, 2007.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: U of
Michigan P, 1995.
Brennan, Teresa. The Ransmission of Affect. Ithica: Cornell UP, 2004.
Bollen, Jessica et al. “The effects of actue inflammation on cognitive functioning and
emotional processing in humans: A systematic review of experimental studies.”
Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 94, 2017, 47-55. 272
Bollinger, Laurel. “Are is too many for one woman to foal”: Embodied Cognition in As I
lay Dying” Texas Studies in Literature and Language. 57.4 (2015). 433-463.
Boyer, Marilyn. “The Disabled Female Body As a Metaphor for Language in Sylvia
Plath’s The Bell Jar. Women’s Studies, 33, 2004, 199-223.
Britzolakis, Christina. Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1999.
Chang, Kenny. “Superhistory” and the “Spirit of Transgression”: E. L. Dcotorow’s The
Book of Daniel.” NTU Studies in Language and Literature, 15, 2006, 41-62.
Cornell, Drucilla. Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction and the
Law. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Cowart, David. Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. U of Georgia P, 2002.
Cuddy-Keane, Melba. “Movement, Space, and Emobodied Cognition in To the
Lighthouse.” The Cambridge Companion to the Lighthouse. Edited by Allison Pease,
Cambridge UP, 2015, 58-68.
Davis, Kimberly. “Postmodern Blackness: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the end of
History.” Twentieth Century Literature, 44, 2, 1998, 242-60.
DeLillo, Don. Americana. New York: Penguin Books, 1989.
---. The Names. New York: Vintage Books, 1983.
---. Point Omega. New York: Scribner, 2010
---. Ratner’s Star. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.
---. White Noise. New York: Penguin Books, 1998.
---. Underworld. New York: Scribner, 2007. 273
---. Zero K. New York: Scriber 2016.
Dewey, Joseph. Beyond Grief and Nothing: A Reading of Don DeLillo. The U of South
Carolina P, 2006.
De Paolo, Ezequiel and Evan Thompson. “The Enactive Approach.” The Routledge
Handbook of Embodied Cognition, edited by Lawrence Shapiro, Routledge, 2014, 68-
8.
Doctorow, E. L. The Book of Daniel. New York: Random House, 1996.
Donofrio, Nicholas. “Esther Greenwood’s Internship: White-Collar Work Literary
Careerism in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.” Contemporary Literature, 56, 2, 2015,
216-254.
Dowbnia Renee. “Consuming Appetites: Food, Sex, and Freedom in Sylvia Plath’s The
Bell Jar. Women’s Studies, 43, 2014, 567-588.
Etsy, Jed. Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of
Development. London: Oxford UP, 2013.
Erickson, Daniel. Ghosts, Metaphor, and History in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and
Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Year of Solitude. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978-
1979. New York: Picador, 2010.
---. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
---. The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction. New York: Vintage Books
Edition, 1990.
---. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977-1978. New
York: Picador, 2009. 274
---. “Society Must be Defended.” Biopolitics: A Reader. Edited by Timothy Campbell
and Adam Sitze, Duke U P, 2013, 61-81.
---. “Space, Power and Knowledge.” The Cultural Studies. 3rd ed., edited by Simon
During, Routledge, 2008.
Fraysse, Suzanne. “Words Under Erasure: Lolita and Postmodernism.” Cycnos, 12, 2,
1995, 93-100.
Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. “E. L. Doctorow and the Technology of Narrative.” PMLA,
100, 1, 1985, 81-95.
Hayles, N. Katherine. “Cognition Everywhere: Rise of Cognitive Nonconcious and the
Costs of Consciousness.” New Literary History. 45.2. (2014). 199-220.
---. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and
Informatics. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1999.
Horkheimer, Max and Theodor Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Edited by Gunzelin
S. Noerr. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Standford: Sanford U P, 2002.
House, Elizabeth B. “Toni Morrison’s Ghost: Possession and Dispossession in Beloved.”
Studies in American fiction, 72, 2, 1990, 117-26.
Hutcheon, Linda. “Historiographic Metafiction” Theory of The Novel: A Historical
Approach. Ed. Michael McKeon. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 2000. 830-50.
---. The Politics of Postmodernism. 2nd Ed. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Irom, Bimbisar. “Between ‘Retreat’ and ‘Engagement’: Incomplete Revolts and the
Operations of Irony in E. L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel.” Studies in American
Fiction, 39, 1, 2012, 61-85. 275
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.
Ithica: Cornell UP, 1982.
---. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.
Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud. A Dictionary of English Folklore. Oxford: Oxford
U P 2000.
Juan-Navarro, Santiago. “History on Trial: The Rosenberg Case in E. L. Doctorow’s The
Book of Daniel.” The Grove, 6, 1999, 80-92.
Kalavado, Jesse. Don DeLillo Balanced on the Edge of Belief. Peter Lang, 2004.
Kendall, Tim. Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study. London: Faber and Faber Limited, 2001.
Krishnan, Ranga R et al. “Comprehensive model of how reality distortion and symptoms
occur in schizophrenia: could impairment in learning-dependent predictive perception
account for the manifestations of schizophrenia. Psychiatry and Clinical
Neuroscience, 65, 2011, 305-17.
Kukkonen, Karin. “Presence and Prediction: The Embodied Reader’s Cascades of
Cognition.” Style, 48, 3, 2014, 367-84.
Kwon, Jieun. “Redeeming the National Ideal: Revisiting E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of
Daniel and its Political Implications.” Studies in the Novel, 46, 1, 2014, 83-99.
Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1980.
---. Philsophy of the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought.
New York: Basic Books, 1999.
Lang, Randy. Technology and Postmodern Subjectivity in Don DeLillo’s Novels. Peter
Lang, 2010.
LeClair, Tom. In The Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. U of Illinois P, 1987. 276
Little, Johnathan. “Ironic Mysticism in Don DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star.” Papers on
Language and Literature, 35, 3, 1999, 301-332.
Lorsch, Susan. “Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel as Kunstlerroman: Politics of Art”
Papers on Language and Literature, 18, 1982, 384-97.
Lukacs, Georg. “From Realism in Our Time: Literature and the Class Struggle.” Theory
of The Novel: A Historical Approach. Ed. Michael McKeon. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins U P, 2000. 380-50. 759-89.
---. History of the Novel. Trans. Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell. London: Merlin
Press, 1962.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans.
Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.
Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke
UP, 2002.
---. The Power at the End of the Economy. Durham: Duke UP, 2014.
Marx, Leo. The Machine in The Garden Oxford UP. New York 1964.
Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Biopolitics: A Reader. Edited by Timothy Campbell
and Adam Sitze, Durham: Duke UP, 2013, 161-92.
Mitchell, Lee Clark. Determined Fictions. New York: Columbia UP, 1989.
Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungroman in European Culture.
London: Verso, 1987.
Morgenstern, Naomi. “The Primal Scene in the Public Domain: E. L. Doctorow’s The
Book of Daniel.” Studies in the Novel, 35, 1, 2003, 68-88.
Morrison. Toni. Beloved. New York: Random House, 1987. 277
McHale, Brian. Postmodern Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Nealon, Jeffrey T. Foucault beyond Foucault: Power and Its Intensifications. Stanford:
Stanford U P, 2008.
Nero, Charles. “Toward a Black Gay Aesthetic: Signifying in Contemporary Black Black
Gay Literature.” African American Literary Theory: A Reader. Ed. Winston Napier.
New York: New York UP, 2000. 399-420.
Norris, Frank. MeTeague: A Story of San Francisco. Ed. Donald Pizer. W.W. Norton &
CO New York, 1977.
Oosterwijk, Suzanne and Lisa Feldman Barrett. “Embodiment in the construction of
emotion experience and emotion understanding.” The Routledge Handbook of
Embodied Cognition, edited by Lawrence Shapiro, Routledge, 2014, 250-60.
Oosterwijk, Oosterwijk et al. “The Neural Representation of Typical and Atypical
Experiences of Negative Images: Comparing Fear, Disgust and Morbid Fascination.”
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 11, 1, 2016, 11-22.
Osteen, Mark. American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture.
Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000.
Pilińska, Ann. “Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: A Case of Postmodern Gothicism. Anglica
Wratislaviensia, 51, 2013, 59-70.
Pizer, Donald. “Preface.” Documents of American Realism and Naturalism. Carbondale
and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois U P, 1998.
Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. New York: Harper Perennial, 1999.
Powers, Richard. The Eco Maker. New York: Picador, 2007. 278
Rasmussen, Eric Dean. “E. L. Doctorow’s Vicious Eroticism: Dangerous Affect in The
Book of Daniel.” Symploke, 18, 1-2, 2010, 189-217.
Reitz, Bernhard. “The Reconstruction of the Fifties in E. L. Doctorow’s The Book of
Daniel and Robert Coover’s The Public Burning.” Historiographic Metafiction in
modern American and Canadian literatures, 1994, 223-40.
Richardson, Michael J. and Anthony Chemero. “Complex Dynamical Systems and
Embodiment.” The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition, edited by Lawrence
Shapiro, Routledge, 2014, 39-50.
Sellei, Nora. “The Fig Tree and the Black Patent Leather Shoes: The Body and Its
Representations in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Hungarian Journal of English and
American studies, 9, 2, 2003, 127-154.
Shapiro, Laurence. Embodied Cognition. New York: Routledge, 2011.
Thompson, Evan. Mind in Life. Cambridge: The Belknap P of Harvard UP, 2007.
Trumpeter, Kevin. “The Language of Stones: The Agency of the Inanimate in Literary
Naturalism and the New Materialism.” American Literature, 87, 2, 2015, 225-52.
Wallace, David F. Infinite Jest. New York: Back Bay Books, 2006.
Wagner, Linda. “Plath’s The Bell Jar as Female Bildungroman.” Women’s Studies, 12,
1986, 55-68.
Wyatt, Jean. “Giving Body to the Word: The Maternal Symbolic in Toni Morrison’s
Beloved” PMLA, 108, 3, 1993, 474-488.
Zunshine, Lisa. “Introduction.” Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 2010, 1-34.