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Masculinity, Sincerity, and Settlement in Contemporary US Fiction

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Masculinity, Sincerity, and Settlement in Contemporary US Fiction LAMINACK, ZACHARY S., Ph.D. Wounded Whiteness: Masculinity, Sincerity, and Settlement in Contemporary U.S. Fiction. (2015) Directed by Dr. Christian Moraru. 248 pp. This dissertation examines representations of wounded white masculinity in contemporary American fiction from the late 1960s to the mid-2000s through a critical perspective developed within Native-authored creative and critical work. It departs from currents within studies of contemporary U.S. fiction in approaching representations of the experience of whiteness within settlement in nonnative writing. The project’s critical focus is grounded in the work of Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d’Alene) and Anna Lee Walters (Otoe/Pawnee). Alexie and Walters theorize white masculinity as the experience of prosthetic belonging within settlement. The project develops their theories of whiteness into a unique approach to novels typically read as exemplars of postmodern narrative. Reading works from Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Kurt Vonnegut, and Jonathan Safran Foer, Wounded Whiteness examines the ways these writers imagine sincerity as an emotional prosthetic for white masculinity. This examination yields a new perspective on contemporary fiction’s engagement with questions of personal, spatial, and national belonging in highlighting the embodied, sensory dimensions of racial and gender identity for a category—white masculinity—typically associated with disembodied rationality. The dissertation thus demonstrates the extent to which contemporary U.S. fiction imagines performances of white masculinity’s distanced disembodiment as actively dependent on the sensory inhabitance of others’ identities; and how, out of those relationships, white masculinity instantiates an expansive experience of belonging within contested spaces. WOUNDED WHITENESS: MASCULINITY, SINCERITY, AND SETTLEMENT IN CONTEMPORARY U.S. FICTION by Zachary S. Laminack A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 2015 Approved by _____________________________ Committee Chair © 2015 Zachary S. Laminack For Cindy, all of this and more. ii APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation written by Zachary S. Laminack has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Committee Chair Committee Members Date of Acceptance by Committee Date of Final Oral Examination iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project would not have been possible without the help, support, and conversation of family, friends, mentors, and colleagues. I wish to thank my fellow graduate students at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro for their support and insight as this project took form. I owe an especially large debt to the members of my dissertation committee, without whose feedback and challenges along the way these ideas would not have become a project. Thanks to Karen Kilcup for introducing me to new ways of thinking about sentimentality, and for her careful and patient reading of my work. To Mark Rifkin, whose profound influence on my thinking and professional trajectory is incalculable. And to my chair Christian Moraru, whose steadfast support of my vision for this project carried me through to its completion. Finally, I cannot overstate the support I have received from my family through the years I have spent bringing this project to life. Cindy, without you none of this would have become possible. Mom, I owe you everything. And Papa, you have helped me understand what it means to become rather than to be. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................1 Wounded Whiteness and White Masculinity: Re-Thinking Victimization and “Invisibility” ........................................7 Native Phenomenologists: Re-Reading Nonnative Writing as a Phenomenological Archive ............................................................13 Sincerity and Contemporary Nonnative Fiction ........................................20 Organizing Wounded Whiteness ................................................................27 Notes ..........................................................................................................35 II. INHABITING INDIANNESS: SHERMAN ALEXIE’S INDIAN KILLER, ANNA LEE WALTERS’S GHOST SINGER, AND THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF WHITE SINCERITY ..........................................39 “A Positive Portrait of…Your People”: Indian Killer, Prosthetic Indians, and White Sincerity .........................46 “The Very Last Shilshomish Indian”: Jack Wilson’s Indian Killer, John Smith, and the Violent Fantasies of Prosthetic Attachment .............................57 “Have We Somehow Travelled Back to the Nineteenth Century?”: Wounded Whiteness and Settler-Violence in Indian Killer ..................70 “Not in Our Skins, but in Our Minds”: Whiteness as a Plugged-Up Sensorium in Ghost Singer ......................78 Structures of Feeling: Wounded Whiteness as Inhabiting Indianness ......................................92 Notes ..........................................................................................................96 III. BODY DRAMAS: SEX, SINCERITY, AND WHITE SOLIPSISM IN DON DELILLO’S WHITE NOISE AND DAVID FOSTER WALLACE’S THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM ............101 Whiteness, Crisis, and Victimhood: White Noise and White Men’s Plugged-Up Sensorium ......................106 “Fiction’s about What It Means to be a Fucking Human Being”: Sincerity, Sexuality, and Whiteness’s Disappearance in The Broom of the System .....................................................................123 v “Just Human”: White Solipsism and the Fantasy of Plain Personhood ...............................................................146 Notes ........................................................................................................151 IV. REGIONS OF SILENCE: TRAUMA, SENTIMENTALITY, AND EMOTIONAL SURROGACY IN KURT VONNEGUT’S SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE AND JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER’S EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE ......................................156 Absorbing Violence, Performing Silence: Trauma and “Life’s Hiding Place” in Slaughterhouse-Five and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close ..........................................162 “Frames Are Where the Money Is”: Whiteness, Insularity, and National Feeling in Slaughterhouse-Five ...........................................................................175 “It’s Unspeakable, Write It!”: Sentimentality and National Familiality in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close ..........................188 Mixed Feelings: What We Talk about When We Talk about Sincerity .........................200 Notes ........................................................................................................207 V. CONCLUSION ..................................................................................................211 Everyday Forms of Wounded Whiteness ................................................214 Re-Reading Contemporary Fiction as Nonnative Self-Representation ...........................................................217 Notes ........................................................................................................221 WORKS CITED ..............................................................................................................222 vi CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Since at least the 1960s, white men have been wounded men within U.S. cultural representation. As Sally Robinson, David Savran, and others have argued, this pattern marks a strategic response to the destabilization of white masculinity’s normatively hegemonic home at the center of U.S. cultural privilege.1 Woundedness may seem like a strange strategic vehicle. However, Robinson suggests that in order for white masculinity to “most fully [represent] itself as victimized” it has to inhabit a “wounded body” (6). Though Robinson develops this claim through a focus on white men’s response to the “forced embodiment of whiteness and masculinity” (4), what would it mean to read the wounded body white men inhabit as someone else’s? How might the pattern of white men’s victimized representation in so much of U.S. literature, film, and television from the past half-century flag a pattern of surrogation and prostheticization, affective transmissions that produce the experience of whiteness as an experience of woundedness?2 For what would woundedness become a surrogate if we were to take this perspective? And how might it push us to reconsider representations of white men’s victimization as less strategic than sincere? In this project I examine representations of wounded white masculinity in contemporary U.S. fiction as expressive of a phenomenological orientation I call wounded whiteness. I develop this perspective from the critical-creative work of two 1 Native American novelists, Anna Lee Walters (Otoe/Pawnee) and Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d’Alene). In Ghost Singer and Indian Killer, Walters and Alexie respectively develop a critical phenomenology theorizing white masculinity as the experience of prosthetic belonging within settlement and suggest that whiteness inhabits its imaginary of Indianness in order to inhabit itself—a form of prosthetic attachment to a fiction borne from settler-colonial relations that becomes self-authorizing and self- generating. Alexie’s and Walters’s white
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