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Mythscapes: Violent Spaces in Postmodern Literature and Culture Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports 2010 Mythscapes: Violent Spaces in Postmodern Literature and Culture Jonathan R. Harvey West Virginia University Follow this and additional works at: https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd Recommended Citation Harvey, Jonathan R., "Mythscapes: Violent Spaces in Postmodern Literature and Culture" (2010). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 3256. https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/3256 This Dissertation is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by the The Research Repository @ WVU with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Dissertation in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you must obtain permission from the rights-holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/ or on the work itself. This Dissertation has been accepted for inclusion in WVU Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports collection by an authorized administrator of The Research Repository @ WVU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Mythscapes: Violent Spaces in Postmodern Literature and Culture Jonathan R. Harvey Dissertation submitted to the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Kathleen Ryan, Ph.D., Chair Charles Baldwin, Ph.D. Gwen Bergner, Ph.D. Ryan Claycomb, Ph.D. Lisa Yaszek, Ph.D. Department of English Morgantown, West Virginia 2010 Keywords: postmodern fiction; speculative literature; violence; marvelous space; gender studies; cultural studies. ABSTRACT Mythscapes: Violent Spaces in Postmodern Literature and Culture Jonathan R. Harvey This project focuses on British and American speculative novels written between the 1960s and the 2000s that position the reader to critique the contemporary world. Depictions of violent, fictional spaces, or what I call mythscapes, are playing an influential role in literary, political, religious, and even scientific discourses. The mythscape can initiate introspection on real issues by suggesting possible alternatives, conjecturing about potential consequences, and posing compelling comparisons. I define “mythscape” as an imagined space that features: a setting that is nonrealistic and radically different from, yet implicitly contrastive with, material reality; a rhetorical stance, which is inevitably grounded in the author’s historical and cultural moment; and the depiction of violent acts which are designed to shock and disturb while engaging the sympathetic emotions of the reader. Such imagined spaces could be fertile ground for rhetorical manipulation: consider, for example, individuals who have moderated their behavior due to imagined fears of the afterlife. Determining the argumentative designs and possible social impacts of such imagined spaces is the primary goal of my analysis. TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1: Defining the Mythscape ……………………………………………………………. 1 Chapter 2: From the Ruins of the Post-Apocalyptic Feminist Novel …………………………. 24 Chapter 3: Antiwar Dystopias and the Myths of Postmodern Wars …………………………... 62 Chapter 4: The “Wild West” and the “New Weird” …………………………………………… 92 Chapter 5: The Surreal, Pornographic Worlds of Carter and Acker ………………………….. 119 Chapter 6: Mythscapes in Post-Millennial Culture …………………………………………… 147 Works Cited ……………………………………………………………………………………158 iii Chapter 1: Defining the Mythscape Mythmakers often engage our deepest fears—death, powerlessness, global destruction, torture, perpetual warfare—and arouse in us the desire for transformation, whether spiritual, personal, or political. Such “mythology is certain to participate in the making of the world,” as Roland Barthes has famously argued (156). Depictions of violent, fictional spaces, or what I call mythscapes, are playing an influential role in literary, political, religious, and even scientific discourses. A tactical space from which to launch radical arguments about our world, a mythscape is a marvelous setting featuring violent imagery and a specific rhetorical purpose. These mental spaces are part of an imaginative cultural heritage of folklore and religion, from fairy tales to allegories, from descriptions of the afterlife to prophecies of the end of the world. In contemporary literature, mythscapes are often found in speculative fiction, a literary field which includes science fiction, fantasy, and, to some extent, surrealism, horror, and magic realism. Modern and postmodern readers do not necessarily “believe” in the actual presence of these mythscapes, but they can be influenced by them nonetheless, as I will argue. This project focuses on British and American speculative novels written between the 1960s and the 2000s that position the reader to critique the contemporary world. My approach to these texts is mindful of Baz Kershaw’s analysis of theatrical performances which have “the potential ...to achieve efficacy in a particular historical context” (3, emphasis in original). Likewise, the mythscape can initiate introspection on real issues by suggesting possible alternatives, conjecturing about potential consequences, and posing compelling comparisons. Mired in the mundane—a word whose roots are analogous to the Latin term for “world”— readers can find it difficult to disentangle themselves from the apparent reality imposed by culture. The process of reading superimposes an imagined world upon the material reality of the 1 text and the reader, and in this perceptual dislocation between the mundane and the fictional, there is a recursive space of comparison and critique. Such an imagined space is rife with possibility, and it is not unique to speculative writing; consider Helene Cixous’s comment urging women to write because “writing is precisely the very possibility of change ” (879, emphasis in original). Speculative fiction is just particularly suitable for this analysis because it presupposes a world unlike our own, and as Darko Suvin writes, science fiction “sees the norms of any age, including emphatically its own, as unique, changeable, and therefore subject to a cognitive view” (7, emphasis in original). Over the past several decades, scholars like Suvin have been arguing for a legitimization of speculative fiction, which is often tagged with the stigma of being less-than-literary “genre” fiction. Rather than addressing real world issues directly, so the argument goes, much speculative fiction is regarded as escapist, resulting in statements like those by Benjamin Kunkel, who writes that “genre fiction typically offers consolation at the expense of illumination” and blasts its lack of “moral imagination,” “stale language, secondhand insights, [and] hackneyed plots” (95). Despite the proliferation of such generalizations about speculative fiction, I contend that mythscapes can be effective tools of argument. The unreal aspects of the setting and narrative can unmoor readers from the everyday, the “‘zero world’ of empirically verifiable properties” (Suvin 11), and instigate critical reflection on our world, its people, and our fears and wishes. Just as fairy tales can, in Marina Warner’s terms, “encipher concerns, beliefs and desires in brilliant, seductive images that are themselves a form of camouflage” (xxi), mythscapes take an oblique approach to argument. Imagined spaces can have a powerful effect on personal decisions: consider, for example, individuals who have moderated their behavior due to imagined fears of the afterlife. Henri Lefebvre refers to the psychological influence which imagined space 2 might have on readers when he describes “the fictitious/real space of language and that of mental space, magically (imaginarily) cut off from the spatial realm, where the consciousness of the ‘subject’—or ‘self-consciousness’—takes form” (236). If subject formation occurs in an imagined space, a mental landscape tailored by language and colored by affect, then this intimate, infinitely mutable space could be fertile ground for rhetorical manipulation. Determining the argumentative designs and possible social impacts of such imagined spaces is the primary goal of my analysis. Since I am focusing on mostly postmodern texts, I will attempt to briefly parse how postmodern mythologizing contrasts with pre-modern and modern forms of mythmaking. “[M]odernism tends toward the monumental and the mythic, while postmodernism works to undermine such totalizing structural principles” by focusing instead on “the marginal, the fragmentary, and the heterogeneous” (Freedman 182). The mythscapes I analyze are not products of grand narratives widely believed by a culture, but rather narrative spaces conceived as heuristic possibilities and compelling forms of argument. Perhaps this relates to post- industrialized western culture’s “changing notions of what exactly constitutes ‘reality,’” as Rosemary Jackson describes in relation to the evolution of fantasy literature (4), which are, of course, in sharp contrast to monolithic notions of the real. Postmodern art tends to lack “an effective theory of agency that enables a move into political action ,” as Linda Hutcheon claims (3, emphasis in original), rendering postmodernism’s wry skepticism of truth conducive to a state of indifference. But since postmodern art “cannot but be political, at least in the sense that its representations—its images and stories—are
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