Melancholy Utopia: Loss and Fantasy in Contemporary American Literature and Film by Julia Patricia Wallace Cooper A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto © Copyright by Julia Patricia Wallace Cooper, 2016 Melancholy Utopia: Loss and Fantasy in Contemporary American Literature and Film Julia Patricia Wallace Cooper Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto 2016 Abstract My project examines sites of social and psychic resistance to forfeiting loss in contemporary literature, film, and philosophy. I call these textual, cinematic, and performative spaces of resistance melancholy utopia. Working at the intersection of affect theory, queer studies, and psychoanalysis, I argue for the utopian potential in the protracted grieving of melancholia. The pathologization of grief in contemporary Western culture proceeds from the incessant demand for productivity inherent to late-stage capitalism: extended mourning is unproductive and economically inefficient, an emotional nuisance. Therefore, I focus on the violence that is intrinsic to the temporal demands made on mourning and argue that there is an innate counterhegemonic impulse in the melancholic’s steadfast grief. The melancholic !ii subject resists the violent injunction to “move on” from her sorrow and creates instead an affective utopia that allows him or her to experience his or her pain and new forms of thinking. By focusing on post-1945 literature and film, I chart the “ugly” affect of melancholia and the contemporary salience of utopian dreaming. Although the authors and directors through whose work I develop the concept of melancholy utopia are otherwise diverse, they share a preoccupation with the relationship between loss and fantasy. My first chapter interrogates critical analyses of grief (Jacques Derrida), failure and lack (Judith Halberstam; Jacques Lacan), queer futurity (Lee Edelman), and utopia (José Muñoz). My next three chapters chart melancholy utopia and the alternative kinship relations it fosters in the kitchens of the American South (Carson McCullers; Harmony Korine), in the literary archive (David Foster Wallace), and in New Queer Cinema (Jennie Livingston; Sean Baker). Each chapter illustrates melancholy utopia as the nexus of pain and hope in modern grief. My project thus has broader implications for rethinking the discursive limits of kinship, love, and ethical fidelity in our contemporary moment. !iii Acknowledgments I am forever grateful to my supervisor Professor Mari Ruti for her guidance, support, and unrelenting encouragement throughout this project. I am also thankful to my committee members Professors Sara Salih and Naomi Morgenstern for their invaluable insights. I would like to thank the other mentors who have been generous to me and my ideas over many years: Manish Sharma and Omri Moses at Concordia University, Ara Osterweil and Sean Carney at McGill University, Mark Knight at Lancaster University, Eli Friedlander for his seminar on Walter Benjamin at The School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University in 2015, Jennifer Friedlander at Pomona College, and finally, Larry Switzky, Cheryl Suzack, and Corinn Columpar at the University of Toronto. You are—as Frankie Addams would say —the we of me. I am grateful for various forms of financial support received over the course of this dissertation through the Ontario Graduate Scholarship, the V. A. De Luca Memorial Fellowship, the University of Toronto Award for the Study of the United States, and the University of Toronto Fellowship. Thank you to my friends and family for standing by as I worked through what it means to write, feel, and live with grief. To my sweet Tim Macleod, for the bliss. This dissertation is dedicated to my mom Patricia Wallace, who, if she were here, I would say: this has all been for you, and it has all been worthwhile. !iv Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements iv Table of Contents v List of Figures vii Introduction: The “Problem” of Melancholia and The Promise of Utopia 1 1. Loss, Enjoyment, Failure 26 Filling the Lack 30 The Birth Pangs of Biopolitics 32 Grief’s Strange Temporality 40 Fidelity 44 Psychoanalysis and The Political 48 Enjoying Loss 55 Failure 58 The Queer Negative 67 The Anti-Relational Turn 72 2. Spectres in the Southern Kitchen: Carson McCullers and Harmony Korine 81 A History of the Back-of-House 84 The Member of the Wedding 87 Kitchen Conversations, Strange Intimacies 95 Foreclosing Queerness 106 Another Kitchen: Gummo 110 Kitchen Revolt 116 Generating New Social Analogies 125 3. David Foster Wallace and The Melancholy Utopia of Articulation 128 A Split View: The Wallace Criticism 132 Wallace’s Self-Help Library 144 Inside Suicide: “Good Old Neon” 154 — THE END. 160 The Meaning of “Whatever” 168 Psychoanalysis and Cézanne’s Apples 170 The Pale King and Abiding Melancholia 177 4. New Queer Cinema Then and Now: Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning (1990) & Sean Baker’s Tangerine (2015) 183 The Arrival of New Queer Cinema 186 Ball Culture & Paris Is Burning 196 Venus Xtravaganza and Fantasies of Whiteness 201 “Just Enjoy It”: Finding Satisfaction in Lack 215 Tangerine, A West Hollywood Epic 222 The Ambivalence of Whiteness 226 Silence in the Laundromat 229 iPhone Politics: Beyond The Selfie 233 !v Conclusion: Returning to Disappearance 243 Works Consulted 250 !vi List of Figures Figure 1: McRay, Percy. Miriam Burbank. 2014. Figure 2: Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I, 1514. Figure 3: Judie Bamber, I’ll Give You Something to Cry About (Dead Baby Finch),1990. Figure 4: Emma Kisiel, Squirrel 2, 2011. Figure 5: William Safie, Typical American House, Moscow, 1959. Figure 6: Jennie Livingston, Venus at the Ball, Paris Is Burning, 1990. Figure 7: Sean Baker, Sin Dee Pulls Dinah, Tangerine, 2015. Figure 8: Jennie Livingston, Venus Xtravaganza, Paris Is Burning, 1990. Figure 9: Sean Baker, Sin Dee and Dinah, Tangerine, 2015. !vii Introduction The “Problem” of Melancholia and The Promise of Utopia Figure 1: McRay, Percy. Miriam Burbank. 2014. nytimes.com. Photograph. Miriam Burbank died. It was a June day in New Orleans in 2014. Burbank was only 53 years old, but she had made arrangements for her funeral. There, her embalmed body sat upright at a table with a cigarette in one hand and a wineglass in the other. Her light black skin had a waxy finish. A pair of thick, black sunglasses covered Burbank’s eyes and a glossy shoulder-length wig framed her face and shoulders. Like many of the dead, she wore her finest: diamond earrings, gold watch, and a silk scarf. On the table in front of her was an ashtray and lighter, a pack of menthol cigarettes, and a couple of small New Orleans Saints helmets in honor of her favorite team. Behind Burbank was a large screen TV and a half empty bottle of Jack Daniels. According to The New York Times, this scene recreates how !1 !2 Burbank “had spent a good number of her living days” (Roberston). With those days now behind her, Burbank’s funeral is a scene of prosopopoeia: her corpse is meant to look as though it is a body still in action, perhaps even about to speak. But more than this, the unlikely still-life registers that Burbank is gone, but not quite. Waiting expectantly at her table, Burbank is making a visual and prosopopoeic address from before—and not yet beyond—the grave. As Diana Fuss remarks in her study of the modern elegy, a corpse testifies to an absence, and “a corpse negates interiority” (44). The cadaver is the empty remains of someone who, until very recently, once was. So when a corpse “speaks” as it does in the elegies of Fuss’s study, or when a corpse appears as though it is about to speak, as it does in the instance of Burbank’s funeral, the corpse is misbehaving. We associate death with disappearance rather than with appearance, and, yet, in the context of Burbank, what is gone reappears in a makeshift sort of way. This form of lifelike funeral staging is relatively new to the United States, and it breaks with conventional mourning rituals in more ways than one. Burbank’s service shirks the solemnity of traditional mourning rites by having her body mimic life rather than death. However, solemnity is not replaced by a flippant irreverence. In a sense, those who are left to grieve can be with their loss for a bit longer, and a peculiar comfort is given room to emerge. In this unconventional scenario, Burbank has orchestrated a novel encounter between her mourners and their loss that has the timbre of fantasy. According to Julia Kristeva, one way of understanding fantasy is as the “intimate creation of representations” (63). Kristeva writes that the Greek root of fantasy (fae, faos, fos) !3 “expresses the notion of light and thus the fact of coming to light, shining, appearing, presenting, presenting oneself, representing oneself” (2002: 63). In this respect, the unfolding of fantasy is like shining a light upon the shadowy corners of one’s inner life. Indeed, this funeral stages a certain representation of Burbank (orchestrated by Burbank herself, in anticipation of death), and she appears to her mourners in the peculiar glow of the fantastical. The uncanny corpse, in a manner of speaking, poses some significant questions about grief: how do we experience loss? And how might we begin to renegotiate the terms of public grieving in order to make room for fantasy? Burbank’s New Orleans funeral presents an alternative way of relating to grief. The question remains: alternative to what? On the surface, the peculiar contortion of Burbank’s dead body into a pose of aliveness might seem like a spectacle that functions as a denial of death. Burbank’s undead appearance could be construed as a refusal on her part to accept death.