SSStttooonnnyyy BBBrrrooooookkk UUUnnniiivvveeerrrsssiiitttyyy The official electronic file of this thesis or dissertation is maintained by the University Libraries on behalf of The Graduate School at Stony Brook University. ©©© AAAllllll RRRiiiggghhhtttsss RRReeessseeerrrvvveeeddd bbbyyy AAAuuuttthhhooorrr... Against an Age of Legibility: Reading, Vision, and Embodiment in Twentieth-Century American Literature A Dissertation Presented by Amy Elizabeth Falvey to The Graduate School in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Stony Brook University May 2011 Copyright by Amy Elizabeth Falvey 2011 Stony Brook University The Graduate School Amy Elizabeth Falvey We, the dissertation committee for the above candidate for the Doctor of Philosophy degree, hereby recommend acceptance of this dissertation. Ira Livingston – Dissertation Advisor Chairperson, Humanities and Media Department, Pratt Institute Jeffrey Santa Ana – Chairperson of Defense and Co-Advisor Assistant Professor, English Department, Stony Brook University Heidi Hutner Associate Professor, English Department, Stony Brook University Neda Atanasoski Assistant Professor, Feminist Studies, University of California Santa Cruz This dissertation is accepted by the Graduate School. Lawrence Martin Dean of the Graduate School ii Abstract of the Dissertation Against an Age of Legibility: Reading, Vision, and Embodiment in Twentieth-Century American Literature by Amy Elizabeth Falvey Doctor of Philosophy in English Stony Brook University 2011 This dissertation gathers twentieth and twenty-first century literary texts that contest conceptions of purity and readability that have dominated approaches to the body over the past century in the United States. In an age reputed to premise knowledge not on the visible – but on the genomic, the biological – the visible nonetheless remains absolute signifier of truth and knowledge. Beginning with a reading of George S. Schuyler‘s 1931 novel Black No More, I argue that a fixation on bodily and facial features as unalterable signs of otherness grew in response to the movement of bodies with both the ―second wave‖ of immigrants into the U.S., and the migration of African Americans northward, between 1910 and 1930. Through its satire of racial purity and its revelation of mixed genealogical lines, Schuyler‘s text both exposes and critiques the growing desire to visually distinguish racial features, and to secure them as truth. I assert that both Schuyler‘s text and Ralph Ellison‘s Invisible Man refute claims of national bodily purity and legibility, by challenging the presupposition that spaces of non-contact exist, and are – or were once – accessible. Each text that comprises this project poses a challenge to iii realism and, in turn, contests the possibility of a fully coherent narrative of selfhood or embodiment, in that both texts and bodies are ongoingly in contact, and are thus both self and not-self. In Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs parodies and undermines the power of the visible by making it infinitely unstable, and by presenting abjection – in both form and content – that refuses absolute readability and bodily coherency. The desire for legibility has also informed how sex and morphology are comprehended or imagined, and through Katherine Dunn‘s Geek Love and Jeffrey Eugenides‘ Middlesex, I demonstrate that legibility is reiteratively performed in the name of creating stable signifying bodies that are never, in fact, stable. Approaching television and films that include David Cronenberg‘s Videodrome, this dissertation closes by addressing the ever-present networks of contact between bodies and ―foreign‖ material through visual narratives that themselves question the coherency of the visible. iv Table of Contents Introduction 1 Legibility and Bodies Between: Always Already In-Contact Chapter 1 34 Fictions of Purity, Fears of Illegibility, and the Face of the Nation: Mixing Trees & Paint in Schuyler‘s Black No More and Ellison‘s Invisible Man Chapter 2 98 Narratives of Isolation & Fleshly Commerce: Abjection, Illegibility, Interzonality, and Contact in William S. Burroughs‘ Naked Lunch Chapter 3 139 Saviors and Tragic Bodies: Disrupting Narratives of Protection in Katherine Dunn‘s Geek Love and Jeffrey Eugenides‘ Middlesex Chapter 4 184 Illegibility and Between-ness On Screen: Histories of Contact in Nip/Tuck, Videodrome, and XXY Conclusion 235 Kinect: Posthuman Bodies in Contact Endnotes 240 References 248 v Acknowledgements I would like to thank my dissertation committee for the tremendous amount of time, feedback, encouragement, and guidance they willingly dedicated to the completion of this project: Professor Ira Livingston, whose sense of humor and ability to imaginatively interrupt have been a relief and a source of inspiration; Professor Jeffrey Santa Ana, whose capacity to recommend the most relevant, compelling, and innovative theoretical texts is uncanny, and aided immeasurably in the development of this project; Professor Heidi Hutner, whose faith in me as a thinker and writer throughout my entire graduate career was a comfort; Professor Atanasoski, who introduced me to the work of Sara Ahmed, and encouraged me to pursue an intersection between visual culture and gender theories that grounded this project. I would also like to thank Professor Celia Marshik, who guided me through a number of difficulties and questions over the course of my graduate experience. I would like to thank all the teachers whose classes, conversations, and words of wisdom brought me here. The professors I was fortunate enough to know during my undergraduate experience had an indelibly positive impact on me. A special thanks to Carl and Stella Herzig, and the Herzig family, for their spiritual support. I would also like to thank those friends whose support outside the program at Stony Brook contributed immensely to my survival within it: Sara Nylander, Alicia Giffin, Krista Thanos, and others. I would like to thank my family for their unrelenting support in pursuit of this degree. My brothers – Shaun, Paul, Daniel, and Matthew – have continued to offer their words of encouragement and congratulations, and lent an interested ear to the sounds of this strange path. My parents – Kristina and John – deserve an unending hymn of praise. My dad always said that his dream was to help his children live out their dreams. Without the support of my parents, my completion of this dissertation would not have been possible, and I cannot thank them enough. Their pride in me is humbling, and their love and faith in me outstanding. Finally, I would like to thank the four people whose presence at Stony Brook was essential to my eventual completion of the dissertation, as well as my growth as one who thinks, writes, critiques: Eileen Chanza Torres, from whom I learned so much that words simply cannot express it; Rachel Neyra Ellis, whose musical abilities in both sound and word have so many moments struck me with an indescribable beauty; Emily Churilla, whose sarcasm served as my salvation so many times; and last, but hardly least, Jacqueline Vigliotti (Standardotti), my eternal sage. Introduction Legibility and Bodies Between: Always Already In-Contact …how might we encounter the difference that calls our grids of intelligibility into question without trying to foreclose the challenge that the difference delivers? What might it mean to learn to live in the anxiety of that challenge, to feel the surety of one‘s epistemological and ontological anchor go, but to be willing, in the name of the human, to allow the human to become something other than what it is traditionally assumed to be? This means that we must learn to live and to embrace the destruction and rearticulation of the human in the name of a more capacious and, finally, less violent world, not knowing in advance what precise form our humanness does and will take. It means we must be open to its permutations, in the name of nonviolence. -Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, 35 Deceptive, Readable Bodies This project gathers twentieth and twenty-first century literary texts that contest conceptions of purity and readability that have dominated approaches to the body over the past century in the United States. In an age reputed to premise knowledge not on the visible – but on the genomic, the biological – the visible nonetheless remains absolute signifier of truth and knowledge. This project suggests that dramatic alterations undergone in the United States in the beginning of the twentieth century brought with them public, national, and institutional imaginings of otherness that centered on the reading of bodies and faces. Over the course of the century, this project maintains, the desire for – and belief in – the ultimate legibility of difference has continued its hold over the nation. Shifts in science and medicine at the turn of the century reflected and contributed to a growing focus on the visible as locus of truth. The changes developing in these fields cultivated a philosophy of the visible contending that, while the surface or appearance of a body or object may deceive or be deceptive, the truth of a body, a face, or an object could be – and should rightly be – detected and read with the implementation of a scrutinizing look. 1 In 1911, scientist Wilhelm Johannsen delineated between the genotype and phenotype of an organism, suggesting that the phenotype was the visible expression of genetic makeup. Differentiating between internal and external, and maintaining