READING CINEMATIC ALLUSIONS IN THE POST-1945 AMERICAN NOVEL by PHILIP DERBESY Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY May 2020 2 CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES We hereby approve the dissertation of Philip Derbesy Candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy* Committee Chair William Marling Committee Member Robert Spadoni Committee Member Christopher Flint Committee Member Daniel Goldmark Date of Defense March 18, 2020 * We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein. 3 Table of Contents Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................. 4 Abstract ............................................................................................................................... 5 Introduction: Reading Cinematic Allusions........................................................................ 6 Chapter 1: Jack Kerouac’s Supplementary and Complementary Allusions ..................... 25 Chapter 2: Affectless Acting in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer ..................................... 49 Chapter 3: Audience Response and Its Limits for Elmore Leonard ................................. 78 Chapter 4: Empty Allusions in Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays ................................... 111 Conclusion: Affective Films, Reflexive Novels ............................................................. 142 Notes……………………………………………………………………………………155 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………….169 4 Acknowledgments Thank you to William Marling, whose mentorship and practical advice guided this dissertation through to completion, and to my committee members, Robert Spadoni, Christopher Flint, and Daniel Goldmark, whose formal and informal feedback made this a better project and me a better scholar. Thank you to the participants in the College of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Fellowship for their collegiality and feedback, and to Martha Woodmansee and Kenneth Ledford for leading. Thank you to Charles Rzepka for his comments on various drafts of my chapter on Elmore Leonard. Thank you to Michael Chiappini—for friendship, for giving me good things to read and watch, and for looking things over on short notice. Thanks to Benjamin Fischer, without whom I wouldn’t have known where to start. Thanks to my mother, who taught me that education is never wasted. Finally, thank you to my fiancé, Julia LaPlaca, for her love and support. Life is better as a team. 5 Reading Cinematic Allusions in the Post-1945 American Novel Abstract by PHILIP DERBESY This dissertation analyzes the cinematic allusions that appear in the novels of four postwar American writers: Jack Kerouac, Walker Percy, Elmore Leonard, and Joan Didion. I argue that these novelists employ cinematic allusions to comment on the ways that audiences interact with narrative texts. My definition for “allusions” is intentionally broad, including references to particular films, stars, tropes, viewing spaces, and productions. I argue that such allusions afford reflection for the readers of these novels, giving them a chance to pause and consider the differences between reading a book and watching a movie. Many scholars have theorized the differences between novels and films, but my project takes a new approach by considering how novelists can comment on these questions directly. All of the authors in my study find the cinema to be manipulative, and their cinematic allusions suggest that they believe the novel to be a more reflective, and therefore morally responsible, medium than film. However, this can lead to uncertainty for readers when their books simultaneously denounce and rely on the cinema’s affective possibilities. 6 Introduction: Reading Cinematic Allusions How does film impact the novel, and how can we write about this impact? Most scholars begin to answer these questions by asking what makes novels “cinematic,” tracing images that resemble camera shots or plot structures that mirror montage editing techniques. Peter Lurie’s work on William Faulkner is a nuanced but representative example: Although direct and indirect references to particular films or texts occur throughout Faulkner’s thirties fiction . what I find most compelling as a way of reading Faulkner’s modernism is its inflection by what we might call the “film idea,” the manner of impression and visual activity his novels model from the cinema. (6) Lurie’s project is to investigate the “film idea,” explaining the epistemological significance of novelistic images that mimic the cinema. While scholars define the “film idea” in various ways, this quest to track how films influence novels visually is the primary pursuit of the field. Lurie’s work is among the best examples, as he carefully traces the ways that Faulkner’s novels comment on and foil the conventions of film. This approach notwithstanding, I would like to suggest that it becomes a problem for novel/film studies when everyone is interested in the “film idea” or something like it. The result of this fixation is that Lurie’s “direct and indirect references to films and other texts” remain under-analyzed among scholars who write about the interactions between literature and the cinema. 7 My dissertation articulates the importance of cinematic allusions to the novels of Jack Kerouac, Walker Percy, Elmore Leonard, and Joan Didion. I argue that these novelists’ direct references to the cinema encourage readers to reflect on the differences between novels and films. When characters in these novels watch movies, or make movies, or describe their lives in terms of the movies, readers can consider how these actions compare to the story that they are reading. For example, Elmore Leonard has movie star Michael Weir comment about a role in Get Shorty (1990), “What fascinates me about this one . is the chance to play an essentially cliché-type character in a way that’s never been done before, against his accepted type” (259). I will argue that moments like this afford layered reflection for readers: we can consider how characters in the novel we are reading may be “clichéd,” and we may start to wonder whether they would seem more or less clichéd if we saw them on the screen instead of the page. (We can also see the irony that Michael Weir is fulfilling the well-worn role of the pretentious actor while insisting that he is daring and original when he appears onscreen.) While Leonard treats this question playfully, all the novelists under investigation use similar moments to comment on the differences between reading novels and watching movies. The term “cinematic allusion” is intentionally broad as I use it, usually to refer to moments where novelists invoke recognizable films, stars, character types, and viewing practices. Sometimes these cinematic elements appear literally in the world of a text, as with Leonard’s actor above or when the protagonist of The Moviegoer (1961) happens to meet William Holden in the street. Other characters merely imagine their lives in cinematic terms, as in On the Road (1957) when Sal Paradise insists that his friend Dean Moriarty looks like Groucho Marx. Either way, I argue that the allusions in these novels 8 reflect the experience of a single character, usually the protagonist. Thus, my study focuses on the ways that novelists comment on film’s impact on the individual, as opposed to its formal properties in the abstract. To this end, I deploy recent scholarship on affective reader response that examines the moral ambiguity of texts playing on the emotions of readers. All of the authors in my study consider the cinema to be manipulative, and their cinematic allusions suggest that they believe the novel to be a more reflective, and therefore morally responsible, medium than film. However, this can lead to uncertainty for readers when their books simultaneously denounce and rely on the cinema’s affective possibilities. Film in the Novel Some theorists argue that novels and films are so dissimilar that the best way to write about their relationship is to enumerate the differences between them.1 Among scholars who look for similarities between the two media, on the other hand, there is no consensus about what a movie-tinged novel looks like. Kamilla Elliott gets to the heart of this issue when she points out that “No literary form has been declared ‘cinematic’ more frequently than the novel, regardless of what form the novel has taken and regardless of what form the film has taken” (113). Scholars want to pinpoint the ways that novelists incorporate cinematic techniques into their work, but their definitions vary depending on the argument that they want to make. This is not a new problem, either. In a deftly caustic essay written over thirty years ago, Steven G. Kellman traces the history of the “cinematic novel” as a concept. Kellman points to the diversity of uses for the term; critics can use it to denigrate a novelist’s work as a “repository of gaudy plots” or to praise experimental novels for being “overtly edited and modern” (473). The upshot is 9 that the moniker “cinematic” is applied to such disparate works as nineteenth-century realist novels, the Aeneid, and Hollywood novels like Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon. Kellman considers this final move to be particularly misguided: “To call these cinematic novels . is to compound the confusion.