Terminal Cities: Non-Places in Contemporary American Literature and Film David Boylan Department of English McGill University, Montreal March 2019 A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy © David Boylan 2019 2 Table of Contents Acknowledgements 3 Abstract 4 Résumé 5 Introduction 6 Chapter One: Highways 37 Chapter Two: Hotels 82 Chapter Three: Convenience Stores 129 Chapter Four: Airports 182 Chapter Five: Cyberspace, and the Body as Place 224 Afterword 268 Works Cited 271 3 Acknowledgements I want to thank McGill University and the Department of English for the institutional funding they have provided me for my time here, as well as those faculty and colleagues who have guided the development of my thinking and research interests throughout, in particular Thomas Heise, Ned Schantz, and my thesis supervisor Derek Nystrom, whose insight, knowledge, and encouragement has been absolutely essential to the completion of this project. Additional special thanks to Hélène Bromhall for translating the abstract, as well as to my parents for their support, Jeff for his candor, Ian for his friendship, and Elizabeth, for more than I could begin to say. 4 Abstract This dissertation is about non-places in contemporary American literature and film. Non-places are public spaces that are nevertheless transitory, efficient, and impersonal, dedicated mostly to logistics and straightforward tasks rather than community formation or personal identity— primary examples include things like highways, hotel rooms, convenience stores, and airports. I use these spaces here to discuss the challenges of everyday life in the highly mobile and interconnected world that they themselves have helped build, and how its high speeds, complex programs, and loose ties are illustrated and worked through in the popular imagination. On a practical basis, such infrastructure represents a series of simple bargains or trade-offs, as its emphasis on material and economic concerns comes into conflict with those of a more social or civic nature, foregrounding some important changes in how the public sphere is seen to work more generally. And in the texts selected for this study, the overall ongoing transition toward a society predicated on flexibility, uncertainty, instantaneity, disposability, and excess that these developments speak to is seen to have a number of related problems, coming to affect not just the exchange of goods, services, and information, but the lives and lifestyles of people—their outlooks, ambitions, values, relationships, and so on. What this dissertation argues specifically is that in addition to providing the functional backbone of globalization in its various guises and configurations, non-places are also where this still emergent period's primary discontents—a widespread lack of relations, history, and identity—are experienced, articulated, and managed on a personal level, as revealed through the growing presence of these spaces in American fiction. 5 Résumé Cette thèse est sur les non-lieux dans la littérature et le film américains contemporains. Les non- lieux sont des espaces publics qui sont néanmoins transitoires, efficaces et impersonnels, dédiés principalement à la logistique et aux tâches simples plutôt qu'à la formation de la communauté ou à l'identité personnelle—les exemples principaux comprennent des choses comme les autoroutes, les hôtels, les dépanneurs et les aéroports. J'utilise ces espaces ici pour discuter des défis de la vie quotidienne dans le monde très mobile et interconnecté qu'ils ont eux-mêmes contribué à construire, et comment ses vitesses élevées, ses programmes complexes et ses liens lâches sont illustrés et examinés dans l'imagination populaire. Sur une base pratique, une telle infrastructure représente une série de marchés ou de compromis, car l'accent mis sur les préoccupations matérielles et économiques entre en conflit avec ceux de nature plus sociale ou civique, en mettant en avant certains changements importants dans la façon dont la sphère publique est perçue comme travaillant plus généralement. Et dans les textes retenus pour cette étude, la transition générale en cours vers une société fondée sur la souplesse, l'incertitude, l'instantanéité, la déposabilité et l'excès que ces développements indiquent est considérée comme ayant un certain nombre de problèmes connexes, venant à affectent non seulement l'échange de biens, de services et d'informations, mais aussi les vies et les modes de vie des personnes—leurs perspectives, leurs ambitions, leurs valeurs, leurs relations, etc. Ce que cette thèse fait valoir spécifiquement, c'est qu'en plus de fournir l'épine dorsale fonctionnelle de la mondialisation du capitalisme tardif, les non-lieux sont aussi là où le mécontentement primaire de cette période— un manque généralisé de relations, d'histoire et d'identité—sont expérimentés, articulés, et gérés à un niveau personnel, comme révélé par la présence croissante de ces espaces dans la fiction américaine. 6 Introduction The title of this dissertation is taken from a piece by Eric Drooker, which depicts a man standing at an apartment window. The window is one of a couple dozen in a forest of nondescript high- rises, and the man is the only figure looking out toward the viewer, pensively leaning against the wall. The other apartments are darkened but the shapes of their residents are also visible, each hunched over a keyboard, backs turned, faces and features obscured by the glow of their monitors. The play is of course on the word terminal, which as an adjective ominously denotes endings and finitiude, and as a noun refers to the most ordinary features of any modern city. In the context of the illustration, it most directly refers to the computers in the other apartments—a city of terminals, linking everywhere to everywhere else. Because cities are really just spaces where crowds of people go to socialize and transact, it is implied, hosting these meetings online has made obsolete the actual sites where they used to take place. But the man at the window is looking outside at the landscape that seems to have been forgotten, apparently relegated to performing society's lower-order operations. From the viewer's vantage point in a neighbouring window, neither street nor sky are visible, obstructed by a wall of identical buildings. The occupants of the buildings are likewise identical, anonymously managing their affairs from behind their screens, the man the only irregular presence in frame. This is the other terminal city, a concrete hinterland so lifeless that someone bothering to look at it is already the most noteworthy thing to be seen there. --- 7 This dissertation examines non-places in American literature and film from the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. The term 'non-place,' popularized in 1995 by French anthropologist Marc Augé, refers to commonly encountered public spaces dedicated to transportation, transaction, accommodation, and the other logistical challenges of today's world. They are utilitarian, locations “which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity,” yet take in countless individuals on a daily basis, most of whom are already heading somewhere else (Augé 77-78). They include highways, hotel rooms, and supermarkets, everything from airports to ATMs, all manner of information kiosks, ticket queues, loading zones, and check-in screens. Designed around the principles of speed, motion, consistency, efficiency, and function, they are eminently short-term, occupied without being inhabited, the spaces of “solitary contractuality” briefly stopped at or passed through on the way to an actual destination (Augé 94). But despite their transitory nature, non-places have become a foundational part of contemporary life in many significant ways, particularly within cities. As “the installations needed for the accelerated circulation of passengers and goods,” they form the basic infrastructure undergirding the highly mobile, interconnected, and informational global society that has rapidly developed over the last several decades (Augé 34). And because of their central importance to urban affairs in this role, they are also forming the backdrop against which the everyday routines of urban populations are carried out, an ever-present fact and facet of the metropolitan experience. Originally intended purely for the fulfilment of specific material needs, in their ubiquity non-places have begun to accrue the same kinds of personal significance as other highly trafficked spaces, and invite the same kinds of critical attention. Each of the five chapters following this introduction discusses one example of this vital but overlooked terrain, and all are structured around this dual focus on material versus 8 sociocultural issues. On the one hand, I consider non-places in their capacity as the circulatory system of globalization—a worldwide network tasked with the drudgery of transportation, containment, and exchange at previously unimaginable scales and speeds. The economic applications of this leap in infrastructural might are particularly apparent during the postwar period in the concurrent development of post-Fordist, 'late' capitalism, which functions according to a similar short-term, contingent logic. Now characterized by intense dynamism and interdependency, the world's markets for goods, labour, services, and information rely on these spaces to quickly rearrange assets as needed, shuffling