Universität Trier Fachbereich II Anglistik/Amerikanistik (Literaturwissenschaft) The Family Novel in North America from Post-War to Post-Millennium: A Study in Genre Schriftliche Prüfungsarbeit zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde Vorgelegt von: Kerstin Dell, M.A., M.A. Töpferstraße 41 54290 Trier 0651 / 9989597 [email protected] Die Arbeit wurde betreut von: Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Klooß, Erstkorrektor Prof. Dr. Gerd Hurm, Zweitkorrektor 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to Bischöfliche Studienförderung Cusanuswerk for supporting so generously the completion of this project. Also, I am very much indebted to Jonathan Franzen for kindly consenting to give me an interview. I wish to thank my family and friends for their encouragement and care. Thanks to Dr. Christine Spies for helpful proofreading. Last but not least I thank Martin for his love. 3 To the memory of my father, Hermann J. Dell, who always believed in me. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS I. Introduction p. 5 II. Answering the Question: What Is a Family Novel? p. 17 2.1 Pride and Prejudice: The State of Criticism p. 17 2.2 Realism, Conflict, Decline? Ru’s Structuralist Taxonomy p. 26 2.3 (Re-) Defining the Family Novel p. 31 III. Parent Figures: Functions and Symbolic Potential p. 38 3.1 The Mother Figure in Fiction p. 38 3.2 The Father Figure in Fiction p. 44 IV. The Post-War Family Novel p. 52 4.1 The Fifties: Texts and Contexts p. 52 4.2 John Cheever’s The Wapshot Chronicle (1957) p. 56 4.2.1 The Importance of Being a Wapshot: Heritage and Tradition p. 62 4.2.2 “The Iron Women in Their Summer Dresses”. p. 64 Mother Figures and Their Negative Potential 4.2.3 “All Gone with Dawn’s Early Light”. p. 80 The Legacy of the Father 4.2.4 Look Back in Anxiety: Talking about the New Generation p. 88 4.3 Synopsis: The Nostalgic Family Novel p. 95 V. The Postmodern Family Novel p. 99 5.1 Postmodern America: Texts and Contexts p. 99 5.2 Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985) p. 110 5.2.1 The Postnuclear Patchwork Family: A Fearful Symmetry? p. 118 5.2.2 The Family (Novel) at the End of History p. 140 5.3 Synopsis: The Subversive Family Novel p. 150 VI. The Fin de Millennium Family Novel p. 156 6.1 After Postmodernism p. 156 6.2 The Contemporary Family. Renegotiations of a Model p. 166 6.3 Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001) p. 168 6.3.1 Enchanted Worlds: Corrective Constructions p. 171 6.3.2 Disenchanted Worlds: Constructive Corrections p. 189 6.3.3 The Return of Meaning p. 194 6.4 Synopsis: Reconstruction and the Family Novel p. 199 VII. The Family Novel Then and Now: Trash, Trends, Traditions p. 203 VIII. Bibliography p. 212 IX. Appendix p. 226 9.1 A Conversation with Jonathan Franzen p. 226 9.2 Zusammenfassung der Arbeit in deutscher Sprache p. 233 9.3 Erklärung über die verwendeten Hilfsmittel p. 239 5 I. INTRODUCTION When Jonathan Franzen’s third novel The Corrections was published on September 10, 2001, it became an immediate success. Reviewers have even gone so far as to claim that the publication of Franzen’s novel had an impact on America’s cultural landscape considered equally enormous as, on a political level, the dreadful events that only one day later left the nation in terror and grief1. Regardless of the question whether such a comparison is justified or not, it cannot be denied that Franzen’s third novel has indeed caused an astonishing echo. Celebrated by the academic community as well as by reviewers, The Corrections was soon called the first masterpiece of the twenty-first century2. As New York City dramatist Donald Margukies remarked, one could hardly attend an East coast dinner in the weeks and months following the publication of Franzen’s novel without noticing the fervent discussions about it (Marshall, n.p.). The majority of reviewers praise the novel for its complex structure, its engaging portrayal of characters, its wittiness and its keen observation of the everyday intricacies of contemporary American life. The chorus of the praisers and acclaimers also points repeatedly to the company in which the book is held to be – a company that includes internationally acclaimed novelists ranging from Thomas Mann to Salman Rushdie or Don DeLillo. Such applause for a family novel is not the norm. Considering the fact that Franzen’s third work is a perfect example of a family novel, the praise is rather surprising. Generally speaking, the genre of the family novel has been traditionally regarded as trivial by literary critics. There are numerous scholars whose treatises on family novels are nothing short of condescending. Their criticism ranges from the widespread association of the family novel with the superficial and mundane to the very specific wish that the family novel go to hell3. The family novel, often (and unjustifiably) associated with the domestic novel, has been derided by critics for the past couple of decades. An astonishing number of scholars and critics have attacked it for lacking the necessary pinch of social criticism. In their opinion, family novels are full of predictable characters and deal with average and smallish problems 1 As Elena Lappin writes in the German weekly Die Zeit: “Zwei Ereignisse erschütterten Amerika im Herbst 2001: die Verheerungen des 11. September und die Veröffentlichung eines Romans von Jonathan Franzen mit dem Titel The Corrections. Es mag hart klingen, beides in einem Atemzug zu nennen. Aber der Roman wühlte das Land auf wie ein Erdbeben und legte entlang klar definierter, aber lange verborgener Verwerfungslinien sein rohes Innenleben frei”, Die Zeit 24 (6. 6. 2002) 53. 2 E.g. by John Marshall in “Meteoric Success a Novel Experience for Author Jonathan Franzen”, The Seattle Post, http://seattlepi/nwsource.com/books/41634_franzeno6.shtml (acc. 11 Oct. 2002). 3 W. J. Keith, “To Hell with the Family: An Open Letter to the New Quarterly”, Special Issue: Family Fictions. The New Quarterly 1/2 (1987): 320-24. 6 in a domestic, often pastoral, environment. Their general assumption - if not prejudice - is that the conflicts in these novels are petty and the scope restricted to the immediate familial surroundings, i.e. the house, the neighborhood, the village, the small town. Celebrated family sagas of high aesthetic quality, e.g. John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, have been regarded in terms of the famous exception that proves the rule. The surprisingly meager number of works on the family novel can thus be seen as a direct consequence of the generally shared negative attitude towards this genre. Despite academia’s disregard of the family novel, its manifold exemplars have always met with the significant interest of the reading public. Leaving aside for a moment the possible reasons for this continuous public approval, an explanation of academia’s low opinion of family novels includes formal as well as thematic aspects. Especially in the past few decades critics have tended to appreciate a certain radicalism of style that family novels generally were assumed not to offer. Secondly, a novel concentrating on family life was not only thought of as being restricted to the domestic sphere, but also as displaying merely regionalist features, a combination considered traditionalist by modernist or postmodernist critics. Frank Lentricchia’s essay on Don DeLillo’s White Noise (a book to which The Corrections has been compared frequently4) is a striking example of the almost arrogant stance academia has taken towards the more “traditional” family novel. Disregarding the fact that White Noise is also a family novel, albeit a postmodern one, Lentricchia praises it as the longed-for deviation from the domestic fiction of, e.g., Bobbie Ann Mason or Frederick Barthelme. According to Lentricchia, such novels, which he sees as limited, have developed parallel to a stable socio-political situation in the US: So American novelists and critics first look sentimentally to the other Americas, where (so it goes) the good luck of fearsome situations of social crisis encourages a major literature; then look ruefully to home, where (so it goes) the comfort of our stability requires a minor, apolitical, domestic fiction of the triumphs and agonies of private individuals operating in “the private sector” of Raymond Carver and Anne Tyler, the modesty of small, good things: fiction all but labeled “No expense of intellect required. To be applied in eternal crises of the heart only.” Unlike these new regionalists of and for the Reagan eighties, DeLillo offers us no myth of political virginity preserved, no “individuals” who are not expressions of – and responses to – specific historical processes5. Besides attacking domestic fiction (under the heading of which he also subsumes family novels) for their supposedly minor intellectual stimulus, Lentricchia’s surprising observation 4 Cf. Stewart O’Nan, “Jonathan Franzen: A Stranger in the Family Paradise”, The Atlantic September 2001, www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/09/noteworthy.htm (acc. 18 Oct. 2002). 5 Frank Lentricchia, “Don DeLillo’s Primal Scenes”, White Noise. Text and Criticism, ed. Mark Osteen (New York: Penguin, 1998) 413. 7 (and criticism) is that this kind of literature seems to be thought of as connected to a secure and calm political environment.6 In the passage quoted above, Lentricchia is not critical of the somewhat simplistic understanding of fiction as merely reflecting socio-historical conditions that this attitude entails, but of the claim that truly grand literature could only grow in an unstable world. He also attacks regionalist elements in fiction, a feature which also very often, though not exclusively, applies to family novels.