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Inside Men Confession, Masculinity, and Form in American Fiction since the Second World War Iain McMaster PhD in English Literature University of Edinburgh 2018 8I0Z eunl 6z r4B(I -!#W.fi/q:pedrs 'uonecglpnb puolssegord ro ea.6ep raqlo ifue roJ pe$rrgns uooq ssg sFeql s1tn;o prd o11 '1ro,u uno Iur,(puue s1 pue au dq pssoduroc ueaq suq u51tpr perrytuoc ryo,n eg leql {ruer ol $ sryr uollBrepeo Acknowledgements Firstly, I would like to thank my supervisor, Paul Crosthwaite, for his unwavering encouragement, patience, and guidance. I am very grateful for the critical insights he shared over the course of my doctoral studies. Thank you to the students and staff in the School of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures for creating a welcoming and stimulating academic environment. Thank you to Sarah Bernstein for her friendship throughout this journey. This project was made possible with support from a Wolfson Foundation Postgraduate Scholarship in the Humanities. This thesis is dedicated to my parents, Blake and Christine, and my sisters, Sarah and Vivienne, for their inspiration, understanding, and love. And to Uly, too. Abstract This thesis examines the use of form and spatial language in confessional fiction by men to elucidate how they conceptualise and negotiate material, corporeal, and psychological boundaries amidst the shifting social and political landscape of the United States since the Second World War. In light of increasingly urgent calls to address gender and racial discrimination in the United States, this study offers timely insight into an identity that, while culturally dominant, often escapes examination: white, heterosexual masculinity. Focusing on the representation of forms and spatial imagery, the chapters explore how five formally experimental novelists—Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph McElroy, Harry Mathews, William H. Gass, and Peter Dimock— employ the confessional genre to illustrate the way men perceive themselves as spatially and temporally circumscribed, and to look at the way they reinforce or transgress the boundaries of masculine identity. The post-war period in the United States witnessed a proliferation of confessional writing that coincided with the popularisation of Freudian psychoanalysis, the cold war rhetoric of suspicion, and the rise of second-wave feminism. As a result, the concept of the self increasingly becomes a repository for fantasies of potential discovery and hidden danger that rely, significantly, on metaphors of surface and depth. It is within, and often against, this cultural preoccupation with the self that these writers address, both directly and indirectly, the status of white masculinity. Drawing on innovative theories of forms and spatiality, this study examines the diverse language and imagery men use to describe their sense of selfhood as well as the bonds they form with others. The works considered in this study demonstrate a common preoccupation with the boundaries that separate interior from exterior and private from public. In response to pressures both intimate and impersonal, the narrators of the texts discussed in this thesis turn to confessional practices of written self-examination to locate themselves within networks of fluctuating relations and obligations. The question that this thesis seeks to resolve is whether the forms and spatial language the narrators employ enable or obstruct their efforts to negotiate the competing demands of ethical responsibilities to others and the desire to preserve a stable sense of self. Lay Summary This thesis examines the use of form and spatial language in confessional fiction by men to elucidate how they conceptualise and negotiate material, corporeal, and psychological boundaries amidst the shifting social and political landscape of the United States since the Second World War. In light of increasingly urgent calls to address gender and racial discrimination in the United States, this study offers timely insight into an identity that, while culturally dominant, often escapes examination: white, heterosexual masculinity. Focusing on the representation of forms and spatial imagery, the chapters explore how five formally experimental novelists—Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph McElroy, Harry Mathews, William H. Gass, and Peter Dimock— employ the confessional genre to illustrate the way men perceive themselves as spatially and temporally circumscribed, and to look at the way they reinforce or transgress the boundaries of masculine identity. The post-war period in the United States witnessed a proliferation of confessional writing that coincided with the popularisation of Freudian psychoanalysis, the cold war rhetoric of suspicion, and the rise of second-wave feminism. As a result, the concept of the self increasingly becomes a repository for fantasies of potential discovery and hidden danger that rely, significantly, on metaphors of surface and depth. It is within, and often against, this cultural preoccupation with the self that these writers address, both directly and indirectly, the status of white masculinity. Drawing on innovative theories of forms and spatiality, this study examines the diverse language and imagery men use to describe their sense of selfhood as well as the bonds they form with others. The works considered in this study demonstrate a common preoccupation with the boundaries that separate interior from exterior and private from public. In response to pressures both intimate and impersonal, the narrators of the texts discussed in this thesis turn to confessional practices of written self-examination to locate themselves within networks of fluctuating relations and obligations. The question that this thesis seeks to resolve is whether the forms and spatial language the narrators employ enable or obstruct their efforts to negotiate the competing demands of ethical responsibilities to others and the desire to preserve a stable sense of self. Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Crossing the Boundaries of Confession 51 The Surface and Depth of Masculine Identity in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita Chapter 2: The Distance Between Men 91 Field Theory and Friendship in Joseph McElroy’s Ancient History: A Paraphase Chapter 3: The Key and the Lock 127 Cryptic Masculinity in the Fiction of Harry Mathews Chapter 4: The Madman in the Cellar 177 Digging up the Past in William H. Gass’ The Tunnel Chapter 5: Looking into Another Man’s Eyes 211 Confession and the Ethics of Exchange in Peter Dimock’s George Anderson: Notes for a Love Song in Imperial Time Conclusion: Confession and the Digital Dark Box 245 Works Cited 249 Introduction Among the most peculiar examples of the twentieth century’s fascination with confessional writing is the monumental diary of Arthur Crew Inman. Inman began his diary in 1919 at the age of twenty-four and brought it to an end with his suicide in December 1963, by which time he had amassed “approximately seventeen million words” (Aaron 1). Inman, the only child of a wealthy Southern family, spent most of his life in Boston, Massachusetts, where he lived with his wife, Evelyn, on a family allowance and sought relief from various ailments. Unable to contribute to the management of the family cotton business, Inman turned to writing for a sense of self-worth. Though his poetry and fiction were not well received, Inman held out hope that one day his revealing diary would provide him with the recognition he believed was his due. The diary did, ultimately, make its way into the public sphere, some twenty years after Inman’s death, edited down to a manageable two-volume set by Daniel Aaron for Harvard University Press in 1985. In his introduction to The Inman Diary: A Public and Private Confession, Aaron notes that the work does not fit easily into any one category of literature and suggests that the reader might think of it as, among other things, “a case history” (4), a “social history of America” (6) or a “gigantic nonfiction ‘novel—or work with novel-like patterns,’” with the last describing “the way Inman came to see it” (8). Despite the diary’s generic fluidity, there is a formal feature that unites the text, which Aaron highlights in the subtitle to his edition: confession. Inman’s diary is replete with confessions—not only does he present “the results of [his] self-exploration and self-analysis” (Inman 189), but he also “hired ‘talkers’ to tell him the stories of their lives—the more lurid the better” (Aaron 3), 1 which he later recorded in his diary. The Inman Diary is thus a secular compendium of confessions, which Inman quite self-consciously brought together to appeal to the market for confessional writing.1 Inman is not uncritical of the tradition, observing “that no very personal record such as this may be written without causing the reader to label the author as an introspective and hypochondriacal weakling living, to an unwholesome and inexcusable degree, within himself,” but he suggests that “diaries centered around external happenings and enlivened by change and movement […] are interesting, instructive and useful, as no other species of writing can ever hope to be” (Inman 182). The binary opposition of internal and external, of private and public, is a central motif of Inman’s diary and, as we will see, fundamentally organises his perception of a masculine ideal and his own inadequacies.