“A SHOT IN THE DARK”: POST-9/11 ONE-OFF SPECULATIVE FICTION by MICHAEL LYNN BRITTAIN Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Arlington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON MAY 2017 Copyright © by Michael Lynn Brittain 2017 All Rights Reserved ii Acknowledgements First, I want to thank my committee for their patience and understanding in this long and arduous adventure. I must thank Kenneth Roemer for his undying optimism and patience. Even after seeing my pale face in the stairwell of Carlisle Hall on the day I found out I was about to be the father of twins, he never lost faith in me. I will be forever thankful for his guidance. Tim Morris has always been optimistic and giving of his time throughout my entire graduate school experience. His courses have always forced me to ask questions about the role of literature and history, which in many ways is the basis of this project. And I also want to thank Desiree Henderson for her invaluable feedback on my drafts and for her encouragement during the writing process. Her input on my revisions, along with my research experiences in her cultural studies-based literature courses, are also major factors in the development of this project. Also, a very special thanks to Penny Ingram, Amy Tigner, and Kathryn Warren for their guidance and recommendations for the fellowship and scholarship that helped me greatly along the way. I offer special thanks to Laurie Porter and the late Emory D. Estes, as well, for encouraging me to pursue my doctorate degree. Secondly, I must thank my wife, Rhonda, for her patience and love throughout my graduate experience. I want her to always know that “we” accomplished this goal together. Without her encouragement, I would have never returned to finish my undergraduate degree. I must also thank my three daughters, iii Audrey, Mary, and Emily, for their unconditional love and inspiration. The fact that I come home to these four people every day is a blessing. They are, and will always be, my heroes. Also, many thanks to my sister, Yondi Upchurch, for always being encouraging and available to listen to me when the road got rough. A very special thanks must also go to my sisters-in-law, Shannon Dietrich and Melissa Hardaway, who helped care for the girls so that I could research, write, and teach. Without their support, I would not be writing these acknowledgments. I must include a special thanks to all who have inspired me and/or helped pull me out of the ditches more than once. Special thanks to Julie Jones and Susan Midwood, who in the early years of graduate school forced me to laugh during the craziest of times. I still appreciate all of their help and our friendship. I also want to thank Tra Daniels Lerberg for taking a chance on me as the assistant director of the UTA Writing Center years ago—an experience that has forever changed how I teach. A very special thanks to my “musical therapists”: Kevin Townson, Scott Thompson, Jeremy Taylor, Brian Essary, Josh Thompson, and Jan Ryberg, for providing oxygen when it was needed. Finally, I dedicate this to my mom and my grandmother, who were my first two teachers, and to my 11th grade geology teacher and future father-in-law, Ricky Theobalt. November 20, 2016 iv Abstract “A SHOT IN THE DARK”: POST-9/11 ONE-OFF SPECULATIVE FICTION Michael Lynn Brittain, PhD The University of Texas at Arlington, 2017 Supervising Professor: Kenneth M. Roemer The cultural, political, and historical impact of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, as an event, continues to be questioned. For this project, I will examine six “one-off” or “one-time” works of speculative fiction from highly-acclaimed and award-winning writers— Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004), Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), Chang- Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014), and Ben Marcus’s The Flame Alphabet (2012) —who, prior to the terrorist attacks on 9/11, all worked predominantly in creating works in the genre of realist fiction. In writing works of speculative fiction during what has been deemed the “age of terror,” these writers, through cognitive estrangement, have developed works in separate generic spaces where the intersection of event and corporeality collide (in what Ilai Rowner refers to as the “literary event”). In doing so, they examine not only the repercussions of a post-9/11 world, but they also present warnings against future events that now v resonate globally. The crossing of these writers from realism to genre or speculative fiction is an act of artistic and historical refraction, a change of direction from one medium to another; in other words, they are works representative of the “disruptive nature of genre fiction.” Considering the spectacle of 9/11 and the creation of these texts in the wake of the tragedy, I will focus most of my attention on examining these texts through the theoretical lens of “the event” and event theory as presented in Ilai Rowner’s 2015 study, The Event: Literature and Theory, which focuses on establishing a theory of the “literary event” influenced by an amalgam of event theories and definitions from Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot, and Deleuze. Rowner’s approach attempts to establish a theoretical set of questions that will illuminate the role of the event in literature by identifying and analyzing the intersections of language and corporeality within an event. Since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, understanding the overall impact of an “event,” be it a single individual accomplishment or global tragedy, has likely never been more important than in the 21st century. I argue here that September 11th, as a historical event and spectacle, created an initial indistinguishability of reality and non-reality, which I believe provided an event-inspired gateway for these six novelists to make their generic leap from realist works to the genre of speculative fiction and, more specifically, the subgenres of alternate history, dystopia, and post-apocalyptic fiction. vi Table of Contents Acknowledgements ................................................................................................ iii Abstract ................................................................................................................... v Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION .................................................................................. 1 Chapter 2 NARRATIVE, HISTORICAL, AND LITERARY EVENT THEORY .............................................................................................................. 37 THEORETICAL PRELUDE: ALTERNATE HISTORY……………………….64 Chapter 3 "AN ABOMINATION OF VIOLENCE": PHILIP ROTH'S THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA……………………………………………….74 Chapter 4 THE BACK HALF ACRE OF NOWHERE: HISTORY, PLAY AND LANGUAGE IN MICHAEL CHABON'S THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN'S UNION……………………………………………………..…110 THEORETICAL PRELUDE: POST-APOCALYPTIC FICTION………….....138 Chapter 5 NO ONE IS LISTENING: VIRUSES REAL AND VIRTUAL IN BEN MARCUS'S THE FLAME ALPHABET……………………………....147 Chapter 6 "NO HELL BELOW US" CALL AND RESPONSE TRAUMA IN CORMAC McCARTHY'S THE ROAD……………………..…170 THEORETICAL PRELUDE: DYSTOPIAN FICTION…………………….....196 Chapter 7 SILENCE IS POWER: KAZUO ISHIGURO'S NEVER LET ME GO……………………………………………………………205 Chapter 8 WE ARE ONE BODY: CHANG-RAE LEE'S ON SUCH A FULL SEA………………………………………………………..223 Conclusion……………...…………………….....……………………...……....240 vii References ........................................................................................................... 254 Biographical Information .................................................................................... 271 viii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION P.D. James’s The Children of Men is a dystopian work set in England in 2021 that presents a country mired in crisis, as all men have become sterile and the future of humanity is in jeopardy. Under the control of a tyrannical leader, Xan, the controlling forces of the government encourage suicide for the elderly and treat immigrants as if they were slaves. Theo Faron, the novel’s narrator and protagonist, remembers back to the year 1995, known as Year Omega, when he first heard the shocking words of a biologist “that nowhere in the whole world was there a pregnant woman” (7). The cause of the universal infertility for humans was initially considered a disease, but as countries competed for trying to find a cure, the cause became less and less important as the anxiety and hopelessness of citizens peaked as it was believed that “it is twenty-five years now since a human being was born and in our hearts few of us believe that the cry of a newborn child will ever be heard again on our planet” (9). Theo reveals that as the end of days nears, the Omegas, the last generation, have just lost the last of their group—the last human being to be born—in a senseless pub fight. James’s dystopian creation, published in 1992, served as both a warning against and an examination of the issues of government control, population 1 control, and immigration, at a point in British history when rising immigration concerns in the 1990s were identified by UK national statistician, Len Cook, as “the most significant social change in Britain” (Carvel 1). The importance of the publishing of James’s dystopian novel during this period is twofold. First, The Children of Men is a significant departure from James’s five-decade career as a mystery writer. Of the nineteen novels that James published, The Children of Men is the only work that she published outside of the genre of mystery/detective fiction. Second, the novel serves also as an example of how the power and influence of historical events can impact the creation of art and literature. Thirdly, the novel presents a dystopian world in which a catastrophic event plays an integral role in the development of the society in its current state; however, the cause of the event that altered the world has seemingly become irrelevant or forgotten by the story’s end.