The Self in Trouble: Young Adults in the Urban Consumer Society of the 1980s in Janowitz, Ellis, and McInerney Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung des Grades eines Doktors der Philosophie in der Fakultät für Philologie der RUHR-UNIVERSITÄT BOCHUM vorgelegt von GREGOR WEIBELS-BALTHAUS Gedruckt mit Genehmigung der Fakultät für Philologie der Ruhr-Universität Bochum Referent: Prof. Dr. David Galloway Koreferentin: Prof. Dr. Kornelia Freitag Tag der mündlichen Prüfung: 11. Mai 2005 Danksagungen Ich bedanke mich für die Promotionsförderung, die ich von der Konrad- Adenauer-Stiftung (Institut für Begabtenförderung) erhalten habe. Meinem Lehrer, Herrn Prof. Dr. David Galloway, gilt mein besonderer Dank für seine kompetente Unterstützung und für sein nicht erlahmendes Wohlwollen, das er mir und meinem Projekt allzeit entgegenbrachte. Vielfache Anregungen erhielt ich von Edward de Vries, Michael Wüstenfeld und Doerthe Wagelaar. Meiner Frau, Dr. med. Bettina Balthaus, danke ich in Liebe für ihre Hilfe und für ihr Verständnis, das sie auch dann noch aufbrachte, wenn niemand sonst mehr verstand. Table of Contents 1 Introduction 8 1.1 A Literary-Commercial Phenomenon 8 1.2 The Authors and Their Works 14 1.3 Relevant Criticism 18 1.4 The Guiding Questions 23 2 The Rise and Demise of the Self 27 2.1 The Rise of the Imperial Self of Modernity 28 2.1.1 From the Origins to the Modernist Self 28 2.1.2 The Emergence of the Inner-directed Character in America 31 2.1.2.1 The Puritan Heritage 33 2.1.2.2 The Legacy of the Frontier 36 2.2 The Self on the Retreat 38 2.2.1 The Appearance of the Other-directed Character in Postwar America 38 2.2.2 Narcissism and the Minimal Self in the Contemporary Consumer Society 41 2.3 The Self Dethroned and Shattered 50 2.3.1 Social Saturation and Multiphrenia 50 2.3.2 Ontological Uncertainty 53 3 The Crisis of Mimesis 61 3.1 Art as Representation 61 3.2 Challenging the Premises of Representation 63 3.3 Fictional Responses to the Crisis of Representation 66 4 Literature and the Marketplace 75 4.1 The Author and the Work in Mass-Market Publishing Today 75 4.2 The Eradication of the Premises of the Traditional Modernist Split between Art and Mass Culture 78 4.2.1 Aesthetic Essence 80 4.2.2 Unity 83 4.2.3 Complexity 84 4.2.4 Subversiveness 87 4.2.5 Uniqueness and Individuality 94 5 Ex-Centrics: Slaves of New York 98 5.1 Ambivalent Ex-centricity 99 5.1.1 Dependence-Based Gender Relations 100 5.1.2 Random Menace, Entropy and Sense-Making 109 5.1.3 A Children’s World 116 5.1.4 Insecurity as an Indication of Increasing Maturity 121 5.1.5 Conclusion 126 5.2 Voluntary Ex-centricity 127 5.2.1 A Tale of Cultural Decline 128 5.2.2 From Fame and Glory to Mere “Well-Knownness” 132 5.2.3 Towards a Heroism of the Future 138 5.2.4 A Spenglerian View 150 5.3 Forced into Ex-centricity: Victims of the Consumer Society 152 5.4 Eiron and Alazon in a Comedy of Manhattan in the 1980s 156 5.5 The Author’s Public Persona as a Means of Opening Up the Literary Work 159 6 A New Narcissus: Less Than Zero 166 6.1 The Family as a Crumbling, Hollow Shell 167 6.2 Emotional Disengagement as a Survival Strategy 188 6.3 The Entertainment Media as a Dubious Sense-Making Institution 202 6.4 Moral Disorientation 225 6.5 A New Narcissus 233 6.6 An Increasingly Self-Conscious Realism 237 6.7 Engaging the Book as a Commodity 244 7 An Impostor: Bright Lights, Big City 247 7.1 An Ethic of Appearances 247 7.2 A Hierarchical Society 253 7.2.1 Otherness and the Need to Belong 253 7.2.2 A Sense of Entitlement 254 7.2.3 A Clichéd “American Dream” of Self-Realization 259 7.2.4 The Elitist Fear of Mass Society 261 7.3 An Incomprehensible Present 263 7.3.1 Meaningless Facts 263 7.3.2 Ungrounded Fictions 269 7.4 Grounding the Self-Image in the Past 273 7.5 A Self-Conscious Bildungsroman 279 7.6 Implication and Credibility 286 8 A Child: Story of My Life 289 8.1 The Breakup of Basic Social Structures 289 8.2 Power Struggles 296 8.3 Self-alienation 301 8.4 Social Isolation 305 8.5 Reality Testing Not Always Successful 308 8.6 The Deceitful Attraction of a Minimalist Ethic 313 8.7 A Novel of Initiation as a Parody of an Infantile Society 322 9 A Pioneer, a Puritan, and a Renegade: Brightness Falls 332 9.1 Russell: A Pioneer 334 9.1.1 A “Perpetual Adolescent” 334 9.1.1.1 The Remains of an Adolescent Self 334 9.1.1.2 The Promise of Effortless Gain 337 9.1.1.3 The Male Struggle for Supremacy 339 9.1.2 The Costs of Participation in the Power Struggle 343 9.1.2.1 Apprentice and Usurper 343 9.1.2.2 Intimacy and Competition 347 9.1.2.3 Ethical Restraints and Animal Desires 353 9.1.3 Growing Up and the Experience of Loss 359 9.1.4 The Heritage of the Frontier 365 9.2 Corrine: A Puritan 371 9.2.1 A Holistic View of the Self and Society 371 9.2.1.1 A Lack of Self-Reliance 372 9.2.1.2 Interconnectedness, Isolation, and a Sense of Doom 373 9.2.1.3 Self-Realization in Social Responsibility 377 9.2.1.4 Patriarchal Ideals of Self-Realization as the Main Cause of Social Strife 380 9.2.2 Inner Emigration 384 9.2.2.1 Turning Her Back on the Financial World 385 9.2.2.2 Renouncing Highlife 388 9.2.3 The Puritan’s Sense of Community and Damnation 395 9.3 Jeff: A Renegade and Tragic Hero 397 9.3.1 Protest 398 9.3.1.1 Emancipation from His Upper-Middle-Class Family Background 398 9.3.1.2 Russell and Corrine as the Role Models of the Perfect Consumers 399 9.3.1.3 Ambivalence vis-à-vis the Consumer Society 403 9.3.1.4 The Hospital as a Cultural Gatekeeper 406 9.3.2 Withdrawal and Loss of Control 413 9.3.2.1 Withdrawal 413 9.3.2.2 Seeking Gratification of Insatiable Desire 415 9.3.2.3 Loss of Control 417 9.3.3 The Rebirth of the Social Self 418 9.3.4 A Renegade and Tragic Hero 423 9.6 A Growing-Up Novel about a Nation Coming of Age 426 9.6.1 An Ailing Society 426 9.6.2 A Maturing Nation Looks into a Cautiously Promising Future 430 10 Conclusion 437 10.1 The Self in Trouble 437 10.2 “The Age Deserves an Image of Its Accelerated Grimace” 440 10.3 Literature Goes Pop 443 Works Cited 445 1 Introduction This is an investigation into the self-concepts of young adults in the urban consumer society of the 1980s as documented in and instanced by selected works of Tama Janowitz, Bret Easton Ellis, and Jay McInerney. The main thesis advanced in these pages is that the self is in serious trouble under the conditions of the urban consumer society of the 1980s. The writers treated here show this in their protagonists’ attempts to formulate viable self-concepts, in their modes of representation, and in their very personal, active engagement of their own cultural and economic implication in the society they portray. 1.1 A Literary-Commercial Phenomenon The writers discussed here played major parts within a literary-commercial phenomenon that caused a sensation on the American book market in the 1980s as well as some commotion in the literary world. The sheer number and diversity of phrases coined to designate the trend—among these were “MTV Novel” (Powers 1985),” “Yuppie Lit” (Sheppard 1987; Kennedy 1991), “Yuppie-Backs” (e.g. Schumacher 1988), the “Young Decadents School” (Adler 1990), “Blank Generation Fiction” and “Brat Pack Fiction” (Young and Caveney 1992)—betrayed the critics’ difficulties in grappling with the new and unwieldy literary products. In retrospect, a broad description and characterization of this “Brat Pack Fiction”—the label that somehow seems to have weathered the times best—is considerably easier. The 1980s saw the happy conjunction of a whole host of young American writers of realist, often minimalist, urban literature bursting onto the scene and, equally important, a huge market eagerly awaiting them. Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, and Tama Janowitz were perceived as being major representatives of a larger phenomenon.1 1 In addition to the writers discussed here there were, for example, David Leavitt, Meg Wolitzer, Elizabeth Tallent, Susan Minot, Peter Cameron, Emily Listfield, and—in a A LITERARY-COMMERCIAL PHENOMENON 9 Ostensibly, here was a group of very young, ambitious literary debutantes that wrote about the young adult, white, upper middle-class urbanite. Living in the vibrant and bizarre climate that developed in American cities under the Reagan administration, the protagonists seemed to be always in tune with the most recent cultural trends. Frequently, the characters in these fictions showed a strong penchant for the glamorous side of life in such cities as New York, Los Angeles, or Pittsburgh. Often brimming with references to pop music, Hollywood movies, and upscale consumer items, the books recorded their protagonists’ efforts to negotiate the problems of early adulthood in the urban consumer society of the Reagan years with its powerful economic, social, and cultural frictions.