AFTER THE BOOM: APOCALYPSE AND ECONOMICS IN AMERICAN LITERATURE OF THE NEOLIBERAL PERIOD A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Daniel Nathan Sinykin May 2015 After the Boom: Apocalypse and Economics in American Literature of the Neoliberal Period Daniel Nathan Sinykin, Ph.D. Cornell University 2015 After the Boom argues that the political rationality and economic practices that we refer to as neoliberalism have been so consequential for literary form in the United States as to justify marking a new literary period. Theorizing neoliberalism as a mode of sense-making that attempts to shape subjects who read all phenomena as economic, this project posits the literary as a site that exceeds and resists – even as it becomes entangled with – neoliberalism. After the Boom brings together four well-known yet starkly distinct U.S. writers – James Baldwin, Cormac McCarthy, Leslie Marmon Silko, and David Foster Wallace – to demonstrate that apocalypse is a formal structuring principle and an occasion for political critique central to American literature of the neoliberal period. Biographical Sketch Dan Sinykin grew up in Minnesota. He lives in Ithaca, New York, and enjoys riding his bike around Tompkins County. iii Acknowledgments I would like to thank Kevin Attell, Jeremy Braddock, Cathy Caruth, and Dagmawi Woubshet for their encouragement, support, and guidance. I am indebted to them in more ways than I could possibly articulate. Eric Cheyfitz generously read significant portions of this dissertation and his insight has been invaluable. Wai Chee Dimock and Donald E. Pease each read versions of the second chapter and offered brilliant advice. Joel Anderson, Adhaar Desai, Luke Donohue, Carl Gelderloos, Sean Hutchison, Lena Krian, Megan Kruer, Adin Lears, Nathan Taylor, and Johannes Wankhammer have been constant and provocative intellectual interlocutors and friends, shaping how I think today. I would like to thank the members of the Big Fat Postwar American Novel Reading Group (better known as BFPWANRG) for always guiding me to the confluence of reading and joy. I have been blessed with friends from outside the academic humanities who have shared their thoughts on my work, especially Nicole Novak and Ben Ratzlaff. Kevin McNellis has again and again gone over and above by reading and re-reading these chapters, providing the perspective of a policy wonk, correcting my economic errors while keeping my literary criticism (I hope!) credible. I would like to thank my family – my parents, Stu and Carol, and my brothers, Andy and Alex – for bearing with me and my soliloquies on art over the years. Finally, I could not have done it without Cory Cochrane, whose daily love and care kept me sane and happy and made it possible to get back to work each morning. iv Table of Contents Introduction………………………………1 Chapter One: James Baldwin’s Apocalypse…………….26 Chapter Two: Evening in America………………………64 Chapter Three: Unreading the World……………………...98 Chapter Four: Almost Magic…………………………….138 Conclusion:…...…………………………..182 v Introduction “If the greatest free nation in the history of mankind has to get down on its knees in fear of something as abstract and arbitrary as these so called ‘free market forces,’ well, then we’re through” – Hubert Humphrey, 1976 “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” – Unknown origin, misattributed to Fredric Jameson Walter Benn Michaels thinks that neoliberalism has led to “a pretty sad time for the American novel” (“Real” 179). Writing in 2013 but reprising an argument that he has been rehearsing and refining for two decades, Michaels argues that novels such as Beloved, Blood Meridian, Underworld, and The Plot Against America participate in the “characteristic” move of the “neoliberal novel”: “the substitution of cultural difference…for class difference” (“Real” 185). Why does this make for a sad time? In 2011, Michaels argued that neoliberal novels “make the central problems of American society a matter of identity instead of a matter of money” during a period when wealth inequality has rapidly increased (“Model” 1023). Such novels should, according to Michaels, “thus be understood as elements in a larger discursive structure, one in which increasing appreciation of the values of identity is accompanied by increasing hostility to discrimination against identities, and in which the appreciation and hostility are both accompanied by indifference to the increasing economic inequality that has been the hallmark of 1 American society since the mid-1970s” (“Model” 1027). Further, “the focus on identity functions not just to distract people from the increase in inequality but to legitimate it” (“Model” 1027). Ultimately, Michaels laments, “neoliberalism has played almost no visible role in our cultural imaginary” (“Real” 177). Michaels’ polemical point aims to “alter the political terrain of contemporary American life” (Trouble 7). He wants to shift the conversation from identity to inequality. But in his polemical zeal, Michaels offers an unsatisfactory either/or – either identity or economic inequality – that simplifies and falsely disentangles the two.1 Further, he understands literature as only superficially different from other kinds of discourse. This allows him to subordinate whatever might be literary about literature to his goal of urging literary criticism away from identity politics and toward renewed attention to economic inequality. But literary criticism that evades the literary has missed what is central to literature. Literature does have a special place in neoliberalism, though not the one Michaels imagines. What makes literature different from other kinds of writing is, in part, its resistance to instrumental thinking, wherease neoliberalism strives to reduce all discourse to instrumental economic calculations. Formally, this means that literary texts produce meaning not through a series of logically linked propositions, but through figural and narrative signification. These alternative modes open literature to what Derek Atrridge calls its “singularity,” illustrated in its “unsettling, intoxicating, moving, [and] delighting powers” (1). Criticism that ignores the singularity of the literary instrumentalizes literature, according to Attridge, who goes on to note the parallel between the instrumentalization of higher education in recent decades and the instrumentalization of literary criticism (6-9). He writes, “The plethora of fashionable buzz-words that emerged in the world of education during the last two decades of the twentieth century – quality assurance, benchmarking, accountability, outcomes assessment, 2 performance indicators, and all the rest of them – are symptoms of an attitude toward teaching and learning, and toward what we can loosely call the aesthetic domain, that is far from new . but that is now . permeating more areas and activities than ever before” (6). We now recognize the practices of standardization described by Attridge as a component of neoliberalism, which works to determine the quantitative value of all spheres of life. Attridge goes on, “Although the majority of recent studies claiming a political function for literature to have appeared in recent years have situated themselves on the left, there is a sense in which many of them could be said to participate in an instrumentalized system of literary education, criticism, and publication” (9). We can hear echoes of Michaels’ own criticism of literary critics who focus on identity, who, he argues, imagine themselves on the left but in practice legitimate the right. Putting literature in the service of political economics, ignoring literature’s specificity at the expense of its outcomes, Michaels himself proves to be an exemplary neoliberal critic. This dissertation argues that the economic crisis of the 1970s and the subsequent rise and institutionalization of neoliberalism established the conditions for a particular literary formation: the neoliberal apocalypse. To put it otherwise: an unlikely group of U.S. writers have, by turning to apocalypse, opened for us new ways of understanding the relationship between neoliberalism and literature. Neoliberalism’s instrumentalizing drive threatens literature’s specificity and, in response, major works of literature of the period internalize, thematize, and express this threat as apocalyptic in rhetoric, form, and genre. In the face of capitalist crisis and neoliberalism, these works insist that we cannot depend on the future not being radically different from the present, a difficult thought that undoes a fundamental premise of economics as a discipline (that tomorrow will be like yesterday and today) and that unsettles the orientation we must take for granted as citizens and consumers in contemporary state capitalism. 3 Apocalyptic narrative is a figurally dense mode with which to characterize the present. The first two chapters of this dissertation study writers – James Baldwin and Cormac McCarthy – whose texts make us rethink history by providing narratives shot through with the figure of silence as a tactic for surviving cataclysmic U.S. imperialism or with the notion that imperial capitalism is destined to be consumed by the violence it required for its institution. The way these ideas emerge are particularly literary: through intertextual references to slave spirituals and through allegory. The last two chapters consider literary accounts of