Qualified hope 2nd Huehls.indb 1 3/10/2009 10:58:49 PM 2nd Huehls.indb 2 3/10/2009 10:58:49 PM Q u a l i f i e d H o p e a postmodern politics of time mitchum huehls The ohio State university press Columbus 2nd Huehls.indb 3 3/10/2009 10:58:49 PM Copyright © 2009 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Huehls, Mitchum, 1976– Qualified hope : a postmodern politics of time / Mitchum Huehls. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8142-0617-1 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. American literature—21st century—History and criticism. 3. Politics and literature—United States—History—20th century. 4. Politics and literature—United States—History—21st century. 5. Time in litera- ture. 6. Time—Political aspects. 7. Postmodernism (Literature)—United States. I. Title. PS228.P6H84 2009 810.9'3581—dc22 2008050627 This book is available in the following editions: Cloth (ISBN 978-0-8142-0617-1) CD-ROM (ISBN 978-0-8142-9184-9) Cover design by Mia Risberg Text design by Jennifer Shoffey Forsythe Type set in Adobe Minion Pro Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 2nd Huehls.indb 4 3/10/2009 10:58:49 PM for marissa 2nd Huehls.indb 5 3/10/2009 10:58:49 PM 2nd Huehls.indb 6 3/10/2009 10:58:49 PM C o n T e n ts acknowledgments ix introduction Time, Postmodern Difference, and the Possibility of Politics 1 parT i: THe CulTure of poliTics chapter 1 Media Messages: Don DeLillo’s White Noise 33 chapter 2 Global Technologies: Thomas Pynchon’sMason & Dixon 57 chapter 3 9/11: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close and Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers 79 parT II: THe poliTics of CulTure chapter 4 Race: Nathaniel Mackey’s From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate 105 chapter 5 Gender: Leslie Scalapino’s Experimental Poetry 133 chapter 6 Borders: Dagoberto Gilb’s The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña 161 conclusion Future, Present, Past 191 notes 197 Bibliography 211 index 221 2nd Huehls.indb 7 3/10/2009 10:58:50 PM 2nd Huehls.indb 8 3/10/2009 10:58:50 PM a C knowledgmen ts First, I thank my two readers at The Ohio State University Press. More than anyone else, they are responsible for helping this project reach its fullest potential. Additionally, I am grateful to Sandy Crooms and the other staff members of the press for their interest in and commitment to my work, and to Sheri Englund for her instruction and guidance. Of course, before anyone at Ohio State ever saw the manuscript, there were many others whose insight and generosity shaped my thinking and writing along the way. Jacques Lezra helped me see what I was saying sooner than I would have otherwise known I was saying it; Lynn Keller taught me how to think productively about form; and Rebecca Walkowitz offered professional mentoring and a firm grounding for my ideas. While endless revisions may have obscured their early contributions, their influ- ence permeates the book. In discussions both planned and impromptu, many friends and col- leagues have sparked ideas, challenged my thinking, or emboldened me to pursue new paths. There are far too many to name, but I am particularly indebted to Dan Grausam, Mark Pedretti, Matt Wilkins, Peter Conroy, Jon Ewell, Temple Cone, Michael LeMahieu, and Cathy Turner. In addition to such supportive friends and colleagues, I have been similarly blessed with some fantastic students, all of whom have contributed to this work in ways they might never imagine. Specifically, I would like to thank the students in two seminars at UCLA—“Postmodernism after 9/11” and “Thomas Pynchon”—for the intellectual growth that those classroom experiences afforded me. Finally, I am grateful to the brilliant members of the Southern California Americanist Group (SCAG) whose comments and ideas sub- stantially improved chapter 6. iX 2nd Huehls.indb 9 3/10/2009 10:58:50 PM X • a C knowledgmen ts Without the financial support and teaching leave granted by my home institutions, this book would have been several years longer in the making: College Misericordia provided useful summer research funding that accel- erated the writing process, and the UCLA English Department has been more than generous in providing ample time, space, and funding for the completion of my research. Some of the book’s chapters have appeared elsewhere and have thus benefited from the scrupulous attention of other editors and readers. The University of Minnesota Press published a version of chapter 1 in Cul- tural Critique 61.3 (2005) as “Knowing What We Are Doing: Time, Form, and the Reading of Postmodernity.” Janie Hinds, the editor of The Mul- tiple Worlds of Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005) provided helpful comments that greatly improved an earlier version of chapter 2, “‘The Space that may not be seen’: The Form of Historicity in Mason & Dixon.” It is reprinted here with the permission of Camden House. Finally, a shorter version of chapter 3 appears in Literature after 9/11 (New York: Routledge, 2008) as “Foer, Spiegelman, and 9/11’s Timely Traumas.” The comments and assistance I received from the editors of that collection, Ann Keniston and Jeanne Quinn, proved invaluable, and that piece appears here by permission of Routledge. Finally, I thank my parents for teaching me the balance of curiosity and discipline required to complete a project of this size and scope. And most of all, I am grateful to my wife, Marissa López, whose advice, perspective, and intellect have enhanced my work on a daily basis. Her unconditional support and understanding are the foundations on which this book is built. 2nd Huehls.indb 10 3/10/2009 10:58:50 PM i n T r o d u ct i o n Time, postmodern differenCe, and the possibiliTy of poliTics The simple possibility that things might proceed otherwise . is sufficient to change the whole experience of practice and, by the same token, its logic. —pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice “The simple possibility that things might proceed otherwise” must be pro- duced as experience if the otherwise is to proceed. —peter osborne, “the politics of time” hat is the political value of time? Is the future, as Elizabeth Grosz’s w feminist work suggests, a source of hope and change—the only possible time for radically new ideas and events to emerge onto the scene? Or is the future just an ideological pipe dream that infinitely defers polit- ical change and reinforces the conservative status quo, as Lee Edelman argues in his polemical No Future? Is the future an empty canvas onto which we can project our utopian dreams and desires, or does the very act of such projection make us complacent to the more pressing concerns of our time? And what about our responsibility to the past, which might not be the site of politics, but which nevertheless informs our understanding of exactly what kind of political work needs to be done? Is history a source of inspiration and guidance, or does its intimate connection to the present threaten our ability to move beyond it? Qualified Hope not only makes the overarching claim that politics can only succeed when treated as a function of time, but it also contends that no single panel of time—future, present, or past—sufficiently grounds politics. For example, when Homi Bhabha asserts that the political ques- tion “What do I belong to in this present?” best captures the problem of 2nd Huehls.indb 1 3/10/2009 10:58:50 PM • i n T r o d u ct i o n modernity, he also notes that an “ambivalent temporality,” caused by an irreducible tension between the smooth time of forward progress and the contingently fractured time of any given present moment, makes answering this question virtually impossible (204). If we experience time exclusively as a forward flow into the future, then we can unproblematically locate political change and action in the future; and if we experience time exclu- sively as an isolated present moment, then we can most assuredly strategize a course of political action without worrying about the demands of the past or the contingencies of the future. But if we experience time as both motion and fracture, then the temporal ground of politics, and of subjectivity itself, becomes both contradictory and compromised.1 Bhabha’s notion of “temporal ambivalence” thus points us toward an epistemological problem that has substantial implications for both individual and collective action, a problem that I will refer to throughout this book as the time-knowledge paradox. A quip from Van Veen, the narrator and protagonist of Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada, nicely articulates this paradox: “[N]o wonder I fail to grasp Time, since knowledge-gaining itself ‘takes time’” (538). Reducing time to the present makes “grasping time” easy, but it compromises time’s constant flow; and as Van notes here, allowing for the flow, for the fact that things “take time,” compromises knowledge. Moreover, this paradox applies not just to knowing time, but to any attempt to know, interact with, and relate to the content of our world. Things are easy to know when removed from time, but removing them from time ignores a crucial component of their existence and thus circumscribes our knowledge.2 Taken separately, Grosz’s and Edelman’s ideas about the proper rela- tionship between politics and the future represent an inability to account for the time-knowledge paradox that produces Bhabha’s “ambivalent tem- porality.” Taken together, they embody this paradox, as Grosz’s work sac- rifices political content for the sake of time’s flow while Edelman rejects temporal form for the sake of politics in the present.