FROM CLASSICAL TO POSTMODERN: MADNESS IN INTER-AMERICAN NARRATIVE By Jennifer A Krause Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in English August, 2009 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Professor Michael Kreyling Professor William Luis Professor Earl Fitz Professor Jason Borge Copyright © 2009 by Jennifer A Krause All Rights Reserved For my sister, Krystin, you know why and For my parents, John and Nancy iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am profoundly grateful to everyone who has helped me with this project, especially the members of my Dissertation Committee. They have provided me with generous feedback and support and allowed me to pursue my interests with a freedom I had not expected and greatly appreciate. I would specifically like to thank my advisor, Michael Kreyling, who agreed to advise me after the dissolution of the Comparative Literature program, even though he had never met me before or read any of my work. Thank you so much for taking that chance. I could not have finished this without the help of several people, who deserve to be thanked profusely. Many thanks to Krystin, my sounding board, my support, and my portable dictionary; to Mum and Dad, for reading the whole darn thing, even if it did not make any sense; and to Christina, for providing sound advice and having answers to all my questions. And to my hounds, Astro and Rosie, who made me leave the house every day for a nice long walk. Good dogs. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page DEDICATION ................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................. iv Chapter I. PLACING FOUCAULT’S MADMAN IN THE AGE OF POPULAR CULTURE Madness and Foucault.................................................................................................1 Madness and Postmodernism ....................................................................................31 Madness and the Culture Industry ............................................................................38 The Inter-American Context .....................................................................................54 II. THE FAN AND THE ACTOR AT THE EDGE OF POSTMODERNISM Zona sagrada ............................................................................................................66 The Moviegoer ........................................................................................................100 III. THE MADNESS OF UTOPIAN DREAMS: CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD ILLUSIONS AND THE FANTASY OF SCIENCE FICTION El beso de la mujer araña .......................................................................................136 Breakfast of Champions ..........................................................................................172 IV. MADNESS IN THE METROPOLIS: THE FAILURE OF MASS METAPHORS AND POPULAR CULTURE PLAGIARISM Onde andará Dulce Veiga? ....................................................................................211 American Psycho ....................................................................................................251 V. WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? .......................................................................291 ENDNOTES Chapter I..................................................................................................................297 Chapter II ................................................................................................................304 Chapter III ...............................................................................................................308 Chapter IV ...............................................................................................................314 WORKS CITED ..............................................................................................................322 v CHAPTER I PLACING FOUCAULT’S MADMAN IN THE AGE OF POPULAR CULTURE Madness and Foucault The trope of madness and the figure of the madman are conceptions that have for centuries absorbed, intrigued, repulsed, and perplexed Western culture. Considerations of madness have sparked countless literary narratives, starting with the madness of Cervantes’ Don Quixote and moving through the ages, past King Lear’s Fool, Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, Faulkner’s Benjy, and García Márquez’s José Arcadio Buendía. This fascination with madness pervades many sectors of society throughout Western history and across geographical bounds. One of the pivotal studies of the interaction between insanity and our own Western cultural views and biases is Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization [Histoire de la Folie], first published in 1961. In Madness and Civilization, Foucault discusses the history of madness from the Middle Ages through the Enlightenment, a moment when he claims our cultural and clinical approaches to the madman transformed considerably due to the advent of modern society. Although other studies also touch on this issue, Foucault’s focus on a chronological account of change within Western civilization’s conception of madness and madmen,1 and his insistence on the links and enforced gaps between society, mediator, and lunatic open up his theories and ideas to a wider range of implications. We can take Foucault’s work and use it as a point of departure for a study of 20th century trends in madness, wherein the trope of madness functions as a part of not only a literary heritage, but also as 1 a historically, politically, and culturally charged, constantly changing reflection of society. Using Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization as inspiration, this dissertation will take one of the fundamental structures of his study (the triad of society, mediator, lunatic) and apply it to the unique cultural circumstances in the Americas after the advent of mass culture studies. By doing so we can reach a more nuanced understanding of how society’s relationship with the madman has changed. I will argue that we must find a new definition of madness in the postmodern age, a definition that takes into consideration the postmodern obsession with popular culture and the illusions it provides. Based on this definition, we must reconsider how the madman interacts with society – in the postmodern age, it is the madman, and not society, who becomes the source material for the production of mediators. Postmodern depictions of madness thus suggest an evolutionary progression of Foucault’s structures, altering the form of the mediator. We need to investigate these changes, especially in an inter-American sense, in order to not only understand the literary implications of the popular culture phenomenon and its interaction with the trope of madness, but also to recognize the wider cultural implications the differing representations of this trope represent. By recognizing how disparate American nations represent madness and how their interactions with popular culture, especially North American popular culture, affect these representations, we can start to question how cultural entities like madness flow across borders and how the ‘taint’ of mass entertainment reflects back upon itself. To begin our analysis, then, we must first understand Foucault. Foucault’s consideration of madness begins by chronicling how each age dealt with its madmen. 2 The key to understanding the medieval conception of madness, for Foucault, is abandonment. Society at large abandons the madman in a very specific way, mirroring how the leper was once repulsed and forsaken. Foucault tells us, “Leprosy disappeared, the leper vanished, or almost, from memory; these structures remained… Poor vagabonds, criminals, and ‘deranged minds’ would take the part played by the leper, and we shall see what salvation was expected from this exclusion, for them and for those who excluded them as well” (Foucault, Madness 7). Jumbled in with other undesirables, all touched with a hint of insanity, the madman was cast out, taking the role left vacant by another unclean, diseased figure. Structures, as Foucault says, remained, thus ensuring a specific form of continuity in the relationship between madman and society. Society needed to repulse these men, to do so was to follow the strictures of the church, yet this abandonment was more than simple negation – it also allowed for the outcasts’ salvation. For both lunatic and leper, “Abandonment is his salvation; his exclusion offers him another form of communion” (7). The church became the intermediary between the leper and civilization, and by association between the madman and civilization, taking control of how and when these lunatics received their punishment.2 The exclusion of madmen (like the leper), not only from society in general, but also from the society found in religion, served as both a distancing mechanism and a pathway to an inverted salvation: “a rigorous division which is social exclusion but spiritual reintegration” (7). Madmen treated in this manner could eventually rejoin their brethren in the next world, but only through a total break from normalcy in this one. Foucault, in comparing the leper to the lunatic, challenges us to follow structures over time while still acknowledging changes in culture and meaning. He explicitly states, 3 “With an altogether new meaning and in a very different culture, the forms would remain the same” (Foucault, Madness