The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction

Transcription

1 The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction

2 American Literature Readings in the 21st Century Series Editor: Linda Wagner-Martin American Literature Readings in the 21st Century publishes works by contemporary critics that help shape critical opinion regarding literature of the nineteenth and twentieth century in the United States. Published by Palgrave Macmillan: Freak Shows in Modern American Imagination: Constructing the Damaged Body from Willa Cather to Truman Capote By Thomas Fahy Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics By Steven Salaita Women & Race in Contemporary U.S. Writing: From Faulkner to Morrison By Kelly Lynch Reames American Political Poetry in the 21st Century By Michael Dowdy Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James: Thinking and Writing Electricity By Sam Halliday F. Scott Fitzgerald s Racial Angles and the Business of Literary Greatness By Michael Nowlin Sex, Race, and Family in Contemporary American Short Stories By Melissa Bostrom Democracy in Contemporary U.S. Women s Poetry By Nicky Marsh James Merrill and W.H. Auden: Homosexuality and Poetic Influence By Piotr K. Gwiazda Contemporary U.S. Latino/a Literary Criticism Edited by Lyn Di Iorio Sandín and Richard Perez The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo By Stephanie S. Halldorson

3 The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction The Works of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo Stephanie S. Halldorson

4 THE HERO IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN FICTION Copyright Stephanie S. Halldorson, Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: December

5 To my grandmother, Rosalie

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7 Contents Preface Acknowledgments ix xiii Chapter 1 1 Defining the Hero: Form 1 Where Have All the Heroes Gone? 1 Defining the Hero 5 Welcome the Assumed Hero 8 Defining the American Hero: Story 11 3D Reality and the End Narrative 11 A Brief Overview of Saul Bellow s Heroes 16 A Brief Overview of Don DeLillo s Heroes 22 Chapter 2 31 Henderson the Rain King: The Hero Surrendered 31 The Novel and its Hero 31 The Hero in the Novel 42 Chapter 3 71 Mr. Sammler s Planet: The Hero Accused 71 The Novel and its Hero 71 The Hero in the Novel 85 Chapter White Noise: The Hero Defended 109 The Novel and its Hero 109 The Hero in the Novel 121 Chapter Mao II: The Hero Returned 145

8 viii CONTENTS The Novel and its Hero 145 The Hero in the Novel 158 Conclusion 179 Notes 185 Bibliography 201 Index 219

9 Preface When I first began my investigations into the hero, it seemed I could not get out from under Thomas Pynchon s definition. Everywhere I looked, I saw as Profane did in Pynchon s V.: Nothing heroic about a schlemihl... What was a hero? Randolph Scott, who could handle a six-gun, horse s reins, lariat. Master of the inanimate. But a schlemihl, that was hardly a man: somebody who lies back and takes it from objects, like any passive woman. (10.3, 288) And there they were, the heroes: Ulysses, Robin Hood, and the latest Hollywood leading man. These men were reaching with both hands to get at the objects of the world and control them: they were heroic. Needless to say, I couldn t believe this was a definition good enough to truly encompass the meaning of hero. Was there not to be some journey? Was there not to be some sort of message? Were all women, academics, theologians, philosophers, and ascetics removed from the possibility of being heroic? Could it really be that a hero was simply the man who held all the marbles at the end of the school day? Pynchon s definition is not wrong we all surely recognize this heroic type but it is a type that sits somewhat uncomfortably in our pluralistic, postmodern world. This hero with his lariat is the hero of a nostalgic black and white world where there were clear boundaries of being in a new America. One still likes to think it possible, as Norman Mailer did when writing about Kennedy s presidential bid in 1960: And this myth, that each of us was born to be free, to wander, to have adventure and to grow on the waves of the violent, the perfumed, and the unexpected, had a force which could not be tamed no matter how the nation s regulators... would brick-in the modern life with hygiene upon sanity, and middle-brow homily over platitude; the myth would not die. (352 3) Mailer is correct when he draws attention to the persistent myth of America as the land that came with a guarantee that each and every

10 x PREFACE person would have the chance to be the adventuring hero of their own life, but at the same time he fails to recognize that America has faced obstacles throughout the twentieth century and particularly post World War II, which have gutted this myth. The myth, today, can be nothing more than the image of the myth. In the past century, America has had to face the fact that there are no more virgin territories to explore and conquer, and there are no more groups of people whose destruction will be accepted as the foundation of a heroic tale. The American hero of this type has been reduced to accumulating rather than conquering. If the adventuring hero can still be said to exist at all in America he will be found as the mogul of real estate, an extreme skier in Aspen, or possibly the latest, sexy Hollywood serial killer. Literature has taken the hardest hit in terms of the loss of clear boundaries and a homogenous society. If Hollywood and genre fiction can still make their money by presenting escapist black-and-white worlds where American men rise from the barrooms of lower-class neighborhoods to save the world from immanent destruction, authors who do not wish to escape have been left a plethora of choice but little ability to use it. Everyone who is not appearing in genre pieces is available for work, but authors have lost the ability to combine what they truthfully see in the world with creating heroes who have something to give to their readers. Authors continue to write and readers to read, but so many of the stories are end-tales where a hero throws both hands to the heavens and walks off to certain death. These are hardly the stories society is built upon. Rather, these are the stories of a society caught in a kind of heroic limbo not knowing what place a hero has in this new world. I am tossed back to Profane as I witness the incredible success of Hollywood movies that turn to increasingly simple worlds of comic book superheroes who are caught in a clear struggle between right and wrong, and the literary authors who can only disagree with this approach but offer no alternative. It is my opinion that studies into the hero have waned in the recent past because the reason for heroes to exist at all has become an almost impossible question to answer. If a hero has historically been the man who walks away from his society only to return with some message or boon that will create a better society for his fellow citizens, the loss of both a reason to leave and a reason to return to our heterogenous (and often hostile) community leaves little to be said. Turning away from Hollywood, which continues to be primarily a repository of male myths, I turned to daytime television that has a

11 PREFACE xi target audience of adult women. Afternoon television is a quagmire of victims and heroes where the victim and the hero are often one and the same. Playing on the American myth that each person has the right to demand their own adventure, self-help experts on daytime talk shows create the viewer as a victim in order to sell them instructions on how to overcome their troubles and become heroic in their own mind. What is enlightening about these shows is that the want of heroes is such that the viewer is willing to overlook both the media s obvious focus on doing business and the bizarre logic of a viewer who is both victim and hero. It would seem that the impulse for the heroic leads the viewer (or reader) to do almost anything to fulfil the desire for direction and conclusion even to the point of creating a paradox. For it is impossible to be both reader and hero. By doing so, the viewers are merely shamming their way to a place that is no longer displayed for them through society s myths and legends. This brought me to the crux of my theory and a rather simple if startling conclusion. The reader and the heroic character are equal in their creation of the hero: no reader, no hero. Stories are written because the reader demands them, wants them, needs them. Even if the hero dies over and over again, and even if the author cannot bring the hero back with a shining key to fix the ills of society, the reader is desperate to engage in the journey. The reader has an impulse to the heroic (to help create the world) but does not have the ability to do so and, therefore, needs a character to do it for them. This need drives the reader. Any available story will be looked at for its heroic potential: the dark tales of failure common in the modernist period of American writing that offer no consolation beyond once there was a hero who succeeded but no more or the Hollywood movies that offer escape only for as long as the lights remain dimmed will both be embraced as stop-gap measures. Advertising and self-help media know this and make a lot of money encouraging the non-hero to buy products that suggest a heroic story. A shade of lipstick, a brand of cologne, the right ten-step program, all promise to, if not make the consumer the hero who brings back a boon to society, at least sell them the accoutrements so they might look like Randolf Scott or any other hero who obviously has control and understanding of what is right and what is wrong in the world. So welcome to the heroic and the hero as concepts in America today. On the surface, it would seem that society is so split apart that it no longer believes that anything could be either completely right or completely wrong, and readers would shun a character who claims as much. Yet, the desire for a hero who offers a secure foundation by

12 xii PREFACE fixing, controlling, and clearly delineating society into what is right and what is wrong continues to be unbelievably strong in the reader (the viewer, the consumer). Like some quantum trick, the reader simultaneously does not believe and believes in the hero. It is another example of the shifting states that exist in a country that embraces the postmodern while looking for a fixed idea of America and the American hero. The American Dream lives on in the postmodern haze. To tease out just how the very modernist, formalist mythology of the American hero has managed to squeeze its way past current literary or cultural discussions is the focus of these investigations. This book is not about people or characters or any other things as things, but rather the fact that we seem to have grown tired of the freedom of the postmodern but are equally disinclined to return to a world of strict boundaries where there are distinct winners and losers (heroes and non-heroes). If this is true and the world has not fallen into anarchy, something must be going on that has not been considered. This book will look at just what is going on. Not in culture but in society as a creation of the heroic narrative. Culture as it is now defined is so often a series of images: flimsy, repetitive, and ultimately boring. I have chosen not to write another book on TV personalities but a book of questions and considerations about the way readers understand the heroic narrative. My focus is on American fiction with Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo as guides who suggest the hero as a narrative moving between fiction and reality. These two authors have been chosen not only because they form an arc from 1944 to the present day but because they, too, have questioned the role of the heroic narrative in American letters and unlike many have made attempts to understand its failure and to write the hero back home.

13 Acknowledgments I would like to extend thanks to all who have encouraged me in this work. In particular I would like to thank Linda Hutcheon for her time and energy, and Russell Brown and Greig Henderson who were there at the beginning.