The Maximalist Novel

B it serves as a geographical marker, the frontier is an idea, a metaphor of position or process. That idea is simultaneously physical, political, and psychological. At the same time that Frederick Jackson Turner published The Frontier in American History, one of the twentieth century’s most influential historical works, Sigmund Freud published The Ego and the Id, one of the century’s most influential psychological works.1 Turner described the frontier as “the outer edge of the wave, the meeting point between savagery and civilization” (3). Freud characterized the ego as “a frontier creature,” managing stimuli from within and without, occupying a “position midway between the id and reality” (56). Turner distinguished European frontiers, with established and fortified borders, from the American frontier, which in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was a fluid marker “at the hither edge of free land.” Initially that edge bordered the Atlantic coast colonies; then explorers, armies, and settlers gradually pushed it westward, as the idea of “the West” became a mythic part of American lore. Freud’s metaphor of the frontier ego blends a European model of the border agent, managing tensions between established boundaries, with an American model of boundaries discovered in a continuing process of negotiation: ego with id, superego, and external reality. The process of exploration, struggle, compromise, then settlement or fortress, describes both psychological and social expansion. “Frontier” means confrontation. In psychology, the gradual separation of self from the object world establishes “ego boundaries” that must be regularly main-

Dialogic Frontiers: History and Psychology in Lonesome Dove and Blood Meridian

The interrelationship of natural and cultural history in Don DeLillo’s Underworld presents an ecology of mimesis. If, as Timothy Morton argues, ecological thought can be understood as a “mesh of interconnection,” DeLillo’s novel studies the interpretation of connection. Underworld situates its action in the Cold War era. DeLillo’s formal techniques examine the tropes of paranoia, containment, excess, and waste peculiar to the history of the Cold War. Parataxis and free-indirect discourse emphasize the contexts of reference in the novel, illustrating how hermeneutics informs the significance of boundaries. DeLillo’s use of parataxis exemplifies the conditions that propose and limit metaphor’s reference to reality, conditions that offer the terms for meaningful action. I utilize Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics to demonstrate how Underworld situates the reference to reality in its temporal and narrative condition. The historical situation of the novel’s narrative structure allows DeLillo to interrogate the role of discourse in producing and interpreting connection. Underworld offers layers of significance; the reader’s engagement with the novel’s discourse reaffirms the conditions of a meaningful relationship with reality in the pertinence of a metaphor.

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/10/1/40/pdf

The Bounds of Narrative in Don DeLillo’s Underworld: Action and the Ecology of Mimêsis

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Con-scripting the masses: False documents and historical revisionism in the Americas

Memorials for the Unmourned: Representations of Politicized Violence in Contemporary U.S.-Mexico Border Fiction

This is a reconsideration of the relationship between history and fiction in the context of postmodernism. Why don't we read novels as if they were histories and histories as if they were novels? Recent postmodern theorists such as Hayden White and Linda Hutcheon have argued that since history is a narrative art, it must be understood as a form of narrative representation analogous to fiction. Yet, contrary to the fears of some historians, such arguments have not undermined the practice of history as a meaningful enterprise so much as they have highlighted the appeal history has as a narrative craft. In addressing the postmodernist claim that history works no differently than fiction, Timothy Parrish rejects the implication that history is dead or hopelessly relativistic. Rather, he shows how the best postmodern novelists compel their readers to accept their narratives as true in the same way that historians expect their readers to accept their narratives as true. These novelists write history as a form of fiction. If the great pre-modernist American historians are Francis Parkman, George Bancroft, and Henry Adams, who are the great modernist or postmodernist historians? In the twentieth century, Parrish argues, the most powerful works of American history were written by William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, and Cormac McCarthy. What survives a reading of these novels is the sense that writers otherwise identified as multicultural or postmodern share the view that nothing matters more than history and what one believes its possibilities to be. In other words, Parrish concludes, history, not identity, is the ground of postmodern American fiction.

Timothy Parrish

Papers

From the Civil War to the Apocalypse: Postmodern History and American Fiction