Showing papers in "Critique-studies in Contemporary Fiction in 2006"

"Put the Book Down and Slowly Walk Away": Irony and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest

Abstract: avid Foster Wallace is constantly concerned with irony. It is at the heart of Infinite Jest and constitutes a major theme of his essays and interviews. In his analysis of the trope, Wallace has centered on two domains in which irony manifests itself, popular culture (“E Unibus Pluram”) and literary production (McCaffery interview). Irony seems to him “a hatred that winks and nudges you and pretends it’s just kidding,” that has “gone from liberating to enslaving” (McCaffery 147). Wallace takes a keen interest in the problem of “literary ethics” (“A Supposedly Fun Thing” 287), in the ways that one can dwell in an “[i]rony-free zone” to speak of “real stuff” (Infinite Jest 369, 592) and maximally to engage the reader. A literary attempt to reinstall this mutual understanding between reader and narrator can be found in “Octet,” in which “completely naked helpless pathetic sincerity” (131) is asked of both narrator and reader. But even in Up, Simba! a commentary on media and politics in the McCain 2000 election campaign, this interest leaps to the eye. In this article, I address the particularities of the use of irony in Infinite Jest, which require examining closely the contents of the novel: How do the characters present and use irony? A thorough examination of James O. Incandenza’s works, especially his lethal movie “Infinite Jest,” is crucial. Second, we must enter the theoretical debate about irony and evaluate the structure of the novel with regard to its (non)ethical treatment of the reader. My interest lies mainly in

Confession and Atonement in Contemporary Fiction: J. M. Coetzee, John Banville, and Ian McEwan

Abstract: (2006). Confession and Atonement in Contemporary Fiction: J. M. Coetzee, John Banville, and Ian McEwan. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol. 48, No. 1, pp. 31-43.

Cormac McCarthy as Pragmatist

Abstract: ormac McCarthy’s readers are unanimous in recognizing him as a great stylist. There is, however, no similar agreement about his message or about what his novels illustrate. In 1995, Nell Sullivan reflected that “[s]ince Cormac McCarthy arrived on the literary scene almost thirty years ago, the critics have been at a loss about how to view his texts” (115). Edwin Arnold summed up the nascent view on McCarthy fifteen years ago saying, “Foremost among the readings found in Vereen M. Bell’s The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy is the idea that McCarthy’s books are essentially nihilistic, devoid of conventional plot, theme or moral reference” (“Naming” 45). Arnold then affirmed “that Cormac McCarthy is no nihilist, that his works have meaning and theme” (“Mosaic” 23). Like many other readers, Arnold suggested that “McCarthy is a writer of the sacred” (“Sacred” 215). I think many readers will agree that William Spencer is also close to the mark in saying, “The problem of evil is a pervasive theme in the novels of Cormac McCarthy, and it is perhaps the issue of human existence that he is most interested in confronting in his fiction” (69). There are, however, two very different ways to talk about the sacred and evil. One way has characters searching for objects, principles, metaphysical causes, and transcendental values. The other approach is more subjective and self-conscious, reflecting on the processes of personal experience, on language as social construction, and on the creation of contexts, such as narration and aesthetic performance. McCarthy’s early novels, up to and including Blood Meridian, brood on the metaphysics of evil and the possibility that tragedy and evil are remnants of a primitive life process, rubble left “like some imponderable archeological phenomenon”

Sisterhood as Cultural Difference in Amy Tan's The Hundred Secret Senses and Cristina Garcia's The Aguero Sisters

Abstract: (2006). Sisterhood as Cultural Difference in Amy Tan's The Hundred Secret Senses and Cristina Garcia's The Aguero Sisters. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol. 47, No. 4, pp. 345-361.

Quantum Mechanics as Critical Model: Reading Nicholas Mosley's Hopeful Monsters

Abstract: (2006). Quantum Mechanics as Critical Model: Reading Nicholas Mosley's Hopeful Monsters. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol. 47, No. 3, pp. 289-308.

Don DeLillo's Americana: From Third-to First-Person Consciousness

Abstract: (2006). Don DeLillo's Americana: From Third-to First-Person Consciousness. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol. 47, No. 2, pp. 185-200.

"Why aren't the books enough?" Authorial Pursuit in Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot and A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters

Abstract: hy does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can’t we leave well alone? Why aren’t the books enough?” (Flaubert’s Parrot 12). So muses Geoffrey Braithwaite, the physician-narrator of Flaubert’s Parrot, as he relates his pursuit of dead author and stuffed bird. The questions would seem less disingenuous if a Braithwaite voice were strong enough to drown out the tones of Julian Barnes with more authority. But Braithwaite’s characterization is skimpy, his literary interests and rhetorical style sufficiently close to Barnes’s own to enforce an involuntary bridging of the notional divide between author and narrator. Textual circumstance itself encourages the heresy. The winner of an Oxford scholarship in French, a Flaubertian of sufficient stature to be asked to review Flaubert’s notebooks and correspondence for the Times Literary Supplement, is, after all, more likely than a Flaubert-loving doctor to have found himself sitting at the feet of Enid Starkie and in a position to comment with reliably on the atrociousness of her French accent and the inadequacy of her scholarship. Parodies of literature examination papers and of Flaubert’s Dictionary of Accepted Ideas, sophisticated excursuses on novelistic theory and practice, the three alternative versions of a Flaubert chronology and Louise Colet’s revisionist account of her relationship with Flaubert—all bespeak the actual Barnes rather than the nominal Braithwaite, even without confirmatory evidence drawn from the recurrent preoccupations and cadences of his other work.1 To adapt Philip Howard’s almost grudging compliment to Barnes’s later novel, Talking It Over (1991), it is all “quick-silver clever and allusive, funny about things that nobody else bothers to write about. [. . .] Its cultural credentials are brilliant” (16). W Copyright © 2006 Heldref Publications

"Our Lost, Discredited Souls": Narrating the Masculine Interior in Graham Swift's Shuttlecock and Ever After

Abstract: eter Widdowson concludes his 2001 critical overview, “The Novels of Graham Swift: Family Photos” by saying that “Graham Swift awaits his critics” (222). If we are to go by recent developments, Swift will not be waiting long. David Malcolm’s 2003 monograph Understanding Graham Swift and a flurry of critical essays suggest that, critically speaking, Swift has arrived. Moreover, he has arrived with more than just one outfit. According to Tamás Bényei, there are two distinct categories of Swift criticism: one focused on Linda Hutcheon’s notion of Waterland as “historiographic metafiction” (105); the other occupied with “mourning and/or melancholia, inscribing the melancholic narrative personae into the broader pathologies of nation, empire or age” (40). These categories, of course, are porous, inasmuch as any discussion of nation, empire, and age is inherently historiographic. Yet Bényei’s emphasis on history and mourning highlights two major (and interdependent) impulses in Swift’s work and the criticism surrounding it. In both camps Bényei outlines, there has been a consistent tendency to think of mourning in terms of some kind of nostalgia for traditional masculine signposts and norms. Adrian Poole suggests that Swift’s characters mourn “a whole world in which [their] ideas of manhood were formed” (155); Wendy Wheeler believes they are “mourning modernity’s losses” in light of “the failure of historical and cultural continuity, the failure [. . .] of the ‘paternal’ function” (64, 66). Emma Parker sees the same crisis as one in which each male character must learn “how to live as a man and express maleness when traditional models of manly being have lost their validity” (89). Such assessments seem to me to be valid but strikingly similar in their tendency to explain Swift’s version of masculine subjectivity in terms of irretrievable historical loss,

After Henry Adams: Rewriting History in Joan Didion's Democracy

Abstract: Historians undertake to arrange sequences—called stories, or histories—assuming in silence a relation of cause and effect. [. . .] Where he saw sequence, other men saw something quite different, and no one saw the same unit of measure. He cared little about experiments and less about his statesmen, who seemed to him quite as ignorant as himself and, as a rule, no more honest; but he insisted on a relation of sequence, and if he could not reach it by one method, he would try as many methods as science knew. Satisfied that the sequence of men led to nothing and that the sequence of their society led no further, while the mere sequence of time was artificial, and the sequence of thought was chaos, he turned at last to the sequence of force.

Tobias Wolff's Back in the World: American Dreamers, American Desert, Saving Word

Abstract: (2006). Tobias Wolff's Back in the World: American Dreamers, American Desert, Saving Word. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol. 48, No. 1, pp. 71-89.

"We've Always Been Different": Louisa Ermelino's Spring Street Trilogy and Italian American Women's Writing

Abstract: o metamorphose one’s identity may necessitate transgressing boundaries such as gender expectation or neighborhood limits. And it may take force of will to defeat an imprisoning sense of fate. I have been a friend of the poet Elaine Equi for years. I never thought of her as an Italian American poet until one day when I needed some information from the Poetry Society of America Web site, I saw that Elaine had contributed a short essay there titled “What is American About American Poetry?” in which she says:

The Merging of Tantric Buddhism and L'Extase Tantrique in John Hawkes's The Passion Artist

Abstract: he overarching and generally accepted interpretation of John Hawkes’s The Passion Artist finds it to be a novel about psychological growth. Because of traumatic sexual experiences suffered in his childhood, Konrad Vost, the protagonist, has a history of pathological relationships with women. His aborted participation in quelling a revolt of women prisoners initiates a sequence of encounters that prompts him to recall and come to terms with the painful memories of his childhood and ultimately liberates his psyche. This interpretation is embedded in an enigmatic and discontinuous text. The many ambiguities in The Passion Artist—for example, characters are alternately alive, dead, and alive again—make the novel one of those that Roland Barthes calls “writerly,” because they “make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text” (4). Some of this novel’s ambiguities may be resolved in the context of the bardo phenomena described in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, particularly in the famously psychologized translation of that ancient Buddhist text by Francesca Fremantle and Chögyam Trungpa that was published in 1975, four years before The Passion Artist appeared. Fremantle and Trungpa’s version of this Tantric Buddhist text is concerned as much with the mental health of the living, their “sanity and insanity” and their release from “paranoia and uncertainty in everyday life” as with “death itself” (1–2). Terry Eagleton cautions,

Cocktails with the Reader Victim: Style and Similitude in Robert Coover's Gerald's Party

Abstract: obert Coover’s novel Gerald’s Party is an elaborate and sometimes repellant venture into a world at once familiar and alien. The novel’s setting is the upper-middle-class home of Gerald (the novel’s first-person narrator) and his (unnamed) wife, where a cocktail party has commenced. People talk, eat, drink, laugh, are insulted and propositioned, cans of beer mingle with highball glasses—in short, this is an environment in which a liberal, bourgeois subject of the American late-twentieth century should feel at home. But something has gone wrong; one of Gerald’s guests tells his host: “‘All the style’s gone out of your parties, Ger [. . .] there’s too much shit and blood’” (168). A number of reviewers and critics of the novel seem to agree with this guest’s complaint, although for some the problem may be too much style. Charles Newman, caviling about the novel’s prodigious stylistic difficulty, cites Coover’s “rubbing your nose in his conduct.”1 Newman registers his grievance in terms that resonate with a strange feature of the novel’s general reception: Critics describing their experiences of reading the novel cite a wide range of somatic discomforts. Richard Gilman, more distressed than Newman, suffers from the novel’s “dizzying profusion of punctuation”; Christopher Lehmann-Haupt finds the book full of “nerve-racking instability”; and Robert Towers, who designates himself a “reader-victim,” writes of being “bombarded with fragments of scenes, with snatches of disembodied talk, with dizzying non-sequiturs.” Christopher Ames experiences the novel as a series of “bruising shocks” from which the “reader [. . .] emerges somewhat battered, worn away by the assaults upon time, coherence, and verisimilitude” (85); and, at the extreme end of this epidemic of readerly ills, Robert Kelly relates the following anecdote:

Iê thi diem thúy's "The Gangster We Are All Looking For": The Ekphrastic Emigration of a Photograph

Abstract: (2006). Ie thi diem thuy's 'The Gangster We Are All Looking For': The Ekphrastic Emigration of a Photograph. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol. 48, No. 1, pp. 3-18.

The Faithful Trace of Misgiving in W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants

Abstract: ucy Landau says, “The windows gleamed like lead, and the sky was so low and dark, one expected ink to run out of it any moment” (Sebald 61). If Lucy’s simile and implied metaphor are beautiful, they also have a patina to which W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants, where they appear, has accustomed us. Throughout her narration of Paul Bereyter’s sad, intelligent life, Mme Landau uses imagery so frequently and casually that by the time she describes the dark weather on the day of Paul’s death, the leaden windows and inky sky do not stand out as a rare expenditure of literary device. In the rush to read Paul’s suicide, one might not notice them at all. But with a subtlety that screens the exactitude of her confession, Mme Landau discloses the purposefully badly kept secret of The Emigrants: its windows and skies are ultimately made of ink and pencil lead—of the book’s print and its precedent manuscript—as are all the other furniture, expanses, and subjects made tangible only in the text.1 That Lucy speaks in simile and metaphor does not preclude her analogy from bearing on the text from which she speaks. As Mark R. McCulloh baldly states, “The primary subject of Sebald’s writing is, in the end, writing itself” (xxi). Because Sebald’s writing takes itself as a subject, applying the writerly device to what is written— in this case, literalizing Lucy Landau’s analogies—consummates rather than disregards the paradigm of Sebald’s novel.2 To literalize, then, the novel does not consist of signifiers only a short remove from their referents; rather, it consists of lead and ink, which recompose and perhaps disfigure their remote signifieds. Mme Landau discloses that even what seems most convincingly documentary (most ostensibly referential) in the novel—a weather report, a newspaper clipping, the photographed open pages of Ambros Adelwarth’s agenda—belong to artifice. The book is composed.

Baseball Is America: The Game of Imperialism in Mark Winegardner's The Veracruz Blues

Abstract: ark Winegardner’s eclectic writing career has recently taken yet another bizarre turn. After an extensive search, Random House and the late Mario Puzo’s executors selected Winegardner, from among roughly forty published authors, to write the next chapter in the story of the Corleone family. He can now add the recently published The Godfather Returns to his already unpredictable list of publications. Having begun his career with a nonfictional travel narrative titled Elvis Presley Boulevard, Winegardner then published two more nonfiction books, both about baseball: Prophet of the Sandlots, the story of a major league baseball scout, and The 26th Man, a co-written (auto)biography of a career minor leaguer. Continuing with the baseball theme, Winegardner published his first novel, The Veracruz Blues, about the Mexican baseball league. With his second novel, he went for the big one; his beefy, 600-page art novel, Crooked River Burning, drew comparisons to Dos Passos’s U.S.A. Trilogy and E. L. Doctorow’s City of God, among other respected literary works. After a well-reviewed collection of short stories titled That’s True of Everybody, Winegardner has now penned the sequel to the mafia classic, The Godfather. Winegardner’s writing career has not been widely tracked, perhaps because it has been hard to follow. This wandering midcareer writer would seem to have more in common with a twenty-two-year-old recent college graduate who aim-

William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow and the Autobiographical Impulse

Abstract: ore obviously than that of most fiction writers, William Maxwell’s work seems to have been shaped by an autobiographical impulse. Anyone familiar with his work knows that Maxwell’s mother died when he was only ten years old, during the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918, and that forever afterward he regarded that as the defining event of his life. Having told the story of his childhood in two earlier novels and a published family history, Maxwell returned to the subject again in So Long, See You Tomorrow, the novel he published when he was seventy-two years old and which earned him both the National Book Award and the Howells Medal for fiction. The first half of So Long covers the territory already so familiar to Maxwell’s readers: his childhood, the death of his mother from influenza, and his father’s subsequent remarriage. It also includes a story Maxwell had not previously used but which the dust jacket suggests has a similarly autobiographical source. The narrator explains that shortly after his father’s remarriage he befriended a farm boy named Cletus Smith. His relationship with the boy was cut short when the boy’s father, Clarence, murdered his own best friend, Lloyd Wilson, having discovered his wife having an affair with Wilson. After news of the murder broke, the boy’s mother moved him to Chicago, where several years later the narrator met him by chance in a high school hallway. Not knowing what to say, the narrator walked by without so much as a nod, and for this he cannot forgive himself. Maxwell devotes the second half of the novel to the narrator’s imaginative reconstruction of life in the Smith and Wilson households in the months leading up to the murder. The narrator acknowledges creating that account entirely out of his imagination because he has no knowledge of the families’ private lives

Beyond the boundaries of the blues: Diane mckinney-whetstone's blues dancing as middle-class blues narrative

Abstract: (2006). Beyond the Boundaries of the Blues: Diane McKinney-Whetstone's Blues Dancing as Middle-Class Blues Narrative. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol. 48, No. 1, pp. 44-57.

Adam's Novel? The Omphalos and the Ending of Possession

Abstract: (2006). Adam's Novel? The Omphalos and the Ending of Possession. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol. 47, No. 4, pp. 331-344.