Character and Satire in Post War Fiction PDF
Preview Character and Satire in Post War Fiction
Character and Satire in Postwar Fiction IAN GREGSON Continuum Character and Satire in Postwar Fiction CONTINUUM LITERARY STUDIES SERIES Forthcoming titles: Beckett’s Books by Matthew Feldman English Fiction in the 1930s by Chris Hopkins Fictions of Globalization by James Annesley Joyce and Company by David Pierce Masculinity in Fiction and Film by Brian Baker Novels of the Contemporary Extreme edited by Alain-Phillipe Durand and Naomi Mandel Re-writing London by Lawrence Phillips Women’s Fiction 1945–2000 by Deborah Philips Character and Satire in Postwar Fiction IAN GREGSON Continuum The Tower Building 15 East 26th Street 11 York Road New York London SE1 7NX NY 10010 www.continuumbooks.com © Ian Gregson 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 0–8264–8747–5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 1 Subverting Racist Caricature: Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison 9 2 Joseph Heller’s Allegories of Money 31 3 Philip Roth’s Vulgar, Aggressive Clowning 55 4 Joyce Carol Oates’s Political Anger 79 5 Muriel Spark’s Puppets of Thwarted Authority 99 6 Magic Realism As Caricature: Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie 111 7 The Caricaturist As Celebrity: Martin Amis and Will Self 131 8 Caricature Versus Character: The Self As Cartoon 151 Notes 169 Bibliography 175 Index 179 For Dave Faggiani and Steve Ormrod Acknowledgements I’m especially grateful to my colleague Tom Corns who made important suggestions about this book, especially about the ordering of chapters. I’m grateful as well to Stephen Wall who did painstaking (and subsequently influential) work on the prose style of the Muriel Spark chapter, which first appeared in Essays in Criticism (where he is the editor). Thanks as well to Linda Jones who did invaluable work on the manuscript. This page intentionally left blank Introduction It has been poststructuralism which has most influenced recent theorizing about characterization. J. Hillis Miller, for example, argues that the realist novel has two, apparently contradictory, functions. On one hand, it pro- motes social cohesiveness because it reassures its readers about the existence of the unitary self. The examples of that self which it provides are so vivid that life imitates art and reproduces them so that ‘England after 1836 begins to be filled with Dickensian characters’.1 On the other, however, it interro- gates the concept of character, calls it radically into question, through a process of ‘autodeconstruction’. It does this in order to respond to the very doubts about the unitary self which its first function appears to dismiss. By allowing these doubts to be expressed aesthetically, and therefore in an arena which does not pose a social threat, it paradoxically reinforces the reassurance offered by its first function. In order to display this autodeconstruction in action, Hillis Miller argues that the realist novel is much less realist than it appears; he cites examples from George Eliot’s novels to show how they interrogate realist assumptions about the self. He summarizes his argument by declaring that the novel is a perpetual tying and untying of the knot of selfhood for the purpose, in the psychic economy of the individual and of the community, of affirming the fiction of character by putting it fictionally in question and so short- circuiting a doubt which, left free to act in the real social world, might destroy both self and community. (98) Leo Bersani and Thomas Docherty use poststructuralist methods to analyse subjectivity in novels. For Bersani it is desire which most threatens that unitary self which Hillis Miller sees as being protected by realism. Bersani is ambivalent about Freudian theory, but he draws upon psycho- analytic thought in order to explore the ways that desire subverts psychic coherence; he traces a literary development from Racine, through Flaubert, Stendhal, Henry James and D. H. Lawrence, and into avant-garde theatre of the 1970s in order to follow ‘stages in the deconstruction of the self in modern literature’.2 He is preoccupied with the impact of repression and sublimation – how they ensure the psychic continuities which constitute personality, but at the cost of ‘a serious crippling of desire’ (6). His politics are close to those
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