Repression and Realism in Post-War American Literature (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century)

259 Pages·2011·1.89 MB·English

by  Erin Mercer

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 and 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
Race and Identity in Hemingway’s Fiction
By Amy L. Strong
Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism
By Jennifer Haytock
The Anti-Hero in the American Novel: From Joseph Heller to Kurt Vonnegut
By David Simmons
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Indians, Environment, and Identity on the Borders of American
Literature: From Faulkner and Morrison to Walker and Silko
By Lindsey Claire Smith
The American Landscape in the Poetry of Frost, Bishop, and Ashbery: The
House Abandoned
By Marit J. MacArthur
Narrating Class in American Fiction
By William Dow
The Culture of Soft Work: Labor, Gender, and Race in Postmodern
American Narrative
By Heather J. Hicks
Cormac McCarthy: American Canticles
By Kenneth Lincoln
Elizabeth Spencer’s Complicated Cartographies: Reimagining Home, the
South, and Southern Literary Production
By Catherine Seltzer
New Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut
Edited by David Simmons
Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton: From Silence to Speech
By Dianne L. Chambers
The Emergence of the American Frontier Hero 1682–1826: Gender,
Action, and Emotion
By Denise Mary MacNeil
Norman Mailer’s Later Fictions: Ancient Evenings through Castle
in the Forest
Edited by John Whalen-Bridge
Fetishism and its Discontents in Post-1960 American Fiction
By Christopher Kocela
Language, Gender, and Community in Late Twentieth-Century Fiction:
American Voices and American Identities
By Mary Jane Hurst
Repression and Realism in Post-War American Literature
By Erin Mercer
Writing Celebrity: Stein, Fitzgerald, and the Modern(ist) Art of Self-
Fashioning
By Timothy W. Galow
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Erin Mercer
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REPRESSION AND REALISM IN POST-WAR AMERICAN LITERATURE
Copyright © Erin Mercer, 2011.
All rights reserved.
Archival material from the Alfred Kazin Papers at the Berg Collection at the
New York Public Library. Copyright © 1954, 1959 the Estate of Alfred Kazin,
reprinted by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.
Quotation from a letter from Norman Mailer to Alfred Kazin dated 11 May
1959. Copyright © 1959 the Estate of Norman Mailer, reprinted by
permission of the Wylie Agency LLC.
Archival material from the Jack Kerouac Papers at the Berg Collection at the
New York Public Library reprinted by permission of SLL/Sterling Lord
Literistic, Inc. Copyright by John Sampas Literary Representative.
First published in 2011 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
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Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
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Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
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ISBN: 978–0–230–11166–0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mercer, Erin, 1977–
Repression and realism in post-war American literature / Erin Mercer.
p. cm.—(American literature readings in the twenty-first century)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978–0–230–11166–0
1. American fiction—20th century—History and criticism.
2. Repression (Psychology) in literature. 3. Realism in literature. I. Title.
PS374.R48M47 2011
813(cid:1).5409353—dc22 2010041986
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: May 2011
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America.
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Acknowledgments vii
1 Missing in Action: Repression, Return, and the Post-War
Uncanny 1
2 Automatons and the Atomic Abyss: Norman Mailer’s
The Naked and the Dead 37
3 Haunting and Race: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man 61
4 The Sacred Other: Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood 89
5 Dubious Reality and the Double: Saul Bellow’s
The Victim 113
6 The Familiar Made Strange: Paul Bowles’s
The Sheltering Sky 143
7 Repression and Confession: Jack Kerouac’s On
the Road 167
8 The Concealment that Fails to Conceal 183
Notes 193
Bibliography 225
Index 247
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A
My most heartfelt thanks go to Charles Ferrall and Anna Jackson
whose tireless efforts in reading innumerable drafts, offering sugges-
tions, and editing manuscripts were only matched by the generosity
of spirit in which they did so. Their expertise and intelligence have
been invaluable; so too have their encouragement and humor. The
best parts of this study must be attributed to their insight and sup-
port, while any deficiencies are entirely my own.
I would also like to thank the School of English, Film, Theatre,
and Media Studies at Victoria University of Wellington and particu-
larly Harry Ricketts, who took time from his busy schedule to share
his expertise in the poetry of World War I, and Mark Williams, whose
advice was eagerly sought and generously given. Special thanks go
to Peter Whiteford whose support of me, first as a postgraduate and
then as a lecturer, is highly appreciated.
Much of my time researching this project was generously funded by
Victoria University of Wellington, both through a PhD Scholarship
and faculty funding, which enabled me to conduct research in
Auckland, Sydney and New York. The New Zealand Education
Postgraduate Study Abroad Award enabled me to deliver a paper
at the 2008 Australian and New Zealand Association of American
Studies based on my research on Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. I
am extremely grateful to the J. L. and Kathleen Stewart Postgraduate
Research Experience Travel Award, which allowed me to spend time
at New York Public Library’s Berg Collection.
I am particularly indebted to Eluned Summers-Bremner at the
University of Auckland who generously allowed a perfect stranger
to attend one of her graduate workshops on post-World War II
British fiction. Thanks also to Richard Nicholson at the University
of Auckland who organized the opportunity for me to deliver a semi-
nar to the Faculty of Arts based on my research into the effects of
McCarthyism on American fiction and film. I am particularly grate-
ful to Anne Garner at the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection
whose suggestions regarding which papers to look at during my
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viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
period of research at the collection proved very fruitful. I would also
like to thank the Estates of Alfred Kazin, Norman Mailer, and Jack
Kerouac for allowing me to reprint archival material held in the Berg
Collection.
Lastly, thanks always to my mother Pamela Mercer whose unwav-
ering support is the foundation of everything I do, and to Zhenya,
whose name is always last on the list and first in my heart. Your love
and light make forays into darkness possible, so this is for you.
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C H A P T E R 1
Missing in Action: Repression,
Return, and the Post-War Uncanny
Repression: c. Psychol. The action, process, or result of suppressing
into the unconscious or keeping out of the conscious mind unaccept-
able memories or desires.
Even the most cursory glance over literature produced in America
during the first decade following the end of World War II raises an
unexpected and perplexing problem: none of the novels engage with
the recent trauma of the most defining events of the twentieth cen-
tury—the mass death due to the war, the Holocaust, and the atomic
bombing of Japan. We might expect an era negotiating the unprec-
edented violence of a war with a casualty toll estimated at 50 mil-
lion people to produce literature dealing with the new and terrifying
aspects of mid-twentieth-century life. Certainly, the example of the
literary tradition following the First World War would encourage us
to look for something similar following the second conflict.1 Yet what
we find is exactly the opposite. The first American novels ostensibly
about the Second World War, such as James Gould Cozzens’s Guard
of Honor (1948) and Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny (1951),
studiously avoided both the Holocaust and the atomic bomb, even
managing in many cases to completely avoid depictions of combat.
While popular novels such as The Hucksters (1946) and The Man in
the Gray Flannel Suit (1955) purport to deal with the new difficulties
facing the post-war American, the anxieties dealt with are provoked
by conformity and corporatization rather than by the recent trauma
of mass death and large-scale destruction. One critic disappointedly
observed that “since 1945, when all signs pointed to a literary revival
comparable to that after World War I, our literature has actually been
in a state of decline.”2 In fact, if the only evidence was the fiction
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