After Postmodernism

The New American Fiction

Christopher K. Coffman, Theophilus Savvas, Christopher K. Coffman, Theophilus Savvas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367640118
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000289114
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Several of American literature's most prominent authors, and many of their most perceptive critics and reviewers, argue that fiction of the last quarter century has turned away from the tendencies of postmodernist writing. Yet, the nature of that turn, and the defining qualities of American fiction after postmodernism, remain less than clear.

This volume identifies four prominent trends of the contemporary scene: the recovery of the real, a rethinking of historical engagement, a preoccupation with materiality, and a turn to the planetary. Readings of works by various leading figures, including Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, A.M. Homes, Lance Olsen, Richard Powers, William T. Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace, support a variety of arguments about this recent revitalization of American literature.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Textual Practice.

Vegetarianism in the Anthropocene: Richard Powers and Jonathan Franzen

Theophilus Savvas

ABSTRACT
This article uses the representation of vegetarianism in Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker (2006) and Jonathan Franzen’s Purity (2015) as a way to think about broader issues of ecological engagement. It argues that these issues are related to the ways in which each writer approaches questions of subjectivity and form after postmodernism. It concludes that the posthumanist dimension of Powers’ novel, achieved through formal experimentation, is a more successful engagement with the questions posed by the age of the Anthropocene than Franzen’s continued realism.

A recent issue of the Times Literary Supplement features a review of two books which are concerned with cultural representations of meat, and another which considers four books focused on the ethics of eating meat.¹ This suggests that the prominent trend in debating the ethics of eating, highlighted in the wide-readership of books such as Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation (2001) and Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2007), has taken a specific, and not unexpected, turn. In recent years, the ethics of eating meat has become framed as part of a wider debate on global sustainability and climate change with significant evidence now suggesting that reduction in or elimination of foods derived from animals would provide global economic and health benefits.² As such it is hardly surprising that two writers frequently described as ‘econovelists’ – Richard Powers and Jonathan Franzen – have included the topic in recent novels.³ Both these writers also feature prominently in the conversation about postpostmodernism, and in this piece I use those ethical debates as a way to focus on matters of subjectivity and form after postmodernism.⁴ In the conclusion I frame these matters within the context of New Sincerity and the emergent concept of the Anthropocene to suggest that it is Powers’ The Echo Maker (2006), rather than Franzen’s Purity (2015), that most successfully addresses the cultural exigencies of the present.

I. Purity and human failure

There is a long history of association of female bodies with meat. It is long enough and important enough that one scholar – Carol J. Adams – has written of the need for a ‘feminist-vegetarian critical theory’ to address the matter of ‘the sexual politics of meat’.⁵ Adams provides myriad examples of the association, as well as a framework for understanding the metaphor, ‘woman-as-meat’, which allows her to make a convincing case for the suggestion that carnivorism is an ‘integral part of male dominance’; vegetarianism thus demonstrates a ‘sign of dis-ease with patriarchal culture’, and ought always be ‘part of the practice of feminism.’⁶ Anabel Laird in Jonathan Franzen’s fifth novel, Purity, would certainly agree with Adams. When she is introduced to the reader she is wrapped in butcher paper with ‘YOUR MEAT’ scrawled across it as a protest against the underrepresentation of females on the Faculty of Tyler Art College.⁷ She continues her protestation of the linked exploitation of females and animals throughout her time at the college, and, for her final project at Tyler – a film titled ‘A River of Meat’ – splices together footage of a cow being bolt-gunned in a slaughterhouse with images of the coronation of Miss America in 1966. These are preparatory pieces for the major work of her life: the painstaking construction of a film detailing the inscription of a grid of 232-square-centimeter ‘cuts’ on her body, each of which she will spend a week acquainting herself with, in a bid to ‘reclaim possession of her body, cut by cut, from the world of men and meat.’ ‘After ten years,’ we are told, ‘she’d own herself entirely’ (402). Anabel’s rejection of the patriarchy is reflected in her rejection of her father’s fortune, the source of which is his work with McCaskil, one of the biggest corporate meat producers in the country. Literalising the metaphor that Adams highlights becomes both Anabel’s life’s work, and a way of reworking the conditions of that life.

The presentation of this radical vegetarian-feminist warrants further attention because the way in which Anabel and her beliefs are framed in the novel suggests some of the reasons why she might feel the need to ‘reclaim’ herself from the world of men in the first place. That emphatic act of rebellion through which the reader is first acquainted with Anabel is undercut by the fact that the narrative trigger for it is the presentation, via a tip-off – and as if on a plate – of Anabel to Tom Aberrant, editor of the school magazine, as a possible subject for a juicy report. Anabel’s story, then, is in the hands of a controlling male editor, even before we meet the woman herself. Anabel and Tom begin a relationship that will eventually see them married, but that relationship, and Anabel’s art, is nearly always focalised through Tom, and so seen through the male prism. This perspective undercuts and trivialises Anabel’s reasons for her vegetarianism; in so doing it also necessarily undercuts and trivialises her feminist ideals. The abstinence from flesh that Anabel has imposed upon Tom as a precondition of their relationship leaves him ‘constantly half nauseated’, and the description of Anabel as ‘full-chestedly anorexic’ conflates the ‘symptoms’ of her dietary choice with those of an illness usually considered in terms of body-image issues; it also connotes that there is something unnatural about her retention of female attributes (195).⁸ Tom, we have been told, is ‘not afraid of anyone’s opinion of how he looked’, suggestively furthering the notion that Anabel’s malady is female and vain (177). Vegetarianism, then, is figured as unnatural and unhealthy; it is constructed as a disorder of the female mind, like hysteria, which, as with all mental illnesses, has a concomitant effect on the body. When, after a few years, both the marriage and Anabel’s mental health start to fail, Tom feels guilty, commenting, ‘I couldn’t leave until I’d helped her out of the stuck place I’d allowed her to fall into’ (408). Both Anabel’s moral position and her agency are undermined by the characters’ pronouncement on her, and any attempt by Anabel to work her way out of that perspective – to ‘own herself entirely’ – seems doomed.

One might be tempted to put this down to characterisation, with Tom’s comments constituting the expression of the inevitable frustrations of a relationship. However, the non-chronological structuring of the novel frames how we view the dietary proclivities of Anabel, and seems to work to confirm this perspective on her. The novel opens with a mother lamenting the state of her body – and life – in a telephone conversation with her daughter: ‘My body is betraying me again. Sometimes I think my life is nothing but one long process of bodily betrayal’ (3). The daughter – Purity ‘Pip’ Tyler – points out the universal nature of these concerns, but her mother is not pacified: ‘This is the terrible thing about bodies. They’re so visible, so visible,’ she concludes (4). These complaints, combined with her subsequent rejection of Pip’s offer to bring her a cake with stevia in it because the sugar substitute has a deleterious effect on her ‘mouth chemistry,’ means that we are likely to agree with Pip’s assessment of her mother: ‘problematic,’ if not quite ‘crazy’ (3-4). Reviewers of Purity have certainly concurred with this view of the mother: ‘not-quite-sane’ was the verdict of Colm Toibin in The New York Times, an ‘oppressively needy hypochondriac’, suggested Duncan White in The Daily Telegraph, ‘a fully-fledged Miss Havisham’, wrote Tim Adams in the Guardian.⁹ Within these first few pages we also learn, but only indirectly, of the unsurprising dietary choice of this ‘Hippie single mom’: one of those on Pip’s shortlist of possible partners for her mother is deemed more suitable than the others because he is ‘likewise a vegan’ (6).¹⁰ That veganism is coded, then, as an attempt on behalf of a ‘problematic’ woman to establish control over the only part of her life amenable to it: her body. Corporeal in the original sense of ‘to do with the body’ rather than the spiritual, the concerns of Pip’s mother seem self-absorbed in the extreme. The mother here – ‘Penelope Tyler’ – is Anabel, who, in her struggle to reclaim her life from patriarchy has disavowed completely her former identity – though the intricate nature of the plotting means that the reader does not find this out until much later in the novel. The effect of this is that when Anabel is introduced in a following section set in the narrative past, the reader has already been primed to read female abstinence as the site where physical and moral vanity coincide; it encourages us to read her feminist-vegetarian ethic as the result of and perhaps a mask for these concerns.¹¹

The opening also, of course, proleptically confirms the view that without a controlling male – her father or Tom – Anabel cannot survive. The narrative seems to endorse the view of male predation and hopeless female victimhood set out by its nastiest character, the appropriately named Andreas Wolf, ‘internet outlaw’ (10). In an email to Pip, Wolf writes:

Maybe being male is like being born a predator, and maybe the only right thing for the predator to do, if it sympathises with smaller animals and won’t accept that it was born to kill them, is to betray its nature and starve to death. But maybe it’s like something else – like being born with more money than others. Then the right thing to do becomes a more interesting social question. (66)

After the revelation of Wolf’s secret abuse of young, vulnerable women when acting as a church counsellor, his thoughts here can only be interpreted as (hardly coherent) amoralistic solipsism designed to rationalise his own behaviour; it certainly does not help that the narrative itself (rather than simply Wolf) seems to offer up the rather tired trope of dysfunctional childhood and oedipal desires as the cause of (if not necessarily an excuse for) his abusive tendencies. That the much older Wolf successfully seduces Pip – into working for him, into a relationship with him – as part of what emerges as a complicated plot to get revenge on her father, only confirms the novel’s message of the vulnerability of women.

It is surely one of the functions, and perhaps the main function – apart from to provoke cynical laughter – of Anabel as a flat character to demonstrate the more rounded, if still vulnerable, character of Pip. Pip, we are told, has learned from her mother ‘the importance of leading a morally purposeful life’, but she ‘shudders’ at the word ‘purity’ (29, 47). In this way, her desire ‘to do good [deeds]’ ought to be contrasted against the rather different (and impossible aim) of being good, which, Franzen seems to intimate marks Anabel. Pip is marked as one who will shun the idealism of the most ardent character in the novel – her mother – in favour of doing what she can. Purity emerges, then, as a paean to the importance of being realistic, which Anabel is not. Early in th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: American fiction after postmodernism
• 1 Vegetarianism in the Anthropocene: Richard Powers and Jonathan Franzen
• 2 The genrefication of contemporary American fiction
• 3 Feverish fictions: William T. Vollmann and American literary history after postmodernism
• 4 Metaffective fiction: structuring feeling in post-postmodern American literature
• 5 Entropology and the end of nature in Lance Olsen’s Theories of Forgetting
• 6 Typical Eggers: transnationalism and America in Dave Eggers’s ‘globally-minded’ fiction
• 7 Making it long: men, women, and the great American novel now
• Index