Aggressive Fictions

Reading the Contemporary American Novel

Kathryn Hume

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780801462887
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Literaturkritik

A frequent complaint against contemporary American fiction is that too often it puts off readers in ways they find difficult to fathom. Books such as Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, Katherine Dunn's Geek Love, and Don DeLillo's Underworld seem determined to upset, disgust, or annoy their readers—or to disorient them by shunning traditional plot patterns and character development. Kathryn Hume calls such works "aggressive fiction." Why would authors risk alienating their readers—and why should readers persevere? Looking beyond the theory-based justifications that critics often provide for such fiction, Hume offers a commonsense guide for the average reader who wants to better understand and appreciate books that might otherwise seem difficult to enjoy.

In her reliable and sympathetic guide, Hume considers roughly forty works of recent American fiction, including books by William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Chuck Palahniuk, and Cormac McCarthy. Hume gathers "attacks" on the reader into categories based on narrative structure and content. Writers of some aggressive fictions may wish to frustrate easy interpretation or criticism. Others may try to induce certain responses in readers. Extreme content deployed as a tactic for distancing and alienating can actually produce a contradictory effect: for readers who learn to relax and go with the flow, the result may well be exhilaration rather than revulsion.

1

NARRATIVE SPEED IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION

Many contemporary novels subject their readers to a breathless sense that the events are hurtling by too fast for real understanding. Scenes and focal figures change quickly, and helpful transitions are missing. The resultant feeling of excessive rapidity is what I mean by narrative speed, and for many readers, this speed produces frustration and serious discomfiture. This effect occurs so frequently in contemporary fiction, and its mechanics are so readily grasped, that it seems a good place to start investigating fiction that denies readers their expected comforts. The immediate lesson to be learned? Relax. Give up the assumption that you must control a text. Then, perhaps, you can enjoy it.

Why has speed become a commonplace in fiction? What effects do authors seek by using it? Why do they refuse to supply the connections and transitions that would help their readers? These questions confront readers of numerous recent novels, and they invite us to ask how one might best understand speed as a narrative technique and as a factor that makes readers feel rebuffed or even attacked. Narrative theory to date seems to offer relatively little insight into these problems. Critics have so far theorized pace (fast or slow) in just four basic fashions: (1) prose portrayal of physical speed; (2) narrative retardation; (3) the amount of story time covered per page; and (4) fictional reflections of cultural speed.

Critical concern with portraying physical speed focuses on the modernist fascination with the sensation of speed and how to represent it in painting, sculpture, and writing. This is only marginally relevant to the kind of frantic narrative I am trying to analyze, because narrative speed does not necessarily increase as one describes physical speed, though the two sometimes coincide. Thomas De Quincey’s prose, for example, actually slows down as he attempts to catalog the sensations of fear provoked by a speeding mail coach. One significant connection between mechanical speed and prose speed has been helpfully analyzed by Stephen Kern.1 In exploring the speed-up mechanisms of the modernist era—bicycle, telegraph, telephone, car, and film—he notes that reporters wired stories to their newspapers. He attributes to this practice the paring away of unnecessary words, the “telegraphic” style that gains recognition in the writing of Ernest Hemingway.2

A second way to theorize narrative pace—retardation—was propounded by Viktor Shklovsky. His approach was conditioned by his viewing folktales as growing from a kernel that could be rendered in a sentence or two. For them to become stories demanded ways of delaying. Likewise, many novels could be summarized in a paragraph. Shklovsky focuses on techniques for slowing down, and gives no thought to speeding up. Hence, for him, stories always consist of a string of delaying devices. He analyzes retarding techniques such as defamiliarization,3 repetitious structures, and the framing of tales within tales. Even characters can function as delaying devices: Conan Doyle’s Dr. Watson, he avers, exists “to retard the action” (104). Shklovsky’s famous image of art slowing our automatic visual processing to make us see the stoniness of a stone puts retardation at the heart of his aesthetic.

Structuralist desire to make literary study a science is what generates the third approach, namely, quantifying literary speed. Gérard Genette tried to describe narrative speed in numeric terms so that texts could be compared mathematically. He conceives of speed primarily as a ratio between the time span covered in the novel and the number of pages allotted to it, so that Proust’s volumes contain passages that cover variously one minute of social action to a page all the way to one century to a page.4 Genette’s Narrative Discourse Revisited reuses this measure of speed and notes that Eugénie Grandet averages ninety days per page, while Proust averages five and a half days.5 Being able to derive a number this way is useful for the traditional fiction that concerns Genette, but it does not explain the contemporary phenomenon. Robert Coover achieves the effect of upsetting speed in the three-hundred-plus-page Gerald’s Party, which covers roughly a dozen hours, or very approximately two and a half minutes’ action per page. The novel is very slow in Genette’s terms, but not in readers’ experience of the text.6

The fourth approach to speed almost passes as a given for many current texts. Critics simply postulate correlations between narrative speed and contemporary cultural speed.7 Speed notoriously characterizes our culture.8 We acknowledge the multiplicity of images streaming ceaselessly past our eyes; we converse about the velocity with which technology changes basic ways of handling everyday life. The faster one’s computer, the faster one’s Internet connection, the better. The sensation of speed is provided by many uppers in the recreational pharmacopoeia: amphetamines (nicknamed “speed”) in the 1960s, cocaine in the 1970s, crack in the 1980s, and methamphetamines in the 1990s. Speed figures as an element in TV cartoons, in film editing, in jazz, and in rap performance. Many novels have been said to embody such cultural acceleration, whether as realistic representation, as Jamesonian hysterical exhilaration, as anxiety about such headlong movement, or as a prose equivalent to wheels spinning on ice, resulting in the stasis of going nowhere fast. Most if not all of the texts I discuss here do reflect cultural speed in some fashion, but as I argue, reflecting it is not all that they do. Narrative speed has many uses, and one is to play with reader anxiety, deliberately provoking it in order to point to some greater cause for anxiety and stress.

So what, more precisely, is narrative speed? The effect I focus on is a sense of the narrative accelerating beyond some safe comprehension-limit. This phrasing equates safety and comprehension. The prose whizzes by us, and we suffer from the sense that it flashes along too rapidly for us to grasp the logic or keep track of what is happening. Reading slowly and carefully does not solve our problem: certain explanatory elements simply do not exist. While knowing the end will make a second reading feel less threatening, we are still unable to reduce most such narratives to conventional logic.

To map the ways that speed is functioning, we need both to identify the main techniques that produce the effect and to study the evident authorial goals fostered by such narrative rapidity. In the first section I discuss three techniques for producing the effect of narrative speed: multiplying elements, subtracting expected material, and rendering actions fantastic. While the techniques are separable in theory, they almost never function alone, so the exemplary texts cannot be neatly divided into three groups. After discussing technique, I consider the kind of effect encouraged by the speed: satire, mystery, protest, exaltation, revolution. Despite their pacing, the novels discussed have relatively little in common. One might link William S. Burroughs’s Ticket That Exploded, Mark Leyner’s My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, and Darius James’s Negrophobia for their drug-like rush, but the similarities are not profound. Po Bronson’s Bombardiers, Robert Coover’s John’s Wife, Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs, Ishmael Reed’s Terrible Twos and Terrible Threes, and Fran Ross’s Oreo will seem even more dissimilar. The closest they come to common ground is their targeting of some oppression or institution or system of order, social or mental.

Insofar as all these speeding texts result in attacks on some form of authority, the politics of narrative speed seems to be radical or at any rate rebellious, with the authors being the rebels. Insofar as the author is attacking us as readers, though, and deliberately inducing anxieties, we feel oppressed and are the ones trying to escape or dissipate the effect of the attack upon us. Paul Virilio shows that the various sorts of physical speed he analyzes can serve the purposes either of hegemonic powers or of revolution; revolution may be movement but can be met by police pursuit at higher speed.9 Narrative speed similarly serves both escape and control functions—but with an interesting modification. The speed effect operates best during one’s first reading but loses its ability to bother us as much on subsequent readings. The politics of using narrative speed are thus relatively ephemeral. In addition to seeing how narrative speed is generated, we need also to look at its politics and their implications.

Speed through Multiplication: The Terrible Twos, The Terrible Threes, John’s Wife, Bombardiers, Oreo

Multiplying units—be they characters, plot elements, episodes, newsbytes, or events—creates the effect of narrative rapidity, especially if little information is given about each. We see this multiplying impulse in Ishmael Reed’s novels The Terrible Twos and The Terrible Threes. Reed creates the effect of careening along by firing at us a plethora of names, topics, and temporarily focalizing characters. Sometimes each paragraph coalesces about a new character, and readers desperately wonder if this character is a one-off, or should be remembered as a key to what the plot might be. In the first few pages of The Terrible Twos, we get volcanoes, wolves in Greece, the American president wearing extravagantly expensive clothes (prices all given), Ebenezer Scrooge, three newspapers commenting on the president, Mrs. Charlotte Ford, 7.8 million unemployed people, including four who freeze to death during inaugural week. Santa Claus appears in many guises, from a Santa doll in Dolly Parton’s cleavage to a Santa robot. We get members of Truth Tabernacle Church deciding that Christmas is the work of the devil and hanging Santa in effigy, Percy Ross (the Jewish Santa Claus), Steven Jones (an assistant professor at Ohio State University, who says Santa is a sexist fertility symbol), a poll that says 75 percent of American women are sexually dissatisfied, Professor James Deetz commenting on the food actually served at the original Thanksgiving (eels), and the Thanksgiving Day parade in New York, watched by two department store magnates, Herman and George Schneider.10 These items and considerably more tumble out in the space of five pages. Sentence by sentence we get no impression of speed, but five pages’ worth will tire us out.

In an interview with John O’Brien, published in 1974, Reed says, “I’ve watched television all my life, and I think my way of editing, the speed I bring to my books, the way the plot moves, is based upon some of the television shows and cartoons I’ve seen.”11 Reed’s narrative structure works like channel surfing, which of course combines multiplication and subtraction. We get momentary fragments of scenes or even whole scenes if we’re intrigued by what we see, and as we cycle through the channels, we can add to our knowledge of what is happening on any one of them, but we lose the connected form of the various narratives. His is a many-channel system, so anxiety accrues simply through our fear that we will forget something important. We ignore TV shows of no interest, but if we are traditional readers, we are less cavalier with novelistic story lines, and continue to assume that all parts of a novel are somehow useful. Reed makes us feel that we are not in control, that we cannot organize the chaos. In the long run, he brings the many threads of story more or less together, but his plot, such as it is, offers no real-world consistency. One character in The Terrible Twos goes from being a blackmailing broadcast executive to a born-again follower of a corrupt evangelist; in The Terrible Threes, that same person turns out to be an extraterrestrial whose orders were to encourage nuclear war to fumigate Earth for extraterrestrial occupation, but who has fallen in love with humans instead of carrying out his mission. One can relax and enjoy this, but one pays the price: giving up expectations and forgoing the rewards of expectations gratified. That means that the ending can give little sense of resolution. The author had better wish to leave readers dangling, unsatisfied.

In a narrative characterized by speed, slowing down the pace naturally focuses our attention. The central scenes in The Terrible Twos use Dickens’s “Christmas Carol” as its “classical myth” and reworks Scrooge’s visions as various ghostly figures of power who lament the moments when they had a chance to improve the world but chose wrongly and spread long-lasting evil. Truman reviews his decision to drop the bomb; Ike, his to have Lumumba assassinated; Nelson Rockefeller, his to bed his girlfriend rather than answer the phone when Attica prisoners rioted. That irresponsibility produced carnage. Rockefeller, chained to demons dressed as his victims, reminisces:

I loved this glory more than I loved my children. It made me hard. . . . I felt the testes shoring up within. I felt like I could squirt it from here to across the continent. I called my friend and told her to meet me. I loved that woman. Southern girl. She used to call me her old billy goat. She’d give me golden showers and other techniques she was so good at. . . . The phone rang. I let it ring. I was having a good time. I was feeling no pain. And so when the phone kept ringing I took out the plug. The next morning they told me. They said they’d been trying to reach me all night. The fuckers had gone into the jail and killed over thirty people. The fuckers were only supposed to kill a few to show those people in the Southwest how tough I was. How I wasn’t just a stupid rich boy with café society connections, but how I could really get the job done. (128)

Such self-contained visions, detailed in part because they need to persuade us that the speaker regrets what he did, make the general speediness all the more noticeable by contrast.

Robert Coover’s novel John’s Wife uses all three techniques: multiplication, subtraction, and intruding the fantastic upon the realistic. At the outset, Coover rather ostentatiously overwhelms us with multiplication. He gives us so many characters that we struggle mightily to retain detail about any individual. John, Floyd, Gordon, Ellsworth, Otis, Kevin, Nerd, Rex, Pastor Lenny, Fish and Turtle (two teens), Alf, Trevor, Waldo, Stu, Mitch, Barnaby, Maynard, Snuffy, Dutch, Oxford and his three sons (Harvard, Yale, and Cornell), Bruce, Daddy Duwayne, and Mikey turn up in the first few pages, and those are just the men and boys. The women are equally numerous: Floyd’s wife, Edna; Gordon’s senile mother; Waldo’s wife, Lorraine; Gordon’s wife, Pauline; Trevor’s wife, Marge; Lenny’s wife, Beatrice; Maynard’s wife, Veronica; Columbia (daughter of Oxford); Cornell’s wife, Gretchen; Kate, the town librarian (and Oxford’s wife); John’s daughter Clarissa; Marie-Claire; Opal (mother of John and wife of Mitch); Stu’s wife, Daphne; Barnaby’s wife, Audrey; Jennifer; Harriet; and Nevada, to name the main ones. And of course we also have John’s wife, never...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Narrative Speed in Contemporary Fiction
• 2. Modalities of Complaint
• 3. Conjugations of the Grotesque
• 4. Violence
• 5. Attacking the Reader’s Ontological Assumptions
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography