White men write now [Elektronische Ressource] : deconstructed and reconstructed borders of identity in contemporary American literature by white men / vorgelegt von Richard Manson

Richard Manson

Informations

• Publié par: ludwig-maximilians-universitat_munchen
• Publié le: 01 janvier 2004
• Nombre de lectures: 38
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

White Men Write Now:
Deconstructed and Reconstructed Borders of Identity
in Contemporary American Literature by White Men










Inaugural Dissertation
zur Erlangung des Doktorgrades
der Philosophie an der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität
München




vorgelegt von

Richard Manson



am 11. Oktober 2004
ii








Datum der mündlichen Prüfung:

11. Januar 2005




Prüferin 1:

Prof. Dr. Ulla Haselstein



Prüfer 2:

Prof. Dr. Graham Huggan



Prüfer 3:

Prof. Dr. Martin Geyer
iii
Acknowledgements




This study may only have one author, but it took many good people to produce. First
and foremost among those good people was my advisor, Prof. Ulla Haselstein. I thank
her for her encouragement from the very beginning, her advice throughout, and her
patience to the very end. Thanks also go to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and its
Graduiertenkolleg for Postcolonial Studies for financial and collegial support. I was
lucky to be part of that Graduiertenkolleg, a unique source of interdisciplinary exchange
and friendship. In this context, I particularly thank Prof. Graham Huggan for his
leadership of the "Kolleg" and willingness to let us lead, which resulted in many
rewarding adventures within the confines of the university and without. All of the
members of that group made large and small contributions to this work. I specifically
thank Eva Bischoff for her razor-sharp insights, Markus Schleiter for the words "all will
be fine", and Nadine Milde for a great deal more.
I have also had the good fortune of an encouraging family. Thus, I would like to
thank my parents, Bruce Manson, Myrna Shiraev, Elaine Bayus, and Buzz Blackett. My
brothers, Bean and David Blackett, for all their youth, also deserve thanks for their
challenging questions. My sister Rebecca Shiraev gets specific thanks for the story about
the Argentine. Finally, the world should know my appreciation for my sister Cynthia
Shiraev who proofread my paper for the low price of dinner at the Happy Hound.
Above all, my greatest thanks and love go to my wife, Sabine. No one has given
me more these past years. iv
Contents

Introduction: The permanent reinscription of white masculinity 1
1. The ends of the white man as we know them 16
1.1. Postcolonial states of whiteness 19
1.2. Framing contested whiteness with the borders of white masculinity 30
1.3. (In-)secure borders: The new beginning(s) and end(s) of white masculinity 47
2. White men's Cold War: Underworld and the rest of the stories 59
2.1. Creating now through then 59
2.2. Wasted narratives and identities in Underworld 66
2.2.1. "The mystery of loss"/"Everything is vaguely – what – fictitious":
Nick Shay and the center 74
2.2.2. Power politics, power play, power art 83
2.2.3. "Bomb your lawn with Nitrotex": Consumerism, fear, and repression 89
3. Insider art: Borders in Mason & Dixon / The Tortilla Curtain 100
3.1. Internal separation and external wholeness 100
3.2. Mason and Dixon: white men on the line 106
3.2.1. Language games with signs of a narrative past 114
3.2.2. Uncertainty, conspiracy, or not 120
3.2.3. "It was all about something else": The outline of a nation 128
3.3. Behind The Tortilla Curtain 132
3.3.1. The home association and the unheimlich 138
3.3.2. Preserving nature 147
3.3.3. Fragile succor and kindness 154
4. Deceptive subversions: Passing, reverse-passing, and the appearance of transformation
for Wally Lamb and Jay McInerney 157
4.1. For getting people passed 157
4.1.1. The rise of passing 159
4.1.2. Passing: the word 161
4.1.3. Dances with Metonymies: reverse-passing 164
4.1.4. The reverse-pass in literature 169
4.2. Passing across the great schism: I Know This Much is True 170
4.2.1. Passing and being not-quite-white 172
4.2.2. Ralph Drinkwater the Indian 175
4.2.3. Dr. Patel, the Other Indian 181
4.3. Passing as Savage: The Last of the Savages 184
4.3.1. Patrick's keen shame of passing 186
4.3.2. Passing and the will to be Savage 193
4.3.3. The message of the genes: I fear nothing is true 202
5. Annihilation (f)or Preservation: Postmodern satirical apocalyptic visions of white male
power by Tom Wolfe and Bret Easton Ellis 206
5.1. Facing the ends of worlds 206
5.2. Ending as it began: Bonfire of the Vanities 216
5.2.1. The apocalypse and the real McCoy 217
5.2.2. Satirizing the apocalypse: the vanity of the bonfire 223
5.2.3. The non-divine burning bush: Why the vanities are not consumed by the bonfire 230
5.3. The violence of the unrevealed text in American Psycho 235
5.3.1. Signs of the apocalypse 237
5.3.2. Black humor 246
5.3.3. The ending of a sense 254
6. Conclusions: Exit the white man 257
Bibliography 269
Anhang: Lebenslauf 2801
Introduction: The permanent reinscription of white masculinity

Now he could go anywhere, associate with anybody, be anything he
wanted to be. He suddenly thought of the comely miss he had seen in the
Honky Tonk on New Year's Eve and the greatly enlarged field from
which he could select his loves. Yes, indeed, there were advantages in
being white.
1
- George Schuyler, Black No More

They reinscribe even as they erase. Contemporary literature by white men in the United
States about the identity "white man" largely focuses on two themes: destabilized
structures of identity and their reinforcement. This concern with the threat to identity
structures, especially structures of race and gender, and the narratives that define them, is
an old one in American literature. However, it takes on a new meaning in the present
postmodern climate that challenges master narratives and their reinscription by forces
which sustain them. The challenge to narratives of nation and civilization brings an
analogous challenge to categories of national Selfhood. It is a challenge to the social
structures of difference, the borders which inscribe difference, in turn complicating
concepts that attempt to transcend those borders.
White Men Write Now sets this discussion against the background of the Cold
War and cultural changes that emerged in it. This study will repeatedly return to the
thesis that the rise of postmodernism and postcolonialism in that period created a
contemporary era which critiques the Cold War as a master narrative. That means two
things: that the Cold War is the master narrative which is now critiqued, and that the
emergence of that critique has formed its own master narrative. These meanings are
concurrent, and both have valence here.
For white masculinity, this double meaning brings with it the potential
deconstruction of that identity and its conceptual borders as central to that narrative,
coupled with the subversion of that potential through the reinscription of white
masculinity as socially normative. That is not to say that non-whites and non-males in the
United States confront the same material obstacles they did fifty years ago. Jim Crow
laws were abolished decades ago, for example. However, similar to postmodern notions

1 George Schuyler, Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of
Science in the Land of the Free, A.D. 1933 – 1940 (1931, Boston: Northeastern UP: 1989). 22. 2
of repetition with a difference, the identity "white man" is reiterated as socially normative
2 3
against a background of being discussed as "beset", "abject", or deconstructed.
This introduction will provide a sketch of the historical and theoretical contexts in
which White Men Write Now is written. It explains the use of postmodern and
postcolonial theory, then briefly discusses some of the terms to be used. A point is then
made to emphasize the complications, but also the importance, of discussing the United
States in a postcolonial context and what effects that discussion has on the concepts of
white masculinity. Finally, it concludes by introducing the novels to be discussed in the
body of the book. They form a theoretical arc that begins with the circumstances for the
contestation of white masculinity in the United States and ends with forces that repress
that contestation.
Just as the postmodern critique of the grand recit would not be possible without
that master narrative, the postcolonial language of margins, peripheries, interstices, and
writing back to the center would not be possible without that imagined center of cultural
structuration. White Men Write Now takes up the task of examining aspects of whiteness
and white masculinity in that "center" and along the conceptual borders that define it.
The search is taken to the purported center