Widiss - Obscure Invitations: The Persistence of the Author in Twentieth-century American Literature

OBSCURE INVITATIONS

OBSCURE INVITATIONS

THE PERSISTENCE OF THE AUTHOR
IN TWENTIETH CENTURY
AMERICAN LITERATURE

BENJAMIN WIDISS

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

2011 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Widiss, Benjamin Leigh, author.

Obscure invitations : the persistence of the author in twentieth-century

American literature / Benjamin Widiss.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8047-7322-5 (cloth : alk. paper)ISBN 978-0-8047-7323-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. American literature20th centuryHistory and criticism. 2. Authorship in literature.

3. AuthorshipHistory20th century. 4. Authors and readersHistory20th century.

I. Title.

PS228.A88W53 2011

810.9005dc22

2011004861

E-book ISBN: 978-0-8047-8068-1

FOR LOUISA AND ABEL, AND NOW SARAH

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

One of the greatest pleasures of bringing this book to completion is the chance to thank the many who helped it and me along the way. It is no overstatement to say that without them the book would not exist. Foremost among these is Dorothy Hale, who has been central to my intellectual and professional development from my sophomore year of college to the present moment. No one has taught me more about how to write, and I suspect no one save the members of my own family (and perhaps a favorite author or two) has taught me more about how to think. Her singular blend of unfailing personal generosity and unstinting critical insight is crucial to these pages, and inspires me far beyond them. The specific genesis of this book lay in a seminar on William Faulkner led with incomparable verve and rigor by Carolyn Porter; while the book has gone on to embrace many other figures, it remains grounded in that experience and in her responses to my work. Eric Naiman not only taught me much about Vladimir Nabokov, but offered stringent and incisive critiques of many other elements of my thinking as well. The project has further benefited from discussions with Charles Altieri, Ann Banfield, John Bishop, Catherine Gallagher, Celeste Langan, and George Starr, and from tenacious early readings by Erika Clowes, Gillian Epstein, Luciana Herman, Heather Levien, Kim Magowan, Diane Matlock, Mayumi Takada, and, most especially, Joseph Jeon and Florence Dore, who have continued to give enormously of their time and sagacityand, far from least, their good humorthrough every stage of its advance.

I am powerfully indebted to many colleagues and students at Princeton who have propelled and sharpened this work through timely conversations, engaged readings, acute questions and suggestions, and general cheer. I would particularly like to thank Oliver Arnold, David Ball, Matt Bieber, Daphne Brooks, Christopher Bush, Anne Cheng, Lawrence Danson, Maria DiBattista, Jeff Dolven, Diana Fuss, Sophie Gee, William Gleason, Claudia Johnson, Ann Jurecic, Soo La Kim, Ulrich Knoepflmacher, Meredith Martin, Lee Mitchell, Deborah Nord, Jeff Nunokawa, Heather ODonnell, Sarah Rivett, Gayle Salamon, Elaine Showalter, Nigel Smith, Anne Sobel, Susan Stewart, Kerry Walk, Tim Watson, Tamsen Wolff, Susan Wolfson, and Michael Wood. And with them Christine Faltum, Pat Guglielmi, Kevin Mensch, Karen Mink, Marcia Rosh, and Nancy Shillingford, who together keep both the department and me moving forward. Mark Maslan and a second, anonymous reader for Stanford University Press offered capacious, keen, and entirely constructive responses to the manuscript; it is enriched by their input. My editor, Emily-Jane Cohen, assisted by Sarah Crane Newman and a truly stunning production teameagle-eyed, tireless, and dizzyingly fleethas shepherded the project to its final form most fluently.

And then there are those relationships that leave the institutional wholly behind. I am endlessly grateful for the support, friendship, and high spirits, all along the way, of Loretta Chen, Jonathan Davis, Stephanie Green, Brian Lee, Matthew Pincus, Ted Robertson, Jackie Starr, Alex Thompson, Abigail Trillin, Charles Tung, Paula Vielmetti, Alex Winter, and especially Jim Hinch and Ramu Nagappan, with whom I have shared classes, houses, peregrinations near and far, and the most wide-ranging of reflections. And in the final going: Christopher Chyba and Deborah Pearlstein, Debbie Finkelstein and Mike Silverberg, Tom Hagedorn and Julie Landweber, and Wey-Wey Kwok and Blue Montakhab. Louise Chegwidden and Jaclyn Boone made the work physically possible, and in the best moments joined the mighty, mighty KALX in setting me to dancing.

My parents, Alan and Ellen Widiss, first taught me to cherish authorial invitations, albeit invitations construed in somewhat less abstruse terms. Their influence colors this writing obliquely but profoundly, and their belief subtends it at a yet deeper level. My extraordinary sisters, Deborah Widiss and Rebecca Widiss, have ever provided counsel, creativity, and conviviality of the very highest order. Doug Goldstein, indefatigable comrade-in-arms, has joined their ranks, too. The last phase of this books long gestation brought first Louisa Ruffine and then Abel Widiss into my life. In ways far too numerous to recount, or even count, they have offered the most joyous of distractions from the work and the most selfless encouragement to return to it. My words can neither recognize nor thank them enough.

OBSCURE INVITATIONS

INTRODUCTION

Why obscure an invitation?

It seems, for a moment, like a contradiction in termsthe open hand half-withdrawn, the beckoning path perversely shrouded, the appeal hobbled and slowed before it is even properly advanced. This dissonance can be resolved by imagining pragmatic grounds: decorum, or established protocols, or even self-protection. Such considerations will enter, obliquely and intermittently, in the chapters that follow, but I am primarily concerned with two alternative motivationsless immediate, less urgent, one might go so far as to say more willful. The first is a spirit of play, in which obscurity serves to augment the more recondite pleasures, for both inviter and invitee, inhering in a veiled interaction. The second is a process of tutelage, each step in the discernment and pursuit of an invitation changing the seeker in small but finally significant ways. These two rationales are far from mutually exclusive, and they have in common their welcome of the delay obscurity confers, freely distending the interval in which an invitation wholly emerges, or profiting by the lengthy expanse (of time, of text) in which it might fully unfold. Both will factor, in varying combinations and degrees, in each of the works I discuss herein, each embracing the longueurs and divagations of the narrative form to stage a dialogue equally as sustained as it is surreptitious.

The texts are, in many other respects, a relatively heterogeneous grouping: two novels, two memoirs, and two feature films; dating from 1930 to 2000; ranging from high modernism to a foray into post-postmodernism, from the projection of an airy elitism to that of an earthy populism, and from the thoroughly canonized to the all-but-untouched-by-academic-critique. They are drawn together here by the particularly artful, and broadly consistent, ways in which they both manage and figure the practice of authorship in twentieth-century America. In so doing, they complicate received wisdom regarding the constitution of and distinctions between literary movements and moments, and shepherd us to a fuller understanding of the stakes and strategies of writing throughout the century. The obscure invitation that each text issues is to a self-conscious apprehension of, and perhaps by extension a form of communion with, its author. At its most basic this is no more than a simple structural homology between reader and author, at its most extreme a full-on annexation of Eucharistic ritual. The emotional valence of this convergence is highly malleable; it may constitute a threat to the reader or a reassurance, a promise or a plea, at the limit a mere observation of proximity otherwise unremarked. That is to say, the call to like an author, or to be like an author, is susceptible to considerable tonal variation; the relationship does not rise free of the text, but instead partakes of all the emotional vagaries of any accomplished artwork.