Abstract
Why is sex sadomasochistic in postmodern novels? The quotations below come, in order, from the first four postmodernist novels to become bestsellers in the United States—Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy (1966), Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), and E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975).1
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Notes
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (New York: Vintage International, 1989), p. 111
John Barth, Giles Goat-Boy, Or, The Revised New Syllabus (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1987), p. 139
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (London: Vintage, 2000), pp. 466–7
E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime (New York: Random House, 2007). Kindle, loc.82. Further references to these four texts will refer to these editions, except where indicated, and will be parenthetical in the text, abbreviated as PF, GGB, GR, and R, respectively.
Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, trans. Jean McNeil, in Deleuze and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, and Venus in Furs (New York: Zone Books, 1989), p. 17. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
Jason Gladstone and Daniel Worden, “Introduction: Postmodernism, Then,” a special issue of Twentieth-Century Literature 57.3–4 (2011): 292.
Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 9.
See Bruce Jay Friedman, Black Humor (New York: Bantam, 1965).
John Sutherland, Fiction and the Fiction Industry (London: Athlone Press, 1978), pp. 65, 69.
Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986)
Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004)
McHale, “1966 Nervous Breakdown, or, When Did Postmodernism Begin?” Modern Language Quarterly 69.3 (2008): 391–413.
See Catherine Turner, Marketing Modernism: Between the Two World Wars (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), p. 182.
See Amy Reading, “Vulgarity’s Ironist: New Criticism, Midcult, and Nabokov’s Pale Fire,” Arizona Quarterly 62.2 (2006): 77–98.
See, for example, Charles B. Harris, “George’s Illumination: Unity in Giles Goat-Boy,” Studies in the Novel 8 (1976): 172–84
Deborah Jones, “The Paradox of the Transcendental Trope: Intertextuality, or, The Allegory of Giles Goat-Boy,” Southern Review 20.3 (1987): 240–60
James L. McDonald, “Barth’s Syllabus: The Frame of Giles Goat-Boy,” Critique 13.3 (1972): 5–10
Campbell Tatham, “John Barth and the Aesthetics of Artifice,” Contemporary Literature 12.1 (1971): 60–73
Laura Barrett, “Compositions of Reality: Photography, History, and Ragtime,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 46.4 (2000): 801–24
Jill LeRoy Frazier, “‘Playing a Game of Worlds’: Postmodern Time and the Search for Individual Autonomy in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire,” Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature 217.2 (2003): 311–27
Michael Seidel, “Pale Fire and the Art of the Narrative Supplement,” ELH 51.4 (1984): 837–55
Christopher Ames, “Power and the Obscene Word: Discourses of Extremity in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow,” Contemporary Literature 31.2 (1990): 191–207
Judith Chambers, “The Freak in Ourselves: The Grotesque in Pynchon’s V. and Gravity’s Rainbow,” JAISA: The Journal ofthe Association for the Interdisciplinary Study ofthe Arts 1.2 (1996): 55–78
Giuseppe Costigliola, “Rubbish, Rubble, Ruins: The Allegorical in Gravity’s Rainbow,” in Gigliola Notera (ed.), America Today: Highways and Labyrinths: Proceedings of the XV Biennial Conference, Siracusa, November 4–7, 1999 (Rome: Grafia, 2003), pp. 559–65
Luc Herman, “Pynchon, Postmodernism and Quantification: An Empirical Content Analysis of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow,” LL: Language and Literature 12.1 (2003): 27–41
John Johnston, “Pynchon’s ‘Zone’: A Postmodern Multiplicity,” Arizona Quarterly 46.3 (1990): 91–122
Eric Meyer, “Oppositional Discourses, Unnatural Practices: Gravity’s History and ‘The’60s,’” Pynchon Notes 24–5 (1989): 81–104.
Barth, “The Literature of Replenishment,” in The Friday Book: Essays and Other Non-Fiction (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), p. 204.
Douglas Robinson, “Reader’s Power, Writer’s Power: Barth, Bergonzi, Iser, and the Modern-Postmodern Period Debate,” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 28.1 (1986): 307–8.
For similar arguments, see Richard Bradbury, “Postmodernism and Barth and the Present State of Fiction,” Critical Quarterly 32.1 (1990): 60–72
Thomas G. Evans, “The Collision of Modernist and Popular Traditions in Two Political Novels, The Grapes of Wrath and Ragtime,” South Atlantic Review 52.1 (1987): 71–85.
Elaine B. Safer, “The Allusive Mode and Black Humor in Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow,” Renascence 32 (1980): 109, 83.
Also see Safer, The Contemporary American Comic Epic: The Novels of Barth, Pynchon, Gaddis, and Kesey (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1988).
Allen Drury, A Senate Journal: 1943–1945 (New York: Da Capo, 1972), p. 4.
Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1955), p. 5.
See Peter Mercer, “The Rhetoric of Giles Goat-Boy,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 4.2 (1971): 156.
Sigmund Freud, “Humour,” in Art and Literature: Jensen’s “Gradiva,” Leonardo da Vinci and Other Works, vol. 14 of The Penguin Freud Library (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 429.
Kathleen E. Woodiwiss, The Flame and the Flower (New York: Avon, 2007), p. 30.
See Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 464.
See Leland de la Durantaye, Style Is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), p. 178
Thomas Karshan, Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play (NY: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 235.
Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (New York: Rinehart, 1948), p. 456.
Mario Vargas Llosa, “The Fictions of Borges,” in Wellsprings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 36.
John Stark, ““Borges” “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” and Nabokov’s Pale Fire: Literature of Exhaustion,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 14 (1972): 139–45
Phyllis Miras, “John Barth: A Truffle No Longer,” New York Times, Aug. 7, 1966, p. BR22
Tony Tanner, City of Words: American Fiction 1950–1970 (NY: Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 48–9; GR, pp. 264, 383.
Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (London: John Lane, 1920), p. 13.
For Boyd, the fact that there is a definite answer to the puzzle of Pale Fire disqualifies it from being a postmodernist text. See Boyd, Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 5.
Doctorow, “False Documents,” in Richard Trenner (ed.), E.L. Doctorow: Essays and Conversations (Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review Press, 1983), pp. 24, 18.
See, for example, Fremont-Smith, “Making Book,” p. 41; and Mark Busby, “E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime and the Dialectics of Change,” Ball State University Forum 23.6 (1985): 44.
Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs, trans. Fernanda Savage (Salt Lake City, UT: Project Gutenberg, 2004), Kindle, loc.722.
Campbell Tatham, “John Barth and the Aesthetics of Artifice,” Contemporary Literature 12.1 (1971): 69
John R. Panza, “Coetzee’s NABOKOV’S PALE FIRE AND THE PRIMACY OF ART,” Explicator 57.4 (1999): 245
Marianna Torgovnick, “Pale Fire as a Fable for Critics,” Style 20.1 (1986): 25
David H. Richter, “Pnin and ‘Signs and Symbols’: Narrative Entrapment,” in Yuri Leving (ed.), Anatomy of a Short Story: Nabokov’s Puzzles, Codes, “Signs and Symbols” (New York: Continuum, 2012), p. 224
Alexander Dolnin, “Caning of Modernist Profaners: Parody in Despair,” Cycnos 12.2 (1995): 54
Lance Olsen, “Making Stew with What You Got: Postmodern Humor in Barth, Nabokov, and Everybody Else,” Thalia: Studies in Literary Humor 10.1 (1988): 27
Maureen Howard, “Recent Novels: A Backward Glance,” Yale Review 65 (1975–76), p. 407
Eric Naiman, Nabokov, Perversely (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), p. 10
James F. English, “Modernist Joke-Work: ‘Pale Fire’ and the Mock Transcendence of Mockery,” Contemporary Literature 33.1 (Spring 1992): 78
Donald Malcolm, “Books: Noetic License,” rev. of Nabokov, Pale Fire, The New Yorker, Sep. 22, 1962, p. 170
Wladimir Troubetzkoy, “Vladimir Nabokov’s Despair: The Reader as ‘April’s Fool,’” Cycnos 12.2 (1995): 55–62
Constance Pierce, “The Syncopated Voices of Doctorow’s Ragtime,” NMAL: Notes on Modern American Literature 3.4 (1979): 27.
GR, p. 96. For critics who agree with this reading, see Will McConnell, “Pynchon, Foucault, Power, and Strategies of Resistance,” Pynchon Notes 32–3 (1993): 162
Speer Morgan, “Gravity’s Rainbow: What’s the Big Idea?” Modern Fiction Studies 23 (1999): 209
Jessica Lawson, “‘The Real and Only Fucking Is Done on Paper’: Penetrative Readings and Pynchon’s Sexual Text,” in Sascha Pohlmann (ed.), Against the Grain: Reading Pynchon’s Counternarratives (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), pp. 231–49
Alexia Kinsley, “Making Sense of the Obscene and Scatalogical in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow,” Philological Review 30.1 (2004): 39–57
Nadine Attewell, “‘Bouncy Little Tunes’: Nostalgia, Sentimentality, and Narrative in Gravity’sRainbow,” Contemporary Literature 45.1 (2004): 22–48
Joshua Pederson, “The Gospel of Thomas (Pynchon): Abandoning Eschatology in Gravity’s Rainbow,” Religion and the Arts 14 (2010): 139–60.
Luc Herman, “Pynchon, Postmodernism and Quantification,” 30; see, for example, Thomas Moore, The Style of Connectedness: Gravity’s Rainbow and Thomas Pynchon (University of Missouri Press, 1987)
Molly Hite, Ideas of Order in the Works of Thomas Pynchon (Ohio State University Press, 1983).
Grace Metalious, Peyton Place (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1999), p. 150.
Lionel Trilling, “The Last Lover: Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita,” Encounter, Oct. 1958, p. 11.
For critics who follow Trilling’s reading, see, for example, De La Durantaye, Style Is Matter; Carter Kaplan, Critical Synoptics: Menippean Satire and the Analysis of Intellectual Mythology (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2000)
Alfred Appel Jr., “Lolita: The Springboard of Parody,” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 8.2 (1967): 204–41.
Maurice Couturier, “Nabokov in Postmodernist Land,” Critique 34.4 (1993): 258, 254.
Malcolm, “Noetic,” p. 170. Other readings of Shade as unironic include David Galef, “The Self-Annihilating Artists of Pale Fire,” Twentieth-Century Literature 31.4 (Winter 1985): 421–37. Barrett, “Reader’s Choice,” rev. of Pale Fire, by Nabokov, Atlantic Monthly, June 1962, p. 108; and of course Boyd, Pale Fire.
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Perrin, T. (2015). Book Smarts: Masochism and Popular Postmodernism. In: The Aesthetics of Middlebrow Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137523952_6
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