Suburban Estrangement
Session Coordinator: Keith Wilhite
Department of English, The University of Iowa
308 English-Philosophy Bldg.
Iowa City, IA, 52242
keith-wilhite@uiowa.edu
Session A: “The Cultural Logic of Suburban Landscapes”
Pynchon as Naturalist? Dreiser as Postmodernist?: The Rapacious Nonurbation in The Crying of Lot 49 and Sister Carrie
Pynchon’s novel is set in a California that is “less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts” (24). Neither suburbs, exurbs, nor conurbation, San Narciso emerges as a nonurbation, a cynically created no-place ordering a serialized and surreal existence clustered around an aerospace industry installation. Oedipa’s paranoiac search for meaning among the endlessly reduplicating artifacts of an invented community succinctly portrays mid-sixties suburban angst. But Pynchon’s postmodern picaresque parallels a keystone text of naturalism. Dreiser’s first novel portrays a similar Chicago: a rapidly-expanding creation of commercial transportation interests. Because the railroads had seen the value of Chicago, “the city had laid out miles and miles of streets…through regions where…one solitary house stood…. Board walks extended out, passing here a house and there a store…eventually ending on the open prairie” (12). Tracing similarities between both Dreiser’s Chicago and Pynchon’s San Narciso and Oedipa’s search for the Trystero and Carrie’s search for work will show that suburban estrangement is symptomatic of the radical conceptual displacement created when the needs of capital and its transportation networks bring cities and suburbs into existence.
Mark T. Decker
The University of Wisconsin – Stout
DeckerM@uwstout.edu
Suburban Intensities; or, A Kind of Radiance in Dailiness
My paper takes up the need to find alternative models for responding to American suburbia by examining the linkages between global economics and suburbia in American culture. Taking as my points of departure Jameson's work on postmodern culture and Deleuze's concept of control society, I aim to map a cultural logic of suburbia that reads the growth of suburbia and the consumerism that fueled that growth not primarily as a story of decline, alienation, and repressive conformity, but rather as a story of the ever-expanding circuits of consumer capitalism, the intensification of media practices, and the affective forces of postmodern power. Through readings of Don DeLillo's White Noise, Andrew Jarecki's Capturing the Friedmans, and Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides, I explore, to use DeLillo's phrase, the "kinds of radiance in dailiness" that permeate American suburbia and argue that attending to the affective intensities of suburban culturescapes not only allows us to consider how global flows of capital radiate throughout our daily lives and produce certain brands of anxious, nostalgic consumer subjectivities, but also suggests that the very discourses of suburban dysfunction are part of the logic of global capitalism as it plays out in American culture.
Charles J. Ebersole
Pennsylvania State University
cje128@psu.edu
“The Bomb is Only a Metaphor Now": Linguistic Alienation and Metaphors of Suburban Space in Barbara Gowdy’s Falling Angels
In Barbara Gowdy’s novel, Falling Angels, the adolescent protagonists are promised a vacation to Disneyland. Several months later, the sisters spend their vacation instead in the bomb shelter their father has constructed in the backyard of their postwar suburban home. For two weeks the family are “Pioneers of Self-Defence” whose daily routine is an ironic parody of the routine of everyday life in suburbia. The chapter’s title, “ Disneyland,” seems to be an empty signifier: like “the bomb” that precipitated the building of shelters during the Cold War, Disneyland fails to materialize as a meaningful signifier. Instead, it and the labyrinthine streets of Toronto’s suburbs function as tropes for the lack that readers and the characters experience whenever we try to find some “real” space in Gowdy’s suburbia. While the quest to find meaningful, habitable spaces seems to lead only to the discovery that the signifiers of suburbia have no signifieds, the irony of living there is that it is the epitome of irony: like the labyrinth, it is both contained and sprawling, real and unreal. This ambiguity offers the possibility of escaping the linguistically and spatially alienating experience of growing up as a female suburban subject in the postwar era.
Cheryl Cowdy Crawford
York University, Canada
ccrawfor@yorku.ca
Real-Estate Terrorism in Jonathan Franzen’s The Twenty-Seventh City
In The Twenty-Seventh City, Jonathan Franzen depicts St. Louis as a metropolitan region under attack: bombs explode in a downtown parking lot and at the football stadium; suburban homes are strafed with gun-fire and burned to the ground; a suburban housewife is beaten and kidnapped at gun-point. Orchestrated by the newly instated Police Chief, S. Jammu, this violence occurs as part of a clandestine real-estate conspiracy in the city. Talking to a co-conspirator, Jammu notes: “Real-estate speculation is a formalism . . . Once it gets going . . . it works by itself and drags politics and economics along after it. Terror works the same way” (76-77). This paper interrogates the symmetry of real-estate speculation and terrorism in the novel, specifically as it relates to the divisive relationship between St. Louis’s suburbs and the city. Though Franzen uses violence and fantastic conspiracies to guarantee, in effect, the fictional nature of the narrative, the novel underscores the very real correspondence between geography and violence ingrained in the logic of suburban sprawl. The transgressions depicted in the novel originate from a specifically “suburban” understanding of geography—from a suburban imagination that requires the presence of a criminalized urban center.
Keith Wilhite
The University of Iowa
keith-wilhite@uiowa.edu
Session B: “The Everyman, the Archetypal Self, and Anti-Poetics in Suburbia”
Suburban Evangels
The suburban boom of the 1920s occurred in the midst of vehement anti-city and anti-country criticism. During this time the suburbs also become the setting for two of the most representative novels of the age: Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. While studies like John R. McMahon’s Success in the Suburbs (1917) and Harlan Paul Douglass’s The Suburban Trend (1925) predicted a glorious synthesis that would answer both rural and urban problems, the literary account of suburban life in the twenties depicts the suburbs as the site of the confluence of all negative aspects of American culture.
Babbitt’s Floral Heights and Gatsby’s West Egg are significantly different “suburbs.” Similarly, Babbitt and Gatsby are significantly different “suburbanites.” Babbitt has come to be regarded as a typical suburbanite (steeped in bland, conservative middle-class values), while Jay Gatsby is rarely viewed as a suburban type at all. I will argue, however, that both novels present images of the culture at large that announce and denounce more than two decades before the post WWII boom the suburb and the suburbanite as all-encompassing symbols of twentieth-century culture in the United States and draw the target for postwar cultural criticism.
E. Christopher Hudson
St. Mary of the Woods College
chudson@smwc.edu
Suburban-Self-Alienation: Louis Bromfield’s Mr. Smith (1951)
In what was to be his final novel, Mr. Smith, Louis Bromfield (1896-1956), the often-overlooked Ohio author, portrays a pathological view of literary suburbia: “I am not writing of Babbitts. […] Babbitt in his way was crude but healthy. The sickness of which I write and which spreads and grows constantly is quite different” (MS 199). Situated in Mr. Smith’s Midwestern suburb of Oakdale — “the torrent of mediocrity and uniformity, a torrent of ranch-type and bungalow houses” — the narrative is juxtaposed with his wartime South Pacific jungle experiences (MS 219). The main protagonist, “detached” and distanced from suburban “civilization”, is the American Everyman, the average “‘Mr. Smith,’ a typical citizen, almost a kind of impersonal symbol” inverting the Puritan typological errand into the wilderness (MS 215). The text, formulated to both mirror and shatter all that is ordinary and everyday, represents self-alienation and flight from the familiar, from “commonplace” normalcy, and from the threat of average. Exploring all of these issues in detail, overall this paper examines Bromfield’s 1951 depiction of 1940s suburbia as a paradoxical space: inscribing a version of America that is both destructive illusion and constructive mythology.
Jayne Wood
University of Leeds , England
engjew@leeds.ac.uk
White Whale, Noise, Plight, Flight: Melville Teaches Suburban Fictionalized Dads How to Stress Out
As fiction writers have sought to portray the modern male experience—the angst of pruning the perfect hedge, the torment of losing in work or love to the good-looking neighbor—some of the best depictions have been modeled on the American archetype found in Melville’s Moby-Dick. As Ishmael struggled aboard the Pequod, these modern-day versions of Melville’s protagonist grapple with issues of Nation, God, Nature, and Self—not in the midst of some great ocean adventure but in their boardrooms and backyards. When these men (and sometimes women) stray from suburbia—into the turbulent oceans of the city or countryside—they find themselves fighting for their lives against whales of a different sort: technological phobias, omni-present government authority, and other markers of their own liminal displacement.
This paper explores the suburban worlds created, via Melville, in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, Paul Auster’s Leviathan, and other works. The findings point not only to Melville’s enduring legacy, but to the continuing influence of the American archetypal Self on our understanding of modern life.
Chris Evans
New York University
chris.evans@nyu.edu
Anti-Poetics in Suburbia
Suburban poetry is often anti-poetic in that it conveys the impossibility of writing in traditional modes, for example the elegiac and the pastoral. But, as the suburban anti-poem attempts to impose conventional forms and tropes onto suburban subject matter, it extracts from this impossibility a provocative tension. A disconnect between the past, allied with the anti-suburban poet and poetic conventions, and the present, earmarked by commodified suburban culture and landscapes irreconcilable with poetic history, engenders the definitive characteristic of the suburbanite persona: psychic estrangement. Richard Wilbur and John Ashbery demonstrate such estrangement, portraying their suburbanite personas as victimized by the inefficacy of their milieus for poetic inspiration and content. Such victimization might be viewed as diminishing the exclusionary, therefore victimizing, culture of the suburbs; however, it is important to view the suburban poem as a composite of cultural and aesthetic components, both of which in some way oppress the suburbanite. The first type of oppression remains ethically suspect, but the second might require the poet to take a radical stance towards poetic conventions, and it is difficult when considering aesthetic ingenuity to condemn the suburban poem altogether as an artifact of bourgeois discourse.
Pete Monacell
University of Missouri-Columbia
plm3kf@mizzou.edu