AMERICAN LITERATURE READINGS IN THE 21ST CENTURY Series Editor: Linda Wagner-Martin American Literature Readings in the 21st Century publishes works by contemporary critics that help shape critical opinion regarding literature of the nineteenth and twentieth century in the United States. Published by Palgrave Macmillan: Freak Shows in Modern American Imagination: Constructing the Damaged Body from Willa Cather to Truman Capote By Thomas Fahy Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics By Steven Salaita Women & Race in Contemporary U.S. Writing: From Faulkner to Morrison By Kelly Lynch Reames American Political Poetry in the 21st Century By Michael Dowdy Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James: Thinking and Writing Electricity By Sam Halliday F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Racial Angles and the Business of Literary Greatness By Michael Nowlin Sex, Race, and Family in Contemporary American Short Stories By Melissa Bostrom Democracy in Contemporary U.S. Women’s Poetry By Nicky Marsh James Merrill and W.H. Auden: Homosexuality and Poetic Influence By Piotr K. Gwiazda Contemporary U.S. Latino/a Literary Criticism Edited by Lyn Di Iorio Sandín and Richard Perez The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo By Stephanie S. Halldorson Race and Identity in Hemingway’s Fiction By Amy L. Strong Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism By Jennifer Haytock The Anti-Hero in the American Novel: From Joseph Heller to Kurt Vonnegut By David Simmons Indians, Environment, and Identity on the Borders of American Literature: From Faulkner and Morrison to Walker and Silko By Lindsey Claire Smith The American Landscape in the Poetry of Frost, Bishop, and Ashbery: The House Abandoned By Marit J. MacArthur Narrating Class in American Fiction By William Dow The Culture of Soft Work: Labor, Gender, and Race in Postmodern American Narrative By Heather J. Hicks Cormac McCarthy: American Canticles By Kenneth Lincoln Elizabeth Spencer’s Complicated Cartographies: Reimagining Home, the South, and Southern Literary Production By Catherine Seltzer New Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut Edited by David Simmons Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton: From Silence to Speech By Dianne L. Chambers Emergence of the American Frontier Hero 1682–1826 By Denise Mary MacNeil Fetishism and Its Discontents in Post-1960 American Fiction By Christopher Kocela Fetishism and Its Discontents in Post-1960 American Fiction Christopher Kocela FETISHISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS IN POST-1960 AMERICAN FICTION Copyright © Christopher Kocela, 2010. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2010 978-0-230-10290-3 All rights reserved. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-28743-7 ISBN 978-0-230-10998-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230109988 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kocela, Christopher, 1971– Fetishism and its discontents in post-1960 American fiction / Christopher Kocela. p. cm.—(American literature readings in the 21st century) 1. American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. American literature—21st century—History and criticism. 3. Fetishism in literature. 4. Psychoanalysis and literature—United States. I. Title. PS228.F48K63 2010 813(cid:2).54093538—dc22 2010001963 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: August 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Amanda, Julian, and Gabriel Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Fetishism and Its Discontents 1 Part I Fetishism from Theory to Fiction 1 A Parallax History of Fetish Theory 31 2 Signifying on Fetishism in Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo 61 Part II Fictions of the Female Fetish 3 Queering Lesbian Fetishism in Pynchon’s V. 91 4 Resighting Gender Theory: Butler’s Lesbian Phallus in Acker’s Pussy 123 Part III Pomo-Pornologies 5 Domesticating Fantasy: S/M Fetishism, Suburban Fiction, and Coover’s Spanking the Maid 155 6 Narrating the Death Drive: Automotive SinthoMosexuality and Hawkes’s Travesty 187 Conclusion 215 Notes 221 Bibliography 245 Index 259 Acknowledgments This book has lived two separate lives, one in Canada and one in the United States, and I would like to thank those who have helped it throughout its long development. The book began as a disserta- tion at McGill University and was subsequently expanded as part of a postdoctoral research project at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. I want first to express my appreciation to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for doctoral and post- doctoral fellowships that supported me during this initial stage of the project. Thank you to Berkeley Kaite for supervising my disserta- tion, and thanks to the members of my dissertation committee, Peter Gibian and Peter Ohlin, for support along the way. Thank you as well to Asha Varadharajan and Paul Stevens for mentoring me during my stay as a postdoctoral fellow at Queen’s. In this phase of writing I benefited greatly from feedback that I received through the review processes at the journals Genders and Pynchon Notes, and I thank the anonymous readers for those journals as well as their editors, Ann Kibbey and John M. Krafft, for taking an early interest in my work. A portion of what is now chapter 4 was first published in Genders 34 (2001) under the title “A Myth Beyond the Phallus: Female Fetishism in Kathy Acker’s Late Novels” and is presented here in revised form with permission (www.genders.org). Chapter 3 was first published as “Re-Stenciling Lesbian Fetishism in Pynchon’s V.” in Pynchon Notes 46–49 (2001) and appears here in significantly revised and expanded form with permission. On moving to Atlanta and Georgia State University my develop- ing book underwent a major conceptual and theoretical overhaul into its present form, for which I have several people to thank. The Department of English “WIP” (Work in Progress) workshop provided an early venue for feedback and revision, and I thank my colleagues in that group—Randy Malamud, Renée Schatteman, Pearl McHaney, Marilynn Richtarik, and LeeAnne Richardson—for their careful reading and thoughtful commentary. Thanks especially to Randy Malamud, who later reread the opening chapters of the manuscript x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS and offered invaluable practical and organizational advice. The work that I produced through “WIP” was first published as “Resighting Gender Theory: Butler’s Lesbian Phallus in Acker’s Pussy” in LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 17, no. 1 (2006). With permission of the Taylor and Francis Group, that essay now appears here in revised form as chapter 4. I also want to express my appreciation to the infor- mal “Lacan reading group” which met at Emory University from 2004 to 2006 and which influenced a number of conceptual changes in my manuscript. Thanks in particular to Cal Thomas for intro- ducing me into the group, and to Adrian Johnston for generously answering my subsequent queries concerning his own reading of the drive in Freud and Lacan. Thank you to Georgia State University and the Department of English for a Research Initiation Grant and a Summer Research Award that provided time for reading and writ- ing. In addition, the department has provided me with two graduate research assistants in recent years, Florian Schwieger and Julie Hawk, both of whom worked harder than I asked them to, for which I am very grateful. Numerous portions of this book have been presented at academic conferences in the United States, Canada, and England, and I thank the many listeners and fellow panelists who have provided helpful feedback. I would like to say thanks, too, to the editorial staff at Palgrave. My editor, Brigitte Shull, was enthusiastic about my work at a time when I needed it, and Lee Norton has responded to my wor- ried e-mails and phone calls with calm and reassurance. The only person who has lived both lives of this book with me is my wife, Amanda, who has supported, believed, and been patient far beyond my right to ask. To her I dedicate this book and with it, my most heartfelt thanks and love. Introduction: Fetishism and Its Discontents Late in Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud poses a question that signals an important turn in his argument about the development of culture. Having advanced the idea that civilization is the result of a mythic struggle between Eros and Death, Freud asks: “What means does civilization employ in order to inhibit the aggressiveness which opposes it, to make it harmless, to get rid of it, perhaps?” (70). The aggressiveness to which Freud refers is that “natural aggressive instinct, the hostility of each against all and all against each” which he defines as the main representative of the death drive (69). His answer, elaborated over the remainder of his book, is that civilization inhibits the aggressive instinct that opposes it at the level of the indi- vidual, through a process of internalization. Part VII of Civilization and Its Discontents describes the role played by guilt, sublimation, and the superego in the development of civilized societies. In the course of this argument, Freud offers an intriguing example of the difference between primitive and civilized man where hostility and guilt are concerned: The people of Israel had believed themselves to be the favourite child of God, and when the great Father caused misfortune after misfor- tune to rain down upon this people of his, they were never shaken in their belief in his relationship to them or questioned his power or righteousness. Instead, they produced the prophets, who held up their sinfulness before them; and out of their sense of guilt they created the over-strict commandments of their priestly religion. It is remarkable how differently a primitive man behaves. If he has met with a misfor- tune, he does not throw the blame on himself but on his fetish, which has obviously not done its duty, and he gives it a thrashing instead of punishing himself. (74) Freud does not elaborate on how the primitive beating of fetishes might be regarded as a counterpoint to the creation of law, nor