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 and 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 99778800223300111111666600__0011__pprreevviiiiii..iinndddd ii 33//2299//22001111 22::5511::3344 PPMM 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 The Emergence of the American Frontier Hero 1682–1826: Gender, Action, and Emotion By Denise Mary MacNeil Norman Mailer’s Later Fictions: Ancient Evenings through Castle in the Forest Edited by John Whalen-Bridge Fetishism and its Discontents in Post-1960 American Fiction By Christopher Kocela Language, Gender, and Community in Late Twentieth-Century Fiction: American Voices and American Identities By Mary Jane Hurst Repression and Realism in Post-War American Literature By Erin Mercer Writing Celebrity: Stein, Fitzgerald, and the Modern(ist) Art of Self- Fashioning By Timothy W. Galow 99778800223300111111666600__0011__pprreevviiiiii..iinndddd iiii 33//2299//22001111 22::5511::3355 PPMM R  R  P-W A L Erin Mercer 99778800223300111111666600__0011__pprreevviiiiii..iinndddd iiiiii 33//2299//22001111 22::5511::3355 PPMM REPRESSION AND REALISM IN POST-WAR AMERICAN LITERATURE Copyright © Erin Mercer, 2011. All rights reserved. Archival material from the Alfred Kazin Papers at the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. Copyright © 1954, 1959 the Estate of Alfred Kazin, reprinted by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC. Quotation from a letter from Norman Mailer to Alfred Kazin dated 11 May 1959. Copyright © 1959 the Estate of Norman Mailer, reprinted by permission of the Wylie Agency LLC. Archival material from the Jack Kerouac Papers at the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library reprinted by permission of SLL/Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. Copyright by John Sampas Literary Representative. First published in 2011 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: 978–0–230–11166–0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mercer, Erin, 1977– Repression and realism in post-war American literature / Erin Mercer. p. cm.—(American literature readings in the twenty-first century) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–0–230–11166–0 1. American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Repression (Psychology) in literature. 3. Realism in literature. I. Title. PS374.R48M47 2011 813(cid:1).5409353—dc22 2010041986 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: May 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America. 99778800223300111111666600__0011__pprreevviiiiii..iinndddd iivv 33//2299//22001111 22::5511::3355 PPMM C Acknowledgments vii 1 Missing in Action: Repression, Return, and the Post-War Uncanny 1 2 Automatons and the Atomic Abyss: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead 37 3 Haunting and Race: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man 61 4 The Sacred Other: Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood 89 5 Dubious Reality and the Double: Saul Bellow’s The Victim 113 6 The Familiar Made Strange: Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky 143 7 Repression and Confession: Jack Kerouac’s On the Road 167 8 The Concealment that Fails to Conceal 183 Notes 193 Bibliography 225 Index 247 99778800223300111111666600__0011__pprreevviiiiii..iinndddd vv 33//2299//22001111 22::5511::3355 PPMM 99778800223300111111666600__0011__pprreevviiiiii..iinndddd vvii 33//2299//22001111 22::5511::3355 PPMM A My most heartfelt thanks go to Charles Ferrall and Anna Jackson whose tireless efforts in reading innumerable drafts, offering sugges- tions, and editing manuscripts were only matched by the generosity of spirit in which they did so. Their expertise and intelligence have been invaluable; so too have their encouragement and humor. The best parts of this study must be attributed to their insight and sup- port, while any deficiencies are entirely my own. I would also like to thank the School of English, Film, Theatre, and Media Studies at Victoria University of Wellington and particu- larly Harry Ricketts, who took time from his busy schedule to share his expertise in the poetry of World War I, and Mark Williams, whose advice was eagerly sought and generously given. Special thanks go to Peter Whiteford whose support of me, first as a postgraduate and then as a lecturer, is highly appreciated. Much of my time researching this project was generously funded by Victoria University of Wellington, both through a PhD Scholarship and faculty funding, which enabled me to conduct research in Auckland, Sydney and New York. The New Zealand Education Postgraduate Study Abroad Award enabled me to deliver a paper at the 2008 Australian and New Zealand Association of American Studies based on my research on Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. I am extremely grateful to the J. L. and Kathleen Stewart Postgraduate Research Experience Travel Award, which allowed me to spend time at New York Public Library’s Berg Collection. I am particularly indebted to Eluned Summers-Bremner at the University of Auckland who generously allowed a perfect stranger to attend one of her graduate workshops on post-World War II British fiction. Thanks also to Richard Nicholson at the University of Auckland who organized the opportunity for me to deliver a semi- nar to the Faculty of Arts based on my research into the effects of McCarthyism on American fiction and film. I am particularly grate- ful to Anne Garner at the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection whose suggestions regarding which papers to look at during my 99778800223300111111666600__0011__pprreevviiiiii..iinndddd vviiii 33//2299//22001111 22::5511::3355 PPMM viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS period of research at the collection proved very fruitful. I would also like to thank the Estates of Alfred Kazin, Norman Mailer, and Jack Kerouac for allowing me to reprint archival material held in the Berg Collection. Lastly, thanks always to my mother Pamela Mercer whose unwav- ering support is the foundation of everything I do, and to Zhenya, whose name is always last on the list and first in my heart. Your love and light make forays into darkness possible, so this is for you. 99778800223300111111666600__0011__pprreevviiiiii..iinndddd vviiiiii 33//2299//22001111 22::5511::3366 PPMM C H A P T E R 1 Missing in Action: Repression, Return, and the Post-War Uncanny Repression: c. Psychol. The action, process, or result of suppressing into the unconscious or keeping out of the conscious mind unaccept- able memories or desires. Even the most cursory glance over literature produced in America during the first decade following the end of World War II raises an unexpected and perplexing problem: none of the novels engage with the recent trauma of the most defining events of the twentieth cen- tury—the mass death due to the war, the Holocaust, and the atomic bombing of Japan. We might expect an era negotiating the unprec- edented violence of a war with a casualty toll estimated at 50 mil- lion people to produce literature dealing with the new and terrifying aspects of mid-twentieth-century life. Certainly, the example of the literary tradition following the First World War would encourage us to look for something similar following the second conflict.1 Yet what we find is exactly the opposite. The first American novels ostensibly about the Second World War, such as James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor (1948) and Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny (1951), studiously avoided both the Holocaust and the atomic bomb, even managing in many cases to completely avoid depictions of combat. While popular novels such as The Hucksters (1946) and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955) purport to deal with the new difficulties facing the post-war American, the anxieties dealt with are provoked by conformity and corporatization rather than by the recent trauma of mass death and large-scale destruction. One critic disappointedly observed that “since 1945, when all signs pointed to a literary revival comparable to that after World War I, our literature has actually been in a state of decline.”2 In fact, if the only evidence was the fiction 99778800223300111111666600__0022__cchh0011..iinndddd 11 33//2244//22001111 66::1133::1111 PPMM