subject: Unfettered Aesthetic Freedom as the Alternative to Modernist Impersonality [print this page] As McGurl shows in his next chapter, it would be simplistic to characterize unfettered aesthetic freedom as the alternative to modernist impersonality, and hence to cool craftedness. After all, by the end of his previous chapter, McGurl has demonstrated the substantial affinities between Stegner and Kesey, seeing them both as theorists of what small group identity could and should look like. Beginning with Portnoy's final howl at the end of Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, and continuing through arresting readings of, among others, N. Scott Momaday and Charles Johnson, McGurl points out in the next chapter that the commitment to finding your voice looks somewhat different for minority writers; here experiments in Wholesale Jewelry voice constitute less a radical transcendence of experience and biography, and more an interrogation of that biography from the perspective of what has been systematically repressed. Voice as authentic self-expression may, for instance, be radically divorced from biography if that biography everywhere attests to the suppression of voice, a voice that its author would have to claim rather than merely find. And the seemingly easy distinction to be made between Portnoy's howl and impersonal craft looks different indeed when we understand the extent to which voice might be achieved only through mediating techniques. Roth and O'Connor might not be so far apart after all, and, for an author like Momaday, writing a distinctly Native American novel was "necessarily as much a matter of hard study as of passive inheritance".
Describing the late Sixties and early Seventies as a "profoundly (let us dust off the term) phonocentric literary historical moment, when the New Critical idea of narrative impersonality was rotated into a minor position in relation to a dominant ideal of vocal presence, but persisted in the assumption that this presence should not speak directly to the reader but should be staged", McGurl is able also to offer an original account of the reception of French theory in Jewelry On Sale the United States, a counter to Derrida's one-sided critique of phonocentrism that registers just how important the written word had become, and how voice and speech were far from dominant.
Chapter 5 offers suggestive readings of Raymond Carver and Joyce Carol Gates: on the surface an unlikely pairing, here they come together as critics of class and the system of higher education. Their work consistently returns to a "dialectic of shame and pride, self-hatred and self-esteem" that, as McGurl demonstrates, is at the heart of the system of American higher education. The lack of emotion as subject in the minimalist short story is for McGurl a form of self-protection: "If the modern world is a world of risk, a 'Risk Society,' then minimalism is an aesthetic of risk management, a way of being beautifully careful" and is best understood as "the Utopian return of unalienated labor" through craft, in a world that made white-collar labor potentially just as alienated as any other form of work.
But if minimalism is a defense against showing too much feeling in a world that really doesn't care, how are we to read an author as (over)productive as Gates, whose sheer output seems to leave no place to hide If "the various deprivations of Carver's represented worlds are set in counterpoint to the aesthetic zed inarticulacy of his highly crafted, paired-down [sic] sentences," here "Oates's narration, by contrast, drags the hidden injuries of class into the bright light of an agonized articulacy". Both these authors, then, understand the contrast between class identity and class positional, and are read as emblematic of how the radical increase in access to higher education made this a systematic problem in postwar America.
What could be a more typical aesthetic goal than disaffiliation In chapter 6, McGurl refracts the question of institutional homes for writers through their imagined links to two other institutions the family and the nation and through the ways in which literary authority is culturally granted to those texts that transcend the nation-state by, ironically, accounting for themselves via subnational forms of hyphenated identity. Here Sandra Cisneros is an exemplary figure; it was only at the Iowa program that Cisneros, alienated from her upbringing, found it suddenly possible to write about it. In a stunning reading of Toni Morrison's Beloved, McGurl foregrounds that the villain in that novel as "flat" a character as we are likely to find is named "schoolteacher," a fact all too often ignored in discussions of the novel. Here the ambivalent attitude to education a scene of potential liberation, it nonetheless threatens a symbolic reenslavement through the blind spots of representation, as in the Dick and Jane primer at the beginning of Morrison's The Bluest Eye explains in part Morrison's "implosive" narratives, which endlessly question the value of education.
Unfettered Aesthetic Freedom as the Alternative to Modernist Impersonality
