Staying out of step: Compulsiveness and detachment in contemporary fiction.

摘要

My dissertation addresses the recent rise in psychiatric drug use, the growing dominance of medicalized explanations of personality and mental illness, and many contemporary fictional representations of mental and physical illnesses. I examine these evolving views of embodied selfhood through the lens of recent novels that contextualize mental illness in the social and economic effects of globalization: Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn, Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. My dissertation isolates in these works two broad categories of disorder, compulsiveness and detachment, which designate illnesses such as obsessive compulsive disorder, Tourette syndrome, and dementia. I argue that these novels use compulsiveness and detachment to develop a notion of subjectivity that I call exterior: an identity founded on the material world of both objects and biological bodies, accompanied by a divestment from one's inner life, the stable presence of which has been a lynchpin in the liberal human subject and its persistent legacies. By investing in an expansive realm of materiality that includes objects, human relationships and biologically and medically defined bodies, exteriority depends on a complex objectification of one's self and life: characters identify with objects, both consumption-capital-generated and not, and are defined by illnesses objectified by medical approaches. Further, compulsive and detached exteriority diminishes the relevance of inside and outside worlds as epistemological categories of human experience and replaces them with an expanded conception of the importance of materiality, flexibly and broadly defined. Exteriority lays crucial theoretical groundwork between socially and biologically determined identity, and it positions these novels as challenging the purported nihilism of postmodernity by describing positively defined selfhoods. Exterior subjects' investments in their materialities include investing in their bodies' weaknesses and frailties: compulsions, ticcing, drug cravings, amnesias and incontinences. Such an investment demands accommodation to avolitionality, to failures of self-control and agency. These books are remarkable in demonstrating that we can improve our ability to change ourselves and our worlds by embracing this entire realm of weaknesses, and by establishing respectful relationships with both objects and one's body as a dynamic, socially constructed, and non-othered object.