Table Of ContentCharacter and Satire in
Postwar Fiction
IAN GREGSON
Continuum
Character and Satire in Postwar Fiction
CONTINUUM LITERARY STUDIES SERIES
Forthcoming titles:
Beckett’s Books by Matthew Feldman
English Fiction in the 1930s by Chris Hopkins
Fictions of Globalization by James Annesley
Joyce and Company by David Pierce
Masculinity in Fiction and Film by Brian Baker
Novels of the Contemporary Extreme edited by Alain-Phillipe Durand
and Naomi Mandel
Re-writing London by Lawrence Phillips
Women’s Fiction 1945–2000 by Deborah Philips
Character and Satire in
Postwar Fiction
IAN GREGSON
Continuum
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© Ian Gregson 2006
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 0–8264–8747–5
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
1 Subverting Racist Caricature: Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison 9
2 Joseph Heller’s Allegories of Money 31
3 Philip Roth’s Vulgar, Aggressive Clowning 55
4 Joyce Carol Oates’s Political Anger 79
5 Muriel Spark’s Puppets of Thwarted Authority 99
6 Magic Realism As Caricature: Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie 111
7 The Caricaturist As Celebrity: Martin Amis and Will Self 131
8 Caricature Versus Character: The Self As Cartoon 151
Notes 169
Bibliography 175
Index 179
For Dave Faggiani and Steve Ormrod
Acknowledgements
I’m especially grateful to my colleague Tom Corns who made important
suggestions about this book, especially about the ordering of chapters. I’m
grateful as well to Stephen Wall who did painstaking (and subsequently
influential) work on the prose style of the Muriel Spark chapter, which first
appeared in Essays in Criticism (where he is the editor).
Thanks as well to Linda Jones who did invaluable work on the manuscript.
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Introduction
It has been poststructuralism which has most influenced recent theorizing
about characterization. J. Hillis Miller, for example, argues that the realist
novel has two, apparently contradictory, functions. On one hand, it pro-
motes social cohesiveness because it reassures its readers about the existence
of the unitary self. The examples of that self which it provides are so vivid
that life imitates art and reproduces them so that ‘England after 1836 begins
to be filled with Dickensian characters’.1 On the other, however, it interro-
gates the concept of character, calls it radically into question, through a
process of ‘autodeconstruction’. It does this in order to respond to the very
doubts about the unitary self which its first function appears to dismiss. By
allowing these doubts to be expressed aesthetically, and therefore in an arena
which does not pose a social threat, it paradoxically reinforces the reassurance
offered by its first function. In order to display this autodeconstruction in
action, Hillis Miller argues that the realist novel is much less realist than it
appears; he cites examples from George Eliot’s novels to show how they
interrogate realist assumptions about the self. He summarizes his argument
by declaring that the novel is a
perpetual tying and untying of the knot of selfhood for the purpose, in the
psychic economy of the individual and of the community, of affirming the
fiction of character by putting it fictionally in question and so short-
circuiting a doubt which, left free to act in the real social world, might
destroy both self and community. (98)
Leo Bersani and Thomas Docherty use poststructuralist methods to
analyse subjectivity in novels. For Bersani it is desire which most threatens
that unitary self which Hillis Miller sees as being protected by realism.
Bersani is ambivalent about Freudian theory, but he draws upon psycho-
analytic thought in order to explore the ways that desire subverts psychic
coherence; he traces a literary development from Racine, through Flaubert,
Stendhal, Henry James and D. H. Lawrence, and into avant-garde theatre of
the 1970s in order to follow ‘stages in the deconstruction of the self in modern
literature’.2 He is preoccupied with the impact of repression and sublimation
– how they ensure the psychic continuities which constitute personality, but
at the cost of ‘a serious crippling of desire’ (6). His politics are close to those
