Disillusionment of Modern American Culture Through Works of American Literature

Disillusionment in Postmodern American Literature

The latter half of the twentieth century saw a raft of dramatic changes to American culture and society, bringing with them new forms living and thinking about the world. Beginning in the 1960s and continuing onward, the country saw a deep disillusionment with the suburban trappings of contemporary America, as Cold War anxiety combined with rampant consumerism to instill a sense of moral vacuity, which was reflected in a variety of literature from the time. In particular, John Updike's Rabbit, Run, Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road, Raymond Carver's short story "Neighbors," and Don DeLilo's White Noise all explore how the ramifications of this widespread disillusionment play out in the lives of their characters. The narratives demonstrate the paradoxical nightmare of postmodern America; just as the trappings of the so-called "American Dream" crop up in the form of the suburb, the overwhelming dread of the Cold War fuels rampant consumerism by posing a constant threat to these very same homes and property, so that every purchase and life is simultaneously crucial and disposable. This loss of meaning beyond property and fear precipitates the crises of each of the aforementioned stories, using the characters to enact the larger crisis of identity America was undergoing at the time and in doing so exploring the eroding notions of family and value, which are replaced by empty objects and pharmaceutically-induced contentment.

Before looking at each of the narratives in further detail, it will useful to examine how the social upheavals of the 1960s precipitated a dramatic shift in cultural production, and more specifically, the literature of the subsequent years. In the essay "Revolutions in the Meaning and Study of Politics," author Michael Rothberg sees the 1960s as the site of a revolution "that represent[s a] novel development" in the history of American politics "rather than [a] return to important topics or rescaled geographies" (Rothberg 301). In particular, "the recasting of social or economic relations in political terms, the recognition of the political dimensions of cultural phenomena, [and] the rise of studies of politics in journals of literary criticism since the 1960s" combined together to "fundamentally [reshape] the objects of our attention, causing (or allowing) us to see politics everywhere" (Rothberg 301). Although Rothberg deals with how this change in scholarship during the 1960s affected the interpretation and historicization of the American Revolution, his analysis remains cogent because of what it implies for life in America beginning in the 1960s. The Cold War saw a previously-unseen, or at least unseen so explicitly, conflation of the political, economic, and social hierarchies in America in opposition to communism. In addition to the very real threat of nuclear war, communism as embodied by the Soviet Union represented an existential threat to America the likes of which the country had never encountered before. As Soviet policies embedded themselves in every aspect of Soviet citizens' lives, and communism represented a questioning of not only the visible political constructs of America, but also the economic, religious, and social ones, Americans soon realized that the political actually permeated everything about American society.

The American response to communism was spastic and reactionary, as leaders attempted to rebut the central ideological attacks of communism simply by stepping up their blind devotion to their own in "a period marked by the ascendance of transnational corporations, the upheavals of decolonization, fears of nuclear holocaust, and the partitioning of the globe into ideological spheres" (Adams 250). Thus, rampant consumerism became a way of defending "American principles," the empty religiosity of adding "In God We Trust" to paper currency (conflating the spiritual and economic gods) soothed those predisposed to believe in it in the first place, and the animosity between two polar opposite political ideologies permeated the culture so extensively that the aforementioned attempts at buttressing American imperial capitalism were revealed in all their hollow glory, leading to the widespread disillusionment of postmodern America. The awareness that the (petty) political conflict of the time had so fully permeated American culture, so fully ensnared America's populace into acting out the feverish, vaudevillian performance of opposition to a poorly understood ideology ultimately led to a loss of individual meaning, because if every act is informed by and engages with the false binary of religiously informed American capitalism vs. Soviet communism, then those acts lose any novelty or meaning independent of this binary.

Thus, beginning with Updike's Rabbit, Run in 1960 and continuing all the way to DeLilo's White Noise in 1985, the literature during much of the Cold War contains what Rachel Adams calls "the dark humor; themes of paranoia, skepticism, and conspiracy" which represent "a response to and reaction against what Alan Nadel has called the "containment culture" of Cold War America" (Adams 250). This understanding also helps to explain the notion of the postmodern most relevant to this study, that is, "defining [post-modern] more narrowly as a particularly successful mode of narrative experimentation that declined with the waning of the Cold War," as it "provides an opportunity to consider the distinctive features and historical circumstances of a new chapter in American literary history" (Adams 250). These "distinctive features" can be divided largely into categories of space and identity, because "the unprecedented integration of the world's markets, technologies, and systems of governance; surprising and innovative new forms of cultural fusion; and the mobilization of political coalitions across the lines of race, class, and other identitarian categories" caused a breakdown of previous categories regarding geographic and personal boundaries. Just as "the perceived ubiquity of transnational corporations and increasing commodification of the world's cultures gave rise to fears about the impending demise of literary innovation," so too did these same changes give rise to a demise of meaning more generally (although as the existence of this essay suggests, the fears regarding literary innovation were relatively exaggerated) (Adams 251). Thus, space and the identities which fill it are placed in a state of flux, so that each of the protagonists studied here are, in their own way, searching for some meaning around which to orient themselves, before they are overcome by the crippling void of paranoia or subsumed by the pull of numbing consumerism.

In terms of space, the Cold War precipitated a fundamental reconsideration of the globe, because just as formerly distant countries became reachable via the newest missiles and weapons systems, America itself was becoming further segmented, as the suburbs grew and the individual was relegated an increasingly small portion of space. This in turn creates the ideal conditions for a crisis of identity, as previously constructed identities are challenged in the face of a world and human society whose destructive potential has only recently been revealed. These identity crises take many forms, from the spiritual vacuity explored in John Updike's Rabbit, Run to the darkly comedic jealousy of the protagonists in Raymond Carver's "Neighbors." In the former, the protagonist seeks some unattainable meaning through a variety of interpersonal relationships, while in the latter the protagonist's lives become oriented wholly around that of their neighbors and their apartment, offering two of the myriad responses to the psychological pressures of Cold War America. Bearing in mind the political and sociological pressures informing the literature of the Cold War, it will now be possible to examine a variety of texts in detail, as a means of explicating how the historical forces of the time were interpreted and analyzed via postmodern literature.

John Updike's Rabbit, Run, published in 1960, is the earliest text to be considered here, and offers a basis around which to orient the following discussion of postmodern, Cold War texts, because its narrative exists superliminally, bridging the gap between what can be considered the relative "blissful ignorance" of the decade immediately following World War II and the active, angry, disillusionment of the 1960s and beyond. In "John Updike's Rabbit, Run: A Quest for Spiritual Vocabulary in the Vacuum Left by Modernism," author David Fekete argues that "the protagonist, Harry Angstrom [the titular Rabbit], flounders with feelings of spirituality that his culture cannot sustain" (Fekete 25). Fekete sees this failure to sustain spirituality represented in Rabbit's series of increasingly and decidedly unerotic "erotic" encounters, because "concomitant with the death of God, the Modern Period is also pessimistic in its treatment of eroticism," as "God's death includes the death of the god Eros" (Fekete 31). That Fekete identifies Rabbit, Run as "modern" whereas this essay has chosen to regard it as postmodern is of little concern here, as the arguments Fekete makes informs the discussion of postmodern literature equally as well, and as has been previously stated, Rabbit, Run is a superliminal text, and thus one may recognize that it can easily be located at both the end of the modern and the beginning of the postmodern.

Though Rabbit's erotic couplings are ultimately "successful" in the traditional, biological (and prior to postmodernism, sociological) sense, as any woman he has sex with becomes pregnant, these pregnancies do not bring an accompanying relief or joy, but rather serve to highlight the utter lack of attainable meaning in Rabbit's life. Whereas in earlier historical moments the birth of a child and the passing on of one's genetic information is considered the ultimate attainment for a male, in Rabbit, Run this "accomplishment" is rendered irrelevant by the overwhelming, "unrelenting social forces" under which "human endeavor is ultimately crushed," and thus the acts which precede these pregnancies become devoid of any meaning or eroticism (Fekete 31). This lack can be understood in strictly mathematical terms; where before numerous children were prized due to their individually high mortality rate, when all of one's children, no matter how numerous, are constantly under threat from nuclear annihilation, each additional child brings no real extra meaning into the world. Thus, Janice, Rabbit's wife, is left to struggle with their new child in a world in which that child means very little. As "her breasts are used without shame, [as] tools like her hands" by the baby, Janice is drained of her agency and meaning, to the point that she breaks down crying, exclaiming "I'm dry. I just don't have anything to feed her" (Updike 195, 203). This moment seems to suggest that along with the loss of eroticism noted by Fekete, this breakdown of previous standards regarding intimacy and sex extends into the consequences of sex as well, that is, motherhood and children. Just as the Cold War milieu has robbed American life of any focalizing values other than fear and consumerism, so too has this same milieu metaphorically robbed Janice of her life-giving abilities as a mother, so that she has nothing to offer her baby to drink aside from her tears, and eventually, the bath water in which her baby drowns. Although Rabbit and Janice's crises remain particularly gendered (Rabbit struggles with a loss of eroticism and meaningful sexual fulfillment, whereas Janice suffers from the loss of her "motherly" attributes), they offer a picture of how the erosion of previously sustaining cultural constructions due to the new reality of the Cold War also erodes the very basic structures of identification and meaning creation, including notions of the family. As time goes on, the family becomes less immediately relevant to postmodern literature in favor of questions regarding the individual and his or her belongings, and Rabbit, Run represents the initial movement of the family away from being the central orienting structure in the individual's life.

If Rabbit, Run marks the initial erosion of traditional conceptions of the family, then Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road is the interstitial text, portraying characters not yet free from previous notions of the family structure, represented by their mundane suburban existence, but nonetheless struggling to escape them, even if, as in Rabbit, Run, their endeavors are "ultimately crushed under unrelenting social forces." The futility of these struggles is demonstrated by the main character's inability to escape their gender roles, even as those roles are mutated in the laboratory of suburban America. According to Michael Moreno is his essay "Consuming the Frontier Illusion: The Construction of Suburban Masculinity in Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road," the shift "between the waning era of manual industry and the emerging computer age" during the emerging Cold War precipitated a "transformation [that] firmly reifies, rather than revolutionizes, gender roles in the domestic sphere and, in the process, re-manufactures the suburban male from the "GI Joe" image of masculinity to an emasculated body, an anonymous, gray-flanneled consumer" (Moreno 85). To this one can add an accompanying reification of the feminine gender role as well, although in this case the dutiful mother and wife is re-manufactured into a fractured, fun-house mirror version of "traditional" femininity.

Although like Rabbit, Run, Revolutionary Road focuses more attention on its male protagonist, it is the female character's relation to motherhood and the family that most dramatically demonstrates the shifting cultural and ideological landscape of Cold War America. In particular, looking at how April in Revolutionary Road fares in comparison to Janice in Rabbit Run will give a clearer picture as to the trajectory of the shifting notions of family and identity in postmodernism. Whereas Janice's pregnancy offers at least a temporary bridge between the two protagonists, April's pregnancy in Revolutionary Road serves to disrupt her and her husband's plans, effectively acting as one more outdated tie to an earlier conception of America, inescapable but revealed as repressive and horrible in the new, politicized America. When John, the Wheeler's unstable but incisive neighbor confronts them over their decision not to move to Paris, he asks "little woman decide she isn't quite ready to quit playing house?" (Yates 301). Although their decision to stay rests on more than this, in a way the pregnancy could be seen as the "house" not being quite ready to quit playing April, trapping her in a kind of nightmare domesticity. Thus, just as the crisis of modernity is more acute in Revolutionary Road than in Rabbit, Run, so too are the consequences more extreme for the woman attempting to escape the fading notions of motherhood. April attempts to escape the continued constraints of her existence by aborting her pregnancy herself, and dies as a result. Thus, the identity crisis introduced in Rabbit, Run is seen in its death throes in Revolutionary Road. Just as the goals of the protagonists become more explicit (moving to Paris as opposed to Rabbit's ephemeral search), so too do the consequences for attaining those goals, to the point that April dies for her attempts.

If Rabbit, Run and Revolutionary Road narrate the initial crisis of spiritual self-identification and eroding social mores as a result of the Cold War and early postmodernism, then Raymond Carver's "Neighbors" and Don DeLilo's White Noise represent the second generation of these postmodern narratives. Whereas the earlier two texts focused on characters attempting to bridge the gap from the woefully naive 1950s to the brutal, catastrophic awakening of the 1960s with varying degrees of success, the latter two stories portray protagonists accustomed to this new reality, embodying the particular traits of their historical moment rather than combating them. As such, children are less important in both stories, because questions of the family have been overcome by consumerism and the dominance of fear (even though the Gladney's have numerous children in White Noise). In "Neighbors," the central characters' lives are almost entirely oriented around how they compare to their neighbors', and in White Noise, the fear of death has been integrated and commodified to the point that it is a pharmaceutically manageable state of being. In effect, the latter two stories demonstrate the farcical extremes to which consumerism and the fear of death replace all other meaning in postmodern America.