第2章 Introduction

This joint monograph attempts an intertextual reading of modern and contemporary American literature and Western critical theories, with a dual purpose to study American society and culture on the one hand and reinterpret those theoretical formations on the other, that is, employing literary perspectives to negotiate with our understanding of varieties of critical theories, and reading critical theories against those social realities that American writers have constructed. The neutral territory that literature and critical theory meet, evokes a kind of intersectionality where American society and culture in particular is focused and analyzed, accordingly shedding light on the whole human society and culture in general and making possible the reconstruction of a literary sociology of evaluating civilization and diagnosing its discontents.

Contemporary American society and culture is one of the major contexts, under, against and with which both American writers and critical theorists have negotiated. What those writers have done led us to value contemporary American literature as a theoretical resource. Saul Bellow (1915—2005) is a Jewish Canadian-American writer. His monumental writing represented, in the words of the Swedish Nobel Committee for "The Nobel Prize in Literature 1976," "the mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our [American and Western] culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our age." Bellow's well-known works, as will be respectively addressed in the following, The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Henderson the Rain King (1959) and Herzog (1964), deal with American history from the Great Depression in the 1930s to the 1960s.

Philip Roth (1933- ) is one of the most awarded American writers of his generation for his provocative explorations of Jewish and American identity. His 2004 novel The Plot Against America deliberately blurs the distinction between reality and fiction, and offers an alternative history in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882—1945) is defeated in the 1940 presidential election by Charles Lindbergh (1902—1974), having provided a good glimpse of American society and culture in the 1930s and 1940s in particular and the American culture in general, including its glories and shames.

The contemporary Italian American novelist, playwright and essayist Don DeLillo (1936- ) writes the American life from the 1970s to the present, with such diverse subjects as the Cold War, nuclear war, television, sports, the complexities of language, performance art, the digital age, politics, economics, and global terrorism. His reputed writings, such as The Names (1982), White Noise (1985), Libra (1988) and Mao Ⅱ (1991), provide a more recent understanding of America with its prosperity and gloom. As he has once defined, "contemporary American society is the worst enemy that the cause of human individuality and self-realization has ever had."[1] On another occasion, he repeated: "I think my work is influenced by the fact that we're living in dangerous times. If I could put it in a sentence, in fact, my work is about just that: living in dangerous times."[2]

From Saul Bellow's writing of "the dilemma of our [his] age" and Philip Roth's "alternative American history" to Don DeLillo's pronouncement of "contemporary American society [as] the worst enemy" and "we're living in dangerous times," American society seems to have contracted a variety of fatal diseases spreading to its vital organs, being rotten to the core, hopeless, incurable, and at death's door. This metaphorical description may go to the extreme, but as a literary reflection, it needs further exploration and clarification.

In the concluding remarks of his classic dissertation Civilization and Its Discontents (1929), Sigmund Freud proposed a diagnosis and therapy of collective or social psychoses and neuroses of the general human society and culture, instead of those of the individuals' in the professional psychopathic analysis, saying:

The diagnosis of communal neuroses is faced with a special difficulty. In an individual neurosis we take as our starting-point the contrast that distinguishes the patient from his environment, which is assumed to be normal. For a group all of whose members are affected by one and the same disorder no such background could exist; it would have to be found elsewhere. And as regards the therapeutic application of our knowledge, what would be the use of the most correct analysis of social neuroses, since no one possesses authority to impose such a therapy upon the group? Yet despite all these difficulties we may be fairly sure that one day somebody will venture upon such a pathological study of cultural communities.[3]

Freud wished that this project, "the diagnosis of communal neuroses" and "a pathological study of cultural communities," should be undertaken, but he had not yet or dared not to do this in his life time under his peculiar living circumstances. As Stivers has explained, "Freud's apparent discovery that repressed sexuality was the basis of the unconscious was a historical accident-a product of the Victorian period."[4]Freud's unfinished work and thirsty expectation invite and call for contemporary writers, theorists and critics' action.

The study of communal psychoses or neuroses has always been an academic attempt but for a long time a practical infeasibility, the reasons for which are two-folds: one is that the collective group has always been a frame of reference to evaluate the individual, while the other is that the culture, as a representation of the group's beliefs, behavior patterns and psychologies, constitutes the individual's formative configuration; generally, it has always been a theoretical risk to say that one culture is inherently distorted or abnormal. Consequently, to categorize whether a culture is diseased or morbid largely depends on its social dysfunction, that is, on the fact that the totality of people of the social group is psychiatric in their mental status or abnormal in their routine behaviors. Moreover, as a constitutive element, culture has formed their subjectivity, thus making their awareness of what they have acquired as being pathological especially difficult. Despite such complications of cultural pathology, we attempt to venture upon such a study.

The peculiar qualities or functions of the overall civilization or dominant culture have been repeatedly discussed and criticized, but none of those discussions and critiques has offered ethics based on its ontology and epistemology. Sigmund Freud's unfinished work, though with strong expectation to accomplish, may contribute to the present cultural work. As a scientific study of the nature of a disease and its causes, process, development, and consequences, the scientific terminology "pathology" often deals with the structural and functional changes in abnormal physical and biological conditions, and thus is also called "pathobiology." It is here used as a metaphor for cultural studies in terms of the pathology of our shared ideas, values and behaviors that have constituted a communal culture. In addition, pathology also conceives a broader meaning in the sciences of the study of disorders, not specifically in such a discipline as psychology, which is termed as "psychopathology," or simply "pathology," indicating disorders within their domains (mental, emotional and behavioral) to be forms of "illness" or "disease." When it is appropriate in the field of the study of collective disorders in the domain of culture, it can thus be termed as "cultural pathology" and "patho-culturology." Therefore, the terminology "cultural pathology" here basically refers to "communal" or "social" psychoses or neuroses, just to legitimize Freud's academic legacy.

In his classic Marxist interpretation of the last phase of capitalism or imperialism,Vladimir Ilyich Lenin arbitrated such a conclusion: "We have to begin with as precise and full a definition of imperialism as possible. Imperialism is a specific historical stage of capitalism. Its specific character is threefold: imperialism is monopoly capitalism; parasitic, or decaying capitalism; moribund capitalism."[5] According to Lenin, imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, followed by its succeeding historical stage of communism. The four terminologies characteristic of imperialism, "monopolistic," "parasitic," "decaying" and "moribund," not only define its economic morphology, but also frequently name its socio-political institution. Lenin didn't arbitrate its cultural pattern, but it can be ratiocinated or logically concluded from his verdict that the culture of the highest stage of capitalism is also "hegemonic" (as the term "monopoly" indicates), "parasitic," "decaying" and "moribund," being on the verge of disintegration or approaching death. The present study will keep on taking this metaphor of capitalist or imperialist culture as a hypothesis that it is, just to paraphrase Lenin's terminology, "diseased" and "pathological."

Lenin's arbitration on the highest stage of capitalism has not yet been obsolete, despite the constant revision, reassessment and retheorization along landscapes of various contemporary critical discourses in categorizing the present capitalism. Such neologisms as "postmodern society," "postindustrial society," "information age," "society of simulation and simulacrum," "age of globalization," "multinational capitalism," "late capitalism" and so on circulate within the horizon of contemporary cognitive mapping. Fortunately, they share a lot, or largely overlap with, Lenin's description of those peculiar characteristics of the highest stage of capitalism. In terms of the cultural studies, the first hypothesis based on the classic Marxist interpretation echoes with the contemporary perspectives, which can find consensus not only in the theoretical or critical arena, but also in the fields of arts and literature.

Marx and Lenin's theorization indicates that capitalism is inherently cancerous with its dominant culture as its manifest "social" psychoses or neuroses. Marx observed the workers as isolated, alienated, and exploited in the factory system; Emile Durkheim diagnosed schizophrenia as the morbid consequence of capitalism, and in his The Division of Labor in Society, he used anomie to refer to the lack of moral guidance in the relations between social functions and between positions in the social structure, and this anomie represented a "pathological" condition of industrialized capitalism, in particular, large industry and large markets; Max Weber saw individuals trapped in the iron cage of an over-determined rationality.

Cultural pathology, or pathological culture, has also been constantly addressed besides the Marxian tradition. As Friedrich Nietzsche once put it, "Protest, evasion, merry distrust, and a delight in mockery are symptoms of health: everything unconditional belongs in pathology."[6] Nietzsche disregarded a totalized reality and the unified moral self, finding personal autonomy banal. Van den Berg thought of a neurosis as simultaneously a "sociosis" and neurosis is a social "disease" before it is a psychological one. Renaming neurosis "sociosis," he noted that "no one is neurotic unless made so by society. A neurosis is an individual's reaction to the conflicting and complicating demands made by society."[7] Stanley Diamond argued that schizophrenia is virtually unknown in primitive societies; it is a product of civilization, especially modern civilization.[8] In her The Neurotic Personality of Our Time, the psychologist Karen Horney once wrote: "The dominant culture is largely pathological" and "the perfect normal person is rare in our civilization."[9] In his The Origin of Social Dysfunction: The Pathology of Cultural Delusion, Everett E. Allie observed: "Social systems and institutions, not keyed to natural functions, or oblivious to natural functions and their necessary, become the carriers and enforcers of serious cultural pathology." [10]As Stivers has concluded, "there is reason to believe, then, that neurosis and psychosis are directly related to the social organization of modern societies."[11]As one of the most theoretical challenges to the conventional cognitive mapping of culture, the present study requires a detailed anatomy of the nature of cultural diseases or viruses and their causes, processes, development, and consequences, and an exploration of possible diagnoses and transgressive therapies.

As "cultural studies" generally investigates how cultural practices relate to wider systems of power associated with or operating through social phenomena, such as ideology, class structures, national formations, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and generation, our cultural pathology proceeds on the same track. To a great extent, the majorities of contemporary theoretically, politically, and empirically engaged cultural studies are studies of various "cultural pathologies," whether focusing on the political dynamics of contemporary culture or its historical foundations, defining traits, conflicts, and contingencies.

Recognizing the terminological similarity in literary works and cultural studies, we concentrate upon this pervasive and formative power to observe how it produces and at the same time corrupts culture. As the French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist and literary critic Michel Foucault says, "power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society."[12] DeLillo further elaborates that, "writers must oppose systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments [...] I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us."[13] As Magurie speaks of contemporary deep ecology, "The only sanity worth having is one which, in a deep sense, is a recognition of the madness of contemporary society."[14]As we live in "DeLillo-esque times," [15] we, as critics, follow suit.

The cultural values in the United States that Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and Don DeLillo cherished have formed the cornerstone of the cultural contradictions Karen Horney has identified, and similarly, the cultural contradictions Horney has discovered in her studies form the basis of the cultural values in the United States that these writers cherished. While "cultural contradictions do not automatically lead to neurosis," it takes the actions of others toward the neurotic, as well as the neurotic's own reaction, to produce the basic anxiety,"[16] which can be illuminated in such an intertextual reading.

The present study attempts to invigorate the dialogue about the history, phenomenology, and contemporary experience of psychoses, neuroses and socioses in the American social-historical context, to recast the arbitrary opposition between the "pathological" and the "normal," to place "these ills" within the domains of American history, culture, and politics, and to see how the deepest realms of somatic sensation and psychological suffering are interlocked with the technologies, knowledge, and values, and how our bodies and minds are immersed within American economic, political, and scientific struggles.

As an academic background for Saul Bellow studies, whether the sharp binary opposition between the young and gerontic characters respectively symbolizes the aesthetic "Beautiful" and the aesthetic "Ugly" in The Adventures of Augie March, whether it is the energy of youth that forever drives the protagonist to search for that "elusive truth" that he can find only in the African primitive communities in Henderson the Rain King, and whether the conscientious intellectual does what he can to subvert that pathological "Name of the Father" that has been thickly inscribed in history, culture and contemporary society, Bellow believes that the natural selection is behind the individual having functional or dysfunctional social mechanisms and the society and culture he lives in have corrupted his integrity as a modern subject. As an academic background for Philip Roth's studies of communal psychoses or neuroses of the American character in The Plot against America, whether illuminating an inseparable combination of paranoiac individualism and terrorism as the American national character, exhibiting conspiracist democracy and terrorism as the American cultural identity, and anatomizing mass-hysteric universalism and terrorism as the American communal behaviors, Roth acknowledges such a basic thesis: "In sociopathic societies, the clinical effort to dissect the sociopathic personality cannot be separated from an analysis of national character and ideology."[17]

And finally, as an academic background for Don DeLillo's studies of postmodern American society and culture, for instance, those biotechnological and psycho-pharmacological machinery have made contemporary bodies and subjective life new sites of economic interchange and pharmaceutical investment, thus driving his protagonists to take medicine to cure their psychological problems in White Noise. Moreover, as Laplantine puts it:

The self-inflicted psychotic pollution by a culture will not respond to any psychiatric treatment as long as its main symptoms (regression, dissociation, deindividualization) are systematically nurtured and encouraged by surrounding cultural milieux.... Those of us who live today in Europe and the US suffer from a chronic psychosis whose intensity is still mild. If the manifestly paranoid and schizoid characteristics of our daily behaviors are not experienced for what they really are, it is simply because we all share them.[18]

Baudrillard responds to Laplantine's judgment and intensifies its seriousness: "when you think about the incredible neurotic complexities of millions of individuals and about the cumulative effects of all those problems, you realize that the psychic pollution of the planet is much worse than the biological or technological one."[19] All these, and a great quantity of others, shed light on our understanding of DeLillo's anatomy of cultural pathologies of the American late capitalism, whether generating sovereign interpolation and social paranoia as social mechanism in The Names, cultural dysfunction and collective X-Syndromes as psycho-mechanism in White Noise, empowerment and cultural aphasia as signification dysfunction in Libra, or subjective resistance and critique of dominant power in Mao Ⅱ. As we live in "DeLillo-esque times," just to repeat for emphasis, we need to recognize and deal with what Magurie speaks of "the madness of contemporary society."