Masculinity in Contemporary New York Fiction

Peter Ferry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317743149
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Masculinity in Contemporary New York Fiction is an interdisciplinary study that presents masculinity as a key thematic concern in contemporary New York fiction. This study argues that New York authors do not simply depict masculinity as a social and historical construction but seek to challenge the archetypal ideals of masculinity by writing counter-hegemonic narratives.

Gendering canonical New York writers, namely Paul Auster, Bret Easton Ellis, and Don DeLillo, illustrates how explorations of masculinity are tied into the principal themes that have defined the American novel from its very beginning. The themes that feature in this study include the role of the novel in American society; the individual and (urban) society; the journey from innocence to awareness (of masculinity); the archetypal image of the absent and/or patriarchal father; the impact of homosocial relations on the everyday performance of masculinity; male sexuality; and the male individual and globalization.

What connects these contemporary New York writers is their employment of the one of the great figures in the history of literature: the flâneur. These authors take the flâneur from the shadows of the Manhattan streets and elevate this figure to the role of self-reflexive agent of male subjectivity through which they write counter-hegemonic narratives of masculinity. This book is an essential reference for those with an interest in gender studies and contemporary American fiction.

1 Introduction

Finding Yourself in New York

New York City is the greatest city in the world. Thanks to a Research Training Support Grant from the Department for Employment and Learning in Northern Ireland, the generosity of the scholarship awarded to me by the Helen Ramsey Turtle Group at Queen’s University Belfast, the muchappreciated contribution from my parents, and, of course, the understanding of my wife and young children, in March 2012, I fulfilled my lifetime ambition of spending one month as a New Yorker. I had always imagined myself arriving onto the shores of the New World like my Irish ancestors on a large steamship to see man’s image of himself emerge slowly into view. As I sat in a cramped cabin—alas an air cabin, not a ship cabin—watching the little airplane edge frustratingly slowly across the Atlantic Ocean on the tiny screen in front of me, I experienced that sense of nervous excitement of those arriving into the unknown of New York City for the first time. This, of course, is one of the great paradoxes of the experience of the first-time visitor to New York. Everyone knows New York. Everyone has a connection to New York. Everyone’s favourite movie, sitcom, cartoon, band, song, standup comedian, chat show, magazine, podcast, and, dare I say, even book is most likely to be inspired by New York, set in New York, produced in New York, or remains interminably connected to New York.

Unbeknownst to that only child growing up in a small town in Northern Ireland in the 1980s, New York would become a reference point in every stage of my formative years. The first cartoon that I became obsessed with was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the story of Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and Michelangelo, four teenage crime-fighting, pizza-loving turtles who lived with their father, the rat Splinter, in the New York City sewers. The first movie that my dad took me to see at the local cinema, on the eve of my eighth birthday, was the live-action film version of the cartoon. One of my first toys was the car from one of the great 1980s New York City movies, Ghostbusters (1984). The Ectomobile, also known as Ecto-1, was the distinctive white 1959 Cadillac Miller-Meteor that Peter Venkman, Ray Stanza, Igon Spengler, and Winston Zeddemore used to catch the spectres and spirits that terrorised Manhattan. The first grown-up film that my dad let me watch one Christmas in the early 1990s was Batman (1989). Tim Burton’s reboot before reboots of Gotham’s urban detective delved into the dark side of Bruce Wayne’s struggle with the issues surrounding his dual identity. Burton’s gothic re-imagining is still my favourite interpretation of the greatest superhero of them all.

Moving into my teenage years in the 1990s, U.S. sitcoms became an unexpected obsession. While Friends was a cultural phenomenon in the U.K., due mainly to it being a window into the lives of six good-looking thirty-somethings struggling in the city (but still able to afford pretty luxurious Manhattan apartments!), I also remember watching lesser appreciated shows such as Mad About You, Caroline in the City, Spin City, Just Shoot Me!, and King of Queens. It wasn’t until the arrival of the era of the box set during my undergraduate years in the new millennium that I discovered what is undoubtedly the greatest New York City sitcom of them all: Seinfeld. Seinfeld was more than an obsession. After studying during the day and working the local petrol station in the evening, I would spend each night living New York with Jerry Seinfeld, George Costanza, Elaine Benes, and Cosmo Kramer. Seinfeld is more than a sitcom; it is an extremely acute critical investigation into New York social behaviour. I identified wholeheartedly with the skits that satirise our obsession with absurd social etiquette. The four main characters are far from sympathetic city dwellers, and that is exactly the point. As Jerry puts it somewhat sarcastically in the fifth season episode “The Dinner Party”: “The fabric of society is very complex, George.” The overarching influence over the characters for the full nineseason run of Seinfeld, as they struggled with the inanity of everyday adult life, was New York City. Seinfeld couldn’t have been set anywhere else.

New York also had a major influence on me in terms of the music I listened to growing up. Certainly New York doesn’t have the same grassroots rock identity as other American cities such as Seattle or Detroit; New York is more of a musical melting pot and more often than not the place that young artists find themselves gravitating towards in search of other, likeminded musicians on the long road to creative and/or commercial success. The New York band that made the biggest impression on me in my guitar playing years was The Strokes. Their debut album, Is This It? (2001), is arguably the finest indie-rock album of the opening decade of the twentyfirst century. Along with the New Wave revivalists of that time, such as Interpol and The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Strokes echoed the urgency and the attitude of the great New York bands such as The Velvet Underground, The Ramones, The Talking Heads, Television, and Blondie. The Strokes were the perfect pin-up garage rock band, a group of five good-looking Manhattan boys whose infectious melodic riffs gave people around the world a taste of New York City cool.

To this day New York remains a cultural referent for me. The New York Times Sunday Book Review is the place I go to first to read about the latest works of fiction and nonfiction. The New Yorker magazine is my cultural compass for keeping up with the latest critical thinking on the changing American landscape in areas such as politics, culture, and literature. The New Yorker Fiction Podcast keeps me company on my commute. And now, as a father of five, New York continues to find its way into my everyday life through my children. The most scratched DVD in our house is the Sam Raimi–directed Spiderman (2002). As a photographer capturing everyday images of the city, as well as a crime fighter intent on keeping the New York City streets safe, Spiderman is possibly the ultimate New York flâneur; he is the superhero who uses the very physicality of the city itself to move around as he watches and protects the people of New York. What Raimi’s film succeeds in doing so well is exploring the developing masculine identity of the boyish Peter Parker. With Tobey Maguire as this sympathetic young everyman, Peter Parker is forced to deal with his changing body in his teenage years, the move into responsibility and adulthood following the loss of his father figure Uncle Ben, and the (sexual) development of his relationship with the girl-next-door Mary Jane Watson. At this stage, however, my kids just like the fact that he gets to wear a cool costume!

Clearly New York has been a huge influence in my life. Echoing in my head as I arrived into Manhattan was the resonating line from Colson Whitehead’s urban sketch of the great city, The Colossus of New York (2003): “you start building your private New York the first time you lay eyes on it” (4). I started building my New York as I lugged my suitcase up the steps at 79th Street and Broadway into the bright spring sunlight of the Upper West Side. At that moment I felt what in many ways has become cliché in describing the experience particular to the first-time New Yorker taking his or her first steps in the city: beginning to move within the unique energy of the people, the sensory overload created a weird sensation of both moving within the throng while feeling somewhat detached and distant from those people enveloping me. On my way to the studio apartment I was to rent on 82nd Street and Columbus Avenue, I found refuge in the safety of a Starbucks on Amsterdam Avenue. Looking out through the window at the everyday Manhattanites passing by, I realised that while New York had been my city growing up in cartoons, TV shows, sitcoms, music, and movies, finally arriving here it felt both oddly familiar and yet a surreal fiction.

The primary objective of my time in New York was to consult the Paul Auster collection of papers from the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library. I had the honour and the pleasure of spending hours in the inspirational Room 320 on the third floor of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street. Being able to see, touch, and smell Auster’s notebooks, correspondence, and private materials was an exhilarating experience. In particular, the postcards and letters sent between Auster and Don DeLillo gave an intimate insight into the developing relationship between two of New York’s finest living writers; from Auster’s initial reverential tone in the first contact between the two to their later lighthearted quips about the Mets, book tours, and trips with their wives. Getting this close to Auster in terms of understanding the process of his writing was an opportunity that I am incredibly grateful for and one that has left a mark on how I now read and appreciate Auster’s narratives.

Despite the self-discipline and diligence I mustered to go through the wealth of materials in the Auster archive, after a stretch of long days I found myself hankering to return to the city streets. I fell very easily into the rhythm of making my daily commute on the South Ferry–bound 1 train down to 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue from what had become my station on West 79th and Broadway. I soon realised that it was these journeys that were beginning to define my New York. I began to step off the subway at random stops and experience that sense of lightheaded wonderment as I climbed out of the subway into the glare of the spring sunshine. Arriving at street level, what strikes you is how blue panels covering construction work blanket the New York City sidewalks. New York is truly E. B. White’s city that is both “changeless and changing” (Here Is New York 48). If I returned to New York tomorrow, it would not be my New York from 2012. Nor would I expect it to be. New York is a living organism; the people who walk the city streets under the sprawling skeleton of endless scaffolding are the blood in its veins.

On the first day trying to make my way to the Public Library, in my sleepy haze I went left instead of right and found myself standing in the middle of Times Square. The idea that I had to make my way past the blazing spectacle of the Disneyfication of New York in all its glory to get to the distinguished solemnity of the Stephen A. Schwarzman building, established in the nineteenth century and currently the second largest public library in the United States and the third largest in the world, was in many ways telling of the New York experience. The city is so vast that I wasn’t able to see half of what I had intended to see and yet in many ways I saw twice as much as any tourist ticking off the famous New York landmarks. This idea of the need to walk a city in order to understand a city underpins William B. Helmreich’s recently published sociological study, The New York Nobody Knows (2013). Helmreich, to his eternal credit, walks every street of the five boroughs, a gruelling project that he estimates as having led him to walk about 6,000 miles over four years! Helmreich is certain that his decision to walk the city—as crazy, dangerous, and daunting as that might sound—was absolutely fundamental in the success of his project. For him it was this ethnographic method of direct observation of the buildings, the people, and the little everyday happenings that walking allows, as well as having the opportunity to stop and chat with random folk, that enabled him to truly touch upon the uniqueness of New York City:

Walking is critical to the task because it gets you out there and lets you get to know the city up close. However, you cannot merely walk through a city to know it. You have to stop long enough to absorb what’s going on around you. And the only way to do that is to immerse yourself in it—spending as much time as possible in the city streets. (Helmreich 3)

Taking a wrong turn, if such a thing even exists in this city, is to stumble upon something that adds to your New York. New York rewards those willing to walk the city streets.

And still on the days I spent in downtown Manhattan, or on Fifth Avenue, or in the Upper East Side on “Museum Mile,” or in a deli in front of the Flatiron Building, or on the Brooklyn Bridge looking back at Manhattan, I was always happy to return to what had become my pocket of New York in the Upper West Side. New York demands a lot from its people but it gives back so much more. My New York was the New World coffee shop on Columbus. Crazy customers? Yes. Discombobulated service? Yes. Overpriced breakfasts? Yes. But good coffee, decent pastries, and the perfect window counter to sit and watch people of New York walk their dogs towards Central Park. The P&K Laundromat on Amsterdam Avenue was a godsend with great service, lightning fast turnaround, and out-ofthis-world folding of my shirts, trousers, and smalls. The Chirping Chicken satisfied my cravings on Saturday nights in front of the box watching the Knicks. The Dead Poet is highly recommended by many as the cool quirky artsy bar, but I preferred watching soccer with some pub grub a few doors down in the Gin Mill. Popping into The Zingone Brothers grocery store, an old mom-and-pop store that has been selling produce on Columbus Avenue since 1927, became a daily ritual. If it is good enough for Jerry Seinfeld, then it was good enough for me! Reading the article “A Zingone in Every Aisle,” published recently in the New York Times, had me welling up with pride.¹ This was my New York!

I left the Big Apple on a cold, blowy Sunday evening to make my way to Boston, where I would spend time with the Shere Hite Archive in the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. As I looked wistfully out the window while the train weaved its way past downtown Manhattan, I was happy that walking the city had answered the main premise of my research: that is, to know New York is to walk New York, and to walk New York is to know something greater, something deeper about your inner self. Letting myself fall into the rhythm of the city I began to see the city and see myself in the city. While in principle the flâneur may come to New York as a stranger with the primary objective of documenting the city, eventually it is the city that adopts the flâneur and encourages this social observer to not only muse upon the spectacle of the external that envelops him but also to reflect upon the impact of the city on his own individual identity. It is the city that fosters the creation of these narratives that make us who we are, whether we are first-time visitors, longtime city dwellers, or distant but firmly attached admirers of New York. To paraphrase and add to Meyer Berger’s maxim that each man finds his own meaning in New York, in the finely attuned acts of walking and writing the city each man also finds his own meaning in himself.²

This might go some part of the way to explain why the contemporary New York writers that are the focus of this book—Paul Auster, Bret Easton Ellis, and Don DeLillo—engage with the literary figure of the flâneur in their critical investigations into masculinity in the city. The choice of authors for this study is a very deliberate one. Auster, Ellis, and DeLillo are the heavyweights of the contemporary canon. They enjoy a degree of commercial and critical crossover not experienced by what some may call difficult “literary” writers. Despite Auster, Ellis, and DeLillo featuring strongly on modules and courses of American fiction, up to now gender and masculinity have been criminally overlooked in the critical reading of these literary greats. Gendering these writers underlines the fact that Auster, Ellis, and DeLillo are white, heterosexual, middle-class, educated men writing white, heterosexual, middle-class, educated men.³ And yet this is something that remains criminally overlooked. It appears that the call of Michael Kimmel, one of the leading figures within the field of Masculinity Studies, still rings true:

to men . . . gender often remains invisible. Strange as it may sound, men are the “invisible” gender. Ubiquitous in positions of power everywhere, men are invisible to themselves. (“Invisible Masculinity” 29)

Using this as a springboard, as much as it is absolutely crucial to study the representations of marginalised and subordinate masculine groups, there is the need to challenge the privilege of invisibility that the hegemonic group of men in society enjoy. The act of gendering these works of fiction not only enables us to understand how masculinity is an overlooked central theme of these writers, but also underlines the sociological value of the novel as a self-reflective device for challenging established patterns of the performance of masculinity.

With such a focused study on only three authors, there may be concerns regarding the narrow range and scope of this study. The range of issues that feature in the subsequent chapters should allay any such qualms. Gendering the works of Auster, Ellis, and DeLillo illustrates how their explorations of New York men and masculinities are tied into the principal themes that have defined the American novel from its very beginning. These include: the role of the novel in American society; the individual and (urban) society; the journey from innocence to awareness (of masculinity); the archetypal image of the absent and/or patriarchal fath...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Finding Yourself in New York
• 2 Walking Manhattan, Writing Masculinity: (Re-)Introducing the New York Flâneur with E.B. White's Here Is New York and Joshua Ferris' The Unnamed
• 3 "The Son Saves the Father": Counter-hegemonic Father Figures in Paul Auster's Fiction
• 4 "Because I Want to Fit In": The Influence of the Male Peer Group in Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho
• 5 "A World Citizen with a New York Pair of Balls": The Global Hegemonic Male in Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis
• Bibliography
• Index