Abstract
Neoliberalism has come to be the concept scholars of literature turn to most readily when attempting to describe the current economic and cultural moment in the United States. Over the past several years, a number of studies have analysed contemporary American fiction as both an expression of and a reaction to an almost inescapably neoliberal society. Novel Shocks: Urban Renewal and the Origins of Neoliberalism marks itself out as different in taking a genealogical approach to the topic, looking back at novels published in the 1950s or early 1960s in order to trace the initial stirrings of a neoliberal worldview. Combined with this genealogical approach is a materialist emphasis on the built environment and a particular focus on New York City, which features as a prominent setting in each of the works discussed: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. The discourse and practice of urban renewal, as it played out in post-war New York, is conceived of as promoting a specifically entrepreneurial kind of subjectivity that is implicitly white and masculine. By reshaping the city in the interests of business and attempting to eradicate the ‘blight’ of largely non-white ‘ghettoes’, the post-war policies of urban renewal function as an early expression, for Myka Tucker-Abramson, of the rise of neoliberalism.
This book offers compelling insights into how authors at the time, working from a range of political perspectives, negotiated the reshaping of the city in their narratives. Tucker-Abramson argues that this negotiation produces ‘a new kind of modernism’ in these novels, in which shock is figured not only in relation to trauma but also as ‘a therapeutic force that helps strengthen and shape a more flexible, self-reliant, and resilient subject’, suited to neoliberalism (p. 4). The overall case made in this book for shock’s co-optation as a tool of neoliberal self-making, functioning through practices like urban renewal and psychological shock therapy, is interesting. The notion that the city is mastered by a new kind of entrepreneurial subject, one who has not only become impervious to the kinds of alienating urban shocks described by Walter Benjamin or Georg Simmel and figured in traditional literary modernism, but who actively harnesses shock as a means of purging the city of commercially and racially ‘undesirable’ inhabitants or purging the self of discontent, points towards an important aspect of the relationship between neoliberalism and control. Portraying the emergence of this subject, Tucker-Abramson suggests, has significant implications for the use of genre, causing ‘shock-based modernisms’ (p. 4) such as surrealism and naturalism to fail. This makes for a resurgence of the Western and a rethinking of its tropes of the frontier and rugged individualism.
The book proper begins by focussing on the impact of urban renewal on an African-American population that had become ‘surplus’ (p. 28) to capitalism’s requirements. For Tucker-Abramson, Ellison’s Invisible Man underscores the still-traumatic psychological shock-effects of the racial segregation, dispossession and overt violence associated with urban renewal for such populations. Attempts at rebellion in the novel do no good; indeed, they unwittingly serve the ends of urban renewal, helping to justify its ideology and sometimes literally clearing its path by destroying buildings. The protagonist’s self-isolation at the end of the novel should be read, it is suggested, as an expression of defeat and a move towards alignment with neoliberal individualism – a move that is viewed critically by Ellison, as Invisible Man’s turn away from the community is associated with immobility and closed spaces. This is starkly contrasted with the ability of the white middle-class to travel easily between urban space, suburban space and the third space of ‘the West’, in the second chapter on Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, which draws particular attention to the racial and class-based limits of access to neoliberal forms of personal independence. But it also points to the costs involved for those who do have access, given that the wealth, independence and mobility obtained by the novel’s protagonists entails the erasure of their past lives, just as the gleaming new buildings flung up by urban renewal entail the erasure of the communities that previously inhabited the spaces they occupy.
Taking a more expansive approach, Tucker-Abramson’s third chapter views Naked Lunch’s New York and Tangier as twin ‘new frontiers’ (p. 66) in the American imperial project, spaces that are both shaped by and pivotal in shaping neoliberal subjectivity. Here, the ways in which shock can be harnessed for ‘therapeutic purposes’ (p. 34) start to come into view via a discussion of Dr Benway’s Reconditioning Center, and a compelling reading is offered of the masculinist sexual politics bound up with an emerging, neoliberal US ‘informal’ imperialism via an analysis of the relationships between the Reconditioning Center, ‘Freeland’, the Interzone and the novel’s famous intertwined depictions of sex and violence. Delving deeper into the neoliberal utility of shock, the fourth chapter examines Rand’s Atlas Shrugged as a novel that celebrates laissez faire capitalism as a phenomenon that is itself unshockable but able to inflict destructive shocks on a state that is perceived as interfering in the natural process of capital expansion. Points made here about how this novel ignores the racial contours and impacts of liberal capitalist urban renewal and about the exclusion of even middle-class characters from neoliberal power on the basis of ‘personal failing[s]’ (p. 102) are particularly insightful. The relationship between neoliberalism and race is again central to the book’s final chapter, on Plath’s The Bell Jar, where Tucker-Abramson suggests that Esther’s ultimately critical perspective on commodity culture and the city depends on the latter’s association with a foreignness viewed as threatening not in the traditionally Cold War terms through which the novel is often read but as destabilising Esther’s privileged white middle-class status. For Tucker-Abramson, Plath reveals Esther’s developing neoliberal subjectivity as restrictive and as leading her to embrace a suburban life whose realities are far more damaging to her than those of the city. Esther’s harnessing of shock therapy thus becomes a tool to quell her discontent rather than an expression of triumphant mastery over self and city.
Novel Shocks takes a fresh approach to some well-discussed works of mid-twentieth-century American literature. The best parts of this book reveal how the policies and practices of urban renewal fed into contemporary modes of subject formation and literary expression, and the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion involved. A greater degree of specificity in distinguishing an emergent neoliberalism from earlier and co-existent forms of capitalist culture would be beneficial, however. Also, the approach taken is perhaps a little too multi-stranded, with arguments about urban renewal, shock, the frontier, considerations of race, sexuality, class and gender as well as ideas about modernism and literary genre all competing for attention. But all in all, this complexity pays off and Novel Shocks provides compelling insights into how post-war fiction navigated a rapidly transforming urban, economic and cultural terrain.