History's Unmentionables: Reference and Interiority in the Contemporary American Historical Novel

My dissertation, History's Unmentionables: Reference and Interiority in the Contemporary American Historical Novel, analyzes what I argue are traces of historical referents, specifically the minds of historical figures, in the works of Norman Mailer, Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon. The project critiques postmodern theories of narrative that, citing their equivalence as texts, attempt to undo the distinction between histories and fictions. While such claims are predicated on the assumed irrecoverability of historical referents, I argue that we can only account for a network of stylistic peculiarities in these authors' works as disruptions created by such referents. My first chapter, "`Strange Even to Himself': History, Characterization, and the Absence of Interiority in Libra," accounts for a self-alienation unique to the historical figures in DeLillo's novel. I argue that DeLillo skirts the epistemological limit posed by the minds of historical figures by folding that limit into his characterizations; that is, unlike the novel's purely fictional creations, his versions of Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby lack access to their own interiorities. Failing to identify with a text that does not correspond to their referential selves, they register their own fictionality as a result. My second chapter, "The Devil's in the Details: The Mundane Symbols of The Executioner's Song," combines theories of description with recent work in thing theory to show how the recalcitrant materiality of the story's details undercuts any symbolic reading of the text. Mailer's presentation of his material certainly begs for such readings at moments; even Hugh Kenner has, somewhat ghoulishly, linked the coroner's initial inability to recognize Gilmore's heart (the actual organ) to "the truth that...the heart of man is very often desperately wicked." The resistance of Gilmore's corpse to this distasteful metaphorization marks, I claim, an ethical limit to fictionalization. My third chapter, "The Abstracted Ladder: Mason & Dixon's Model of History," examines the purpose underlying the multiple returns to literal meanings and material objects staged over the course of the novel. As the text reveals the arbitrariness of the organizing principles governing historical narrative, it frees up areas of the past such narratives have obscured and suggests their recuperation depends on a multiplicity of imperfect frames