Uzbekistan state university of world languages english language faculty №1 Course paper

Conclusion

Writing about the suburb as a fictional space extends beyond the literal consideration of ‘fictions about suburbia’. Stories about the suburbs are also intimately connected with the way the suburb has been discursively constructed. A small part of the intention of this thesis has been to examine how conceptions about the suburb have affected how critics read Cheever’s suburban stories. But the suburban model raises a much wider critical concern about subjectivity and identity itself; it traces out and restages the divergence of the desire for satisfaction, and the resistant fear that such satisfaction must be accompanied by conformity, inauthenticity, disempowerment and stasis. In existentialist terms, the will to both refuse and conform to a suburban ideal is a microcosmic expression of the inevitable angst-filled desire to become (and to resist becoming) a being-in-itself. Richard Ford’s work aptly demonstrates how this conflict can manifest as a fundamental indeterminacy. It can be argued that his texts rehearse a desire to maintain identity, and a further self-awareness problematically predicated on a constant interrogation of that identity.
Refusing to postulate suburban identification as total, and as opposed to authenticity and consciousness, necessitates an inquiry into the potential malleability of the relationship between the individual and the patterns from which they draw their sense of self. Finding some measure by which to identify and to create value (even if that measure is contingent) is a central motivation at the heart of Ford’s work. Before Ford, this form of desire lent John Cheever’s stories part off their peculiarly nostalgic and ambiguous tone. Those critics who essentialise their own measures of what literature ought to do lament that Cheever’s stories fail to meet their terms for what makes a text an appropriately worthy piece of social inquiry. Cheever’s texts fail to conform to their standards in the same way that Cheever’s suburban characters fail to conform to certain suburban measures of success. Frequently the response of Cheever’s characters is to attempt to find new orders, new measures and new standards from which to derive value and meaning – even if those measures seem arbitrary, collapse under scrutiny, or ultimately become self-defeating.
Critics are engaged in an analogous process: both characters and readers try to stabilise or prioritise identity, ideology, vocabulary, meaning, or interpretation. A further endeavour of this thesis has therefore been to build new models by which to read Cheever and to apply those models to Ford; I aimed to disengage the texts from readings that demanded a suburban critique, and to demonstrate how their subject matters can be read in less reductive terms. In Ford’s case the concessions to contingency, the limitation of perspective, and the refusal of traditional forms of closure, never prevent Frank Bascombe from offering his voice. Ford’s novels explicitly engage issues surrounding American politics, nationhood, and the relationship between state and individual. Like his own character Frank, who chooses to write a letter to the president, Ford commands the right to a voice that does is not defeated by (and does not depend on) any assumed identification he might have with a white, heterosexual, American male demographic. Any criticisms that Ford is not radical enough, or that he does not speak for a real America, or that his voice has fled to a kind of self-apologetic safety by light of its contingency, only rehearse the same forms of criticism once directed toward Cheever. The identifiable fault in the practice of Cheever’s earliest critics was not their willingness to posit an ideal to aspire to, but rather, their failure to admit the contingency of their own ideals. One of those ideals proposed a place figured as free from conformist constraint and free from the suburbs; the other, the ideal social text, constrained their own conception of what makes for adequate social critique.
Jonathan Franzen’s somewhat infamous Harper’s essay “Perchance to
Dream” (Later re-written and published as “Why Bother” in his collection How to be Alone) considers among other things, the purported death of the social novel. He even refers nostalgically to the days when people like John Cheever and James Baldwin graced the covers of Time Magazine, were read by his father, and were considered important. One of the great ironies of Franzen’s essay is that he was at the time of its publication writing his own social novel, The Corrections which would go on to be a best-seller. Perhaps more interesting is Franzen’s use of the familiar suburban/urban metaphor to articulate his argument about the state of the white American male novelist:
Much of contemporary fiction's vitality now resides in the black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, and women's communities, which have moved into the structures left behind by the departing straight white male. The depressed literary inner city also remains home to solitary artists who are attracted to the adversity and grittiness that only a city can offer, and to a few still-vital cultural monuments (the opera of Toni Morrison, the orchestra of John Updike, the museum of Edith Wharton) to which suburban readers continue to pay polite Sunday visits. (“Perchance to Dream”)
Here culture, ethnicity and sexuality are identity issues figured as urban and gritty and as the “literary inner city”. Supposedly the “departing straight white male” novelist has fled to the relative safety of the suburbs in a pattern that mirrors 1950s ex-urbanisation. Franzen co-opts the familiar signification of the suburbs as a place without real weight. The suburbs are the cleaned out and irrelevant space of (obsolete, culturally irrelevant bourgeois) white male novelists; they continue to signal debilitating places of safety, stagnation, and unconscious silence. Yet his very own novel The Corrections and the stories of writers like Cheever and Ford testify to the alternative claim that the suburb is a setting like any other, where identity is still at issue, and where novelists can write from.
In the work of both Cheever and Ford the suburban setting assumes a metaphorical association with the patterning issues surrounding identity and subject positioning. The simplicity of positing a suburban image as purely inauthentic is undone by both authors as they demonstrate that human angst and anguish – qualities of consciousness and self awareness – are qualities exhibited in the kinds of longings, desperations and dissatisfactions that motivate their characters. In Cheever these motivations lead to various substitutions of one order for another, one act of narration or explanation or imagination for another. In Ford these motivations lead Frank Bascombe to go on narrating, to go on seeking that sense of his meaning in life, his identity, the unification of his perspective of himself with the perspective others have of him. Both writers have a careful and deliberate concern for tone, and a specific awareness of language as a source of pleasure and comfort, as well as an apparent awareness of the gaps of language – the potential for irony, for multiple meanings and connotations. Essentially the quality of self-awareness underpins all of their work as the texts not only make demands of their characters to meet the sources of their identification, but also potentially necessitate a cautious awareness among readers of how their own reader-positions, ideological assumptions, or desires affect their understanding of irony and their appreciation of the literature at hand.
List of used literature
Aldridge, John. “The New American Assembly-Line Fiction: An Empty Blue Center.” The