Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture

I extend special thanks to Philip Sicker from Fordham University for providing the clarity, insight, and support necessary for the development of this book. I also extend gratitude to Lenny Cassuto, Christopher GoGwilt, Moshe Gold, Yvette Christianse, and Nicola Pitchford, all from Fordham. I would like to thank Jean Walton, now at the University of Rhode Island, whose seminar on postmodern fiction and theory led me to develop the ideas that became the basis of this project.

I wish to acknowledge the Walsh Library at Fordham University, the New York City Public Library, the Raether Library and Information Center at Trinity College in Hartford, and the Mitchell College Library in New London for their invaluable resources. I am grateful to Ruth Higgins of Mitchell College for her meticulous proofreading. I would also like to thank Hiromi Yoshida for her valuable commentary on the second edition this project and her continued friendship.

I wish to express special gratitude to my parents, Lucian and Ann Bombaci, whose confidence and support made possible my years of graduate study.

Chapter 1 is a revised and expanded version of an article published in the April–June 2004 edition of LIT: Literature/Interpretation/Theory.

Chapter 2 was previously published in the Spring 2002 edition of Criticism.

During the late modernist period of the 1930s and early 1940s, a number of American artists displayed a fascination not only with the distortion of conventional verbal and visual media, but with bodies, which, from an essentialist perspective, had been deformed by nature. In exploring “freakishness,” these artists locate the similarities and differences between those who are born freaks and those who, through strenuous effort, aim to become freaks by identifying with human oddities. Characters in narratives by Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Tod Browning, and Carson McCullers not only exhibit a fascination with the genetically maimed and distorted, but fetishize this difference. This fetishization, as we will see, is based not on a prurient objectification of freakish bodies, but on a desire to know and experience the subjectivity of marginalized others. In a period of American culture beset with increasing pressures for social and political conformity and with the threat of fascism from Europe, narratives that fetishize the freak defy oppressive norms and values as they search for an anarchic and transformational creativity. Influenced by high modernism, but not encumbered by it, the artists in question developed a “freakish aesthetics” by combining “high” and “low” (i.e. popular) forms. In doing so, they challenged the avant-garde, apolitical elitism of high modernism and remade it in ways that initiated postmodern aesthetics. This movement towards postmodernism in the works of Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Tod Browning, and Carson McCullers is marked by an acceptance of the disteleology, anarchy, and degeneration associated with racial and ethnic outsiders, rather than the high modernist nostalgia for order, progress, and grand narratives.

Using Benjaminian, Foucaldian, and psychoanalytic theoretical contexts, this study will explore the aesthetic and ideological challenges posed by West’s, Barnes’s, Browning’s and McCullers’ late modernist “freakish” aesthetics—a creative vision that fuses “high” and “low” themes and forms in relation to distorted bodies. All of these artists are fascinated by the sphere of “low” culture which they find in Hollywood, freak shows, circuses, and rural towns filled with eccentrics. Except for Barnes’s late work, all use forms that are accessible to a reading public unfamiliar with high modernist habits such as proliferating allusion, syntactical inversion, and self-conscious difficulty. All of these artists employed themes and forms that put them in dialogue with high modernism, which according to Andreas Huyssen created a “great divide” between high and mass culture. Nevertheless, Huyssen notes that the number of “high” appropriations of the popular (as in Joyce, Eliot, and Williams) suggests an unacknowledged symbiotic relationship between high modernism and popular forms: