A PATRIARCHY OF PAIN NAM LE, DON DELILLO, AND THE HIERARCHICAL COSMOPOLITANISM OF CONTEMPORARY FICTION

A PATRIARCHY OF PAIN: NAM LE, DON DELILLO, AND THE HIERARCHICAL COSMOPOLITANISM OF CONTEMPORARY FICTION RODNEY TAVEIRA UNITED STATES STUDIES CENTRE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY Ripe fruity notes, supported by a delightful mix of East African and Central American acidity —Description of Bin Sixteen coffee, Picholine restaurant, New York This article examines a conflict of cosmopolitanisms in contemporary literary production and reception I argue that a graphic depiction of pain and the male body—a patriarchy of pain —reveals a tension between the newer and the older, the local and the transnational in the field of contemporary literature and in its reception This tension adumbrates what I call the hierarchical cosmopolitanism of contemporary fiction, which results from an encounter of different cosmopolitanisms Firstly, I elaborate these different cosmopolitanisms by reading Nam Le s Meeting Elise, from The Boat , Le s much-awarded collection of short stories set across the globe, alongside Philip Roth s late work and Don DeLillo s Cosmopolis (2003), a novel that depicts the daylong journey in a limousine of a billionaire currency trader down New York s th Street Secondly, ) compare Le s newer cosmopolitanism and DeLillo s older cosmopolitanism against the cosmopolitan scene of New York City book reviews By an older New York cosmopolitanism, ) refer to what Bruce Robbins identifies as an attitude of detachment from one s place of origin and a transfer of primary loyalty to a larger social collectivity which claims an antithesis to local loyalties Pheng Cheah argues that this mode of cosmopolitanism primarily designates an intellectual ethic, a universal humanism NEW SCHOLAR: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HUMANITIES, CREATIVE ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES VOLUME NUMBER 1, 2016 | ISSN 1839-5333 | WWW.NEWSCHOLAR.ORG.AU RODNEY TAVEIRA| A PATRIARCHY OF PAIN that transcends regional particularism This ethic ranges across the (international) world of literary production, distribution and consumption, and is assumed in New York book reviews New York book reviews, then, are an apposite field in which to explore the fate of contemporary cosmopolitanism, because the older cosmopolitanism enters into relations with newer cosmopolitanisms in the space of a global city The newer cosmopolitanisms emerged, Robbins contends, in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall Cosmopolitanism was democratised; what was previously an exclusively Western, exclusively upper-classed Robbins attitude became available to all in a globalised and decolonised planet of late capitalist relations i What ) call hierarchical cosmopolitanism emerges from these relations, but it also lies nascent within the older cosmopolitanism )n his essay On Cosmopolitanism, Jacques Derrida recognises a productive contradiction within )mmanuel Kant s claim for universal hospitality as a natural right, which has the effect of making the basic condition of cosmopolitanism—the acceptance and opening of a historical place to all newcomers; that is, universal hospitality— precede culture, institutions and the state (20-21) Kant s cosmopolitanism is almost pre-human: limits and borders emerge as soon as the pragmatics of finite space, economic imperatives, personal autonomy, and bodily safety are taken into account Consequently, cosmopolitanism becomes conditional; it only makes sense if its constitutive hospitality can be withheld, bestowed, curtailed In its articulation of contradictions and limits Derrida s thinking on cosmopolitanism originally Kant s cosmopolitanism is presented in 1996 before the International Parliament almost pre-human: limits and of Writers, and citing its constitution s call for the borders emerge as soon as the opening of cities of refuge , sits at and, in a sense pragmatics of finite space, enunciates, the juncture between the older and newer economic imperatives, personal cosmopolitanisms The reception of Le and DeLillo in the field of New York book reviews foregrounds the autonomy, and bodily safety encounter of the different cosmopolitanisms What are taken into account Donald C Goellnicht calls Le s refugee Consequently, cosmopolitanism one of the newer cosmopolitanisms cosmopolitanism becomes made available by democratisation, globalisation, and conditional; it only makes decolonisation) is regarded differently from the older sense if its constitutive New York cosmopolitanism ascribed to DeLillo This hospitality can be withheld, regard is shaped by the conditional hospitality of the bestowed, curtailed older cosmopolitanism of the New York book reviews.ii Le s Meeting Elise provides a productive point of intervention because it recognises and challenges the scene of New York s older and ascriptive cosmopolitanism The story depicts Henry Luff, a decrepit figure who hobbles through New York An internationally-recognised painter, Luff has reaped the financial benefits of his aesthetic capital But his time is almost up He is diagnosed with colorectal cancer that has metastasised into his lymphatic system Both the first paragraphs of Meeting Elise and the sentences within the subsequent paragraphs alternate between representations of the pain in Luff s body, and memories These paragraphs are centred on a bathtub that, in Luff s present bodily sense or time, has drops of blood leaked from his anus into the water Described as little roses, these drops evoke the memory of Olivia, Luff s muse and dead lover, with whom he spent hours soaking in this tub Memory and also a sense of temporal duration connects Luff, his lover, and his estranged daughter Luff met Olivia when she was seventeen Seventeen years have elapsed 118 NEW SCHOLAR: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HUMANITIES, CREATIVE ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES VOLUME NUMBER 1, 2016 | ISSN 1839-5333 | WWW.NEWSCHOLAR.ORG.AU NEW SCHOLAR | VOL NO | COSMOPOLITANISM AND ITS CRITICS since he last saw his daughter, Elise, who has come to In their graphic depiction of New York from Russia to play at Carnegie Hall to pain and looming death in receive the global recognition that affirms her value as ageing artists in the characters a musician Luff reads in a newspaper review of his of Luff and Zuckerman, Le and cellist daughter s inventive fingering for passagework Roth portray a patriarchy of (77), which foreshadows the pain of his rectal pain that intersects across examination in the story s next section When he imagines the hard lump outside his rosebud, a New York and maps ailments memory of his daughter as a baby is triggered, just a that are gendered male by bloody, scraggly mess between my wife s harness-hung association with the prostate legs , which again connects through florid imagery and consequent impotence to the blood in the bathwater Thus, even Luff s rectal blood is made valuable in its association with procreation and its aestheticisation by his painterly eye This hold on value and creation—domineering yet vulnerable, defiant yet impotent—in the face of bodily, explicitly male pain, defines the patriarchy of pain that Le exploits and challenges Luff has been unable to paint since Olivia died from a heroin overdose His incapacity is redoubled on other fronts (is rectal examination reveals his impotence: There s a girl in the room who ) d jump if ) could stand up, but even if ) did – get this – her face wouldn t budge from the same mix of tenderness and pity holding it together now Other distant connections, instances of Anthony Giddens intensification of worldwide social relations under globalisation (64), press upon Luff His ex-wife has an extra-territorial claim on him from Russia, extracting money for a cello worth hundreds of thousands of dollars (is daughter s music manager and fiancé is a Briton whom Luff calls The Leech —more bloodletting and figuration Luff s aesthetic capital is riven with the blood and money that underwrite global markets and exchange Similar to Robbins dating of the democratisation and pluralisation of the previously monolithic cosmopolitanism, Goellnicht notes in Meeting Elise an intergenerational jostling between older Eastern European Jewish émigrés, such as Luff, and a displacing influx of post1989 Eastern Europeans, such as his daughter (208) A similar relevance-questioning displacement befalls Philip Roth s Nathan Zuckerman, that most horny and sexed of characters in American literature Roth, like DeLillo, occupies a canonical position in contemporary American fiction.iii In Exit Ghost (2007), Roth portrays Zuckerman, a kind of alter ego that has appeared in seven novels since 1979, as incontinent and impotent after the removal of his prostate ) know it s no comfort, says Zuckerman s urologist, but you re not alone—this disease has reached epidemic proportions in America Your struggle is shared by many others )n Roth s previous novel, Everyman , a doctor pushes on the main character s groin, and the pain is so excruciating that he, the unnamed Everyman, feels on the verge of vomiting (35) At another point he phones his friend Ezra, who was expected to live about a month; Ezra says, Sometimes my prostate feels like ) m trying to excrete it In their graphic depiction of pain and looming death in ageing artists in the characters of Luff and Zuckerman, Le and Roth portray a patriarchy of pain that intersects across New York and maps ailments that are gendered male by association with the prostate and consequent impotence ) d say it s in part about the dissolution of [Zuckerman s] creative force, says Roth in an interview with Amazon.com Roth continues that Zuckerman has suffered the consequences of a prostate surgery for cancer, juxtaposing an ailing mind with an ailing body 119 NEW SCHOLAR: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HUMANITIES, CREATIVE ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES VOLUME NUMBER 1, 2016 | ISSN 1839-5333 | WWW.NEWSCHOLAR.ORG.AU RODNEY TAVEIRA| A PATRIARCHY OF PAIN The inability to create is associated with dysfunction in the male reproductive system.iv Similarly, in Meeting Elise, Luff s artistic and physical incapacities are linked to impotence (Luff cannot seduce the young female medical student), and exacerbated by foreign intervention (the Leech) and foreign aid (money for a European cello in Russia) In Cosmopolis, DeLillo resists the dissolution of age, and of sexual and artistic potency, portrayed by the patriarchy of pain in the work of Le and Roth Instead of creating a man on the edge of obsolescence, DeLillo has the novel s main character render the world obsolescent Born in 1973, the year that the American currency was fully floated, Eric Packer, twenty-eight, multibillionaire futures and currency trader, lives in a 104-million-dollar penthouse towering above the United Nations building in Manhattan He is chauffeured in his super hi-tech limousine on what will be, literally, a death drive, for he we will be shot dead when he reaches (ell s Kitchen, where he was raised Packer is a master cosmopolitan, a self-described world citizen with a New York set of balls (e deliberately loses his heiress wife s old-money European fortune, squanders his good old American self-made wealth by irrationally but intentionally betting against the rise of the yen, survives an attack by anti-World Trade Organisation protesters after they bomb the NASDAQ, kills his bodyguard, shoots himself in the hand in front of his assassin, and has an onanistic sexual encounter whilst having his prostate examined Throughout his journey, the integrity of the present and the future is teased apart because Packer continually sees images of future events before they occur; what Joseph Conte identifies as repeated images of hysteron proteron (186)—putting his hand on his chin, a bomb explosion, and finally, his own death—via video screens in his car and his bleeding-edge electron wristwatch Far from death and dysfunction, Packer is ahead of time, denying the deterministic drive toward death that shadows Luff and Zuckerman This visual remediation of time and experience is illuminated keenly by Sean Cubitt s discussion of the post-cinematic era of the digital moving image in The Cinema Effect (2004) In a section fortuitously entitled Cosmopolis, concerning the transnational production and consumption of Ang Lee s film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon , Cubitt denotes the field of the cosmopolitan battle : Inseparable from the concept of globalization, informationalization describes the way in which communication has changed during the course of the twentieth century Since the emergence of a world economy in the sixteenth century, the dominant medium of human communication has been money During the last seventy years or so, that centrality has begun to be displaced by information, understood here in its technical definition, a structured pattern of data Informationalization is the process through which economic domination becomes information domination (336) As James Annesley notes, Packer dominates globally and locally: [Packer] is, as he drives across New York, not just at the centre of the market (and by implication history), but in the heart of everyday life (is prousted limousine is littered with screens feeding him televisual information from around the globe.v Sometimes the images are information itself, a flux of digits representing the erratic movements of global markets that he can affect by a small hand movement or an abbreviated utterance, bringing the weight of his mathematical genius and massive wealth to bear on the world via a slight bodily gesture: The context was nearly touchless He could talk most systems into operation or wave a hand at a screen and make it go black Pace Derrida s understanding of antiethical, as against the home, Cubitt writes that [b]y abandoning the ethical commitment to hospitality, the cosmopolitan abandons the ethic of the face-to-face, the ethics of communication The other becomes a data set, an object to be 120 NEW SCHOLAR: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HUMANITIES, CREATIVE ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES VOLUME NUMBER 1, 2016 | ISSN 1839-5333 | WWW.NEWSCHOLAR.ORG.AU NEW SCHOLAR | VOL NO | COSMOPOLITANISM AND ITS CRITICS managed When Packer reaches the end of his journey, he refuses the integrity of the name of the man who is standing in front of him and wants to kill him Sheets Richard Sheets Means nothing to me He said these words into the face of Richard Sheets Means nothing to me He felt a trace of the old stale pleasure, dropping an offhand remark that makes a person feel worthless So small and forgettable a thing that spins such disturbance (192, emphasis in original) Packer stares down the responsibility demanded by the face of the other—here, his former employee Sitting in the home of Richard Sheets a squat in an abandoned building in (ell s Kitchen), the older kind of cosmopolitan, comfortable and authoritative anywhere in the world, declares that neither the perception of the other, nor the claim the other makes to its own identity and humanity, means anything Yet recognition and identification linger; despite the novel s concentration on newness, the future, sexual prowess, and global power, the patriarchy of pain manifests The asymmetry of Packer s daily-examined prostate is an extended joke throughout Cosmopolis, occurring five times , , , , until its punchline near Packer s death )ts significance perplexes Packer until he meets his assassin Richard Sheets (alias Benno Levin), who also possesses an asymmetrical prostate Packer asks, What does it mean? Benno nodded for a while He was happy to sit there nodding Nothing It means nothing, he said )t s harmless A harmless variation Nothing to worry about Your age, why worry? Eric didn t think he d ever known such relief, hearing these words from a man who shared his condition (199) That a shared asymmetry does not mean anything is one of the greatest things that the cosmopolitan Packer has ever heard.vi There is a perverse pleasure in this patriarchy of pain; the pleasure is a way of denying the ailing and obsolescence that it indicates in Luff and Zuckerman Nonetheless, after Packer shoots a hole in his own hand, pain is all: The pain was the world (201) But its significance here is undermined in being self-inflicted, another attempt to control death, which looms in the near future In Underworld , DeLillo declares, Pain is just another form of information Packer will be killed, but his economic-cum-information domination means that he sees his death before it occurs (on the video screen in his electron wristwatch) and that he lives on in the time warp of informationalisation made possible by his genius, wealth, and cutting-edge technology Russell Scott Valentino has noted that sacrifice is signalled early in Cosmopolis— When he died he would not end The world would end —and will lead to a rupture of sorts in the time-space dimension Valentino Packer is presented by his Chief of Theory the option of living on a disk when he dies, becoming an idea beyond the body Packer moves from a cosmopolitan world citizen with a New York set of balls to beyond the grounding in his body to become the information he mastered in life Packer exits his limousine only to have sex with women Per Serritslev Petersen calls Packer s frequent sexual encounters, Packer s favoured embodiment therapy , take part in a rave with ecstatic, youthful revellers high on a new kind of drug, and to die a death that is deferred by the preposterous figure of hysteron proteron 121 NEW SCHOLAR: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HUMANITIES, CREATIVE ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES VOLUME NUMBER 1, 2016 | ISSN 1839-5333 | WWW.NEWSCHOLAR.ORG.AU RODNEY TAVEIRA| A PATRIARCHY OF PAIN and his digital afterlife Here, as in the stories of Le and Roth, the male reproductive system acts as a metonym for the ailing body and its looming death, the patriarchy of pain from which Packer seeks both sustenance and escape While ) read Packer s eternal digital presence as a resistance to the challenges of displacement and dissolution that looming death and newcomers present for canonical figures of older cosmopolitanism like Roth and DeLillo, this is not to say that other constituents of this cosmopolitanism scene—the book reviewers—recognise this resistance Recognition of the resistance would admit the abovementioned challenges Moving on to the New York book reviews, I argue that the conditional hospitality of cosmopolitanism affects Le s work and that this is further inflected by the hierarchical cosmopolitanism of its reception In his review of The Boat for The New York Times, (ari Kunzru perceives the problems of a non-white writer trying to negotiate the world of contemporary fiction production, particularly in the collection s first story, Love and (onor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice vii Most acclaim for The Boat has focussed on this story and The Boat, the final story, which provides the title for the collection Both can be traced to Le s biography: Le came to Australia as a Vietnamese refugee when he was three months old and, after quitting a corporate life as a lawyer in Melbourne, he wrote much of the collection at the )owa Writers Workshop The Boat is a harrowing account of the weeks at sea of a group of refugees, heading from Vietnam to Australia Love and (onor is a metafictional, self-reflexive narrative of a VietnameseAustralian writer at the )owa Writers Workshop Blighted by writer s block, he struggles with the question of ethnic literature and the ethics of using his family s biography in stories like The Boat Tellingly, aside from Goellnicht s insightful essay, little critical or academic attention has been paid to Meeting Elise, which is referred to archly in Le s first story as depicting New York painters with haemorrhoids —an apt gloss Indeed, the attention that the story has received has largely been negative After praising Love and (onor and The Boat, Kunzru condemns Meeting Elise by passing it over )t falls, then, under the banner of empty virtuosity that Kunzru flies over Le s other stories, set in Medillín, Tehran, and (iroshima The Boat is transparently a product of the increasingly formalized milieu in which American writers train – a well-wrought collection that, in its acute self-consciousness, trails a telltale whiff of the industry that is its initial concern, of the heap of fellowship and job applications the fictional Le needs to draft and submit when he s interrupted by his father Ethnic lit is unhappily what emerges when identity politics head into the marketing meeting, and for any writer with a non-WASP name, it s all too easy to feel one is being pimped for one s background and life experience (real or imaginary), and somehow colluding in the production of a crude, essentialized version of oneself in return for an advantage over ethnically uninteresting peers Le is starting to grapple with the subtleties of authenticity, but one comes away feeling that it s not really his subject, that he has a future as a very different kind of writer Le s stories that are not linked to his biography are empty because the traces of research, says Kunzru, indicate an attempt to remind us that we are far away from )owa, and Vietnam They become an excluded middle enveloped by the success of the authentic, ethnically interesting stories that begin and end the collection, which frame the collection as informed experience The excluded middle might be a place, or a future, in which to move away from a narrative of exclusion, but Kunzru s charge seems to be that we are too close to )owa or Vietnam in the excluded middle, as if veering toward the authentically ethnic pole pushes us away from the recognisably local pole, or that the proximity to the imagined locations is laboured.viii 122 NEW SCHOLAR: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HUMANITIES, CREATIVE ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES VOLUME NUMBER 1, 2016 | ISSN 1839-5333 | WWW.NEWSCHOLAR.ORG.AU NEW SCHOLAR | VOL NO | COSMOPOLITANISM AND ITS CRITICS Other critics found fault along similar lines Laird (unt, in New York s Bookforum, praised the collection, but found the anomaly in this otherwise stellar gathering is Meeting Eliose [sic], which predictably triangulates love, death, and futile New Yorker-esque longing Michiko Kakutani, in The New York Times, spies the puppet-strings: Some of his attempts at ventriloquism – like his portrait of an ailing New York painter … can feel strained, like creativewriting exercises in point of view ix So perfect must be the outsider s mimicry of his host s milieu that one is not supposed to even know that he is a visitor Yet, naming his efforts as ventriloquism or finding their basis in The New Yorker defines Le as an outsider that, nonetheless, clarifies and thus challenges the contradictory scene of cosmopolitan hospitality When Le is taken by Patricia Cohen for his New York Times interview to Picholine, he orders the same dish that Luff orders but does not eat in Meeting Elise : sea urchin panna cotta Like most details in The Boat, writes Cohen, they were pulled from assiduous research he did from a fungus-plagued farmhouse in )owa City )t is Le s first visit to the restaurant (e conceals neither his research nor his craft: I picked the dishes because they were so exotic sounding, said Le ) ll confess to you ) didn t know what panna cotta was, he says, his Australian accent stretching out each vowel like Silly Putty Le s openness creates every possibility for what So perfect must be the Jahan Ramazani might describe as cosmopolitan fellow outsider s mimicry of his host s feeling By roving assiduously across the globe, Le s milieu that one is not supposed transnational method deploys what Ramazani calls, to even know that he is a interstitial poetries, which articulate a verbal space visitor Yet, naming his efforts that resembles a cosmopolitan public sphere Ramazani repeats some of the humanistic-cum- as ventriloquism or finding their basis in The New Yorker utopian language of the older cosmopolitanism, but he defines Le as an outsider that, includes within it a translocal cosmopolitanism that allows dialogic encounters between different groups, nonetheless, clarifies and thus from the global to the parochial But Cohen attends to challenges the contradictory Le s voice, concentrating on the trans and foreclosing scene of cosmopolitan the local Le s Australian accent does not connect hospitality smoothly to his name or his Southeast Asian appearance—it looks like ventriloquism Further, describing his accent as Silly Putty makes him sound childish and false, thinly veiling a cringe as the outsider betrays his outsiderness Even while they praise him, Le s champions recapitulate the insider-outsider, host-guest model of literary production and reception of the older New York cosmopolitanism It reads as quaint, and not cosmopolitan or translocal, that Le finds New York haute cuisine to be exotic Further, Marilynne Robinson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning teacher of Le at )owa, Cohen assures us, says his background sensitized him to very different cultural settings, giving him an unusual ability to identify with his characters; he never seems to be looking at them from the outside Kunzru takes an opposing view that nonetheless reinforces a value based on proximity: We read about basuco and kami, but through the lens of ethnic lit the main effect of such well-chosen words is a kind of empty virtuosity, a way to remind us that we are far away from )owa, and Vietnam Yet nothing is made of the authenticating exotica of tiet canh – a specialty – mincemeat soaked in fresh congealed duck s blood Le , over which the father in Love and (onor recounts his personal experience of the My Lai Massacre 123 NEW SCHOLAR: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HUMANITIES, CREATIVE ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES VOLUME NUMBER 1, 2016 | ISSN 1839-5333 | WWW.NEWSCHOLAR.ORG.AU RODNEY TAVEIRA| A PATRIARCHY OF PAIN Le s value comes from, is recognised, as elsewhere Christopher Lee, pace Paul De Man on the resistance to theory, argues that in Love and (onor, Le reveals … the tropological nature of the ethnic story and its constituting elements While Lee privileges an ethnic story that can be authenticated by Le s biography, he does so by interrogating Rey Chow s concept of coercive mimeticism, whereby writers categorised as ethnic or marginal must reproduce the features of their ethnicity or marginality ascribed to them from a native or central group (33) )nstead, Lee finds that the reproductions of marginality in Love and (onor end up acquiring a materiality of their own through slippages of meanings and misinterpretations as when a homeless man does not realise that the narrator and his father are visitors to the US from Australia, not new immigrants By concentrating on the framing stories and the middle stories, Goellnicht detects Le s refugee cosmopolitanism Unlike the New York reviews, Goellnicht recognises the coercive mimeticism in Love and (onor when Le references tiet canh, though he assigns this move to the narrator: Nam thus fulfils the stereotype of producing ethnic writing dismissed as shallow by his friends At the same time, Goellnicht sees in the stories cast otherwise as an excluded middle Le s refusal to be trapped in the role of the Vietnamese ethnic writer , citing Le s own concern that the inauthentically ethnic stories might be misread as five-finger exercises qtd in Goellnicht —mere inventive passagework, to re-associate Le and his translocal character, Elise Goellnicht sees Le as a newer kind of cosmopolitan, one who is not detached or above the fray, who is suspicious of the aestheticisation created by the distance between writer and what is written Indeed, Le does not hide his engagement with the questions posed by his presence as a writer with a particular and particularising background )t s barely clear what the lines would be separating, he says of ethnic literature in a Knopf Q&A, available on his website, especially when you consider how fiction necessarily invokes contradictory impulses: what s most authentic is rooted in the most contrived artifice, truth and verisimilitude are often poles apart, biography is essential yet irrelevant, sometimes you can tell a story only by not telling it Le recognises that his outsiderness gives him a certain capital that, at the same time, renders the older form of cosmopolitanism elusive The interaction of the attendant cosmopolitanisms of these milieux draws out the hierarchical cosmopolitanism of the New York reviews Instead of being tempted, then, to read the reviewers inhospitable censures and patronising pats-on-the-head as unbefitting cosmopolitan critics and the critical sphere in which they operate, one should recognise these pronouncements as precisely that of the older cosmopolitanism For Derrida, quoting Kant: hospitality signifies the claim of a stranger entering foreign territory to be treated by its owner without hostility The latter may send him away again, if this can be done without his death; but, so long as he conducts himself peaceably, he must not be treated as an enemy It is not a right to be treated as a guest to which the stranger can lay claim … but he has a right of visitation It is never polite for a guest to mimic the host behind his or her back It is embarrassing if a ventriloquism of local customs is unsuccessful Surely, though, if there is an attempt to engage the host and the host s milieu, it deserves more than dismissal, or an encounter with a local reality (sea urchin panna cotta!) that reveals the artifice of the guest s product and its production While this might be a slightly supercilious application of one of Kant s Three Definite Articles for perpetual peace, the same criticism—traces of research, artifice, labour— is not levelled at DeLillo by the New York reviews.x A native New Yorker, a cosmopolitan of its ilk, DeLillo would seem to possess Kunzru s subtleties of authenticity —think of the Bronx sections of his magisterial Underworld, often praised as one of the best novels of the twentieth century, in which DeLillo, apparently, reproduces the Bronx street slang of his youth.xi 124 NEW SCHOLAR: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HUMANITIES, CREATIVE ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES VOLUME NUMBER 1, 2016 | ISSN 1839-5333 | WWW.NEWSCHOLAR.ORG.AU NEW SCHOLAR | VOL NO | COSMOPOLITANISM AND ITS CRITICS This is not to say that Cosmopolis was met with fawning reviews Indeed, the locals were hostile John Updike, in The New Yorker, felt Cosmopolis to be inauthentic because of its narrative implausibility; it would be fine coming, he opines, from other patriarchs of American fiction, like Kurt Vonnegut or Paul Auster (to whom the book was dedicated) Updike encourages the reader to find better accounts of Masters of the Universe by reading Tom Wolfe.xii Yet, Updike manages to spot the authentic: (is limo ride … does, however, have a few stops in the world of the living, of the substantially felt The very notion of a daylong push along Forty-seventh Street is funny and metaphoric—a soul s slow-motion hurtle from the U.N s posh environs to the desolation of (ell s Kitchen, with the diamond block between Fifth and Sixth Avenues providing a splash of noontide sparkle Injecting herself less belletristically into her review than Updike, Kakutani puffs DeLillo s place in the American literary canon: No American novelist has been more attuned to the surreal weirdness of our recent history than Don DeLillo Yet she attacks Cosmopolis: )ts … portrait of a millennial Manhattan is hopelessly clichéd… And shockingly for Mr DeLillo, some of the details – like the proliferation of white limos like Eric s that swarm the city s street – feel strained, neither heightened and odd enough to create a satiric portrait of New York nor deadon accurate enough to capture a real moment in time xiii While Le works hard, tries, DeLillo, who is an authentic native son, does not try hard enough DeLillo merely repeats what is in front of him without the illumination of embellishment or invention, or deploys clichés, something anyone, no matter his or her location, could also deploy The title of Laura Miller s review for The New York Observer reveals her verdict: All Day in a Rich Guy s Limo Makes for a Very Silly Novel Walter Kirn is more scathing in The New York Times Book Review: Our world has been transistorized to a fare-thee-well – now tell us something we don t know DeLillo refuses (is is a fossilized academic futurism )t s as though he had gone into permanent seclusion in 1968 or so following a New Wave film festival and has gathered all of his subsequent experiences via the reading of essays on poststructuralism and the viewing of remote-control security cameras trained on major urban landmarks Kirn suggests that DeLillo assimilates a dated cosmopolitan aesthetic from the (presumably French) New Wave Yet he grants DeLillo some authenticity, even if DeLillo s authenticity is irrelevant and out-of-date And while Kirn might be slaying a literary father by his tying of DeLillo to the failed revolutionary year of ,xiv he gets it exactly wrong.xv DeLillo s notes and drafts for Cosmopolis indicate not a preternatural grasp of the subtleties of authenticity, or laziness, but an anxiety of authenticity Amongst DeLillo s papers held by the Harry Ransom Center, a five-page itinerary, in typescript, lists significant locations along th St / , handwritten in the upper right hand corner, indicates that the research trip was repeated—an attempt, it seems, to ensure his local knowledge is relevant and up-to-date DeLillo adds to the list of real places (as evinced by handwriting around and over the typewritten itinerary) only on the west side of 47th St, where Cosmopolis becomes less beholden to the actuality of New York s geography and veers into the imaginary Further, perhaps recognising what Ramazani identifies as the common perception of poetry as being local, regional, and inward , DeLillo belabours the rap lyrics of Brutha Fez, whose funeral Packer encounters The lyrics are worked and re-worked across approximately twenty pages Just six short excerpts are included in the novel Even Brutha Fez s name is a laboured invention There are nearly fifty variations on the name in DeLillo s drafts: Fez (ead, 125 NEW SCHOLAR: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HUMANITIES, CREATIVE ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES VOLUME NUMBER 1, 2016 | ISSN 1839-5333 | WWW.NEWSCHOLAR.ORG.AU RODNEY TAVEIRA| A PATRIARCHY OF PAIN Rhymer Fez, T-Bird Fez, and so on (ad DeLillo chosen, say, Macro Fez instead of Brutha Fez, the relationship between Packer and the Sufi rapper would be interpreted differently )nstead of Brutha being a means of exclusion Packer s association with Brutha Fez cannot fall under the filial bounds of religious and racial brotherhood, even as their masculinity and their wealth—features of the older cosmopolitanism—meant they met twice, and even though Packer plays Brutha Fez s music in one of his two elevators , Macro provides a global connection between the two through an inclusive image of worldwide financial structuration that elides or overwrites the difference, the newer and pluralised cosmopolitanism, contained in Brutha Both Le and DeLillo have worked assiduously on their texts, yet they have been judged on different terms Le, whose biography is always explicitly noted, remains an outsider, a guest to be admitted DeLillo s previous works provide most of his background, and this background always situates him as local.xvi Le s Meeting Elise, as well as its reception, grapples with New York as a site of contestation between bodies, generations, family, lovers, and memory This challenges the kind of literary parochialism, a host s protest, played out in Roth s and DeLillo s patriarchy of pain, where the locals paint, trade, write and review in a formalized milieu (Kunzru) of hierarchical cosmopolitanism As ) argue above, by portraying a patriarchy of pain in Meeting Elise, Le does Roth and a version of DeLillo that DeLillo resists in Cosmopolis.xvii Placing Meeting Elise between the lauded and authentic or authenticating stories, The Boat and Love and (onor, leaks the transnationalism of its production and the patriarchy of pain signals a slipping grasp on cultural and literary value The Boat jars with the New York reviewers because transnationalism is methodical Goellnicht, less derisive of method and not beholden to the older cosmopolitanism, cites Peter Nyers concept of abject cosmopolitanism : These groups of outcasts, discarded and rejected, appear to be the opposite of the highly valued cosmopolitan who is at home everywhere, but they are in fact constitutive of the democratic cosmopolitan as the other is constitutive of the self Such groups have, in many instances, taken up democratic agency in combating the restrictive measures that would seek to exclude or deport them, thus adopting a stance of critical cosmopolitanism (212) The value of Le s transnational method becomes his refugee cosmopolitanism operating in his final story, The Boat (is broader abject, critical cosmopolitanism, ) have argued, is present in the middle stories This is especially the case for Meeting Elise, as it depicts the scene of older, New York cosmopolitanism, and anticipates and resists the reluctant responses of the New York reviewers to its Both Le and DeLillo have portrayal of the patriarchy of pain worked assiduously on their The contradictory parochialism of the texts, yet they have been globalised field of literary production and the judged on different terms Le, hierarchical cosmopolitanism of its critical reception is whose biography is always telling in the need to use DeLillo s archive to demonstrate that, despite the claims of the New York explicitly noted, remains an reviews, he actually tried when he wrote Cosmopolis outsider, a guest to be That this labour is not used to criticise a DeLillo or a admitted DeLillo s previous Roth but instead points to an obsolescence that works provide most of his nonetheless authenticates what is considered late background, and this work, indicates that what Paul Giles has identified as background always situates the reciprocal position of the United States in the him as local transnational era of literary production actually resists 126 NEW SCHOLAR: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HUMANITIES, CREATIVE ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES VOLUME NUMBER 1, 2016 | ISSN 1839-5333 | WWW.NEWSCHOLAR.ORG.AU NEW SCHOLAR | VOL NO | COSMOPOLITANISM AND ITS CRITICS reciprocity The archive is unseen or overlooked because the authenticity allowed DeLillo or Roth gives value to the canon and the ancillary markets of ethnic or world literatures in English.xviii Even when DeLillo sets his novels outside the United States, salutary mention is made of his travels in Greece and the Middle East in the preceding years British novelist Geoff Dyer, upon declaring The Names (1982) to be his favourite novel, uncritically cites DeLillo s interview with Anthony DeCurtis, in which DeLillo claims that there were periods in Greece when ) tasted and saw and heard with much more sharpness and clarity than ) d ever done before or since qtd in Dyer This bestows DeLillo, whose other novels are set in the contemporary United States, with the prized subtleties of authenticity.xix Hierarchical cosmopolitanism explains the resistant New York reviews that met Meeting Elise Australian, European, and Asian reviewers did not have a problem with the story.xx This statement is slippery as Kunzru, I argue above, criticised the story by association But the elision of Australia from the list of places from which Kunzru claims Le tries to distract his readers, with his all-too-obvious research, is a telling indication of the hierarchical cosmopolitanism to which Kunzru adheres, even if he, a non-white writer from outside the United States, also criticises it The world-famous )owa Writers Workshop? Vietnam s traumatic recent history and its tortuous relationship to the United States? Hot Corporate law in Melbourne? A fishing town in Australia? Not so hot By placing the story of a New York painter with haemorrhoids, an obsolescent beneficiary of older cosmopolitanism between his roundly praised ethnic stories, and amongst others set in )ran, Australia, Colombia, and Japan, Le visits his critical cosmopolitanism upon globalised literary production and pre-empts its reception What could have been read as interstitial prose instead finds blockage, the critical arrhythmia of hierarchical cosmopolitanism in the global city of New York If the older cosmopolitanism is not dying it is inhospitable Its creative males are obsolescent and incapacitated, even as they portray and resist this patriarchy of pain Their failing reproductive systems hurt them and will kill them—yet the body cosmopolitic rejects a transplant NS DR RODNEY TAVEIRA is Lecturer in American Studies at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney Rodney has published on contemporary American fiction, television, literary responses to 9-11, and the interrelation of cinema, photography, painting, and literature He is currently working on a manuscript that investigates visual culture and the postwar American novel NOTES Robbins (10– cites the changing usage of cosmopolitanism by James Clifford, who used it derisively in 1980 when identifying the humanism in Edward Said s Orientalism, only to laud i 127 NEW SCHOLAR: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HUMANITIES, CREATIVE ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES VOLUME NUMBER 1, 2016 | ISSN 1839-5333 | WWW.NEWSCHOLAR.ORG.AU RODNEY TAVEIRA| A PATRIARCHY OF PAIN the specific cosmopolitan viewpoints of a cosmopolitanism Clifford saw in the host of servants, helpers, companions, guides, bearers, etc [who had] been discursively excluded from the role of proper travellers because of their race and class qtd in Robbins ii Bertold Schoene, Goellnicht notes, finds the older cosmopolitanism at its peak between the fall of the Berlin Wall and / , and dismisses it as naïve and curiously aestheticizing (arold Bloom stated in that today there are four living American novelists ) know of who are still at work and who deserve our praise, when expressing his horror that Stephen King was awarded a National Book Foundation Award Alongside Roth and DeLillo, Bloom placed Thomas Pynchon and Cormac McCarthy iii The self-proclaimed diminution of Roth s own literary capabilities, which has led to Roth s retirement, ran parallel to the appearance of male impotence in his late work (Pierpoint 283) iv Prousted is DeLillo s neologism Packer has his limousine lined with cork, as did Marcel Proust, famously, his writing room Both attempt to block out the immediate world of everyday life even as they range across it and beyond in memory, and create it through imagination and cognitive-aesthetic prowess v Aaron Chandler writes that the the asymmetrical prostate represents that otherness in Packer that he cannot see in himself; he understands it in theory, but depends on others to probe and survey it He is blind to it, as he is to every instance of asymmetry in the novel (251) vi The beautiful bombast of William Faulkner s Nobel Prize acceptance speech provides the title to this story The writer, says Faulkner, must leave vii no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice Until he does so, he labors under a curse He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value… (is griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars He writes not of the heart but of the glands viii Mark McGurl notes that DeLillo (along with John Updike and Cormac McCarthy) does not fall within The Program Era instituted by the )owa Writers Workshop because he has instead been supported by book sales, by the healthy per-word rates of a magazine like the New Yorker, or by the largesse of non-academic institutions like the Guggenheim Foundation (30) Interestingly, Andrew Riemer, in the Sydney Morning Herald, finds (alflead Bay, set in a small fishing town in Australia, to be the collection s weakest story, though he does not cite reasons of predictability or obvious workmanship ix ) must note that New York reviews implies a space more reminiscent of Benedict Anderson s imagined community of a nation, as opposed to comprising reviewers that reside in New York, or were born and raised there x ) say apparently because how to verify its accuracy? )ts verisimilitude is a product of DeLillo s aesthetic capital and the power of his prose Also, note that authenticity is grounded in ethnicity (here, Italian immigrants) xi David Foster Wallace names Updike, alongside Roth and Norman Mailer, as one of the Great Male Narcissists who ve dominated postwar American fiction that are now in their xii 128 NEW SCHOLAR: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HUMANITIES, CREATIVE ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES VOLUME NUMBER 1, 2016 | ISSN 1839-5333 | WWW.NEWSCHOLAR.ORG.AU NEW SCHOLAR | VOL NO | COSMOPOLITANISM AND ITS CRITICS senescence in his scathing review of Updike s Toward the End of Time (1997) Yet, like Kakutani, he upholds Updike s canonicity on the basis of his previous novels Kakutani herself has been an object of derision because she is a non-white writer )n Roth s Sabbath’s Theatre, a character named Kimiko Kazizaka is described, as Roth s biographer Claudia Roth Pierpoint notes, as the Japanese viperina The novel s objectionable titular character, Mickey Sabbath, goes on: Kakizomi Kazikomi Who would remember their fucking names Who wanted to qtd in Pierpoint Jonathan Franzen, in many ways an heir to Roth s and DeLillo s canonicity, is less racially specific in his criticism, roundly describing Kakutani as the stupidest person in New York Yabroff xiii xiv Kirn was thirty years old when he reviewed Cosmopolis and in the wake of the success of his novel Up in the Air (2001) DeLillo would have been roughly the same age in 1968, and he did not publish a novel until three years later (Americana, 1971); Kirn effectively renders all of DeLillo s work a relic xv Cosmopolis has received a critical renaissance after the worldwide financial ructions of 2008, what is known in the US as the Great Recession and in the rest of the world as the Global Financial Crisis or GFC Toon Staes finds in both Cosmopolis and Underworld that DeLillo, contra Francis Fukuyama, constructs valuable counternarratives to the triumphalistic view of late capitalism as history s logical endpoint Alison Shonkwiler, discussing what she calls DeLillo s financial sublime, declares that Cosmopolis can be understood to revolve around the convergence between a neoliberal fantasy of technology and the seductions of transpoliticized capital Joe Moran, in his discussion of DeLillo s tussle with and exploitation of literary celebrity, notes that DeLillo s novels contained the briefest of bio-blurbs—a list of publications and his place of residence New York xvi Displaying what in America’s Asia Colleen Lye identifies as the definitional continuities between negative and positive descriptions of Asia and Asian Americans , DeLillo presents an Asian bodily presence in Packer s limo by his currency analyst Michael Chin, who had advanced degrees in mathematics and economics and was only a kid -2) but is also bestial, infantile, and alien: (e sat down and looked at Chin, who was biting the dead skin at the side of this thumbnail He watched him gnaw He was gnawing, grinding his teeth on the hangnail, then the nail itself … and there was something awful and atavistic in the scene, Chin unborn, curled in a membranous sac, a scary little geek-headed humanoid, sucking his scalloped hands xvii Korean-American author Chang-rae Lee chose to read DeLillo s short story BaaderMeinhof when he was a guest on The New Yorker Fiction podcast Its host, The New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Triesman, noted a stately reflectiveness in DeLillo s later work, and Lee s choice of DeLillo surely reflects a recognition of DeLillo s value by the younger, nonwhite writer )nterestingly, Lee s third novel, Aloft, the single novel by Lee that is focalised by a character with a non-Asian background, was the least well-received of his four novels For example, James Wood, reviewing Lee s Surrendered in The New Yorker, says Aloft seems feebler, a thematic poor cousin, to Lee s other books )t lacks the pressure of Lee s first two novels: Jerry Battle, an Italian-American, is not as complexly bound up as Henry Park and Doc (ata in the making of an immigrant s life of successful gestures Without that productive xviii 129 NEW SCHOLAR: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HUMANITIES, CREATIVE ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES VOLUME NUMBER 1, 2016 | ISSN 1839-5333 | WWW.NEWSCHOLAR.ORG.AU RODNEY TAVEIRA| A PATRIARCHY OF PAIN social anxiety, the novel relaxes too easily into suburban familiarity, and plot stresses (sad daughter, tricky son, ailing mom quickly become clichéd and histrionic The last sentence reveals the can t-win situation of the non-white writer He must try hard, for the clichés are not his, yet trying hard reveals the anxiety of authenticity that betrays his eternal outsiderness DeLillo s Ratner’s Star (1976) is set on another planet The genre of science fiction gives authenticity different determinants in this instance: hard versus soft science fiction; allegory and analogy; predictive power; utopia and dystopia xix Even the West Coast was more favourable Le deftly juggles dialogue, memory and the physical sense of an ageing man s body to create a continuous, seamless consciousness, wholly convincing throughout, says Antoine Wilson in the Los Angeles Times xx WORKS CITED Annesley, James Fictions of Globalization: Consumption, the Market, and the Contemporary American Novel London: Continuum, 2008 Print Bloom, (arold Dumbing Down American Readers The Boston Globe Web September 24, 2003 Chandler, Aaron An Unsettling, Alternative Self : Benno Levin, Emmanuel Levinas, and Don DeLillo s Cosmopolis Critique 50.3 (2009): 241–262 Print Cheah, Pheng )ntroduction Part )): The Cosmopolitical—Today Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation Eds Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992 20–41 Print Cohen, Patricia Stories to Explore Someone Else s Skin The New York Times Web May 14, 2008 Conte, Joseph M Writing Amid the Ruins: / and Cosmopolis The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo Ed John N Duvall Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008 179–192 Print Cubitt, Sean The Cinema Effect Cambridge, MA: The MIT P, 2004 Print DeLillo, Don Americana London: Vintage, 1971 Print –– Ratner’s Star London: Vintage, 1976 Print –– The Names London: Picador, 1983 Print –– Underworld London: Picador, 1997 Print –– Cosmopolis London: Picador, 2003 Print 130 NEW SCHOLAR: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HUMANITIES, CREATIVE ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES VOLUME NUMBER 1, 2016 | ISSN 1839-5333 | WWW.NEWSCHOLAR.ORG.AU NEW SCHOLAR | VOL NO | COSMOPOLITANISM AND ITS CRITICS Derrida, Jacques On Cosmopolitanism London: Routledge, 2001 Print Dyer, Geoff Book Choice: The Names The Telegraph (UK) Web 30 Jun 2006 Faulkner, William William Faulkner – Banquet Speech Nobelprize.org Nobel Media AB Web 11 Jan 2015 Giddens, Anthony The Consequences of Modernity Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1990 Print Giles, Paul The Global Remapping American Literature Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2011 Print Goellnicht, Donald C Ethnic Literature s (ot: Asian American Literature, Refugee Cosmopolitanism, and Nam Le s The Boat Journal of Asian American Studies 15.2 (2012): 197– 224 Print Hunt, Laird Rev of The Boat, by Nam Le Bookforum Web Apr/May 2008 Kakutani, Michiko (eaded Toward a Crash, Of Sorts, in a Stretch Limo Rev of Cosmopolis, by Don DeLillo The New York Times Web March 24, 2003 –– A World of Stories From a Son of Vietnam Rev of The Boat, by Nam Le The New York Times Web May 13, 2008 Kirn, Walter Long Day s Journey )nto (aircut Rev of Cosmopolis, by Don DeLillo The New York Times Web April 13, 2003 Kunzru, (ari Outside Ethnicity Rev of The Boat, by Nam Le The New York Times Web June 8, 2008 Le, Nam The Boat Camberwell, Vic.: Penguin, 2008 Print –– Knopf Q&A )nterview Nam Le Online Web Lee, Christopher Asian American Literature and the Resistances of Theory Modern Fiction Studies 56.1 (2010): 19–39 Print Lye, Colleen America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature Princeton UP, 2004 Print 3-1945 Princeton, NJ: 131 NEW SCHOLAR: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HUMANITIES, CREATIVE ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES VOLUME NUMBER 1, 2016 | ISSN 1839-5333 | WWW.NEWSCHOLAR.ORG.AU RODNEY TAVEIRA| A PATRIARCHY OF PAIN Miller, Laura All Day in in a Rich Guy s Limo Makes for a Very Silly Novel Rev of Cosmopolis, by Don DeLillo New York Observer Web March 31, 2003 Moran, Joe Star Authors: Literary Celebrity in America London: Pluto P, 2000 Print McGurl, Mark The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2009 Print Petersen, Per Serritslev Don DeLillo s Cosmopolis and the Dialectics of Complexity and Simplicity in Postmodern American Philosophy and Culture American Studies in Scandinavia 37.2 (2005): 70–84 Print Pierpoint, Claudia Roth Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books New York: Farrah, Strauss and Giroux, 2013 Print Ramazani, Jahan A Transnational Poetics Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009 Print Riemer, Andrew Rev of The Boat, by Nam Le The Sydney Morning Herald Web June 20, 2008 Robbins, Bruce Perpetual War Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2012 Print Roth, Philip Everyman Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006 Print –– Exit Ghost Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007 Print –– Exit Zuckerman )nterview by Tom Nissley Amazon.com Web Schoene, Berthold The Cosmopolitan Novel Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2009 Print Shonkwiler, Alison Don DeLillo s Financial Sublime Contemporary Literature 51.2 (2010): 246– 282 Print Staes, Toon The Enduring Stuff of Narrative: Late Capitalist )deology and the End of (istory in Don DeLillo s Underworld and Cosmopolis English Text Construction 4.1 (2011): 1-17 Print Treisman, Deborah Chang-rae Lee reads Baader-Meinhof The New Yorker Fiction Podcast iTunes April 4, 2010 Web Jan 2, 2014 Updike, John One-Way Street Rev of Cosmopolis, by Don DeLillo The New Yorker Web March 31, 2003 Valentino, Russell Scott From Virtue to Virtual: DeLillo s Cosmopolis and the Corruption of the Absent Body Modern Fiction Studies 53.1 (2007): 140-162 Print 132 NEW SCHOLAR: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HUMANITIES, CREATIVE ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES VOLUME NUMBER 1, 2016 | ISSN 1839-5333 | WWW.NEWSCHOLAR.ORG.AU NEW SCHOLAR | VOL NO | COSMOPOLITANISM AND ITS CRITICS Wallace, David Foster Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think Rev of Toward the End of Time, by John Updike Consider the Lobster Boston: Back Bay Books, 2006 Print Wilson, Antoine Across Seven Seas Rev of The Boat, by Nam Le Los Angeles Times Web June 1, 2008 Woods, James Keeping )t Real Rev of Surrendered, by Chang-rae Lee The New Yorker Web March 15, 2010 Yabroff, Jennie Jonathan Franzen, the Writer We Love to (ate Newsweek Web August 26, 2010 133 NEW SCHOLAR: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HUMANITIES, CREATIVE ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES VOLUME NUMBER 1, 2016 | ISSN 1839-5333 | WWW.NEWSCHOLAR.ORG.AU ... Placing Meeting Elise between the lauded and authentic or authenticating stories, The Boat and Love and (onor, leaks the transnationalism of its production and the patriarchy of pain signals a. .. death in ageing artists in the characters of Luff and Zuckerman, Le and Roth portray a patriarchy of pain that intersects across New York and maps ailments that are gendered male by association... screen and make it go black Pace Derrida s understanding of antiethical, as against the home, Cubitt writes that [b]y abandoning the ethical commitment to hospitality, the cosmopolitan abandons the