Aging Masculinities in Contemporary U.S. Fiction (Global Masculinities) [1st ed. 2021] 3030715957, 9783030715953

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GLOBAL MASCULINITIES

Aging Masculinities in Contemporary U.S. Fiction Edited by Josep M. Armengol

Global Masculinities

Series Editors Michael Kimmel, Department of Sociology, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA Judith Kegan Gardiner, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

The dramatic success of Gender Studies has rested on three developments: (1) making women’s lives visible, which has also come to mean making all genders more visible; (2) insisting on intersectionality and so complicating the category of gender; (3) analyzing the tensions among global and local iterations of gender. Through textual analyses and humanities-based studies of cultural representations, as well as cultural studies of attitudes and behaviors, we have come to see the centrality of gender in the structure of modern life. This series embraces these advances in scholarship, and applies them to men’s lives: gendering men’s lives, exploring the rich diversity of men’s lives - globally and locally, textually and practically - as well as the differences among men by class, race, sexuality, and age.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15013

Josep M. Armengol Editor

Aging Masculinities in Contemporary U.S. Fiction

Editor Josep M. Armengol Departamento de Filologia Moderna Facultad de Letras University of Castilla-La Mancha Ciudad Real, Spain

Global Masculinities ISBN 978-3-030-71595-3 ISBN 978-3-030-71596-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71596-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Chapter “No Country for Old Men? An Introduction” is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/). For further details see license information in the chapter. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: © skynesher/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

The Editor wishes to acknowledge the funding provided by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (Research Project “No Country for Old Men? Representations of Masculinity and Aging in Contemporary U.S. Fiction,” ref. FFI2016-74826P, 2017–2020), the European Regional Development Fund, and the Spanish Research Agency for the writing of this book. I thank Taylor and Francis (https://www.tan dfonline.com/) for their permission to reproduce here part of the article “Aging as emasculation? Rethinking aging masculinities in contemporary U.S. fiction” (Josep M. Armengol, 2018). I would also like to thank Manuel Barberá for his technical assistance while editing this volume.

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Contents

No Country for Old Men? An Introduction Josep M. Armengol

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Gendering Age Harvest Time for Updike’s Rabbit: Sex Dies Harder Than Gender Juan González-Etxeberria

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Geographies of Aging in Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Third and Final Continent” and Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex Sarah Boykin Hardy

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The Aging Male Body as a Contested Site of Privilege: Literary Representations in Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge Teresa Requena-Pelegrí

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Men’s Aging in Popular Fiction “You Are All Too Old to Do Anything but Get Yourselves Killed:” Age and Masculinity in Stephen King’s It, Dreamcatcher and Doctor Sleep M. Isabel Santaulària-Capdevila

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CONTENTS

‘‘To Oldie Go”: From James T. Kirk and Jean-Luc Picard to Samuel Lord and the Reconstruction of the Aging Male Body in the Final Frontier Ángel Mateos-Aparicio Martín-Albo

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Older Men in Autobiography and Memoir Self-Representation “Between Two”: Aging Males and the “Otherness Within” in Philip Roth’s Patrimony Esther Zaplana Reconstructing the (Masculine) Self from Old Age: Memories of the Aching Male Body in Paul Auster’s Winter Journal Leonor Acosta-Bustamante

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Aging Beyond Whiteness Black Masculinities and Aging in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Love Mar Gallego

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Aging Men in Contemporary Arab American Literature Written by Women Marta Bosch-Vilarrubias

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Queering Age Sex and Text: Queering Older Men’s Sexuality in Contemporary U.S. Fiction Josep M. Armengol

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On Long-Lasting Humanimal Friendships: Gayness, Aging, and Disease in Lily and the Octopus Ignacio Ramos-Gay and Claudia Alonso-Recarte

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Index

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Notes on Contributors

Leonor Acosta-Bustamante is a Lecturer on Cultural Studies and Gender Studies at Universidad de Cádiz. Her publications cover representations of masculinities and femininities in popular culture approached from a multidisciplinary methodology which benefits from the discourses of Anthropology, Sociology, Historiography, Literary theory and Cultural Studies. Her contributions address some cross-road topics such as the relations between Postmodernism and Feminism, pornography, male pathologies in film representations, male bodies and Fascism in popular culture. In 2016 she was one of the founders of CIES (Centro Iberoamericano de Estudios sobre Sexualidad, Mérida, Spain). Claudia Alonso-Recarte is Associate Professor of English at Universitat de València. Her research revolves around the field of (Critical) Animal Studies, with a focus on animal ethics within literary and performative arts. Her work intersects with concerns such as gender-based identities, historiography, performativity, and national sentiment. She analyzes how the organic, overlapping markers of identity based on aging and masculinity may additionally encode signifiers related to animal ontologies. Some of her more recent work may be found in academic journals such as Gender,Place and Culture, Atlantis, Journal for Critical Animal Studies, Critical Studies on Terrorism, and Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens. Josep M. Armengol is Full Professor of American Literature and Gender Studies at Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha. He is the author of

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Masculinities in Black and White: Manliness and Whiteness in (African) American Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), among others, and coeditor of books such as Alternative Masculinities for a Changing World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Embodying Masculinities: Towards a History of the Male Body in U.S. Culture and Literature (Lang, 2013) and Queering Iberia: Iberian Masculinities at the Margins (Lang, 2012). José is also directing the project “No Country for Old Men? Representations of Masculinity and Aging in Contemporary U.S. Fiction.” Marta Bosch-Vilarrubias is an Assistant Lecturer in the literature section of the English Studies Department at University of Barcelona. Her research has focused on the representation of masculinities in ArabAmerican literature written by female authors. Bosch-Vilarrubias has published books and articles on the work of writers such as Diana AbuJaber, Laila Halaby, Mohia Kahf, Alicia Erian, and Frances Kirallah-Noble and on contemporary representations of the male Arab in cinema and television. Mar Gallego is Associate Professor of American literature at Universidad de Huelva, Spain, where she has taught American and African American literatures since 1996. She has been awarded fellowships at the Universities of Cornell, Northwestern, and Harvard. Currently, she is the Director of the Research Centre on Migrations at Universidad de Huelva. Her major research interests are African American studies and the African diaspora, with a special focus on women writers and gender issues. She is the author, among other works, of Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance (LitVerlag, 2003). Juan González-Etxeberria is an Associate Professor at Universidad Complutense de Madrid where he has taught courses in literature and cinema in the English Studies department since 2003. He has been awarded fellowships at King’s College London for an academic year and Harvard University for two academic years. His research interests include masculinity studies applied to film and literature. He has been a member of funded research projects on aging masculinity in contemporary American fiction (Mascage), on Mythocriticism (Acis&Galatea, Aglaya), on Intermediality (SIIM), and on Latino identity (Interpretación Transatlántica de la Identidad Hispano/Latina en los Estados Unidos). Sarah Boykin Hardy is Elliott Professor of English at Hampden-Sydney College, where she teaches courses in literature, rhetoric, and masculinity

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studies. Her recent publications include “Nick Adams and the Construction of Masculinity,” in Teaching Hemingway: Gender and Sexuality (2016) and “Making Sense of Miscarriage Online,” coauthored with Rebecca Kukla, in the Journal of Social Philosophy, Winter 2015. She is coeditor of Motherhood and Space: Configurations of the Maternal Though Politics, Home, and the Body (Palgrave, 2005) and has also published essays about short fiction, televisual narratives, and the postmodern novel. Ángel Mateos-Aparicio Martín-Albo is an Assistant Professor at Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, where he teaches courses in English language and literature. His main research interests lie at the intersection of science fiction, mainstream postmodern literature, and postmodern culture. Among his recent publications are the book chapters “Popularizing Postmodern Utopian Thinking in Science Fiction Film: Matrix, V for Vendetta, In Time and Verbo,” in Making Sense of Popular Culture (Cambridge Scholars, 2017); and “Perfect Cities, Permanent Hells: The Ideological Coordinates of Urban Space in Postmodern Science Fiction,” in Contemporary Writing and the Politics of Space:Borders, Networks, Escape Lines (Peter Lang, 2017). Ignacio Ramos-Gay is Full Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Universitat de València. His research focuses on contemporary European drama and popular culture. He is the author of Oscar Wilde and French Boulevard Theatre (Valencia UP, 2007) and has coedited a number of volumes which include Adaptations, Versions and Perversions in Modern British Drama (Cambridge Scholars, 2013) and Curious About France: Visions littéraires victoriennes (Lang, 2015). His research has been published in journals such as Studi Francesi, Revue de Littérature Comparée, Romantisme, or Cahiers Victoriens et Édouradiens. He is the team leader of the research project “French Sources of Victorian British Drama: Adaptation, Theatre Industry and Cultural Imperialism.” Teresa Requena-Pelegrí is a Permanent Lecturer in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and English at University of Barcelona. She has participated in research projects such as “Men in Fiction: Towards a History of Masculinity through U.S. Literature and Cinema” (2012–2015) and “No Country for Old Men? Representations of Masculinity and Aging in Contemporary U.S. Fiction” (since 2017). Her research has dealt with literary representations and critical studies

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of men and masculinities, including ecomasculinities, models of fatherhood, alternative masculinities, and the ethics of care. Her publications have focused on authors such as Jonathan Franzen, Annie Proulx, Jane Smiley, Ernest Hemingway, and George Sanders. M. Isabel Santaulària-Capdevila is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Linguistics at Universitat de Lleida, where she teaches English literature, popular narratives, and history and society of the UK. Her research interests include cultural studies, gender studies, and popular narratives, more specifically the intersections between posthumanism and gender and the representation of aging men in genre fiction. She has published a book on serial killer fiction (El monstruo humano: Una introducción a la ficción de los asesinos en serie, 2009) and numerous articles in national and international journals such as Journal of Gender Studies, Clues: A Journal of Detection, Victoriographies or The European Journal of English Studies. Esther Zaplana is Assistant Professor of English literature at Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha. Her research covers cultural, feminist, and theoretical approaches to aesthetic questions in musical performance, with emphasis on the female voice and the relationship between the visual and the auditory. As a cultural analyst, she is also interested in filmic and literary representations of gender, including masculinity. She specializes in French feminism and the work of Luce Irigaray, contributing a chapter on feminine musical performance and Irigaray’s thinking to Luce Irigaray: Teaching (Continuum, 2008), edited by Irigaray herself. Her publications include work on gender and music, ideal masculinity, and feminist literature.

No Country for Old Men? An Introduction Josep M. Armengol

Traditionally, gender studies have focused on women. Politically, this is logical enough. It is women who have undergone the worst effects of gender discrimination, and so it is women who had to make gender visible as a political category for the first time. Nevertheless, gender studies have since the late 1980s started to pay increasing attention to men’s lives as well, recognizing that the lives of women are inextricably linked to men’s, and that men can, indeed should, actively participate in the struggle for gender equality if we are all to live better, happier lives (Kimmel 2009). Over the last twenty years, then, gender studies have increasingly expanded to incorporate both women and critical studies on men and masculinities. This has contributed to promoting a thriving interdisciplinary masculinity research, which has given way to a fast-growing number of publications in the Social Sciences and the Humanities, including sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological, and cultural studies of masculinity, among others (see, for example, Michael Flood’s bibliography at mensbiblio.xyonline.net). While

J. M. Armengol (B) Departamento de Filologia Moderna, Facultad de Letras, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Ciudad Real, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. M. Armengol (ed.), Aging Masculinities in Contemporary U.S. Fiction, Global Masculinities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71596-0_1

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the first studies of masculinities in the late 1980s stemmed from sociology and psychology, the focus has since the late 1990s shifted into the Humanities (Kimmel 2009), resulting in the recent publication of a growing number of studies on cultural representations of masculinity in literature, cinema, art, music, the media, etc. These studies have covered a multiplicity of topics, such as cultural representations of male sexualities, the male body, fatherhood, friendship, and gender violence, to name but a few. Much less attention seems to have been paid, however, to specific studies on cultural representations of masculinity and age. Yet the UN World Population Prospects, for example, insist on the global challenge posed by the continuously growing older population of most developed countries, especially Europe and the USA. Indeed, it is estimated that, given the fast increase in life expectancy and parallel decrease in fertility rates, the global population of 65+ will triple to 1.5 billion by midcentury. By 2025, near one-third of the U.S. population will also be aged 60+, with a particularly rapid increase in the number of people aged 80+, due to the aging of postwar baby boomers. This will have an enormous impact at both economic and social levels, affecting factors like healthcare, the active workforce, pensions, family structures, and intergenerational relations, among others. Yet while aging is increasingly being scrutinized from multiple perspectives, both gender and gerontology studies have recurrently overlooked analyses of older men, concentrating, respectively, on older women (Segal; Maierhofer; Wyatt-Brown and Rossen) or on “ungendered portraits of aging” (Saxton and Cole). As a consequence, both fields, as Saxton and Cole insist, have “contributed to the cultural ‘invisibility’ of older men” and, even more, “the inverse correlation between masculinity and aging.” In other words, both fields seem to have failed to study the specificities of older men as men. “Especially outside, but even inside, the field of gerontology,” Edward H. Thompson (xi) lamented, “there has been a tendency to view the elderly population as…homogeneous.” While there exist numerous studies on the influence on masculinity of race, class, sexuality, or nationality, among other factors, little has been done on how age can affect masculine identity in decisive ways throughout the life course, particularly late life. Indeed, much of the existing scholarship seems to keep overlooking the fact that, together with racism or sexism, ageism is one of the main problems in our societies. Western cultures seem to be obsessed with eternal youth, stigmatizing

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN? AN INTRODUCTION

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old age and trying to prolong youth through bodybuilding, sport, or even plastic surgery. Yet, probably as a result of this very ageism, scholarship on men and masculinities has tended to focus on boyhood and youth culture, rather than old age. Moreover, the few studies available on aging masculinities have come either from sociological (Thompson; Jackson) or biomedical sources (Wentzell). So, the innovative scientific potential of this project lies in “gendering” age from the perspective of masculinity, and especially in the Humanities, as scientific research has seldom focused on a cultural (especially literary) arena. If, as Teresa De Lauretis has argued, “the representation of gender is (its) construction” (3), then there is no doubt that cultural representations play a key role in the social construction and de-construction of masculinities, the wide variety and psychological complexity of literary characters and cultural representations proving particularly helpful to rethink masculinities in new and profound ways. Focusing on representations of aging masculinities in contemporary U.S. fiction, the innovative component of this book project thus lies in a number of different albeit interrelated factors. First of all, while there have been studies concerned with female-authored portrayals of older women in fiction—for example, Zoe Brennan’s The Older Woman in Recent Fiction (2004)—there has not been a comparative study for aging male characters.1 “While in relation to early and middle adulthood we find clear models of dignified masculinity,” Gabriela Spector-Mersel contends, “these become vague, even non-existent, when referring to later life…Western masculinity scripts are not designed for elderly men, and thus are concluded somewhere before ‘old age’” (73). Given the fast-growing number of representations of older men available in U.S. literature and culture over the last few years—including a large number of popular films with older (male) characters as protagonists (“No Country for Old Men” [2007]; “Gran Torino” [2008]; “Up” [2009]; “Nebraska” [2013], for example)—it now seems both possible and desirable to rethink the specific influence on masculinity of aging in contemporary U.S. fiction. As many contemporary U.S. (and, indeed, global) writers (e.g., Paul Auster, Philip Roth, John Updike, Stephen King, Elizabeth Strout, Toni Morrison, Diana Abu-Jaber, Jhumpa Lahiri) have entered maturity, older characters have become increasingly present in contemporary U.S. fiction in recent years, which makes the present study both timely and necessary.

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Taking up Roberta Maierhofer’s claim to explore age and gender in relation to each other, this book thus engages with, and revisits, traditional assumptions of gender and/in aging studies, especially those which establish clear-cut distinctions of aging according to sex. In particular, this study seeks to question the seemingly accepted gendered classification and critique, issued by scholars like Barbara Waxman, that women are much more likely to author Reifungsromane—“a novel of ripening” (2), presenting “newly self-knowledgeable, self-confident, and independent” women (17)—than men, who tend to produce portraits of old men that are characterized by sadness and decline. Drawing on a wide range of U.S. critical and literary texts, the project will investigate a selection of literary texts that place old men at the center of the narrative, analyzing these authors’ depiction of issues such as older men’s health problems, body changes and shifting perceptions of sexual prowess, depression, loneliness and loss, but also greater wisdom and confidence, legacy, changing notions and appraisals of time, joyful forms of “retirement” and (grand)parenting, as well as new friendships, relationships, and affective patterns, among others. Thus, the overall aim of this project is to explore the intersections between masculinity and aging, especially their representations, in different contemporary U.S. literary works, by canonical or established writers like Roth and Morrison but also more popular authors such as Stephen King or William Shatner, including a wide variety of literary genres, ranging from novels (including detective, horror, and science fiction) to autobiography and memoirs. The cultural productions analyzed in the proposed study are both male- and female-authored, gay and straight, as well as from different cultural, ethnic and/or religious backgrounds, including African-, Arab-, Asian-, Jewish, and American cultures. In line with this, the project is divided into five main sections. The first section focuses on gendering age in/through contemporary U.S. fiction, analyzing a number of texts, male and female-authored, which set the tone for some of the main gendered issues affecting older male characters throughout the volume. The second section moves on to analyze some more specific examples from popular fiction, including detective, horror, and science fiction novels, just as the third section deals with men’s aging in autobiography and memoir. The last two sections, on the other hand, add an extra layer of complexity by exploring the effects on men of aging beyond whiteness and heterosexuality, focusing on non-white and queer fictions, respectively. Ultimately, then, the study will aim to prove that

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there is no common male vision of aging, but that men’s aging experiences as described in contemporary U.S. literature and culture are as complex and varied as those of their female counterparts. To do so, the book will draw on both an interdisciplinary and intersectional methodology, examining not only the interrelationship of age and gender, as well as aging and gender studies, but also cultural variations by factors like race-ethnicity (Lamb), sexuality (Bergling; Halberstam; Freeman; Goltz), and/or religious affiliation (Geffen), among others, thus proving the decisive influence of all these factors on their conceptions and representations of old age. Moreover, several, though by no means all, of the literary texts analyzed in the volume are by authors who might themselves be considered as “aging,” which might raise interesting questions (allowing for Roland Barthes’s classic death of the author views) on the relevance of the age of the author, male or female, to the aging experiences of his/her characters. This is most obvious, perhaps, in the case of authors like Philip Roth or John Updike, whose literary characters seem to have aged alongside their authors, as Juan González-Echeverría’s chapter argues of Updike’s Rabbit, for example. Yet, as in the case of the “sex” of the author, this book aims, again, to avoid any simplistic equation between text and artist, or characters and authors, emphasizing instead the social and cultural constructedness of aging itself, as well as the complex, changing, multifaceted, and far from univocal experience(s) of (men’s) aging in contemporary U.S. literature. As Thompson argued, “much of the research on men failed to recognize that numerous masculinities coexist for older men, and that these individuals are not living equally by the same standard” (xii). In the first chapter, González explores the meaning of Harry Angstrom’s final life chapter in Rabbit at Rest (1990), the last book of the Pennsylvania tetralogy by John Updike. Much of its narrative interest lies in its protagonist’s difficulty in dealing with his aging process in the 1980s, which leads him to a gender identity crisis. The ultimate sequel, where only his sexual desire survives, thus emphasizes the gradual loss of his social identity and his decline as a man from the 50s who idealizes the past. This chapter will show how, after his days as a basketball star, he sees himself as a failed man, which precipitates his fall from his American Dream. His quest for meaning thus concludes in a dead-end that represents both the self-destroying component of masculinity and the ascendance of the New Woman in postwar American culture. Jhumpa Lahiri’s 1999 short story “The Third and Final Continent” and Geoffrey

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Eugenides’ 2002 novel Middlesex draw complex portraits of immigrant American masculinities that change with age. In these fictions, characters, as Sarah Hardy argues, work to construct masculine identities in a diaspora at the same time as they confront their own aging and mortality. This essay will use the short story to explore the relationship between emerging gender identity and shifting geographies and then turn to see how this relationship is complicated in Eugenides’ longer work. For her part, Requena’s chapter will focus on the materialities of age, and old age specifically, in order to contest popular stereotypes of older men and instead center on the complex masculinities portrayed in this period of life. More specifically, she suggests analyzing aging male bodies in Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (1991), and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge (2008), wherein aging male characters struggle both with their assumptions about their past masculine “embodied” identities and the instability of their present condition as older men. In the following section, dedicated to popular fiction, M. Isabel Santaulària-Capdevila will focus on how Stephen King correlates aging masculinity to feelings of obsolescence, anxiety, and worthlessness. She contends that in his novels—especially, It (1986), Dreamcatcher (2001), and Doctor Sleep (2013)—King presents old age in general as pathetic, disgusting and even outright monstrous, thus turning it into a stage of life that incapacitates people in general, and especially men, from meaningful and heroic action. In so doing, he challenges patriarchal constructions of masculinity that impose impossible standards on men, especially as they age, drawing instead on qualities such as solidarity, friendship, love, and memory as essential in order to battle the forces of evil. Exploring the centrality to (science) fiction of technological advances, Mateos-Aparicio analyzes the relocation of the myth of the frontiersman to interplanetary space (the “final” frontier) and the evolution of the representations of masculinity models in science fiction, discussing hybridity in the Star Trek and Zero G sagas. Moving into the autobiographical, the third section features Esther Zaplana’s study on Philip Roth’s memoir Patrimony (1991) and his portrayal of old age vis-à-vis the bond created between father and son in the context of the mother’s death toward the end of Roth’s father’s life. Similarly, Acosta will focus on Paul Auster’s Winter Journal, published when the writer was in his sixties, as an autobiographical writing which, in her opinion, points to a way of understanding the self as mediated by a body in constant change.

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Within the framework of a new “politics of the black body” that contests any prevalent narratives of race and gender, it is Mar Gallego’s contention that Toni Morrison has deeply invested in the investigation of the nature and configuration of black masculinities and the intricate link with other identity categories such as age and aging. Starting from Song of Solomon, the first novel which featured a male protagonist, Morrison has incessantly depicted black male characters who challenge any univocal vision of what black manhood may entail. As these characters mature, she further argues that they gradually become more articulate to address other topics such as systemic violence, the deep traumas that haunt them or the necessity to relate to other human beings on an equal basis. In her chapter, Bosch-Vilarrubias will explore the tensions between Islamic teachings and practice regarding the elderly in a situation of displacement. She will delve into the particular case of Arab immigrants to the United States and examine the specific relationships depicted between daughters, granddaughters, and elderly men, as portrayed in Arab American literature written by women. To do so, she will analyze the family dynamics and treatment of aging men in contemporary novels such as Diana AbuJaber’s Arabian Jazz (1993), Naomi Shihab Nye’s Going Going (2005), and Alia Yunis’s The Night Counter (2009). In the last section, Armengol’s chapter will concentrate on “queering” age by analyzing the representation of older men’s sexualities in selected works by male authors such as Philip Roth or John Updike. The selected literary corpus includes male authors from different backgrounds so as to illustrate how (self-)representations of aging men vary according to not only gender but also ethnicity (Ernest Gaines) and sexual orientation (Edmund White), among other factors. The chapter thus ends up challenging the conventional equation of men’s aging processes with (sexual) decline, exemplifying their plurality as well as irreducible contradictions. On the other hand, Ignacio Ramos-Gay and Claudia Alonso-Recarte will analyze the significance and structural development of the theme of aging in Steven Rowley’s debut novel, the bestselling Lily and the Octopus (2016), where its protagonist Ted inadvertently parallels his own aging condition as a single gay male with the helplessly ephemeral lifespan of his beloved dog. In so doing, they argue, the former unconsciously tries to carve out his masculinity in a world of confusing homosexual and humanimal parables in which the feminine holds a central position. Taken together, then, all these chapters set out to “gender” aging from a masculinity studies perspective, and then use aging studies to also revisit

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masculinities. We hope that rethinking masculinities from the perspective of aging studies will contribute different perspectives on the topic, and that by exploring aging through masculinities we will understand new aspects of the relationships among these two constructs. By applying both masculinity and aging studies to literary and cultural analysis, we also hope to challenge stereotypical images of aging men, using cultural representations to prove the variety and irreducible complexity of men’s experiences of getting older. Of course, further research will be needed to confirm these preliminary findings. In particular, it will be necessary to expand the corpus of authors and texts to include, for example, more men as well as women’s representations of aging male characters, which is far beyond the scope and possibilities of this book. Yet the preliminary results do seem to suggest that while men’s and women’s experiences of aging may certainly differ, aging is neither less varied nor easier for men than it is for women. Although there is no doubt that ageism and sexism are deeply intertwined, the available research indicates that women not only live longer in all developed countries and a majority of less developed ones, often by as much as ten years, but they also seem to age better, with about 85% percent of all suicides among older adults in the USA, for example, being by men (Segal 82). It seems that as they retire, older men have a harder time finding themselves without gender-appropriate occupations in the domestic sphere. Since masculinity has traditionally been defined as individualistic and self-reliant, aging men also seem to have a particularly difficult time adapting to what they perceive as a gradual loss of independence, and many of them refuse to seek help even when they cannot manage well on their own. While it is true that widowers tend to remarry more often and faster than widows, which has traditionally been interpreted as an indication of gender inequality, Pat Thane is right in suggesting that maybe this should be revisited as a sign of men’s greater dependence, as they have often “fared poorly without the aid of a wife” (152).2 Even though some older men keep playing important roles as businessmen or political readers, they seem to be the exception to the rule, many of them being confined to social marginality.3 Indeed, the feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir devoted most of her study on old age, The Coming of Age (1970), to men, precisely because, as Lynne Segal reminds us, she “was convinced that it was men, not women, who suffered most from growing old” (77). In Beauvoir’s view, men suffered more because of aging, particularly after retirement, because old age reduced them to the situation she had earlier explored in The Second Sex, that is,

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the situation of women. In Beauvoir’s words, the aging male “becomes, and to a far greater extent than a woman, a mere object.” Whereas “she is necessary to society,” even if only as a lifelong carer, “he is of no worth at all” (Beauvoir 89).4 Yet the challenge to hegemonic (read youthful) masculinity posed by old age may also help undermine, as we shall see, the traditional equation of masculinity with phallic prowess, thus pointing to alternative models of being a man. For men, then, old age no doubt represents a challenge, but also a unique opportunity to rethink themselves as men.

Notes 1. For a few though remarkable exceptions, see Hobbs; Leverenz. 2. Pat Thane also notes that in the seventeenth century, for example, poor old women could find jobs more easily than men since (younger) men’s jobs often involved manual work, which old men were no longer capable of performing because of their waning physical strength (162). 3. As early as the thirteenth century, for example, the elderly, like women and children, were already represented as a single marginal group irrespective of rank or social class. Indeed, they were usually classed with the invalids, foreigners, or the very poor, “the emphasis being on…their social inferiority and their exclusion from political influence” (Thane 80). 4. This does not mean, of course, that we can give up exploring the specificities of women’s aging, or the strong historical links between sexist and ageist discriminations. On the contrary, it is precisely the strong connections between sexism and ageism, I do believe, that demand that we continue to explore the gendered effects of aging on both women and men. Not despite feminist contentions, but precisely because of them.

Works Cited Beauvoir, Simone De. The Coming of Age. 1970. New York: Norton, 1996. Bergling, Tim. Reeling in the Years: Gay Men’s Perspectives on Age and Ageism. New York: Southern Tier Editions, 2004. Brennan, Zoe. The Older Woman in Recent Fiction. London: McFarland, 2004. Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. Geffen, Rela M., ed. Celebration and Renewal: Rites of Passage in Judaism. Philadelphia and Jerusalem: The Jewish Publication Society, 1993. Goltz, Dustin Bradley. Queer Temporalities in Gay Male Representation: Tragedy, Normativity, and Futurity. New York: Routledge, 2010.

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Halberstam, Jack. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York UP, 2005. Hobbs, Alex. Aging Masculinity in the American Novel. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016. Jackson, David. Exploring Aging Masculinities: The Body, Sexuality and Social Lives. New York: Palgrave, 2016. Kimmel, Michael. “Masculinity Studies: An Introduction.” Debating Masculinity. Eds. Josep M. Armengol and Àngels Carabí. Harriman: Men’s Studies Press, 2009. 16–30. Lamb, Sarah. Aging and the Indian Diaspora: Cosmopolitan Families in India and Abroad. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2009. Leverenz, David. “Aging Beyond Masculinities, Or, The Penis as Failed Synecdoche.” Alternative Masculinities for a Changing World. Eds. Àngels Carabí and Josep M. Armengol. New York: Palgrave, 2014. 63–91. Maierhofer, Roberta. “American Studies Growing Old.” Crossing Borders: Interdisciplinary Intercultural Interaction. Eds. Bernhard Kettemann and Georg Marko. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen, 1999. 255–268. Saxton, Benjamin and Thomas R. Cole. “No Country for Old Men: A Search for Masculinity in Later Life.” International Journal of Ageing and Later Life 7.2 (2012): 97–116. Segal, Lynne. Out of Time: The Pleasures and the Perils of Ageing. London: Verso, 2013. Spector-Mersel, Gabriela. “Never-Aging Stories: Western Masculinity Hegemonic Masculinity Scripts.” Journal of Gender Studies 15.1 (2006): 67–82. Thane, Pat, ed. A History of Old Age. London: Thames and Hudson, 2005. Thompson, Edward H. Older Men’s Lives. New York: Sage, 1994. Waxman, Barbara. From the Hearth to the Open Road: A Feminist of Study of Ageing in Contemporary Literature. London: Praeger, 1990. Wentzell, Emily. Maturing Masculinities: Aging, Chronic Illness, and Viagra in Mexico. Durham: Duke UP, 2013. Wyatt-Brown, Anne M. and Janice Rossen, eds. Aging and Gender in Literature: Studies in Creativity. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1993.

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Gendering Age

Harvest Time for Updike’s Rabbit: Sex Dies Harder Than Gender Juan González-Etxeberria

Introduction John Updike concludes his introduction to Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy (R.A.), the 1995 edition of his saga, by emphasizing the seasonal pattern of our lives, “spring, fall, summer, winter: a life as well as a year has its seasons” (xxii). Such conventional metaphor can be linked to the Renaissance “Sonnet 21” from Astrophel and Stella by Phillip Sidney (1554–1586), when, considering social expectations, the lyrical subject asks himself a rhetorical question: “For since mad March great promise made of me, / If now the May of my years much decline, / What can be hoped my harvest time will be?” (464). It would be difficult to find a better summary not just for the last of the installments but for the whole tetralogy. In fact, Rabbit at Rest (R.a.R.) describes its main protagonist’s harvest time. Harry’s last months of life and his death at 56 represent the novel’s main topic, as emphasized by British novelist Martin Amis: “the book is all about ageing, about seizure and closure: it is itself an ending” (32).

J. González-Etxeberria (B) Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. M. Armengol (ed.), Aging Masculinities in Contemporary U.S. Fiction, Global Masculinities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71596-0_2

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Like in Sidney’s poem, Harry’s life is conceived of as a logical unity, with every part connected dialectically to the others. Accordingly, his aging days can be analyzed, on the one hand, as an echo of his past life. Marshall Boswell’s statement, “Rabbit at Rest in effect replays that trilogy in reverse” (187), is particularly noteworthy in this regard; also, Updike’s words: “So many themes convene in Rabbit at Rest that the hero could be said to sink under the burden of the accumulated past” (R.A. xxii–xxiii). On the other hand, the novel can be interpreted as an elegiac moment when most of the protagonist’s experiences are transformed by his diminishing ability to perform his gender role, and the reader discovers an aging man behaving the way Alex Hobbs characterized old age: “[I]t is a time for reflecting on previous growth” (xi).

Harry’s Aging Crisis Defining aging is complex due to its multiple nature and the lack of clear physical limits. From a biological point of view, Harry is 56 when he dies; i.e., he is situated far from the national average life expectancy statistics that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Resources gave for the decade: “In 1984, it [life expectancy] was 78.2 for women and 71.2 years for men” (Rowan 17). However, from the cultural and personal perspectives, he can be considered an old man because of his health problems and his obsession with death and because of the way his family marginalizes him from the very beginning of the novel, when his wife thinks he should be talked “as if he’s prematurely senile” (R.a.R. 4). The character, who Updike considers “a brother to me and a good friend” (Charlie Rose Interview 1996), shares his author’s main worries about religion, sex and death. The time when people become conscious of their age and attempt to give their existence a meaning was addressed by Updike, according to Richard Adelman (410), in at least half a dozen of his books, starting from his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair (1959), which was written as an homage to the memory to his grandfather, John F. Hoyer, and finishing with one of his last ones, Seek My Face (2002)—apart from several dozens of his short stories. Although Updike insisted that Rabbit was “many things his author was not: a natural athlete, a blue-eyed Swede, sexually magnetic, taller than six feet, impulsive and urban” (Scott 2064), he identified himself with his Rabbit at Rest: “[A] depressed book about a depressed man, written by a depressed man” (“Why Rabbit Had to Go” 1). The identification between the author and the main character confirms

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the philosophical approach of the saga. Harry helps the reader understand Updike’s reason to continue to write, which the author himself confessed in his last interview: “[I do it] in the hope I can find something to say about being alive, life, this country, but in general, the human condition” (Wilde n.p.). In the Rabbit tetralogy, Pascal’s Pensées establishes an existential framework from the very beginning by warning the reader about the depth of these novels with epigraph number 507: “The motions of Grace, the hardness of the heart, external circumstances” (Rabbit, Run [R.R.] 2). The search for transcendence is shared by Harry, whose first memories are deep enough, “A frightening view, remembered from boyhood, when he used to wonder if you jumped would you die or be cushioned on those green heads as on the clouds of a dream?” (R.R. 107). At 26, he sees himself getting old on the second page of the first part of the saga. Accordingly, when he stops playing basketball with the boys, he insists, “The old man’s going” (R.R. 10–11). This example supports the subjective view of an age when he already feels what will be his life frustration, “Harry’s search for infinite freedom” (Updike “One Big Interview” 510). Unsurprisingly, when he is 56, he has more problems to deal with what Updike defined as the “unbearable heaviness of being” (Ritts 71). It should be noted that Joyce Carol Oates identifies this subject as the novel’s topic: “Its courageous theme – the blossoming and fruition of the seed of death” (1). The author’s literary answer to existentialist issues connects with Proust’s idea of the writer’s main task as a translator of the connection between the self and the world. Harry’s intuitive search for revealing the invisible through visible reality, “I do feel, I guess, that somewhere behind all this there’s something that wants me to find it” (R. R. 120), tries to make sense of his existence and defends himself from nihilism. As a matter of fact, Kierkegaard’s definition of human being, “a synthesis of the finite and indefinite, of the temporal and the eternal” (10), applies perfectly to Harry. Indeed, it could be argued that his dualistic conception represents Harry’s main cause of anxiety. Yet, Updike refuses to provide an easy answer: “Rather than arrive at a verdict or a directive, I sought to present sides of an irresolvable tension intrinsic to being human” (“Introduction,” R.A. xiii). Updike’s ontological interpretation of the novel as a genre, which he synthesizes with this image, “a tissue of literal lies that refreshes and informs our sense of actuality” (Picked-up Pieces [PP ] 16), constitutes the philosophical basis of an oeuvre whose main aim is, in its author’s words, “to give the mundane its beautiful due” (The Early Stories: 1953–1975 xvii).

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Therefore, Harry’s life and death should be approached from the impossibility of the texts to offer a clear conclusion to any of the issues the novels deal with, including the aging process. The reason for this is that the author prefers to invite readers to think about our world and our existence: “My books attempt to show several sides of something, and leave the reader with the awareness of difficulty, rather than with the grasping of a slogan or a motto to live by” (Plath 46). As it has been said, Harry feels old since he is 26. However, this has nothing to do with his age or body condition, which are, in the terminology of Deats and Lenker, the chronological and biological ages (9). Both have little to do with social age, our culturally constructed behavior, that is linked to the different stages, for example, the association of aging and retirement. In Harry’s case, his retirement is from the basketball courts when he finishes high school. From that moment onwards his perspective on his life is always biased by the comparison with those glory days: “I once did something right. I played first-rate basketball. I really did. And after you’re first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate” (R.R. 101). The dissatisfaction he feels with his marriage and his job is logically connected to the way in which sexuality and sport’s triumphs defined his perception of who he was when, after playing basketball, he had a date: “he was much bigger, a winner. He came to her as a winner and that’s the feeling he’s missed since” (R.R. 184). His is not an individual case in a country where the male athlete— especially in those days when the national obsession about being young was at its peak—is considered a mythic figure. After enjoying his high point in high school, young Harry is not ready for the downward spiral the rest of his life would be like; in his wife’s words, “He had come to bloom early and by the time she got to know him at Kroll’s he was already drifting downhill, though things did look up when the money from the lot began to be theirs” (R.a.R. 510). Harry does not become aware of time and history until he realizes about it in the last car of the saga. All he knows is his primary feeling of being enclosed, which he reacts to by blaming himself: “Maybe I trapped myself” (Rabbit Is Rich 258). However, Updike defined Rabbit at Rest as “an ‘Eisenhower book’” (PP 482) because its protagonist mirrors his age. Greiner confirms this hypothesis: “[H]e is an extreme product of the placid, hermetic Eisenhower years, a kind of historical artifact” (49– 50). In his opinion, this ideological subordination should be extended to Harry in the whole saga, whom he describes as follows: “a relative innocent, trapped in the American culture of 1950-1990” (51). The

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decade Robert Lowell called the “tranquilized Fifties ” (85) was a time when American society followed a dualistic system based on the We vs They mindset; as a continuation of postwar national foreign policy against communism, life was organized according to that same binary worldview. In gender terms, it meant that “[M]asculinity can be defined only negatively as that which femininity is not” (John MacInnes 62). In spite of the time lapse separating the 50s from the 80s, Janice reminds her husband that their marriage is built on this notion of separate spheres—husband as breadwinner and wife as domestic overseer: “The outdoors is your responsibility, the indoors is mine – isn’t that how we do it?” (R.a.R. 423). The Eisenhower era believed in a unified and static vision of reality, which was based on national myths rather than on the dynamic actuality. Updike, born in 1932, came of age when youth was considered as happiness, and the white male represented the heroic construction of the spirit of America, embodied here by the main character. Moreover, Harry in his successful basketball days was a member of the idealized form of masculinity that Connell (184) called hegemonic masculinity, and Michael Kimmel defined as follows: “The hegemonic definition of manhood is a man in power, a man with power, and a man of power” (The Gender of Desire 30). Janice’s first memory of her husband fits this idea of such a man: “[S]he first saw him in the high-school corridors and at the basketball games, out there on the court so glorious and blond, like a boy made of marble” (R.a.R., 509). Obviously, theirs is not the only country, but “[I]n the United States, winning is the central theme in the making of a boy’s self-image” (Craig 135). In a way, Harry’s economic and social triumph is a consequence of his sexual success. It explains that it is only in his last year that Harry realizes what men in general experience for much longer time, “For most men in capitalist societies, their careers, their professions, their trades, their skilled and unskilled jobs are the prime focus of identity” (Brittan 189). He misses work as the social element that fulfilled him, “What he enjoyed most, it turns out in retrospect […] was standing around in the showroom […] earning his paycheck, filling his slot in the big picture […] doing his bit, getting a little recognition. That’s all we want from each other, recognition. Your assigned place in the rat race” (R.a.R. 451); whereas what he gets from people at present is ironic: “You’re the big cheese” (R.a.R. 255). Yet, Harry’s case is not a exception when it comes to fulfilling the requirements to be a member of the hegemonic group. By mid-seventies,

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critics such as Jack Sawyer warned men about “being a master,” as this self-imposed rule “has its burdens” (171). Similarly, in 1990 David Gilmore called the hegemonic myth “the Big Impossible” (15). The oppression men felt to prove their manhood together with factors such as the social consequences of the civil rights and feminist movements and of the economic crisis provoked what Arthur Schlesinger had identified in a 1958 article entitled “The Crisis of American Masculinity,” where he stated that “today men are more and more conscious of maleness not as a fact but as a problem” (63). When Updike was preparing his Rabbit’s fourth part, he was conscious about both the national and the gender crisis. Certainly, “the novels stand as the story not only of a man but of a nation, which, like its hero, is in decline” (“One Big Interview” 501). In an ironic interpretation of Kimmel’s idea, “America and American masculinity evolved together” (Manhood in America 10), Harry represents the declining patriarchal system. His family and his social context make him aware of changes he is not happy about because he has been treated like the center of the world since he was young. His new attitude toward change implies the deep differences between past and present: “There was a time, when he was younger, when the thought of any change, even a disaster, gladdened his heart with the possibility of a shake-up, of his world made new. But at present he is aware mostly of a fluttering, binding physical resistance within him to the idea of being uprooted” (R.a.R. 429). His fear to change helps us understand that Harry is at the end of his life when his endemic thanatophobia increases and he prefers to avoid any change. The reason why it is so hard for him to adapt to the new reality is clearly based on his childhood days and the world in which he was educated, as he himself realizes: “Rabbit felt betrayed. He was reared in a world where war was not strange but change was: the world stood still so you could grow up in it” (R.a.R. 461). However, there are signs that show he cannot stay away from the unavoidability of changes: “He is still trying to keep up with America, as it changes styles and costumes and vocabulary, as it dances ahead ever young, ever younger” (R.a.R. 280). As a result, he finds out, probably too late, that “the world was not solid and benign, it was a shabby set of temporary arrangements rigged up for the time being” (R.a.R. 461).

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Breaking Gender Boundaries Harry’s pessimism makes it difficult for him to see some other changes that he experiences before dying. In 1996 Mary O’Connell in her Updike and the Patriarchal Dilemma: Masculinity in the Rabbit Novels firstly claimed her challenging contribution: “[N]one of the existing Updike criticism focuses on the exploration of masculinity as a central issue in the tetralogy” (xi); secondly, she clarified the systematical misreading of his works: “Updike was not just portraying Rabbit as a stereotypical male; he was scrutinizing masculine gender identity” (x); and, finally, she explained Harry’s changes: “he progresses from one who asserts and controls to one who surrenders and nurtures. Thus he recovers the lost feminine” (201). Taking into account her outstanding work and in a close reading of the last part of the saga, the aging process will be analyzed here as the key element in the recovery of Harry’s lost femininity. In the 1960s, Elaine Cumming and William E. Henry formulated the “disengagement” theory, according to which “aging is an inevitable, mutual withdrawal or disengagement, resulting in decreased interaction between the aging person and others in the social system he belongs to” (227). While they considered the aging individual as having greater freedom from the norms, they also insisted on the process being mutual. On the one hand, the oppression men feel in patriarchal societies causes what Pleck called a paradox of power, whereby “most men have very little power over their own lives” (10). Sacrificing part of their freedom in order to be successful, especially at work, does not make sense when work is no longer the center of their day-by-day. Consequently, individuals relax their social pressure moving into “a social arena where patriarchal rules and gender-based expectations have been weakened” (Silver 381). Following the example of Roberto in Paul Auster’s Brooklyn Foolies, “I’m an old man, and old men are free to do what they want” (9), some of Harry’s actions when he is in his mid-fifties can be explained better as part of his new acquired freedom. His reactions can also be interpreted as the consequence of his physical weakness, lower sexuality and the different forms of dependency that make it harder for him to continue identifying himself with his gender ideals. On the other hand, the real cause of aging disengagement cannot be ignored: the feeling of becoming “feminized” lies in society considering that aging men are no longer productive. Simone de Beauvoir in the 1970s wrote about the disempowering effect of aging on men, making

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the following conclusion: “Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable” (543). Since gender is, in Butler’s words, “a system of power” (3), aging men lack the possibility of achieving it and the consequence contributes to what Hobbs identifies as a common problem: “masculinity diminishes with age” (15). Both factors, the diminishing self-confidence and the social rejection or ageism, are symbiotically connected, and prioritized by Catherine B. Silver: “Decline of former social power and status, economic productivity, bodily strength and sexual potency that ageing men encounter in old age may weaken at least some men’s attachments to patriarchal relations” (390). It is logical that those elements that supported hegemonic masculinity are the ones that old men do not represent: “sexuality and work are no longer at the core of self-identity” (Silver 387). Far from being a negative change, as Harry considers it, having what society considers a much more feminine attitude is what allows him to enlarge his attitude toward a world no longer his. Silver’s idea of the degendering of old people often implies physical changes, as Peter Öberg has proved: “[T]he proportion of men who think they look masculine decreases with each successive age group” (106). The way faces and bodies can lose their gendered features and shape is exemplified in the case of Harry: “And frankly, Harry, the wig on you is somehow alarming. It makes you look like a very big red-faced woman” (R.a.R. 362). Dressed as Uncle Sam, the hero cannot feel flattered, in spite of which Janice goes ahead: “It’s not insulting, it’s interesting. I never saw your feminine side before. I bet you would have made a nicer woman than either your mother or Mim. They should have been men, both of them” (R.a.R. 363). The psychological and social aspects of our identity are also transformed by the degendering process. It can even produce the loss of selfhood when it is obsessively based on work, success, and selfish sexuality to prove one’s masculinity. Behaving in the opposite gender’s way, individuals break what Kimmel defined the “interplanetary theory of gender difference” (The Gendered Society 15). This difference is what Connell criticized because of its “categoricalism” (64), which reduces social and individual differences to men and women, having anatomy as our destiny and ignoring our common species-identity. This is even more true in countries like the United States of America, where essentialist approaches have historically eternized social practices. Alexis of Tocqueville’s testimony, written almost two hundred years ago,

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already placed emphasis on this: “In no country has such constant care been taken as in America to trace two clearly distinct lines of action for the two sexes, and to make them keep pace with the other, but in two pathways which are always different” (225). American society, as most communities, is founded on the ideological meaning of gender—even if authorities like Freud claimed the opposite: “Every individual on the contrary displays a mixture of the character-traits belonging to his own and to the opposite sex; and he shows a combination of activity and passivity whether or not these last character-traits tally with his biological ones” (186). It is noteworthy to mention that contemporary studies prove the same conclusion to be true: “[T]he main finding, from about eighty years of research, is a massive psychological similarity between women and men in the populations studied by psychologists. Clear-cut block differences are few, and confined to restricted topics” (Connell 170). Therefore, our social identity is based on what Butler calls the “asymmetrical binary of masculinity and femininity” (31). As stated by Rubin, this contradicts natural reality: “Far from an expression of natural difference, exclusive gender identity is suppression of natural similarities” (180). Away from the classical model of androgynous perfection, our societies penalize hybrid gender constructions, so that there is only one way to become a member of the privileged group: “Men are expected to repress whatever is considered feminine” (Beneke 189). With relatively few exceptions, men therefore cut off the male emotional side in their social life: “Men in our culture are pretty much limited to a menu of three strong feelings: rage, triumph, lust” (Pollack 168). Harry is then a perfect example of phallocentric and misogynous narcissism all along the Rabbit series. However, examples like the fact that he reflects about his past in a long internal monologue on his way down to Florida make him part of the list Nancy McCampbell Grace called “the feminized male” when referring to twentieth-century male characters that present “characteristics which we categorize as feminine” (4). Having as an origin James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, these characters substitute the supposed manly virtues by a more passive role, a rather intuitive behavior and a richer emotional life, all of which are supposed to be female features. Aging Harry is not that different from the young man who suffered obsessively, but this time he is going to behave quite differently. In the last part of the novel, the adjective “new” is used many times. Although it apparently only refers

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to Harry after his first heart attach, it identifies in fact a different person as “the new me” (R.a.R. 194). His wife, Janice, notices the difference, “he seems more of a baby than he ever did, letting her make all the decisions” (R.a.R. 310). Furthermore, the specified time, “nine months ago” (R.a.R. 474), speaks about his rebirth, as she tells him when he is back from the hospital and admires natural beauty for the first time: “You’ve seen, it’s just you see differently now” (R.a.R. 188). It is not a coincidence the body organ doctors work on: “[Y]ou’ll be a new man, with damn close to a brand-new heart” (R.a.R. 284). It needs to be noted also that the novelty includes new female ways of approaching life: “In his solitude, his heart becomes his companion. He listens to it, tries to decipher its messages” (R.a.R. 470). Judith Butler’s gender performativity theory, summarized as “Gender is always a doing” (25), explains some of the daily routines Harry will carry out in the last novel for the first time in the tetralogy. Updike insists on specifying the way he does them, from the beginning of the novel, “Sitting on the toilet like a woman” (R.a.R. 46), to its end: “He urinates sitting down, like a woman” (R.a.R. 500). He even identifies the physical explanation of such change: “Harry says, in a brave voice that sounds high in his ears, as if out of a woman’s throat” (R.a.R. 274). Whereas initially he is able to control his behavior, “He has an impulse to help Janice with the dishes and suppress it” (R.a.R. 114), little by little he talks openly about it: “Hey Janice. I was thinking just the other day we ought to get the wall-to-wall carpets in our house cleaned. No fault of yours, but they’re filthy, honey” (R.a.R. 283). In the end, he gives up: “Harry makes the bed and sweeps the kitchen floor […]. When Janice shows up at last he wants the state of the place to give an object lesson in housekeeping” (R.a.R. 501). Apart from what society has established commonly as female tasks, including some outdoor activities, “I’ve been doing some gardening” (R.a.R. 189), Harry’s emotional reactions, “He too wouldn’t mind having a cry” (R.a.R. 23) or “He could almost cry” (R.a.R. 286), get him close to women’s world; also, his imagination: “He wonders, is this what having a baby is like, having Dr. Raymond inside you? How do women stand it, for nine months? Not to mention being screwed in the first place? Can they really like it?” (R.a.R. 273). His heart surgery makes him aware of his physicality not in a positive way as when he played basketball, but in a negative one: “You see it happen: your heart lies

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there dead in its soupy puddle. You, the natural you, are technically dead” (R.a.R. 270). Neither he nor his women consider his change positively. His lover, his sister, and his wife share a surprising reaction observing this new old and female Harry. In the case of Thelma, his lover, it is Harry who realizes he is not the same for her, “He feels that Thelma is looking at him in a new way – clinically, with a detached appraising look far distant from the melting crazy look” (R.a.R. 204). His sister and his wife use even the same language to verbalize their shock. Mim asks him, “What are they doing to you now?” (R.a.R. 286), and Janice insists, “It’s depressing to see you like this. You’ve changed so. What have they done to you, these doctors?” (R.a.R. 281)—even if Mim was probably including Janice among those who were having such a bad effect on Harry, whereas his wife prefers to blame doctors.

New Sexual Pleasure Pru, his daughter-in-law, can also be counted among the women who are not happy about his change. When informed by him that he has to become a new man, she answers skeptically: “And I’ll paint my toenails” (R.a.R. 175). Her flirting attitude and words, “Pru, standing tall again, says in a level low voice he has not exactly heard before, aimed flat at him as a man, ‘Don’t change too much, Harry’” (R.a.R. 175), warn the reader about the moment Harry and his daughter-in-law will have sex. It can be seen as Harry’s sexual fantasy or it can be the cause of trouble to those who cannot understand what constitutes in fact one more example of Harry’s change; i.e., his willingness to cross boundaries and feel free. There is nothing new about Harry approaching women, as Elvira tells him: “Late in the game as it is, you keep trying” (R.a.R. 382). His own son confirms his father’s “sexist flirtatious stuff” (R.a.R. 256) as part of Harry’s characteristic—almost indiscriminate—sexual advances. Harry’s endemic priapism has made Updike deserve every type of criticism—both literary and moral, and from elder and younger generations. He has been accused mainly of dirty old man chauvinism, as in the notorious case of David Foster Wallace and Sven Birkerts in their article “Twilight of the Phallocrats,” where they called Updike, Mailer, Bellow, and Roth “Great Male Narcissists” and defined Updike as “Just a penis with a thesaurus.” This is a never-ending debate that De Bellis tried to close arguing the following, “Updike can hardly be faulted for

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being honest in his depiction of a male chauvinist. In fact, his accurate portrayal of Rabbit’s assumptions of superiority can be construed as negative modeling. It might be overhasty to see Rabbit as Updike’s spokesman” (169). Anyway, all this information helps the reader to see the importance of an episode, which has nothing to do with the rest of Harry’s sexual encounters in the tetralogy. He is usually identified with his penis, as his lover Thelma confirms: “Before you go, let me see him at least.” “See who?” “Him, Harry. You. With his bonnet” (R.a.R. 206). Harry himself is conscious about the huge importance of his penis: “Rabbit wonders what his own life would have been like if he had been circumcised” (R.a.R. 119). His conclusion cannot be more eloquent, “he might have been a more dependable person” (R.a.R. 120). The sexual tension between Harry and Pru starts the moment they meet and continues in previous novels of this saga, but it is surprisingly solved when not even Harry expects it. It has previously worked as his private sexual fantasy, with the typical male fetishistic objectification of most of Pru’s body parts. Updike prepares carefully the sex sequence some pages in advance when Harry falls asleep before dinner and goes through his common mental processes. Feeling the victim of somebody else’s plan, “helpless in bed, people hit you up for sympathy. They’ve got you where they want you” (R.a.R. 331); taking a moment to think about all those people he knew that have passed away, “They go away. A ghostly moment […] reminded him of Jill, another of the many dead people he knows” (R.a.R. 331); asking himself that “there must be some other way of being alive than all this eating and sleeping, this burning and freezing, this sun and moon. Day and night blend into each other but still are nothing the same” (R.a.R. 331); and recalling some memories about his dead daughter, “He went back to the apartment that day after Becky died and nothing was changed. The water in the tub, the chops, in the skillet” (R.a.R. 332). Then, he will have the first example of switching roles, “Janice called but the meal was cooked by Pru; it is light, delicious, healthful” (R.a.R. 332). Reality and fiction continue mixing when Judy speaks, “making it up or confusing her own classroom with classroom shows she has seen on television” (R.a.R. 333). At table, “Pru asks Harry how he is feeling” (R.a.R. 333), and later Harry gets his first sexual reaction: “It excites him, this transposition […] expecting to see red-haired Pru staring back and instead it’s Janice’s middle-aged face” (R.a.R. 335). He loves the

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game: “Janice is wrapped in Pru’s red raincoat, and he’s the man of Pru’s house” (R.a.R. 336). From this example of double entendre, Harry falls under Pru’s spell: “Her face, as his face glided past it on the way to kiss another, exuded an aura, shampooey-powdery, just as the trees outside the house are yielding to the rain a leafy fresh tree-smell” (R.a.R. 339). These long preliminaries remind readers about Harry’s mental circuit, starting on religion and death and usually ending up in sex—as a way to escape from fear; but, this time, they will be followed by an actual love sequence. Pru pokes in Harry’s bedroom, “standing erect… wearing that shorty bathrobe of hers” (R.a.R. 341), and asks: “Mind if I smoke?” Harry’s physical reaction is crystal clear, “his heart thundering at the strangeness” (R.a.R. 341), and “He smells not only her cigarette smoke but her femininity […] and moves his legs so she can sit on the bed” (R.a.R. 342). The sex role reversal is underlined by the author in this dialogue: “‘I bet you were asleep,’ Pru says. ‘I’ll only stay for this cigarette. I just need a little adult company.’ She inhales like a man, deep” (R.a.R. 342); and Harry asks her about the children, “I hope putting the kids down with Nelson gone isn’t such a nightmare every night” (R.a.R. 342). He then realizes he will have the opportunity to enjoy this moment: “There was plenty of time to see this through. He relaxes back in his pillows” (R.a.R. 342). After Pru’s speech lamenting her wasted life and emphasizing men’s freedom and her own condition as trash, Harry denies his freedom as a man: “I can’t run, I can’t fuck, I can’t eat anything I like” (R.a.R. 345). He cannot wait any longer: “She’s left-handed, he remembers. The oddity of this excites him further […] lifts hers from his chest and places it lower, where an erection has surprisingly sprouted from his half-shaved groin” (R.a.R. 345). Harry’s sexuality does not follow the hegemonic normative steps to prove manhood, “His gesture has the pre-sexual quality of one child sharing with another an interesting discovery” (R.a.R. 345). An adult real sexual action, in parallel with one of Thomas Wyatt’s most famous Renaissance poems, “They Flee from Me,” is initiated by Pru. In fact, it is she who “says ‘Shit’, jumps from the bed, slams shut the window, pulls down the shade, tears open her bathrobe and sheds it, and, reaching down, pulls her nightie up over her head” (R.a.R. 346). The description of their sexual encounter finishes with the beauty of her nakedness being compared to “those pear trees in blossom” (R.a.R. 346), and Harry’s experiencing it as “a piece of paradise blundered upon, incredible” (R.a.R. 346).

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The conclusion connects her beauty to his transcendental peaceful state of mind. It is a similar message to the one Updike suggests in the first line of his poem, “Elderly Sex”: “Life’s buried treasure’s buried deeper still.” The sexual encounter, later described as “the poetry of his first sight of her naked and pale” (R.a.R. 354), is not further described, and so takes place off-screen. In relation to this, Brian Keener noticed that “Updike atypically refrains from detailing the sexual act” (114). The difference between this erotic moment and the pseudo-pornographic scenes that readers usually get in Updike’s graphically, and phallically, explicit descriptions of Harry’s experiences is explained by his “female” perspective. The new point of view represents the opposite to Joyce Carol Oates’ general definition of the character as “the very archetype of the American macho man” (1). The sensual atmosphere and mise-en-scène that represent initially the sequence focus are much later completed by factual information about their actual sexual encounter. Far from hegemonic male oral sex obsession or anal and urolagnic experiments in Harry’s usual pseudo-masturbatory performance, readers this time get details of deep concern about the other person. First of all, he uses a condom; when he remembers this moment, it is described as “A strange aspect of the encounter” (R.a.R. 354) because he had not used one since the Army. However, this fact makes clear the new sexual hierarchy: “[I] went along with it without a protest, it was her show” (R.a.R. 354). Finally, this is confirmed by Harry’s summary: “She did it all” (R.a.R. 354). Moreover, his interest is mainly centered on his mate’s satisfaction: “she came twice, under him once and then astraddle” (R.a.R. 354). Later on, when the whole thing becomes public, he avoids telling his wife that “he had felt used, expertly” (R.a.R. 433), assuming his subordinate passive role of first times: “This is the first time I’ve ever fucked a left-handed woman” (R.a.R. 355). Actually, it is this idea he repeated himself in order “To keep his prick up” (R.a.R. 354) in front of his Shakespearean “master mistress,” or better “mistress master,” in this case. The completely unknown type of sexual experience, “For me, it was almost like I’d dreamed it” (R.a.R. 445), shows a brand-new Harry. It is true that in Pru’s case, she has to admit, “That’s it, that’s the trouble. I don’t see you as an old guy, Harry. I never did” (R.a.R. 446). For him it is a way of proving himself he, after hospital, is still alive, “Whajou think I was, dead already?” (R.a.R. 433). It is clear the most important change is his attitude. The love sequence makes Harry less selfish, or at least, he includes other people in his world. That would also be

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the case of his role as a grandfather focused on his caregiving responsibilities that he is so unfamiliar with for gender reasons: “That strange way women have, of really caring about somebody beyond themselves” (R.a.R. 305). In an example of poetic justice, he thinks he has saved Judy’s life from drowning, something he was not able to do for his own daughter Becky. So his feeling is understandable: “He acted proud of saving her life” (R.a.R. 162)—even if later the girl confesses him she was playing. He cannot believe her and prefers his new role, “She has a child’s sense of immortality and he is its guardian” (R.a.R. 134). From that moment Harry will feel something almost physical for his grandchildren: “He suddenly needs, as suddenly as the need to urinate comes to a man taking diuretics, to talk to his grandchildren. He is a grandfather, they can’t deny him that” (R.a.R. 494). His piece of advice about the importance of childhood and studying hard includes his most important message: “Don’t force growing up” (R.a.R. 444). The echoes of some personal regret reinforce the idea of a new Harry who acts differently to the one who, when advised, reacted negatively: “[M]y instinct’s always to do the opposite” (R.a.R. 22). His changing attitude includes other people, like his own wife, whom he has to admit: “[H]e was beginning to respect her” (R.a.R. 510). Ironically, she moves in the opposite direction; that is to say, toward a more powerful male figure who, apart from being the boss of the car business, is becoming a “working girl.” More importantly for Harry, she saves him from his fears: “There is a whole host of goblins […] that Janice’s warm little tightly knit body, even snoring and farting as it sometimes did, protected him from” (R.a.R. 472). He realizes her power when he is alone in Florida in his suicidal last moments.

Conclusion O’Connell considers that in Harry’s case “the movement toward the feminine within him will precipitate his destruction as well as signal the general disempowerment of men in society at large” (202). Although her conclusion’s second part is irrefutable, Harry’s self-destructive process can be better analyzed as the consequence of his stubborn attempt to solve his situation by moving back to the hegemonic male behavior to feel safe after having sex with his daughter-in-law. According to Leslie A. Fiedler, “The typical male protagonist of our fiction has been a man on the run […] anywhere to avoid ‘civilization’, which is to say, the confrontation of

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a man and a woman” (6). Updike confirms this is true for Harry: “[H]e flees from domestic predicaments” (R.A. XX). The misogynistic background of the final “on the road” narrative was established by Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, and, unsurprisingly, both novels share their main characters’ anti-social spirit represented by the way Huck is called by his father, the Angel of Death. Needless to say, this is very similar to Mr. Death, which is the name Harry is also given. Death is waiting for Harry when he repeats the journey he started thirty years before and did not conclude because he was advised “to know where he was going before he went there. Well, now he did. He had learned the road and figured out the destination” (R.a.R. 438). In the tradition of American transcendentalism, Emerson established in his “Solitude and Society” (1857) the antagonism in the tension our lives go through getting to the conclusion that “Solitude is impracticable, and society fatal. We must keep our head in the one and our hands in the other” (15). Emersonian confidence cannot find any better solution than the escape from a single answer to accept the impossibility of an optimistic way out. Updike has to face the same dilemma in his literary work, and he follows the same path: “There is a certain necessary ambiguity. I don’t wish my fiction to be any clearer than life” (“Desperate Weakling” 108). He supports his decision by quoting Melville’s lines from his Civil War poem “The Conflicts of Convictions”: “Yea and Nay - / Each had its say; / But God He keeps the middle way” (Updike On Updike, 1). In order to assert his character’s freedom, “Far away, where everybody wants me” (R.a.R. 444), Harry sacrifices his life in a complex way, proving the different meanings which, according to David Leigh, we go through at the end of our lives: “[D]eath as a natural occurrence, death as a human choice, and death as a hope for transcendence” (56). The natural occurrence is, of course, his two heart attacks. However, the second one can be interpreted as a suicidal choice, since Harry, knowing his medical condition, insists on playing basketball, and closes the narrative circle feeling the stereotypical male way: “[A]drenaline and nostalgia overrule” (R.a.R. 504). His language gets back to masculinist rhetoric, “No big deal. No big deal you’re too out of shape for this. No big deal you aren’t good even for a little one-on-one” (R.a.R. 505). Nevertheless, he will finally find out he is a loser. Statistics prove these male elements to be real causes for death, as Kimbrell proved: “Over all men commit suicide at four times the rate of women” (6). Probably, it is the third type of death, the hope for transcendence, the one Updike was more interested in when

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he wrote: “The nature of this exertion is to mix him with earth and sky” (R.a.R. 504). After having Harry go for the last combat against himself, he described his end: “[T]he big old white man […] collapse soundlessly, like a rag doll being dropped” (R.a.R. 506). This last example of the lack of humanity in the male hegemonic construction contrasts with the “feminized” idea of love taking into account that for Updike, “Not to be in love […] is to be dying” (“The Future of the Novel” in PP 36). Harry’s words before dying contain a salvation message, “The boy depends on him […]. ‘Well, Nelson,’ he says, ‘all I can tell you is, it isn’t so bad’” (R.a.R. 512). The author’s ironic ambiguity reaches no end; the reference for “it” may be life or death, but, as the text finishes, the message is clear “enough.” For over 15,000 pages, Updike has gone through the life of his hero and his country from 1959 to 1989 with the tetralogy as “a kind of running report on the state of [Updike’s] hero and his nation” (R.A. ix). Critics like Dilvo Ristoff see Rabbit as actually Updike’s symbol of America, “‘one and the same’: white, crude, overweight and rich in material resources” (57). Joyce Carol Oates goes further, “If Mr. Death is also, and enthusiastically, Uncle Sam, then the Rabbit quartet constitutes a powerful critique of America” (1). Hegemonic masculinity as synecdoche for the whole country is a quite obvious ideological reading of the tetralogy. However, Updike’s literary work reaches higher dimensions when revealing not just an American reality but a much more universal cathartic conclusion very close to Beauvoir’s last idea in her work on aging: “Old age exposes the failure of our entire civilization” (543).

Works Cited Adelman, Richard C. “John Updike Packing.” Journal of Aging, Humanities, and the Arts, vol. 4, 2010, pp. 406–414. Amis, Martin. “Death of the Typical American Heart.” Independent on Sunday. 28 October, 1990, p. 32. Auster, Paul. Brooklyn Foolies. London: Faber & Faber, 2006. Beauvoir, Simone de. The Coming of Age. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996 [1970]. Beneke, Timothy. Proving Manhood: Reflections on Men and Sexism. Berkeley, CA: California UP, 1997. Boswell, Marshall. John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony in Motion. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Brittan, Arthur. Masculinity and Power. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989.

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Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Connell, Robert and Raewyn W. Gender and Power: Society, the Person, and Sexual Politics. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1987. Craig, Steve (ed.) Men, Masculinity, and the Media. Newbury Park: Sage, 1992. Cumming, Elaine and William E. Henry. Growing Old: The Process of Disengagement. New York: Basic Books, 1961. Deats, Sara Munson and Langretta Tallent Lenker (eds.) Aging and Identity: A Humanities Perspective. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999. De Bellis, Jack. The John Updike Encyclopedia. London: Greenwood Press, 2000. Emerson, Ralph W. “Solitude and Society.” The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 12 vols. Boston: Houghton, 1903 [1857]. Fiedler, Leslie A. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Dell Publishing, 1960. Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books, 1975 [1962]. Gilmore, David D. Manhood in the Making. Cultural Concepts of Masculinity. New Haven & London: Yale UP, 1990. Grace, Nancy M. The Feminized Male Character in Twentieth-Century Literature. Leviston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995. Greiner, Donald J. John Updike’s Novels. Athens: Ohio UP, 1984. Hobbs, Alex. Aging Masculinity in the American Novel. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. Keener, Brian. John Updike’s Human Comedy: Comic Morality in The Centaur and the Rabbit Novels. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. Kierkegaard, Soren. The Sickness unto Death. London: Penguin Classics, 1989 [1849]. Kimbrell, Andrew. The Masculine Mystique: The Politics of Masculinity. New York: Ballantine Books, 1995. Kimmel, Michael S. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. New York: Free Press, 1996. ———. The Gender of Desire: Essays on Male Sexuality. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. ———. The Gendered Society. New York: Oxford UP, 2007. Leigh, David. “Ironic Apocalypse in John Updike’s Toward the End of Time.” Religion & Literature 34.1 Spring 2002, pp. 51–65. Lowell, Robert. “Memories of West Street and Lepke.” Life Studies and For the Union Dead. New York: Noonday, 1969. MacInnes, John. The End of Masculinity: The Confusion of Sexual Genesis and Sexual Difference in Modern Society. Buckingham: Open UP, 1998. Oates, Joyce Carol. “So Young!” The New York Times Book Review, 30 September, 1990, p. 1.

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Öberg, Peter. “Images versus Experience of the Aging Body.” Aging Bodies: Images and Everyday Experience. Ed. Christopher A. Faircloth. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2003, pp. 103–139. O’Connell, Mary. Updike and the Patriarchal Dilemma: Masculinity in the Rabbit Novels. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1996. Plath, James (ed.) Conversations with John Updike. Jackson Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi University, 1994. Pleck, Joseph H. The Myth of Masculinity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981. Pollack, William. Real Boys: Rescuing our Sons: From the Myths of Boyhood. New York: Henry Bolt, 2005. Ristoff, Dilvo I. Updike’s America: The Presence of Contemporary American History in John Updike’s Rabbit Trilogy. California: University of Southern California, 1988. Ritts, Morton. “Sick at Heart” in Maclean’s. 19 November, 1990, p. 71. Rose, Charlie. Charlie Rose Interview, 24 October, 1995, YouTube. Rowan, John. Healing the Male Psyque: Therapy as Initiation. London: Routledge, 1997. Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” Rayna R. Reiter (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women. London: Monthly Review Press, 1975, pp. 157–210. Sawyer, Jack. “On Male Liberation.” Joseph Pleck and Jack Sawyer (eds.), Men and Masculinity. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1974. Scott, Anthony O. “Still Wild About Harry.” The New York Times Book Reviews, vol. 1, 19 November, 2000, pp. 2064–2066. Schlesinger, Arthur. “The Crisis of American Masculinity” in Squire, 2008 [1958] pp. 63–65. Sidney, Phillip. “Sonnet 21” from Astrophil and Stella The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 6th Edition, vol. 1. New York: W W Norton & Company. 1993 [1591]. pp. 463–464. Silver, Catherine B. “Gendered Identities in Old Age: Toward (De)gendering?” Journal of Aging Studies 17, 2003, pp. 379–397. Tocqueville, Alexis of. Democracy in America. New York: J. & H.G. Langley, 2004 [1840]. Updike, John. “Desperate Weakling.” Time, 7 November, 1960, p. 108. ———. “Elderly Sex.” Collected Poems 1953–1993. New York: Random House, 1993. ———. Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism. New York: Vintage Books, 1984. ———. The Early Stories: 1953–1975. New York: Ballantine Books, 2004. ———. “The Future of the Novel” and “One Big Interview,” Picked-up Pieces: Essays. New York: Knopf, 1976. ———. Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy. New York: Everyman’s Library, 1995.

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———. Rabbit at Rest. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990. ———. Rabbit Is Rich. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981. ———. Rabbit, Run. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960. ———. “Updike on Updike”. The New York Times. 27 September, 1981, p. 1. ———. “Why Rabbit Had to Go.” The New York Times. 5 August, 1990, p. 1. Wallace, David Foster and Sven Birkerts. “Twilight of the Phallocrats.” New York Observer. 13 October, 1997. Wilde, Gervase de. “John Updike’s Last Interview.” The Telegraph, 29 January, 2009, n.p.

Geographies of Aging in Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Third and Final Continent” and Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex Sarah Boykin Hardy

Having been born across the world, we are translated men. —Salman Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands”

Jhumpa Lahiri’s 1999 short story “The Third and Final Continent” and Geoffrey Eugenides’ 2002 novel Middlesex draw compelling portraits of immigrant American masculinities that change with age. In these fictions, characters work to construct masculine identities in a diaspora at the same time that they confront their own aging and mortality. Using theoretical framings of the migrant experience to guide a reading of aging male characters, this essay will explore the relationship between emerging gender identity and shifting geographies in Lahiri’s short story and then turn to see how this relationship is complicated in Eugenides’ longer work. As the first-person narrators explain in both texts, migration resonates with projects of gendered self-construction over time. “The Third and Final Continent” is the final story in Lahiri’s 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, Interpreter of Maladies. Most of the collection’s plots concern immigrants from India to the United States

S. B. Hardy (B) Hampden-Sydney College, Hampden-Sydney, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. M. Armengol (ed.), Aging Masculinities in Contemporary U.S. Fiction, Global Masculinities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71596-0_3

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and subsequent generations in the Indian diaspora. In an essay reviewing changes in diaspora studies, Aisha Khan observes that “diasporas have been most valued for the stories they tell about cultural encounters, transformations, the vitality of cultural production, and the conditions of self-reflexivity that give rise to new or emerging identities” (29). Lahiri’s characters often reveal not just the vitality but the complexity of living in a migrant dynamic of “in-between,” one in which identities are split and recombined across different spaces and cultures. While other stories in the volume treat stillbirth, uncertain marriages, and doomed fantasies in snapshots that attest to the diversity and contested spaces of any diaspora, the final story brings resolution to the sequence with a quieter narrative that spans decades and traverses continents, tracing an immigrant’s life from young bachelorhood to settled later middle age. Within this migration success story, the protagonist’s masculine identity shifts as he ages and adapts to his new settings. In London he lives in a house full of “penniless Bengali bachelors like myself, all struggling to educate and establish ourselves abroad” (173). After returning to India to marry the woman his brother has chosen for him, he moves to Massachusetts to start his job and wait for his bride, renting a room by the week from a Mrs. Croft, who is 103 years old and astonished that men have just put an American flag on the moon. It is his connection to Mrs. Croft that launches the narrator toward his new immigrant masculinity in the United States. Her solitude in extreme old age shocks him, for as a dutiful son he had cared for his mother until her death, and the small kindnesses he performs for his cantankerous landlady earn him the label of “gentleman.” His attitude towards being a husband is at first based on Indian conventions: it is “a duty expected of me, as it was expected of every man” (181) as is the expectation that he must take care of his wife Mala once she arrives. Only after he takes Mala to see Mrs. Croft does he make a connection to his wife beyond mere marital duty. In his narration, Mala’s laughter at his interactions with the aged woman, as well as Mrs. Croft’s pronouncement of Mala as a “perfect lady” to match the narrator’s status as a gentleman, starts their real life together and allows for aging and masculinity in a new context. Later Mrs. Croft is the first person the narrator grieves for in his new home, and when he reaches middle age, she and the house she lived in became a fixed point in the geography of his story about becoming a citizen, a husband, and a father. This touchstone is part of the narrative through which he passes lessons about his new country to his son, who

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fulfills a high-achieving immigrant’s story by attending Harvard: “Whenever he is discouraged, I tell him that if I can survive on three continents, then there is no obstacle he cannot conquer. While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for thirty years” (198). The comparison to the masculine heroics of the Apollo astronauts anchors the narrator to a key moment in his adopted nation’s iconography at the same time that it loops back to his time with Mrs. Croft. She was amazed at the journey to the moon; the narrator is bewildered by his own journey, like that of countless other men, “to seek fortune far from home.” He concludes his story, and Lahiri’s collection, with a moment of narrative humility: “As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination” (198). Though his migration story traces a fairly straightforward arc toward contented old age, the narrator still finds its particulars inexpressible. This path of aging immigrant masculinity is complicated and multiplied in Middlesex: the intersex narrator Cal,1 in the process of asserting a masculine identity after a childhood as a girl, weaves a story that draws on those of his father Milton, his mysterious maternal grandfather Jimmy Zizmo, and his other immigrant grandfather, Lefty. All four characters undertake narratives as self-made men, and all have stories anchored in Detroit’s Greek diaspora. Members of Cal’s family have come to the United States as refugees from either Turkish violence or oppressive gender expectations. The space they move into is not a static or necessarily comfortable one, however; as Avtar Brah notes in Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities, “all diasporas are differentiated, heterogeneous, contested spaces, even as they are implicated in the construction of a common ‘we’” (184, quoted in McLeod, 238). In addition, unlike the fairly stable world of Cambridge, Massachusetts depicted in Lahiri’s story, Detroit itself undergoes enormous changes related to industry and racial unrest during the decades of the Stephanides family saga. Cal exploits the complexity of this context as he narrates his own equally complex coming-of-age story. In spite of the rich hybrid narration of the novel (and its title), critical treatments of Cal’s shifting gender identification sometimes point to a failure of the protagonist to remain in a queer middle ground with respect to his identity. For instance, Merton Lee asserts that the reason Middlesex comes across as inoffensive

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comes down to the place of narrative closure, since to close the book with Cal as a stable, happy, heterosexual male is to enact the neutering of the queer that Halberstam says is so comforting to a conservative ideology. It is true that throughout the novel, the underlying ambiguities always threaten to irrupt through the conciliatory surface, but the fact that these undercurrents are invisible, and by definition below the surface, serves to preserve the inoffensive hierarchy of a queer coming of age in which the teleological destination, and what is most desired, is normalcy. (45)

Yet such readings may not be giving enough attention to the way the narrator treats the stories of the men in earlier generations of his family— elements that are hardly below the surface of the narration and that allow Cal to examine contesting models of aging diasporic masculinities. As these characters grow older and confront gendered expectations, their constructions of masculinities are articulated, critiqued, and intertwined into Cal’s narrative to reveal identities whose “normalcy” is undermined by the text. The novel opens by announcing its own birth as the third in a series, after Callie’s birth as an infant and Cal’s as a teenaged boy: Cal asserts that he wants to capture “this rollercoaster ride of a single gene through time” (4); for this, he tells us, he needs to “rewind the film” (20). These metaphors for the narrative of Cal’s background and his genetic inheritance turn out to be deceptively linear when it comes to the novel and its family stories, neither of which ever settles on a single central image or discourse. As Lee points out, “science and cinema both represent discourses that present specular unities which are really full of omissions” (45), and the novel’s many modes of narration frequently present conflicting cause-and-effect narratives. Like rewinding a film to its beginning, tracking a single gene backward through time implies a migration story with a single locatable point of origin or “home” that is the ultimate goal of the narrative, but no single ancestor is responsible for Cal’s genetic composition, and the twists and turns of this text resist limitation to a singular quest. Instead, as Bilyana Kostova maintains, “Everything about Middlesex is a promise for hybridity: the intersexual narrator, his Greek-American familial culture, the novel itself – part immigrant saga, part coming-of-age narrative – and its mode of narration, marked by the tragicomic” (309). I want to argue (unlike Kostova) that the book’s approach to gender resonates with this promise, as we see when we begin to map Cal’s multiple stories of the men (and women) in his family. A

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single point of origin or a single model—for the narrative, for identity, or for a sense of belonging—becomes impossible. If migration can trouble a fixed sense of home for those who experience it while also opening up a space for creativity and innovation, I would suggest that the novel sets up a similar dynamic with respect to conventions of gender: an ambivalence toward a fixed sense of masculinity in older male characters ultimately allows Cal more space for playful agency in his own gender identity. Two patriarchal figures fail to fully reach old age in the scope of the narrative, but their stories are instructive for both the constructions they uncover and the gaps they reveal. Cal’s father Milton is a first-generation American and a self-made man, a status that Michael Kimmel reminds us must be “proved constantly” (17). Caught up in a post-WWII enthusiasm for scientific progress, Milton believes he is the master of his own destiny, which extends to his determination that his second child will be a girl (10–11). He forms a “no-nonsense attitude” in the Navy and develops middle-class tastes in Brooks Brothers fashion and racial politics (199–200). A successful entrepreneur by the time Callie is a teenager, Milton has turned his Greek ethnicity into a chain of fast-food restaurants that reaches from Michigan to Florida: Hercules Hot Dogs. The solid twentieth-century American masculine identity Milton has constructed is destabilized, however, when he is confronted with facts about his child— pertaining not only to gender but to biology—that he cannot control. “Armored” in his “most commanding clothes” to meet with the doctor about Callie’s gender identity prognosis, Milton betrays uncertainty as he puts on Greek drama cufflinks denoting comedy and tragedy, both of which Cal pursues in telling the scene that follows (425). This double telling device continues when Cal narrates the end of Milton’s life, which is itself brought on by his reaction to Callie’s disappearance and refusal to “remain a girl.” Milton dies in a ten-car pileup with injuries “consistent with a crash of a vehicle going seventy-plus miles per hour” (510). But Cal simultaneously recounts his father’s final moments as a fantastical journey through space and time over Detroit, seeing the city and its landmarks in the past, present, and future, and ending with a deprecating flash of self-awareness. “He could hardly believe he had loused things up quite so badly. His last word, therefore, was spoken softly, without anger or fear, only with bewilderment and a measure of bravery. ‘Birdbrain,’ Milton said, to himself, in his last Cadillac. And then the water claimed him” (511). The narration insists on multiple disruptions in this scene: two versions of the end of Milton’s life, a collapse of time and urban

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geography, and Milton’s failure to maintain his identities as an effective father and a savvy businessman. By fracturing the linear construction of his father’s self-image, Cal’s compassionate telling illuminates the fragility of Milton’s masculinity. If the fissures in Milton’s constructed self call into question one version of assured masculinity, Cal’s maternal grandfather presents a challenging model of manhood in other ways. Jimmy Zizmo is not just radically self-made, but remade, and to an extent that even Cal’s impossible omniscience cannot fully see: “Amateur herbalist; antisuffragist; big-game hunter; ex-con; drug pusher; teetotaler—take your pick” (88). Although his wife says that he is from the Black Sea, his ethnicity is never clear; he has an indeterminate skin tone, a face “rumpled like an unmade bed,” and seductive, girlish eyebrows and eyelashes (89). A patchwork of possibilities that never cohere, in his mid-forties Zizmo disappears into the frozen lake one night, and Cal notes that “Just like the ice, lives crack, too. Personalities. Identities. Jimmy Zizmo, crouching over the Packard’s wheel, has already changed past understanding” (125). This enigma drops out of the narrative, but he then reappears years later as W. D. Fard, the founder of the Nation of Islam, now associated with multiple names and possible homelands that range from Jamaica and Syria to New Zealand, born “To either Hawaiian or British and Polynesian parents” (146–47). This unlikely grandfather then disappears again, resisting any attempts to pin down his immigration story or affirm the truth of any of his personae. This character can be partially explained using the distinction Paul Gilroy makes between “roots” that fix a person in geography, nationality, or ethnicity; and “routes” in a cultural as well as physical sense. John McLeod explains that the migrant’s routes can forge “a shifting and mobile relationship between past, present, and future, one that does not presume an even, continuous passage through time but which reconstellates these different moments” (249–50). Jimmy Zizmo’s reconstellation takes an extreme form that refuses any origins or any conclusions. He tells Desdemona “you never knew who I was or where I came from” (164); Cal reluctantly admits “It’s anybody’s guess,” adding that his maternal grandfather “returned to the nowhere from which he’d come” (165). Zizmo’s cameos as a controlling husband, a daring bootlegger, and a charismatic religious leader never coalesce into a single identity that his family can hold onto. Instead, these moments present his immigrant masculinity in middle age and beyond as a collection of compelling but disconnected performances.

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The most complete portrait of aging masculinity in Middlesex comes in Cal’s depiction of his other grandfather, Lefty, with whom he has a special connection. Enamored of Western European and American culture as a young man, Lefty is ready to reinvent himself when he and Desdemona are forced to flee. On the ship from Smyrna to New York, he was “aware that whatever happened now would become the truth, that whatever he seemed to be would become what he was—already an American, in other words” (67). While this story of migration follows a path that is in many ways typical, Lefty’s reinvention also includes a crucial fiction that turns his sister into a stranger whom he can then marry. His route therefore introduces a sharp break from acknowledging his past family context while it builds a present on a family secret. At first, elements of his immigration story follow an arc parallel to that of Lahiri’s protagonist: he arrives in the melting pot of America (literalized in a scene staged by the Ford Motor Company English Language School), enters the workforce, and starts a family (104). However, his identity as a breadwinner and patriarch falters through a series of events: his speakeasy is threatened by the Depression, his wife refuses to have more children, he is nudged into early retirement by Milton, and he loses his savings through gambling. Still in his midfifties, “Lefty walked out of the bank into his penniless old age” (207). He and Desdemona sell their house and most of their belongings before moving in with Milton’s family, and on the day Calliope is born, Lefty suffers the first of thirteen strokes and loses his ability to speak (17). José María Armengol, in a reading of representations of old age in recent American fiction, argues that “the challenge to hegemonic (read: youthful) masculinity posed by old age may also help undermine…the traditional equation of masculinity with phallic prowess, thus pointing to alternative models of being a man. For men, then, old age no doubt represents a challenge, but also a unique opportunity to rethink themselves as men” (364). Cal’s narration of Lefty’s old age may offer just such a model, although it also exposes his grandfather’s masculine bravado and leaves gaps in ways that resemble his telling of Milton’s and Jimmy Zizmo’s stories. Cal tells us that “from the beginning there existed a strange balance between my grandfather and me. As I cried my first cry, Lefty was silenced; and as he gradually lost the ability to see, to taste, to hear, to think or even remember, I began to see, taste, and remember everything, even stuff I hadn’t seen, eaten, or done” (269). Furthermore, and in keeping with Armengol’s argument, in his old age Lefty becomes an author figure who balances out Callie’s widening volubility with a

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narrowing attention to the fragmentary. In spite of multiple strokes, he spends seven years communicating with the family using a hand-held chalkboard and translating bits of Sappho’s poems “into a larger mosaic, adding a stanza here, a coda there, soldering an anapest or an iamb” (12). Interestingly, by taking on Sappho’s voice, Lefty aligns himself with a differently gendered subject position as well. This boundary crossing resonates with Cal’s stated ability “to communicate between the genders, to see not with the monovision of one sex but in the stereoscope of both” (269). In the last three years of his life, Lefty’s identity crosses additional boundaries of space and time as his mind moves backward through his immigration story. While Lahiri’s narrator uses history as a touchstone that allows him to mature, Lefty regresses permanently as he re-experiences events like the assassinations of the 1960s and the completion of the St. Lawrence Seaway in the 1950s. His use of English deteriorates and then disappears, and along with his mind’s return to Bursa, with his hair “pomaded a la Valentino,” comes his inability to see Desdemona as anything but his sister (267–68). Reverting from American to Greek, from husband to brother and then to dependent infant, “In the end he became as fragmentary as the poems of Sappho he never succeeded in restoring” (269). Cal’s narration of Lefty’s dissolution thus causes this story of migration and gender identity to unfold in more than one direction before his death, pushing against the flow of what Halberstam calls “generational time” (5) and ultimately unraveling a coherent, legible narrative with a transmissible ending to pass to subsequent generations. Instead, the mosaic of fragments that Cal recollects becomes malleable material to be worked into his project of self-telling. In “Imaginary Homelands,” Salman Rushdie explores the intertwining of emigration and memory; in a parenthetical observation toward the end of his argument, he uses language as a metaphor for experience, observing that “the word ‘translation’ comes, etymologically, from the Latin for ‘bearing across.’ Having been born across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained” (17). Anastasia Christou points to a similar gain for older men in particular in her study of second-generation Greek-Americans who return to Greece, finding that for the subjects she interviews, “both ageing and new cultural spaces become added layers of self re-invention” (813). The masculine self-inventions of the aging “translated men” in

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Cal’s family vary, as we have seen, and the models they represent can be in tension with each other. Cal’s portrayal of these constructions of gender shows them to be fluid, unstable, and even doomed, yet the narration reveals these flaws with some sympathy. In fact, articulating— and perhaps (re)translating—what lies behind the masculine facades of his male relatives aids Cal in uncovering and expressing his own hybrid self. Cal complains, in one of the novel’s many self-referential musings, that “Maybe the best proof that language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling” (217). He wishes instead for hybrid expressions, such as one that can suggest how “‘intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members’ connects with ‘the hatred of mirrors than begins in middle age’” (217). This longed-for, non-patriarchal complexity is met by the text itself, to the extent that it captures variations of story in new combinations that refuse to oversimplify age and family relationships as well as national identity or gender. Cal needs this complexity in order to apply it to narrating his own unconventional situation as an intersex character. And clearly, his challenge is not just that of articulating his own difference, but a need to express a family’s intersectional identities over time. In the service of both projects, Cal illuminates the impermanence of masculine identities in relatives as they age, exploiting what Kostova notes is “the connective capacity of stories to bring together disparate elements” (314). As the stories of individual relatives combine and jostle against each other in Cal’s narration, a larger “reconstellation” of possibilities develops.2 Indeed, Cal brings together many axes of identity that I have been using in this essay—age, gender, ethnicity, migration—in his efforts to find a non-patriarchal, connective language in his own middle age. He refers to his shift from Callie to Cal as a kind of migration: “I was becoming a new person, too, just like Lefty and Desdemona, and I didn’t know what would happen to me in this new world to which I’d come” (443). Migration parallels the route to a new gender identity, and both transformations open up possibilities for agency in-between. As he watches a Turkish baker in Berlin and imagines living in Istanbul, Cal thinks “we’re all made up of many parts, other halves. Not just me” (440). Though we have not seen much of Cal’s progression from childhood to his own middle years, at forty-one he presents us with a model for gender identity that we might call contentedly transgressive. It is true, as critics have pointed out, that he tells us he identifies as a man and is pursuing a heterosexual relationship; Sarah Graham states that “his self-image is driven by what he defines as a key signifier of

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masculinity, sexual desire for women” (15). But as the adult Cal teases out his stories about his grandfathers and his father, his own masculine identity is self-consciously and sometimes playfully constructed from a pastiche of sources: The Three Musketeers, double-breasted suits, fauns, and Freudian cigars. His developing relationship with Julie Kikuchi attains its own ambiguities of desire when he finally breaks a long pattern of “incomplete seductions” in which he refuses to reveal himself (320). He and Julie agree that they could either be each other’s last stop on the way to homosexuality or each other’s first stop to a meaningful relationship that acknowledges difference and indeterminacy—in his body and in hers. Cal is finally prepared to confront these multiple possibilities: “I was trying to keep up the banter. I was also taking off my clothes. So was Julie. It was like jumping into cold water. You had to do it without thinking too much. We got under the covers and held each other, petrified, happy” (514). Reading this scene through Sedgwick’s suggestion that getting beyond subjectivity would be necessary for seeing “how gender might be made coherent despite the aporia between gender and sexuality,” Lee concludes that “for Middlesex, the contradictions and inconclusiveness of gender and sexuality are what gender and sexuality means” (43–44).3 The nonlinear narration does not however end with this complex, if positive, moment in Cal’s middle age. In the final pages of the novel, Cal narrates his teenaged self’s return to Middlesex in his newly claimed identity. Comparing his gender transition to growing older, the mature Cal resists absolutes in order to set forth a middle ground as he looks back: “my family found that, contrary to popular opinion, gender was not all that important. My change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from infancy to adulthood. In most ways I remained the person I’ve always been. Even now, though I live as a man, I remain in essential ways Tessie’s daughter” (520). Having recounted his struggles to discover and live with his intersex identity for over five hundred pages, Cal finally insists on a self that goes beyond a conventional male/female binary that would define him as monstrous, dwelling in a fluid space of “many parts,” calling himself instead “a new type of human being” (529). By figuring aging as travel and the discovery of new gender identity as migration, Middlesex draws attention to a common liminal status for those who cross boundaries of any sort. Lahiri’s and Eugenides’ stories of immigrant men place their characters at the intersection of many

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such crossings, combining geographies, nationalities, masculinities, and the challenges of aging. These intersectional elements shift variously as characters grow older, but taken together, these fictions point to an openendedness in later life, rather than an encroaching predetermined ending. Lahiri’s narrator thinks back over his life—the miles he has traveled and the people he has known—at the end of an apparently contented story that nonetheless gestures towards aspects “beyond… imagination” (198). Cal ends his complicated story literally on a retrospective threshold: “I lost track after a while, happy to be home, weeping for my father, and thinking about what was next” (529). Far from concluding an expected linear life story or quest narrative with a settled sense of self, these depictions of aging posit masculinities that are en route, in transition, and still emerging. Acknowledgements I am grateful for the kind assistance of José María Armengol in pointing me to resources for this essay, and for the editorial advice of my colleague Cristine Varholy. Work on this project was also supported by a Faculty Summer Research Grant from Hampden-Sydney College.

Notes 1. The term “intersex” is used by the novel’s narrator to refer to his condition, though he also alludes to some of the controversy around “intersex,” “hermaphrodite,” and other labels that can be considered pejorative or inaccurate. I use this term in my discussion to echo Cal’s own language, but I am mindful of changes in medical and cultural approaches to disorders of sex development. See also Heather Laine Talley and Monica J. Casper, 270–89. 2. Although it is not the immediate subject of this essay for the present volume, Cal’s narrative of course also develops the stories of several characters with other gender identities, including his mother, his two grandmothers, and, in an important cameo, Zora Khyber, an intersex character with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome who educates Cal and tells him “we’re what’s next” (490). 3. This conclusion is consistent with Richard Elkins and Dave King’s observation that “the ‘lessons’ of transgender for masculinity (and femininity) are complex and often contradictory. They revolve around the nature of and the relationships between sex, gender, and sexuality. The neat binary divisions in each of these areas has given way to diversity, and the simple linkages between them have given way to complexity” (390).

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Works Cited Armengol, Josep M. “Aging as Emasculation? Rethinking Aging Masculinities in Contemporary U.S. Fiction.” Critique, vol. 59, no. 3, 2018, pp. 355–367. https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2017.1386157. Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. Routledge, 1996. Christou, Anastasia. “Ageing Masculinities and the Nation: Disrupting Boundaries of Sexualities, Mobilities and Identities.” Gender, Place & Culture, vol. 23, no. 6, 2016, pp. 801–816. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2015. 1058760. Elkins, Richard and Dave King. “Transgendering, Men, and Masculinities.” In The Handbook of Studies on Men & Masculinities, edited by Michael S. Kimmel, Jeff Hearn, and R. W. Connell. Sage, 2005, pp. 379–394. Eugenides, Jeffrey. Middlesex. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. Graham, Sarah. “‘See Synonyms at Monster’: En-Freaking Transgender in Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex.” Ariel, vol. 40, no. 4, October 2009, pp. 1–18. Halberstam, J. Jack. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York UP, 2005. Khan, Aisha. “Material and Immaterial Bodies: Diaspora Studies and the Problem of Culture, Identity, and Race.” Small Axe, vol. 19, no. 3, 2015, pp. 29– 49. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/602409. Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. 2nd ed., Oxford UP, 2006. Kostova, Bilyana Vanyova. “Remembering Ethnicity in Middlesex.” Orbis Litterarum, vol. 70, no. 4, August 2015, pp. 306–327. https://doi.org/10.1111/ oli.12071. Lahiri, Jhumpa. Interpreter of Maladies. Houghton Mifflin, 1999. Lee, Merton. “Why Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex Is So Inoffensive.” Critique, vol. 51, no. 1, Fall 2009, pp. 32–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/001116109 03249856. McLeod, John. Beginning Postcolonialism. 2nd ed. Manchester UP, 2010. Rushdie, Salman. “Imaginary Homelands.” In Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. Granta Books, 1992, pp. 9–21. Talley, Heather Laine and Monica J. Casper. “Intersex and Aging: A (Cautionary) Research Agenda.” In Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Aging: Challenges in Research, Practice, and Policy, 1st ed., edited by Tarynn M. Witten and A. Evan Eyler, Johns Hopkins UP, 2012, pp. 270–289.

The Aging Male Body as a Contested Site of Privilege: Literary Representations in Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge Teresa Requena-Pelegrí

The study of privilege within Critical Studies of Men and Masculinities (CSMM) has been part of the mapping of gender relations since the early development of the field. Drawing on the intersectional nature of the different sites of privilege we may inhabit, the articulation of privilege as the other site of oppression has placed Western dominance, class elitism, white, patriarchal, heterosexual or able-bodied privileges under scrutiny and has contributed to the critique of dominance. Focusing on those who benefit most from existing social divisions and inequalities and thus emphasizing the structural basis of discrimination, the study of privilege lays bare, among other things, the sense of entitlement members of privileged groups usually have as to the privileges they enjoy (Pease 3, 15). The analysis of privilege in relation to the aging male body reveals the competing subject positions that may coexist in old age. The aging male body thus inhabits a contested site of privilege, both signifying a

T. Requena-Pelegrí (B) University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. M. Armengol (ed.), Aging Masculinities in Contemporary U.S. Fiction, Global Masculinities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71596-0_4

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dominant and unearned position of dominance derived from the patriarchal dividend as well as a social position of invisibility and discrimination based on ageism. I am interested in exploring the inherent tension in the aging male body that results from the different experiences of privilege and discrimination and the ways in which, as I shall argue, possibilities for constructing non-normative identities arise. To that effect, I read two different aging male characters in light of their relation to privilege. The first is the character of Larry Cook in Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (1991), an old man who has just retired. Larry Cook’s aging experience is based on the struggle to maintain a gendered narrative of a domineering man in both the private and public realms, a man who has exercised different form of violence and sexual abuse over his two daughters. Thus, the text depicts him as a character who resists his loss of entitlement, ascendance over his family and the privilege granted to him in the social world he inhabits. In contrast to Larry Cook, the depiction of the aging male body in the character of Jack Kennison in Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge (2008) offers a counter-narrative of the aging male body that resists losing his gendered privilege in order to open up the possibility of an aging narrative based on vulnerability and intimacy. While Larry Cook constitutes an example of an aging male character who attempts to reproduce his unearned male privilege after his voluntary retirement, Jack Kennison embraces a masculinity that accepts his transformed body while enjoying a renewed intimacy with Olive Kitteridge.

Masculinities and the Aging Male Body Current theoretical arguments in feminist thought have welcomed the rise of the materiality of bodies as a critical category, which has posed a challenge to the characteristic linguistic turn informing humanist studies in the past decades (Alaimo and Hekman 1). In response to the focus on the discursive at the expense of the material, which constitutes what Elizabeth Grosz has described as “a conceptual blind spot in both mainstream Western philosophical thought and contemporary feminist theory” (3), the rendering of bodies as material entities has underscored the embodied nature of knowledge, materiality, and discourse (Hearn, “Men, Masculinities, and the Material Discursive”). Similarly, the largely unexplored male body as an object of critical analysis has received growing attention in studies of masculinities (Chernisavsky 26).

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The increasing critical study of bodies has constituted a topic of discussion in critical gerontology. As Peter Öberg notes, there has been a visible paradox in the field of social gerontology in that the body seems to be “absent” despite the fact that aging is presented both in terms of surface and it is experienced via the body (701). Jackson also contends that “previous research on men and masculinities as well as the field of aging studies has largely ignored aging men and aging men’s bodies in particular” (38). Despite the traditional invisibility of aging male bodies in critical discourse and in literary representations, it constitutes a truism to say that aging is about the body and that old age is readily symbolized by the body (Gilleard 156). Accordingly, aging and gender are interlinked dimensions, both are bodily phenomena, we deal with them, incorporate and express them through our bodies (Wehrle). Although the aging body is constantly being culturally inscribed and reinscribed through life, “in the study of aging we often lose sight of the lived body” despite its material presence, tangibility, and visibility (Featherstone and Wernick 1). It can be argued that one of the reasons for the absence of aging bodies from critical discussions is the valorization of youth, since it is the young male body what has constituted and constitutes the normative site of male privilege; youth has been an integral constituent of the normative male model. The body was a constituent element of analysis in the early theorization of hegemonic, complicit, marginalized, and subordinate masculinities. As Connell noted in Masculinities, there has been the belief that “true masculinity is almost always thought to proceed from men’s bodies—to be inherent in a male body or to express something about a male body” (45). Such inescapable material sense of maleness and femaleness is key to the Western cultural interpretation of gender, thus making masculinity, among other things, “a certain feel to the skin, certain muscular shapes and tensions, certain postures and ways of moving, certain possibilities in sex” (Connell 52–53). The inescapable materiality of bodies in discussions of masculinities revealed the extent to which corporeality constitutes a site of inscription, a text onto which constitutive features of masculinity are inscribed. In particular, attributes such as vigor, domination, strength, or virility have been the stock characteristics of normative masculinities and hence rendered desirable. Such a prevailing sense of the universality of youth in critical discussions of masculinities has led Hearn to argue that aging constitutes one of the commonly neglected intersectionalities in the field (“Neglected Intersectionalities” 89). In a similar vein, Bartholomaeous and Tarrant

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have noted that “age relations…are largely invisible in discussions of masculinities because hegemonic masculinity valorizes youth or focuses on a middle-age group often perceived to be universal to all ages (or at least the most important)” (354). Moreover, images of older men continue to be largely constructed in opposition to youthful energy and physicality, an aspect that coexists with the common “ghettoization of old age” (Gilleard 157). Inherent in the ghettoization of old age is the detachment from the attributes commonly associated with normative masculinity such as power and control, youth, sports, or the occupational world and therefore, this separation is perceived as the subsequent reduction or loss of masculinity in old age (Specter-Mersel 75). There are several assumptions that are inferred from this process. First, that the material evidence of the transformation of the body along the life course continues to be largely understood as an inexorable decline, involving processes such as shrinking, atrophy, and loss of mental capacity (Barry 132). Such cultural narratives of decline (Gullette 15) seem to be grounded on the continuing relational quality of aging male bodies to young bodies, on the narratives that construct the aging body as the downside to the desired attributes of youth: diminishing of physical function, capacity, illness, dependency, and lack. And secondly, as we shall see in my discussion of Olive Kitteridge, counter narratives that move away from the narrative of inexorable decay may include that of successful aging in order to foster images of healthy, active, and independent retirees (Sandberg 219).

Jane Smiley’s a Thousand Acres (1991): Holding on to Privilege A Thousand Acres has been celebrated as Jane Smiley’s skillful rewriting of the Shakespeare’s King Lear plot with a feminist gender lens. Set in rural Iowa in the 1970s, the story features a domineering widowed father, Larry Cook, and his three daughters, Ginny, Rose, and Caroline. Narrated by Ginny Cook, the oldest one, the plot progressively reveals the abuse both Ginny and Rose were subjected to by their father, a traumatic event that has been fenced out from Ginny’s memory. Only after her sister Rose mentions it to her, will the events come back. The story chronicles the aftermath of the patriarch’s unexpected decision to divide his family farm—a thousand acres, the biggest in Zebuloun County—into three parts in order to hand it over to his daughters. The subsequent

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family’s disintegration that accompanies Larry’s act of patriarchal assertion—like King Lear’s—will be derived from his taking for granted his daughters’ compliance with the terms he establishes. The text constitutes a nuanced representation of old age and retirement in the character of Larry Cook. Exercising the privilege of his gender and class, Larry decides to hand over his thousand acres by splitting them up into his three daughters. This self-chosen retirement constitutes the catalyst for uncovering and making public the sexual abuse this respected farmer impinged on his two eldest daughters. Echoing King Lear’s decision, Larry decides on the time of his retirement and sets the precise terms and conditions under which the transfer of the farm will be implemented. Before this turning point, the narration establishes Larry as the patriarch, the central symbol of normative masculinity, the manifest center against which other family members gravitate and define themselves in relation to. His public self as a well-respected farmer owning the largest amount of land conforms the public signifier of the control, domination, and abuse he exercises at home. Larry’s refusal to let go of the male privilege that has granted him dominance over his two eldest daughters and his extended family constitutes a skillful portrayal of an aging male character stubbornly attached to what David Leverenz refers as the “synecdoche of the penis”: Across cultures and centuries, the erect penis has been the most basic synecdoche for a man’s virility and force. At least to himself, his private part stands for his public firmness. It symbolizes a man’s capacity for penetration, insemination, and dominance. It also represents his self-confidence. An erection makes him feel at least twice life size, alive with power and desire…For most aging men, however, the limp penis becomes a private synecdoche for their failing powers. (63–64)

Equating male privilege with sexual performance and the qualities symbolized by the erect penis Leverenz describes, Larry Cook has exerted his virility and force in public through the symbolic capital in the form of massive land possessions. For example, he buys an expensive Buick in order to take his family on regular rides, an extravagant public gesture; a display of wealth and status, concomitant with the dominant position awarded by his acreage and a synecdoche for his normative masculinity. As Ginny notes, this is something “farmers rarely do” because of the price of gasoline (Smiley 5), but throughout his life, Larry has proved his

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masculinity in public through domination and competition. In private, the synecdoche of the penis acquires a far more literal and disturbing sense when Larry’s abuse of his two eldest daughters in their adolescence is revealed after his decision to divide the farm. The turning point in the narrative is, like in King Lear, Larry’s transferring of his farm to his daughters, an action whose justification rests on two basic principles. On the one hand, a practical stance with which Larry tries to convince his daughters that it is better to hand over his possessions in life rather than paying thousands of dollars of inheritance taxes and the other, and most significant for my argument, on his age (he is 68)—“Hell, I’m too old for this” (Smiley 19). Larry’s willful act offers an interesting instance of the ways in which the occupational structuring of older men is complicated by notions Jeff Hearn identifies as “early retirement” or “voluntary severance” (“Imaging the Aging of Men” 101) since his resolution to apparently relinquish the social power attached to the managing of his farm reinforces his privileged class position as a man who can escape the usual material consequences of retirement. As C.B. Silver argues, the gendered dimension of retirement may include a related series of consequences: Men and Women’s location in the social structure during their adult years (structures of power, inequality, kinship structures, patriarchal structures) greatly shape their social status, economic positions, and sense of self in advanced years. Retired men often face a loss of power, income, status, public recognition, and authority in the family. (387)

Larry resists such loss of power. In the same way that he has always decided over his daughter’s lives, he envisions a future in which he continues to be a de facto patriarch unashamedly displaying his male rage, his abusive demands for domestic care and the claim that his daughters tend to him in his life post-retirement. Larry’s assumption rests on the unquestioned principle that the very same daughters he had sexually abused will take care of him in old age, which constitutes another instance of both his unquestioned entitlement to male privilege as well as his daughters’ continued domination since they are expected to be indebted to their father’s “gift” of the farm. In his world, the dominance he exerted through his body in the form of sexual abuse now becomes verbal and psychological violence.

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The time after his retirement thus heralds his refusal to rewrite his masculine identity along non-normative features. Interestingly, Larry Cook refuses to be rendered invisible by his retirement. Quite to the contrary, Larry’s resistance to dismiss his symbolic self-aggrandizing masculinity develops in an increased violent verbal abuse of his two eldest daughters as well as of his neighbors. His sense of entitlement to male privilege remains intact, he purports to embody the actions of the young, vigorous farmer with a tight control over everything and everybody despite the fact that as an aging man his position of privilege has been transformed by his increasing dependency on his daughters. Larry’s acts and words from this point onwards reveal his refusal to accept the transformation of his body and his aging process, or what Leverenz terms the resistance to surrender to the material transformation of the body as an attempt to retain “[King] Lear-like grasping for patriarchal control” (65). Indeed, the intertextual references to Shakespeare’s King Lear are fitting. As Leverenz contends, “[King Lear] remains the ur-text for all these dramas of aging, narcissistic, needy men in thrall to their penis nostalgia” (76) and actually, Leverenz seems right in pointing at the possibility of incestuous relationships of Lear with Regan and Goneril that ultimately presents Lear’s tragedy as one of loss of patriarchal power as well as an old man’s impotence” (78). Thus, despite the evidence that every man’s body ages, Larry refuses to acknowledge the transformation since his body has been the site on which normative masculinity in the form of physicality, sexual prowess, and authority have been inscribed. As Calasanti and King claim, bodies are constructed and physically real, “physiological shifts we link to puberty or middle age may be equally powerful, but groups interpret them differently” (“Intersectionality and Age” 195). Ginny’s recollections of her father when she was a child reflect her reading of his body, he had a massive, big, body with a deep voice that corresponded to the farmer who owned “the biggest farm farmed by the biggest farmer” (Smiley 20). It is from this stance that Larry comes to resist the contradictions that Jackson has identified as being characteristic of some aging men’s lives. As he argues, “In many aging men’s lives there is a contradictory mixture of some legacies of gender privilege interacting with the threat of loss, bodily fragility and defeat” so that “aging men’s embodied selves are contradictory, contested sites where multiple meanings are in dynamic conflict with each other” (Jackson 92). While Larry tries to retain his patriarchal dominance, such entitlement becomes gradually challenged by the

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disclosure of the sexual abuse of his daughters, and his rage will show his useless efforts to maintain his male privilege. In an attempt to resist what Spector-Mersel refers to as “older men’s transparency” (76), that is the construction of older men as redundant or even invisible, Larry capitalizes on his sense of male entitlement. Part of the process rests on physicality, an integral component in normative models of masculinity that becomes invisible in old age (Calasanti and King, “The Dynamic Nature” 17). Jackson also discusses the invisibility some aging men suffer after retirement or what he refers to as the “voicelessness, marginalization and sense of occasional uselessness experienced by some aging men following their departure from paid employment and taken for granted relationships and identities” (1). Resisting to be read as frail or invisible, Larry maintains his violent nature and his unearned privileged position as a man. His irritable, fear-inspiring character is prone to outbursts of rage and verbal abuse. As Hearn argues, “what ‘violence’ is and what ‘violence’ means is both material and discursive. It is both a matter of experience of change in bodily matter, and a matter of change in discursive constructions…[Violence] is simultaneously painful, full of pain; and textual, full of text” (“Men, Masculinities, and the Material Discursive” 9). Larry’s sexist and abusive assumptions about his daughters continue in the present, he keeps calling Ginny and Rosie whores and wishes to have had sons instead (Smiley 195). Among the three daughters, it is only Caroline the one who is reluctant to accept Larry’s offer and hence participate in his continued exercise of control. Her hesitation and refusal to acquiesce challenges his long and unquestioned rule and triggers a process by which her father’s grandiose “self-inflation” will be debunked.

Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge (2008): Intimacy and Vulnerability While Larry Cook embodies a masculine identity based on the resistance to accept the aging process perceived as the loss of patriarchal authority, Jack Kennison in Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge (2008) constitutes a different portrayal of the aging male body and its relation to privilege, opening up possibilities for the representation of older men and their relationship to their bodies away from the struggle to maintain male privilege. As Jackson contends:

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I talk about the historically unique, social space (between retirement and death) that is slowly emerging in the lives of older men. I also suggest that this unique, social space might prove to be a creative space for re-thinking old age together with a critical re-assessment and possible re-formulation of conventional, masculine identities. (ix)

The possibilities embedded in the transformation derived from moving beyond the representation of aging masculinities as examples of loss and decay extend to the redefinition of gender paradigms of masculinity. As Hearn asserts, “a focus on older men may problematize dominant forms of men and masculinities, including hegemonic masculinities” (“Imaging the Aging of Men” 98). A similar thesis is that expressed by Bartholomeus and Tarrant, who argue that since “age is unique from other categories because of its apparent universality and its status as continually changing…it offers the opportunity to highlight the fluid and socially constructed nature of gender…Potentially revealing possibilities for social change” (354). The viable pathways derived from these premises seem to be multiple. One of them is the redefinition of the aging body in relation to sexuality. The demands of normative masculinity and its association with youth promotes assumption that sexuality is the exclusive domain of the young, an aspect that has been reinforced by the strong links between reproduction and sexuality in both Western Christian tradition and sexological literature (Sandberg 218). However, “the emphasis on staying active as an older adult has extended to the possibilities of staying sexually active” (Sandberg 219). A glimpse at an aging narrative that can represent an example of “successful aging” and its related redefinition of sexuality in later life constitute central aspects in the last story that appears in Olive Kitteridge. Built on different short stories that share characters and settings, we follow Olive, a retired schoolteacher, through middle age into old age. In the last one, “River,” Olive has become a widow who has a well-established routine that includes walking by the river every day: At six, it was mostly the old folks, and you could walk a good mile before seeing anyone. Olive parked in the gravelly parking lot, took her walking shoes out of the trunk, tied them on, and took off. It was the best, and only bearable, part of the day. Three miles in one direction, three miles back. Her one concern was that such daily exercise death might make her live longer. Let it be quick, she thought now, meaning her —a thought she had several times a day. (Strout)

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Olive’s sarcastic nature surfaces in her questioning of physical activity, perhaps here echoing the tension derived from a social narrative that impels older people to adhere to activity as a mandatory healthy alternative to fence off death. It is in her daily walks that she meets Jack Kennison, a retired professor and a widower. As the story unfolds, we realize that both characters are separated by what may seem irreconcilable differences. While Olive despises the Republicans, Jack votes for them; while Olive has no qualms about homosexuality, Jack has not spoken with his daughter ever since she moved in with her female partner two years ago. Despite such fundamental differences, they establish a somewhat unforeseen intimacy. Olive and Jack’s first significant meeting in the path by the river is preceded by Olive’s musings about her almost backing into him the day before as she was getting out of the parking lot of the library. Jack had not noticed her in the car, but Olive offers a glimpse at her thoughts upon the episode: “Old horror, Olive thought. He was a tall man with a big belly, slouching shoulders, and—in her mind—a kind of arrogant furtiveness in the way he held his head thrust forward and didn’t look at people” (Strout). Age, body, and attitude are the constitutive elements in her perception of Jack. While she admits to Jack being different from “summer people or retirees, those who came up the coast to live out their last days in a setting of slanting light,” he nevertheless has what appears to be an inescapable “arrogant look.” The emphasis on Jack’s arrogant look contrasts sharply with their meeting by the river, the one that initiates their closer relationship: It was an old man—she could see that much, as she walked tentatively closer—a balding head, a big belly. God in heaven. She walked with faster steps. Jack Kennison lay on his side, his knees bent, almost like he’d decided to take a nap. She leaned down and saw his eyes were open. His eyes were very blue. ‘Are you dead?’ She asked loudly. (Strout)

Jack responds nonchalantly to Olive’s joke and his vulnerability leads him to see his situation as an emotional one rather than a medical one. It is his emotions that take center stage in his demand for Olive not to leave him: “‘I don’t care if I die,’ the man said. ‘Just don’t leave me here alone’” (Strout). Loneliness constitutes his biggest fear, that of dying alone, while for Olive, it is the possibility to “shrivel for years in a nursing home like my poor husband did” (Strout). Jack’s physical vulnerability is further

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reinforced by his crying, the reason for which, as we learn as the conversation unfolds, is the recent death of her wife. This initial exchange between the two characters based on emotional exchange and the vulnerable male body are the focus of the scene and it will develop into an increasing sense of intimacy. Olive and Jack’s story offers an appealing metaphor of an old heterosexual couple growing towards intimacy and thus offering a narrative away from the failed sexual or sick body. Alex Hobbs contends that there seems to be few representations of alternative aging narratives that rewrite the stereotyped failing of sexual performance or illness: “male characters who show anxiety stemming from the loss of sexual capacity has been a subject more often written about by male authors than female authors” (145). The story shies away from a sexual male imperative of performance based on erection and instead offers an intimate encounter between the two characters that combines sexual desire with intimacy. Narrated from Olive’s point of view, the passage highlights the aging body and the feeling of a new sexual desire: They were here, and her body—old, big, sagging—felt straight-out desire for him. That she had not loved Henry this way for many years before he died saddened her enough to make her close her eyes. What young people didn’t know, she thought, lying down beside this man, his hand on her shoulder, her arm; oh, what young people did not know. They did not know that lumpy, aged, and wrinkled bodies were as needy as their own young, firm ones, that love was not to be tossed away carelessly, as if it were a tart on a platter with others that got passed around again. (Strout)

The narration of their encounter focuses on the pleasure and intimacy Olive and Jack can participate in, which offers a representation of the aging (male) body that can enjoy pleasure beyond the demands of penetration and the erect penis and thus rewrite the hegemonic sexuality script. As the above passage underlies, the need for closeness and intimacy together with the presence of desire are also present in older people’s lives. In relation to the construction of masculinities, the representation of an aging masculinity participating in vulnerability and intimacy as the one offered in this story may suggest what Specter-Mersel refers to as “respectable models of later life masculinity” (78), that is a narrative that does not follow the codes of normative masculinity plots: youth, physicality, and social power. As Hearn argues, “a particular focus on older men may problematize dominant forms of men and masculinities, including hegemonic masculinities” (“Imaging” 98).

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Conclusions The analysis of male privilege and aging offers a nuanced representation of masculinities in old age as a site of intersecting identity positions. From this perspective, traditional aging narratives of decline in which aging men are perceived as engaging in an inexorable loss as the one that is resisted by Alfred Lambert in A Thousand Acres, may coexist with other kinds of narratives. A glimpse at such possibility is the one offered by Jack Kennison in Olive Kitteridge, whose masculinity is built on an acceptance. By embracing the vulnerability of his body, Jack becomes a character who welcomes the transformation of his body and his concomitant loss of privilege. While the model of successful aging may be far from the material lives of older people as Olive’s irony reveals, a more nuanced representation of aging masculinities shows that there are specific benefits to be gained in offering different models and hence, more avenues of research.

Works Cited Alaimo, Stacy and Susan Hekman, editors. Material Feminisms. Bloomington, Indiana UP, 2008. Barry, Elizabeth. “The Ageing Body.” The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, edited by David Hillman and Ulrika Maude, Cambridge UP, 2015, pp. 132–148. Bartholomaeus, Clare, and Anna Tarrant. “Masculinities at the Margins of ‘Middle Adulthood:’ What a Consideration of Young Age and Old Age Offers Masculinities Theorizing.” Men and Masculinities, vol. 19, no. 4, 2016, pp. 351–369. Calasanti, Toni and Neal King. “Intersectionality and Age.” Routledge Handbook of Cultural Gerontology, edited by Julian Twigg and Wendy Martin, Routledge, 2015, pp. 193–200. ———. “The Dynamic Nature of Gender and Aging Bodies.” Journal of Aging Studies, vol. 45, 2018, pp. 11–17. Connell, Raewyn W. Masculinities. Cambridge, Polity Press, 1995. Cherniavsky, Eva. “Body.” Keywords for American Cultural Studies, edited by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler, New York University, 2007, pp. 26–29. Featherstone, Mike, and Andrew Wernick. “Introduction.” Images of Aging: Cultural Representations of Later Life, edited by Mike Featherstone and Andrew Wernick, Routledge, 1995, pp. 1–16. Gilleard, Chirs. “Cultural Approaches to the Ageing Body.” The Cambridge Handbook of Age and Ageing, edited by Malcom L. Johnson, Cambridge UP, 2005, pp. 156–164.

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Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington, Indiana UP, 1994. Gullette, Margaret M. Aged by Culture. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2004. Hearn, Jeff. “Imaging the Aging of Men.” Images of Aging: Cultural Representations of Later Life, edited by Mike Featherstone and Andrew Wernick, Routledge, 1995, pp. 97–114. ———. “Neglected Intersectionalities in Studying Age(ing), Virtuality, Transnationality.” Framing Intersectionality: Debates on a Multi-Faceted Concept in Gender Studies, edited by Helma Lutz et al., Ahsgate, 2011, pp. 89–104. ———. “Men, Masculinities, and the Material Discursive.” NORMA: The International Journal of Masculinity Studies, vol. 9, no. 1, 2014. http://doi.org/ 10.1080/18902138.2014.892281. Accessed 28 May 2020. Hobbs, Alex. Aging Masculinity in the American Novel. Lanham, Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2016. Jackson, David. Exploring Aging Masculinities: The Body, Sexuality and Social Lives. New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Leverenz, David. “Aging Beyond Masculinities, or the Penis as Failed Synecdoche.” Alternative Masculinities for a Changing World, edited by Àngels Carabí and Josep Maria Armengol, New York, Palgrave, 2014, pp. 63–96. Mosse, George L. The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity. New York, Oxford UP, 1996. Öberg, Peter. “The Absent Body-A Social Gerontological Paradox.” Ageing and Society, vol. 16, no. 6, 1996, pp. 701–719. Pease, Bob. Undoing Privilege: Unearned Advantage in a Divided World. London, Zed Books, 2010. Sandberg, Linn. “Sex, Sexuality and Later Life.” Routledge Handbook of Cultural Gerontology, edited by Julian Twigg and Wendy Martin, Routledge, 2015, pp. 218–225. Smiley, Jane. A Thousand Acres. New York, Anchor Books, 1991. Spector-Mersel, Gabriela. “Never-Aging Stories: Western Hegemonic Masculinity Scripts.” Journal of Gender Studies, vol. 15, no. 1, 2006, pp. 67–82. Strout, Elizabeth. Olive Kitteridge. E-book, New York, Random House, 2008. Wehrle, Maren. “Becoming Old. The Gendered Body and the Experience of Aging.” Aging and Human Nature. International Perspectives on Aging, edited by M. Schweda et al., vol. 25. 2020. https://doi.org/10.1007/9783-030-25097-3_6. Accessed 30 September 2020.

Men’s Aging in Popular Fiction

“You Are All Too Old to Do Anything but Get Yourselves Killed:” Age and Masculinity in Stephen King’s It, Dreamcatcher and Doctor Sleep M. Isabel Santaulària-Capdevila

Introduction: Age and the Pitfalls of Patriarchal Masculinity Not all straight white men enjoy the same power. As Fred Pfeil playfully phrases the idea, not “all be-penised humans whose skins lack melanin and whose sexual preferences run towards humans with vaginas” are promised recognition, privilege, or status regardless of, for example, “their class background, socio-economic status, or ethnic heritage” (ix). Yet, in general, men (especially if white and heterosexual) have more power than women. As Brittan explains, “[t]he category ‘man’ is not neutral – it implies power and domination” (109) in a society which mostly remains patriarchal, masculinist, and phallocentric and, thus, foregrounds (white) “men’s needs, [white] men’s privilege and [white] men’s

The quote in the title is from Stephen King’s It (1987: 540). M. I. Santaulària-Capdevila (B) University of Barcelona, Lleida, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. M. Armengol (ed.), Aging Masculinities in Contemporary U.S. Fiction, Global Masculinities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71596-0_5

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power” (Buchbinder 1994, 32). This is not to imply that there has been no “interrogation of men’s normative, gendered power and privilege” which, in fact, began in earnest in the 1960s and 1970s with the emergence of Second Wave feminism, the Civil Rights Movement and alternative sexualities (Jackson x). This interrogation led to transformations of masculinity, notably the eruption of the New Man in the 1980s, which Imelda Whelehan describes as “a media vision of what pro-feminist men would look like” (61). However, and in spite of the normalization of softer, more malleable forms of being men, at least in the media, the notions associated with what constitutes dominant masculinity remain mostly intact, rooted in old patriarchal ideals of men’s superiority based on the values of achievement, aggression, strength, or dominance over women. While this definition of masculinity legitimizes men’s authority by cementing the association between maleness and superiority, it turns out to be an oppressive regime nonetheless, especially as men become older and the process of aging is accompanied with loss of financial power, physical strength, or sexual prowess. In their seminal works about aging, feminist critics Simone de Beauvoir (1970), Susan Sontag (1972), and Betty Friedan (1993) complained about the double standards of aging affecting men and women in a culture that still equals acceptable and desirable femininity with beauty and youth while representations of attractive old(er) men saturate the media and help to perpetuate the illusion that age does not diminish men’s standing. While it is true that age affects women differently, it is also true that men do also feel threatened by, even frightened of, aging, especially so if we take into account that social, economic, and cultural transformations in the last decades have eroded the centrality of white men, who can no longer count on their superior status to go unchallenged. Studies such as Susan Faludi’s Stiffed (2000), Anthony Clare’s On Men (2000) or Michael Kimmel’s Angry White Men (2013) expose the factors that have profoundly affected the lives of contemporary Western men, such as the diminishing value of the physical, laboring male body in a technologized and bureaucratized society or women’s triumphant assaults on male citadels of privilege, which have led to what Naomi Wolf (1993) has called a “genderquake” or a transformation in the power dynamics that guaranteed men’s ascendancy over women. According to these critics, these factors have affected men deeply because they have impinged on their sense of entitlement, their belief that they “may not

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be in power at the moment [but they] deserve to be” (Kimmel Angry xiii) simply because they are white, straight, and male. In Aged by Culture and in Ageing, Popular Culture and Contemporary Feminism Margaret Morganroth Gullette and Imelda Whelehan & Joel Gwynne, respectively, factor on age to reveal how our youth-obsessed, capitalist society has further undermined men’s claims to power in a world where men see their workplace seniority and security destabilized as they age since “figures [reveal]…men are the most dramatic losers in ongoing age battles” (Segal 80). So aging is also an aspect that erodes men’s self-confidence. What this ethos of men’s disenfranchisement puts into evidence is that patriarchy may still guarantee men’s superior status but it privileges a form of masculinity not all men can abide by when their bodies and/or financial situation are weakened, which is often the case after men reach middle age. This situation should have led to adjustments of masculinity and a degree of adaptability to new forms of being men—and in some cases it has. However, it has also resulted in legions of angry white men who feel beleaguered by the forces that conspire against them and cheated of their birthright, which promised them pre-eminence. These angry white men have made their way into popular culture, which is ripe with images of middle-aged men who resort to violence and aggression to regain a sense of purpose in a world they regard as hostile.1 These stories are often cautionary tales that show that violence is sterile and self-defeating since it does not help men to escape what they see as constraining conditions. Furthermore, even if those stories reflect that violent masculinity does not guarantee men’s ascendancy, they do not ultimately challenge patriarchy or offer alternatives to traditional masculinity. Success (and the attendant claim to power) is still related to financial gain and to values that are supposedly grounded in men’s biological make-up since it is assumed that men are naturally “strong, active, powerful, authoritative, hard, aggressive, violent, competitive and rational” (Milestone and Meyer, 114). Given these circumstances, men are as conditioned by their biology and by patriarchal society as women are and, as they age and their powers, both physical and financial, diminish, they are also prone to see aging as a frightening prospect.

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Horror, Stephen King’s It, Dreamcatcher and Doctor Sleep and Old Age Horror novels function as spaces “where society can safely represent and address anxieties of its time” (Levina and Bui, 1) and, as a horror writer, King reflects our collective nightmares in his stories, which, as Tony Magistrale suggests, should be read as “social satire, revealing cultural fears and fantasies which go unspoken in everyday life” (6). In a society in which youth, health, and productive work are regarded as invaluable commodities, old age, as a stage associated with decay, physical and mental deterioration, and parasitic dependence on public funds, features prominently in Stephen King’s novels. In fact, using three of his novels featuring groups of male friends as protagonists—It (1986), Dreamcatcher (2001), and Doctor Sleep (2013)—I will focus on how King capitalizes on our fear of old age to present this stage of life as debilitating, even terrible and horrifying, for people in general and for his adult male protagonists in particular. King’s male protagonists do not meet patriarchal standards of success since they are weighed down by the weaknesses, frailties, and insecurities they experience as they age. However, they do not explode into bouts of anger and violence as is the case with middleage discontents in some contemporary narratives. Instead, King targets patriarchy as an asphyxiating, debilitating, and ultimately monstrous force that works against men as they age by imposing impossible standards and, incidentally, he also advocates alternative forms of masculinity that can be heroic even as men grow older. In the three novels, King “zeroes in on the milieu of old people with razor-sharp focus” (Wiater et al. 111) and shows that old age’s pains and miseries outnumber its rewards. The physical and mental deterioration accompanying old age is chronicled through a cast of elderly secondary characters that populate the pages of the novels. Especially, he consolidates the perception of old age as “a bad dessert at the end of a really fine meal” (King Insomnia 101) by linking it to monstrosity. In his three novels, the horror of the monsters in the stories is built on the association between age and repulsion and/or evil. Pennywise, the child-killing clown in It, for example, is “the apotheosis of all monsters,” (It 18) “worse than the somethings in a hundred horror movies,” (19) “terrible enough [to] … [destroy] … sanity” (26) because of what he does (he horribly maims, mutilates, and cannibalizes little children) and what he represents (everything that is evil and sick in Derry and, by extension, society at large). It

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is also described as a very old entity that has existed “since the beginning of time,” (750) “the oldest thing that anyone could imagine” (1034). In its different incarnations (It haunts the protagonists in different guises), It is described as “ancient” (221, 541) or “very old” (564) and is always repulsive, corpse-like, and/or rotten. As the mummy, It has “stony fingernails, … old tendons, … nostrils devoid of moisture” in his “wrinkled … face” with “black eyesockets” and a “toothless mouth” (220). As a leper, It is “a creature hideously arisen from long years in a wet grave. The flesh … [hanging] in putrescent strings and runners” (554). As an old witch, It appears as a “crone with an apple-doll’s face” with “wrinkles in her skin … gone sickly yellow,” claws instead of fingers, black teeth, and a voice “the sound of a crypt door swinging mindlessly on hinges clogged with black earth” (It 565). Pennywise also stinks of things that are old, dead, or rotten, a “yellow and ancient” stench (1004) like “fish … left to rot in a huge pile that had become carrion slushy in the summer heat” (267) or “dead pork … exploded in a fury of maggots in a place away from the sun” (425). Mr Gray, the impersonation of an invading alien virus (or byrus, as King calls it in the novel) in Dreamcatcher is equally terrifying, “[t]he stuff of a hundred movies and ‘unexplained mysteries’ documentaries” only “[o]ld and sick,” (Dreamcatcher 839) “its gray skin … in loose folds and swags, like the skin of an elephant dying of old age” while from its wrinkles run “listless yellow white streams of some pussy substance” (252) because “its body is breaking down, decaying from the inside out” (391). If the monsters in It and Dreamcatcher reinforce the connection between old age and decrepitude and evil, those in Doctor Sleep plainly personify the scare around baby boomers reaching pensionable age and draining resources in an allegory too obvious to deserve the name. The True Knot, as they are known, are a group of elderly looking creatures who leisurely travel the country in RVs hunting for children with special powers to get the sustenance (called “steam” in the novel) they need to live long looking younger than they really are. They seem harmless enough, just “elderly retirees … living their rootless lives on the turnpikes and blue highways” (Doctor 134) “on comfy fixed incomes” travelling in their “fuel-guzzling monstrosities” (135). In truth, they are parasitically living off the energy of the young so they are “silent virus[es],” (137) “empty devils on the land like a cancer on the skin,” (234) “life-sucking vampires” (298) whose only objective is to endure taking nourishment from the young.

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Middle-Age Men, Masculinity, and Strategies of Contestation in Stephen King’s It, Dreamcatcher and Doctor Sleep Middle age, as the threshold to old age, is not a much better prospect in the novels, at least for the male protagonists who, in the stories, have reached their late thirties without having fulfilled the expectations of success required of them as men. By the end of Dreamcatcher, two of the four protagonists will be dead but they are all already spiraling down at the beginning. Joe “Beaver” Clarendon works as a carpenter, has shoulder-length hair, and still dresses like a teenager in jeans and a leather jacket. After a failed marriage, he drinks and smokes too much, ending most of his days in stale bars which make him feel “desperately depressed” (Dreamcatcher 13). Pete Moore wanted to be an astronaut but he is only an alcoholic car salesman who “hasn’t felt within a holler of happy” (23) for the last couple of years. Henry Devlin is a psychologist who has lost “interest … in such things as papers and journals and conventions and colloquia.” He barely sleeps and eats since “[a] darkness has come into his … life” (29) and is now struggling with depression and seriously considering “the Hemingway Solution,” (Dreamcatcher 102) suicide. Gary “Jonesy” Jones is a university associate professor who has just been in a terrible accident and whose personal life is a disaster. The injuries have left him in constant pain. His wife, Carla, is an alcoholic with a prescription pills addiction and he has a houseful of kids so he needs to become professor because “if there aren’t at least a few salary bumps in his future, life is apt to become a pretty tough scramble” (45). For the four of them, life is SSDD (same shit different day), the phrase they use to greet each other ever since adolescence, and they have to come to terms with the fact they have to “adjust to taking less than [they] hoped for” and that “the dream machine [has] a big OUT OF ORDER sign on it” (28). At the beginning of Doctor Sleep, Dan Torrance hits rock bottom. He is an alcoholic who has anger issues, “a dangerous dog inside his head” (Doctor 33) he can keep on a leash unless he drinks. He works as an orderly at a hospital, mopping floors and changing light bulbs. He is behind on the rent and spends too much time in bars where he gets into fights and hooks up with women. The latest one-night stand is Deenie, a girl who is barely past her teens and who has a toddler son. The day the story starts, Dan wakes up with a “hangover to end all hangovers,”

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(33) steals from Deenie’s purse since the money he had they had spent in coke and goes from the house leaving the toddler, who shows signs of physical abuse, unattended while his mother sleeps. The only acts of kindness before Dan leaves are removing the remains of the coke on the coffee table so that the toddler does not eat it thinking it is sugar and not stealing the food coupons that Deenie also has in her purse. After that, he steals a blanket from a bum, no less, and spends the night outdoors while he mulls over where he will go next and realizes he has become “the Incredible Shrinking Man…Steal a few more things and [he] will vanish entirely from sight” (44). Unlike Dan and the four protagonists of Dreamcatcher, the members of the Losers’ Club in It are successful in their careers and they have amassed small fortunes—except Mike Hanlon, who has stayed in Derry working as a librarian. However, they have not outgrown their childhood insecurities or become confident, independent, and strong men in their late thirties. Stanley Uris commits suicide at the beginning of the story when he is summoned to go back to Derry to confront his childhood nightmare; he was not a happy man in spite of his success, though, so his suicide seems to be the logical turn for a man who “was heading out of the blue and into the black” (It 64). Richie Tozier makes a career out of the characters he impersonated as a child, but having to be himself is what he finds difficult and, in fact, it gets “harder to do every year. It [is] easier to be brave when you [are] someone else” (72). Ben Hanscom was a fat child and is now a handsome and famous architect; he is also “the most God-awful lonely man” (83) in the world. Eddie Kaspbrak is a hypochondriac with an over-stuffed medicine cabinet (92–93). Finally, Bill Denbrough is now a famous writer married to a film star but has bad dreams every night and “drink[s] too much beer and [doesn’t] get enough exercise” (It 139). When they were children, they had hoped they would “crack the world open with their passion” (1109) only to discover, as the protagonists of the other two novels do as well, that things “only [change] for the worse” (Dreamcatcher 55) and that, once you realize that, “days as a viable, paying customer in the great funhouse that [is] Kulture Amerika [are] numbered” (356). Physically, they are also inadequate. They are all “pressing middle age” (It 1108) but they look older. Ben’s eyes, for example, look “ten—no, twenty—years older than the rest of his face” and his “hair [is] graying” (84) after he receives the summoning call in It. Mike’s “lines in his face [say] he is on the darker side of forty instead of only thirty-eight or so”

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(481). Furthermore, they are not fit. Jonesy hurts all the time because of his injuries but he is also out of shape and struggling in the big, wild, freezing outdoors, his “muscles … stupidly, infuriatingly weak” (Dreamcatcher 795). Also stranded outdoors, Henry feels “a hundred years old” until he has to outstretch himself even a little more and “decide[s] it [is] more than a hundred and ten” (It 565). He moves “like Methuselah on a bad day” (565). Though not all of them are ugly—Dan Torrance, Bill Denbrough, and Ben Hanscom are handsome—they show signs of bodily deterioration as well. Eddie is a “short man with a timid, rabbit sort of face,” much of his hair is gone and what is left grows “in listless, piebald patches” (94). Jonesy is developing a “perfect white man’s ass, hairless, just starting to turn flabby and settle on the [back] of the thighs” (Dreamcatcher 221). Bill has a “bald head,” a “pot belly that comes with a few too many good steaks, a few too many Kirin beer,” his “seat’s dropped,” has “love-handles and [his] balls are starting to get that middle-aged dangly look” (It 1107). Age has not only affected their bodies. Gone, it seems, is also their potential as heroes able to confront the supernatural/alien creatures haunting the novels because “[their] perspectives have narrowed; [their] faith in the magic that makes magic possible, has worn off like the shine on a new pair of shoes after a hard day’s working” (880). As the stories develop, the characters also face excruciating pain as they confront the wilderness in Dreamcatcher and fight the monsters in the three novels. Paul Smith in his article “Eastwood Bound” argues that the pleasures of masochism are not to be found when physical pain is being inflicted. Instead, it is a deferred pleasure experienced when men regain the power that the masochistic moment deprived them of. Therefore, the humiliating lessons of masochism “do not last, they come and are gone, forgotten as part of the subject’s history of struggle of learning to triumphantly reach symbolic empowerment” (91). The pleasure experienced from the spectacle of males going through hell, malaise, and abasement, all in all, is that of seeing them regenerate their potent bodies, regain control of their lives, and of the narrative action, and re-assert their positions of authority and power through a re-activation of their skills in violence, which, incidentally, critics and commentators point out is often considered “the single most evident marker of manhood” (Kimmel “Masculinity” 278). Stephen King does not follow this pattern, which is widespread in popular narratives where male heroism is constructed on the basis of overcoming physical weakness and re-armoring the body

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(through actual firearms or the excessive “musculinity” of the heroes, as Yvonne Tasker calls it when describing muscle men in action cinema). Instead, Stephen King endeavors to deconstruct the patriarchal ethos that favors “social contexts which positively evaluate aggression and competitiveness” (Brittan 83), an ethos that, as mentioned before, is uncongenial to aging men who experience a diminishment of their physical power. Stephen King uses different strategies to undermine aggressive, patriarchal masculinity. First of all, he shows excessively aggressive men as monsters. In the case of the protagonists, surplus rage has to be contained. Dan Torrance, for example, has to suppress the urge to use violence when he drinks and loses control, such as when he almost chokes an answer out of Deenie, whom he thinks has stolen his money (Doctor 37). More pertinently, King provides a panoply of extremely violent men who turn out to be more disgusting and abhorrent than the actual supernatural or alien forces the protagonists confront. The emblematic abuser cum monster is Jack Torrance of The Shining, the protagonist of Doctor Sleep’s father, but in the three novels King targets other inhabitants of “Macho City” (It 29) and subjects them to opprobrium not only by describing their violent, even murderous, abuse of others in vivid detail but also by presenting them as primitive, referred to as “cavem[e]n” (127) or “dinosaurs” (214); incapable of rational thinking, communicating with “grunts” or “enraged bellows” (It 261), lost in “frenz[ies] of … rage,” “[c]onscious thought … gone … like … bull[s] after a red flag” (683); or accidents waiting to happen, such as “floods or tornadoes or gallstones” (233–234). King particularly reviles men who abuse those they should love and protect, such as husbands and fathers who beat up and rape their wives and daughters when they heat up like “furnaces with a bad thermostat,” (112) like Al Marsh and Tom Rogan, the father and husband, respectively, of the only female of the Losers’ Club, Beverly Marsh; or pederasts, such as Dan’s old mentor, Dick Hallorann’s granddad, who molested Dick as a child. King’s condemnatory gaze also falls on violent men outside domestic scenarios, including bullies who target smaller children, like Henry Bowers, Victor Criss or Belch Higgins in It or Richie Grenadeau and his acolytes in Dreamcatcher; psychopaths who kill small animals before they move on to larger creatures, like Patrick Hockstetter in It; or deranged dictators like Kurtz in Dreamcatcher who, like his namesake in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, sacrifices the lives of innocents, American citizens in this case, in a re-enactment of Hitler’s “final solution” (Dreamcatcher 448; italics in the original). All in all, King

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focuses on “asshole[s] that walk like … [men]” (It 392) whose reigns of terror turn other people’s lives into living hell. Secondly, Stephen King makes his characters embrace their “fabled inner child” (Doctor 163) to be able to succeed against the forces of evil they confront in the stories. In Stephen King’s universe, children are vulnerable and invisible. Or rather, they are vulnerable because they are invisible. They are likened to ghosts (It 978) because grownups do not see them, lost as they are in their “grownup thoughts about work and appointments and buying cars and whatever else grownups [think] about” (925). Thus, adults do not notice when children are bullied, or worse, because they stay below their sightline, so they become easy prey to the monstrous predators that inhabit the pages of King’s novels. However, childhood is also pictured as a magic kingdom. Children may face abuse or neglect and be lonely—the story of It, for example, is one of “six boys and one girl, none of them happy, none of them accepted by their peers, who [stumble] into a nightmare” (158). Yet, they are also capable of escaping from their problems and responsibilities thanks to their games, books, and adventures with their friends, their own “Never-Never Land” where they can be “Wild Boys for … a few hours at a stretch” (303). When they are with their friends, in fact, they feel “lively, vital, unsophisticated, free,” (709) “lovely and Godlike” (533). Adolescence in Dreamcatcher is described as a “sad jungle of insecurities, confusion, smelly armpits, crazy fads, and half-baked ideas” (166) but the teenage protagonists are still “beautiful” because they have not yet “given up [their] dreams” (Dreamcatcher 167). What makes them particularly special is their capacity to incorporate “the inexplicable into their lives,” to believe “implicitly in the invisible world” (It 531). This capacity to believe translates into faith in their powers. Unlike adults, who are “crippled by a sort of spiritual and imaginative arthritis,” (879) children can “imagine the stake to kill [vampires]” (999). Men believe that age diminishes their masculine role and makes them vulnerable so they often associate aging with “a return to the helplessness of childhood” (Segal 161). In King’s universe, by contrast, childhood is empowering and desirable and not because it makes men physically stronger, but because it renews their will to live. Thus, all the male protagonists have to take a trip down memory lane to be able to actually stand up to the threats in their lives. Their journeys are physical since they move locations in the three novels, but they all find themselves in a “time machine … back … in time” (It 110). As an effect, they are re-energized because they recapture their “curiosity and … excitement”

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as if they were “[b]oys on a treasure hunt” (Doctor 274) and believe “the old lies again: that life [is] good, that the lives of boys and men, girls and women, [have] some purpose. That there [is] light as well as darkness” (Dreamcatcher 799). The three novels, on the whole, transcend the prejudices linked to the infantilization of old men. Recapturing childhood does not mean being invisible or weak. Instead, it is necessary and therapeutic since it gives the protagonists renewed enthusiasm, faith, and joy. Finally, Stephen King redefines male heroism in aging-friendly terms. In popular culture, Buzzanell and D’Enbeau argue, the hero “is a man who transcends the mundane, excels in what he sets out to accomplish, mystifies others, symbolises success and conquest, and does it all without noticeable assistance from others” (133). This definition subjects men to impossible standards since “the hero persona translates to a set of unattainable criteria to which ordinary men often aspire” (133). It is also a standard that excludes aging men since, Buzzanell and D’Enbeau follow, “youthfulness is embedded as a taken-for-granted criterion of both successful manhood and heroism” (134). In the three novels, Stephen King does not rejuvenate men or, for that matter, re-activate their bodies or re-define their strengths so that they can aspire to popularly accepted notions of male heroism. Instead, he reconceptualizes the heroic so that it incorporates characteristics older man can feel comfortable with since they do not result from attributes that diminish with old age (such as power, control, or confidence). It does not mean that King’s male protagonists are not aggressive. They have to be given the forces they confront and which need to be destroyed: the life-sucking vampires in Doctor Sleep, an alien invasion in Dreamcatcher and evil itself in It. Furthermore, they ultimately stand for what is right and just in the world so they are not cowards who “make a career out of running away” (It 678). Consequently, they do feel anger when confronted with abuse, injustice and evil and they are exhilarated when they manage to defeat, or, on occasion, outrun, their enemies. But their real victories, those that make them truly good and define their “basic okayness” (Doctor 209) are much more mundane but equally important, like not hiding their emotions, even those that are eschewed for not being manly enough, such as displays of incapacitating fear; realizing that trying to escape your mistakes by leaving them behind is not effective since “you [take] yourself with you wherever you [go];” (Doctor 52) managing to stay sober when it is easier to drink yourself into a stupor; or being able to help and forgive your enemies. Above all,

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heroism is defined as a joint effort grounded in true friendship, companionship, and acceptance in spite of their differences. The groups of friends in the novels, including Dan Torrance and the friends he engages to help him in his adventure, in fact, make “a closed body” (It 1092) and this is the basis of their power, amplified by the memories of the life and love they once shared or by the strength they draw from the new bonds they establish in adulthood. This is what keeps Jonesy, Henry and, before they die, Pete and Beaver, going in Dreamcatcher and what keeps Dan Torrance focused and alert in Doctor Sleep. When the Losers’ Club finally manage to kill It, they strike together with their right fists but Bill understands “it [is] not really their fists they [are] striking with at all; it [is] their combined force, augmented by the force of … memory and desire; above all else, it [is] the force of love and unforgotten childhood like one big wheel” (It 1072).

Conclusion Stephen King’s horror stories chronicle the cultural anxieties that haunt the night thoughts of contemporary Western society, including, in the three novels under analysis, the fear of age in general and the feelings of inadequacy and impermanence it generates among men. King confirms negative stereotypes about aging, making it appear as a stage of life that renders people weak, dependant, and even monstrous. He also shows aging is gendered and a central factor in the considerations of masculinity and not just femininity. His male protagonists in It, Dreamcatcher, and Doctor Sleep do not all benefit from the perks ascribed to men in our patriarchal society and reach middle age with not much to look forward to as they grow old(er). Interestingly, though, King does not make his protagonists join the ranks of “unhappy, morally compromised, complicated” men we find in contemporary fiction who are presented sympathetically even though they conform “a gamut of criminals whose offences would … include everything from adultery and polygamy … to vampirism and serial murder” (Martin 4) and who lash out in anger against a modern world they feel thwarts them. He does not pump up his male protagonists’ testosterone levels, either, or rejuvenate their bodies so that they can fit in preferred definitions of heroic masculinity. Instead, King interrogates patriarchy itself, showing it is sustained on the basis of masculine violence and aggression against the weak and the helpless. Above all, he rewrites the heroic so that it incorporates values and actions associated

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with love, memory, childhood, and friendship. This redefinition is relevant because it is an alternative to the macho action men identities that are favored in popular narratives. However, King’s presentation of middleaged men does more than just widen the existing masculinity palette. Far from perpetuating the message that men do not have to be young to be manly and heroic, he problematizes the very notions associated with traditional masculinity by showing they are as damaging for men as they are for women, especially as men age.

Note 1. See, for example, TV series such as The Shield (Fox, 2002–2008), Deadwood (HBO, 2004–2006), Breaking Bad (AMC, 2008–2013), Ray Donovan (Sony, 2013–2020), Fargo (FX, 2014–) or Lights Out (Fox, 2015).

Works Cited Beauvoir, Simone de. The Coming of Age. Norton, 1970. Brittan, Arthur. Masculinity and Power. Basil Blackwell, 1989. Buchbinder, David. Masculinities and Identities. Melbourne UP, 1994. Buzzanell, Patrice M., and Suzy D’Enbeau. “Aging Masculinity in Popular Culture: The Case of Mad Men’s Roger Sterling.” Aging Heroes: Growing Old in Popular Culture, edited by Norma Jones and Bob Batchelor. Bowman and Littlefield, 2015, pp. 131–141. Clare, Anthony. On Men: Masculinity in Crisis. Chatto and Windus, 2000. Faludi, Susan. Stiffed: The Betrayal of Modern Man. Vintage, 2000. Friedan, Betty. The Fountain of Age. Simon and Schuster, 1993. Gullette, Margaret Morganroth. Aged by Culture. Chicago UP, 2004. Jackson, David. Exploring Aging Masculinities: The Body, Sexuality and Social Life. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Kimmel, Michael. Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era. Nation Books, 2013. Kimmel, Michael. “Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity.” The Masculinities Reader, edited by Stephen M. Whitehead and Frank J. Barrett. Polity, 2006, pp. 266–287. King, Stephen. Doctor Sleep. Hodder, 2014. ———. Dreamcatcher. Pocket Books, 2001. ———. Insomnia. Signet, 1994. ———. It. New English Library, 1987.

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Lennard, Dominic. “Too Old for This Shit? On Ageing and Tough Guys.” Ageing, Popular Culture and Contemporary Feminism: Harleys and Hormones, edited by Imelda Whelehan and Joel Gwynne. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 93–107. Levina, Marina, and Diem-My T. Bui, editors. Monster Culture in the 21st Century: A Reader. Bloomsbury, 2013. Magistrale, Tony. Landscape of Fear: Stephen King’s American Gothic. Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1988. Martin, Brett. Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution. Penguin, 2014. Milestone, Katie, and Anneke Meyer. Gender and Popular Culture. Polity, 2012. Pfeil, Fred. White Guys: Studies in Postmodern Domination and Difference. Verso, 1995. Segal, Lynne. Out of Time: The Pleasures and the Perils of Ageing. Verso, 2014. Smith, Paul. “Eastwood Bound.” Constructing Masculinity, edited by Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis and Simon Watson. Routledge, 1995, pp. 77–97. Sontag, Susan. “The Double Standard of Aging.” The Saturday Review, September 1972, pp. 29–38. Tasker, Yvonne. Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema. Routledge, 1993. Whelehan, Imelda. Overloaded: Popular Culture and the Future of Feminism. The Women’s Press, 2000. Whelehan, Imelda, and Joel Gwynne, editors. Ageing, Popular Culture and Contemporary Feminism: Harleys and Hormones. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Wiater, Stanley, Christopher Golden, and Hank Wagner. The Stephen King Universe: A Guide to the Worlds of the King of Horror. Renaissance Books, 2001. Wolf, Naomi. Fire with Fire. Chatto and Windus, 1993.

‘‘To Oldie Go”: From James T. Kirk and Jean-Luc Picard to Samuel Lord and the Reconstruction of the Aging Male Body in the Final Frontier

Ángel Mateos-Aparicio Martín-Albo

Space Cowboys in the New Frontier In his already pivotal study on American masculinity at the turn of the century, Angry White Men (2013), sociologist Michael Kimmel claims that one of the most deeply ingrained beliefs in American culture, the “American Dream,” has been and still is a gendered, ethnically biased notion which has been appropriated and represented as the privilege of American white men. The myth of the “self-made” man, which Kimmel himself explored in Manhood in America (1996), has been unquestionably accepted as a defining trait of white American male identity, as Kimmel argues: “No single group of Americans has clung so tenaciously to those beliefs. No single group has so ardently subscribed to the traditional definition of ‘what it takes’ to make it in America. And no other group has felt so cheated” (16). As a consequence of this gender and

Á. Mateos-Aparicio Martín-Albo (B) Departamento de Filologia Moderna, Facultad de Letras, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Ciudad Real, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. M. Armengol (ed.), Aging Masculinities in Contemporary U.S. Fiction, Global Masculinities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71596-0_6

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ethnic partiality, the exhaustion of this ideal, which has been caused both by historical erosion and by cultural criticism since the 1960s, has affected American white men to a greater extent than any other social or ethnic group in the United States, and has been perceived as a threat to white men’s masculinity, and therefore represented in white men’s minds as a form of feminization or emasculation, as Kimmel suggests: … white American men came to believe that power and authority were what they were entitled to, by birth, and that that birthright is now eroding. Economic and social changes that are bewilderingly fast and dramatic are experienced as the general “wimpification” of American men—castrated by taxation, crowded out by newcomers who have rules bent for them, white men in America often feel like they are presiding over the destruction of their species. (16)

As a genuinely American product, this myth of the self-made man is one of the thousand faces of the most genuinely American (and masculine) heroic figure: the frontiersman, as Kimmel himself suggests (18). Conveyed in numerous different forms and in countless cultural productions, the cowboy, the gunslinger, the lone ranger, the hunter, the man-who-knows-Indians has been extensively analyzed as the American myth by historian Richard Slotkin (1973, 1985, 1992). If the self-made man was distinctively masculine, it is therefore logical to conclude that the portrayal of this dominant American myth—the frontiersman—is also characteristically male. Being so profoundly embedded in its essential definition, this masculinization of the American myth of origin must therefore be present also in its latest transformation, the one that interests us here: the icon of the “space” cowboys in the “final” frontier. Although the transition from the frontier myth to the space race was probably made apparent by President J. F. Kennedy, who in his famous 1961 speech compared the 1960s U.S. space program with the Myth of the Western Frontier, the connection between the two had long before been obvious to American culture. Staged as the conquest of space, the space race, a by-product of the cold war, was more appealing to Americans as a continuation of their (white, male) national myth. And few other cultural products captured this assimilation of the frontier myth by science fiction like the fictional universe of Star Trek, whose initial Original Series (1966–1969) pompously used a reverberating phrase that appears in the

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opening lines of all its episodes: “Space—the final frontier.” The American frontier myth became thus a recurrent theme in science fiction and the American frontiersman became a space cowboy. And Captain James T. Kirk of the starship Enterprise became the new man-who-knew-aliens in American popular culture. The TV series even acknowledged the influence of the Western in the episode entitled “Spectre of the Gun” (Episode 6, Season 3), where Kirk and the other spaceship officers—all men—are forced to repeat the legendary duel at O. K. Corral. Similarly, but in a very different tone, Star Trek: Next Generation (1987–1994) also acknowledges the Western cultural imagery in “A Fistful of Datas” (Season 6, Episode 8), where the characters enjoy a simulation of the Wild West. This connection between the Western and (especially American) science fiction is nowadays evident and undeniable as the critical literature shows.1

Aging in the Final Frontier: Kirk/Shatner and Picard/Stewart as Old Men on Screen Star Trek: The Original Series was first released for television in 1966. Since then, the Star Trek franchise has never been absent from either the small or the big screen for long periods. The number of spin-offs, sequels, and prequels has multiplied and evolved without any sign of exhaustion. As these lines are written, Star Trek: Beyond (2016), the last film of the new James T. Kirk series (this time Kirk’s role is played by Chris Pine) is only four years away; Star Trek: Discovery is in its third season, and a sequel to Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987) simply entitled Picard (2020) has been released in 2020 featuring the return of British actor Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard, Kirk’s successor as captain of the starship Enterprise in the densely populated fictional universe of Star Trek. As captains of the starship, Kirk and Picard gained prominence and an iconic nature; Shatner and Stewart, who respectively played the leading roles, have impersonated the characters so successfully that their appearance has become indissolubly associated with them in the popular imagination. William Shatner first played James T. Kirk in 1966, when the Original Series was broadcast on TV, and he was the one and only Captain Kirk of the Enterprise until 1991, when the film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country was released. Patrick Stewart’s involvement with the universe of Star Trek has been similarly long-lived. As already mentioned, he first enacted Captain Jean-Luc Picard in the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987), which ran for seven years until 1994. He was also

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Captain Picard in four Star Trek films between 1994 and 2002, and in the recent spin-off Star Trek: Picard (2020), where he plays a retired, aging Picard who sets off on a mission to save the universe, as usual. Both actors coincided in the 1994 film, Star Trek: Generations (1994), thanks to a complex plot that included time travel. As cowboys in space, Kirk and Picard enact an updated, modernized version of the myth of the frontiersmen that disseminate all throughout the universe the traditional values of an American culture dominated by its major epic and ideological reference—the frontier—which at the time of the first release of the TV series in the 1960s was being vigorously contested in the United States itself. This has been suggested by Lee Heller (1997) and Daniel Bernardi (1997), who claim that even if the fiction itself is governed by creator Gene Roddenberry’s belief in the liberal-humanist project of a global human society (and state) where gender, race, ethnic, or even age divisions have been superseded and rational human behavior prevails (represented by the very notion of Star Trek’s Federation and Starfleet), the narrative is still (at least until 1997 when the authors were writing) unable to transcend existent hegemonic discourses. In this Star Trek universe, represented as the final frontier but intentionally open to endless racial, gender, and ethnic diversity, Kirk and Picard continue to embody traditional, dominant ideologies which, like their bodies, are aging. William Shatner (b. 1931) first played Captain Kirk when he was 35 and continued to appear regularly as Kirk until he was 60; similarly, Patrick Stewart (b. 1940) became Captain Picard when he was 47 and continues to play this role until this day as protagonist of the Star Trek: Picard TV series at eighty. Not only have Shatner’s and Stewart’s impersonations of Kirk and Picard transcended the imaginary nature of the characters until both actor and character have fused into a half fictional, half real persona, but they also have evolved in the audience’s imagination so that it is possible to argue that they have virtually aged while on the screen. In this sense, they have become excellent subjects for the analysis of both the ideological and physical aging of their performances of traditional masculinity. In a way, these characters can be read as the obstinate resistance of an ideal of white masculinity that, as Michael Kimmel suggests, has been left behind by history (17). Although clearly aging, Kirk and Picard still retain the captain’s chair, that is, their hegemonic position of authority in the wider social context envisioned by the fictional universe of Star Trek, which is densely populated by characters that challenge the centrality of the white man’s body

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in the dominant cultural order: humans of all races, aliens of all colors, animal-like extraterrestrials, robots, computers, androids, cyborgs; the number of alternative embodiments of intelligent consciousness is endless. As an example of science fiction, the Star Trek stories have a potential for the representation of alternative and subversive conceptualizations of the human, as the critical literature has often claimed: “My suggestion is that sf allows for the production of radical (gendered and un-gendered, hybrid, cyborgian) bodies that impel us to reflect upon our own understanding of the ‘body’ and upon the ways in which bodies are viewed and regulated in the social world” (Mitchell, n.p.). In this context of extreme possibility and potential fluidity, Kirk’s and Picard’s white, male, natural bodies and unified consciences actually stand out as acts of resistance against the proliferation of technologically upgraded humans whose hybrid or modified bodies challenge traditional oppositions and assumptions. Ideological assumptions are incarnated in the characters’ bodies: the presence of obviously gendered, racially marked characters and the diversity of alien ethnicities in the Star Trek franchise should therefore be read in this light, as Lee Heller suggests. This is evident in the nature and identity of Kirk’s and Picard’s most serious and dangerous respective antagonists: Kahn and the “Borg.” Although Klingons are probably the most recurrent and popular enemies of Captain Kirk and the Federation in the original series and the first films, Kahn’s is always a much more threatening presence. In the original series, Klingons are represented as entirely Other: their appearance is weird and grotesque (clearly but undefinedly colored), their society is the complete opposite of what the Federation represents; even their language sounds barbaric. Such complete otherness paradoxically makes them less menacing. In fact, in Star Trek: The Next Generation, where Picard has the leading role, they have become part of the Federation and of the Enterprise’s crew: it is in this sense significant that Klingon officer Worf is played by a black actor, which suggests the Klingons’ racial difference. But Kahn cannot be unquestionably identified as Other. In the fiction he is presented as a genetically modified human (in short, as a posthuman in more modern terms) who was stronger, faster, and more intelligent than the “only” human Kirk, even if he appeared older on the screen. By the time the film The Wrath of Kahn (1982) was released, William Shatner was in his early 50s, while Ricardo Montalban, who played Kahn in the movie was ten years his senior, and wore a long mane of grey hair. In the fiction, Kahn was also older than Kirk: he had been “created”

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hundreds of years before meeting Captain of the Enterprise as the first of new race of genetically modified humans that showed an enhanced prowess in combat. Kahn’s body can therefore be read as the confluence of a traditional, aggressive manly masculinity (Ricardo Montalban was popular for his roles as “Latin lover”) and a modernized, updated, improved version of the human with a longer life span, and less signs of aging. The fact that he could stand up to a younger man in hand-to-hand combat in the fiction is proof that he actually represents—embodies— the idea of a new man, which is nevertheless depicted negatively in the fiction: Kahn’s increased abilities reinforce traits traditionally associated with masculinity, such as a perverse ambition and an exaggerated readiness for bloodshed. Nevertheless, it is Kahn’s hybrid, posthuman nature (as a genetically modified human he is a mixture of nature and technology) that gives the character its intimidating force. Similarly, Picard’s most threatening adversary in Star Trek: The Next Generation is also the result of a different combination of biology and technology that evokes the cultural debate on the advent of the posthuman era. Like Kirk, Picard’s body is fully human in the sense that his biology has not undergone any modification. In the future of The Next Generation, the twenty-fourth century, this should be regarded as an oddity. Picard’s best “friend” in the narrative is an (completely artificial) android, Data, and one of his crew members, LaForge, stands out as a cyborg since he uses a technological device to compensate for his blindness. In this sense, Picard’s unmodified body is in itself not only a sign of the reluctance to change of traditional masculine representation, but, as will be argued here, a mark of his complete aversion and violent rejection of technological modification. The Borg predominantly appears in the 3rd season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Like Klingons and Romulans, the Borg are one of the numerous alien societies that the Star Trek pioneers encounter in their journeys. However, the Borg are different, Other, to anything that is considered One in Western culture: they are a nomadic, collective community of human/machine hybrids controlled by a hive mind. Cynthia Fuchs describes it as “[a] neosocialist cyborg ‘community’ which is interconnected through bioengineering and other advanced technologies, the Borg appear to be androgynous cyborgs” (1993, 113). In the Borg society, there are no class, race, or gender distinctions: all Borg collaborate and act as one. Their major advantage is that they share their minds and that they allow to be penetrated by new ideas coming from

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the inside or from the outside. The Borg do not conquer, they assimilate other races and civilizations, and that includes the Earth and the Federation of Planets. To more easily achieve this, they captured Captain Picard on the basis that (perhaps ironically) this middle-aged, white man represents the whole of the human race, and they proceed to assimilate him to their cyborg nature: in the last scene of the season, Picard, now called Locutus, appears on the screen in his cyborg form. Picard’s apparently impenetrable identity as a white man seems finally and irreversibly compromised, as Fuchs suggests: Profoundly challenging the notion of an embodied and discrete masculine identity, this image of a penetrated, ungendered, and unfamiliar Picard collapses conventional binary terms of difference: self and other, desire and repulsion, culture and nature, death and life. Simultaneously absorbing and punctured by multiple inorganic implants, Picard’s is a white male body in crisis, contestable, without desire or agency, and spectacularly incorporated. (1993, 113–114)

Like Kirk’s, Picard’s natural body contains and repeats the traditional representation of humanity as white, heterosexual, and male: the bodies of their adversaries prominently display marks of difference. Perhaps the point here is that Khan’s genetically modified and Locutus’s technologically altered bodies are as much a social construction as the clear image of a “natural” white masculine body is, and that other possible versions of the human are possible (see Mitchell). However, these new embodiments of humanity and masculinity are defeated in the fiction, and therefore negated as viable alternatives, as it happens perhaps more evidently in science fiction films like Saturn 3 (1980), where the obvious patriarch of an isolated space station (played by an aging Kirk Douglas) is threatened by a young technologically modified man (Harvey Keitel) and by a monstrous cyborg over the control of the older man’s young female partner (Farrah Faucet).2 In the end, Kirk achieves victory over Kahn, and Picard is finally rescued from the Borg and returned to his “natural” state, even though the former will always feel threatened by Khan (a character that has reappeared in the new James T. Kirk movies trilogy that began in 2009), while the latter is continuously haunted by threatening dreams and horrifying memories of the abduction, penetration, and violation of his body by the Borg. Nevertheless, the fictional universe of Star Trek is not limited to Kirk’s and Picard’s adventures. The franchise

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continues to develop and more recent Star Trek films and TV series have questioned not only the traditional version of masculinity by depicting it as dated and obsolescent, aging, but also these very assumptions about the very notion of aging in the characters’ male bodies.

Picard 2.0 and Shatner’s Samuel Lord: A New Perspective of Aging Masculinity William Shatner’s interpretation of Captain James T. Kirk of the starship Enterprise, which lasted from the 1960s until the 1990s, had a great impact on this career as an actor up to the point that in many viewers’ minds he has been Captain Kirk, even after Chris Pine appears as young James Kirk in the Star Trek reboot in 2009. In a way, the analysis of the ideological implications of Kirk’s body carried out here so far refers to Shatner’s body on screen. Nevertheless, Shatner has had an active career as a producer and a writer beyond the Star Trek franchise, which continues in his eighties. And perhaps more importantly for this article, he has written, with David Fisher, a volume which can be readily considered as a book on aging since he recounts his own experiences as an old man: Live Long and… What I learned Along the Way (2018). Furthermore, he is also the co-author, with Jeff Rovin, of two recent fiction novels, Zero G: A Novel (2016) and Zero G: Green Space (2017), which are set in an orbital station in 2050 and whose main character is an 83-year-old man: Samuel Lord, FBI Director for Orbital Operations. As Shatner explains in Live Long…, he has participated in the film Senior Moment, which is yet to be released (Shatner and Fisher 169). What I would like to argue here is that Shatner has created a complex persona that transcends the boundaries of fiction and reality and the connection between actors and their characters, and that he has recently conveyed this persona as an old man. What he has created seems to subvert what James T. Kirk represented in Star Trek: the persistence of traditional notion of masculinity embodied in his obstinately natural white male body. In contrast, William Shatner’s imagination has created a character, Samuel Lord, who challenges assumptions about aging and masculinity. His impersonation of Kirk should not transcend the fiction, as Shatner himself suggests when he reiterates that an actor’s role is not to represent his own opinions but to enact imaginary characters’ feelings and views. When commenting on his interpretation of a racist character in the 1960s, he writes:

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It was not an easy speech for me to make. My personal beliefs were the exact opposite of those of my character. Had I met him in real life, I would have had nothing to do with him. And yet I had to say those words in a convincing manner. (Shatner and Fisher, Live Long and… 90)

Shatner may have embodied Kirk, but what the character represents according to this analysis may contradict what Shatner means as an actor and as an author. In fact, his FBI Director Samuel Lord, protagonist of his novel Zero G and perhaps an alter ego, is very much the opposite of Kirk, and this difference is mainly marked in his fictional body. Lord is described in the novel (from the point of view of a woman) as a “… new man … considerably older, a little squatter, and a little thicker than the rest. Thicker, but clearly fit and muscular” (Shatner and Rovin 16). However, his aging but still muscular body is not unmodified: one of his legs had to be replaced by an artificial prosthesis, so Lord is an 83-year old cyborg. Unlike Picard in The Next Generation, however, he is a happy one: “[Lord] appreciated and disdained that his artificial leg worked more efficiently than his real one” (42). His bodily adaptation to new versions of humanity allows him to subvert stereotypical images of old men and to challenge previous assumptions on masculinity. To Lord’s mind, the myth of the frontier should no longer be a country forbidden for and not representative of old men, in fact he actively criticizes this idea: “Ageism is the final frontier. I never understood why a quality envied in wine is frowned on in humans” (29). As this statement shows, Lord implies that the traditional notion of the frontier is actually a repressive barrier that reinforces stereotypical ideas, since it continues to be the privileged space of young men only. As an old man and a cyborg, Lord subverts this association, since he is actually in charge of security in the orbital station, as if he was an old (cyborg) sheriff in a frontier town. In this sense, his deputy, Adsila Waters, is also a challenge to the white male frontier myth. On the one hand, he is a “full-blooded Cherokee” (11) who had “graduated at the top of the FBI academy” (11). On the other, s/he is what is called a “pan-gender,” someone who can change sex at will: “As Adsila moved, the nearly six-foot tall pan-gender shifted into his dominant female gender” (13). The body change is complete, and includes sexual organs: “Adsila’s biological sexual flip was achieved with a migration of reproductive organs that had been genetically engineered in the womb” (14). In contrast to Lord, her/his deputy is a genetically modified

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human, like Kahn in the early Star Trek films. According to the implications described in this article, Adsila’s body changeability and fluidity subvert identification of the frontier myth as white and male, as the novel itself suggests: “Space, after all, was the abode of miracles” (14). Shatner’s impersonation of Kirk, with its completely white, masculine, and “natural” body, may well have represented the continuation of identification between the white man and the frontier myth in space, or even male resistance to the loss of the cultural centrality with the presentation of an unmodified impenetrable body, but Shatner’s imagination has produced science fiction bodies that constantly challenge these traditional assumptions. Similarly, the narrative of the recent TV series Star Trek: Picard (2020), where Patrick Stewart re-appears as an aging, retired Admiral Jean-Luc Picard, may imply a revision of assumptions suggested by his earlier impersonation of the starship Enterprise’s Captain. In this sense, this analysis will continue to focus on bodies as sites for the representation of cultural constructions. In the opening scenes of Star Trek: Picard, Jean-Luc is portrayed living the life of a stereotypical retired old man. In opposition to the hectic activity of his rank in the starship Enterprise, his daily routines seemed to be attuned to the rhythm of nature. Picard now lives in a French château, where he contemplates the growth of the vineyards that surround the property in the company of his dog and two Romulan aides. His days seem to be seeping away peacefully while he dedicates his time to activities normally associated to old men: he enjoys walking his dogs in the countryside, watching his vines grow, and drinking tea. His days as the captain of a combat starship, responsible for the lives of hundreds of crewmates are gone. To add to this image of lack of energy and initiative that is presumably associated to old age, viewers learn in the second episode that Picard, even though still physically fit, is terminally ill, so that he as a character acquires another of the traits that have constructed the cultural perception of old age: sickness. In short, the Jean-Luc Picard of the beginning of the narrative denotes physical and mental decline, outdatedness, obsolescence, and an increasing sense of powerlessness. Nevertheless, this stereotypical image of aging will soon change when Picard is visited by Dahj (Lisa Briones), a mysterious unaware android that is unexplainably attracted to him. The fact that Dahj is killed by extraterrestrial assassins awakens Picard’s from his drowsy retirement and becomes an incentive for his return to space with a purpose despite his

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old age. He suddenly realizes that a secluded, uneventful life is equivalent to an early death: “I haven’t been living; I have been waiting to die” (Episode 1, min. 35:40). In this sense, he overcomes his own prejudices about maturity and begins a mission to find and protect Dahj’s identical artificial twin, Soji. What is suggested in the fiction is that Soji is actually a biological android, that is, a human/machine hybrid, so the fictional confrontation between the characters is again represented in terms of the body: Picard’s adversaries in the story, the Romulans, reject all kinds of artificial life and are determined to exterminate all androids and AI in the galaxy. Similarly, the Federation has put a ban on humanoid machines due to an unexplained rebellion that caused a catastrophe. Picard’s engagement with this human/machine creature can therefore be read on the one hand as a politically charged subversive act and on the other as a dismissal of his own earlier rejection of cyborg nature. In fact, at the end of the first season, he himself becomes posthuman. When his biological body fails, his mind is transferred to an artificial body that allows him to live longer although not indefinitely. Picard’s rebirth as a human/machine hybrid brings an end to the major conflict generated in the narrative: the oppression and persecution of all artificial and android life by humans and allies (the Federation) and by Romulans. The new Picard 2.0 is not hostile to assimilation by non-biological entities. His new cyborg body may not be the crudely penetrated, ungendered, and de-individualized Locutus of The Next Generation, but by first showing and then overcoming vulnerability his new self does no longer play the part of the stout young space cowboy exploring the final frontier nor of a man handicapped by a stereotypical notion of old age. Besides, some scenes in the narrative repeatedly seem to question the nature of his love for his android friend Data, hinting at a well concealed homosexual desire.

Conclusion: “I Was Not Living, I Was Waiting to Die”. Toward a New Portrayal of the Aging Male Body In her study The Coming of Age (1970), Simone de Beauvoir carried out what would nowadays be called a cultural history of the notion and representation of old age in Western culture from antiquity to the twentieth century. She explored how the concept of old age had changed and

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concluded that the representation of aging men and women was therefore social and cultural and not natural (1996, 38).3 Furthermore, she argued that since the advent of the modern dominant capitalistic, bourgeois society of the twentieth century, the value attributed to old age has been associated with concepts like “decline” (13) and “decay” (41), as modern Western technocratic societies have put more emphasis on innovation. In this sense, it is possible to affirm that the representation of aging has been associated with the notion of obsolescence, which implies loss of relevance and disempowerment. Beauvoir also suggested that old age could not be analyzed in isolation from other identity markers such as class or gender. The latter idea is emphasized by Susan Sontag, who in “The Double Standard of Aging” (1972) argues that gender is an essential factor in the invisibility of old age that affects aging women to a much greater extent in the structure of power relations of modern Western societies. Nevertheless, as Beauvoir already suggested, aging men’s role in a technological society that privileges youth and innovation may also imply a sudden and abrupt disempowerment that can be associated to the very concept of masculinity, since technological know-how has been traditionally associated with men, while women have been associated with the natural world in the patriarchal imagery (Balsamo 1996, 9–10). In this sense, obsolescence may imply (masculine) disempowerment: aging for men may denote, as J. M. Armengol has shown, “emasculation” (2018). Contrarily, keeping up with technological advance implies empowerment, as Donna Haraway suggests when defending the technological enhancement of the human body as a strategy to overcome gender and racial discrimination. In this sense, cyborgs and “cyborgization” can be considered as political statements in a posthuman society where possession of technology represents power. Two conclusions can be drawn from this discussion. On the one hand, that the representation of aging in literature and culture has to be studied in relation to other concepts like race, gender, and class, and on the other that the aging body, just like the gendered or racialized body, can be used ideologically. This is partly what Dereck T. Thiess suggests in Embodying Gender and Age in Speculative Fiction (2016), where this author explains that the analysis of age in science fiction has been inextricably associated to the study of gender (8). In a literary genre like science fiction, where the imagination can transcend the limits of the possible, the site for the confrontation of ideological frameworks is the body, as Thiess points out: “Because sf is not constrained by physical reality, it allows us to consider

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topics such as gender in new ways, for example creating seemingly genderless worlds…” (5). Embodiment in science fiction is therefore dialectical, and the biological (genetic) alteration and mechanical intervention of bodies has profound political implications that “actualize” or “literalize” (McHale 150) the contemporary clash between the transhuman and posthuman approaches to the definition of humanity. On the one hand, Transhumanism implies a denial of the body, which is a malleable, dated, disposable nuisance of a mind that contains human identity and suggests that human evolution should logically lead to the transference of human consciousness to computers or similar entities that will allow for preservation and transcendence beyond the limits of the body. The ideological reference of transhumanism is Max More and his “Extropian Principles 3.11.” On the other hand, Posthumanism rejects the idea of disembodied consciousness, and emphasizes its penetrability and interconnectedness. Authors like Hayles (1999), Vint (2007), and Braidotti (2013) underline the relevance of the body and defend a new vision of the human in which the boundaries between human and machine, natural and artificial, mind and body have been overcome or have become permeable. The most relevant icon of this version of posthumanism is Haraway’s description of the cyborg as a fluid, multiple entity that is no longer human nor artificial and has no essence, and therefore no destiny, to fulfill (cf. Luca Varela 2014). The succession of “natural” humans, fully mechanical androids, and cyborg bodies therefore are the political statements that outline the conflicting ideologies in one specific cultural context. As Kaye Mitchell would claim, “[t]he history of the body (as a normative, supposedly unified concept) is a history of competing ideologies” (2006, n.p.). In this sense, Kirk/Shatner and Picard/Stewart have a long history as characters, and their aging male bodies may help disclose the story of the evolution of the perception of men in nearly five decades. This article has tried to trace this development from their early embodiment of the traditional notion of masculinity in American culture as self-made frontiersmen, what Donna Haraway would call “the Sacred Image of the Same” (1995: xv),4 to their final adjustment to a more fluid, flexible version of masculinity whose multiplicity and permeability are represented by their acceptance of cyborg penetration. Their numerous confrontations with bodies reconceptualized by the science fiction imagination generate the dialectical strife that allows for the arrival of new masculinities. In the same way Kirk/Shatner and Picard/Stewart have altered their roles as typical men, they have also evolved as aging men. The cyborgization of Shatner’s alter

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ego Samuel Lord and of Picard 2.0 may be considered as an ideological strategy to undermine the traditional association of old age with decline, obsolescence, and disempowerment. The presence of unracialized, ungendered, classless cyborgs in science fiction may inspire reflection on the constructed essence of the notions of race, gender, and class, while the visualization of alternative models of old men might encourage a new, unprejudiced perception of old age.

Notes 1. The recurrent presence of the frontier in sf literature and film has been pointed out by several studies, from the already classical book by David Mogen Wilderness Visions: The Western Theme in Science Fiction Literature (1993), to more recent works like Gary Westfahl’s essay compilation Space and Beyond: The Frontier Theme in Science Fiction (2000), Carl Abbot’s Frontiers Past and Future: Science Fiction and the American West (2006) and William H. Katerberg’s Future West: Utopia and Apocalypse in Frontier Science Fiction (2008). 2. Actress Farrah Faucet was 33 at the time the film was released, while coprotagonist Kirk Douglas was 64. 3. See Also Andrew Blaikie, whose study on the representation of age is based on the premise that aging is a sociological and historical construct (2005, 5) and that gerontology (as a discipline) has become a “discourse” (2005, 12) in the Foucauldian sense of the term. 4. In Chris H. Gray (ed). 1995. The Cyborg Handbook. London: Routledge.

Works Cited Abbot, Carl. Frontiers Past and Future: Science Fiction and the American West. Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 2006. Armengol, J. M. “Aging as Emasculation: Rethinking Aging Masculinities in Contemporary U.S. Fiction.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 59:3 (2018). Online. www.tandfonline.com. Last Accessed 30 May 2019. Balsamo, Anne. Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996. Beauvoir, Simone. The Coming of Age. 1970. Trans. Patrick O’Brian. London: Norton, 1996. Bernardi, Daniel. “Star Trek in the 1960s: Liberal-Humanism and the Production of Race.” Science Fiction Studies 24:2 (July 1997). Web. https://www. depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/72/bernardi72.htm. Last Accessed 30 September 2020.

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Beyer, Kirsten, Michael Chabon and Akiva Goldsman, creators. Star Trek: Picard. CBS (Amazon Prime), 2020. Blaikie, Andrew. Ageing and Popular Culture. 1999. Cambridge: CUP, 2005. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge (UK): Polity Press, 2013. Franklin, H. Bruce. “Star Trek in the Vietnam Era.” Science Fiction Studies 21:1 (March 1994), n. p. Web. https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/62/fra nklin62art.htm. Last Accessed 30 September 2020. Fuchs, Cynthia. “‘Death Is Irrelevant’: Cyborgs, Reproduction, and the Future of Make Hysteria.” Genders 18 (1993): 113–133. Haraway, Donna. “‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs’: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture. Ed. Bruce Grenville. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery/Arsenal Pulp Press, 2001. 65–99. ———. “Cyborgs and Symbionts: Living Together in the New World Order.” The Cyborg Handbook. Ed. Chris Hables Gray et al. New York and London: Routledge, 1995. xi–xix. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1999. Heller, Lee E. “The Persistence of Difference: Postfeminism, Popular Discourse, and Heterosexuality in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Science Fiction Studies 24:2 (July 1997), n.p. Web. https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backis sues/72/heller72.htm. Last Accessed 30 September 2020. Katerberg, William H. Future West: Utopia and Apocalypse in Frontier Science Fiction. Lawrence: U of Kansas P, 2008. Kimmel, Michael. Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era. 2005. New York: Nation books, 2013. McHale, Brian. “Elements of a Poetics of Cyberpunk.” Critique XXXIII.3 (Spring 1992): 149–175. Mitchell, Kaye. “Bodies That Matter: Science Fiction, Technoculture, and the Gendered Body.” Science Fiction Studies 33:1 (March 2006). Web. https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/98/mitchell98.html. Last Accessed 30 September 2020. Mogen, David. Wilderness Visions: The Western Theme in Science Fiction Literature. 1982. San Bernardino: Borgo Press, 1993. More, Max. “Extropian Principles 3.11.” Web. https://es.scribd.com/doc ument/203978899/Max-More-The-Principles-of-Extropy. Last Accessed 30 September 2020. Roddenberry Gene, creator. Star Trek: The Original Series. NBC (Netflix), 1966– 1969. ———, creator. Star Trek: The Next Generation. Paramount Pictures (Netflix), 1987–1994.

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Shatner, William, with David Fisher. Live Long … What I Learned Along the Way. Chicago: Gale, 2018. Shatner, William, with Rovin. Zero G: A Novel. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016. Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America. 1992. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1998. ———. The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890. 1985. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1998. ———. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier 1600–1860. 1973. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 2000. Sontag, Susan. “The Double Standard of Aging.” Saturday Review of The Society. September 23, 1972. 29–38. Saturn 3. Directed by Stanley Donen, performances by Farrah Faucet, Kirk Douglas, and Harvey Keitel. ITC Films and Associated Film Distribution, 1980. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Directed by Nicholas Meyer, performances by William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, and Ricardo Montalban. Paramount, 1982. Thiess, Derek. Embodying Gender and Age in Speculative Fiction. New York and London: Routledge, 2016. Valera, Luca. “Posthumanism: Beyond Humanism?” Cuadernos de Bioética XXV.3 (2014). Web EbscoHost. Vint, Sherryl. Bodies of Tomorrow: Technology, Subjectivity, Science Fiction. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2007. Westfahl Gary, ed. Space and Beyond: The Frontier Theme in Science Fiction. Wesport (Connecticut): Greenwood Press, 2000.

Older Men in Autobiography and Memoir

Self-Representation “Between Two”: Aging Males and the “Otherness Within” in Philip Roth’s Patrimony Esther Zaplana

In the search for literary representations of aging males and masculinity, Philip Roth’s Patrimony (1991) offers one of the most poignant portrayals of the author’s elderly father and his harrowing experience prior to his death due to brain tumor. The autobiographical novel takes the reader through an intimate and emotionally charged journey that expands a few years from the death of Roth’s mother to the last months in the life of the father. One of the main themes identified in the novel is the focus on memory as a recurrent motif linked to Roth’s elderly father’s obsession at the end of his life with remembering everything about their family experience and Jewish heritage. Herman Roth recurrently urges his son not to forget anything, which Benjamin Hedin interprets as the elderly man’s last source of strength and pride (Hedin 146). Hence the father’s anxieties in passing on his recollections before death bury his memories with him. In this sense, Roth’s memoir becomes a testimony of remembering, a conscious act of bringing back the past and confirming the remembrance of his father’s identifications and individuality. The interest

E. Zaplana (B) Departamento de Filologia Moderna, Facultad de Letras, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Ciudad Real, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. M. Armengol (ed.), Aging Masculinities in Contemporary U.S. Fiction, Global Masculinities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71596-0_7

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of Patrimony rests not only on the testimonial narrative and the fact that the novel gives the reader an opening into Herman’s identity, but, also, into the subjectivity of an elderly man and the perils of age in the American Jewish context. Moreover, the interest significantly lies on the fact that the centrality granted in the story to Herman Roth recoils back toward Roth as narrator. Roth’s fascination with the self as subject matter in his literary production is embodied in Patrimony in the form of a representative “I” at the center of the autobiographical. Indeed, it has been pointed out that Patrimony is primarily “about the making of the son” (Wirth-Nesher 167) and “the author’s obsession with sonhood” (Hedin 148). Whilst it is evident in the novel that the experience of Roth as a son takes center stage in many junctures in the narrative, it is not less obvious that the self-representational here is transformed into a text concerned with the constructions of an individual always in relation to an “other”—one’s family, community, and country (Gilmore 12).1 Roth as Roth becomes the central speaking subject whose construction of the personal and the self-representational is built on the relationship with his father, to whom he crucially gives a voice and hence language and agency. Rather than focusing on memory as a family story, one of the facets that this chapter aims to explore from a gender perspective is the meanings of the presence of renewed intimacy in the relationship between a dying father and his son, as well as the implications for aging males and masculinity. Sharing of the place of grief between the two men in Patrimony and the powerlessness in the face of circumstances expressed into language brings the father and son together. Roth’s autobiographical account underpins a life story which the reader already understands and it is in this sense that the novel does not dabble in the forms of auto fictional self-experimentation detected in Roth’s oeuvre.2 Yet Patrimony is written in the aftermath of real traumatic experience, and as such we may say that this is still a project of self-exploration where the author’s response to trauma can also be seen as “a means of situating the self in a new context” (Dix 4). Patrimony characteristically “narrativizes” the life of Roth’s father in his last years as a real person—as A True Story—inasmuch as truthfulness is met in Roth’s mediated depiction of his father. In the process, the novel develops a father–son “conversation” that re-situates the self in the context of aging and loss, where the narrating “I” of the text, Roth’s sense of selfhood, is constituted through the interactions with his father.3

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In this sense, this chapter will argue that Roth’s self-representation is not moving unidirectionally toward the self, especially because even the concepts of sonhood and individuality in the novel can be approached in terms of a subject that enters into a relation with an “other.” Roth’s elderly father becomes the “other” subject whose individuality and relationality are inseparable from the attentive gaze of the narrator. It is precisely the cultivation of a relationship of this kind which comes into focus and transforms Roth’s autobiography into a project that can be embraced from the perspective of Luce Irigaray’s discourse of selfrepresentation “between two” or “being in two.” It will be argued that this approach provides a path to trace the connections between aging masculinities, the self-representational, and the voice of the other acknowledged in Irigarayan thinking. Roth’s lets his father’s voice distinctively be heard early in the chronology of the illness when they visit the neurosurgeon for a second opinion and decide on the biopsy. The account of this medical consultation is placed in the middle of the narrative sequence, since Roth navigates a nonlinear journey through his father’s ordeal, starting when the father is first diagnosed with the tumor and henceforth developing a writing structure in time flashbacks and patchwork memories which converge in the final stages of Herman’s life. When the two men are discussing alternatives with the doctor, Roth tells us about Herman’s request of living two more years, which in a couple of minutes is extended to three or four years. Roth is able to anticipate his father’s mind and the thoughts he would have vented with the doctor: I raised myself out of the immigrant streets without a high school education, I never knuckled under, never broke the law, never lost my courage or said “I quit”. I was a faithful husband, a loyal American, a proud Jew, I gave two wonderful boys every opportunity I myself never had and what I am demanding is only what I deserve —another eighty-six years! Why, he would ask him [the doctor], “should a man die at all?” And of course, he would have been right to ask. It’s a good question. (Roth 92–3)

Albeit mediated through Roth’s memory, Herman’s first-person voice addresses the reader in a borrowed confessional mode that welds together his most private experience with the individual identifications engendered in the American Jewish community to which he belongs. Roth’s father as protagonist in Patrimony undergoes a physical ordeal where his life

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is susceptible to annihilation. This particular storyline finds similarities in Roth’s other literary writings and has been interpreted as a way to access identity constructions. Ann Basu argues that Roth’s Jewish protagonists endure trials, ordeals, and sufferings where “the body is threatened with disintegration or contamination” (7). These trials arise in “an attempt to establish firm ideological boundaries to the American national body” where Jewish men participate in the “absorptive and expulsive movements of the national body” (7). According to Basu, Roth makes the Jewish self “the key to understanding … American ideas about personal and national identity” (7–8). Thus, the quote earlier illustrates Herman’s way of facing his ordeal by voicing his individual identifications within the boundaries of the national body as a descendant of immigrants, a law abiding American and a proud Jew. What this passage also reveals is the personal constructions of masculinity and old age in a Western setting. Values attached to the masculine patriarchal standard, such as courage, entrepreneurship, relentlessness, and faithfulness are highlighted in the context of forthcoming decline, loss, and the very prospect of death. The latter is directly questioned almost in spiritual terms, as if Herman were addressing a divinity ready for a final verdict. The answer to Herman’s predicament comes from Roth himself, as the author confers to every man the right to question death, hence casting a redeeming gaze toward his father. At the time when Roth receives Herman’s first brain scans and sees from the pictures the tumor invading his father’s brain, the narrator pauses to meditate on the transcendence of witnessing, in a single printed image, a lifetime going through his eyes: “This was the tissue that had manufactured his set of endless worries and sustained for more than eight decades his stubborn self-discipline, the source of everything that had so frustrated me as his adolescent son” (6). Despite the bond created between the two men in the face of traumatic experience, Roth’s meditation rememorates the conflicts and tensions that had taken place since Philip’s younger years. The narrator’s gaze is then re-directed once more to the inanimate pictures of the brain to bestow on them the flesh and blood qualities of an ailing fatherly corporality. They reflected back the decline of his father’s masculine power, and thus the emasculation, of the elderly man: “the thing [the brain scan] that had ruled our fate back when he was all-powerful and determining our purpose, and now it was being compressed and displaced and destroyed” (6). Later in the story, when the father becomes increasingly weak and helpless and Roth embraces a

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fully fledged caring role, Roth’s redeeming gaze is directed once again toward his father’s reconfigurations of identity in old age, which result from the father’s struggle against powerlessness and emasculation: There was a new ordeal to face, and facing ordeals did not allow for hopelessness. It called forth instead that amalgam of defiance and resignation with which he [Herman] had learned to confront the humiliations of old age. (105)

Commentators have highlighted the uniqueness in the novel of the portrayal of the relationship between the father and son, despite the fact that this special bond is not without conflict, as already mentioned. Benjamin Hedin describes Roth’s experience with his father as ambivalent and a sinuous journey from “youthful rebellion to the softened appreciation of middle age, when the son must suddenly reverse nature’s roles and see his father through death” (Hedin 147). Hedin notices that the father–son dynamic in Roth’s account “flows through his lineage” (148). Resorting to literary sources alluded to in the novel, and which inform Roth’s writing—Hamlet in particular—,Hedin argues for an interpretation of Roth’s father as an “intercessory figure, the barrier who stands on behalf of the son between life and death” (148). For Roth, the uncanniness of feeling the father’s embodiment, of inhabiting his spirit, and even of sensing a doubleness with regard to the father, involves the internalization of one’s ancestry, and this connects with a vision in Patrimony of vertical flow from grandfather to father to son through the patriarchal lineage. As example, Roth is acutely aware of repeating his father’s actions when Herman nursed his father Sender in illness and old age, and wonders whether he will find himself in the same predicament with his own father, in having to “sit helplessly beside just the way he [Herman] once sat with his father” (Roth 43–4). In another example of nostalgic fixation with vertical lineage, Roth turns his gaze toward a photograph taken fifty-two-years earlier at the Jersey shore, where Roth’s father and his two sons are posing one directly behind the other, rising upward to form a V. The memento significantly captures the perpendicular genealogy of three male figures superimposed into one forming a V shape: “Yes, V for Victory is written all over that picture: for Victory, for Vacation, for upright, unbent Verticality!” (164). Roth’s patrilinear inheritance in the novel, his patrimony, is primarily epitomized in three objects: the grandfather’s shaving mug passed down

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to his son, Herman’s Jewish tefillin and the excrement Philip is compelled to clean up in his nursing endeavors. Hana Wirth-Nesher points out that these three symbols encapsulate the patrimony for a generation of American Jewish immigrants, inasmuch as the shaving mug signifies the daily act of removing hair and a sign of control over the body; the tefillin carry an ancient fetishistic power and hence whether or not to preserve this power becomes analogous to Jewish assimilation in America; and the third symbol, the excrement, is a sign of care and nursing for the old, which is associated with the mother (Wirth-Nesher 165–6). The mother as a metaphor for nature as life-giving and nurturing appears in the novel in connection with the father and son and hence with a role reversal that traverses from nature to gender. This gender role reversal and the ubiquity of the maternal-feminine more generally are found “inhabiting” Roth’s spirit, as well as in the interstices of the relationship between Roth and his father. Despite the death of the mother in Patrimony, the pervasiveness of the trope of the maternal-feminine linked to a relationship of respect and caring for the old constitutes the other facet in Roth’s biographical account that this chapter aims to explore in the next section.

The Trope of the Maternal-Feminine and the Ethics of the Relationship with the Elderly as “Other” None of the two objects as symbols of Roth’s patriarchal cultural lineage mentioned in the narrative turn out to be inherited in Patrimony, neither the grandfather’s shaving mug nor the Jewish tefillin. Roth’s father does not provide a specific reason for not passing the heirloom mug on to Philip, and the tefillin are left in the men’s locker room at the local YMHA.4 As for the third, the excrement, this is the only patrimony that Philip inherited: “There was my patrimony: not the money, not the tefillin, not the shaving mug, but the shit” (Roth 124). Roth’s introspective thought comes in the context of an explicit episode in the novel when Herman returns home frail from his biopsy; unable to hold his bowels, he smears the whole bathroom in excrement, forcing Roth to sanitize the place. The scatological and detailed description of the incident can be seen as a climactic moment in Roth’s attentive gaze toward the elderly father and his portrayal of the perils of aging. Ross Posnock identifies in Roth’s novels a tendency to engage with the theme of loss linked to a

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relaxation of “propriety in the face of aging and death,” a situation which is mirrored in Herman’s loss of bodily control in this scene - which can be interpreted as a way of exposing the frailty of the body self and our dependency on others. In Posnock’s terms, loss of bodily self-control can be seen as an “unmasking that reveals the flayed self as an open channel attuned to otherness” (259). Wirth-Nesher interprets the legacy of the excrement in Patrimony as an opportunity for Roth to look after the elderly father, as well as a “commandment to care for his father as his father had done before him” (Wirth-Nesher 166). Yet, the son’s commitment to clean up the mess in this ordeal prompts Herman to spontaneously remark that “Philip is like a mother to me” (Roth 127), thus establishing an alliance with the mother and simultaneously subsuming the activity of caring into a role that has traditionally been seen as naturally given to the feminine. According to Wirth-Nesher, the filiation with the mother problematizes the male lineage to the extent that Herman’s acknowledgment of the mother denies Philip paternity (Wirth-Nesher 166). At the crux of this major episode of excrement cleaup in the story is the intersection of the feminine and the masculine in an ethics of caring for the old; there is also the question of whether men, having hegemonic masculinity as their founding identity, enact their caring role partaking of the constructions of the maternal-feminine, or solely displaying actions that would go against subordinated and controlling masculinities. A more specific gender reading of the father–son dynamic in Patrimony points toward a failure of the inheritance of symbolic objects passed on through the male lineage, specifically within the context of the aging father and the construction of his masculinity in old age. The only successful inheritance in the novel, caring for the old, encompasses a gender role reversal and a recognition of the maternal-feminine. Roth’s internalization of the maternal is not argued here as a means of invalidating or interfering with his own construction of masculinity—hence the paternal—but deriving in part from Roth’s own rejection of the father’s authority and his conscious questioning of the father’s masculine model. Roth’s ambivalence toward the father stems from his attempts to resolve the “oppressing conflict” between grief and scorn: “… he was the father, with everything there is to hate in a father and everything there is to love” (Roth 127). The maternal filiation in the narrative emerges in Roth not so much as a conscious, but rather an unconscious process of subjectification and

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re-configuration of the performative self. This is illustrated in Roth’s surprised reaction at his father’s convictions when he describes Philip as being like a mother to him: “I was surprised. I would have thought he’d say ‘like a father to me’, but his description was, in fact, more discriminating than my commonplace expectations” (127). Earlier in the story, on the morning when Roth needed to drive to his father to break the news about the brain tumor, he accidentally takes a wrong turn, which leads him to the cemetery where his mother is buried. The unintended journey reveals Roth’s unconscious fascination in revisiting the site of the maternal: “… all I did by getting out of the car and entering the cemetery to find her grave was to bow to its impelling force” (9). The maternalfeminine may also be explained in the Irigarayan sense of embracing and sharing the different other; even if Roth’s dead mother is only felt as a presence, she can still be “part of our interiority while remaining exterior” (Irigaray Key 24). In view of these considerations, what appears to be operating in Patrimony is a masculine identification associated with the instability of the verticality of the father–son relationship and a feminine identification connected with the trope of the maternal-feminine culturally attached to an ethics of caring for the old. Rather than understanding Roth’s care for his aging father as an action that goes against subordinated masculinities, his enactment of care can be understood from the perspective of the relational subject and the result of the intersubjective relation with his elderly father as “other.” Luce Irigaray’s theorization of the “sexuate” subjects can be applied with a view to explaining the internalization of the “Otherness within” and the ethics in respecting the difference of the “other”: The presence of the other included us in a strangeness of his or her appeal. The presence of the other included us in a certain mystery, communicating to us an awakening that is both corporeal and spiritual … we incorporate the other in turn: through our knowledge, our affection, our customs. At the limit we no longer see the other … The other is part of us. Unless we reject the other. (Key 24)

Thus, Roth’s feelings of empathy, love, and protection which traditionally accompany the feminine come into play when incorporating his father as “other” and establishing a rapport with his father from the perspective of respecting difference.

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Irigaray’s philosophical premise of cultivating a culture “between two” or “being in two” forms part of her far-reaching project of challenging hegemonic masculine culture, and is related to “sexuate” subjects, a notion that contests the assumption of humans as being universally neuter subjects: “Sexuate identity rules out all forms of totality as well as the complete ownership of the subject” (Key 10). Her model allows for the respective becoming of two subjectivities, masculine and feminine, and the cultivation of a relationship “between two”: “‘Approaching the other as other’ explains why it is so difficult for us to recognize the other as such and to respect difference between us” (Key 5). It is worth noting that Irigaray’s model of “sexuate” identity does not correspond to the sexes as “natural given,” nor does it refer to an identity that is fixed and static. In this sense, her writings also emphasize the development of, or working toward, a feminine culture on a level with the masculine, which will enable an alternative subjectivity that has the potential to re-balance the configuration of a world dominated by a masculine culture, a culture of the Same: “The love of sameness among men often means a love within sameness which cannot posit itself as such without the maternal-natural-material” (Ethics 86); hence the importance given by Irigaray to the feminine for the relationship of the “sexuate” subjects and in “being in two.” Placed within a politics of performativity, Irigaray’s “sexuate” identity is explained in broad terms by looking at Heideggerian ideas on phenomenological ontology in reference to the existential interpretation of our modes of being (Van Leeuwen 111), whereby our situation is revealed in the context of being-with-others.5 Irigaray’s sexual ethics engage in the respect of “sexuate” identity and the understanding of the “Otherness within” in the construction of an intersubjective relationship; thus, the feminine and masculine subjects approach each other instead of appropriating one another: “the transcendence of the other, of the ‘you’ as irreducibly different from the ‘I’ is not yet a habit in our culture” (Key 5). Irigaray’s concept of “sexuate” subjects has at times been critiqued for falling short in the articulation of the relationships between different cultures and same-sex and subjects relationships. Yet, her model subsumes the difference of the subjects in themselves regardless of their relationship to other “sexuate” subjects.6 Since this difference is present in every relationship, not only in relationships between males and females, the model is helpful for our purpose of reading relationships both between older men and toward aging individuals. Rachel Jones suggests developing an

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ontology of specific cultural differences capable “of thinking alterity positively in all its forms” where the ontological “is the ethical insofar as ‘Being is disclosed in the ethical encounter with the Other’” (Ingram qtd in Rachel Jones 22). In this sense, Irigaray’s ideas can initiate a way forward to develop ethical relationships of care toward old people from the position of respecting the differences, instead of being diluted and ignored within a culture of sameness. Herman Roth’s experience of infirmity, vulnerability, and objectification affects the construction of his elderly self, and thus Roth’s commitment to his father is approached with caring feelings of love and protection: “… I felt as protective of his vulnerability (as an emotional family man vulnerable to family friction, as a breadwinner vulnerable to financial uncertainty, as a rough-hewn son of Jewish immigrants vulnerable to social prejudice)” (Roth 127). The acceptance of masculine disempowerment linked to a loss of control generally, and over bodily functions in particular, poses for men another significant challenge in the subjective construction of their masculine elderly selves. Roth’s empathic gaze turns toward his father’s shame and humiliation after beshitting himself: “I felt awful about his heroic, hapless struggle to cleanse himself before I had got up to the bathroom and about the shame of it, the disgrace he felt himself to be…” (123). Irigaray’s critique of the culture of the Same, primarily promoted by male subjects, and endured by both women and men, gravitates toward the obliteration of the respect for differences, which can provide also an explanation for the marginalization of the elderly. One of the roots for the ostracism and “exile” of the elderly in late capitalist societies can be found on a failure to recognise an ontology of aging in human beings: this can be understood in terms of a phenomenology of aging linked to Heideggerian ideas of interpreting the meanings of our situation in the context of being-toward-death.7 In the case of the elderly, an internalization of the “Otherness within” will entail an ontology of being-toward-death. As explored in this chapter, Patrimony offers many instances of the father–son relationship that can be explained in terms of “being in two,” where the elderly father is intrinsically implicated with death; and yet one instance that specifically conflates the maternal-feminine with death as becoming can be found when Roth accompanies his father in grief after the mother’s death. Roth describes how in twenty-four hours after Herman’s wife passed away the father’s physique transforms from being in excellent health into looking disfigured, similarly to the way he looked

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when approaching his own death. The night after the mother’s death, Roth sleeps with his father in the double bed and lays down side by side in an act of intimacy, of reaching out to the father, performing a maternalfeminine gesture of nurturing in the face of loss and death: “After turning off the lights, I reached out and took his hand and held it as you would the hand of a child who is frightened of the dark. He sobbed for a minute or two” (66–7).

Conclusion To conclude, we have seen how Roth’s engagement with the autobiographical in Patrimony develops a narrative of self-representation in connection with his elderly father as “other” and brings an understanding of the place of traumatic experience through the development of an ethical relationship of care with his ailing father before death. The powerlessness of the circumstances brought into language has also drawn attention to the nature of renewed intimacy between Roth and his aging, dying, father. The principles of patriarchal lineage and masculine verticality are undermined in the novel, enabling the maternal-feminine to emerge first in Roth’s performative self, as a result of his identity constructions resulting from the relationship with his father. Secondly, Herman experiences a feminizing effect in senectitude as a result of his process of identity transformation when having to face the ordeal of suffering from the brain tumor and having to gradually face to emasculation in old age. Herman’s irreducible difference arises from his subjective experience of losing masculine power and control, as well as the meanings he draws near the end of his life from his existential situation in being-toward-death. The analysis has engaged with Luce Irigaray’s philosophical ideas, in particular her account for the need and cultivation of a culture, as well as a politics, appropriate for subjects produced by difference with a view to examining the bond and affection in the relationship between Roth and his aging father. Irigaray’s model of “sexuate” identity and her articulation of a culture ‘between two” or “being in two” is helpful in arguing for an old and aging subject whose identity would relate inter-subjectively with an “other.” Crucially for the relationship between Roth and his father in Patrimony is that the difference of the subjects in the model is also primarily within their own selves in the process of becoming old, prior to their relationship to “others.” In Irigaray’s view, the respect for difference does not “correspond to the respect of something visible

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but of something invisible which results from the relation with oneself” (“Dialogues” 147). Irigaray tells us that the subject follows a path of becoming, which does not mean “estrangement from the flesh, from my body, from my history. I go towards that which enables me to become while remaining myself” (Love 104). In this sense, the concept of irreducibility and the “Otherness within” as seen in the analysis can offer male and female subjects the prospect of an ethics of care in a relationship with older and elderly individuals which involves respecting the differences arising from old age. It also means building space between persons, which “safeguards the transcendental dimension between the two,” and which “results from the restraint that the respect for the other requires of us” (Sharing 54). Patrimony illustrates the affection and care within the father–son dynamic; if we follow the Irigarayan perspective, a space can be said to have been created in the narrative for the two protagonists to travel the journey in “being in two” and transit along a difficult path to bring about a transformation in their relationship. From the verticality of the masculine lineage to a horizontal re-configuration that takes into consideration identity constructions, and which is open to cultivate a non-hierarchical culture of the feminine.

Notes 1. The point made here is drawn from Leigh Gilmore’s expanded discussion on the genre of autobiography as being an assembly of theories of the self: “Every autobiography is a fragment of a theory. It is also an assembly of theories of the self and self-representation; of personal identity and one’s relation to a family, a region, a nation […].” See Gilmore 12 (Limits of Autobiography). 2. Examples of Roth’s novels which have been studied as auto-fiction include the “Zuckerman” novels, in so far Zuckerman as a character is thought of as Roth’s fictional alter ego, and Roth’s memoirs and novels about himself. 3. For further discussion on the implications of Roth’s use of perspectives regarding the points of view of the author, the implied author and the narrator vis-à-vis the genres of autobiography and auto-fiction, see Todd Womble’s “Roth Is Roth as Roth: Autofiction and the Implied Author.” See Dix (Autofiction). 4. Young’s Men Hebrew Association. 5. See Heidegger for an in-depth explanation of his theorization on phenomenology, ontology and Being-in-the World, Being-With and BeingOne’s Self. Heidegger 149–166 (Being and Time). Van Leeuwen carries out

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a comprehensive analysis on Irigaray’s and Derrida’s readings of Heidegger and the influence of the latter on Irigaray. Van Leeuven focuses in particular on the theme of phenomenological ontology, as well as the differences that separate Heidegger’s and Irigaray’s conceptions of sexuate identity. See Van Leeuwen 111–126 (“Sexuate Difference”). 6. I take this point from Penelope Deutscher’s reading of Irigaray: she discusses whether Irigaray’s politics and her conceptualization of sexual difference provide a model to rethink cultural differences or have the potential to offer such model. See in particular “The Impossible Friend: Traversing the Heterosocial, the Homosocial and the Successes of Failure,” 123–142 (A Politics of Impossible). 7. See Heidegger’s sections on Being-a-Whole and Being-toward-Death 312– 317 (Being and Time).

Works Cited Basu, Ann. States of Trial—Manhood in Philip Roth’s Post-War America. New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Deustcher, Penelope. “The Impossible Friend: Traversing the Heterosocial, the Homosocial and the Successes of Failure”. A Politics of Impossible Difference: The Later Work of Luce Irigaray. Ithaca: Cornell University UP, 2002. 123– 142. Dix, Hywell, Ed. Autofiction in English. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Gilmore, Leigh. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca and London: Cornell University UP, 2001. Hedin, Benjamin. “The Measure of All Things: Patrimony”. Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author. Ed. Derek Parker Royal. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005. 143–151. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. Irigaray, Luce. I Love to You: Sketch of Possible Felicity in History. Trans A. Martin. New York and London, 1996. ———. “Dialogues”. Paragraph 25, Num 3 Edinburg UP, Nov 2002. ———. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. London and New York: Continuum, 2004. ———. Key Writings. London and New York: Continuum, 2004. ———. Sharing the World. London and New York: Continuum, 2008. Jones, Rachel. Irigaray: Towards a Sexuate Philosophy. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011. Posnock, Ross. Philip Roth’s Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2008.

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Roth, Philip. Patrimony: A True Story. London: Vintage, 1991. Van Leeuwen, Anne. “Sexuate Difference, Ontological Difference: Between Irigaray and Heidegger”. Continental Philosophy Review 43 (2010): 111–126. Wirth-Nesher, Hana. “Roth’s Autobiographical Writings”. The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth. Ed. Timothy Parrish. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. 158–172.

Reconstructing the (Masculine) Self from Old Age: Memories of the Aching Male Body in Paul Auster’s Winter Journal Leonor Acosta-Bustamante

The autobiographical component in Paul Auster’s work has been claimed by most scholars agreeing that it is essential to understand the thematic lines recurrently developed in his novels such as the loss of father figures, the nature of chance, and the existentialist side of the act of writing. All of them are relevant constituents of Paul Auster’s life as a man and as a writer and are also present in his autobiographical books published throughout his career. The intimate connection between his manner of approaching fiction and life writing is made evident by a number of critics who focus on the philosophical tenets concerning identity as an artefact constructed by language and texts (Fredman 1996; Giannakopoulos 2017). The unreliability of memory and the idea that autobiography is just a reconstruction of incoherent mental data artificially ordered set the basis of all his books of memoirs (Gudmundsdóttir 16), positioning Auster as a practitioner of the disruptive Postmodernist principles of the 1980s (Butler 13–43). The Invention of Solitude (1982) and The New York Trilogy (1985–1986) become his official presentation in the world of American letters and establish his tendency to postmodernist poetics by combining theories

L. Acosta-Bustamante (B) University of Cadiz, Cadiz, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. M. Armengol (ed.), Aging Masculinities in Contemporary U.S. Fiction, Global Masculinities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71596-0_8

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about “the Death of the Author” (Roland Barthes), the trap of language in creating suspicious images of the world (Jacques Derrida), and the critique of the humanist subject (Michel Foucault), all of them derived from French philosophy. The work as the text, and the world as a text, seem to be a good definition of his first incursions into literature, which inaugurated a repeated interest in telling tales about the self in an unsuccessful search for lost identity. And the recovery of identity by interpreting fragmented mental images and by translating them into words provides a key for the reading of The Invention of Solitude as experimentation with life writing (Lehnert). In 2012 Winter Journal appears as his third autobiographical book, after another attempt to experiment with the genre in Hand to Mouth (1996), a chronicle of the obstacles he had to face to become a writer in the mercantilist framework of publishing companies, or as he defined it “my little autobiographical essay about money” (Hutchinson 153). The gap between these two autobiographical books and Winter Journal produces an important difference regarding their perspectives and his thematic interests since the focus of this third immersion into life writing seems to rise from the recognition of old age as a new existential scenario at the age of 64. Here the literary exploration of the past does not involve a philosophical discussion of the unstable self, but centers on the problematic act of memory in aging. The book handles the experience of remembering as a collage of scattered miniatures, which sometimes are even repeated and recalled throughout the paragraphs. This apparent lack of pattern is perhaps the reason why Winter Journal has received much less attention from scholars than the rest of his writings up to this year, and there are a very few critical contributions dealing with this book indepth, even provoking some disappointment and rejection among certain reviewers in magazines and journals (Lehnert 758). In terms of form, the most striking element which provides the text with a sense of estrangement is the second-person narrator used by the author to tell the story. In Alex Hobbs’s view, this shift in perspective is an “attempt to separate, once and for all, the writing self from the body whose life it is describing” (74), which at the same time produces a sense of community with the reader sharing the effect of time passing. Yet it also generates a dissolving bridge joining past and present in a voluntary inconsistency of the “real,” impossible to be told and existing at a distance from the writer. Past and present, the “I” and the “you,” youth and old age, are all parts of the self, which the book tries to explore from

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the deficient angle of an old man’s memory. In a conversation with Paul Holdengräber in 2012, the author speaks about Winter Journal as “a book of autobiographical fragments” (qtd in Lethern 759), and justifies fragmentation not as a metaphorical stand to write about the self, but as the natural effect of memory, as he again declares to Vicente Molina Foix in another recorded interview the same year: No elements of fiction. No, no, I wouldn’t propose to do a book like this, which is autobiographical, fragmented – yes – it’s not a coherent narrative, it’s made in little pieces, but everything is as accurately presented as I could possibly have done. Listen: Memory is a very flippery business, and we forget a lot, and we often distort memory, but to the best of my ability, I wrote what I remember. (qtd in Lethern 760)

The “little pieces” which he can remember, and his rejection of filling up the voids left, reinforces his belief in the impossible task of finding the truth behind the story, and the mood is that of a writer in need to present himself to the world in the state of mind of a man facing the last phase of his life. Writing in old age usually means to confront “firstly, the ever-lurking threat of death, and, secondly, a serious reduction of one’s agency through physical decline” (Rivera Godoy-Benesch 92–93). Winter Journal makes it all clear just in its opening lines: “Time is running out, after all. Perhaps it is just as well to put aside your stories for now and try to examine what it has felt like to live inside this body from the first day you can remember being alive until this one” (Auster). What is significant in this memoir is that it is not the life of the self what he writes about, but the memories of his body evolving from childhood to old age, “a catalogue of sensory data,” as he advances in the first page, recorded in the very same manner as he dealt with identity in the previous autobiographical books: the body in fragments, the fragments of the body in pain, the body’s response to an emotional breakdown, the body in rooms, in houses, in hospitals, in short, the body walking inevitably toward death. Though it would be easy to interpret this concentration on the body as part of Paul Auster’s apprehension with his senior days, the physical component in the process of writing has been part of his literary landscape from early times. In a conversation with Jonathan Lethem for The Believer (2005) he described the process of creation in terms of the intimate connection between hand, pen, and paper, in an unbreakable chain:

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Writing is physical for me. I always have the sense that the words are coming out of my body, not just my mind. I write in longhand, and the pen is scratching the words onto the page. I can even hear the words being written. So much of the effort that goes into writing prose for me is about making sentences that capture the music that I’m hearing in my head. (Hutchinson 150)

Moreover, if writing entails a level of physicality for the author by understanding that his hand is intimately connected to the pen and the pen to the page, then it is not difficult to think that in Winter Journal this metaphorical interpretation might be extended so that to write his memoir is a process through which his body writes about itself, and inscribes his life in a book identified with the body, where scars, illness, and panic attacks are the words on the page. Hence the structure of the book of bodily remembrances is no more than a record of the body in the process of growing up and growing old. Besides, when ordering the scattered images of pains and sufferings, there is an incontestable exploration of the body as a gendered body, which follows a pattern of masculine apprenticeship, a social law that unconsciously is printed on his skin. Yet, the rules of hegemonic masculinity present important obstacles in the rituals of becoming a man. The manner in which Paul Auster writes about this tough journey places the book in a significant opposition regarding theories of aging masculinity and their agreement on old men’s sense of invisibility and absence (Fennell and Davidson 2003; Calasanti 2005; Calasanti and King 2005). Rather, Winter Journal appears like an exhibition of his body as the signifier of the self, by exposing the imprints of time passing and making himself more visible than ever. Regarding this exhibition, the author undertakes the job through a disordered dialogue between the embodiment of manhood and the slow assimilation of the body intervened by social forces and agents: by parents, by physicians, by neighbors, by schoolmates, by girlfriends, while the inner self seems to be constantly working for maintaining life at all costs. In this sense, the spatial duality of inside and outside is not identified in this book with self and body, but with two appreciations of the body: on the one hand, as a physical entity on which pains are stamped in the manner of scars, and, on the other, as an instrument of socialization which needs to move around to find a proper place to live.

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The Body as a Text Composed of Scars and Pains Taking the first of the definitions mentioned above, the book presents a disordered set of experiences by which the body is seen under the biomedical paradigms of a machine that must be working in harmony, but which sometimes breaks and needs some medical intervention. Following this line of interpretation, it is possible to consider that Paul Auster creates what Rita Charon calls a piece of “narrative medicine” (Charon 2006), a concept close to that of Ricoeur’s “narrative identity” (Lénárt-Cheng 2016), which serves as redemption for aging men in search for a sense of life (MacAdams and McLean 2013). The very title of the book suggests an exercise of writing from old age, but it also metaphorically provokes connotations about stillness and hibernation, transforming the text into a pathography that enables the author to give voice to what he has constantly set apart and to be able to celebrate his endurance. Hence Winter Journal becomes an exercise of facing not just the factual events of his life, but rather the pains and physical aching considered as an existential fight which has always the same meaning, because “with the body in view, autobiography cannot claim immortality but must succumb to temporality” (Charon 70). Then, by organizing the list of illnesses, pains, breakings, and bodily aches in chronological order, there is a pattern that significantly provides a link with the manners of learning masculinity in the procedure of his body put in motion within the social world. When localizing the ages linked to these experiences, it is possible to differentiate them according to the ages of masculinity that he undergoes. Starting with childhood Paul Auster explores Seidler’s declaration that “boys are not supposed to acknowledge the hurts they feel, they learn from early age strategies of denial” (113). In Winter Journal the aging narrator reminds the scars left by masculine rituals represented as a map written on his skin. “The inventory of scars,” as the author calls it, is a collection of “letters from the alphabet that tells the story of who you are, for each scar is the trace of a healed wound and each wound was caused by an unexpected collision with the world” (Auster). The phase of learning how to be a boy in a world dominated by masculine hegemony starts when he was three and half years old on a shopping day when accompanying his mother and a friend of the same age: it is the report of a child running free in the slippery floor of the mall and crashing against a wooden table with a nail that broke his cheek. The narrator symbolizes this adventure as

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one of getting from a small room to an infinite space liberated from the chains of home. The dangers of freedom, Paul Auster seems to be saying, are written as scars normally caused by either school experiences of shaping the body (gymnastics, basketball, baseball) or by confrontations with neighbors who set aggression as the rule of sociability for boys. And from these physical pains he reaches the first learning about his self: the need to become a boy who must defend his body from aggression. The experience, however, produces his first break with the masculine code: the rejection of violence to exercise power in his gendered world, a world the narrator depicts as a ring with wild animals fighting for social recognition. Later on, in the threshold between boyhood and adolescence, his sexualised body situates him at the next level of maleness, that of the years of phallic obsession, “like every other male who has wandered this earth, you were in thrall to the miraculous change that had occurred in your boy. On most days, you could think of little else –on some days, of nothing else” (Auster). The process of embodying sexuality is depicted in Winter Journal as the incoherence of being a boy in a man’s body, as well as a constant castration of his sexual drives which can only relieve through unsatisfactory masturbation, or through the disappointing experience of going to brothels. Memories about these practices lead him to express a negative response to his sexuality, which is depicted as an inescapable load, a physical need that he has to fulfil to keep in terms with his body pulses. This is why from twelve to sixteen years old, his life is conditioned by his penis as the signifier of his bodily experience, and it is only when the book pictures middle age when this obsession with sex vanishes from the text. However, there is a clear difference between the portrait of his young body and the one containing his self when he reaches adulthood. Then the body is no more subjected by external wounds or suffering from sexual drives, and it turns to be assaulted by problems in the inside: His bladder, his heart, his veins, the cornea of his eye, all aches filling his life with the sense of broken organs in the interior of the body machine. It is perhaps in these paragraphs disseminated without order throughout the pages of the book where it is possible to figure out how Paul Auster manages to solve the problematic dilemma of the body as the material part of the self, and the body as a social instrument. As stated by Johnathan Watson, “Human bodies are taken up and transformed as a result of living in society, but they remain material, physical and biological entities” (60). From this point of view, the author uses the pages of the book to insert

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his awareness about the power of the physical body over his intellect and his emotional drives, and step by step the report of his inner pains (for his father’s and his mother’s death, for example) evolves into a conversation with the symptomatic bodily troubles coming from psychological aching. In a constant oscillation, Winter Journal produces and reproduces images of the existential battle between body and mind, sometimes under control, as when the body is in the hands of medical treatment, and some others without any possible dominion, as if all his cells finally carry the seed of death. In this respect, there is a section in Winter Journal devoted to the significant moment in which the narrator is watching the film D.O.A., just after his mother’s death. A classic film noir released in 1950, the plot presents a curious twist in its point of departure as regards the principal conventions of the genre. Like many noir stories, the opening scenes concern the finding of a murder and the moral need of solving the crime by discovering the criminal. But notably, this film is the story of a man who searches for his murderer, after learning that he has been poisoned and is going to die. The author introduces these first sequences of the film to connect them metonymically with his emotional chronicle about realizing that his time is also coming to an end: You have been that man, you tell yourself, and what you are watching on the television screen is a precise rendering of what happened to you two days after your mother’s death in 2002; the hammer that descends without warning, and then the inability to breathe, the pounding heart, the dizziness, the sweats, the body that falls to the floor, the arms and legs that turn to stone, the howls that blast forth from maddened, airless lungs, and the certainty that the end is upon you, that one second from now the world will no longer exist, because you will no longer exist. (Auster)

The interest of the American author in the narratives of private eyes involved in the criminal milieu is well-known (Lewis 1994) and it is the pretext of City of Glass (1985), where he uses this pattern to insert a metafictional perspective that destabilizes the world of the text (Nealon 1999). In Winter Journal the intertext functions in a different manner and Paul Auster introduces the film for the spectacle of a body containing death with no possible solution except for finding the truth behind it. Actually, this is the objective of the whole book, to trace the life of his body through pains, wounds, and sufferings just to reach the true

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sense of life, which is death. At sixty-four, in the phase which is marked “as the point of departure because it appears to be the new marker for men and aging” (Blundo and Estés 62), living becomes an “inching ever closer to senior citizenship, to the days of Medicare and Social Security benefits” (Auster), because the body is an entity in action, as Shilling’s assertion puts it: “Humans are forced to act, and require a shield from the terror of death, because of the universal biological conditions of their embodiment” (156).

The Body in Rooms/The Rooms as Bodies Your body in small rooms and large rooms, your body walking up and down stairs, your body swimming in ponds, lakes, rivers and oceans, your body traipsing across muddy fields, your body lying in the tall grass of empty meadows, your body walking along city streets, your body labouring up hills and mountains, your body sitting down in chairs. (Auster)

Apart from the exploration of the physical body and the map of scars reminding that life is a material process imprinted on the skin and the organs, Winter Journal is also a memoir of the body living in the world, as the only instrument for the self to communicate with the society surrounding it. In the case of Paul Auster’s literary landscape, the self is many times depicted in the claustrophobic space of the room, a consideration of the self in exile from the external forces that spin around out there. The room, thus, symbolizes the site for self-assertion, the place in which the character-writer is free from social disturbance. As Stephen Fredman puts it, “Auster insists over and over again on the physicality of writing. He makes this physicality graphic by welding together three distinct spaces: the room, the space in which writing is enacted; the interior space where writing happens in the writer; and the space on the page the words occupy” (226). This idea is consistent with the section in Winter Journal devoted to listing the main memories the author keeps about the twenty-two homes in which he lived up to the moment of the book’s publication. Though some critics are very critical of this technique by considering it a distraction to distress the reader with anecdotes (Lethern 784), it is possible to join this long account with the cultural interpretation of the concept of “home” for aging men when facing old age and death. This is the main

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thesis in the collective book edited by Graham D. Rowles and Habib Chaudhury with the title Home and Identity in Late Life (2005), which points to the relevance of “home” as constructing a sense of identity in a secure place confronted to the chaotic world beyond the front door and connected with a healthy relief from the disturbance of social life (3). In aging, men might remind the renting or buying of apartments or houses as partial achievements in their masculine obligations of providing and protecting, of creating healthy families. In the autobiographical record of houses and apartments that occupy more than fifty pages in Paul Auster’s book, it is possible to trace the process by which the narrator constructs the connection between the buildings and the journey of his life. On the one hand, this journey can be interpreted as the experiment of his body moving across regions in his life span: New Jersey, New York, Paris, and New York again. On the other hand, these changes are meticulously connected with the passing of time and his evolution from childhood to old age, by dating in detail the years he spent living in each one of them, and by describing the particulars of apartments and houses in connection with his state of mind and body when inhabiting them. In this sense, there is little to say about the lines devoted to the houses in New Jersey which he shared with his parents up to the moment that their divorce broke the family unit covering his first 17 years of age. However, this shifts to a different consideration when he moves to Columbia University as a student where books, sex, and drugs are the center of these records, leading to the five years he lived in Manhattan. This stage is concerned with the body making experiments of cohabitation: sharing space with a friend and feeling tormented by bad dreams, living alone in the middle of the students’ strikes and the street demonstrations against the Vietnam war, and living together with his first girlfriend while attending the Columbia doctoral program in Comparative Literature, a period that ended with the couple breakup. Between 18 to 24 years old all these attempts to find a room of his own proves unsuccessful and the bodily responses to these failures make him think about the power of the body over the mind in living: Whenever you come to a fork in the road, your body breaks down, for your body has always known what your mind doesn’t know, and however it chooses to break down, whether with mononucleosis or gastritis or panic attacks, your body has always borne the brunt of your fears and inner battles, taking the blows your mind cannot or will not stand up to. (Auster)

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This reinforces the main idea which lurks throughout the scattered pieces of memory to create the metaphor of the body as the mind’s room, with absolute dominion over intellectual abilities and over constructed images of the self. All are conditioned by the situation of the body in health or in illness, the biomedical discourse which is inevitably crossed by the category of aging masculinity (Bartholomaeus and Tarrant 2016). The hegemony entailed in learning to be a man favors youth and marginalizes old age, when lack of physical power, sexual impotence, and inactivity in the public realm, place elder men in a situation of weakness and invisibility (Fennell and Davidson 2003). Hence, the paragraph above stands for a moment of break that functions as a full stop, by separating the homes of young age from the rest, and by inaugurating a new form of laying bare his interest in describing the next homes with the aging body. The years spent in Paris and then in Southeastern Provence, which are connected to the recovery of his girlfriend and his idealistic concept of love, explore the idea of the estranged body living in an unfamiliar social environment. In the France of 1971, an American Jew trying to develop himself in the literary and artistic social realm stands as a rare being, and his feeling of alienation reigns through the experience of living in his first apartment in Paris, where he finds himself constantly rioting with neighbors and undergoing moments of despair in coping with some of his French surroundings. Then the second break with his girlfriend comes and he finds for the first time a room suitable for artistic inspiration, “the smallest room you have ever inhabited, a room so small that only the barest essentials could fit in there” (Auster), the room he had imagined in his first novels where writing notebooks is the essential component of the self. Nevertheless, his longing for establishing himself as a perfect lover leads him to think about living in the countryside, and during nine months he and his girlfriend get along together in contact with country people and in communion with nature. All the same, these settings show a continuous uneasiness and a sense of not belonging, so that they finally come back to New York and the stage of experiencing the European scenario as a room for living finishes. The second stay in Manhattan presents a transitional gap regarding the structure of this section of the book. The rented apartment on the tenth floor of a building overlooking the Hudson is described in numerous details regarding firstly its interior, focusing on claustrophobia and decay, and secondly its exterior, the “gift” of a roof terrace which connects his body to the noises of the city. This ambiguous feature of the apartment is

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also sensed in the depiction of his life in this phase: the passing of time has changed his mental image of Manhattan and he faces some difficulties in adapting himself to New York again, to meet once more the instabilities of his professional life, and to assimilate the idea of marrying his girlfriend after so many upheavals. And as it usually happens to some of his characters, a matter of chance makes him and his wife move again, this time to California using a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, with the idea of trying another city, another life that could rescue him from economic breakdown and despair. The months they lived in Berkeley cover some pages devoted to the narration of wounds, pains provoked by playing sports at the university campus, hospitals, and a long description of the effects of valium on his body. The new experiment proves to be no good, his wife gets pregnant and they decide to move again and to give a second opportunity to experience country life. The two-story house in Stanford symbolizes a haunted house where to reencounter traces of antiSemitism, as well as witnessing other people’s death and the first hints of a malfunctioning marriage: “A bleak time, without question the bleakest time you have ever gone through, brightened only by the birth of your son in June 1977” (Auster). This stage covers his father’s death, and this terrible situation breaks with his first idea of living in Manhattan to the prospect of finding a new place, Brooklyn, where he is to find the stability he was so eager to discover. The final phase in this quest for a suitable home is characterized by the final decision of buying a house, to possess the place as the definite option to reach stability, but it does not come easily, and his first attempt at a co-op apartment, now that he falls in love again, is translated into a nightmare of problems with the building: bugs, an impracticable fence, falling ceilings, unsuitable windows, all details depicting the apartment as a sick place, from which he and his brand new family have to escape to figure out a proper future. And this finally comes: “Somewhere in Park Slope; Brooklyn. A four-story brownstone with a small garden in back, built in 1892. Age 46 to the present” (Auster). Homes, rooms, places, cities, and the ever-persistent presence of his body investigating how to live healthy and happy, are numbered to show the failures and pains undergone, to prove that nothing is under his control, but, on the contrary, under the control of external forces. What is significant in Paul Auster’s account of his body life is his constant disaffiliation with the other bodies surrounding him, even in the moments of despair or panic attacks, the social world does not produce any sense of

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relief except for healing physical wounds. In this regard, Winter Journal seems to be an extension of all his narrative preoccupations, he is, even in facing his bodily problems, a person in exile, and finally, the secondperson narrator stamps this characteristic into the text. The fight to shape his body to adapt to social standards is sometimes a defeat, mainly at his early age, but it is described as a heroic quest in adulthood, though there are times of decline and fear to be unable of reaching the goal. However, there is no trace in the whole autobiographical book to meet a man with uncertainties about what this goal is, or doubts about what is the sense of being alive. He is all the time wishing to find a family to fulfill his identity as a good husband and a good father, and simultaneously wanting to find a room to fulfill his role as a writer. In the end, everything is achieved, family and writing, all too perfect except for the impression that winter is behind the door.

Works Cited Auster, Paul. The Invention of Solitude. Faber and Faber, 1982. ———. The New York Trilogy. Faber and Faber, 1987. ———. Hand to Mouth. Kindle ed., Henry Holt and Co., 1996. (n.p.). ———. Winter Journal. Kindle ed., Henry Holt and Co., 2012. (n.p.). Bartholomeaus, Claire and Anna Tarrant. “Masculinities at the Margins of ‘Middle Adulthood’: What a Consideration of Young Age and Old Age Offers Masculinities Theorizing”. Men and Masculinities, vol. 19, no. 4, 2016, pp. 351–369. Blundo, Robert and Tamara Estés. “The Peculiarities of Men Aging: A Collection of Anecdotes”. Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, vol. 32, no. 1, 2005, pp. 61–70. Butler, Christopher. Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2002. Calasanti, Toni. “Ageism, Gravity, and Gender: Experiences of Aging Bodies”. Generations, vol. 29, no. 3, 2005, pp. 8–12. Calasanti, Toni and Neal King. “Firming the Floppy Penis. Age, Class, and Gender Relations in the Lives of Old Men”. Men and Masculinities, vol. 8, no. 1, 2005, pp. 3–23. Charon, Rita. Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness. Oxford UP, 2006. Fennell, Graham and Kate Davidson. “‘The Invisible Man?’ Older Men in Modern Society”. Ageing International, vol. 28, no. 4, 2003, pp. 315–325. Fredman, Stephen. “How to Get Out of the Room that Is the Book? Paul Auster and the Consequence of Confinement”. Postmodern culture, vol. 6, no. 3, 1996. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/pmc.1996.0024.

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Giannakopoulos, Giorgios. “Inside Paul Auster’s Crypt: Autobiography and Spectrality in Ghosts ”. E-rea. Revue électronique d’études sur le monde Anglophone, vol 15, no. 1, 2017. Gudmundsdóttir, Gunnthórunn. Borderlines: Autobiography and Fiction in Postmodern Life Writing. Rodopi, 2003. Hobbs, Alex. Aging Masculinity in the American Novel. Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. Hutchinson, James H. (ed.) Conversations with Paul Auster. UP of Mississippi, 2013. Lehnert, Robert. “Autobiography, Memoir and Beyond: Fiction and Non-Fiction in Philip Roth’s The Facts and Paul Auster’s Winter Journal ”. Anglia, vol. 132, no. 4, 2014, pp. 757–796. Lénárt-Cheng, Helga. “Paul Ricoeur and the “Particular” Case of Autobiography”. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, vol. 31, no. 2, 2016, pp. 355–372. Lewis, Barry. “The Strange Case of Paul Auster”. The Review of Contemporary Literature, vol. 14, no. 1, 1994, pp. 53–61. MacAdams, Dan P. and Kate C. McLean. “Narrative Identity”. Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol. 22, no. 3, 2013, pp. 233–238. Nealon, Jeffrey T. “Work of the Detective, Work of the Writer. Auster’s City of Glass ”. Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism, edited by Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999, pp. 117–133. Rivera Gody-Benesch, Rahel. “Ageing, Agency, and Autobiography. Challenging Ricoeur’s Concept of Narrative Identity”. Traces of Aging: Old Age and Memory in Contemporary Narrative, edited by Marta Cerezo Moreno and Nieves Pascual Soler, Transcript-Verlag, 2016, pp. 91–109. Rowles, Graham D. and Habib Chaudhury (eds.). Home and Identity in Late Life: International Perspectives. Springer, 2006. Seidler, Victor J. Transforming Masculinities: Men, Cultures, Bodies, Power, Sex and Love. Routledge, 2006. Shilling, Chris. The Body in Social Theory. Sage, 2003. Watson, Johnathan. Male Bodies: Health, Culture and Identity. OUP, 2000.

Aging Beyond Whiteness

Black Masculinities and Aging in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Love Mar Gallego

Contesting prevalent narratives of race and gender, it is my contention that Toni Morrison has deeply invested in the investigation of the nature and configuration of black masculinities and the intricate link with other identity categories such as age and aging as crucial factors. Morrison posits patriarchal black masculinity vis-a-vis other models in order to eschew this model of normative manhood, and its harmful effects on African American men. Imaginatively constructing alternative notions of subjectivity and belonging, she attempts to defy denigratory stereotypical designation of black men. Furthermore, she also envisions new interdependent relationships which reveal the importance of partners, family and community, and the ethical elements that are prominent in this writer’s positionality as feminist and anti-racist. Presenting a whole array of black masculinities, Morrison has undoubtedly contributed to challenge any univocal vision of what black manhood may entail. As these characters mature, I would further argue that they gradually become more articulate to address topics such as systemic or gender violence, the deep traumas that haunt them or the necessity to

Mar Gallego (B) COIDESO, Universidad de Huelva, Huelva, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. M. Armengol (ed.), Aging Masculinities in Contemporary U.S. Fiction, Global Masculinities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71596-0_9

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relate to other human beings on an equal basis. Thus, some of them are able to develop resistance strategies that allow them to go beyond trauma and victimization, and to recreate new forms of subjectivity and communal life. In this chapter I will examine patriarchal versus alternative masculinities in two of Morrison’s most impressive novels: The Bluest Eye (1970) and Love (2003).

Aging and Black Masculinity As Lynne Segal emphatically asserts, “cultures of aging … are always gendered” (79). I would readily add that they are also markedly racialized. Although the stereotypes usually associated with old men—physical decrepitude, frailty, lack of productivity, feminization, sexual impotence, and death—are also applied to black men, there are some telling differences I will try to point out in this chapter, that are inextricably connected to the way in which dominant representations of black men have historically depicted them. In general, the exploration into aging black men needs more critical attention, as both life-course studies and age studies have mainly overlooked them.1 Within black masculinity studies age has not played a relevant role in the critical discussion about black masculinity, not even about alternative black masculinity. What bell hooks calls “the contemporary plight of black men” (Looks 112) does not seem to take into consideration the importance of age as a crucial identity factor which determines black men’s identities. I would argue that the hegemonic disparaging view of black masculinity is actually reinforced in the case of aging black men, especially concerning their feminized representation connected to their lack of sexual prowess. So, it is indeed contradictory how age prejudice affects black men differently from white men, as it focuses on their bodily decay, especially on the sexual aspect, even more poignantly than in the case of white men. As they become more feminized and less prone to violence, they are subjected to further contempt and invisibility. The predicament of black men is thus utterly disregarded and silenced. Moreover, the impending physical decline leads to obvious psychological decay too, which is often neglected. As a rule, African American men project the same fears and anxieties about aging as white men, nevertheless the consequences strikingly differ in many aspects.

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Firstly, the different high suicide rates between white men and all other age-gender-race groups according to the American Association of Suicidology are quite significant. In 2012 white men’s suicide rate multiplied “almost 2.5 times the current rate for men of all ages” (cited in Martin 100). As “largely a male phenomenon” (Coleman, Kaplan and Casey cited in Martin 100), suicide is linked connected to the adherence to hegemonic masculinity in Sara Martin’s words: “the demands that the social construction of masculinity imposes on men and male suicide are not sufficiently understood” (99). Martin lays bare the suffocating role of dominant discourses about masculinity that may justify men’s suicide rates, especially in old age. The failure to adequately respond to the traditional requirements of masculinity such as keeping control over their lives and others’ lives upholds this affirmation.2 Martin rightly observes that “the closer a man is to hegemonic masculinity, the higher his fear is of being disempowered by unmanning, infantilizing dependence” (200). It may be inferred that the position of African American men on the margins of hegemonic masculinity is then a protective factor for a better, more serene transition into old age. I would contend, though, that this is much more complex than it may initially seem, as will be seen in the analysis of the novels. Secondly, hegemonic masculinity is basically relational as it is “defined in relation to the subordination of women and to other subordinated and marginalized masculinities” (Collins “Difference” 78). This evidences that “masculinity is not a fixed quality, it is a dynamic one” (Lewis 48). However, it has been proved how men across racial, class, and ethnic lines often partake of this gender ideology to different degrees. One of the classic examples is the way in which African American men construct notions of their manhood around definitions of heteronormativity and dominant social norms dictated by hegemonic masculinity, which results in what Patricia Collins calls a “hierarchy of masculinities” (“Difference” 81), with the subsequent subordination of black men to the dominant patriarchy (Blauner cited in Lemelle 2). Furthermore, black masculinity is shaped in opposition to women, homosexual, and poor men. Accordingly, “real” or black men are identified by their physical and sexual dominance and aggressiveness which perpetuates the myth of the “black macho” severely contested by many black female and male critics.3 Originating in the figure of the brute or the Buck dating back to slavery times, the myth of the “black macho” is basically reduced to the bodily needs, thus animalized and sexualized to the extreme. As Ronald

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Jackson explains, the buck “essentially, refused to even attempt to control his insatiable sexual desires and urges” (41), and therefore it coalesced with the figure of the black rapist whose primary target was allegedly white women. Historically the lurking insinuation of the potential threat of miscegenation represented by the buck was instrumentalized in order to justify the horrendous lynchings to which African American men were subjected.4 Regrettably, the image of the buck has remained intact to the present day with different variations such as the gangsta5 : It has invaded public life so much that it has become ingrained in the social consciousness, psychologically imprinted as a vivid picture of the typical Black man in the United States. (Blount and Cunningham cited in Jackson 44)

In addition to this denigratory stereotypical designation, the construction of black masculinity is the result of the combination of what Anthony Lemelle calls “social feminization” (2), which derives from “two gender/power strategies”: “On the one hand, black males were expected to perform the hypermasculine role; on the other hand, they were feminized vis-à-vis white males” (15). Thus, the precarious situation of black men facilitates the continuation of stereotyped ramifications of the “real” man or “macho,” mainly relying on their aggressive attitude and uncontrollable sexual urges, whereas within the dominant patriarchy they are still defined as marginalized, inferior, and feminized, and therefore, not really men. Nevertheless, challenging the prevalence of physical and sexual dominance and violence may also ground an alternative vision of aging black men. Indeed, “alternative” or “progressive” black masculinities have tried to counteract the dominant definition of African American men. Looking for other principles to base the notion of heterogeneous black masculinities on such as care, commitment to partners, families and communities, and meaningful relationships to other black men, these alternative formulations have explored fatherhood, equal gender relations, or communal healing for more than two decades now.6 In order to deconstruct the damaging effects of hegemonic masculinity and leave room for alternative masculinities to emerge, in black masculinity studies several critics have actively engaged in proposing these new forms and models as alternative to the canonical notion of patriarchal manhood. Tracing more egalitarian

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and positive models of manhood for black men in Morrison leads to unexpected or unprecedented characters who create new forms of subjectivity and value communal life and healing.

Cholly vs. Blue Jack: Belonging, Hierarchy of Masculinities, and Trauma in The Bluest Eye In her very first novel Morrison explores the meaning of love, family and horror through the figure of Pecola, an eight-year-old girl who searches for a loving father figure and finds a terrible abuser instead. I have discussed elsewhere how Cholly Breedlove, Pecola’s father, is “one of the most dysfunctional characters in Toni Morrison’s oeuvre” (“Masculinities” 92), a deeply traumatized man due to his parents’ abandonment as a child and his early encounters with racist biggots who treated him like an animal, an abject figure. Philip Weinstein asserts that Morrison “narrates the wounds Cholly has incurred: his orphaning, his emotional undoing, his soiling himself … and weeping, and finally—in a futile and terrifying act of male assertion—his raping his daughter Pecola” (8). Indeed, he is one of Morrison’s haunted characters, unable to articulate the deep traumas that affect him and to relate to his wife Pauline or, by extension, to any woman on an equal basis. He is undoubtedly a failed husband, a failed father, a ruined man. His physical and psychological decay are evidently substantiated as he becomes a mature man. It is important to assess Cholly’s evolution from youth into maturity as a chronicle of a decline, a descent into hell as it were, that also prefigures the dreadful future events. His wife Pauline narrates how kind and lively Cholly was when they first met and decided to get married and migrate to the North: “Young, loving and full of energy, they came to Lorrain, Ohio” (The Bluest Eye 92). However, over time, he changed under the pressure of Northern work and stressful family life: “Cholly was kindness still, but began to resist her total dependence on him. They were beginning to have less and less to say to each other” (93). Gradually, she felt lonelier and decided to start working, and their marriage deteriorates: “Cholly commenced to getting meaner and meaner and wanted to fight me all of the time” (94). In addition to the lack of money, Cholly became a drunkard and Pauline the breadwinner in the family. Traditional gender roles shifted and Cholly’s downfall was by then fully materialized. However, I also argued before that there are some good references in Cholly’s childhood, especially interesting for the purposes of this analysis

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is the figure of a “nice old man” (106) named Blue Jack that Cholly used to work with as a boy. Blue is actually the only male positive influence Cholly has in life, clearly acting as an ancestor who is able to connect him back to African American history and the community7 : “Blue used to tell him old-timey stories about how it was when the Emancipation Proclamation came. How the black people hollered, cried, and sang” (106). According to Morrison, the ancestors “are not just parents, they are sort of timeless people whose relationships to the characters are benevolent, instructive, and protective, and they provide a certain kind of wisdom” (2008: 62). In this novel Blue personifies the figure of the wise elder, a substitute (grand)father replacing Cholly’s runaway biological father, who creates meaningful links with Cholly and shows him what love is really about. In a very inspiring scene Blue and Cholly shared “the heart of the watermelon” (107), which symbolizes their loving relationship but also the possibilities of a rewarding life together in the midst of the black community. Blue represents then an alternative masculinity that cherishes communal harmony and new ways for black men to interact with each other, but also with the rest of the community. Things begin to strikingly change for Cholly, nonetheless, when he has to face the consequences of a racist attack afterwards and cannot confess his anxieties to Blue because he is drunk. Hence, the brief sense of belonging and connection to a father figure is rendered insufficient in the face of the racial brutality Cholly is subjected to. At fourteen he undergoes a very traumatic experience: the first time Cholly has sexual intercourse with a girl, Darlene, turned into “sadistic white spectacle” (Weinstein 8) as they were forced by two white men to continue while calling him racist slurs such as “nigger” and “coon.” What is extremely disturbing about this scene is Cholly’s reaction of burning hate against Darlene, the other victim: “he cultivated his hatred of Darlene. Never did he once consider directing his hatred toward the hunters. Such an emotion would have destroyed him. They were big, white armed men. He was small, black, helpless” (119). In this quote some of the harming stereotypical images about black men are actually recalled, as Cholly feels utterly helpless to help himself or protect Darlene. The white supremacists are too powerful opponents and the youngster Cholly is unable to face or attack them demonstrating the “hierarchy of masculinities” Collins points out. He feels disempowered and, consequently, his masculinity is further compromised. This reveals that Cholly’s

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sense of manhood is grounded in his adherence to hegemonic masculinity, which is both racist and sexist. Moreover, Cholly’s decision to turn against the most powerless character, a black woman, is also used as a measure of his failure to perform as a “real” man because she is a witness to his impotence. Once again sexual prowess is intimately tied to the shaping of black masculinity. This terrible incident marks him for life and the scars of his trauma are more visible as he matures, and it will eventually lead him to “alcohol, gender violence and madness” (Gallego “Negotiating” 92). In a scene which foresees what is later going to happen to his daughter Pecola, the little girl ponders on the significance of love: What did love feel like? She wondered. How do grown-ups act when they love each other? … Into her eyes came the picture of Cholly and Mrs. Breedlove in bed. He making sounds as though he were in pain … Terrible as his noises were, they were not nearly as bad as the no noise at all from her mother … Maybe that was love. Choking sounds and silence. (48–49)

In this premonitory scene of Pecola’s rape by her father, Cholly’s sexual behavior also expresses his failure to go beyond trauma and victimization. His “pain” is thus connected not only to his incapability to cultivate a positive image of sex, even within marriage, but also to his lack of empathy with his wife, as he cannot forge healthy interdependent relationships with her or any other woman on equal grounds in his life. As the novel progresses, his notion of deteriorated manhood as a mature man nourishes his need to impose his will at any cost, without accepting the consequences of his horrid actions. In the climatic moment of his daughter’s rape, guilt, resentment, and hatred guide his actions in a clear transference from both Darlene and his own wife (127–128), actually “related through the eyes of the abuser” as Ágnes Surányi notes (15). As a result, the whole family falls into pieces, even more disintegrated and traumatized by the end of the book, and unable to cope with a glaringly absent husband and an abusive father, ultimately the figure of utmost abjection. The novel thus points at the high price black men have to pay to try to follow hegemonic indoctrination that compels them to continue the cycles of violence and self-destruction. As a whole, Cholly’s physical and mental degradation as he ages shows that he is not a role model to follow. Instead of learning from his past experiences and becoming an empathic figure, his frustrations and fears

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guide him to lack of self-esteem and madness. He falls prey to the traumas that haunt him and cannot find another father figure like Blue Jack who could steer him back to the community, helping him to restore his mental health. His aging process is hindered by his inability to forge those links that may have saved him, so he ends up alone and dies away from his family. No redemption or healing is possible in his case.

Dark Vs. Sandler: Parenting, Interdependence, and Healing in Love In this section I would like to pay attention to other two characters who stand for the opposition between patriarchal and alternative models of black masculinity. Specifically I consider the role of parenting sons as extremely significant for young men’s construction of manhood. I contend that, while an endorsement of traditional masculinity on the part of fathers has harmful effects on their (grand)sons’ process of building their identities, departing from the conventional model of the father opens new venues for alternative portrayals to surface. In so doing, Morrison attempts to disentangle violence and dominance as the defining traits of black men, both old and young. Thus, I would center on two fathers: Cosey’s father appropriately named Dark and Sandler Gibbons, Cosey’s confidant and Romen’s grandfather. Dark can be considered as the specular character of Sandler, but also of Blue Jack in the previous novel. The most striking fact about Daniel Robert Cosey or DRC (the initials Dark derives from) is that he is a court informer: Contrary to the tale put in the street, the father he (Bill Cosey) bragged about earned his way as a Court-house informer. The one police could count on to know … all sorts of things Dixie law was interested in … (he) kept his evil gray eye on everybody. (2003: 67–68)

Basically, he is a traitor to his race at the service of white supremacy, getting extremely wealthy by betraying his own community “as the eyes and ears of white power” in Mary Cander’s words (160). Dark cannot be read as an ideal or nurturing father, and even less a loving husband, since he “withheld decent shoes from his son and passable dresses from his wife and daughters, until he died leaving 114,000 resentful dollars behind” (68). His profound disregard for his family’s needs exposes his

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failure to establish emotional links with them, as he is only attentive to his lucrative purposes which involve many illegal activities. This utter disregard is intimately tied to his refusal to question the racist and sexist status quo. Quite the contrary, he uses it to his advantage, so he is complicit with a system that oppresses his own family and, by extension, the rest of the black community. However, he seems to believe that he fulfills the standards of a “successful” man according to heteronormative white patriarchy. But in the end he is another victim of that cruel system, since he is actually known as “Danny Boy” (68) by those whites he panders to. This nickname clearly signals him not as “real” (read white) man, but as a “boy” obeying white men’s orders despite his wealth. Analyzing the impact of the “father-dominant model of home and family” (Carden 151), Morrison also interrogates discourses of sexism and gender discrimination in the novel. The fact that Dark is not capable of feeling love and trust for his wife is another unmistakable sign of his estrangement from her. Dark’s incapability of standing on equal grounds with his wife emphasizes his adherence to the sexist view of women as minors and dependent on their husbands. At this point it is important to acknowledge that for Morrison both masculinity and femininity are interdependent notions. As Stacy Kaye surmises, to understand Morrison’s view of masculinity, it is necessary to understand her view of femininity. She cites Susan Mayberry who states that black women have been the scapegoat for the suppressed frustration and rage of black men (7). In this way, Morrison declares that endorsing white patriarchy constitutes a real danger for both black men and their female partners. Dark seems to need to assert his masculinity even at the expense of his own wife and of his own family too. Reflecting the hegemonic idealized pattern of aggressiveness of the “real” macho is clearly one of the objectives of the depiction of Dark, a sinister and untrustworthy man, who may be even seen as the representative of the “Devil.” The evil nature of Dark is another indication of his failure as a father and a husband, recalling Cholly’s wrongdoings. However, Dark goes a step further, as he openly defines himself as a mischievous and inherently bad man who finds joy in betraying his family and community. Hence, he represents what Susana Morris calls “repressive black masculinities and oppressive patriarchal leadership” (320), whose legacy disturbs his son’s growth.

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Like father, like son. Bill Cosey is also a successful businessman, besides being respected as a leader of the black community, a powerful “benefactor” despite his own dealings with white men.8 Following in his father’s footsteps, he is also seen as a womanizer and a perverse man who makes his whole family suffer tremendously by marrying his granddaughter’s eleven-year-old best friend. As James Mellard argues: “If Dark is an original positing, then Bill Cosey, as a negation of it, becomes dialectically defined by him … His success if made possible precisely because of—and because he is not —his father” (243; author’s emphasis). In the novel he is also a failed husband, father, and grandfather, indeed a sexual predator, unable to live up to the expectations of his own community. Sandler Gibbons mirrors Dark as a more positive type of masculinity, a nurturing husband, father, and grandfather to Romen. In Morrison’s presentation of a range of masculinities, I have argued that he would represent an alternative model.9 Indeed, Anthony Neal states that Sandler and Romen are new black men, veritable illustrations of “a progressive and meaningful black masculinity” (29). Sandler does not elude his responsibilities, quite the opposite he is often located in a domestic setting taking care of his family. Moreover, he believes in a more egalitarian outlook that denies the use and abuse of women on the part of men: A woman is an important somebody and sometimes you win the triple crown: good food, good sex, and good talk … A good man is a good thing, but there is nothing in the world better than a good good woman. She can be your mother, your wife, your girlfriend, your sister, or somebody you work next to … You find one, stay there. (154–155)

In this quote Sandler unabashedly advocates for the need of interdependent relationships between men and women. Besides, Sandler can also be identified as an ancestor, who passes on his knowledge and his ethical behavior to his grandson. Being very critical of Cosey’s immoral acts of sexual abuse and pedophilia, he looks for ways to prevent Romen from becoming a sexual predator. In fact, when Romen is involved in a gang rape, he is the one who saves the girl, thus negating the destructive link between black masculinity and gender violence. Like Sandler in his marriage, Romen searches for a meaningful connection with Junior, his affair, even despite Junior’s early mistrust. In addition, Sandler also voices his concerns about Cosey’s discriminatory practices against the local black community, who were not allowed

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access to Cosey’s resort as clients. It may also be added that Cosey also refused to sell land to local blacks, so Sandler clearly “sees the limits of Cosey’s commitment to helping other blacks” (Fultz 100).10 Sandler is able to perceive Cosey’s continuation of certain practices initiated by his father that he finds very pernicious for the well-being of the community. In this sense, he is one of the few characters who questions the legitimacy of Cosey’s actions, while many members of the community seem to grant him impunity for those actions. It is also important to highlight Sandler’s defence of communal harmony and cohesion, while Dark and Cosey attempt to disrupt them, albeit in different ways and for different reasons. Unlike Cholly, Sandler is a retired old man who does not feel any anxiety about aging and old age. He seems to actually enjoy his life even though he misses his old neighborhood, precisely because he appreciated a warmer relationship to the neighbors. Sandler is thus presented almost as the guardian of the community, always on the alert to instruct his grandson and other young black men on how to become a different kind of black man whose conceptualization of manhood is not subjected to patriarchal castrating paradigms. In her pervading critique of hegemonic masculinity, Morrison is intent on debunking notions such as violence and dominance that may be extremely detrimental for the physical and psychological development of black men. By subverting hegemonic representations of black masculinity and exploring alternative and interdependent gender and communal relations, she propounds healthier, more holistic and inclusive ways of inhabiting black manhood, and particularly aging black manhood. Examining these alternative configurations of black masculinity allows room for nurturing (grand)fatherhood, more equal relationships and communal healing represented by the figure of Sandler. Morrison thus portrays a truly alternative manhood that questions traditional harming patterns upheld by white patriarchy and internalized by some black men like Cholly, Dark, and Cosey, and involves an acceptance of the “multiple bodies” that men inhabit throughout their lives according to Victor Seidler (Carabí and Armengol 230). Acknowledgements The author wishes to acknowledge the funding provided by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (Research Project “Bodies in Transit 2,” ref. FFI2017-84555-C2-1-P), the European Regional Development Fund, and the Spanish Research Agency for the writing of this

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essay. And also the funding by the Regional Ministry of Economy, Knowledge, Enterprise and Universities of Andalusia, and the European Regional Development Fund for the project “Embodiments, Genders and Difference: Cultural Practices of Violence and Discrimination,” ref. 1252965.

Notes 1. In a similar vein, this is also the case with black boys and youths as I discussed in “Negotiating Childhood and Boyhood Boundaries: Richard Linklater’s Boyhood and Toni Morrison’s Black Boys” (2017). 2. In his insightful analysis of Paradise, Andrew Read tackles some of the main characteristics of American masculinity drawn from Europeanimported gender ideology: “autonomy, agency, and power, control over one’s self, family and environment” (529). 3. The pioneering voice was Michele Wallace’s in Black Macho and The Myth of the Superwoman published in 1970, where she openly denounced sexism within black communities. Although biased because of her monolithic representation of black men, it was the first public discussion of this topic and opened the path for many others to follow. 4. There are different estimations of the number of lynchings that have taken place in the history of the United States. Pinar informs that almost 4.900 lynchings occurred between 1882 and 1927 (cited in Jackson 17). The hideous spectacle of lynchings was actually very popular, and to this day this horrendous practice is known as “strange fruit” like the homonymous poem. 5. In We Real Cool, bell hooks traces the connection between patriarchal manhood and gangsta culture, especially in Chapter 2 on “Gangsta Culture: A Piece of the Action” (15–32). 6. See leading female critics’ groundbreaking works such as Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Sexual Politics or Athena Mutua’s Progressive Black Masculinities (2006), to name a few. 7. Morrison’s investment in the crucial role of ancestors is present in most of her novels, but also in her well-known essay “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation” (1984). 8. Chapter 4 is entitled “Benefactor” in the book. 9. In “Progressive Masculinities: Envisioning Alternative Models for Black Manhood in Toni Morrison’s Novels” (2014). 10. Although Fultz also mentions the fact that, though the character of L, readers are aware that Cosey discreetly helped members in the black community by paying funerals and college tuitions, and helping them to get out of jail (100). But Sandler does not know about all this, consequently his judgment is valid.

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Works Cited Carabí, Ángels and Josep Armengol, eds. Alternative Masculinities for a Changing World. New York: Palgrave, 2014. Carden, Mary Paniccia. “‘Trying to Find a Place When the Streets Don’t Go There’: Fatherhood, Family and American Racial Politics in Toni Morrison’s Love.” The Novels of Toni Morrison. Critical Perspectives. Ed. Kusha Tiwari. New Delhi: Pencraft International, 2018. 151–180. Collins, Patricia Hill. “A Telling Difference: Dominance, Strength and Black Masculinities.” Mutua, 2006. 73–98. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Sexual Politics. New York: Routledge, 2005. Fultz, Lucille. “An Elegy for the African American Community, or the Unintended Consequences of Desegregation/Integration.” Toni Morrison. Memory and Meaning. Ed. Adrienne Seward and Justine Tally. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2014. 93–104. Gallego, Mar. “Negotiating Childhood and Boyhood Boundaries: Richard Linklater’s Boyhood and Toni Morrison’s Black Boys” (2017). Masculinities and Literary Studies. Intersections and New Directions. Ed. Josep Armengol et al. New York: Routledge, 2017. 89–97. Gallego, Mar. “Progressive Masculinities: Envisioning Alternative Models for Black Manhood in Toni Morrison’s Novels.” Alternative Masculinities for a Changing World. Ed. Ángels Carabí and Josep Armengol. New York: Palgrave, 2014. 162–173. hooks, bell. Black Looks. Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992. hooks, bell. We Real Cool. Black Men and Masculinity. New York: Routledge, 2004. Jackson, Ronald. Scripting the Black Masculine Body. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. Kaye, Stacey. “‘What It Is to Be a Man’: Beyond Stereotypes of African American Masculine Identities in Selected Works by Toni Morrison.” PhD Dissertation, 2012. Lemelle, Anthony. Black Masculinity and Sexual Politics. New York: Routledge, 2010. Lewis, Linden. “Constructing Black Masculinity Through the Fiction of Gloria Naylor.” Color, Race and Bone: Race in the Twenty-First Century. Ed. Linden Lewis and Glyne Griffith. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2010. 46–68. Martin, Sara. “Fighting the Monsters Inside: Masculinity, Agency, and the Aging Gay Man in Christopher Brahm’s Father of Frankestein.” Masculinities and Literary Studies. Intersections and New Directions. Ed. Armengol et al. New York: Routledge, 2017. 98–106.

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Mellard, James. “Unimaginable Acts Imagined: Fathers, Family Myth, and the Post-modern Crisis of Paternal Authority in Toni Morrison’s Love.” Mississippi Quarterly 63 (2010): 1–2: 233–267. Morris, Susana. “A Past Not Pure, But Stifled: Vexed Legacies of Leadership in Toni Morrison’s Love.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 112.2 (Spring) (2013): 319–338. Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Washington Square Press, 1970. Morrison, Toni. Love. London: Chatto & Windus, 2003. Morrison, Toni. “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation.” What Moves at the Margin. Ed. Carolyn Denard. 1984. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2008. 56–64. Morrison, Toni. “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation”. Mutua, Athena, ed. Progressive Black Masculinities. New York: Routledge, 2006. Neal, Anthony. New Black Man. New York: Routledge, 2005. Read, Andrew. “‘As if Word Magic Had Anything to Do with the Courage It Took to Be a Man’: Black Masculinity in Toni Morrison’s Paradise.” African American Review 39.4 (2005): 527–540. Segal, Lynne. “‘Men Who Cry in their Sleep’: Aging Male Hysteria in Martin Amis’s London Stories.” Masculinities and Literary Studies. Intersections and New Directions. Ed. Armengol et al. New York: Routledge, 2017. 79–88. Surányi, Ágnes. “The Bluest Eye and Sula: Black Female Experience from Childhood to Womanhood.” The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison. Ed. Justine Tally. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 11–25. Wallace, Michele. Black Macho and The Myth of the Superwoman. New York: Dial Press, 1970. Weinstein, Philip. “‘Dangerously Free’: Morrison’s Unspeakable Territory.” Toni Morrison. Memory and Meaning. Ed. Adrienne Seward and Justine Tally. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2014. 7–18.

Aging Men in Contemporary Arab American Literature Written by Women Marta Bosch-Vilarrubias

September 11 put Arab Americans on the map. After being historically invisibilized in the United States due to their official status as white, the 2001 attacks propagated stereotypical images of Arabs, typecasting Arab, Middle Eastern, and Muslim men as threatening Others.1 This sudden hypervisibilization popularized Arab American Studies, a branch of ethnic studies which had started to develop in the late twentieth century.2 Since then, extensive scholarly work has been conducted on Arab American literature and Arab American feminism,3 helping in the publication of novels by Arab American women writers, who have conveyed particularly interesting views on the contradictory representations of manhood from a feminist perspective.4 The present chapter will draw on these fields of study and delve into a virtually non-existent part of Arab American studies: aging and its representation in literature. The focus will be on Arab American men in order to examine how Arab American women writers have been writing about their aging. While mirroring the diversity in the Arab American community, contemporary Arab American women writers have been portraying a

M. Bosch-Vilarrubias (B) University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. M. Armengol (ed.), Aging Masculinities in Contemporary U.S. Fiction, Global Masculinities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71596-0_10

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variety of enactments of masculinity in old age. The present chapter will consider these representations and compare them to the existing gerontological studies on the aging of Arab Americans. For the purpose of this article, five novels from the late twentieth century to the early twentyfirst century will be examined: Diana Abu Jaber’s Arabian Jazz (1993) and Crescent (2004), Naomi Shihab Nye’s Going Going (2005), Randa Jarrar’s A Map of Home (2008), and Alia Yunis’s The Night Counter (2009). Their portrayals of men in old age deviate from traditional depictions of patriarchy while still providing nuanced representations of manhood, usually tinged with nostalgia. In fact, Arab American elderly men may occupy a liminal position which could allow them to open up to alternative identity modes, in some instances more caring and nurturing than traditional perceptions of Arab manhood. As Catherine B. Silver explains, “The loss of socioeconomic power and social status of older/retired individuals, especially men, has created a social arena where patriarchal rules and gender-based expectations have been weakened, creating conditions for altered identities” (381). Taking this notion as a starting point, the present study of fiction will add to the gerontological study of aging men and inquire into the possibility of alternative masculine identities in old age.

Gerontological Studies on Arab American Communities Arab Americans form a very diverse community, with different religions, countries of origin, and reasons for immigration.5 However, there are cultural commonalities among them, and particularly relevant for the present chapter is the traditional Arab conception of family. Family in the Arab world (and for its diaspora) has traditionally been perceived as extended and patriarchal, in a way that would allow for the support of the elderly.6 Nonetheless, despite the importance given to family relations for Arabs both in the Arab world and transnationally, the topic of aging in Arab American communities has been remarkably understudied. Kristine J. Ajrouch and Sawsan Abdulrahim acknowledge this lack of literature, and draw on the more abundant studies on other immigrant groups to the United States (namely, Hispanic and Asian) to emphasize the importance of taking a life course perspective to explain and be faithful to the diversity of Arab American immigrants. For example, they conclude that there may

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be differences between those aging Arab Americans born in or outside of the United States, with better health status (physical and psychological) of those born in America.7 National origin is also considered a differential factor, as reasons for immigration may change one’s life experience (for example, war, political instability or upward mobility), as well as command of the English language and education, resulting in lower acculturative stress and depression for those with higher education and command of the language.8 Kristine J. Arjouch has also examined the relationship between children’s support of the elders and their health, concluding that those better cared for reported better health (“Isolation” 47). In other words, family still has a preeminent space in Arab American socialization networks in old age, although this “ideal situation … may not represent lived experience” (Abdulrahim and Ajrouch 115). That is, even though family care is optimal, it does not always correspond to reality. The diversity of life experiences given by place of birth, reasons for immigration or proficiency in English will be taken into consideration when examining the representation of aging in contemporary Arab American literature written by women. Furthermore, this life course perspective will be complemented with the theory of the convoy model of social relationships, which establishes three circles of socialization: the inner circle (the closest, usually comprising the nuclear family), the middle circle (usually made up of close friends), and the outer circle (for example, acquaintances or coworkers).9 The social engagement of the individual in each of these circles has been said to aid in achieving successful aging. Thus, examining such circles in the representation of aging men will provide valuable information when contrasted with their mental and physical health in old age. Taking into account all of the above, the present chapter attempts to shed light to the depiction of aging in contemporary Arab American literature and examine the masculine roles taken on by elderly and aging men as well as the relationalities established in their family ties, especially in the relationships established between them and their daughters and granddaughters.10

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Arabian Jazz and Crescent: Non-Constrictive Aging Father Figures in the Fiction of Diana Abu-Jaber Arabian Jazz (1993) is a novel, by Jordanian American author Diana Abu-Jaber, which focuses on the Ramoud family. The patriarch of the family is Matussem, whose favorite activity is playing what he calls “Arabian jazz”—music which encapsulates the way he conciliates his immigrant identity. He was born in Jordan as the youngest of seven female siblings, and migrated to the United States in 1959 because of his falling in love with an Irish American woman called Nora. On a visit to Jordan a few years later, Nora died, leaving Matussem with their two daughters, Jemorah and Melvina, with whom he formed a single-parent family in the town of Euclid in upstate New York. Having to live without the traditional extended family that he used to know implied a disruption in his convoy of social relations, reducing his inner circle to his two daughters. However, he embraced his role in his transnational inner circle. As Abu-Jaber puts it, America was the place where his world began, away from the webs of family. In the new, wild western country, family flew into particles […] It was dangerous to create a new kind of family, to be so vulnerable to the elements. This was the kind of living he had come to want for himself, the choice to live together, to love. (264)

Therefore, although his migration resulted from a conscious choice to follow love, the loss of his extended family resulted in a feeling of vulnerability on his part. Because of that, and his immigrant status, Matussem longs for his homeland (as it is expressed in the novel, “his displacement [is] a feature of his personality” [98]), and conciliates his homesickness through music. He plays “Arabian jazz” and, through his (hybrid) drumming, he is able to make sense of his dislocated life. Matussem is an aging man who works in a hospital maintenance office. His family, with his two daughters in their 20s and 30s, is what he considers the most important part of his identity. He takes his fatherhood very seriously, introducing himself in a show as, “Père, Abu, Fader, Señor, Senior. Call me Pappy, Pappa, Padre, Paw, Sir! … Call me Big Daddy! I’ve got a car and two daughters, I’m free! Is my life’s work, is the work of the world, is nice work if you can get. My greatest work, a father!”

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(148–149). While he establishes himself as a patriarch, his enactment of fatherhood is based on freedom, for himself and for his daughters, who he does not constrain. He is not repressive at all, and his daughters believe that part of his non-traditional enactment of masculinity comes from his uprooted life, as maybe his nostalgia has subverted his view of patriarchy. In this respect, his daughter Jemorah thinks that her father’s masculine identity would have been different, had he not emigrated, [h]e wouldn’t have been the same father, she knew, if he had stayed in Jordan and raised them there. His removal was part of that soft grieving light behind his eyes and part of the recklessness in his laugh. His eyes were so steady at times Jem thought they were taking in the whole of the world and all its expanse of loneliness. (98)

Despite the fact that he has a good relationship with his daughters, he nonetheless lives a life tinted by the loneliness of the immigrant. In fact, his non-traditional enactment of masculinity is also influenced by what he saw happened to his sisters back in Jordan. He is aware of the sexism of the Arab world, as he remembers his sisters’ sufferings. As Salwa Essayah Chérif explains, Matussem’s memories of Jordan consist in having been spared his sisters’ hardships. As the only son in an Arab family of daughters, Matussem “knew, watching and overhearing his sisters at night, that it was a bitter thing to be a woman” (187). He remembers being fondled in his mother’s arms, when he has outgrown her lap, while her voice poured insults at his sisters around them. His memory of home consists of “so many lonely sisters” and of “social restrictions that kept them home.” (212–213) (233)

Having learnt about the difficulties of being an Arab woman in the Jordan of his youth, Matussem is aging in a dislocated space away from the restrictions of his own country and family, and it may have been that fact which allowed for this non-constrictive alternative masculinity to flourish. While giving preeminence to his figure as a (single) father, he nonetheless enacts a patriarchal manhood that is open, fluid, and that makes him be caring to his daughters, regardless of their gender. Matussem gives a lot of freedom to them, only worrying about their well-being, but not constricting them. In other words, his in-betweenness has allowed him to question assumptions of domination of women that circulated in his old world.

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Therefore, taking a life course perspective, this first-generation immigrant experienced a series of life events and choices that aided in the construction of his alternative masculinity; from the sexism that he saw in his sisters’ experience, his falling in love and marrying someone of a different culture, to his becoming a widower and thus a single father. As a consequence, he constructed a masculinity based on fatherhood (that is, giving preeminence to his inner circle of social relations), but also expanding it in his drumming of “Arabian jazz”, and thus constructing a sense of fatherhood which exists, just like his music, in a liminal space that allows for equality and freedom. As the novel finishes, Matussem is not yet retired, is in good health, and it looks like his ambivalent identity and understanding of fatherhood will help him to age successfully. A similar character appears in another one of Diana Abu-Jaber’s novels, Crescent (2003), the plot of which focuses on Sirine, a 39-year-old second-generation Iraqi American chef and her love story with a recently arrived Iraqi UCLA professor called Han. Although Sirine’s parents are no longer alive, she is accompanied in the novel by a father figure, her uncle, who she lives with. He is a professor in the Near Eastern Studies department at UCLA, and is presented as a storyteller in the novel. He becomes its guiding thread as he tells Sirine “the moralless story of Abdelrahman Salahadin” (5). As Sirine’s uncle puts it, “It’s the story of how to love” (5), which punctuates and helps Sirine out in her love story with Han.11 Her uncle’s paternal love for her (just as Matussem’s in Arabian Jazz) is one which allows a lot of freedom to his niece. Sirine’s love story with Han is tinged with nostalgia and trauma, but her relationship with her uncle remains positive throughout the novel. While Han is (negatively) influenced by the trauma of exile, which will ultimately make him leave the United States, Sirine’s uncle, on the contrary, has found a balance in the United States through his storytelling and his job, which have helped him create a link between his homeland and America. The reader only learns about Sirine’s uncle through her perspective and, as a consequence, we do not learn much about him (and cannot take a life course perspective on the character), but we do know he is an accompanying figure who, through metaphor (his storytelling), does not try to exert his power over Sirine but just help her out. Georgette Jabbour, in her review of Arabian Jazz and Crescent, contends that, “In both novels, Abu Jaber has chosen to picture daughters whose mothers are American and yet ‘unavailable’, and in both novels,

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the role of the father, or uncle, is limited to that of a supporter, a noninterfering figure” (223). In other words, these two “non-interfering” father figures (Matussem in Arabian Jazz and Sirine’s uncle in Crescent ) present modes of aging masculinities that deviate from traditional conceptions of patriarchy. Both, by finding ways to reconcile their uprootedness and dislocation (that is, their condition of immigrants), ultimately allow freedom to their inner circle of social relations, and provide alternative manhoods that point to a successful entering into old age, accompanied by family.

Going Going and a Map of Home: Alternative Manhoods in Transnational Grandfathers Naomi Shihab Nye’s young adult novel Going Going (2005), focuses on a sixteen-year-old girl of Arab and Mexican descent called Florrie, who is against the gentrification of her San Antonio (Texas) neighborhood, something which she learned about from her beloved Lebanese American late grandfather. The walks they would take together and the stories he would tell her informed the girl who, after her grandfather’s death when she was 11, decided to take on a crusade of her own. Before his death, Florrie’s grandfather Hani had aged successfully, happy with the life he created in San Antonio, where he started a Mexican restaurant with his Mexican wife. Florrie’s mother talks about her father’s transplanted home as, “the city [that] had welcomed him so warmly” (22). In fact, his experience of immigrant life (he moved from Lebanon to Texas as a teenager in 1933), and his chosen transnationality (in terms of his settling in the United States forever, also through his choice of wife and job), aided him in achieving happiness with a very close inner circle. He also established sound middle and outer circles and became very well respected in the community, making his death hard for them as “he was such a popular person” (167). Florrie, in a research paper she writes for school about her late grandfather, calls him “a self-made success” (168), and it looks like this was such throughout all his life, including in old age. For his family, and particularly for Florrie and her brother, their grandfather was a very beloved figure. They praised his patience and his attention towards them (Nye 163), as well as his positivity regarding his position in life. As Florrie expresses in her paper, “I remember his attitude, which retained great optimism even when Lebanon had its Civil War” (168). This infectious confidence in positive outcomes in life helped

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him age successfully, and even after he passed away, he left a huge imprint on Florrie, making her live up to his memory in her fight against the gentrification of San Antonio. Florrie’s grandfather Hani, although only through her memories, is presented as a man who achieved successful aging because of his positive attitude and his strong (inner, middle and outer) circles of socialization. Florrie’s memories of him place him as a positive presence for his family, as well as a transnational model of alternative manhood. The figure of the grandfather in Randa Jarrar’s debut novel A Map of Home (2008) provides similar feelings of positivity in his granddaughter. The novel traces, from the point of view of a teenage Arab (American) girl named Nidali, the life of a family from Boston through different Arab countries until they settle in Texas. It is a coming of age story, marked by the difficult relationship the protagonist has with her violent father.12 For the purposes of this chapter, the focus will be on the figure of Nidali’s maternal grandfather. He is Egyptian, and he married a Greek woman who died at fifty-six. Nidali was born in Boston, but after her grandmother’s death and the funeral in Egypt, she and her parents move to Kuwait. Later, they also live in Jordan, but then move to Egypt, where Nidali reencounters her grandfather, Geddo (“grandpa” in Arabic), and starts to take care of him. A friend of his contacts his family after he falls on the street, so they can “keep an eye on him” (Jarrar 179), and Nidali volunteers. Despite her father’s reservations, he eventually allows her to be with him for a month. This makes Nidali happy, as it allows her to live in a freer environment than that of her own household. Nidali’s grandfather is not Arab American, although he lived in the United States for part of his life and is certainly a transnational character, a fact which might have changed his view of gender relations. He is an Egyptian man who met his wife during the Second World War at a Greek orphanage where he was a soldier and she a nurse. Although he was Muslim, he married a Greek Orthodox woman in a civil ceremony, evidencing his (religious) openness. They then lived in Spain, Russia, and even the United States in the 1960s, of which he has memories of preCivil Rights segregation and racism (189). His tolerant nature is, indeed, part of what Nidali likes about him. While her father tries to police her every move, her grandfather does not and, actually, she usually finds him sleeping when she comes back home (186). Her stay with him finishes when the war in Kuwait ends, making Nidali’s father want to leave Egypt to go back there. However, the family

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end up moving to the United States, where Nidali’s father gets a job and, as a consequence, they leave the grandfather in Egypt. Nevertheless, Geddo is not left alone, as he has a good middle and outer circle of social relations to fall back on. That is, he has a good community and group of friends to socialize with. For example, the novel explains that he used to go “to the Sporting Club every morning, played cards and backgammon and talked with his old army friends, and then headed to the mosque for evening prayers” (181). Thus, the story points to successful aging for Geddo as, even if his inner family circle is not with him anymore, he has a strong circle of social relations to take care of him. Both Going Going and A Map of Home emphasize the importance of a solid convoy of social relations for aging transnational men, thus confirming Abdulrahim and Ajrouch’s theories on successful aging. Both novels highlight the positive outcomes resulting from establishing good relationships as an immigrant, and underline the open-mindedness consequence of transnational experiences as a beneficial aspect in growing older. In both cases, the two grandfathers’ successful aging may be related to the different modes of manhood learned in their transnational lives.

The Disengagement of Arab American Men in Old Age: The Case of Ibrahim in The Night Counter Alia Yunis’s The Night Counter (2009) tells the story of the Abdullah family, originally from Lebanon. The novel is structured through the unifying thread of grandmother Fatima’s conversations with Scheherazade–the Arab queen and storyteller from One Thousand and One Nights. Fatima thinks that she will die after her one thousand and first night with Scheherazade, so she tells her about the history of her family. The novel takes the readers through all members of the family, but in this case, the focus will be on Fatima’s second husband, Ibrahim, as the grandfather of the family. Fatima’s first husband died soon after she moved to the United States with him, and so Fatima ended up marrying his friend Ibrahim, who also worked “with Mr. Ford” (83) in Detroit.13 Fatima and Ibrahim were married for sixty-five years, but their marriage was brought to a halt before 9/11, when she asked him for a divorce as she moved to Los Angeles to live with her grandson Amir, while Ibrahim stayed in Detroit. Ibrahim married Fatima out of love–as he expresses to his stepdaughter Laila, “I wouldn’t have had no nine other children with her if I did not

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want to marry her” (99). However, Fatima always believed he married her out of pity after she became a widow. His love for her is actually related to his home country, making her an anchor to his beloved Lebanon: “When your mama talked, she laughed a laugh –she brought Lebanon back to me” (99). Fatima reminded him of his origins, and their divorce implied a fracture in his link to them. As a consequence, at ninety-six years old, and after the end of his marriage, Ibrahim is a lonely man who longs for his homeland. His life in his old age has reduced his inner circle of socialization, leaving him without a wife, and with children scattered all over the United States, so that now he only “accept[s] occasional telephone calls from them that mostly consist of weather reports” (18). As a consequence, he attempts to fill this void by trying to get closer to his origins. To do so, twice a week, he takes public transportation from his house in Dearborn to the Detroit Metropolitan Airport where he waits for flights that arrive from Lebanon and Jordan so that he can “hear the sound of his childhood dinners in their hyperbolic greetings” (19). Despite his longing for further connection to his homeland and his children, his alienation from them is explained in the novel because of his parenting, portrayed as that of an emotionally absent father (129). His withdrawal is justified in the story through his fear for his children’s safety, because his sisters had been killed in Lebanon three years before he moved to America, and two of his three sons were killed by a tornado in the United States. Consequently, once he had his daughters, he curtailed their freedom as an attempt at keeping them safe (199). Ultimately, however, the overprotection towards his daughters resulted in them disengaging from him. That made him also a silent man, though still caring, as he continued to fulfill his role as a provider even after his divorce by sending money to his family, and so observing what he believed was his duty as a patriarch. The story ends with Ibrahim passing away, all by himself, on the bus coming back from the airport. The way it is expressed in the novel underlines the fact that Ibrahim’s dreams of old age had not been accomplished: “[Fatima’s] husband had been loved by so many children yet left alone on a bus at the end, a bus that took him twice a week to a place where he once imagined his children would have stayed near him, even lived next door, if not in the same house” (361). His love for Fatima is evident at the end when he leaves everything to her in his will (362), and because of this gesture, she finally becomes aware of his love for her. At that point, Scheherazade tells Fatima that “Some people are storytellers, and

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some people, like Ibrahim, are story keepers” (363), thus denoting that Ibrahim’s silences had been a result of the nostalgia that he kept inside. Following tradition, Ibrahim performed conservative acts of protection of his daughters, thus having his dream of a close inner circle of social relations curtailed. Although arriving healthy at an old age, Ibrahim’s failed marriage ultimately left him alone in his death, thus epitomizing a denunciation of the possible loss of an inner circle when trying to assert one’s authority as a patriarch. In any case, the novel presents a nuanced portrayal of old age for Arab American men, while at the same time highlighting the contradictions between one’s ideals of family and one’s “lived experience” (Abdulrahim and Ajrouch 115).

The Nuances of Transnationalism in Promoting Alternative Arab (American) Aging Masculinities Adding to the very few existent gerontological studies on Arab Americans, the present chapter has examined the representation of aging men in contemporary Arab American prose fiction written by women. Their portrayals of men in old age move away from traditional representations of patriarchy while depicting nuanced masculinities in a situation of displacement. In Arabian Jazz and Crescent, Diana Abu-Jaber portrays nonconstrictive aging father figures, whose dislocation and understanding of their condition of immigrants allows them to find a place in their inbetween identities which opens up their enactments of aging masculinity to positive relationships with their inner circle. Naomi Shihab Nye’s Going Going and Randa Jarrar’s A Map of Home provide alternative depictions of manhood in the figure of transnational grandfathers who age successfully thanks to their strong circles of socialization, and thus point to the potential benefits of learning different modes of manhood in their transnational lives. Alternatively, Alia Junis shows a contrasting outcome of transnationality in The Night Counter, where the character of Ibrahim suffers a disengagement from his inner circle of social relations in old age, while also showing his love and longing for a closer relationship to them and to his country of origin. All in all, Diana Abu-Jaber, Naomi Shihab Nye, Randa Jarrar, and Alia Yunis depict Arab (Americans) in old age through complex representations of nostalgic aging men. They show that the more they embrace

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their displacement and transnationality, the more they obliterate traditionally patriarchal enactments of masculinity in favour of alternative modes of manhood. As a consequence, these novels and their analysis may point to possible ways of aging which may advise Arab American and immigrant men on how to age successfully.

Notes 1. For a full account on the official classification of Arab Americans as white, see Bosch-Vilarrubias (21–34). 2. See Orfalea, Naff, and Mattawa and Akash. 3. Regarding Arab American literature, see: Fadda-Conrey, Gana, as well as Bosch-Vilarrubias. For more information about Arab American feminism, see Abdulhadi, Rabab, Evelyn Alsultany, and Nadine Naber. 4. These representations usually both condemn traditional enactments of patriarchy and profess love for Arab men. See Bosch-Vilarrubias for an extensive study on the topic. 5. Arab Americans come from any of the Arabic-speaking countries which, according to the UNESCO are: Algeria, Bahrain, Djibouti, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Malta, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. Palestine is listed separately, as it is not a worldwide accepted country, as can be seen in “Arab States.” In terms of beliefs, the religions professed by Arab Americans are: 42% Catholic (including Roman Catholic, Maronite, and Melkite); 23% Muslim (including Sunni, Shi’a, and Druze); 23% Orthodox (including Antiochian, Syrian, Greek, and Coptic); and 12% Protestant. Figures from “Factsheets: Arab Americans”. The Prejudice Institute. http://www.prejudiceinstitute.org/Factsheets5ArabAmericans.html. Accessed: 12 August 2012. 6. This idea is explained in Barakat (27–48). 7. See Abdulrahim & Baker, Dallo et al., and Ajrouch. 8. See Wrobel et al. 9. For more information on the convoy model of social relationships, see: Kahn and Antonucci; and Antonucci, Ajrouch and Birditt. 10. Focusing on Arab American women writers, the fictional texts will serve as a view women offer of elderly Arab (American) men, very distinct from their depiction of younger men, such as father figures. For more information about the representation of Arab American fathers, see Bosch-Vilarrubias. 11. An account of the parallelisms between the story of Abdejrahman Salahadin and Sirine and Han’s is beyond the scope of this chapter. For a further analysis on the novel, see Bosch-Vilarrubias (164–168), and

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for further information the story of Salahadin, see Taalat Abdelrazek (213–220), Gana (207–209), and De la Luz Montes (212). 12. In order to learn about the character of Nidali’s father and his relationship with her, see Bosch-Vilarrubias (150–161). 13. The Arab migration to Detroit at the beginning of the twentieth century to work at the Ford car plants has been documented by Sarah M.A. Gualtieri (48–50).

Works Cited Abdelrazek, Amal Talaat. Contemporary Arab American Women Writers: Hyphenated Identities and Border Crossings. Youngstown, Cambria Press, 2007. Abdulhadi, Rabab, Evelyn Alsultany and Nadine Naber (Eds). Arab and Arab American Feminisms. Gender, Violence and Belonging. New York, Syracuse University Press, 2011. Abdulrahim, Sawsan and Kristine J. Ajrouch. “Arab Americans and the Aging Process”. In Biopsychosocial Perspectives on Arab Americans. Culture, Development, and Health, edited by Sylvia C. Nassar-McMillan, Kristine J. Ajrouch and Julie Hakim-Larson. New York, Springer, 2014, pp. 107–125. Abdulrahim, Sawsan and Wayne Baker. “Differences in Self-Rated Health by Immigrant Status and Language Preference Among Arab Americans in the Detroit Metropolitan Area”. Social Science and Medicine, 68 (12), 2009, pp. 2097–2103. Abu-Jaber, Diana. Arabian Jazz. New York and London, W. W. Norton & Company, 1993. Abu-Jaber, Diana. Crescent. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2003. Ajrouch, Kristine J. “Resources and Well-Being Among Arab-American Elders”. Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology, 22 (2), 2007, pp. 167–182. Ajrouch, Kristine J. “Social Isolation and Loneliness Among Arab American Elders: Cultural, Social, and Personal Factors”. Research in Human Development, 5 (1), 2008, pp. 44–59. Antonucci, Toni C., Kristine J. Ajrouch and Kira S. Birditt. “The Convoy Model: Explaining Social Relations from a Multidisciplinary Perspective”. Gerontologist, 51 (1), 2014, pp. 82–92. Barakat, Halim. “Arab Families”. Women and the Family in the Middle East: New Voices of Change, edited by Elizabeth W. Femea, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1985, pp. 27–48. Bosch-Vilarrubias, Marta. Post-9/11 Representations of Arab Men by Arab American Women Writers: Affirmation and Resistance. New York, Peter Lang, 2016. Chérif, Salwa Essayah. “Arab American Literature: Gendered Memory in Abinader and Abu-Jaber”. MELUS, 28 (4), 2003, pp. 207–228.

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Dallo, Florence, Soham Al-Snih, and Ajrouch, Kristine J. “The Prevalence of Disability Among US- and Foreign-Born Arab Americans: Results from the 2000 US Census”. Gerontology, 55 (2), 2009, pp. 153–161. De la Luz Montes, Amelia Maria. “Crescent (Review)”. Prairie Schooner, 80 (1), 2006, pp. 211–213. Fadda-Conrey, Carol. Contemporary Arab-American Literature: Transnational Reconfigurations of Citizenship and Belonging. New York, New York University Press, 2014. “Factsheet 5: Arab Americans.” The Prejudice Institute, 12 August 2012, http:// www.prejudiceinstitute.org/Factsheets5-ArabAmericans.html. Gana, Nouri (Ed). The Edinburgh Companion to the Arab Novel in English. The Politics of Anglo Arab and Arab American Literature and Culture. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2015. Jabbour, Georgette. “Arabian Jazz and Crescent (Book Review)”. International Journal of Arabic-English Studies (IJAES), 5, 2004, pp. 221–224. Jarrar, Randa. A Map of Home. New York, Penguin Books, 2008. Kahn, Robert L. and Toni C. Antonucci. “Convoys over the Life Course: Attachment, Roles, and Social Support.” Life-Span Development and Behavior (Vol. 3), edited by Paul B. Baltes and Orwill G. Brim. New York, Academic Press, 1980. Mattawa, Khaled and Munir Akash (Eds). Post Gibran: Anthology of New Arab American Writing. Syracuse, Syracuse University Press, 1999. Naff, Alixa. The Arab Americans. Philadelphia, Chelsea House, 1999. Nye, Naomi Shihab. Going. New York, Greenwillow Books, 2005. Orfalea, Gregory. The Arab Americans: A History. Northampton, Olive Branch Press, 2006. Silver, Catherine B. “Gendered Identities in Old Age: Toward (De)gendering?” Journal of Aging Studies, 17, 2003, pp. 379–397. “Varieties of Worship. Demographic Facts.” Muslim Life in America, 2001, Office of International Information Programs. U.S. Department of State, 12 August 2012, http://infousa.state.gov/education/overview/muslimlife/dem ograp.htm. Wrobel, Nancy H., Mohamed F. Farrag, and Robert W. Hymes. “Acculturative Stress and Depression in an Elderly Arabic Sample.” Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology, 24 (3), 2009, pp. 273–290. Yunis, Alia. The Night Counter. New York, Three Rivers Press, 2009.

Queering Age

Sex and Text: Queering Older Men’s Sexuality in Contemporary U.S. Fiction Josep M. Armengol

Introduction Most gender-ed approaches to aging may be traced back to Simone de Beauvoir’s classic study The Coming of Age (1970). If Beauvoir’s The Second Sex had set out to describe women as secondary to men, who used them simply as “mirrors” to enlarge their own masculine selves, The Coming of Age went on to denounce the oppression of the elderly as another marginalized social group, which the young have long defined themselves against, “for in the old person that we must become, we refuse to recognize ourselves” (4). While Beauvoir’s text focuses on aging in general, and while she acknowledges the disempowering effect of aging on men, she also reminds us of the strong connections between age and sexual discrimination, suggesting that both women and the elderly are similarly disempowered as dependent objects, for the social status of both groups is always granted, not won, by men and adults, respectively.1 In

J. M. Armengol (B) Departamento de Filologia Moderna, Facultad de Letras, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Ciudad Real, Spain e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2021 J. M. Armengol (ed.), Aging Masculinities in Contemporary U.S. Fiction, Global Masculinities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71596-0_11

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a similar vein, Susan Sontag’s influential essay “The Double Standard of Aging” (1972) continued to denounce older women’s double oppression in gender and age terms, reinforcing rather than qualifying the traditional gendered division of aging. “Growing older,” Sontag claims, “is mainly an ordeal of the imagination—a moral disease, a social pathology— intrinsic to which is the fact that it afflicts women much more than men” (29). Not only does Sontag describe aging in exclusively negative terms but she also contends, then, that it is women, above all, who experience aging with horror “and even shame” (29). Similarly binary in its gender-ed treatment of aging is Betty Friedan’s classic The Fountain of Age (1993), which, as in the case of Simone de Beauvoir, was published after her equally well-known feminist text titled The Feminine Mystique (1963). If Friedan’s earlier text had denounced the patriarchal oppression undergone by (young) women, particularly the mirage of the contented housewife and mother in 1950s America, her later text, written when she was herself in her sixties, focused on what she referred to as the “age mystique,” which affected, for example, the invisibility of older women in the Hollywood industry, except as witches or hags, as opposed to the large number of male actors like Paul Newman or Burt Lancaster playing “attractive, distinguished older men” (54). Like Beauvoir, Friedan recognized the powerful effect of aging on diminishing masculinity, as the older men she interviewed often felt “feminized” because of their growing weakness and dependency. Yet Friedan concluded that women’s “softer” transition into old age was to be seen as the result of their lifelong inferior status. To put it simply, older women may not lose as much power as older men simply because women never had it to start with. “There is, of course, a ‘double standard’ of aging,” she concluded, “a remnant of the feminine mystique that defined women solely in terms of their biological role as mothers and as nubile sex objects” (264). More recently, other feminists have just followed suit. If Germaine Greer devoted a whole book to rethinking the specific physical, psychological, and social implications of menopause for aging women, the British psychologist Lynne Segal has recently argued that aging “affects us all, and affects us all differently,” but she also insists that “it is women who have often reported a very specific horror of ageing” (Out 13). No wonder, then, that Margaret Gullette sees ageism as deeply ingrained in (male-dominated) academic institutions and cultural studies, or that Kathleen Woodward has gone even further, suggesting that “ageism is entrenched within feminism itself” (11).

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From this, it would seem, then, that the main gender-ed studies of aging have centered on women. Moreover, aging males, when/if studied at all within feminist scholarship, have seldom been approached as a specific and equally complex gendered group, having been recurrently depicted as a homogeneous, “genderless” group against which older women were implicitly compared (Thompson Older 1–2). Inevitably, this has contributed to the cultural “invisibility” of older men and, even more, “the inverse correlation” between masculinity and aging (Saxton and Cole 98). “While in relation to early and middle adulthood we find clear models of dignified masculinity,” Gabriela Spector-Mersel (73) agrees, “these become vague, even non-existent, when referring to later life…Western masculinity scripts are not designed for elderly men, and thus are concluded somewhere before ‘old age.’” Admittedly, this issue has been acknowledged by some social scientists of gender. Edward H. Thompson (“Images” 633), for example, has repeatedly insisted that there is a “pluralistic ignorance of nearly 20 percent of the adult men.” Even though psychologists such as Daniel J. Levinson and sociologists like David Jackson have drawn upon interviews to analyze the challenges men face at various stages of their lives, the study of masculinity in relation to age thus remains largely unexplored, both the changing constructions of masculinity over the life course (from boyhood to manhood) and, especially, in old age. The same applies to the Humanities. Admittedly, there have been numerous studies concerned with female-authored portrayals of older women—for example, Zoe Brennan’s The Older Woman in Recent Fiction (2004) and Aging and Gender in Literature, edited by Anne M. Wyatt-Brown and Janice Rossen, to name but a few. Yet there has not been, surprisingly enough, a comparative in-depth study for aging male characters in (contemporary) (U.S.) fiction.2 “The scholarly material available for describing men’s experiences of ageing,” as feminist scholar Lynne Segal reminds us, “remains more limited, far sparser for men than for women” (Out 83). Thus, the present chapter sets out to fill this gap, challenging in particular some contentions made by recent feminist studies of femaleauthored fiction, which seem to highlight the ageism women face while underexploring similar effects upon men. More specifically, this essay seeks to question the seemingly accepted gendered classification, put forward by influential scholars like Barbara Waxman, that women are much more likely to author Reifungsromane—“a novel of ripening” (2), presenting “newly self-knowledgeable, self-confident, and independent”

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women (Waxman 17)—than men, who usually produce portraits of older men that are simply characterized by depression, self-hatred, and decline. Challenging these assumptions, the chapter will show how aging experiences are neither a lesser concern for men nor can they simply be pitted against those of their female counterparts. To do so, I first look at some examples of what I call “canonical” (self-)representations of men’s aging, particularly by the contemporary U.S. male writers John Updike and Philip Roth, who seem to have recurrently represented men’s aging as, literally, the opposite of virility, with diminished sexual prowess inevitably leading to the loss of manhood and feminization.3 While seemingly reaffirming binary gendered notions of aging, such examples will then be qualified and even contradicted by differing images of aging males in the fiction of other contemporary U.S. male writers, black and white, gay and straight, including Ernest Gaines and Edmund White, who represent men’s aging as inflected by the particularities of race and (homo)sexuality, respectively. In so doing, the chapter will conclude not just the variety but also the ambiguities that define men’s gendered experiences of aging in contemporary U.S. (male-authored) fiction.

Rethinking Aging Masculinities in Contemporary U.S. Male Fiction(s) It is common knowledge that male sexuality has been defined as eminently phallocentric. “Across cultures and centuries,” as David Leverenz reminds us, “the erect penis has been the most basic synecdoche for a man’s virility and force” (63). No wonder, then, that the loss of sexual prowess, which has traditionally been associated with older men, has been represented as a deeply gendered issue, sexual impotence being repeatedly depicted as itself a metaphor for diminished manhood and virility. The aging male, as Simone de Beauvoir rightly noted, is “the spectre that haunts the most virile of men…in the old man he hates his own future state” (107). While such stereotype may indeed be traced back centuries ago,4 and across different cultures,5 it does seem to recur in contemporary U.S. fiction, as well. As the U.S. literary scholar Leslie Fiedler famously argued, aging men’s experience (or simply fear) of sexual impotence, often reflected in U.S. fiction, can easily result in narcissistic injuries, causing them to redouble their attempts to prove themselves young through increased sexual performance with younger sex partners. “The archetypal pursuit of the Puer/Puella,” as Fiedler himself elaborates, “stands for a kind

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of narcissism once removed, since what the Senex yearns to embrace is the image of his own youth reincarnated” (38). This traditional image recurs in uncountable contemporary U.S. literary works, ranging from John Cheever’s “O Youth and Beauty” to Saul Bellow’s The Dean’s December, among many others. While the list is enormous and far too lengthy to achieve here, many novels by John Updike (now deceased), for example, focus on male characters having (or at least fantasizing about) sex with younger women, from the infamous Rabbit tetralogy up to his later works. Yet it is these late novels that have the greater number of older male protagonists, no doubt reflecting the author’s own aging, with most of Updike’s male characters trying to stay “forever young” through predatory sexual conquest and performance. In Toward the End of Time (1994), for instance, sixty-six-year-old Ben Turnball, who hates and fears his wife Gloria, wishes her dead so that he can simply get more and better sex with younger women, blaming his aging wife’s unattractive body for his own sexual dysfunction. Dreaming of her death, he ruminates, “I would seek out only younger whores, with tight lower bodies and exercise-hardened limbs, and put the problem of my erratic erections to them” (23). Just as his late novel Villages (2004), which features a male narrator reliving his former sexual conquests as he ages, Toward the End of Time thus has Updike’s protagonist mourn the loss of his sexual potency and dream of having an erection, which he recurrently fails to achieve, “when I awake and peek inside my soaked Depends, my poor prick is as red and flaccid as a rooster’s comb. How could so superfluous an appendage ever have served as the hub of my universe?” (291), Ben wonders. Such a recurrent male complaint is even better exemplified, perhaps, in the fiction of Philip Roth, whose novels depict, once and again, his protagonists’ direct association of aging with what they perceive as the inevitable demise of masculinity and virility. Embodying archetypal images of “dirty old men,” Roth’s aging male characters thus feel compelled to continue to prove their manhood by compulsively seeking sex with younger women. As most of Roth’s male characters have aged alongside their creator, it is no wonder that, as in the case of the late John Updike, the topic becomes more common in his later novels. Thus, Coleman Silk’s use of Viagra to be able to have sex with younger women in The Human Stain (2000), for example, reveals nothing but his desperate attempts to stay young and masculine. They were, in Roth’s words, “the pitiful sorts of temptations with which the aging male will try to compensate for the loss of a spirited,

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virile manhood” (80). While Coleman remains addicted to Viagra, his younger male friend, Primus, looks down on the older man as an example of diminished manhood, and no doubt a reflection of his own future. “Another chemical menace, the young man thought. The guy might as well be smoking crack, for all the good that Viagra is doing him” (Human 80).6 Roth’s novel, then, not only subscribes to the traditional stereotype of the “dirty old man,” lustful but sexually impotent, but also seems to reaffirm the intergenerational male rivalry that has long pervaded classic (Western) literature (Thane 138). The topic does indeed recur in several other (late) novels by Roth, too, ranging from The Counterlife (2005) to Everyman (2006) to Exit Ghost (2007), among others. Thus, in The Counterlife, for example, Henry Zuckerman prefers undergoing openheart surgery, even if it proves fatal, to taking the beta-blockers which improve his heart condition but which seem to have left him sexually disabled. Not only does he blame these for causing what he describes as an “epidemic” of impotence in America, of which he claims to be a victim; he proves equally unable to live without sex with his young girlfriend Wendy, “conjuring up every position in which she could be entered by the erection he no longer had…without recourse to the savage quick fix that keeps a lonely man half-sane in his cell” (Roth Counterlife 9–10). Similarly, in Everyman Roth’s protagonist feels as sexually attracted to women as ever before, although his actual sexual performances are limited by the “spigot of wrinkled flesh” (103) between his legs. If Roth’s obsession with proving manhood through sexual conquest had already been present in his infamous early novel Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), whose young protagonist’s masturbatory fantasies take center stage for the most part of the book, Portnoy’s aging version in Exit Ghost (2007) seems to remain as obsessed with young women as his predecessor, although his sexual fantasies are now curtailed by his impending sexual impotence. “Nothing any longer kindled his curiosity or answered his needs…nothing except the young women who jogged by him on the boardwalk in the morning. My God he thought, the man I once was!…The force that was mine!…Once upon a time I was a full human being” (Exit 130). Unfortunately, then, Roth seems unable to dissociate masculinity from sexual performance, associating aging not just with feminization but, as is clear from the above example, with the loss of humanity itself! For Roth, the aging male is just a feminized male, a “half-man,” not even fully human. As Lynne Segal rightly notes in this respect, “In Roth’s writing, a man’s aging desire is never able for long to eroticize the comforting familiarity

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of a long time companion. However bereft and lonely, it would seem that Roth’s men have little choice but to die as they have lived, as lecherous mavericks…as sexual predators” (Out 85). Yet such a monolithic image of the aging male may be challenged in different ways. On the one hand, Roth himself has occasionally dissociated old age from purely phallic concerns, for instance in Patrimony, a memoir of his father. Rather than his recurrent obsessions with the loss of phallic prowess, this text, written when Roth was already fifty-eight, depicts his own caregiving role following his mother’s death, when the writer provided his aging father with emotional support—for example, by sleeping with him while holding his hand “as you would the hand of a child who is frightened of the dark” (Roth Patrimony 99–100). “It is in this book,” as Lynne Segal has rightly noted, “that Roth is able, for once, to shed much of his masculine carapace, revealing the softer, supposedly ‘feminine’ traits it exists to hide” (Out 157).7 Besides this, there are other contemporary (male) writers whose depictions of men’s aging do even more clearly move away from traditionally phallocentric notions. Thus, in Richard Powers’ Orfeo (2014), for example, Els, the aging male protagonist, seems to be “post-sex” or “asexual” (Hobbs 85), as when he sees an attractive young woman jogging, “he no longer felt desire” (Powers 72), thus defying as well the traditional dirty old man stereotype. In other words, Powers’ character, as Hobbs notes of this scene, “dodges this lecherous stereotype and remains…largely without libido” (85). Similarly, in The Brooklyn Follies Paul Auster describes the relationship between his aging protagonist Nathan and his girlfriend Joyce as one based on tenderness and emotional connection, rather than simply mechanic, phallocentric, and ultimately ageist notions of sexuality. “Sex among aging people,” as Nathan himself recognizes, “can have its embarrassments and comical longueurs, but there is also a tenderness to it that often eludes the young” (Auster 275). As he elaborates: Your breasts might sag, your cock might droop, but your skin is still your skin, and when someone you care about reaches out and touches you, or holds you in their arms, or kisses you on the mouth, you can still melt in the same way you did when you thought you would live forever. (Auster 275)

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The picture does indeed seem to become even more complex and nuanced when we move beyond Roth or Auster’s (mostly white, middleclass, heterosexual) male characters into fictional representations moving along alternative racial lines, as African American writer Ernest J. Gaines’s novel A Gathering of Old Men (1983).8 Just as the specific experiences of aging by African American women may be seen to question and qualify the supposedly “universal” experiences of their white counterparts,9 so will Gaines’s fiction help us understand some specificities of African American men’s aging, showing how the aging process is not just gendered but also raced. A Gathering of Old Men focuses on a group of African American men in Louisiana, most of them in their seventies. One of them has killed a white man, a much-hated Cajun farmer in the region, but each of the old black men claims guilt, promising to organize a riot at the courthouse if the sheriff tries to make an arrest. While the sheriff is thus left speechless, the feared white patriarch also ends up backing down from leading a lynch mob because his own son refuses to join. The novel climaxes into a gun battle in which both the black killer and the leader of the white-trash attackers die. The remaining black men feel equally proud of themselves and each other for the first time in their lives, having gained respect from trusting their long-term friendships. Revolving around a group of black men “with white beards,” Gaines’s text proves especially useful, I believe, to question, once again, the supposedly universal equation of men’s aging with sexual impotence, whether literal or metaphorical, proving the plurality as well as the complex intricacies, even contradictions, resulting from the complex intersections of age, masculinity, and ethnicity. As Lynne Segal has shown, hegemonic masculinity, white and heterosexual, has traditionally been defined by the opposition. The power of dominant models of masculinity, she notes, stems from their difference from, and superiority to, that which they are not. In her words, “To be ‘masculine’ is not to be ‘feminine,’ not to be ‘gay,’ not to be tainted with any marks of ‘inferiority’—ethnic or otherwise” (Slow xxiv). Hence the recurrent “feminization” to which black men have been subjected by their white counterparts, whether literally or figuratively. In American Anatomies (1995), which remains probably the best study on the infamous practice of lynching in the U.S. South, Robyn Wiegman already showed how the turn toward lynching as a white supremacist activity in the late nineteenth century implied the denial by white men of the black male’s newly gained right to citizenship and of the patriarchal power

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that ensued thereof. Lynching’s twisted racial and gendered implications would seem to be confirmed, on the one hand, by its selective use as a punishment mainly reserved for black men accused of raping white women. And, on the other hand, by its increasing fusion with castration as the preferred form of mutilation for African American men. In Wiegman’s words: In severing the black male’s penis from his body, either as a narrative account or a material act, the mob aggressively denies the patriarchal sign and symbol of the masculine, interrupting the privilege of the phallus and thereby reclaiming, through the perversity of dismemberment, the black male’s (masculine) potentiality for citizenship. (83)

If, as Wiegman herself acknowledges, racism may itself be considered a (symbolic) form of lynching, then it may also be possible to re-read Gaines’s novel as an allegory for the symbolic “castration” of black men in the racist South. As the descendants of the black slaves on the Southern plantations, all of them do indeed appear to have been subjected to similar humiliations, and thus felt equally “emasculated,” by white men. As Mat complains to his wife, “the years we done struggled in George Medlow’s field, making him richer and richer and us getting poorer and poorer” (Gaines 38). Or, as Beulah reminds the sheriff, “black people get lynched, get drowned, get shot, guts all hanging out” (108). No wonder they all feel “black and helpless” (67). Or, as Lou Dimes has it, as not “much of a man” (74). In this sense, then, the black men’s decision to stand up to the white man by taking up their rifles (read penises) may clearly be read as metaphor for their remasculinization, symbolically transforming them from boys into men. “A man got to do what he think is right,” Mathu reminds the sheriff, “That’s what part him from a boy” (Gaines 85). Even Charlie, whose white boss would speak to him “as you would speak to a dog, and he would not raise his head, let alone his voice” (58), is thus transformed into a “tough old goat” (73). While everyone had assumed that Mathu, a hate-filled black man “up in his eighties” (Gaines 84), was the killer, near the end of the novel the seemingly docile Charlie confesses, who dies proclaiming, “Now I know I am a man” (Gaines 193). Unlike Philip Roth’s aging male characters, who feel sexually impotent because of their physical inability to perform, Gaines’s old (black) men do indeed seem to get over their feelings of feminization by standing up to the white man thanks to their “erect” rifles, if not penises. “With rifles as their penis

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synecdoches,” as Leverenz puts it, “black patriarchs have defeated white patriarchs” (85). I would like to keep questioning the traditional association of men’s aging with physical and sexual decline by drawing on one more example from contemporary U.S. (gay) male fiction. The relevance of gay fiction to our discussion is, I believe, crucial, especially to deconstruct stereotypical binary images of older men’s (homo)sexuality. On the one hand, (older) gay men, like black men, have been stereotyped as hypersexual and as sexually voracious, as little less than perverted sexual predators. On the other, they have also been represented as weak and effeminate, miserable and lonely, and as less manly than their heterosexual counterparts. Quite often, as Goltz (6) reminds us, the two stereotypes intersect, as in classic literary texts and films such as Death in Venice, Gods and Monsters, or Love and Death on Long Island, to name but a few, where ageism and homophobia combine to judge intergenerational relations as inappropriate and gay characters as “dirty old men” eager to recover lost youth. Given these negative images, it is no wonder, then, that youth-centeredness, or “youthism,” has become part and parcel of contemporary gay culture, which may also be linked to the few positive cultural images available of aging gay men. “Younger gay men’s awareness of popular, negative stereotypes of their older counterparts,” Hajek and Giles rightly note, “may contribute to their fear of aging, due to their fear of adopting such negative, stereotypical characteristics as they age” (707).10 Yet the very specificity of homosexual men’s aging, what Jack Halberstam has described as “queer” as opposed to “straight” time, may also be particularly useful to rethink the alleged universality of (heterosexual) men’s aging experiences (Berger; Bergling; Goltz; Sears; Freeman), including the recurrent equation of men’s aging with sexual decline. It is true that whereas older heterosexual men are often stereotyped as asexual or sexually impotent, older gay men are highly sexualized as sexual perverts and predators, which points to a “unique stigma to gay male aging” (Goltz 6). Yet the very fact that gay men continue to be seen as sexually active well into old age also helps deconstruct traditional images of men’s aging associated with physical and sexual decline. Above all, this helps problematize the powerful cultural stereotype of gay men as less vigorous and manly than their heterosexual counterparts, proving how the isolated and depressed images of older (gay) men are at least partly inaccurate. As Goltz insists, “multiple studies report that older gay men actually display less signs of depression than aging heterosexuals and

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are equally equipped to handle the challenges of aging” (6–7). This is nowhere better exemplified, perhaps, than in the fiction of the contemporary U.S. writer Edmund White, particularly some of his recent work, like Chaos (2010), which provides interesting insights into his (at least semi-biographical) sexual experiences as an aging gay male. White’s alter ego is Jack, a gay writer of identical age, likes and dislikes as his author. He is also working at a slower pace now, increasingly forgetful of names and dates, and complaining that “his [own] name was now more celebrated than his books, his blurbs more solicited than his stories” (19). Moreover, Jack has been HIV positive for more than twenty years, which makes him fear that “maybe his wits were slowing down in the same way as his vision was dimming and his hearing becoming less acute” (20). Yet only one thing had never changed: “His sex ambitions were still the same—to have sex with every man in the world. He would have been a perfect whore, since he found every man do-able” (White 21). Like Roth’s aging male characters, then, Jack is presented as sick with desire. Unlike Roth’s heterosexual men, however, White’s gay characters defy both the age and gender-ed conventions traditionally attached to the aging male. On the one hand, Jack seems ready to have sex with men of all ages, not just young men, describing “every man” as “do-able.” If the sexual fantasies of Roth’s aging males exclude older women explicitly, White’s character describes “every man” as a potential sex partner. Moreover, Jack defies the traditional narrative of men’s aging as (sexual) decline, presenting himself as more sexually active than ever. At first sight, this might seem to simply transform White’s character into the gay version of Roth’s male characters. Implicitly, however, White’s gay fiction also questions the (heterosexual) ideal of phallic penetration, as well as the active–passive binary it attaches itself to, since Jack’s sexuality might be phallic or anal, but also neither or both. Unlike straight men, as Lynne Segal notes of this, “it seems he can find ways of actually ‘doing’ them, or perhaps, to the sheer terror of men fashioned in the normative mould of…Roth, Updike or Amis, being ‘undone’ by them.’ Oh no: ‘Just like a woman’!” (Out 89). Clearly, then, male sexuality proves, once again, to be contextual, as the same (sexual) acts often acquire different meanings in different contexts.

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Notes 1. “In The Second Sex,” Beauvoir explains, “I showed that…women…owe it [their standing] in fact to the men. This is equally true for the aged in relation to the adults. Their authority is based upon the dread or the respect they inspire: the moment the adults break free from it, the aged have no power left whatsoever” (Coming 85–86). 2. A recent and remarkable exception is the study by Alex Hobbs, which focuses on the representation of aging masculinity in the contemporary American novel. Also Gullette as well as Woodward and Schwartz, among other feminist age scholars, had devoted some attention to men’s aging, although their focus has been primarily on women. 3. Interestingly, older women in eighteenth-century France, for example, were often “masculinized” (Thane 196). And, in the nineteenth century, aging became even more literally gendered, as the largest London workhouses, such as St Pancras or Marylebone, were sex-segregated, just as the large hospices of Paris were, notably the Bicêtre for men and Salpêtrière for women (Thane 238–243). 4. In the opening pages of Plato’s Republic, for example, Socrates meets the elderly Cephalus and asks him what it is like to grow old, to which the latter replies that “they [older men] hanker for the pleasures of their youth, remembering how they used to make love…and thinking it a great deprivation that they can’t do so any more” (qtd. in Pane 14). In Greek art, one of Heracles’s jobs was also to fight against personified old age, “typically an emaciated figure with grotesquely swollen but flaccid genitals” (Thane 65), just as Plautus’s plays tended to focus on older men’s “sexual, though impotent, proclivities” (Thane 54). In the Middle Ages, a lustful old man (senex amans ) looking for sex with younger women was equally subjected to ridicule, as he was seen as “flouting the laws of nature and behaving like a madman” since he would be easily cuckolded (Thane 94–136). Even at the end of the nineteenth century, as Simone de Beauvoir explains, the aging process was still seen as the demise of masculinity, being medically attributed to a degeneration of the sexual glands. “At the age of seventy-two, Brown-Séquard, a professor at the Collège de France, injected himself with extract of guinea-pigs’ and dogs’ testicles…Voronoff, also a professor at the Collège de France, thought of grafting the glands of monkeys upon elderly men” (Coming 22). And, in twentieth-century Soviet Russia, experiments with hormones and glandular grafts from monkeys continued to be encouraged, which was expected to restore youthful vigor and even cure male impotence (Thane 281). While both experiments proved equally failed, they do point to the strong historical association of virility with youth, even rejuvenation, and, by implication, of men’s aging with weakness, physical decline and,

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ultimately, “feminization.” Aging, in Beauvoir’s words, has long been in “complete conflict with the manly…ideal cherished by the young and the fully-grown” (Coming 40). The old, male and female, play a very important role among the primitive people of Bali, for instance, where “the distinction between the sexes,” as Beauvoir reminded us, “disappears with age” (Coming 77). As Pat Thane (138) reminds us, the older man pretending to be younger has long been an object of ridicule, being often looked down on as a child. In the seventeenth-century Commedia dell’Arte, for example, Pantaloon becomes “an object of contempt, petulant, pretending to be young, falling in love with unattainable young women and being deceived on all sides” (Thane 138). While John Updike has also been accused of being unable to move beyond the stereotypical male lament over the loss of sexual prowess in old age (Segal Out 86–88), Alex Hobbs reminds us that both Roth and Updike have written stories of old age that “do not express mature masculine identity in largely sexualized terms” (148), as in Updike’s portraits of several older men in My Father’s Tears and Other Stories (2009). While an analysis of the multiple ethnic masculinities in contemporary U.S. fiction falls beyond the scope and possibilities of this chapter, it may be relevant to note, however, the central role played by Latino works like The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) by the Dominican American author Junot Díaz in moving beyond traditional representations of Latino men as machos. Just as Díaz’s coming-of-age story centers on a Dominican anti-hero who is unable to live up to the phallic expectations set by his culture, other Asian American authors like David Henry Hwang have, on the contrary, set out to subvert stereotypical images of Asian American men as “feminized.” For their part, contemporary Native American writers like Sherman Alexie have recurrently depicted older Native American men as highly respected religious leaders and valuable counsellors of their communities, thus moving beyond the seemingly exclusive obsession of older white males with keeping their phallic prowess. There exist studies as well on specific concepts and representations of aging in (diasporic) Jewish (Geffen 1993) or Indian (Lamb 2009) cultures, among many others, where, again, aging males appear to enjoy far greater respect as sources of wisdom than aging men in contemporary Western (white) culture. This is only to suggest, then, the great variations among aging masculinities by different ethnicities, of which the African American text by Ernest Gaines analyzed herein is just an illustration, and which should, hopefully, be complemented and/or qualified by further research on other non-white authors and texts. Upon completing the third volume of her autobiography Force of Circumstance (1963), when she was only fifty-four, Simone de Beauvoir,

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for example, already complained about her aging. Indeed, after reaching middle age, she seemed incapable of accepting that she was no longer young: “How is it that time, which has no form or substance, can crush me with so huge a weight that I can no longer breathe?” (Force 672), she wondered. Above all, she lamented her increasing erotic invisibility. “Never again!” (Force 673), she lamented, naming the passing of all the projects and joys, including men, now eluding her. “It is not I who I am saying goodbye to all those things I once enjoyed, it is they who are leaving me” (Force 673), she insisted. If Beauvoir thus complained about her increasing erotic invisibility as a (white) woman, Toni Morrison’s (African American) women in her first novel The Bluest Eye (1970) celebrate aging as their ultimate liberation from sexuality and, above all, from the (white) male gaze: Then they were old. Their bodies honed, their odor sour…They were through with lust and lactation…They alone could walk the roads of Mississippi, the lanes of Georgia, the fields of Alabama unmolested…They were, in fact and at last, free. (137) 10. Indeed, research within gay male cultures suggests that the term “older” may be used to describe gay men as early as thirty-five to forty years of age (Goltz 7).

Works Cited Auster, Paul. The Brooklyn Follies. London: Faber and Faber, 2006. Beauvoir, Simone de. The Coming of Age. 1970. New York: Norton, 1996. ———. Force of Circumstance. 1963. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. Berger, Raymond M. Gay and Gray: The Older Homosexual Man. 1982. New York: Harrington Park Press, 1996. Bergling, Tim. Reeling in the Years: Gay Men’s Perspectives on Age and Ageism. New York: Southern Tier Editions, 2004. Brennan, Zoe. The Older Woman in Recent Fiction. London: McFarland, 2004. Fiedler, Leslie A. “More Images of Eros and Old Age: The Damnation of Faust and the Fountain of Youth.” Memory and Desire: Aging-LiteraturePsychoanalysis. Eds. Kathleen Woodward and Murray M. Schwartz. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. 37–50. Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. Friedan, Betty. The Fountain of Age. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993. Gaines, Ernest J. A Gathering of Old Men. 1983. New York: Vintage, 1992.

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Geffen, Rela M., ed. Celebration and Renewal: Rites of Passage in Judaism. Philadelphia and Jerusalem: The Jewish Publication Society, 1993. Goltz, Dustin Bradley. Queer Temporalities in Gay Male Representation: Tragedy, Normativity, and Futurity. New York: Routledge, 2010. Gullette, Margaret Morganroth. Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1997. Halberstam, Jack. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York UP, 2005. Hobbs, Alex. Aging Masculinity in the American Novel. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. Jackson, David. Exploring Aging Masculinities: The Body, Sexuality and Social Lives. New York: Palgrave, 2016. Lamb, Sarah. Aging and the Indian Diaspora: Cosmopolitan Families in India and Abroad. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2009. Leverenz, David. “Aging Beyond Masculinities, Or, The Penis as Failed Synecdoche.” Alternative Masculinities for a Changing World. Eds Àngels Carabí and Josep M. Armengol. New York: Palgrave, 2014. 63–91. Levinson, Daniel. The Seasons of a Man’s Life. 1978. New York: Random House, 1986. Maierhofer, Roberta. “American Studies Growing Old.” Crossing Borders: Interdisciplinary Intercultural Interaction. Eds. Bernhard Kettemann and Georg Marko. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen, 1999. 255–268. Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. 1970. New York: Vintage, 1999. Powers, Richard. Orfeo. London: Atlantic Books, 2014. Roth, Philip. The Counterlife. New York: Vintage, 2005. ———. Everyman. London: Jonathan Cape, 2006. ———. Exit Ghost. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007. ———. The Human Stain. 2000. New York: Vintage, 2001. ———. Patrimony: A True Story. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991. Saxton, Benjamin and Thomas R. Cole. “No Country for Old Men: A Search for Masculinity in Later Life.” International Journal of Ageing and Later Life 7.2 (2012): 97–116. Sears, James T., ed. Growing Older: Perspectives on LGBT Aging. New York: Routledge, 2010. Segal, Lynne. Out of Time: The Pleasures and the Perils of Ageing. London: Verso, 2013. ———. Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men. 1990. London: Virago, 1997. Sontag, Susan. “The Double Standard of Aging.” The Saturday Review (September 1972): 29–38. Spector-Mersel, Gabriela. “Never-Aging Stories: Western Masculinity Hegemonic Masculinity Scripts.” Journal of Gender Studies 15.1 (2006): 67–82.

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Thane, Pat, ed. A History of Old Age. London: Thames and Hudson, 2005. Thompson, Edward H. “Images of Old Men’s Masculinity: Still a Man?” Sex Roles 55.9 (2006): 633–648. ———, ed. Older Men’s Lives. New York: Sage, 1994. Updike, John. My Father’s Tears and Other Stories. 2009. London. Penguin, 2010. ———. Toward the End of Time. 1994. London: Penguin, 2006. ———. Villages. 2004. London: Penguin, 2006. Waxman, Barbara. From the Hearth to the Open Road: A Feminist of Study of Ageing in Contemporary Literature. London: Praeger, 1990. White, Edmund. Chaos. London: Bloomsbury, 2010. Wiegman, Robyn. American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender. 1995. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. Wyatt-Brown, Anne M. and Janice Rossen, eds. Aging and Gender in Literature: Studies in Creativity. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1993.

On Long-Lasting Humanimal Friendships: Gayness, Aging, and Disease in Lily and the Octopus Ignacio Ramos-Gay and Claudia Alonso-Recarte

In an interview with Manuel Betancourt published online in 2016, author Steven Rowley half-jokingly stated that if his successful debut novel, Lily and the Octopus (2016), contained a reflection on the problem of aging, it was mainly due to the meteorological conditions that framed his writing process. For an author such as him, born in 1971 in Portland, Maine, and later residing in Los Angeles, the Californian city offered a climate similar to a bubble that encapsulates the passage of time: . . . there is something very odd about LA. And it comes from the weather…I had probably lived here for five years before it occurred to me, “Oh, winter never came!” I didn’t realize I was five years older. I thought it was this really long summer and life had slowed down. It’s sort of tied into that, I think: people don’t realize that time passes in quite the same way. It lends to people not really understanding that time is passing, that they

I. Ramos-Gay (B) · C. Alonso-Recarte University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain e-mail: [email protected] C. Alonso-Recarte e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. M. Armengol (ed.), Aging Masculinities in Contemporary U.S. Fiction, Global Masculinities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71596-0_12

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are aging. And there’s this desire to keep up sameness, always. (Betancourt and Rowley)

Contrary to the classical interpretation of the experience of aging as the expression of the passage of time, of the inexorable advancement of life, Rowley proposes a reading of aging as a form of immobilism that echoes the sort of seasonal stagnation characteristic of certain warmer climates. Thus, it is not surprising that such a sense of aging could be experienced by someone who is not yet at an advanced biological age—both the author and Ted, the novel’s protagonist and Rowley’s somewhat fictionalized self, as admitted in several interviews (Betancourt and Rowley, Baume), are in their forties. What Rowley ultimately projects in his character is an idiosyncratic form of aging masculinity fixated upon a midlife crisis. Such crisis is marked by the inability to evolve as a maturing subject in the face of an organic body that inescapably advances according to its own chronology. Stunned and emotionally paralyzed within the cage of an unstoppably aging body (an existential paradox tictocking to the beat of inevitability), Ted finds refuge from the passing of time in a fantasy world that is fittingly inhabited by himself and by his elderly and sick dog, Lily. Not only does he upgrade Lily’s personality by rendering her quite the conversationalist; he also transforms her into a cryptogram of sorts in which to encode and project his fears about the caducity of life and his grieving for the loss of loved ones. Afflicted by a brain tumor that cannot be operated on due to her advanced age and medical history, Lily, a twelve-year-old dachshund, becomes her owner’s proxy in the struggle between, on the one hand, the inexorable evolution of an illness that progressively eats away at the body and, on the other, the memories of the moments lived together that Ted desperately tries to preserve. The novel thus constitutes a reflection on the passage of time and an active—yet futile—attempt to stop it. The confrontation with the very nature of time leads Ted into a delusional universe that seems to operate on the belief of self-preservation through interspecies affection. Will and memory become the prime mechanisms through which to confront the crippling advancements of age and disease, leading to dialogues reminiscent of fables. Through the memories and fictional worlds that Ted multiplies in the face of his dog’s certain death, Rowley carves out a portrait of a gay, white, adult male who refuses to accept that aging necessarily involves letting go of the sense of purpose and security that is so much a part of youth.

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In this paper, we first address Ted’s metaphorization of aging masculinity through Lily, a construct midway between a trope and a more carnal, loveable character that teaches, through her canine nature, what it ultimately means to be human. Long past her prime and dwelling in her sickly condition, Lily’s small, fragile body becomes the perfect symbol in which to condense all of Ted’s anguish and anxieties at the prospects of growing old himself. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of “becoming-animal” (A Thousand Plateaus ) provides an adequate framework through which to analyze how Ted and Lily constitute an indissoluble entity in which the sexual orientation of the former and the age of the latter become inextricably bound. We then turn to discuss how such transformative process invokes elements of literary fable as a defense mechanism against time characteristic of more infantile perceptions. Finally, we focus on how Lily’s illness absorbs and assimilates Ted’s aging process, and conclude that only through the symbolic transformation into the animal can the subject transcend his psychological paralysis. In this sense, Ted’s verbal and clinical atonement of trauma is key in his rebirth into acceptance, an acceptance of where one stands in the coordinates of time.

Molarity, Molecularity, and Becoming-Animal Literary identification between human and nonhuman animals is a stylistic resource whose terminology is dependent upon who the “host” maybe (humans are animalized or animals are personified). There are multiple classical rhetorical figures that explore such possibilities (personification, prosopopoeia, allegory, reification, animalization, anthropomorphism, etc.), and these are greatly diversified not only following each figure’s function but also depending on the cultural variables and traditions that define and connote animals. It therefore comes as no surprise to find that animalization has for long equated the objectification of man, given the extent to which nonhuman others have, for the last two millennia, been legally and culturally regarded as little more than things and property (Schaffner 19). The so-called “animal turn” of the late twentieth century (Rivto), however, marked the vindication of the nonhuman other as a sentient being endowed with consciousness and deserving of moral and ethical consideration. Western literature has to a great extent provided an

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aesthetic response commensurate with such advancements, and the techniques that have traditionally explored interspecies hybridization have overcome the mimetic process reflected in classical rhetoric. Indeed, the sheer number of neologisms that explore the definition of the human through its relationship to other species—“zoopoetics” (Derrida), “zooesis” (Chaudhuri), “zoontologies” (Wolfe) or “zoographies” (Calarco)—is indicative of the extent to which philosophical and aesthetic thought have shifted their focus onto animality. Today’s understanding of humans’ undetermined position in the species divide, as simultaneously indissoluble and homogeneous to other animals, has unsurprisingly determined its ontological foundation. Overcoming biblical exegeses and Cartesian dualism (among other traditional Western anthropocentric trademarks), “humanimalism” thus constitutes much more than an update of classical cultural assumptions. What it offers is a vision of the world decentralized from human subjectivity; one in which reason has proven itself largely limited and inadequate for a proper assimilation of the experience of the “other.” What is proposed as a hermeneutical alternative is a world based on empathy and cohabitation, one that has found its aesthetic reflection in postmodern popular culture (Gadd). In what is considered one of their central works, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980), as well as in Kafka. Toward a Minor Literature (1975) and What Is Philosophy? (1991), Deleuze and Guattari break down the complex process of conversion that involves all “becomings,” whether it be animal, woman, child, vegetable, or mineral (A Thousand Plateaus 300). From the beginning, “becoming” is established neither as an actual, physical transformation of the individual, nor as a biological, derivative or cultural evolution. It is not a metamorphosis that revolves around visual diacritics. Rather, what Deleuze and Guattari understand as “becoming” is a kind of affective encounter between two non-fixed bodies in constant motion within an artistic activity. Here, the term “affection” completely lacks emotional or sentimental overtones and becomes synonymous with contact, “proximity” or “copresence” (A Thousand Plateaus 273). The interspecies contact or encounter does not lead to a transformation of the “molar” entities. Rather, what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a process of “becoming-animal” involves a kind of recognition at a cellular (or “molecular,” to use their terminology) level of the “other” in oneself. The awareness is one of the protean molecularity that composes us all—only in such ways can we find and

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acknowledge the “other” in ourselves: “becoming is to extract the particles between which one establishes the relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness that are closest to what one is becoming, and through which one becomes” (272). Such type of contact cannot, as Deleuze and Guattari clarify, be based on any imitative, representative, or reproductive process: “becoming is not to imitate or identify with something or someone” (272). It is the creation of a new ontology, rather than the repetition of selfhood, that determines the process of “becoming,” whose origin lies in the different velocities or movements of bodies in contact, rather than in their static state. As a result of the continuity of affective elements, “becoming” is rendered perceptively through any gesture likely to “emit corpuscles that enter the relation of movement and rest of the animal particles” (274). “You become animal only molecularly,” they state. “You do not become a barking molar dog, but by barking, if it is done with enough feeling, with enough necessity and composition, you emit a molecular dog” (275). The dog in oneself thus emerges, allowing the human to expose the nonhuman in him and bringing forth a “deterritorialization” of the subject (282). Although Rowley does not cite Deleuze and Guattari as an influence, his insistence on Ted’s assimilation of Lily (as an animal and as an embodiment) does echo the process of “becoming-animal.” “I love thinking of Ted and Lily as a pack,” Rowley states in a series of reflections at the end of the novel (n.p.). To emphasize such sense of unity and oneness, a quote from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book opens the novel: “for the strength of the pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the pack.” (n.p). Deleuze and Guattari use the same group metaphor to illustrate the conjunction of subjects typical of “becoming-animal,” invoking the figure of the “animal pack” as well, “into which the human being passes or in which his or her becoming takes place, by contagion” (A Thousand Plateaus 247). The uniting force that brings two bodies together into an indissoluble entity, in a “pack” in which each body reciprocally recognizes a connection with the other, is what the protagonist feels when he comes into contact with his dog: “I can sit with her quietly, our bodies touching just enough to generate warmth, to share the vibrating energy of all living things, until our breathing slows and falls into the parallel rhythm it always does when we have our quietest sits” (Rowley 7). It is interesting to note that Rowley uses a myriad of gestures (“parallel rhythm,” “energy,” “breathing”) that are very similar to those alluded to by Deleuze and Guattari (“feeling,” “necessity,” “composition”) to

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support the process of man’s recognition in the animal. Far from considering it purely poetic or symbolic, both philosophers refer to this process as a kind of reciprocal “truth” in terms very similar to the “emotional truth” (Rowley n.p.) between a human and his dog that Rowley seeks to make explicit in his novel. “The becoming-animal of the human being is real,” write Deleuze and Guattari, “even if the animal the human being becomes is not; and the becoming-other of the animal is real, even if that something other it becomes is not” (A Thousand Plateaus 238). Furthermore, the fact that, in the novel, the animal into which the character “becomes” is an old, sick dog resonates with Deleuze and Guattari’s observations on the conversion of the individual. Indeed, they argue that it is precisely those subjects that find themselves at an advanced, culminating stage in their lives who are most prone to “become.” Citing Scott Fitzgerald’s short story, “The Crack-Up” (1936), they claim that “of course all life is a process of breaking down” (A Thousand Plateaus 198). Aging is a substantial part of life, made manifest in “micro-cracks, as in a dish.” Aging involves “molecular changes” (198) that are initially imperceptible, but that become evident once they have consummated their purpose toward the final stages of life: “When something occurs, the self that awaited it is already dead, or the one that would await it has not yet arrived” (199). Lawlor expands on Deleuze and Guattari’s idea by stating that “the micrological cracks of ageing, these experiences in which one is finally aware that one has lost something of oneself, are the agent of becoming” (172–173). Rowley claims to have experienced a similar feeling upon receiving his dog, Lily, for his thirtieth birthday. Of course, this is far from an advanced age, and yet the author seems to struggle with making sense of this new vital stage, assimilating it as a moment not only of growing older but of growing old. The gift of Lily struck him with a revelation regarding the passing, transitory nature of time, as it pushed the recipient into a caretaking, maternal-like responsibility: “It did make me realize how much I had grown up over the same amount of time... And of course, animal lifespans are not as long as ours, and we know we’re going to lose them and we sign up for this anyway” (Betancourt and Rowley). The fictional Lily also bursts into Ted’s life in the midst of an existential crisis: the awareness of the illusion and subsequent loss of youthful dreams and aspirations. Speaking about a long-time friend, Ted says that “[f]rom the time we were twenty-two, Trent would tell me not to worry. He said it was all going to happen for us when we were twenty-nine...

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And then I started to panic. What if it didn’t happen for me until I was thirty-one?... I worried about falling behind” (Rowley 18–19). Rowley recognizes that for him, the novel is not “the story about a man and his dog,” but a narrative “about a man who is stuck in his life” (Post and Rowley). Indeed, submerged in a state of learned helplessness that exposes his lack of control of his life (and which echoes the psychology of caged animals giving up on preventing, avoiding or controlling negative stimuli), Ted paces about his existential exhaustion despite only being in his early forties: “Somewhere, sometime, I stopped really living. I stopped really trying” (Rowley 275). The feeling is one of having lost the game to life. “I am forty-two. This is the halftime of my life, and my team is losing” (275). In this light, Lily and the Octopus reflects the “cracks” discussed by Deleuze and Guattari. Ted broods about how his pillars of strength seem to wobble and to ultimately expire and become extinguished, leaving him to inhabit his own helplessness as a passive observer of the inevitability of time. “Lily’s aging coincided with the end of my relationship with Jeffrey and the stalling of my writing career” (128), he notes. Cocooning and hibernating further into isolation with Lily, who becomes his leading interlocutor, he merges into the unity of “becoming,” where he will, paradoxically and eventually, find his agency and recognize his sense of self. This final awareness of his subjectivity comes with the acceptance of Lily’s mortality, which demands an act of responsibility: that of euthanizing her.

Old Age and Homosexuality Deleuze and Guattari assume that “becoming-animal” is, moreover, a process typical of minorities, defined by their liminality and positioned at the margins, where they are “oppressed, prohibited, in revolt, or always on the fringe of recognized institutions” (A Thousand Plateaus 247). Ted’s non-normative sexuality as a gay man not only places him within such liminality, but it also redefines the literary tradition of masculinity in which the theme of the novel is framed. Numerous western narratives have addressed the bond between men and canines: from Homer’s depiction of Ulysses and his dog Argos in The Odyssey and Plutarch’s account of a vengeful dog mourning his master to more modern examples of faithful dogs such as Bullseye in Oliver Twist (1839), Gyp in George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859) or Buck in Jack London’s The Call of the

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Wild (1939), among many other literary references to pets, these recurrences illustrate Lévi-Strauss’s well-known claim that animals are “good to think with” (89). Narratives featuring young or middle-aged men with a strong bond with their canine companions (which tend to be male as well, for the most part) not only heighten the moral value of the dog himself but also use him as an instrument through which to signify on humanity and gender. The individual identity with which certain literary dogs are invested comes with the responsibility of not only transcending their status as mere property, but also of representing “their owners’ gender identities and personalities” (Ramirez 234). Within these narratives, breeds are significant cultural indicators. Melissa Boyde (2014) employs the term “cultural capture” of the animal to refer to the extent to which their subjectivity is subdued by cultural discourses pertaining to breed, size, physiognomy or personality traits. American mythology has frequently resorted to the image of a boy/man and his dog confronting the frontier wilderness, and breeds (or lack thereof) have become an essential part of the narrative. Already in the nineteenth century, newspaper and journal reports could not get enough of the legendary potential of the curs and mongrels that Davey Crockett used for bear-hunting; or Seaman (the brave Newfoundland who accompanied Lewis and Clark on their expedition); or John James Audubon’s Plato (also a Newfoundland), with whom he explored the Florida Keys; or General Custer’s Scottish staghounds, Blucher and Maida, whom he took to the Indian Wars. Enthusiasm for the coupling of a male hero undertaking a masculine task with his male dog continued well into the twentieth century: Norwegian musher Leonhard Seppala and his team of Siberian huskies acquired legendary status in the 1925 Serum Run to Nome, Alaska, while popular culture increasingly celebrated the pairing of a leading male figure with a canine sidekick (White House dogs have, for instance, become prominent symbols of presidents’ heterosexual normativity as family men with leadership skills). In Ramirez’s terms, “dogs are essentially extensions of the owners’ selves, masculine dogs give an impression of masculine owners” (232). Within this tradition, the presence of dachshunds is perhaps anecdotal. Despite their aggressiveness (Horowitz 53) and hunters’ use of them for burrows, having a short physique that “is all spine” (Rowley n.p.) seems to limit their potential as adequate companions for strong, rugged men of epic proportions. Unsurprisingly, dachshunds have become largely associated with domestic spaces, a sphere traditionally connotative of the

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feminine. Ramirez sees this as the opposition between “activity” and “intimacy” that is central to normative, heterosexual masculinity’s projection of breeds considered to be “less masculine” or “too feminine” (233). While it is true that Lily is a fictionalized version of the author’s own dog—“I did have a dog named Lily,” Rowley states, “she passed away from a brain tumor in 2013” (Betancourt and Rowley)—she is not exempt from the literary and social context in which her breed is framed. As if defying the heteronormative construct of “a man and his dog,” Rowley’s story revolves around an affection nursed within the domestic space. In Lily and the Octopus, heroic deeds are replaced by much more intimate and homely activities—“the talks about boys, the Monopoly, the movies, the pizza nights” (275). Rowley thus proposes a new signifier of masculinity derived from an interspecies duo in which the genders of both Ted and Lily distance them from culturally institutionalized forms of masculinity. This interpretation makes Rowley’s outright assertion that he would have refused to “de-gay” the novel if asked to do so by a prospective publisher (Betancourt and Rowley) all the more significant. Beyond the autobiographical undertones, the character’s dissident sexual orientation with regard to hegemonic masculinity seems essential in the construction of the interspecies bond within the domestic setting, where values such as affection, complicity, nurturing and mutual care are allegedly developed. Such types of interspecies affection between a homosexual man and a female dog were once explored by J. R. Ackerley in his memoir My Dog Tulip (1956), whereupon canine companionship (this time in the form of a German shepherd) oftentimes competed with interhuman relationships. If dogs have always proven useful in the representation of an “appropriate masculine image” (Ramirez 233), the protagonist’s gay identity proves indispensable in order to question stereotypical assumptions regarding the type of affection that is “acceptable” for a man to have toward his dog. If one must kill one’s dog, it must be in order to come of age and “become a man,” as illustrated in Fred Gipson’s Old Yeller (1956), the film adaptation of which became a cultural referent for generations. At an adult stage, affection considered to be excessive or bordering on sentimentality is regarded as puerile (DeMello xxiii), if not emasculating. A society that is attached to its animals and laments their deaths is perceived as somewhat deviant when it comes to gender expectations, as has men’s participation in animal rights advocacy been frequently

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considered an example of “effeminacy, sentimentality and sham humanitarianism” (Perkins 93). Ultimately, for Rowley, Ted’s gayness seems necessary in order to “become-animal” with Lily, just as Lily’s breed seems to reinforce her identification with Ted. Both are dissident subjects of the same literary tradition in which animal species and breeds and human sexual identity go hand in hand. This symbolic correspondence is something that Rowley is fully aware of. As he states in his interview with Betancourt, “the man and his dog literary trope is a very heterosexual one, which is weird because of the extra importance that gay people have in their relationship with their pets.” The signal difference that, through homosexual orientation and the dachshund breed, Rowley adds to the cliché of the “man-plus-his-dog” is further exacerbated by the animal’s old age and illness. In her article on old dogs in autobiographical Victorian literature, Teresa Mangum concludes that the canine figure is meant to lend visibility to elderly and socially marginalized people. “The fictional animal is a form of subjectivity that requires us... to reconceive our long-told narratives of helplessness, frailty, utility, and obligation as we struggle to comprehend marginal subjects” (45). A similar reflection can be found in Rowley’s novel, where Ted explores his aging self through Lily’s own deterioration and demise. Moreover, his sense of aging stems from a particular way of experiencing time that is influenced by his sexual orientation. Ted feels a rupture between his biological and psychological evolution as an individual, proof of which is the lack of correspondence between his desires and his age. “I like kids well enough,” he states, “but I’m already too old to be a young father, and I don’t particularly want to be an old father, and I’m single and it’s not something I would do on my own” (Rowley 34–35). The overlapping of Ted and Lily’s respective age prompts the former’s relativization of temporal measurement: She is twelve in actual years, which is eighty-four in dog years. I’m fortytwo, which is two hundred and ninety-four in dog years – but like a really young two hundred and ninety-four, because I’m in pretty good shape and a lot of people tell me I could pass for two hundred and thirty-eight, which is actually thirty-four. I say this about our ages because we’re both a little immature and tend to like younger guys. (3)

Such arithmetic gibberish brought about by the consideration of dog years signifies on the dissonance between the actual, biological age and

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the psychological/emotional age that Ted finds so anguishing. As literary motifs, dogs come in handy to emphasize temporal asynchronicity. Teresa Mangum regards this as a typical effect of fictional autobiographies of dogs, whereupon the expression “dog years” formulaically signals “a particular compression of time based on the rapidity – in human terms – with which dogs grow old and die” (36). Paul Monette invokes the same concept when referring to those who, due to a fatal disease, feel the end of their life is near, “where every single year must count for many” (Garber 264). In this interpretative context, Lily may be regarded as an oxymoronic crucible of sorts in which different ages (the actual age, the mental one, that of the metabolism, and the age-appropriateness as expected by society) converge. It is the animal that stirs in Ted the draining sense of imbalance between such forms of temporal measurement. As these different ages advance in their respective timelines, the lack of proportion and synchronicity between them push Ted into a deeper feeling of estrangement regarding where he “should be” in his life, fueling his existential exhaustion. This feeling of premature aging is further exacerbated by the narrator’s sexual orientation. Some studies have indicated that, within the gay community, the forties are perceived as an aging stage that leads to the social death of the subject (Robinson, Suen). Rowley himself defines his novel as “a riotous take on growing older as a gay man in LA” (Betancourt and Rowley). Aware of his decadence within the culture and community in which he partakes, the subject suffers a lack of selfconfidence and self-esteem that affects his desire for companionship. In the same way, Ted’s personal frustration is conducive to his loneliness. As Rowley concedes, “I stripped off all of the people out of the story. So Ted has one friend, he has one sibling, he has one parent, he has one therapist” (Betancourt and Rowley).

Fable, Childhood and Memory In Lily and the Octopus, perceptions on aging are also reflected in the fable-like qualities of the imaginary world that Ted designs for him and for Lily. Rowley defines the microcosm created by the narrator as a kind of “magical realism” influenced by works such as Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) (Betancourt and Rowley). One could easily add Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952) to the list, given the obvious allusion to the

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novel in the chapter titled “The Old Lady and the Sea” and in which Ted’s emotional breakdown culminates with the allegorization of his quest to save his dog’s life into an epic sea battle with the octopus. It is, however, in the dialogical sequences between Ted and Lily (or the octopus) where the fabulous component truly shines. Lily is endowed with a voice of her own, graphically stylized to equate barks with words (“LOOK! AT! THIS! IS! THE! MOST! AMAZING! THING! I’VE! EVER! SEEN!” [Rowley 4]), or to engage in an “imagined conversation” (Betancourt and Rowley), in which case the author uses lowercase (“My mother’s name is Witchiee-Poo?, she asked” [Rowley 209]). The octopus, that imaginary embodiment of the brain tumor that is slowly killing Lily, is also equipped with verbal skills, which he exercises with great sarcasm, wit, and caustic retorts. Creative liberties of this kind, in which an animal is radically anthropomorphized as a character because of its use of human language and discourses, dangerously tread the line between children’s and adult fiction. Rowley’s own fear that, from the offset, his manuscript would be automatically rejected by any publisher because of the conversation between Ted and Lily at the beginning of the novel (Betancourt and Rowley) evinces his own understanding of the extent to which literary genre would be a problematic issue in his work. To resort to “speaking animals,” a strategy so characteristic of children’s and young adult literature, within a text that otherwise deals with serious and sobering themes in a tone typical of more adult-oriented fiction, formalistically reinforces the aforementioned dissonances between “ages.” Plot-wise, the magical realism of the fable is not so much an excuse for literary intertextuality as a mechanism for protecting the protagonist in a universe of his own that is separate from reality. As stated at the beginning, the author defines aging in the novel as a paralysis in the face of time. The fable reveals an attempt by the protagonist to enclose himself in a childlike universe in which reality is perceived through transformative magical illusion. Lawlor argues that Deleuze and Guattari’s “becominganimal” entails becoming a child, for “having shed the form of an adult, one is able to become something other than an adult man. One becomes a child, but becoming-child means that one frees the potentialities that the molar form of adult man was enclosing” (173). The fable would thus function as a “time capsule” that is protective of childhood and in which the different species that interact share an attitude that is defiant of the “hierarchies of age” (Tipper 160).

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This reclaiming of the childhood phase is all the more dependent on the bond with Lily given American culture’s emphasis, especially from the nineteenth century onward, on instilling empathy and domestic values in children through the caretaking of animals (Grier 127–181). At the same time, Western culture points to the need of eventually outgrowing emotional bonds with these same animals in order to reach normative adulthood. In other words, animals have proven very useful so as to mark the boundaries between the different developmental stages that allow us to understand the maturation and subsequent aging of the subject. Therefore, the magical universe that occupies Ted’s perceptions stands as an ode to childhood, which is not to be understood as an actual, biological age but as a geography of the mind that bends at will the otherwise asphyxiating limitations imposed by reality. The use of fable as a means of salvaging and recovering childhood goes hand in hand with Ted’s sense of temporal displacement through his fixation with both the memory of the past and the implacable future. The awareness of the tumor eating away at Lily violently pushes Ted back and forth between the remnants of the past and the foreboding knowledge of the death to come. Trapped within these temporal vectors, there is no longer room for the present, which either becomes immediately extinct and hoarded in the storage of past memories, or represents the pathway leading toward death. Gilles Deleuze argues that “becoming” is a process of simultaneousness “whose characteristic is to elude the present. Insofar as it eludes the present, becoming does not tolerate the separation or the distinction of before and after, or of past and future. It pertains to the essence of becoming to move and to pull in both directions at once” (Deleuze 471). Memory foments this disappearance of the present, manipulating the chronological axes toward the past and the future, projecting and retracting itself into simultaneous movements. Because of her imminent death and her progressive detachment from the world, Lily becomes a symbol of the condensation of those temporal axes. If the novel is an account of aging, it is mainly because, for the narrator, the present has disappeared in favor of a tug of war between the past and the future. Against the fleeting nature of the present, all one can do is try to fix, capture and preserve it in the past. In the space of memory one can be shielded by an eternal life away from lifespans and biological finitude. In this space, one creates a new, timeless age—hence the title of the penultimate section of the novel, “Infinity,” which describes the euthanizing of Lily.

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These obsessive attempts to make sense of time are reflected in the abusive omnipresence of protocols of temporal measurement that structure the novel. Russell argues that the exercise of memorialization “presents a significant opportunity to extend care and responsibility for others beyond the boundaries of life and into an ongoing connection between the living and the deceased” (82). The years, months, days, hours and even minutes that pace the narrative, from the titles of some sections (“Infinity,” “The Invertebrate. Five Years Earlier,” etc.), to the chapters (“Friday Afternoon,” “Midnight,” “2 P.M.,” “Sunday, 4:37, P.M.,” etc.), are not only signs of an inexorable routine marking the countdown. They are also verbal attempts to protect the dog from the illness by chronologically halting and fixing a substantive memory of the two embodied subjects, Ted and Lily, that coexist in their oneness. If time is, above all, spatial measurement, it is the space of the novel and the words housed within what best represent the attempt to stop it. The clinical correlates (from Ted’s initial perception of the tumor next to Lily’s eye, to her multiple seizures, behavioral changes, and the blindness that lead up to her sacrifice) give shape to the hourglass of her final days. The unique cancer diary that the text becomes stands as Ted’s epitaph to his companion.

Metaphors of the Sick, Elderly Dog Lily’s terminal illness is a synecdoche of humans’ own eventual lapse into the sickness, senility and impairment that awaits at an elderly stage. Even Ted identifies Lily’s diagnosis as his own: “the octopus has almost as tight a grip on my head as it does on Lily’s” (Rowley 13). In her famous collection of essays on the cultural metaphorization of tuberculosis, cancer and AIDS, Illness and Metaphor (1991), Susan Sontag alludes to a growing body of scientific literature on the emotional causes of cancer, among which is “being depressed or unsatisfied with [one’s] li[f]e” (51). In the novel, this frustration acquires the carcinogenic hues of the dog’s illness. Like the octopus that metaphorically suffocates Lily with his tentacles, Ted is equally smothered by the crisis of aging. Sontag describes cancer as a “growth” (12), often invisible, as incessant as it is progressive, within a body. The OED definition she provides, “anything that frets, corrodes, corrupts or consumes slowly and secretly” (11), is certainly analogous to the deterioration of aging. Because of its hidden, consuming and unrelenting nature, the carcinogenic emerges as an ideal metaphor to

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symbolize Ted’s sense of aging. In addition, the location of Lily’s tumor also mirrors Ted’s subdual to his own brain. Ted is also a victim of the cerebral, and his mental breakdown is symptomatic of his sense of helplessness against time. “I realize perhaps the octopus is hiding on my head” (Rowley 16), he says. The effects of cancer described by Sontag—“desexualizing,” “crippl[ing] vitality,” and “deaden[ing] desire” (13)—are also experienced by Ted, who spirals further into social isolation alongside Lily: “as Lily aged... Doogie’s predecessor warned me that she might develop something he called Enclosed World Syndrome... Lily did rather quickly come to find comfort only in smaller and smaller concentric circles with our house at the center and, coincidentally, so did I” (127). As Ted and Lily are unified by an illness that they both share (experientially, not clinically), the former launches into an exploration of the self. As if scanning his own brain, he observes how “less than twenty-four hours since the arrival of our…. cephalopod houseguest, I already recognize a trait we share: I, too, am hiding in plain sight. I am walking through life invisible, skulking like a failure, hoping few people notice me” (16). Ted and Lily’s unified quest against cancer and its metaphors is further problematized by the character’s inarticulateness and inability to assimilate the illness. In the same way that some brain tumors lead to aphasia and dysarthria, Ted struggles with verbalizing and expressing the reason for his frustration. “Since the arrival of the octopus... [i]t’s impossible to talk about what I can’t bring myself to say,” Ted confesses (Rowley 128). Not surprisingly, it is the acquisition and recovery of speech that marks a turning point in the novel. Against stoic recommendations to placate disease by not “giv[ing] way to any grief,” Sontag describes how nowadays what is prescribed is “self-expression, from talking it out to the primal scream” (54). The “primal scream” is comparable to the process of becoming-animal in Deleuze and Guattari, who argue that the work of art is the expression of the transformation of the subject that becomes animal. “If the writer is a sorcerer, this is because to write is to become, to write is traversed by strange becomings, which are not becomingswriter, but becomings-rat, becomings-insect, becomings-wolf, etc.” (A Thousand Plateaus 240). Without this creative process, becoming runs the risk of turning into “a bare repetitive circle of the same behaviour, or worse, suicide” (Lawlor 171). The writing process, to “draw with words” (Rowley 181), as Ted puts it, is the metanarrative corollary of the tattoo with which he inscribes his body in the fifth section of the novel, “Ink”: “since the octopus blinded Lily with ink, I’ve harbored a

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growing obsession with getting marked by ink myself, creating a concord between us” (177). It is precisely this moment of “writing” and “being written on” that represents the narrator’s definitive conversion process. The use of writing, metaphorically represented in Ted’s tattoo, marks the culmination of the process—the process, according to Deleuze and Guattari, of “composing a body with the animal” (A Thousand Plateaus 302), or what Ted might call in the novel “sympathy, unanimity, or the desire to mastermind a fraternity with only Lily and me as members” (Rowley 177).

Conclusion: Becoming Lily More than symbolizing the classical overcoming of trauma through the death of the animal, the end of the novel suggests the narrator’s definitive conversion into Lily, thus transcending the division of substances that separated them. “YES! YOU! ARE! LIVING! YOUR! FULL! LIFE!” (Rowley 298), we read. We are left to wonder whether it is Lily’s enthusiastic voice speaking from a world beyond who celebrates Ted’s psychological recovery or whether it is Ted speaking to himself. The image is certainly reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari’s description of a bark in the form of a human voice that expresses the molecular nature shared with the dog. At the end of the narrative, a coping Ted surprises himself by almost immediately falling in love with a man by the name of Byron, whom he immediately associates with the English Romantic poet, who also dedicated an epitaph to his Newfoundland, Boatswain. Ted is freed from the anguish of aging because he has accepted its inevitability, and thus learned to live with it by “fully” and “truly” living. It is to Lily’s life and death that he owes this lesson: “most of all, I am thankful for Lily, who, since she entered my life, has taught me everything I know about patience and kindness and meeting adversity with quiet dignity and grace” (Rowley 122). It is the assimilation of these values and the ability to live by them in his future relationship with Byron that finally release Ted from his existential paralysis, allowing him to reposition himself in the present.

Works Cited Baume, Matt. “Lily and the Octopus Author Steven Rowley Talks Dogs and Dustin Hoffmann.” Hornet, 8 September 2017, https://hornet.com/sto

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Index

A African American men, 125–128, 162, 163 Ageism, 2, 3, 8, 9, 22, 48, 85, 156, 157, 164 Agency, 39, 43, 83, 96, 111, 135, 136, 177 American Dream, 5, 77 Arab, 4, 7, 139–141, 143, 145–147, 149–151 Arjouch, Kristine J., 141 Armengol, Josep M., 7, 41, 45, 88, 135 Autobiography, 4, 97, 106, 109, 113, 167, 181

B Barthes, Roland, 5, 110 Bartholomaeus, Clare, 118 Beauvoir, Simone de, 8, 9, 21, 31, 64, 87, 88, 155, 156, 158, 166–168 Bellis, Jack de, 25

Black macho, 127 manhood, 7, 125, 129, 135 masculinities, 7, 125–128, 131–135 Brennan, Zoe, 3, 157 Brittan, Arthur, 19, 63, 71

C Calasanti, Toni, 53, 54, 112 Castration, 114, 163 Christou, Anastasia, 42 Civil Rights Movement, 64 Collins, Patricia, 127, 130, 136 Connell, Raewyn, 19, 22, 49 Cultural capture, 178 Cumming, Elaine, 21

D Death, 6, 15–18, 27, 30, 31, 36, 42, 55–57, 83, 87, 95, 98–101, 104, 105, 111, 115, 116, 119, 126,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. M. Armengol (ed.), Aging Masculinities in Contemporary U.S. Fiction, Global Masculinities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71596-0

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INDEX

145, 146, 149, 159, 161, 172, 179, 181, 183, 186 Deleuze, Gilles, 173–177, 182, 183, 185, 186 Depression, 4, 41, 68, 141, 158, 164 Diaspora Detroit’s Greek, 37 Indian, 36 studies, 36 Dirty old man, 25, 160, 161 Disengagement, 21, 147, 149

Hearn, Jeff, 48, 49, 52, 54, 55, 57 Heart attack (stroke), 30 Heidegger, Martin, 106, 107 Henry, William E., 21 Hero/ism, 16, 20, 22, 31, 70, 73, 74, 178 Homosexual, 7, 87, 127, 164, 179, 180 Hooks, bell, 68, 126, 136 Huckleberry Finn, 30 Humanimalism, 174

E Elkins, Richard, 45 Emerson, Ralph W., 30 Entitlement (sense of), 47, 53, 54, 64

I Intersex, 37, 43–45 Invisibility, 2, 48, 49, 54, 88, 112, 118, 126, 156, 157, 168 Irigaray, Luce, 97, 102–107

F Flood, Michael, 1 Freedom, 17, 21, 27, 30, 114, 143–145, 148 Friedan, Betty, 64, 156 Friendship, 2, 4, 6, 74, 75, 162 Frontiersman, 6, 78, 79 G Gay, 4, 7, 158, 162, 164, 165, 168, 172, 177, 179–181 Ghettoization, 50 Gilmore, David D., 20 Gilmore, Leigh, 106 Gilroy, Paul, 40 Grosz, Elizabeth, 48 Guattari, Félix, 173–177, 182, 185, 186 Gullette, Margaret Morganroth, 50, 65, 156, 166 H Haraway, Donna, 88, 89

J Jackson, David, 157 Jackson, Ronald, 128 Jew/ish, 4, 96–98, 100, 104, 118, 167 Joyce, James, 23 K Kierkegaard, Soren, 17 Kimmel, Michael S., 1, 2, 19, 20, 22, 39, 64, 65, 70, 77, 78, 80 King, Dave, 45 King Lear, 50, 52, 53 King, Neal, 53, 54, 112 L Lauretis, Teresa de, 3 Lemelle, Anthony, 127, 128 Leverenz, David, 9, 51, 53, 158, 164 Loneliness, 4, 56, 143, 181 Loss, 4, 5, 22, 48, 50, 52–55, 57, 58, 64, 86, 88, 96, 98, 100, 101,

INDEX

104, 105, 109, 140, 142, 149, 158–161, 167, 172, 176 of independence, 8 M Maierhofer, Roberta, 2, 4 Martin, Sara, 127 Masturbation, 114 McLeod, John, 37, 40 Melville, Herman, 30, 181 Memory, 6, 16, 17, 19, 26, 42, 50, 72, 74, 75, 83, 97, 109–111, 114, 116, 118, 143, 146, 172, 181, 183, 184 Migrant (immigrant), 6, 7, 35–44, 85, 97, 98, 100, 104, 140–145, 147, 149–151 N National identity, 43, 98 O Öberg, Peter, 22, 49 Other, 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 16, 19, 21, 23, 24, 26, 28–30, 36, 37, 40, 41, 43–45, 47, 49, 51–53, 55, 57, 58, 68, 69, 71–73, 78, 79, 81–83, 85, 87–89, 96–100, 102–106, 112, 114, 115, 117, 119, 125–132, 135, 136, 139–141, 143, 145, 147, 156, 158–164, 166, 167, 172–176, 178, 182–184 P Patriarch, 41, 50–52, 83, 142, 143, 148, 149, 162, 164 Performativity, 24, 103 Pfeil, Fred, 63 Plato, 166, 178 Posthumanism, 89

191

Proust, Marcel, 17 R Racism/t, 2, 84, 129–131, 133, 146, 163 Rape, 71, 131, 134 Retire/ment, 4, 8, 18, 41, 48, 51–55, 86 Routes (migration), 40, 41, 43, 45 Rubin, Gayle, 23 S Schlesinger, Arthur, 20 Scripts, 3, 57, 157 Segal, Lynne, 2, 8, 65, 72, 126, 156, 157, 160–162, 165, 167 Self-made man, 39, 78 Sexual prowess, 4, 53, 64, 126, 131, 158, 167 Silver, Catherine B., 21, 22, 52, 140 Smith, Paul, 70 Sontag, Susan, 64, 88, 156, 184, 185 Spector-Mersel, Gabriela, 3, 54, 157 Suicide, 8, 30, 68, 69, 127, 185 Synecdoche of the penis, 51, 52 T Tarrant, Anna, 49, 55, 118 Thane, Pat, 8, 9, 160, 166, 167 Thompson, Edward H., 2, 3, 5, 157 Tocqueville, Alexis of, 22 Transhumanism, 89 Trauma/tic experience, 96, 98, 105, 130 W Watson, Johnathan, 114 Waxman, Barbara, 4, 157, 158 Whelehan, Imelda, 64, 65 Wolf, Naomi, 64, 175 Woodward, Kathleen, 156, 166