Martin Hipsky

Department of English
Ohio Wesleyan University
mahipsky@owu.edu

 

Being lectured by the President on fiscal responsibility is a little bit like Tony Soprano talking to me about law and order in the country.

Senator John Kerry, televised presidential debate, 13 October 2004

 

In the autumn of 2001, novelist Jonathan Franzen said of his burgeoning best-seller, The Corrections, “I feel like I’m solidly in the high-art literary tradition.” The comment, occasioned by Oprah Winfrey’s selection of the novel for her televised book club, sparked a media debate over the appropriateness of such a high-brow attitude in twenty-first-century American culture, whose egalitarian array of market niches would (some alleged) belie any old-fashioned binary between elite and mass cultures.¹ It was a popular magazine, I want to suggest, that supplied us later that year with a cognitive map to clarify the debate: the Atlantic Monthly, whose oft-cited David Brooks article, “One Nation, Slightly Divisible,” popularized the notion of “Red America” and “Blue America.” Brooks’s piece torques the status poles of elite v. mass culture with a political wrench; though he does not discuss literature, his investigation of contemporary markers of consumption offers a sociopolitical critique of the judgment of taste, in an analysis we might call “Bourdieu lite” for twenty-first-century U.S. culture. This red-blue trope of national politics has since been refined and elaborated in the popular media, most recently in John Sperling’s widely read The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America (2004), which proposes that “a closer look at this divide reveals that it is not only political but also geographic, economic, religious, cultural, and social” (2). I will not here examine the theoretical viability of this multidimensional schism; instead, I want to propose that if such an admittedly schematic divide does exist, then Franzen’s novel of middle-class angst, together with its pre-eminent television analogue, The Sopranos, offers us a cultural index of the contemporary habitus of much of “blue America.” Indeed, for the eager audiences of the various “blue” demographics, The Corrections and The Sopranos afford parallel experiences–the one in the realm of literary fiction, the other in the realm of visual narrative–of a collective interpellation at once “straight” and ironic. These narratives abjure the formal experimentalism of Pynchonesque or David Lynch-style “high postmodernism” and offer instead a distinctively “accessible” and pleasurable incorporation of modernist flourishes and postmodern play into traditional realist narrative, thereby achieving considerable popular appeal among audiences who, long since immersed in the schizophrenic intensities of near-universal commodification, can powerfully “relate” to the narrative farragoes of psychic fragmentation, the “decline” of the family, and diffuse paranoia now on general offer.

 

Most especially, I would suggest that this novel and television series exhibit a narrative logic that figures the political unconscious of the post-Cold War, professional-managerial class. In recent years, white-collar strata have been experiencing not a confident adjustment to Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” (the catchy paradigm of just over a decade ago), but instead the anxieties of self-definition that have attended the loss of American capitalism’s reverse mirror image–the easily recognized, geographically specific, nationally grounded world system that was the Soviet sphere. As a result, these prominent texts of popular culture among the (largely) white-collar middle class offer us a metonymic realism without the consolations of myth or symbol, without the telos or metaphysics of master metaphor. Firmly established within the “low mimetic” modes of comedy and realism, even as they are intermittently destabilized by postmodern ironies and self-reflexivity, these popular narratives might be said to express the contemporary disquietudes and pathologies of “business as usual,” within a social imaginary that, to extend Jameson’s characterization of some postmodern theorists, is perhaps suffering from a “winner loses” logic (Postmodernism 5). A reductive way to express this notion would be to suggest that these texts address those who suffer from middle-class liberal guilt; but I want to argue that such a seemingly cliché formula concerning the reading and viewing audiences actually takes on textures that are unique to our time, and that these two texts effectively produce their representations of the contemporary white, bourgeois, nuclear family through a two-sided appeal to both domestic anxieties and what I will call “global paranoia.”

 

Needless to say, to declare the emergence of a new strain of postmodern sensibility, on the evidence of two distinctively American narratives, would be foolhardy; the notion that these texts appeal especially to “millennial liberals” is intended to be conjunctural and speculative–an exploratory idea that would extend the logic of some recent discussions of the potential tendencies or vectors of postmodern texts in the contemporary situation. In part, what I am proposing about my case studies is inspired by Patrick O’Donnell’s analysis of representative cultural texts of the 1990s, from the popular films Groundhog Day (1993) and The Truman Show (1998) to Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale (1995) and DeLillo’s Underworld (1997). O’Donnell suggests that such

 

narratives of paranoia . . . divulge [a] pathology in the social identifications and historical investitures of deeply conflicted postmodern subjects, who celebrate fluidity, schizophrenia, and deterritorialization . . . yet whose obsession with boundaries and boundary crossing suggests a collective nostalgia for the old binaries, economies, orders, and nations. (12)

 

Generalizing from these narrative instances, O’Donnell advances his own version of the “winner loses” logic, limning a structure of feeling in which “it appears that the trilateral paranoia of the cold war is now in the process of being internalized, scattered, localized, and reiterated at a multitude of sites–from Oklahoma City, Waco, and Ruby Ridge, to Bosnia, the White House, and the security firewalls of the Internet–giving rise . . . to a perverse nostalgia for a paranoia in which the persecutor had a more or less recognizable face and a clear geographical location” (12).

 

One could protest that in the early 2000s, the collective paranoia of our national culture has once again generated the allegedly “recognizable faces” and “clear geographical locations” of an external, enemy Other. In the analysis of my two case studies to follow, however, I accept O’Donnell’s identification of two-sided, schizophrenic-paranoid tendency within post-Cold War postmodernism as a trenchant and convincing one, which has by no means been obviated by the event of September 11, 2001, and the events that have followed it. Marianne DeKoven has identified the view among some observers that “postmodernism/ postmodernity as the defining paradigm of the contemporary cultural-political moment . . . may seem to have receded, or even to have lost relevance, in the face of what is now perceived as the challenge to modernity represented by the September 11 attacks” (xv). She goes on to refute this view, asserting not only that postmodernism/postmodernity remains “the most salient paradigm for understanding the current global situation” (xv), but also that “because postmodernity is now so well established as a cultural dominant, we are so entirely defined by it, it has become invisible. We no longer ‘see’ it as a phenomenon” (9). I would like to qualify DeKoven’s latter assertion by suggesting that, in light of the schematic of John Sperling’s “great divide,” it is true that certain members of the cultural intelligentsia no longer see, or choose to refine and extend the analysis of, postmodernism as a phenomenon. But perhaps this “phenomenon” continues to be felt, albeit not necessarily by name, by those many denizens of “metro America” who have patently cathected on such popular narratives as The Sopranos and The Corrections. It is the “blue” presidential candidate of 2004, and not his opponent, who would dare to refer to The Sopranos in the quip that stands as epigraph above. John Kerry’s rhetorical use of Tony Soprano may “decide” this ambivalent character as the antithesis of “law and order,” but the senator’s old-fashioned take only underscores a symptomatic paradox: Tony Soprano’s popularity among viewers seems to hinge, at least in part, on their identification, as O’Donnell’s “deeply conflicted postmodern subjects,” with the fundamentally lawless character’s “nostalgia for the old binaries, economies, orders, and nations”–an identification probably not unrelated to the series’ more commonsensically identified lures of sex, violence, and naughty language.

 

As for the relationship of “retro” America to the latest manifestations of postmodern narrative, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri suggest that

 

Christian fundamentalisms in the US . . . present themselves as movements against social modernization, re-creating what is imagined to be a past social formation based on sacred texts . . . . The most prominent social agenda of the current Christian fundamentalist groups is centered on the (re)creation of the stable and hierarchical nuclear family, which is imagined to have existed in a previous era, and thus they are driven specifically in their crusades against abortion and homosexuality. (Empire 148)

 

Hardt and Negri treat this “social modernization” as continuous, if not synonymous, with “postmodernity”; and so by their argument, postmodernism has by no means “become invisible” to the cultural right. Of course, the cultural right–quite distinctly from the more secular, free-market right–views postmodernism as the depraved phenomenon which goes by the name of “cultural relativism,” and the great popularity of The Corrections and The Sopranos, among thousands of other exhibits, is alleged to represent our contemporary decadence. And so we arrive at the obverse–literally, “the more conspicuous of two possible sides”²–of the diffuse, externally focused paranoia offered in these two popular narratives: their inward-facing, painfully equivocal “(re)creation of the stable and hierarchical nuclear family,” in representations which are dismissed as anathema by the tastemakers of “retro” America, but regarded with fascination by denizens of “metro” America. My discussion here will move from the “innermost” to the “outermost” of these zones of representation, and will limn the character of these two texts’ socially symbolic domains: the realm of “deep,” psychic interiority; the arena of the ironized family drama, both nuclear, and in the case of The Sopranos, broadly extended; the anxious, constantly traversed margin between the white, middle-class household and national structures of race and class; and finally, the milieu of post-Cold War capitalism, with its attendant paranoias of globalization. In a set of noteworthy parallels, these texts oscillate between traditional realism and postmodern play, between stable and unstable ironies, between visceral domestic anxieties and abstract global paranoia; they share a distinctive mimetic complex that distills many of the socio-cultural ambivalences characteristic of the early twenty-first-century urban and exurban middle classes.

 

I. Versions of Interiority

 

Within the first of the socially symbolic domains just listed, that of psychic interiority, both narratives offer us compelling panoramas of inner space that verge on the authentically surrealistic, but that are in each case reined in, their potentially destabilizing vistas of the untrammeled unconscious shuttered by their service to plot and character development. Instructive here is the contrast with, say, the aleatory Pynchon of Gravity’s Rainbow, or the perversely obtuse Lynch of Mulholland Drive. The oneiric sequences of The Sopranos, for all their psychic force, serve important narrative functions; there is no excess of signification, no notable transgression of realist representation. Tony’s dreamscapes, set within the perspectival sweep of the ocean shore or the seaside boardwalk, can appear inspired by the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, but their action serves to confirm the darkest hunches of his mafioso Realpolitik and to lend psychological motivation to his waking acts of reprisal. Even the dream of a talking fish (Episode 26, “Funhouse”), for all its mordant absurdism, advances the plot in an essential way, as it confirms Tony’s suspicion about an FBI informant in his ranks (the fish tells him, “you passed me over for promotion–you knew”). Moreover, like Tony’s recounted dream of a “waterbird” that flies off with his castrated penis (Episode 1, “The Sopranos”), the orphic grouper on ice, symbolizing that “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero will “sleep with the fishes,”³ suggests a by-the-book manifestation of Freudian condensation (Verdichtung) and displacement (Verschiebung). These and other dreams in the series are central to the rich layering of the narrative, and unusually daring for a television show; at the same time, they should not be construed as experimental or avant-garde, conforming as they do to a straightforwardly Freudian symptomatology of the unconscious. Indeed, one may be tempted at moments to read them as a flatly parodying Freudianism. But that would unfairly impute a too-smug knowingness to the show’s creators–especially to creator and executive producer David Chase, who has referred earnestly to his own experience in psychoanalysis–and would seem out of keeping with the tone of the series as a whole, which does not generally sacrifice dramatic storyline to gratuitous cerebral display.

 

At the same time, however, the series self-consciously demystifies or textualizes its oneiric sequences, depriving them of their more old-fashioned potential as narrative sites of mystery or transcendence. The series’ pilot episode signals this demystification through its prominent reference to Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. It is Tony Soprano himself who, at one point in his therapy, defensively asserts, “I had a semester and a half of college, so I understand Freud.” The line is funny, but Tony is no ignoramus; as psychotherapist Jennifer Melfi gently nudges him into reading the ducks in his pool as a figure for his family, she reveals that she is indeed, in some respects, an unreconstructed Freudian. In a later episode we hear Melfi’s ex-husband Richard warn her, “Don’t bust my balls with Freud by numbers” (Episode 8, “The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti”). More generally, Tony’s initial allusion to Freud points to one of this narrative’s distinctive counterpoints to its representations of the character’s psychic interiority: its occasional intertextualities, not only (as in common postmodern practice) with variously commingled high- and low-art figures of modern subjectivity–from Hawthorne and Melville to “The Happy Wanderer” and Grace Slick’s drug-induced white rabbit–but with postmodern theories of subjectivity. Tony Soprano’s adolescent son, for instance, encounters a crisis of meaning after a high-school encounter with Nietzsche’s writings (Episode 20, “D-Girl”). Meadow Soprano takes a course at Columbia University entitled “Images of Hypercapitalist Self-Advancement in the Studio Era” (Episode 28, “Proshai, Livushka”). Another episode features the following exchange between Melfi and her son, a student at Bard College:

 

MELFI
So, how’s that English class going? Comparative literature, whatever . . .

 

JASON
Comp lit was last semester. I told you I’m taking Lacan, deconstructive theory.

 

MELFI
Ooooh! Deconstructivist, excuse me . . . And your grandfather a contractor!

 

(Episode 24, “House Arrest”)

 

To see this as a gratuitous pot-shot at poststructuralist or psychoanalytic theory would be too simple; it could just as reductively be taken as a satiric stab at anti-intellectualism. In this scene Melfi is confrontationally drunk, having downed vodka in her office out of fear of her patient Tony Soprano, and she is only too pleased with her broad joke, the hostility of which may well be sparked by the intellectual threat that Lacan presents to such an old-school Freudian as herself. Then, too, there is the oedipal reversal of the scene, in which Jason, trying to control his mother, is resentful and embarrassed by her transgressive behavior when she hits a fellow restaurant patron. My perhaps too cumbersome reading of a deft and weightless scene is meant to show its textualized layerings, which should not be mistaken for easy satire, whether of intellectual pretensions or of anti-intellectualism. There is postmodern pleasure in its undecideable tone, but what I want to argue as distinctive here is the lightness of the self-reflexive touch, which is so clearly subordinate to The Sopranos‘s realist priorities of plot and character.

 

The Corrections, for its part, represents its characters’ interior states in a bricolage of literary modes, predominated by traditional, free indirect discourse, but dipping occasionally into high-modernist and high-postmodern effects. Here is a transcription, from early in the novel, of Alfred Lambert’s consciousness:

 

He began a sentence: “I am–” but when he was taken by surprise, every sentence became an adventure in the woods; as soon as he could no longer see the light of the clearing from which he’d entered, he would realize that the crumbs he’d dropped for bearings had been eaten by birds, silent deft darting things which he couldn’t quite see in the darkness but which were so numerous and swarming in their hunger that it seemed as if they were the darkness, as if the darkness weren’t uniform, weren’t an absence of light but a teeming and corpuscular thing, and indeed when as a studious teenager he’d encountered the word “crepuscular” in McKay’s Treasury of English Verse, the corpuscles of biology had bled into his understanding of the word, so that for his entire adult life he’d seen in twilight a corpuscularity, as of the graininess of the high-speed film necessary for photography under conditions of low ambient light, as of a kind of sinister decay . . . but in the instant of realizing he was lost, time became marvelously slow and he discovered hitherto unguessed eternities in the space between one word and the next, or rather he became trapped in that space between words and could only stand and watch as time sped on without him, the thoughtless boyish part of him crashing on out of sight blindly through the woods while he, trapped, the grownup Al, watched in oddly impersonal suspense to see if the panic-stricken little boy might, despite no longer knowing where he was or at what point he’d entered the woods of this sentence, still manage to blunder into the clearing where Enid was waiting for him, unaware of any woods–“packing my suitcase,” he heard himself say. This sounded right. Verb, possessive, noun. Here was a suitcase in front of him, an important confirmation. He’d betrayed nothing. (11)

 

Through the patriarch Alfred Lambert, especially, the novel offers set-pieces of psychic interiority worthy of Virginia Woolf–or, as in the talking feces episode, of William Burroughs. But of course these moments generally represent Alfred’s psychotic breaks, which are induced by Parkinsonian dementia; no mystical insights soften their darkly comic terror. There may be a schizophrenic opacity to such passages, even a spatialization of the temporal, but their subordination to narrative purposes is quite evident; Franzen is not generally interested in the metonymic illustration of any collective schizophrenia induced by consumer capitalism. This passage is not offered to readers in the high-modernist spirit of the exploration of the dialectic between subject and object, or of the psychic-discursive constitution of the bourgeois self; this is instead postmodernist pastiche–neither parody nor homage–impelled not by textual self-reflexivity, but by a predominantly realist drive to capture the inner state of encroaching mental illness.

 

There is an evident connection in the above-quoted purple patch to theories of poststructuralism in general, and Derrida in particular. But again, we are witnessing neither a parody nor a promotion of critical theory; this is rather the localized borrowing of contemporary philosophical topoi with a view toward psychological verisimilitude. Witness, by way of further example, Chip Lambert’s near-encounter with a nervous breakdown. Abandoning his visiting parents, he rushes through the streets of Manhattan to seek out his would-be screenplay editor:

 

in New York you never had to go far to find filth and rage. A nearby street sign seemed to read Filth Avenue . . . Through the window of a cab he read GAP ATHLETIC as GAL PATHETIC. He read Empire Realty as Vampire Reality . . . He read Cross Pens as Cross Penises, he read ALTERATIONS as ALTERCATIONS.

 

An optometrist’s window offered: HEADS EXAMINED. (102-5)

 

These skittering signifiers offer a brief index of the character’s paranoid projections, but they are tightly linked to the break-up conversation that he has just had with his ex-lover, Julia, who has pointed out the sexually exploitative features of his failed screenplay.

 

Elsewhere, The Corrections features a greater number of references to postmodern theory than does The Sopranos, but their thematic deployment is similarly ambivalent, oscillating between the parody of critical theory’s supposed pretensions, and the sober revelation of characters’ interior states. Witness Chip’s symbolic surrender of his critical oppositionality, as he sells his theory books to the Strand Bookstore:

 

He turned away from their reproachful spines, remembering how each of them had called out in a bookstore with a promise of a radical critique of late-capitalist society, and how happy he’d been to take them home. But Jürgen Habermas didn’t have Julia’s long, cool, pear-tree limbs, Theodor Adorno didn’t have Julia’s grapy smell of lecherous pliability, Fred Jameson didn’t have Julia’s artful tongue. By the beginning of October . . . he’d sold his feminists, his formalists, his structuralists, his poststructuralists, his Freudians, and his queers. (92-3)

 

In part, of course, the passage satirizes Chip’s complicity with the commodification of “the radical critique of late-capitalist society”; there is a familiar postmodern irony in the fact that the theory of lidibinal investment in the fetishized commodity is conveyed by some of the very texts that Chip is selling in exchange for his libidinal “investment” in Julia. But we may also witness, in Alfred’s psychic textures, an abstract intensity that owes its narrative poignancy to the same contemporary philosophies (“his poststructuralists, his Freudians”) that we have presumably just seen spoofed:

 

Like an illogical woman in a dream who was both Enid and not Enid, the chair he’d pictured had been at once completely an electric chair and completely popsicle sticks. It came to him now, more forcefully than ever, that maybe every “real” thing in the world was as shabbily protean, underneath, as this electric chair. Maybe his mind was even now doing to the seemingly real hardwood floor on which he knelt exactly what it had done, hours earlier, to the unseen chair. Maybe a floor became truly a floor only in his mental reconstruction of it. The floor’s nature was to some extent inarguable, of course; the wood definitely existed and had measurable properties. But there was a second floor, the floor as mirrored in his head, and he worried that the beleaguered “reality” that he championed was not the reality of an actual floor in an actual bedroom but the reality of a floor in his head which was idealized and no more worthy, therefore, than one of Enid’s silly fantasies.

 

The suspicion that everything was relative. That the “real” and “authentic” might not be simply doomed but fictive to begin with. That his feeling of righteousness, of uniquely championing the real, was just a feeling. These were the suspicions that had lain in ambush in all those motel rooms. These were the deep terrors beneath the flimsy beds. (274-5)

 

Franzen may or may not have had in mind here Plato’s elaboration of the theory of forms from Book Ten of The Republic, in which Socrates uses a table and a bed, if not a chair, by way of example (“These three, then–painter, joiner, God–are responsible for three different kinds of bed” [Plato 69]). But the congruencies with twentieth-century critiques of metaphysics are plain, and the narrative uses to which they are here put cannot be called parodic; they are integral to the tragic realism of the character’s Innerlichkeit.⁴

 

To complement these interiorized scenes, both novel and series offer a thematic of psychoanalysis and psychotropic drugs that is at once meticulously realist and a recurring gesture toward (an ultimately false) transcendence. Tony Soprano’s therapy sessions have drawn praise from psychoanalytic professionals for their verisimilitude, but there are precious few breakthroughs or transformative epiphanies to be witnessed here. And even as Franzen’s drug “Mexican A” serves as a marker of contemporary youth culture so hip that the thirty-nine-year-old Chip is far too old to understand it, the drug’s alternative name, Aslan, provides the novel’s single sustained metaphor for spirituality or metaphysics–and one that is too self-consciously nostalgic to be anything but ironic and illusory. Generically, then, this shared register of the two texts–the register of deep interiority–may again be described as at once realist and postmodern, the latter term here meaning specifically the implicit exhaustion of the modernist master narrative of transcendence through the mythical archetypes of a collective unconscious.

 

II. Hybrid Irony amid the Family Romance

 

The persistence of traditional realist modes, marbled through with modernist aesthetics and postmodern allusiveness–this in itself would not mark The Corrections or The Sopranos as especially noteworthy within the context of the recent development of popular narrative, notwithstanding their textual references, unavailable to narrative creations of a quarter-century ago, to the theories themselves of postmodernism. Nor, of course, would the shared themes of the family romance seem on first glance to offer anything especially new under the sun. The Home Box Office channel spins wordplay on the mafia in its promotional slogans–“Family Redefined,” “Spend some quality time with your favorite family,” “They are the one family everyone listens to,” etc.–but of course such puns had long since lost their pop-cultural freshness in the wake of the Godfather films and their various progeny of the 1980s, and the show does literally center upon the nuclear family of the title. Indeed, it can be argued that the tremendous popularity of the series lies in its juxtaposition of the extraordinary–the intrigue and violence of organized crime–with the ordinary–the ultra-familiar, up-to-the-cultural-moment depiction of American middle-class family life. Similarly, the schematic outline of The Corrections, with its five major chapters divvied up among the five members of the Lambert family nucleus–the middle child, the eldest child, the parents, the youngest child, and the family ensemble, respectively–is strikingly traditional, even as the novel gets its narrative energy from the centrifugal force of the three adult children’s desire to design their own lives as “corrections” of their parents’ errors.

 

Nonetheless, on the level of their traditionally realist representation, these texts’ treatment of the nuclear family shares a distinctively ironic cathexis, imbricated within what Patrick O’Donnell has labeled the contemporary “obsession with boundaries and boundary crossing,” and suggestive of “a collective nostalgia for the old binaries, economies, orders, and nations” (12). An emblem of this fixation is Melfi’s jab at her son–“Ooooh! Deconstructivist, excuse me . . . And your grandfather a contractor!” Along with the significances I have already noted, the joke registers the generalized anxiety over a decline in morality across the generations, especially in the context of socio-economic upward mobility. This is an anxiety set in place within the first five minutes of the pilot episode, and a recurrent theme through The Sopranos‘ five seasons.⁵ As such, this one-liner encapsulates that category of irony, characteristic of both The Corrections and The Sopranos, which is most prevalent in their representations of the nuclear family: an irony which occupies the space between the distanced, ungrounded, blank ironies long associated with a postmodern sensibility, and the old-fashioned, grounded, stable ironies that Wayne Booth defined in his classic A Rhetoric of Irony (1974).

 

This hybrid irony serves as a kind of representational proscenium to the texts’ parallel dramas of generational divides within the family–to, more specifically, the schisms of cultural identity among World War II, Baby Boom, and post-Baby Boom cohorts. When his teenage daughter Meadow (clearly a post-sixties name!) wants to discuss sex at the family breakfast table, Tony tells her, “Out there it’s the 1990s, but in this house it’s 1954” (Episode 11, “Nobody Knows Anything”). In the same season, Tony’s father-figure, Uncle Junior, complains about Tony to his mother Livia: “These kids today . . . He’s part of a whole generation. Remember the crazy hair and the dope? Now it’s fags in the military” (Episode 1, “The Sopranos”). As these contrasting generational identifications suggest, Tony Soprano’s moral and cultural values (on their realist stratum—the fact of his criminally violent behavior registers meta-realistically, as I will discuss below) ambivalently figure both pre- and post-sixties cultural sensibilities, scrambling the clear binaries so dear to those who favor a straightforward narrative of the historical degeneration of “family values” in U.S. society. David Chase and his series co-creators are well aware that, as Hardt and Negri suggest,

 

the purity and wholesomeness of the stable, nuclear heterosexual family heralded by Christian fundamentalists . . . never existed in the U.S. The “traditional family” that serves as their ideological foundation is merely a pastiche of values and practices that derives more from television programs than from any real historical experiences within the institution of the family. (148)

 

Chase and company have a lot of wicked fun in revealing such ideological projections to be holograms of a past that never was. But these frequently conjured simulacra are complex, part parody and part pastiche. As Uncle Junior lodges his complaint with Tony’s mother Livia, he represents a savage undercutting of the ideological closure of the preceding scene, in which Tony has had a sentimentalized breakthrough with his surrogate son Christopher. His biological father being dead, Christopher has complained that Tony withholds his parental love, and the father-figure has apologized: “You’re right. That’s how I was parented.” Viewers of the original screen-cast of this pilot episode may well have thought that this scene of masculine embrace and “father-son reconciliation” offered a pastiche: the upbeat dénouement, standard in American television drama, to one of the storyline’s family conflicts. But then we segue to the final scene, in which Livia and Uncle Junior, mother and father-figure, begin to plot the murder of the son. The all-too-evident parody of the notion itself of the generational decline of family values offers a stable irony; Livia and Junior are representatives of the World-War-II –or “Greatest”–Generation, just as Tony is supposed by his elders to be a stereotypically self-indulgent Baby Boomer, and Christopher is supposed by Tony to be a stereotypically self-indulgent Generation X-er. Reinforcing the stability of this irony is Livia’s name, an allusion to the wife of Augustus, who was used by the Caesar as a symbol of the restoration of ancient “family values” to the leadership of Rome. But of course this latter allusion is fairly high-brow, and with the undertow of the low-brow we arrive at unstable ironies. What do we do with the generic intertextuality of a father-son reconciliation scene, which refers to countless television holograms of sentimentalized family affirmation? And with the fact that Christopher’s rebellion in this scene takes the form of his threatening to write and sell a Hollywood screenplay of his life in the “family”? We have entered the endless regress of self-referentially ironic undercuttings, of the unstable ironies long seen to be characteristic of postmodern narratives.

 

It is likewise tempting to take the family dinner scene at the center of The Corrections, with its depiction of the monumental repressions that undergird middle-class Midwestern “normality,” as a parody of the family scenes of 1950s and ’60s television sitcoms. This being a novelistic representation, the mimetic relationship to television is different from that of the Sopranos scene just discussed, and offers the stable irony of a nightmare version of, say, The Ozzie and Harriet Show. At the same time, the St. Jude family dinner functions as a counterpoint within Franzen’s text to the Philadelphia family dinners, set in the present, in which the parental policy of a very deliberate permissiveness illustrates Gary’s contention that “his entire life was set up as a correction of his father’s life” (181). This younger father is troubled that his policy is not having its intended effects, however; “to Gary it seemed that the nature of family life itself was changing–that togetherness and filiality and fraternity weren’t valued the way they were when he was young” (166). He fears that his sons are growing up to hate him. And indeed Gary’s familial “corrections” turn out to be, not so much “over-corrections” to which a happy middle course might be the appropriate response, but rather the same, enduring, structural effects of the nuclear family, regardless of the superficial particulars over which he seems to exert some (ineffectual, anyway) agency.

 

So it is that both texts, with their stable ironies, offer their audiences an arch pleasure in the demystifying of the myths of the generational decline of “family values,” but at the same time, and very differently, we perceive that the narratives are propelled along by the engines of Oedipus and Electra. We have here to do with the endless, ironic regress, not only of the simulacra, but also, and quite distinctly, of the psychoanalytically-identified repetitions of the family romance. In The Sopranos, it is the love-denying mother Livia who functions as Tony’s psychic wellspring of malaise, his libidinal fons et origo malorum; in The Corrections, it is the male children’s rebellion against the domineering father, Alfred, which motivates the story arc. The Lambert patriarch is profoundly implicated, too, in his daughter Denise’s sexual adventurism. Her character’s anagnorisis arrives with the discovery of an old graffito of her initials and those of her first sexual partner, enclosed within a valentine heart, spelling “DAD L.[ambert]” (524).

 

The fact that this moment may or may not provide the character of Denise with a traditional epiphany returns us what is perhaps new and different about the two narratives’ classification as postmodern–different, that is, from the (by now) classically postmodern deployment of irony. That difference resides in the undecideability regarding the irony’s function. A stable and socially specific set of ironies can serve the traditionally realist goals of positive social critique and, related to this, character development. If Denise’s surprise discovery is read as anagnorisis, its tragic import is complemented by the possibility that, in light of such moments, the character of Denise will have grown, whether morally or spiritually or epistemologically, etc., by story’s end. If this scene is read instead as a confirmation of the “always already” of psychic structures within the family romance–a possibility of which the characters themselves are explicitly aware–then we are momentarily shifted out of traditional realism and into the symbolic register of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, where all is bounded by textualized, psychic structuration, and so unstable ironies run amok. Here is the moment at which the audience is first introduced to Livia:

 

LIVIA
(in response to a knock at the front door)
Who’s there?

 

TONY
It’s me, ma.

 

LIVIA
Who are you?

 

(Episode 1, “The Sopranos”)

 

On such evidence from the two narrative texts under examination here, it is tempting to pose broad questions about recent developments in postmodern sensibilities. Is it possible that the time of flat and disaffected, postmodern pastiche has past, and that blank ironies have been reabsorbed by a traditional realist narrativity that is nonetheless altered by this subsumption? Do such unstable ironies infect the narratives they inhabit, transforming them, through the resulting tension with mimetically realist ironies, into something distinctive to our moment?

 

III. Domestic Anxiety and the Production of the Middle-Class Family

 

I would like to leave these questions open, and to move into the third and fourth of the mimetic domains I identified at the outset–the nationally mediated experience of the American middle classes, within the milieu of post-Cold War, global capitalism. Leaving the formal and generic issues of self-reflexivity and irony behind, we may now shift into a consideration of the structure of feeling or the prevailing affect of the two narratives in question. This may be labeled an amalgam of domestic anxieties and “global paranoia”: in an analogy with the packaging of computer software, we could say that these twinned affects are “bundled” so as to interpellate the texts’ target demographics by means of conscious and unconscious appeal to certain social preoccupations of our historical moment. These braided psychic energies cross back and forth from the representational domain of American racial and class structures, to that of global capitalism, as the characters experience the effects of these broader phenomena in their quotidian lives. In this section, I want to argue that it is the former of these two affective vectors, domestic anxiety–“domestic” in the double sense of “within the household” and “within the nation”–that initiates and renews the representational production of the white, middle-class nuclear family throughout The Corrections and The Sopranos. More specifically, this anxiety takes the form of apprehensions about the future of the rising generation, within a social universe of class- and race-based inequalities that are felt to be as intractable as indifferent Nature itself.

 

Among the first five seasons of The Sopranos, no episode more compellingly illustrates this representational matrix of domestic angst than “University” (Episode 32). From the perspective of film editing, the episode is visually noteworthy for its matched cross-cutting between the plotlines of Meadow and the young stripper Tracee. The insistent continuity of images contrasts the sufferings of these two twenty-year-old white women, counterpoised as they are on different levels of the socio-economic hierarchy.⁶ Meadow is losing her half-Jewish, half-African-American boyfriend Noah Tanenbaum, in part because of her father’s racial intolerance; Tracee is being exploited and dehumanized by her employers at the Bada Bing strip club, in a plotline that culminates in her being beaten to death by “made man” Ralph Cifaretto. Tony is greatly saddened by the murder of Tracee, a surrogate daughter who had earnestly sought his guidance, but he prevents himself from expressing his emotion directly. The only version of the event that he can construct in his subsequent session with Dr. Melfi arrives in a choked, halting displacement: “A young man who . . . worked for us, Barone Sanitation . . . he died.” Carmela accompanies Tony in this therapy session; he tells her, “You don’t know him . . . he died, that’s all . . . work-related death. Sad when they go so young” (Episode 32, “University”). This verbal refraction of reality–it wasn’t Tracee’s work, but was in a sense her workplace that killed her–links both back and forward to other displacements and transferences on the part of Tony’s psyche. If the migrating family of ducks in the pilot episode established a symbolic leitmotif of the series as a whole (“I afraid I’m gonna lose my family”), Tony’s doomed racehorse Pie-O-My will serve as his psychic index to young Tracee, in whom he saw the image of his daughter. Tony Soprano’s characteristic response to domestic threats is to lash out with retributive violence, and so the eventual beheading of Ralph Cifaretto (“Whoever Did This,” Episode 48) is revenge for the death of the beloved horse, but is also, psychoanalytically speaking, rather overdetermined.⁷

 

Interpreted within the context of the contemporary social experience of the American middle classes, the symbolic doubling of the Tracee episode can be said to involve a generalized dread regarding sociopathic threats to the rising generation;⁸ and at the same time, such moments as Tony’s revenge killing of Ralph are (at least in part) vicariously serving the viewing audience as cathartic fantasies of acting out against phantasmatic social threats. I will have more to say about this latter psychic phenomenon below; the immediate theme of the “University” episode is the relation between the two young women’s social vulnerabilities and their class difference. The stripper Tracee has been reared in hardscrabble circumstances by a mother whose idea of punishment was to hold her child’s hand to an oven burner. As if to mark the gap between the misfortunes of the high-middle class Meadow and the working-class Tracee, the last domestic exchange of the episode features Carmela’s question to her sullen daughter, “How was the dentist?” The moment offers a poignant counterpoint to Tracee’s life conditions; she borrowed money from her boss for orthodonture, in an effort to improve herself. Tracee was on her own, a young adult without parental support, despite her wish to cast Tony in that role. But Meadow is in no mood to feel gratitude; she has just been jilted by a young black man who was both repelled by her racist father, and confident of his own class superiority to her family. Meadow’s petulant response to her mother’s question–“God! Is there nothing to eat in this house?”–implies her obliviousness of her own social privilege, and will be recalled, as a flash of her wounded interiority, in the final scene of the fourth season (“Whitecaps,” Episode 52), when she is traumatized by the news of her parents’ separation. In the context of the present argument, what is noteworthy about these constellated moments of domestic anxiety, shot through with issues of race and class, is the complex of revulsion and identification that Chase and company intend to evoke within the viewing audience. Tony Soprano’s misguided belief that he must protect his daughter from romantic entanglement with a mulignan (a fear nicely ironized by Noah’s social status, with a jet-setting father and wealthy friends in Litchfield, Connecticut) is not unrelated to his life’s mission to consolidate his children’s class privilege. The show critically examines the former parental impulse, even as it lures the viewing audience into self-identification with the latter one. Through these edgy, equivocal representations of white middle-class domestic concerns, the racial policing ends up uncomfortably continuous with the project of upward mobility.

 

The Corrections processes domestic anxieties in similar fashion; the social mise-en-scène of the white, middle-class nuclear family is similarly ambivalent, and a prominent subplot concerns the loss of a young woman to sociopathic violence. In the mid-section of the novel, devoted to Enid and Alfred Lambert, Franzen introduces their foils, Sylvia and Ted Roth, who have recently lost their twenty-something, art-therapist daughter to a crack-fuelled nightmare of a crime: “the tools of Jordan’s torture and murder had been one roll of nylon-reinforced ‘strapping’ tape, one dish towel, two wire coat hangers, one WMF serrated bread knife from Williams-Sonoma . . . the killer, a nineteen-year-old named Khellye Withers, had turned himself in to the Philadelphia police” (303). Sylvia confesses that she has spent the past five years as a “gun artist,” sketching the imaginary firearms that would avenge her daughter’s murder, and has searched hardcore porn sites for the perfect image of a black man fellating a white man–the artist’s model for her own drawing of Khellye Withers sucking on a pistol. Unlike her hyper-rational husband, who has repressed his grief and rage over their loss, Sylvia interprets Jordan’s death as “a divine judgment on her own liberal politics or liberal parenting or senseless affluence” (306). Sylvia serves as Franzen’s most articulate parent-figure, and I believe that she ideologically mirrors The Corrections‘ target demographics more directly than does Enid; her self-scrutiny of “liberal politics or liberal parenting or senseless affluence” informs a nexus of social attitudes, the examination of which is high on the text’s agenda.

 

The character Khellye Withers, The Corrections‘ sole African-American male, is in this context a symbolic touchstone (and, indeed, the text grants him no subjectivity of his own). As Tracee stands in relation to Meadow, so the murdered Jordan Roth doubles for Denise Lambert; it is therefore fitting that Khellye Withers’ state-sponsored execution is linked to Denise’s moment of psycho-social, self-inflicted wounding. In the climactic scene of Denise’s narrative trajectory, her lover Robin has opted out of a long-promised night on the town with Brian (Robin’s husband), and instead attends a candlelight vigil to protest the imminent execution of Withers; Denise takes Robin’s place as Brian’s “date.” The ensuing restaurant scene, a tableau of these privileged characters’ cultural capital and arch knowingness, is rife with subtexts: it critiques both white privilege and liberal guilt over the violence engendered in socio-economic chasms. Brian has just produced an indie film, an updating of Dostoevesky called Crime and Punishment and Rock and Roll, and has convinced Martin Scorsese to see it at a private screening. No sooner does Denise join the entourage at a fashionably retro pizzeria (in company with Scorsese, Stanley Tucci, Mira Sorvino, and a “Famous British Author” who sounds suspiciously like Martin Amis), than the talk turns to the movie: “‘Raskolnikov in headphones, listening to Trent Reznor while he whacks the old lady, is so perfect,’ the very least famous person at the table, a college-age intern of the director, gushed” (427). The fictional Raskolnikov, impoverished Russian perpetrator of a double homicide, is a glamorized agent of violence who will by narrative’s end be redeemed. Meanwhile Withers, black perpetrator of a similar atrocity, is undergoing the institutional fate of those judged irredeemably violent in contemporary U.S. society. Denise appears unaware of the symbolic ironies here, but Robin clearly isn’t; she boycotts the celebration of Crime and Punishment and Rock and Roll under the double onus of her own anarchist brother’s crime (he nearly trepanned a rich corporate executive with a two-by-four) and of her guilt over the disproportionate number of African-American convicts sent to the electric chair. Brian complains to Denise about his wife’s AWOL status on this glamorous evening out: “this morning she decides she’s going to march against the death penalty instead. I’m no fan of the death penalty. But Khellye Withers is not my idea of a poster boy for leniency . . . I said she could miss one march for my sake. I said, why don’t I write a check to the ACLU, whatever size you want” (427-8). The character of Withers, whose own voice registers only in a court-transcribed bit of testimony, functions as a phantasm of the hegemonic racial imaginary, a metonymic projection of social pathology hovering just beyond the would-be security of the protagonists’ domestic spaces. Enid cannot bear to hear Sylvia Roth’s account of a parent’s trauma, but “while not listening she also had to listen, because she was missing certain key facts, such as whether Khellye Withers was black and whether Jordan had been brutally raped” (305). Withers serves the novel’s primary characters, all of whom are white, as an unacknowledged cipher of racial discourse. If Sylvia Roth has abandoned her “liberal politics” and her former guilt over her “senseless affluence” for fantasies of revenge on the racialized Other (including a newfound, visceral support for capital punishment), Robin Callahan has so embraced her white liberal guilt that it has become a form of megalomania–she feels personally responsible for racial and class inequities; a sense of culpability comes to inform her very identity. In their different ways, Sylvia, Robin, and Denise learn that their white middle-class family enclaves provide illusory refuge from the postmodern antinomy of white privilege and liberal guilt.⁹ The fallout of Denise’s night out is her retreat into the questionable domestic consolations of her “last Christmas in St. Jude” with her brothers and aging parents, as well as the dissolution of the Callahans’ domestic life, brought on by Robin’s and Brian’s radically different attitudes toward their own “senseless affluence.” For all three families–Roths, Callahans, and Lamberts–the politics of race and class are inscribed as destructive palimpsests upon the domestic sphere.

 

For all that the Sopranos’ domestic space serves as a similarly fraught site of middle-class viewers’ identification, the audience is also aware that they, along with Dr. Melfi, have “been charmed by a sociopath,” Tony Soprano himself (“Employee of the Month,” Episode 30). With the character of Melfi, the white privilege/liberal guilt impasse lodges in the less exotic subjectivity of one outside the mob milieu; her clear-sighted observation here is of a piece with her own responses, unlike any seen in The Corrections, to that seemingly irresolvable antinomy. The Sopranos offers a correlative to the racial phantasm of Khellye Withers when we witness Melfi’s rape by a Hispanic service worker named Jesus Rossi (Episode 30, “Employee of the Month”). Melfi’s ex-husband, an Italian-American like her, is utterly shaken by the fact that the rapist’s surname could be of Italian provenance; his very identity is threatened by the possibility that this sociopath may not fit his marking of such a depraved human specimen as ethnically/racially Other. Melfi’s rage at her ex-spouse, and his investment in racial difference, points up the episode’s explicit awareness of precisely such racial projections. But if the liberal Melfi is enlightened enough to recognize and eschew such black-or-white, ethnic identitarianism, she does not avoid graphic revenge fantasies; she dreams of violent retribution, as a protective Rottweiler tears apart her real-life assailant. In her own counseling session, Melfi realizes that the Rottweiler represents Tony Soprano, and voices her satisfaction in the knowledge that she could have her rapist, who has gone free on a legal technicality, “squashed like a bug.” Nowhere, however, does the rapist’s putative ethnicity figure in her expressions of rage. Alongside such paroxysms as Tony’s revenge killing of Ralph Cifaretto, Melfi’s dream serves not only as her character’s wish-fulfillment, but as ours, too; the viewing audience enjoys psychic complicity–a complicity that, to the show’s credit, is no sooner engendered than problematized. This moment and others like it serve the viewing audience with cathartic fantasies of acting out against social threats that are felt to be part and parcel of the Real, but are only apprehended through the projection of ready-made constructs (the demonized criminal, the racial Other, etc.). It is all-important, then, that Melfi resists the urge to send Tony–himself a sometime sociopath, but one who has been irresistibly humanized–after her assaulter. After an agonized hesitation, she turns down Tony’s offer of help, and the moment ushers back in the briefly suspended reality principle, reminding the audience that this authoritative patriarch may represent the fantasy protector of the fragile, vulnerable domestic sphere, but he can also be its greatest threat. In The Sopranos, what produces the effects of the white, middle-class, nuclear family, may also symbolically undo the same family. Racially and/or economically privileged viewers are repeatedly denied the easy route of ideologically externalizing all social threats to the nuclear family.

 

IV. Global Paranoia

 

If the national-domestic anxieties that suffuse The Sopranos and The Corrections can be catalogued in such detail, the psychic energies that I have labelled “global paranoia” are a bit more diffuse. Nonetheless, they tinge the social imaginary with their own baleful tone. For decades now, theorists have asserted that postmodern cultural artifacts concentrate upon the schizophrenic circumstances induced by the fragmentation of the subject (Harvey 54). Patrick McDonnell, however, reintroduces paranoia (long associated with modernist texts) into his characterization of key postmodern texts of the 1990s:

 

cultural paranoia is not projected as an existentially specific social disease nor a pathology that subtends a universally conceived “American way of life” but as a certain suturing of individuals to the social imaginary in which crucial differences between agency and national or other identificatory fantasies are collapsed. The representations of interpellation to be found in these works compel us to consider the ways in which cultural paranoia is a problem related to constructions of postmodern identity as symptomatic of late capitalism, its enjoyments and its discontents. (13)

 

The use of this formulation of “cultural paranoia” in the present context is twofold: it suggests the possibility of more abstract, less explicit sites of the “suturing of individuals to the social imaginary” than we have just seen in the domestic representations of the two narratives in question, and it historicizes that suturing as “symptomatic of late capitalism.” I want to suggest that those sites of the texts’ suturing to the social imaginary are the places where radically different realities may intersect the ontological dominants of the texts’ more properly realist registers. For there is a meta-realist level of representation in each of the two texts, an ontological plane sharply askew the concurrent transcription of an everyday life that is familiar, indeed only too recognizable, to much of the “blue” or “metro” audience. Here, the parallel analyses of the two texts briefly part ways, though they will eventually dovetail again. In The Sopranos, the meta-realism consists in the series’ graphic violence, which is imbricated in the popularly imagined, out-of-the-ordinary life of the mafia, and which has never yet erupted within the familiar middle-class domesticity of Tony Soprano’s North Caldwell house; in The Corrections, the meta-realism appears in the uncanny latticework of narrative coincidence, which almost reaches (but does not quite) the level either of Pynchonesque conspiracy theory, or of magic realist enchantment.

 

David Chase has said of his series, “I’ve always tried to cram the show just full of humor, suspense, violence, sex, and great rock ‘n’ roll music” (“Sopranos Homepage”). The self-mocking reference to violence and sex brings to mind the term “violence pornography,” which is of course seen as characteristic of action films of the last few decades, and about which Fredric Jameson has identified a formal problem: “the tension between the construction of a plot (overall intrigue, narrative suspense) and the demand for a succession of explosive and self-sufficient present moments of violence” (“End of Temporality” 714). This emphasizing of the distinction between plot and moments of violence suggests the common-sense notion that the intermittent paroxysms are easily separable from the rest of a given narrative, and are thus “gratuitous.” Jameson observes that in contemporary action films, “the succession of such moments gradually crowds out the development of narrative time and reduces plot to the merest pretext or thread on which to string a series of explosions” (714). Without going into the false problem of whether the violent sequences of The Sopranos are inimical to the realist register of plot, or merit the label “violence pornography” (though it is worth noting in passing that most viewers of the show would probably protest this charge), we can view them in light of Jameson’s larger theoretical point, namely that

 

violence pornography . . . grasped from the perspective outlined here as a reduction to the present and to the body, is not to be seen as a form of immorality at all but rather as a structural effect of the temporality of our socio-economic system or, in other words, of postmodernity as such, of late capitalism. (718)

 

This formulation, for which the primary examples are the Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, and Speed films (among others), is presented as a corollary of his well-known theory of the spatialization of time, the “‘schizophrenic’ structure (following Lacan)” of “our private temporality” under the conditions of postmodernity (Postmodernism 6). Within this broadly theoretical context, there is nothing especially new or noteworthy about the paroxysms of violence in The Sopranos, but Jameson’s notion does at least underscore the likelihood that such moments and images constitute a meta-realist register of representation that is characteristic of postmodern narratives in general.

 

What may be distinctive about the violence of The Sopranos is its symbolic indexing of a generalized affect, suffusing the series as a whole, of a “cultural paranoia” that is well-nigh metaphysical. This cultural paranoia is realized in graphic violence, but is distinct from the representational deployment of violence-as-wish-fulfillment (which, as I tried to show in the previous section, instead has to do with what McDonnell calls a specific social “pathology that subtends a universally conceived ‘American way of life'”). The series begins with Tony’s first visit to the psychotherapist to discuss his panic attacks, which, as he soon comes to realize, hinge on a violence-related fear: “I’m afraid I’m gonna lose my family. That’s what I’m full of dread about” (Episode 1, “The Sopranos”). For viewers, the counter-real violence and the quotidian reality of the show begin their periodic intersections at this moment, which is so presented (the tough guy weeps) as to cement our subjective identification at the outset of a (thus far) sixty-odd-hour viewing experience. The structure of feeling here initiated parallels that conveyed by Franzen’s opening leitmotif: “Ringing throughout the house was an alarm bell that no one but Alfred and Enid could hear directly. It was the alarm bell of anxiety” (3). Panic attacks and alarm bells of anxiety: even the literalized psychic trope of depression, so prevalent in both narratives, is encompassed by a more universal affect of paranoia. It is a graphically violent attempt on his life that snaps Tony out of his deepest depression and back into an energizing renewal of his normal condition of paranoia (Episode 12, “Isabella”). Gary Lambert is coerced into a confession of psychic depression, which he may or may not suffer, due to the constant threat (or is it reality?) of surveillance by “adversaries” under his own roof, whether in the form of his phone-eavesdropping wife, or his son’s “project” of a surveillance camera that records his visits to the liquor cabinet.

 

But these are examples of paranoia as manifested through individual characters, and do not convey the diffusion of this structure of feeling, which is a feature of the life-world itself which the characters inhabit. Detecting a metaphorical and collectivized paranoia as the ground tone to a number of postmodern texts, Patrick O’Donnell returns to Freud to reconstruct paranoia’s originally identified manifestations within individual subjects:

 

a sense of impending, apocalyptic doom; racist, homophobic, or gynophobic fear and hatred of those marked out as other deployed as a means of externalizing certain internal conflicts and desires (the scapegoating of otherness thus is essential to the ongoing work of paranoia); delusions of persecution instigated by these others or their agents; feelings of being under constant observation; an obsession with order; and a fantasizing of the reviled, abjected self as at the center of intersecting social and historical plots. (13)

 

If the exposition of a narrative may be said to help establish the affective ground tone to follow, then I think it may be instructive to juxtapose this list of symptoms with the opening sentences of The Corrections, offered in the second-person omniscient: “The madness of an autumn prairie front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder” (3). There is certainly a cosmic expression of apocalyptic forces here, as well as a connection of disorder with that doom. In response to this atmosphere, we are told, “and so in the house of the Lamberts, as in St. Jude, as in the country as a whole, life came to be lived underground” (10). The exposition to be found in the The Sopranospilot episode–an introduction that takes the form of a dialogue between Tony and Melfi–is less cosmically expressed, but nonetheless offers a comparable social synecdoche:

 

TONY
I don’t know . . . The morning of the day I got sick, I’d been thinking–it’s good to be in something from the ground floor–and I came too late for that, I know, but lately I’m getting the feeling I came in at the end. The best is over.

 

MELFI
Many Americans I think feel that way.

 

TONY
I think about my father. He never reached the heights like me, but in a lotta ways, he had it better–he had his people, they had their standards, they had pride. Today, what do we got?

 

MELFI
Did you have these feelings of loss more acutely in the hours before you collapsed?

 

Moments later, Tony’s account of the day on which he collapsed begins with the story of “having coffee with” (we are shown that this translates into breaking the leg of) a man who owes him money, to whom he says, “You tell people I’m nothing compared to the people who used to run things!” This initial dialogue and flashback introduce the audience to a social matrix in which there will be a generalized sense of “persecution instigated by . . . others or their agents; feelings of being under constant observation; an obsession with order; and a fantasizing of the reviled, abjected self as at the center of intersecting social and historical plots.” In this narrative instance, it so happens that the “persecution by agents” and the “constant observation” will take the literal forms of maneuvers by rival mobsters and surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigations; but such crime-generic phenomena occupy the same fantasy register as the graphic violence. The notion that one’s life would be significant enough to require monitoring by authority appeals to narcissistic fantasies, and one is invited to identify with the subject position of the paranoid on this non-quotidian, non-“ordinary” level of reality.

 

None of this discussion of the generalized affect of paranoia, however, has yet shown how it could be interpreted as “symptomatic of late capitalism.” In this connection, we should recall the last symptom of paranoia identified in O’Donnell’s catalogue, “a fantasizing of the reviled, abjected self as at the center of intersecting social and historical plots.” It is through the prism of this phenomenon, I want to suggest, that the two narratives in question figure an imaginary relationship of their central characters to their “real” conditions of existence within a fiercely competitive social order. In The Corrections, Alfred Lambert’s paranoid fantasy that he, and by extension his family, are in the crosshairs of malevolent plot is raised early on, as he ponders the medical pamphlets meant to prepare him for the ravages of his Parkinsonian dementia: “There were chapters in Hedgpeth’s booklets that even Alfred, fatalist and man of discipline that he was, couldn’t bring himself to read. Chapters devoted to the problems of swallowing; to the late torments of the tongue; to the final breakdown of the signal system . . . . The betrayal had begun in Signals” (68). “Signals” here refers to the Signal Department of the Midland Pacific Railroad, a once proud railway company whose operation is represented in an extended metaphor for Alfred’s formerly healthy nervous system:

 

The brain of the Midland Pacific, the temple of its soul, was a Depression-era limestone office building . . . . Higher order consciousness had its cortical seat in the boardroom and executive dining room on the sixteenth floor . . . . Down at the reptile-brain bottom of the building were billing, payroll, personnel, and data storage. In between were the mid-level functions such as Engineering, which encompassed bridges, track, buildings, and signals. (353)

 

Passages such as this, with its capitalist version of the brain of a Hobbesian body politic, provide a psycho-economic link between the characters’ inner states and the workings of global finance capital within the post-Fordist regime of production. The “betrayal” of Midland Pacific occurs in the mid-1980s, at the apogee of Reaganomic deregulation, when a predatory corporation, the Orfic Group (its very name an oracle of emergent economic practices) achieves the hostile takeover of this regional rail carrier, downsizes its workforce by 33%, and guts many of its operations. The victorious corporation even sends its employees out to dismantle “the railroad’s nervous system” (353), pulling down its networks of signal wires “for copper salvage at sixty cents a pound” (70). This finance conglomerate will reappear in bloated, global form in the present time of the novel as Orfic Midland, which liquidates the assets of Lithuania’s Port of Kaunas, and launches a line of “Dilbert” MasterCards in Vilnius through its banking subsidiary, FrendLee Trust of Atlanta. However, these financial territorializations do not function only as a paranoia-induced analogy to Alfred’s psychic deterioration. Denise discovers that the Electra-like moment of her initiation into adult sexuality was literally a subterfuge within a capitalist plot. In the mid-1980s, the rail-company peon Don Armour seduced her in order to blackmail her father and thereby defend his job against the merger-and-acquisition of the internationalizing Orfic Group. Years later, Denise experiences the vertigo that comes with realizing one’s most “private” moments may be implicated in the social disruptions of globalization. Not alone among the Lambert family members, she finds her abjected self in the crosshairs of intersecting social and historical plots.

 

As I have already suggested, this is not quite a matter of metaphysical, Pynchonesque conspiracy, for neither Denise nor any of the other characters is subject to the mysterious grasp of, say, an octopus-like “Tristero”; it is instead the narrative’s synecdochic means to convey what O’Donnell calls “the paradox of the fluid and fragmented postmodern subject gaining identity by means of a spatialized history and operating within structurated networks of ever increasing complexity” (24). The betrayal that, for Alfred, “had begun in Signals,” represents the depredations of global finance capital, which is bringing about the dissolution of old binaries, economies, orders, and national borders. The acquisition, downsizing, and transformation of Midland Pacific, Alfred’s Fordist-era rail company, may thus represent a chapter of history that he, nostalgic and old-fashioned “man of discipline,” cannot bring himself to read. It seems appropriate here to invoke the Foucauldian and Deleuzian terms employed by Hardt and Negri in their theorization of the postmodern passage from a disciplinary society to the society of control: “The breakdown of the institutions, the withering of civil society, the decline of disciplinary society all involve a smoothing of the striations of modern social space. Here arise the networks of the society of control” (329). If the postmodern regime of flexible capital accumulation can be said to scatter Alfred’s three children to their various vocations–Denise to a venture-capital restaurant in Philadelphia, Chip to a public relations role for the Free Market Party Company of Lithuania, Gary to a position in a high-power East Coast investment bank–that same regime has engendered the private Retirement Communities and Assisted Living Centers that the younger generation, having left behind the institutions of the extended family and civil society that formerly provided the social support for the elderly, now deem appropriate for their aging parents. The Corrections‘ symbolic trajectory between the vocations of older and younger generations thus induces the sense of cultural paranoia that accompanies the society of control, and encodes the withering of civil society, the breakdown of the public/private polarity, and the dissolution of older hierarchies and social striations.

 

This trajectory finds its analogue in The Sopranos‘ depiction of the evolving vocations of the New Jersey mob. We learn in the pilot episode that Tony’s official title is “waste management consultant”; this au courant term euphemizes the sanitation racket that has long been associated with the real-life mafia in the tri-state area. (As Christopher Moltisanti memorably exclaims, “Garbage is our bread-and-butter!”) As the seasons progress, however, the Soprano crew adds to its blue-collar fiefdom an increasingly lucrative series of white-collar endeavors–tech-stock schemes, phone-card swindles, and real-estate projects, including a Housing and Urban Development scam in a low-income Newark neighborhood, and the three-million-dollar Esplanade project along the long-neglected banks of the Passaic River. Tony speculates on real estate, buying property on Newark’s Frelinghuysen Avenue in order to sell it at jacked-up prices to the state-subsidized gentrifiers, who will soon, in the words of one televised politician, be establishing “condominiums, film studios, and public parks–a self-perpetuating revenue base” (Episode 30, “Employee of the Month”). These forms of underworld “earning” represent a significant step up from the petit bourgeois or working-class activities, legal and illegal, of Tony’s deceased father Johnny (“Retail meat and provisions. And a little numbers. Extortion, loansharking” [Episode 7, “Down Neck”]). Despite his upward mobility, as we have already seen, Tony feels that he and his generational cohort lack the “values” of his father’s generation. A key socio-political subtext here is Tony’s distance from the working-class milieu that he associates with his deceased father, a milieu we witness in flashbacks to Tony’s boyhood in the 1960s. In fact, Tony’s life-sphere is notable for the disappearance or the dispersal of the working class, members of which are glimpsed only in the unionized construction workers that he and the New York families control,¹⁰ and in the menials and low-level service workers that surround him–custodians, maids, caretakers, livery drivers, and fast-food employees, nearly all of whom are recent immigrants from Russia, Eastern Europe, Mexico, and the Caribbean. If these workers index the globalization of labor markets, Tony and his crew stand in symbolically (as has been the case, of course, with fictional Mafiosi at least since the 1970s and the first two Godfather films) for the entrepreneurs and managers of the business and corporate spheres. They are the agents of ever-mobile forms of capital accumulation, both in their shell-game with HUD’s federal financing of the “rehabilitation” of downtown Newark neighborhoods (whose denizens are violently evicted, so that–in a neat parallel with the Orfic Group’s gutting of railway infrastructure–Tony’s men can rip out the housing stock’s copper piping), and in their variously ingenious skimmings of the federal and state funding meant for the Esplanade project, with its high-tech, multi-million-dollar Museum of Science and Trucking. These various financial flows are made possible because the New Jersey and New York families “share” a corrupt New Jersey State Assemblyman, Ronald Zellman. The dissolution of the boundary between the private sector and the government sector is of course nothing new, such corruption being as old as capitalism itself, but The Sopranos‘ depiction of the deterritorializing and reterritorializing flows of finance capital certainly evokes an up-to-the-moment aura of conspiracy at high levels.

 

We may well speculate that, in the era of the Enron and WorldCom scandals, The Sopranos‘s representation of venial interconnections between the public sphere of government and the private sphere of capital expresses a collective anxiety over the reality of state-sponsored plutocracy. Hardt and Negri suggest that we live in a time when

 

“Big government is over” is the battle cry of conservatives and neoliberals . . . . The bottom line and brutal irony is that they sounded the attack on big government just when the development of the postmodern informational revolution most needed big government to support its efforts–for the construction of information superhighways, the control of the equilibria of the stock exchanges . . . . Precisely at this time, after the Soviet Union had collapsed, the imperial tasks facing the U. S. government were most urgent and big government was most needed. (348)

 

Of course, the “big government” referenced here is not the welfare state measures of the New Deal or the Great Society, but rather the agent, ancillary to global capital, that “conducts the great orchestra of subjectivities reduced to commodities” (349). Taking this cue from Hardt and Negri, who underscore the significance of the post-Cold War juncture, we may perceive a complementarity in the two narratives under discussion here: just as the U.S. is a place where old-fashioned civil society and the imaginary border between public and private spheres are dissolving away, so too the characters from the former Second World are the toughest capitalists around. In a psychic crystallization of the texts’ global paranoia, the American protagonists of both The Corrections and The Sopranos experience crises of identity that derive directly and indirectly from the reinvention of the former Second World’s political economy after the model of American business culture. In order to illustrate this proposition, I want finally to examine a few passages from the texts that offer a condensed precipitate of these narratives’ political unconscious, on what Jameson calls the “narrowly political horizon–in which history is reduced to a series of punctual events and crises in time, in the diachronic agitation of the year-to-year, the chroniclelike annals of the rise and fall of political regimes and social fashions” (Political Unconscious 76-77). Through fictive synecdoches of the contemporary, global circuits of capital, the explicit horizon of these texts’ social realism may be seen to dispel an older metaphysics of national identity. American-style business-as-usual no longer projects any socio-economic system of the Other through which to constitute its own positive essence.

 

Through the overseas adventures of Chip Lambert, The Corrections links the decaying infrastructure of the American Midwest with the efflux of capital into a social-Darwinist Lithuania. Chip accepts a job as a provider of web content for Lithuanian entrepreneurs who are luring wealthy American investors, and in the process, he begins to observe a certain mirroring between the political economies of the two lands:

 

Chip was struck by the broad similarities between black-market Lithuania and free-market America. In both countries, wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few; any meaningful distinction between private and public sectors had disappeared; captains of commerce lived in a ceaseless anxiety that drove them to expand their empires ruthlessly; ordinary citizens lived in ceaseless fear of being fired and ceaseless confusion about which powerful private interest owned which formerly public institution on any given day; and the economy was fuelled largely by the elite’s insatiable demand for luxury.

 

. . . The main difference between America and Lithuania, as far as Chip could see, was that in America the wealthy few subdued the unwealthy many by means of mind-numbing and soul-killing entertainments and gadgetry and pharmaceuticals, whereas in Lithuania the powerful few subdued the unpowerful many by threatening violence.

 

It warmed his Foucaultian heart, in a way, to live in a land where property ownership and the control of public discourse were so obviously a matter of who had the guns. (443-44)

 

Now, admittedly, this sardonic passage offers an ideological critique that could hardly be called “unconscious” on Franzen’s part. In his 1996 lament over “the death of the social novel,” “Perchance to Dream,” the writer professes that “in college my head had been turned by Marxism” (37), though he makes it clear that he personally has long since rejected the systematic critique of late capitalism. Notwithstanding the author’s cranky anti-theoreticism, Chip’s rumination effectively functions as a synecdoche for broader anxieties about globalization, and the ascendance of social Darwinism across the face of the earth. Indeed, the rest of the novel amply shows that, in the words of one mainstream critic, “the world of the Lamberts is under vaguely felt but continuing pressure from big business and its dubious intentions” (Edwards 84).

 

For its part, The Sopranos imports thuggish Russians and Eastern Europeans to New Jersey, to do business with–and to threaten–the third- and fourth-generation Italian Mafiosi. This post-Cold War feature of mafia life in America is introduced in the series pilot, as recently arrived Czech mobsters are revealed to be undercutting the New Jersey mafia in the garbage contract business. In response to a threat from the Italian-Americans, the Kolar family head is reported to say that “if he could tell the commie bosses back in Czechoslovakia to go fuck themselves, he can fuckin’ tell us.” Soon thereafter we learn that Carmela Soprano employs a recently arrived Polish maid who lifts her cutlery, and that the ruthless Janice Soprano is not as tough as her mother’s one-legged, East European caretaker. When the hardened mafia daughter steals Svetlana’s prosthetic leg, Tony tells her, “don’t mess with the Russians, Janice, that’s all I’m gonna say” (Episode 30, “Employee of the Month”), and the Ukrainian herself says, quite prophetically, “this cunt is going to be sorry she ever fucked with me” (Episode 29, “Favorite Son”). Prominent in the story arc across its five seasons is Tony’s affair with Russian immigrant Irina Peltsin, whose amoral, vengeful survivalism will eventually lead to the biggest crisis in Tony’s nuclear family: she serves as the proximate cause of the separation between Tony and Carmela (Episode 52, “Whitecaps”). But these instances are plot-oriented and exterior to the psychic space that is so powerfully represented in the following post-coital exchange between Tony and Svetlana:

 

TONY
You always have this little smile. You don’t talk much, do you? I wish I knew your secret. Lose a leg, and start making websites.

 

SVETLANA
That’s the trouble with you Americans–you expect nothing bad ever to happen, when the rest of the world expect [sic] only bad things to happen, and they are not disappointed.

 

TONY
Well, that’s a fucking grim outlook.

 

SVETLANA
You have everything, and still you complain. You lie on couches, and bitch to your psychiatrist. You’ve got too much time to think about yourselves . . . I don’t want all the time prop you up [sic].

 

The title of the episode is “The Strong, Silent Type”; the series’ creators are playing on the phrase by which Tony repeatedly invokes his ego ideal, the Gary Cooper of the 1952 western film, “High Noon.” It is perhaps fitting that a physically disabled Ukranian woman should be bestowed with the epithet of the American hero of a Hollywood movie that is often read as an allegory of the Cold War and U.S. foreign policy during the Korean War era. Indeed, Christopher Kocela has demonstrated that “it is Gary Cooper’s image as ‘the strong, silent type’ that Tony invokes repeatedly in order to express his sense of failed American and masculine ideals–ideals most shamefully betrayed by Tony’s own disabling panic attacks and the confessional therapy required to cure them.” Svetlana is the one woman among Tony’s many amorous conquests who rejects the prospect of an affair with him, and he is not a little shaken to be perceived as someone who needs emotional “propping up.” She effectively characterizes their would-be relationship as a global allegory, wherein Tony figures the weak American and she “the rest of the world,” and she forces Tony to recognize, in a flash of paranoid self-illumination, a “certain suturing of individuals to the social imaginary in which crucial differences between agency and national or other identificatory fantasies are collapsed.”

 

The power of these indestructible émigrés, Svetlana and Irina, over Tony’s fate suggests that those raised in the Second World can outdo the Americans on their own turf, in their own supposed milieu of risky entrepreneurship, cutthroat competition, and savvy street-smarts. This threat is the theme of one of the series’ most popular (if fans’ weblogs are any indication) episodes, “Pine Barrens.” Tony Soprano is using the Russian mafia to launder thousands of dollars through international banks, and when his underlings scuffle with one of these ex-Soviet counterparts, we witness the following exchange:

 

Tony walks down the street outside Slava’s, talking on his cell phone as he heads to the Suburban.

 

TONY
(through some static)
It’s a bad connection, so I’m gonna talk fast. The guy you’re looking for is an ex-commando. He killed sixteen Chechen rebels single-handed.

 

PAULIE
Get the fuck outta here.

 

TONY
Yeah. Nice, huh? He was with the Interior Ministry. Guy’s like a Russian green beret. He can NOT come back and tell this story. You understand?

 

PAULIE
I hear you.

 

Paulie clicks off, and looks at Christopher.

 

PAULIE
You’re not gonna believe this. He killed sixteen Czechoslovakians. Guy was an interior decorator.

 

CHRISTOPHER
(amazed)
His house looked like shit.

 

(Episode 36, “Pine Barrens”)

 

This seemingly superhuman “ex-commando,” Valery, is impervious to cold, and survives two attempts to “whack” him by Paulie and Christopher; not only does he escape into the woods, but he evidently steals their vehicle to make his getaway, thereby prompting speculation among fans about his presumably vengeful reappearance one day. As I have already suggested, Tony’s crew is intimidated by the Russians, who can evidently trump the Italian-Americans in the survivalist savagery that serves as a metonym of American-style capitalism. But what I find most interesting about the quoted dialogue is that the Russian Valery is understood in Cold War categories–he is an Eastern European version of the famously gung-ho Green Berets (subject of popular song in the reactionary countercurrent of the ’60s), and, with the term “Czechoslovakians,” his Chechen adversaries are translated–however unwittingly–into the repressed victims of the 1968 uprising against Soviet control. Paulie’s malapropism is thus a symbolic figure for the retrofitting of perplexing new geopolitical realities into outdated categories. In effect, it emblematizes a “collective nostalgia for the old binaries, economies, orders, and nations,” and “for a paranoia in which the persecutor had a more or less recognizable face and a clear geographical location.”

 

V. Conclusion

 

As promised, I have read this little exchange from The Sopranos as a symptom of the text’s political unconscious within what is, for Jameson, any narrative’s most explicit horizon of historical representation, “the chroniclelike annals of the rise and fall of political regimes and social fashions.” It is worth noting that “Pine Barrens” debuted in May of 2001; and likewise, that Franzen’s novel was published in the first week of September of the same year. Geopolitically speaking, of course, we have witnessed some “diachronic agitation” in the years since. The paranoid construction of new cultural and racial Others has proceeded apace in American culture, even as the official organs of the federal government and the culture industry have warned against the generalized scapegoating of Muslims. In this context, both the domestic anxieties and the global paranoia that characterizes the two narratives I have discussed here offer continuing counterpoints to the far more literal-minded paranoia, the cruder fears and hatreds, directed against those most recently marked out as Other. It is this feature of the texts, together with their troubled self-reflexivity and their not-simply-blank ironies, that might be said to mark them as “blue” postmodern.

 

These are formal and thematic possibilities in the evolution of what must in any case be seen, in DeKoven’s words, as the “complex, multivalent, non-self-consistent ‘cultural dominant'” of the postmodern aesthetic (x). Among the many prevalent forms of postmodern culture that these two narratives do not participate in, for example, is the tendency, limned by Linda Hutcheon, of postmodernism as “the locus of a progressive cultural politics of the ‘minoritarian and ex-centric'” (Dekoven 10). Measured alongside those criteria, the best we can say about the cultural politics of The Corrections and The Sopranos, with their primary focus on the subjectivity of the straight white male, may be that they offer a partly complicitous critique of the existing order of things. But in light of the overall question of cultural politics, it is the two texts’ central thematic, the depiction of the nuclear family, that I would like to emphasize in closing, as I think this refracts tellingly through the post-9/11 cultural moment. As I suggested at the outset, The Corrections and The Sopranos evince a diffuse affect of externally focused paranoia, whose less subtle obverse is the representation of the inner workings of the nuclear family. The texts set out quite deliberately to demonstrate that “the traditional family” is, as Hardt and Negri suggest, “a fictional image projected on the past, like Main Street U.S.A. at Disneyland, constructed retrospectively through the lens of contemporary anxieties and fears” (148). These two narratives may be favorites among “blue” or “metro America” in part because of the power of this ambivalent demonstration, which rarely collapses into that different kind of postmodernism, the postmodernism of a too knowing, too distanced, too disaffected irony. Their negative mode of expressing the topoi of American middle-class life eschews the absolute relativism which is attributed, whether fairly or not, to other specimens of postmodern culture. On the contrary, their “winner loses” social logic, with its implicit affirmation of the non-identity of the terms “family” and “American” with their presumed objects, provides a powerful antidote to the far more crudely paranoid identity-think of the cultural right, of the ideologists who would lead “retro America.”

 

Notes

 

1. Franzen’s words come from an interview with the Portland Oregonian in October 2001: “I feel like I’m solidly in the high-art literary tradition, but I like to read entertaining books and this maybe helps bridge that gap, but it also heightens these feelings of being misunderstood . . . . She’s [Oprah Winfrey] picked some good books, but she’s picked enough schmaltzy, one-dimensional ones that I cringe myself, even though I think she’s really smart and she’s really fighting the good fight” (Edwards). On the Franzen/Winfrey controversy, see in particular Miller, Lehmann, and Campbell.

 

2. “obverse.” Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield, MA: G. & C. Merriam Webster, 1973), 787.

 

3. This is one of the series’ moments of self-conscious intertextuality with the Godfather (“Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes”) and other mafia/gangster films–spots of generic self-reflexivity which have so long been standard in postmodern texts as to require no further comment here.

 

4. I think it is worth suggesting, by way of personal digression, that the complaints of literary-theoretical academics (a tiny sliver of “metro” America) about The Corrections‘ “anti-intellectualism” are triggered by subjective animus–the result of their taking the Chip passages too personally. Irrespective of Franzen’s slightly whiney prejudices (see “Perchance to Dream,” the 1996 Harpers piece), I am arguing that the text deconstructs its own occasional lampooning of critical theory. I find it interesting that these same academics, in my experience, do nothing but rave about The Sopranos, which, while it doesn’t (yet) showcase any fictive university professors, offers a parallel awareness of late-twentieth-century intellectual trends. I suspect that these academics’ very different responses to the novel and the series have to do with differences in the expectations brought to “literary fiction” and to television.

 

5. This seems a good place to mention that my analysis is being written before the appearance of Season Six of The Sopranos, which has been promised for spring 2006; certain generalizations may be rendered inoperative by future plot developments.

 

6. For a thorough analysis of racial representations in The Sopranos, one more sophisticated than that offered here, see Kocela.

 

7. The episode featuring Ralph Cifaretto’s murder makes it clear that Tony Soprano’s psychic urge is retributive, both for the horse Pie-O-My, who has died in what Tony believes to be Ralph’s insurance-motivated act of arson, and for the entirely innocent Tracee (or Meadow manqué). The last shot of the episode shows Tony gazing at a photograph of Tracee in the Bada Bing men’s room. Incidentally, this scene represents how, uniquely for a television series of its length, The Sopranos often manages a patient continuity along its vast narrative arc and its multiple plotlines, not unlike the installments in a nineteenth-century triple-decker novel.

 

8. As obvious evidence of the existence of this kind of generalized dread, we can consider the prominence in the national media of news stories concerning the disappearances, abductions, and murders of white girls and young white women. The name recognition of Chandra Levy, Jon Benet Ramsey, Elizabeth Smart, etc., does not seem to be counterbalanced by any equivalent names among non-white, non-female victims of such crimes.

 

9. I will here use antinomy in the sense of “a contradiction between principles or conclusions that seem equally necessary and reasonable” (Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary 50).

 

10. Ralph Cifaretto’s practice of payrolling “no-shows,” or non-existent construction workers, on the government’s “dime” nicely symbolizes the tendential dissolution of the old-fashioned working class and its unions on American soil.

 

Works Cited

 

• Booth, Wayne C. A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1974.
• Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984.
• Brooks, David. “One Nation, Slightly Divisible.” The Atlantic Monthly (December 2001): 53-67.
• Campbell, James. “High Art in the Age of Oprah.” Boston Review: A Political and Literary Forum 27:2 (April/May 2002): PAGE ##S?
• Chase, David. Interview by Terry Gross. “Fresh Air.” National Public Radio. 22 June 2000.
• DeKoven, Marianne. Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern. Durham: Duke UP, 2004.
• DeLillo, Don. Underworld. New York: Scribner, 1997.
• Edwards, Thomas R. “Oprah’s Choice.” Raritan 21:4 (Spring 2002): 75-86.
• Franzen. Jonathan. The Corrections. Hardcover New York: Farrar, 2001.
• —. “Perchance to Dream: In an Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels.” Harper’s (April 1996): 35-47.
• Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.
• Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Avon, 1992.
• Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000.
• Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.
• Jameson, Fredric. “The End of Temporality.” Critical Inquiry 29.4 (Summer 2003): 695-718.
• —.The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981.
• —. Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.
• Kocela, Christopher. “Unmade Men: The Sopranos After Whiteness.” Postmodern Culture 15.2 (January 2005). 8 January 2006. <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v015/15.2kocela.html>.
• Lehmann, Chris. “Jonathan Franzen: A Defense.” Slate 1 November 2001. <http://www.slate.com/id/2058036/>.
• Mailer, Norman. The Executioner’s Song. New York: Little, Brown, 1979.
• Miller, Laura. “Book Lovers’ Quarrel.” Salon 26 October 2001. <http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2001/10/26/franzen_winfrey/index.html>.
• O’Donnell, Patrick. Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia and Contemporary U.S. Narrative. Durham: Duke UP, 2000.
• Plato. “Republic,” Book Ten. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001.
• Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.
• —. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Viking, 1973.
• The Sopranos. Seasons One-Five. Executive Producer David Chase. Los Angeles: Home Box Office, 1999-2004.
• “Sopranos Homepage: Music Credits.” Home Box Office. 2005. 10 January 2005. <http://www.hbo.com/sopranos/music/episode61.shtml>.
• Sperling, John, et al. The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America. Sausalito: Polipoint, 2004.