Abstract for the Work to Come (Courtney)

To think of the act of reading as a performance, in which the reader participates in a world-making involving herself and the text, is to make an intimate connection between reader and text. Novels in which a first-person narrator relays the story under the author’s name—that is, when the author is named as both narrator and character—further complicate this already complex relationship. I would like to rethink this scenario as one in which the reader’s speaking—either aloud or internally—of the narrator’s “I” builds a doubly imbricated relationship in which the reader “becomes” both character/narrator and author. While this scenario is not new in the history of the novel, it is altered in the twentieth century by a new mode of novels in which the narrator/character/author is a villain-protagonist, committing reprehensible or criminal acts. Novels like William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1959), narrated by William Lee, the name under which Burroughs published Junkie, Dennis Cooper’s Frisk (1991), and Bret Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park (2005), intermingle the relationships between author, text, and reader. Using as my model works like Lauren Berlant’s “Thinking about Feeling Historical,” from Political Emotions and Sianne Ngai’s “Stuplimity” from Ugly Feelings, I would like to identify and define the “guiltiness” of this interrelationship in which the reader enacts the abominations of a villain-protagonist under the guise of “realness”—in which the character is presented as real author. I would like to pose this form of readerly narrator/author enactment against an earlier form of author/character narration that is based on a model of believability. What differentiates this twentieth century version, in my opinion, is the way that it forces the reader into a “guilty” position, in which the choice to read is also the choice to perform the violence of the text.