Of Self and Country: U.S. Politics, Cultural Hybridity, and Ambivalent Identity in Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex

Despite negative interpretations coming from Marxist critics like Fredric Jameson (1) and the implications of cultural relativism associated with it, (2) Postmodernism represented a powerful cultural shift that, even if commodified, has produced profound ideological effects, among which remain demands for a more egalitarian society. Within the U.S. in the 1960s, the first wave of postmodernist artists and thinkers openly demanded a type of political tolerance that, rooted in a defense of gender and racial hybridity, could put an end to the ideological implications that, in practical terms, had changed John de Crevecouer's melting pot metaphor into an Anglocentric assimilationist strategy. (3) Still now, this defense of progressive political beliefs in the United States strongly resists the successive attacks that have been coming from the New Right and its most influential representatives, presidents Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and George W. Bush. In the field of creative literature, ideological demands for hybridity have surged in different cultural periods, frequently associated with particular strategies--for example, the use of the conceit that characterized seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry. The works of writers as influential as Shakespeare, Donne, the pre-romantic Blake, or the modernist T. S. Eliot offer clear examples of this emphasis on the blending of disparate experiences into new surprising metaphors and rhetorical devices. In the field of prose narrative, the appearance of a period that clearly favored the aesthetic and ideological hybrid took longer to emerge, probably due to its own prosaic quality. In U.S. fiction, the uncertainties of Romanticism were followed by one of the epochs where once again ambiguity and hybridity became remarkable ideological icons that later critics interpreted as social symptoms of the necessity to escape from the pragmatism of bourgeois official discourse. In Hawthorne's, Poe's, or Melville's pages we can recognize a sustained pull towards uncertainty, undifferentiation, and ideological fuzziness that strongly contests the categorical arguments of the advocates of the Enlightenment project. (4) Inheritors of this tendency to pursue the blurring of categorical limits were many modernist writers, such as T. S. Eliot, Joyce, or Faulkner, whose steps were later followed by postmodernist fabulators--as critic Robert Scholes denominated them (5)--such as Barth, Vonnegut, or Pynchon. These writers insistently carried out parodic contestations of traditional and categorical master narratives, overtly meant to blur the boundaries between fiction and factuality. During the eighties and the nineties, postmodernist works were in their turn contested by the newer aesthetics of dirty realism and minimalism. In the works of writers such as Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Stephen Dixon, U.S. society was depicted as the space of the valueless posthuman self, devoid of the protective, even if patriarchal, umbrella of humanism. These minimalist characters were frustrated beings who lived boring lives and lacked transcendental values and, correspondingly, their existence was presented in bare, apparently simple, realist literary terms. (6) However, more recently a younger generation of white North American writers has emerged that seems to continue along the anticategorical path reopened by their famous postmodernist predecessors forty years ago and continued by so-called ethnic writers. Names such as David Foster Wallace, Chuck Palahniuk, or Jeffrey Eugenides can be linked not only to the first wave of postmodernism. They are also related to an ancient literary tradition that seeks to go beyond the apparent world of categorical forms and offer an interpretation of life that may surpass one of the main pillars of categorical thinking: Aristotle's Law of the Excluded Middle. With this principle, the influential Greek philosopher established the theoretical bases for a type of dual thinking that is rooted in his discussion of categories. …

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