Witnesses to the Cold War: A literary and cultural analysis of containments in 1950s narratives by Hitchcock, Mailer, Kerouac, Ellison, Arnow, and Nabokov

In this study, I develop a method of analyzing Cold War narratives based on containment as a cultural metaphor. By "containment" I mean a three-part operation including (1) segregation--an exclusion defining the subject as not-Other; (2) integration--the assimilation of the Other to make it identical to the self; (3) infiltration--a liminal condition of "both and neither," the inevitable result of this forcing out and drawing in of the Other. Segregation and integration parallel the repressive strategies of the "age of consensus"; infiltration provides the theoretical "tactics" needed for exploring the interstices of this cultural moment.;I provide a methodological background illustrated by Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window. Jefferies "contains" Thorwald's tale by exercising strategies of segregation and integration to establish his own narrative authority. The film is infiltrated by undecidable moments of gendering and the deconstruction of the power of the gaze. I read Norman Mailer's The Deer Park and Jack Kerouac's On the Road as testimonies (segregation) in the jeremiad tradition, alongside transcripts of loyalty and POW brainwashing hearings; as confessions (integration) alongside the therapeutic confession and the quest for an authoritative father (and father confessor) by the novels' Catholic heroes; and witnessing (infiltration), alongside the textual eruptions of the authors' ethnicities and the explosion of the atomic bomb. A "monstrous" final reading gives voice to women silenced by "hipster" and "beat" discourse. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Harriette Arnow's The Dollmaker contain certain dolls (Sambo puppets, carved wooden dolls) which suggest the unheimlich nature of ethnic identity. Ethnicity (integration) finally is no more satisfying a way to formulate identity than race (segregation). Gertie Nevels shows that identity must be fluid (infiltrative) and defined moment by moment by location in community. I read Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita next to the "sexual psychopath," the "repulsive female" (the "teeny bopper"), Peyton Place, and Playboy to suggest that any reading which sees Lolita as only pornography (social critique) or art (parody) will never "feel right." Lolita, like any operation of containment, is both and neither, a thoroughly "infiltrated" text.