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Hollow Men: Colonial Forms, Irish Subjects, and the Great Famine in Modernist Literature, 1890-1930

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Hollow Men: Colonial Forms, Irish Subjects, and the Great Famine in Modernist Literature, 1890-1930 Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports 2016 Hollow Men: Colonial Forms, Irish Subjects, and the Great Famine in Modernist Literature, 1890-1930 Aaron Matthew Percich Follow this and additional works at: https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd Recommended Citation Percich, Aaron Matthew, "Hollow Men: Colonial Forms, Irish Subjects, and the Great Famine in Modernist Literature, 1890-1930" (2016). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 6399. https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/6399 This Dissertation is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by the The Research Repository @ WVU with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Dissertation in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you must obtain permission from the rights-holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/ or on the work itself. This Dissertation has been accepted for inclusion in WVU Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports collection by an authorized administrator of The Research Repository @ WVU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Hollow Men: Colonial Forms, Irish Subjects, and the Great Famine in Modernist Literature, 1890-1930 Aaron Matthew Percich A dissertation submitted to the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English. Lisa Weihman, Ph.D., Chair Dennis W. Allen, Ph.D. Gwen Bergner, Ph.D. John B. Lamb, Ph.D. Enda Duffy, Ph.D. Department of English Morgantown, West Virginia 2016 Keywords: Irish Literature, British Literature, Great Famine, Postcolonial Studies, Badiou, Modernism Copyright 2016 Aaron Matthew Percich Abstract Hollow Men: Colonial Forms, Irish Subjects, and the Great Famine in Modernist Literature, 1890-1930 Aaron Matthew Percich This dissertation traces the impact and influence of Ireland’s Great Famine (145-1852) on the formal developments of Irish and British modernism. The Famine is arguably the founding event for colonial Ireland’s entry into modernity. This forceful event and forced legacy allows us to rethink modernism’s developmental trajectory; rather than a movement deriving out of metropolitan experimentation, I argue for modernism’s colonial roots. Colonial events like the Famine or what I term colonial atrocities are marked by mass death and cultural degradation, and further facilitated by the technological, ideological, and exploitative practices deriving from modernity. Representative practices that arise in response to atrocity—like stream of consciousness, fragmentation, large and elusive allusions—precede and develop ahead of the later consolidation of these practices as “modernism.” At its most ambitious, this dissertation’s philosophical, postcolonial, and formal emphases allow us to rethink the ontological notions of modernity and postcolonial theory while also recasting the relations between colonialism and modernism as generative rather than antagonistic. For writers composing in the aftermath of colonial atrocities, a viable anti-colonial and resistant narrative can be fashioned once the atrocity as pitfall of despair and victimization is seen in another light. My conception of atrocity becomes a mode of analysis that fits Alain Badiou’s philosophy of the event. The Famine, then, is the event that generates truth and revolutionary subjects capable of shifting atrocity’s legacies from victimization and dehumanization to an egalitarian force opposed to colonial hegemony. On a textual level, I see these revisionary Famine legacies played out in the formal practices of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. iii “When he opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature call out, ‘Come!’ I looked, and there was a black horse! Its rider held a pair of scales in his hand, and I heard what seemed to be a voice in the midst of the four living creatures saying, “A quart of wheat for a day’s pay, and three quarts of barley for a day’s pay,” (Revelation 6: 5-6) And War, which for a moment was no more, Did glut himself again;—a meal was bought With blood, and each sate sullenly apart Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left; All earth was but one thought—and that was death, Immediate and inglorious; and the pang Of famine fed upon all entrails—men Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh; The meagre by the meagre were devoured, – Lord Byron, “Darkness” (ll. 38-46) Happier were those pierced by the sword than those pierced by hunger, whose life drains away, deprived of the produce of the field. (Lamentations 4: 9) “The town belonging to the colonized people, or at least the native town, the Negro village, the medina, the reservation, is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how ... The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light” – Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth iv Acknowledgements The paradox of academic study generally and writing a dissertation specifically is that so much of the work is solitary and often self-centered yet so much of what makes this work successful is communal and the often vast number of people who lend a needed hand. I have so many people to thank and so little space to work with. Even more restrictive are the limits of my memory and so any omissions are unintended. I would first like to thank those teachers who played such a foundational role in my journey. At Villanova University, Crystal Lucky, Helen Lang, and Michael Tomko shaped my desire and skills for academic inquiry. I am indebted to your various specialties and styles, but most of all to your consistent passion, compassion, and openness to engaging the mind and the spirit. At West Virginia University, Katy Ryan, Constinia Charbonnette, and Jenny Douglas each played important and various roles in my continuing formation. I am indebted to your regard for my writing, my thinking, and my continued growth as a person. Each of you has modeled for me what a transformative teacher looks like and I hope to reach those heights someday. I would like to thank the members of my committee who directly shaped this project. In classes and conversations, Dennis Allen, Gwen Bergner, and John Lamb were patient, always helpful, and ever willing to share their insights into a project that I was equally discovering and drafting. I am grateful for their time and attention as scholars, but even more so for their support and care as friends. I would like to also thank Enda Duffy for his special generosity and interest in this project. Your work inspired my love for James Joyce and my desire to apply for doctoral studies in literature. I have been equally humbled and exhilarated by your effusive praise and piercing questions throughout this process. I would like to offer a special thanks to Lisa Weihman. Your support and criticism has been steadfast and always welcome. I would not have managed the personal and professional hurdles I encountered without your help. Your roles as scholar, teacher, and advisor have shown me the most affirming and inspiring parts of the academic life. I hope that my professional and personal approach to the academy forever mirrors the one you have gifted to me. I would also like to thank my parents, Dave and Kay Percich. You may not have always understood what I was doing or why, but you always asked questions and you always took an interest. Your constant, unbounded support and love have played a central if often easy to forget role in making this project and my journey possible. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Michelle Percich. Your marks on this project are perhaps the most imperceptible yet easily the most indelible. In our nearly five years of marriage you have always, as Colossians 3: 12 puts it, “clothe[d] yoursel[f] with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.” Throughout the twists and turns, inside and outside of this project, your overflowing compassion and kindness has kept me rooted. Your patience in listening to my brainstorms has been invaluable and you continue to radiate the absolute best I hope to be in our work and life together. As I complete this project, I truly know and affirm that you are, in the most perfect sense, il miglior fabbro. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements iv Chapter I. 1 Chapter II. 50 Chapter III. 92 Chapter IV. 129 Coda 172 Endnotes 178 Works Cited 193 Percich 1 Chapter I. The Great Famine, English Letters, and Irish Colonial Forms Weary men, what reap ye?—Golden corn for the stranger. What sow ye?— human corses that wait for the avenger. (1-2) From the cabins and the ditches in their charred, uncoffin’d masses, For the Angel of the Trumpet will know them as he passes. A ghastly spectral army, before the great God we’ll stand, And arraign ye as our murderers, the spoilers of our land! (45-48) -Lady Jane Francesca Wilde, “The Famine Year” “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, “Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? (71-72) Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. (60-63) -T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land This study begins with a striking poetic connection that is highly suggestive in spite of dissimilar contexts between Irish Famine-era and later British modernist poetry.
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