Wordflesh: the Antinomies of Textual Form
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Wordflesh: The Antinomies of Textual Form Jonathan Dunk A thesis submitted to fulfil requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences School of Literature, Art and Media The University of Sydney 2019 Above image: Kiefer, Anselm. Rorate Caeli Desuper, White Cube, 2016. 1 I certify that to the best of my knowledge, the content of this thesis is my own work, and has not been submitted for any other degree. The intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work and all the assistance received in preparing this thesis, and sources have been acknowledged. The first chapter of this thesis is published as Dunk, Jonathan. ‘Reading the Tracker: The Antinomies of Aboriginal Ventriloquism. JASAL, vol. 17, no. 1, 2017. The second chapter of this thesis is published as Dunk. Jonathan. ‘Short Fiction Short Nation: The Ideologies of Australian Realism’, Australian Literary Studies, vol. 33, no. 3, 2018. An earlier version of the fourth chapter of this thesis is published as Dunk, Jonathan. ‘Parallax: Negative Lyricism in Dialogue with John Kinsella’, Plumwood Mountain: An Australian Journal of Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics, vol. 4, no. 1.1 2017. Jonathan Dunk 2 ABSTRACT This thesis pursues the hypothesis that the structure and the consumption of textual form is defined by a number of antinomies, and that energetic attention to these paradoxes clarifies and to an extent deconstructs the conventions through which form is used by philosophical and political discourses to structure, contain, and symbolically resolve subjectivity and experience. 3 I acknowledge the elders past and perpetual of Cadigal and Wangal, on whose lands, histories and cultures I have had the privilege to be a sojourner, and I’d like to thank Evelyn Araluen and her father Barry Corr for their cultural instruction. I’d like to acknowledge the generosity and support of Mr. Kenneth Reed, whose bequest to the English Department of the University of Sydney has supported my research, and to thank my supervisors for their advice, encouragement, and support. Throughout the at times tumultuous course of my studies the support of my family has been invaluable, particularly my mother Joy, and my brother Jamie. Evie, there aren’t enough ways to say how much this wouldn’t have happened without you. It’s here, and we’re out there. 4 In this first day therefore no light for day, Anti-nomos thus Atheist wise doth say. – Henoch Clapham, ‘Before that Adam Breath'd’, Ælohim-triune iv, 1601. 5 Contents INTRODUCTION: Formless and Void PART I: Antipodal Myth 1: Reading the Tracker 2: Short Fiction Short Nation: The Ideologies of Australian Realism 3: Allegories of Voss PART II: Mein-/Gedicht, das Genicht 4: Parallax: Negative Lyricism in John Kinsella’s Graphology 5: The World is Gone: A Theory of Negative Lyricism in Paul Celan PART III: Manshape Ineluctable 6: Playing the Ghost: Mimesis and Spectral Time in Stephen Dedalus’ Hamlet-theory CONCLUSION: Dreadfully Distinct 6 I: Introduction Franco Moretti has called close reading an essentially theological exercise (2000), and in a penetrating observation Joseph North questions whether the same criticism isn’t more or less valid of all reading experience (114). In any case, it’s true that interpretation is significantly informed by historical beliefs and assumptions to which the majority of its practitioners no longer hold. The long shadow of Kantian aesthetics is an obvious example, but there’s also the relationship between Roland Barthes’ death of the author, and the ongoing influence of historicist author-centric scholarship. It follows that in spite of hermeneutics’ theological origins, belief in its constitutive concepts like language, value, and communication may possess only a limited or conditional importance in the process of textual interpretation. Throughout this project I read texts without and against belief in the axioms that informed either their writing or the history of their interpretation and reception. The texts themselves also occupy liminal positions in regard to literary, national, and philosophical paradigms. As such, this project looks at a series of crises in the history of textual form; analysing these moments as sites of technical innovation, and illustrations of the politics of different hermeneutic paradigms. It departs from much contemporary scholarship in literary criticism in two principal ways. Firstly the primary texts I have chosen to examine are not linked by a common historical period, or a given thematic content. They are identified and examined for the difficulties they pose to different regimes of interpretation. These cover a range of political and philosophical contexts including race, culture, communication, and the representation of time. Secondly, I seldom read a given literary text according to the prescriptions of one particular paradigm or school, preferring to proceed through the history of each text’s interpretation, drawing on different synchronic and diachronic methods where the structure of that history invites it; working toward immanent critique. The texts I discuss have primarily been selected for the depth and diversity of the problems they illustrate; to clarify a number of fraught relationships between literary form and other modes of discourse. The heterogeneity of the texts themselves illuminates the nuance of those possible relationships without endorsing a totalizing or unilateral relation between the entities of philosophy and literature. These texts are each to greater or lesser extents linked to particular disciplines and sub-disciplines. Robinson Crusoe is predominantly approached as a stage in the evolution of the modern English novel, the colonial and Indigenous literatures I discuss in my early chapters are largely associated with the history of Australian literary nationalism, and Ulysses has become the centrepiece of a biographically concentrated subset of manuscript genetics. The lyrical genres I discuss are also steeped in a number of philosophies of connection and communication, particularly those of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jacques Derrida. Like all specialisms these concentrations are regulated by assumptions and habits which frame interpretation. In Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (2017) Joseph North persuasively argues that the Historicist/Contextualist paradigm which dominates contemporary literary studies is symptomatic of neoliberalism’s conquest of the university system in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Historicist literary scholarship, of which each of the foci above forms a subset, is methodologically predisposed to precisely the kind of silo mentality in which texts are primarily perceived as ways of producing knowledge about their contexts. As North demonstrates, this focus has the initial benefit of emphasizing the historical contingency of what were once considered essential values. However, it is also attended or exceeded by another contextualist impulse which perceives literary scholarship as merely another form of cultural history. According to this argument this second paradigm borrows an apparent leftist politics from the first without meaningful commitment to a political program: “the two projects are quite distinct, and neither is implied in the other: just as one can, if one likes, write history from a universalist standpoint, one can also critique essentialisms without having to act as a historian (7). 7 Naturally the influence of these scholarly paradigms is informed by their successes, and in each discussion I seek initially to situate my chosen texts within the history of their interpretation. However in my theoretical methodology, and in the conversation of disparate texts I convene, I attempt to suspend the closures of the assumptions and habits that constitute all disciplines. By way of example: at certain points in this project I discuss writing which represents and articulates the subjectivity of the Indigenous subaltern, and at others I engage with some of the peaks of high modernism. This depart from conventional focus, and brings that focus into question. Ulysses is an intricately social and political text, and the writing of Indigenous elders like Bill Neidjie possesses depths of content and lyricisms of form which challenge the assumptions of western aesthetic value. Today there does not appear to be an ethically articulate argument justifying why these subjects and questions can only be addressed in separate kinds of criticism. Rather, that polarisation at reads as a symptom of the class structures and cultural hierarchies which have largely organised the development of literary criticism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. That criticism has largely approached marginal texts such as the document known as the Statement of Jackey Jackey as sources of raw ethical or political content one the one hand, and texts like Ulysses as abstract and rarefied exercises in formal subjectivity on the other, is overwhelmingly a matter of historical rather than conceptual distinction. At this late juncture in the development of textual analysis, those distinctions seem less and less defensible. These predicaments are integral to the shifting social fabric of globalized late capitalism, and I certainly do not presume to have resolved them. However, it is equally clear from the sweeping disciplinary critiques of new voices like North, and the rise of the global Indigenous literary studies movement spearheaded by scholars like Craig Womack, Chadwick Allen, and Alice Te Punga Somerville,