Jeff Cravens

Wondrous Detritus: Thingness and Alternative Spirituality in American Modernist Fiction by Kumiko Kobayashi A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in The University of Michigan 2012 Doctoral Committee: Professor Sara B. Blair, Chair Professor Jonathan E. Freedman Professor Susan M. Juster Professor Patricia S. Yaeger Acknowledgements I wrote my dissertation in Tokyo, a city located in the “Far East” (viewed from Ann Arbor)—roughly a 11-hour flight from Detroit. Although this at times slowed the progress of my writing, my dissertation chair Sara Blair’s unfailing commitments to my project made it possible for me to complete the task. Perhaps the most fortunate decision I made my time at Ann Arbor was to take Sara’s course on American Modernism, in the very first term of my graduate school career. Since then, she has continued to empower me and encourage me to take risks. I’d also like to express sincere gratitude to Patricia Yaeger, who was chair of my preliminary exam committee; Patsy has made countless suggestions to develop my writing and given warm encouragement when I needed most. Jonathan Freedman helped to widen the scope of my project, and I really appreciate his great sense of humor. Susan Juster provided me invaluable supports as a historian, for which I am truly thankful. Generous funding from the Fulbright Scholarship, the Rackham Graduate School, and the Research Fellowships of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science for Young Scientists, allowed me to pursue my research. I would also like to thank You-Sun Crystal Chung and Xiwen Mai for their terrific friendship. I always remember we had a lot of laughter in our tiny GSI office in Tisch Hall. Lastly, I want to express my deepest gratitude to my parents, Shunji and Fukuko Kobayashi, and especially to my mother, Fukuko, who is also an Americanist and who cultivated my interest in American literature. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………ii List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………… iv Introduction……………………………………………………………………………… 1 Chapter 1 “Life is . .”: Nathanael West’s Anti-symbolism in Miss Lonelyhearts…………………17 Chapter 2 “Only the Flat Irons”: Counter-monuments in The Sound and the Fury……………….. 40 Chapter 3 Damned Facts: Materiality and the Animation of Facts in An American Tragedy………68 Chapter 4 Beauty is Trash, Trash Beauty: The Enchanting Heaps in The Great Gatsby…………...92 Coda: A Nameless Religious Experience and Material Things ……………………..…129 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………136 iii List of Figures Figure 1. The Confederate Monument, Courthouse Square, Oxford, Mississippi, 1907……… 66 Figure 2. The Monument of W. C. Falkner, Ripley Cemetery, Mississippi, 1889…………….. 67 iv Introduction I would like to begin my dissertation with a canonical passage in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, a passage that fully encapsulates the issue that I want to pursue in the following pages: the felt eclipse among writers of the modernist era—and moderns more broadly—of the transcendental and a recourse to a certain kind of materiality to achieve a renewed sense of belief. On talking with an Italian soldier who claims that “the soil is sacred” (184), Frederic Henry avoids openly taking issue with the soldier’s unabashed patriotism, presenting instead the novel’s most extensive inner monologue, which revolves around the incorrigible bifurcation of language: one aspect belongs to the abstract and religious, whilst the other is decidedly concrete and prosaic: I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates. (184-185) The loss of materiality is suggested as the crucial cause of spiritual decay in the modern era. The desperate paucity of meaningful objects—of objects that speak of the possibility 1 of transcendental experience—has made it impossible to feel a certain kind of spiritual presence. As Loren Glass points out, the passage eloquently provokes a sense of “disenchantment,” a definitively modern disposition most frequently connected with “the lost generation,” of which Hemingway was a champion and a key figure (209). What is relevant to my argument is that such disenchantment is deeply tied to a certain kind of semantic exploitation endemic to modernity. Henry (a thinly veiled Hemingway) laments that words once used to express transcendental experiences—of the “sacred,” the “glorious,” and “sacrifice”—have undergone a thorough abstraction by their overuse in various forms of mass advertisement, including the ubiquitous instances of jingoistic billposters. The language of the sacred has become corrupted and promiscuous, showing up anytime anywhere, drained of all the meanings that it once possessed. Only proper nouns, Henry says to himself, can maintain their own dignity and so remain truly meaningful. Henry’s disillusionment derives from the elusiveness of meaning caused by the chasm between the abstract and the concrete, the authentically religious and the plainly nonsymbolic. Hemingway thus locates meaningfulness within the robust materiality of proper nouns; their firm embeddedness in quotidian contexts is a potential route to transcendence. My dissertation explores the type of modernist project that Hemingway evinced in A Farewell to Arms. If the conventional notion of religious feeling came to look especially volatile under the sway of modernity, how could spirituality be felt, discovered, and expressed? How to arrest the rapid process of abstraction that caused a semantic stalemate, turning once precious, transcendental objects into mass-produced goods completely tamed by the capitalist imperative to classify every matter into two kinds: 2 products or waste? All the four novelists I deal with in the subsequent chapters— Nathanael West, William Faulkner, Theodore Dreiser, and Scott Fitzgerald—were deeply enmeshed in their contemporary consumer culture and acutely felt the waning of spirituality, which they considered most apparent in the futility of organized religion. As Hemingway proposed that spiritual enervation was brought forth by the exploitation of materiality in modern society, these four writers sought to rediscover spirituality by embracing the kind of materiality within certain objects that reject facile signification, such as trash, waste heaps, unclassified newspaper articles, and counter-monuments. By examining how each novelist transformed familiar objects into bearers of the magical, I intend for my argument to contribute to current scholarship of modernist literature, a field whose inclination toward secular issues became especially explicit toward the end of the twentieth century. While modernist studies in the 1980s and 1990s largely focused on exposing the constructed nature of ranks and social identities (race, class, gender, sexuality, age, etc.), citizenship, and nation-state, critics after 9/11 have begun to show an acute concern for questions that were suppressed or left unasked by proponents of the influential (new-) historicist approach. How were religious discourses interwoven into the aforementioned issues of racial, national, and class boundaries that U. S. modernity scrupulously attempted to police?1 In looking back over the cultural and academic climate in the late 1 Pricilla Wald’s Constituting Americans (1995) is a representative work on citizenship, a category which became increasingly hard to define in the late nineteenth century. Carrie Bramen’s The Uses of Variety (2000) explores how the process of Americanization operated in turn-of-the-century U. S. culture, in which emergent immigrant cultures coexisted with the dominant culture, forming a kind of cultural pluralism. Walter Benn Michaels’s Our America (1995) also explores the impact of the Immigrant Act on the 3 twentieth century, Lawrence Buell, writing in 2007, recognized a marked discrepancy between the U. S. public culture that increasingly leaned toward evangelical Christianity and contemporary American literary studies, which “has moved decisively away from religiocentric explanations of the dynamics of cultural history” (32, emphasis original). For instance, Buell contends that in the 1950s Melville studies considered the question of Melville’s religious orientation—how deeply marked he was by Calvinism, whether or not he was God-defiant to the last, etc—was a burning question. By century’s end, Moby-Dick’s whiteness had come to seem more compelling for its racial than for its religious symbolism, its politics much more so than its metaphysics, and the author’s attitudes toward cannibalism and body- piercing more consequential than

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