UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Remembering Modernity: Technics of Temporal Memory in Twentieth-Century Literature and Film A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Michael Podolny September 2012 Dissertation Committee: Dr. James Tobias, Chairperson Dr. Steven Axelrod Dr. Kimberly Devlin Copyright by Michael Podolny 2012 The Dissertation of Michael Podolny is approved: __________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Convention suggests that I have written this dissertation myself; however, to paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, since each of us is several, there was already quite a crowd. If I may be forgiven a martial metaphor: soldiering through a Ph.D. program can be an arduous process, the completion of which is unthinkable without the support of many, and if the dissertation is its culmination, then it too must bear the imprint of a multitude of allies. Here is an attempt to acknowledge the deep gratitude I feel toward the lovely crowd of people who made this process and this work possible. I am deeply grateful to the members of my committee. First, an enormous thank you to Dr. James Tobias for chairing this project with strong vision, unyielding rigor, and amazing generosity. Since our first encounter in 2006, when you introduced me to philosophy that would change my life, you have encouraged and challenged my scholarship in countless ways. Throughout my time at UC Riverside, you offered ideas and research paths that were always exciting. You never failed to provide detailed, a l w a y s -useful feedback on drafts and in conferences, even when I could not wrap my mind around this feedback for months afterwards. You gave me license and opportunity to return to my cultural and creative roots in the writing of this dissertation, which kept me going even when my passion for the project seemed to wane. Most importantly, you made me dig deeper when I felt I had everything figured out, and helped me pick up the thread when I felt lost and overwhelmed. Because of that, your stamp is on many of the discoveries made in this dissertation. iv To Dr. Steven Axelrod, thank you for your kindness, flexibility, and collegiality. Your enthusiasm for poetry, writing, and intellectual discovery is truly contagious, and because of this, our interactions over the years have been among my happiest moments in academia. You always had a gift, as a teacher and an advisor, to make me feel intelligence that I have not yet earned, and then to give me the incentive and confidence to earn it. Thank you also for sparking my interest in Gertrude Stein, who became an important part of this dissertation. To Dr. Kimberly Devlin, thank you for reigniting my interest in modernism with your seminars, and for modeling the highest levels of scholarship. Your Ulysses seminar was truly a life-changing experience, and though I may not be a Joycean in the strictest sense, what I learned from you then and thereafter has left an indelible mark on this project and the way I think and feel about literature. I also want to thank my fellow graduate students at UC Riverside who have offered friendship, support, and inspiration through their own brilliant work. In connection with this dissertation, I want to thank Paul Cheng for patiently listening to me rant about movies, April Durham for sharing her passion for Tarkovsky and Malick, and Mike Schwartz for offering counsel while I was trying to balance my writing with the job search. A special thank you to the members of our little writing group, Mary Auxier, Emily Mattingly, and Laura Westengard, who patiently read very early and very rough versions of these chapters and always gave astute and valuable advice. Finally, I cannot say enough about the gratitude I feel to the amazing John and Laura Terrill who became v m y best friends, babysitters, sympathetic ears, and occasional crying shoulders. Thank you for all of those things. Of course, this dissertation would not have happened without my family. I am grateful to my mother, father, and stepfather who worked hard to give me the opportunities to pursue what I love, believed in my abilities, and held their breath while I worked toward completion. To my brother, thank you for our morning chats, which kept me sane and kept me laughing. I am also grateful to Craig and Teri Kochheim for their unequivocal love and support. To my children, thank you for making me happier than I could ever imagine, and for the many moments of levity over the past two years when I emerged from the depths to find your smiling faces waiting for me. Will, I am so proud of you. Finally, to Krista: you are and always have been the reason, the way, and the reward. Thank you for being you, and being in my life, and being my life. Thank you for getting us here. vi This dissertation is dedicated to my grandfather, who cannot read it, and to the memory of my grandmother. With love, огромное спасибо за всё. And, once again, to Krista. vii ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION Remembering Modernity: Technics of Temporal Memory in Twentieth-Century Literature and Film by Michael Podolny Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in English University of California, Riverside, September 2012 Dr. James Tobias, Chairperson My dissertation explores the notion that human memory is technical, prosthetic, and has been connected throughout history to writing. This thesis, when applied to modernist criticism, suggests several important questions: since modernist art, both literary and visual, often seeks a greater fidelity to its own contemporary condition, can an entire age be contemporary to itself? If traditional memory is eradicated by modernism, what takes its place? How can we remember modernity? To answer these questions, I develop a culturally-specific reading of the technics of modern memory. While the dissertation, on the one hand, continues the long-standing tradition of interpreting the cultures of modernity and contemporaneity through technology, it offers a new critical and theoretical matrix that departs from this tradition in significant ways. Ultimately, I argue that the changing philosophical conception of technics must be central viii to the project of analyzing twentieth-century literature and film, focusing on a series of modernist and postmodernist texts that engage in this process of refiguring memory and subjectivity through writing. Because my framework depends on the conception of technical development as a production-related global phenomenon, I analyze concurrent Eastern European modernisms as well. Also, since the very idea of radical mnemonic reevaluation suggests a disruption of conventionalized epochality, each chapter presents a nonlinear argument, often connecting works from different periods. Additionally, to account for the importance of technics for this project, chapters include intermedia analyses, or discussions of alternative textual forms. The dissertation consists of five chapters. The first, a general introduction, explores the theoretical and philosophical groundwork outlined above to position the cultural production of modernity within a larger technological history of the human. The second focuses on modernist texts that engage in the process of refiguring memory and subjectivity through writing. The third examines performative memory and its relationship to the prosthetic body, while the fourth concentrates on textual memory following the rise of cybernetics. Finally, the fifth chapter examines film, continuing the comparative study of works from the West and the former Eastern Bloc to trace the differences in their treatment of memory attributable to each culture’s relationship to technical production. ix TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1. Toward a Techno-logy of Modernity: ……………… …………….........1 Memory, Technics, and Texts CHAPTER 2. Radically Remembered Selves…………………………………………..28 Memory, Time, and the Literary Forms of the Modern CHAPTER 3. Future Beyond Sense: …………………………………………………..69 Absurd Theatrics of Mechanized Memory CHAPTER 4. The Limits of Control: ……………..…………………………………...116 Ethics of Virtual and Cybernetic Memory in Nabokov’s Novels CHAPTER 5. Film as Virtual Engine: …………..…………………………………….165 Actualization, Memory, and Mnemonic Technics in Tarkovsky’s Solaris CONCLUSION. Memory 2.0: …………………………..…………………………….201 New Media, Technics, and Time WORKS CITED…………………………………...…………………………………...209 x Chapter 1 Toward a Techno-logy of Modernity: Memory, Technics, and Texts The technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event. – Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever Traditionally, studies of modernity have been inextricably linked with studies of technology. This connection works on the most intuitive level: the fall into modern life, as we understand it from a historical perspective, has been accompanied by an ever- increasing technicization of that life’s everyday processes. The Industrial Revolution, as early as the eighteenth century, began changing material fabrication through the producers’ increased reliance on machinic production. The process toward greater mechanization continued into the twentieth century, when the so-called Great War, with its unprecedented