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Ideas in the Raw: American Modernist Fiction As a Source of French Existentialism

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Ideas in the Raw: American Modernist Fiction As a Source of French Existentialism IDEAS IN THE RAW: AMERICAN MODERNIST FICTION AS A SOURCE OF FRENCH EXISTENTIALISM by Jonathan M. Bradley A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctorate of Philosophy in English Middle Tennessee State University August 2013 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Will Brantley, Chair Dr. Allen Hibbard Dr. David Lavery ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank: My chair, Dr. Will Brantley, for his ample help not only on this dissertation but on numerous projects during my time at MTSU. He has encouraged my ideas in a way that made them seem feasible for such an extensive project and helped convince me that I am indeed a scholar. My readers, Dr. Allen Hibbard and Dr. David Lavery, for being patient and providing very insightful feedback on my work. I feel more confident about the future of my research because of their valuable responses to my ideas. My fiancé, Kayla McNabb, for her unwavering belief in my abilities. She stayed up many late nights (as late as she could) watching me write, waiting until I had produced enough that I would allow myself to go to bed. My family for being with me when this was still a very distant dream. They listened to me talk about my research even if they did not understand (or care about) it. The friends I made during my time in college (whether faculty, staff, or fellow students) for making the experience, particularly the very difficult times, so very worth it. ii ABSTRACT Despite the compartmentalization of academic fields, philosophy and literature enjoy an impressive amount of cross-fertilization. This interplay was especially notable during the early 1900s, when American modernism developed a conversation that carried over into French existentialism at mid century. This conversation, while not diminishing the creativity and thought of later French philosophers, reveals how ideas come into existence, develop into themes, and eventually become nameable as an established system of thought. The American modernist themes that crossed the Atlantic did not appear spontaneously. They existed in rudimentary forms at earlier points in American literary history, manifesting to varying degrees in both major and minor works. Beginning with Ralph Waldo Emerson, a survey of American writing that prefigures existentialism provides the foundation for an intertextual consideration of three major pairings: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jean-Paul Sartre; Carson McCullers and Simone de Beauvoir; William Faulkner and Albert Camus. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and Sartre’s Nausea (1938) examine paradigmatic questions of authenticity in terms of an individual’s relationship to the past. McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding (1946) and De Beauvoir’s All Men Are Mortal (1946) present the development of female self-conception, including the use of “phallus substitutes” to gain sovereignty in a patriarchal society. Faulkner’s Light in August (1932) and Camus’s The Stranger (1942) advance an absurdist worldview where iii innocents are punished not for their actions but for the social impressions of who they are. These readings, while thorough, invite other pairings and provide space for further research, which should continue to highlight the many threads of this transatlantic conversation. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER I: EXISTENTIALISM BEFORE THE MODERNISTS ............................... 28 CHAPTER II: FITZGERALD AND SARTRE .............................................................. 78 CHAPTER III: MCCULLERS AND DE BEAUVOIR ................................................ 112 CHAPTER IV: FAULKNER AND CAMUS ............................................................... 154 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................... 207 WORKS CITED .......................................................................................................... 219 v 1 INTRODUCTION Philosophy and literature seem at times like bastard siblings. Although both possess a distant heritage, a common blood pours through their veins and impresses itself upon the surface of their character. However, only those willing to forgo ideas of territory and tradition while lauding the intermixing that breeds new possibilities acknowledge their relation to one another. It is becoming more and more acceptable to take an interdisciplinary approach to a respective field, and many clever and thorough scholars across fields challenge the old demarcations. And they should. When we teach students in our undergraduate courses, we encourage them to apply what they take away from our composition and literature courses to their chosen fields, and we often push students to synthesize information in order to discover how the various academic worlds converse with each other. If our goal is to push our students toward interdisciplinary learning, we should strive toward it as well, if for no other reason than to better serve our students. Luckily, though, interdisciplinary readings offer another noticeable advantage. Throughout history, philosophy and literature have been in constant conversation, influencing one another in a give-and-take fashion that has produced an impressive body of knowledge that scholars currently appropriate. As much as we might act as though our chosen field exists in a vacuum, that is not the case, and what better way to understand where we are than to study and analyze the conversation that led us here. The particular conversation studied here is the relationship between American modernism and French existentialist philosophy. On the surface, it may seem like a groundless conversation to research, and, in fact, during my preliminary research, I encountered scholars who suggested that it would be a difficult connection to make. 2 Others, however, found it to be a natural extension of what they knew about American modernism and existentialism. Much of the difficulty in reconciling the two movements stems from what existentialism has become in popular culture today—that is, an amalgamated, simplistic form of nihilism instead of a multi-vocal, multi-facetted statement about what individuals are capable of if they understand the world and how they interact with it. Due to this watered-down existentialism that is so widely available today, the goals of the American modernists and existentialists can seem rather far apart at times. However, at the heart of existentialism is a philosophy that values many of the same themes prevalent in modernist literature. And these overlapping values are not a coincidence but instead a reflection of the age and the natural development that is going on across the world and across disciplines, making this approach an important method for understanding the current state of literature in America. If the overlapping themes were the only aspect of this connection, then the argument would be more difficult and would rely much more heavily on prevalent ideas as a reflection of the state of society. But the conversation existing between American modernist literature and French existentialism displays a literal manifestation as well. Much scholarship has been produced about how the French read American novels, and Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir acted as prominent critics during their respective careers. In a famous review of The U.S.A. Trilogy (1938), Sartre called John Dos Passos the greatest writer of the period, primarily because of Dos Passos’s ability to accurately present the individual experience of a moment in time. In “Existentialism and the American Novel,” Jean Bruneau states that “Sartre is convinced that the only way to write a true novel is to leave the characters as mysterious and 3 obscure as they really are” (68), which is what he believed the American modernists were accomplishing. Camus regularly included Faulkner and Melville among his favorite authors to read,1 and the praise the French writers directed toward the Americans is an important factor in considering their own literary and philosophical development. As our study of the creative process becomes more and more sophisticated, it becomes clear that creation always happens with provocation—a synthesis of experience—and this synthesis often does not occur in a conscious way. Some writers are willing to acknowledge this synthesis. Sartre, in fact, argued that the French writers would take the raw ideas of the Americans and create something new from them: These American novelists, without such traditions, without help, have forged, with barbaric brutality, tools of inestimable value. We collected these tools but we lack the naiveté of their creators. We thought about them, we took them apart and put them together again, we theorized about them, and we attempted to absorb them into our great traditions of the novel. We have treated consciously and intellectually what was the fruit of a talented and unconscious spontaneity. When Hemingway writes his short, disjointed sentences, he is only obeying his temperament. He writes what he sees. But when Camus uses Hemingway’s technique, he is conscious and deliberate, because it seems to him upon reflection the best way to express his philosophical experience of the absurdity of the world. If Faulkner breaks the chronological order of his story, it is because he 1 Camus’s fondness for these two writers is documented in numerous sources, among them James
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