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The University of Chicago Twentieth-Century Fantastic THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO TWENTIETH-CENTURY FANTASTIC: THE NOVEL AND THE RE-IMAGINATION OF HISTORY A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE BY NELL PACH CHICAGO, ILLINOIS AUGUST 2018 Copyright © 2018 by Nell Pach All Rights Reserved Table of Contents Acknowledgments iv Abstract viii Introduction 1 Chapter One: Modernist Fantastic: Transforming and Re-imagining the Subject in Woolf and Joyce 31 Chapter Two: No Gist of It: Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, “Echo’s Bones,” and Allegory- Resistant Magic 89 Chapter Three: The Blasphemous Fantastic: Unorthodox Miracles, Backtalk, and the Mischievous Divine Narrator in The Satanic Verses and Paradise 141 Chapter Four: Log In, Sign Out: Magical Virtual Reality in Thomas Pynchon and Karen Russell 183 Selected Bibliography 242 iii Acknowledgments This dissertation is a testament to the truly inestimable support, generosity, and surpassing love given freely to me by extraordinary people. While I cannot hope to make an exhaustive list of everyone who has, directly or indirectly, enabled me to complete this project, I make a start here in naming those whose presence allowed me to survive the work intact. This is no overstatement. To begin where I can never finish thanking, nor adequately express even a fraction of what they have been to me: thank you, thank you, thank you to my parents, Kathleen Megan and Peter Pach. Any attempt to fill in this thanks will be scattered and laughably incomplete. Mom and Dad, your guidance and unbelievable patience; your endless joy in my explorations and endeavors; your unstinting, selfless attention and support of every kind; and first and last your fierce love; bind me and my world together. Thank you for reading to me from birth, Finnegans Wake to Thidwick the Big- Hearted Moose – the same book over and over for weeks on end sometimes – stoking my imagination and intellect, finding ways for me to pursue every educational and creative goal I’ve had, and standing in the breach in my darkest times. I don’t know why I’m ending on a Grateful Dead line, but it seems as good a place as any to leave off the gratitude I will try to continue to show for the rest of my life: When I had no wings to fly, you flew to me. My brother Sam Pach, my closest genetic relative and best friend in the world, has been a similar source of patience, care, companionship, and above all, love. Sam, I love you so much and am so, so glad that we are so close. Your faith in me tides me over when I’m struggling. Your presence as confidant, corresponding party in inside jokes, and ready-for-anything conversationalist lights up the way. It’s so inspiring to see you go fearlessly into the world you are making for yourself, born of your intelligence, hard work, and curiosity. I’m so proud of and grateful for you. iv My extended family are love and care personified. Special thank yous go to my grandparents: Claire (Russell) Megan; Tom Megan; Constance (Barnard) Pach; and finally S. Warner Pach, who I wish were here for me to thank in person and practice my French with. All have been wells of generosity, creativity, and fathomless love, and I am so lucky to have them. Thank you also to Liz Diamond, whose emotional and intellectual support and encouragement are of singular quality; the same goes for my aunt Carolyn Megan as a source of personal and creative inspiration and deep understanding. I have my uncle Tommy Megan to thank for my passion for Irish literature, having been turned on to Yeats’ work (particularly the weirder stuff) by his own scholarship and musical about the poet; his partner, my aunt Diane Edgecombe, sparked and nourished my love for story and reminds me to attend to myth and intuition. All spent spiraling hours of time with me as I grew up, playing, talking, and cheering me on. Thank you for your love. My mentors at the University of Chicago have been, needless to say, indispensable throughout this endeavor. My advisor Maud Ellmann has been a constant presence since the moment I was admitted to the English program, guiding me through the rockiest moments, gently pushing and challenging my work. I am so, so grateful to her for her openness to this project as it took shape, her meticulous engagement with not just my ideas but my writing at the sentence level, her patience, and her lifesaving kindness. My advisor Hillary Chute has been an invaluable source of guidance and rigor – again, I am so grateful for her openness to my ideas since the inception of the dissertation. Her willingness to continue working with me from afar has been enormously generous. My advisor Sonali Thakkar’s influence on the project has been similarly indispensable: throughout her involvement, she has engaged and challenged my ideas. Without her this would have been a narrower project, and her final feedback is particularly in my mind as I continue forward with developing and improving it. v Thank you as well to John Muse, another faculty mentor who has been a wonderful, patient source of support and advice. His help with teaching, professionalization, and all the mystifying parts of academic life has been so utterly generous. From my first day here, he has been a warm, refreshingly candid friend. Friends in Chicago and elsewhere have come into my life in these years, in an abundance that still surprises and delights me sometimes. I can’t quite believe I have so many smart, funny, fascinating people who show me kindness I can only hope to return in some measure. Peter McDonald is a north star of a friend. His creativity and brilliance inspire me. His remarkable generosity and nonjudgmental willingness to listen has stood between me and suffering so many times. Hours before dissertation submission, he has fielded anxious questions on formatting, long- distance. Likewise, Amanda Shubert has shown me endless kindness and love, inspires me with her brilliant polymathic aliveness, and in a testament to truly selfless friendship is willing to listen to me sing while accompanying myself on the ukulele. They have opened their home and lives to me and I am so, so grateful, beyond repaying. They have been a large part of what has made Chicago a home for me. Others who have homed me here with their love, compassion, practical help, and encouragement (even if it was a small moment and they didn’t know it!) include my adored brilliant cohort fellow Carmen Merport, Katharine Mershon, Abigail Marcus, Anya Bershad, Sam Lasman, Sam Pellegrino, and Sara Lytle. Christine Sterkel has helped me see this past year through and imagine living in a larger world, a process that she continues to guide. Cody Jones has been a particular kindred spirit, brilliant and challenging and fiercely, nonjudgmentally loving and loyal – I am so lucky to have him as a source of inspiration and nourishment for my creative practice. Rachel Kyne’s compassion, candor, and pureness of heart have held me up in the troughs of the waves that vi roll through graduate life – she has made me feel seen in those low times. Finally, a very special thank you to my best friend Merry Smith. A lifetime after we met at fourteen, I feel closer than ever to you. I take so much joy in your incredible accomplishments, and am beyond thankful for your love, patience, and general hilarity. vii Abstract Twentieth-Century Fantastic: The Novel and the Re-Imagination of History This dissertation investigates the resurgence of the fantastic in twentieth- and early twenty- first-century Anglophone fiction. From James Joyce and Virginia Woolf to Thomas Pynchon and Karen Russell, I attend to texts that share a strategy of representing a current, recognizable reality as fantastic. In four chapters, I reconsider work ranging from 1924 to 2013 to open up new sightlines on the fantastic and the authors under study, practitioners of what I term the “twentieth-century fantastic.” Less a stand-alone genre than a versatile narrative mode, the twentieth-century fantastic crosses generic and periodizing classifications. I define the fantastic as a capacious term for narratives in which “mystery [breaks] into real life,” as Tzvetan Todorov writes, through actual and apparent phenomena that defy rational explanation, leaving characters and readers stranded between conflicting natural and supernatural interpretations of events. My grouping of texts, however, challenges Todorov’s contention that the fantastic dies out after the nineteenth century. Fresh from a century when proclamations of a reality crisis became commonplace, we increasingly experience our own world as fantastic, a continual series of interpretative hesitations between rational and irrational, natural and supernatural explanations. These novels confound the tidy binary of “magical” and “realist”: in violating established scientific law, common sense, and the boundary between the living and the inorganic, they are paradoxically committed to a kind of mimesis. Recent theoretical work on the posthuman and nonhuman is important to my analysis, particularly in animal studies, object-oriented ontology, and Anthropocene studies, spearheaded by Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, N. Katharine Hayles, and Jane Bennett, among other thinkers who have reconceptualized agency and subjecthood. I introduce the fantastic nonhuman, which I argue is viii a crucial prong of the nonhuman that theorists have tended to overlook. Fantastic nonhuman encounters run from apparitions of supernatural beings to religious epiphanies; they may also involve inter- and intra-subjective communions that challenge the presumed boundaries of the individual human subject, or challenge its unity.
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