Agnotologies of Modernism: Knowing the Unknown in Lewis, Woolf, Pound, and Joyce
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Western University Scholarship@Western Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository 8-24-2018 10:00 AM Agnotologies of Modernism: Knowing the Unknown in Lewis, Woolf, Pound, and Joyce Jeremy Colangelo The University of Western Ontario Supervisor Allan Pero The University of Western Ontario Graduate Program in English A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree in Doctor of Philosophy © Jeremy Colangelo 2018 Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd Part of the Epistemology Commons, Literature in English, British Isles Commons, and the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Colangelo, Jeremy, "Agnotologies of Modernism: Knowing the Unknown in Lewis, Woolf, Pound, and Joyce" (2018). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 5668. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/5668 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Western. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Abstract Agnotologies of Modernism examines the productive role of ignorance in the work of several key modernist authors. Borrowing concepts from speculative realist philosophers like Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman, and Jane Bennett, as well as such thinkers as Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida, the dissertation endeavors to read modernism epistemologically, and treats ignorance as an active and creative force that often plays a key structuring role in the imaginative world of the text. Drawing from Bruno Latour’s notion of a “black box,” the study shows how ignorance can be transposed into an ontological entity which can then be attributed positive traits and characteristics. The notion of the black box thereby emerges as a key agnotological concept, as a mediator between an ontological presence and an epistemological absence. Chapter one examines one such black box in the form of monism and its relationship to vitalism in the work of Wyndham Lewis and Henri Bergson. The chapter shows how Lewis’s resistance to monistic theories of consciousness, and his embrace of an idiosyncratic form of vitalism, is foundational to his inter-war writings. Chapter two takes a similar approach to Virginia Woolf, analyzing the fundamental role of panpsychism in her work, in particular Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. For Woolf, panpsychism manifests not as a metaphysical belief but rather an epistemological tool, a way to synthesize the vast array of seemingly distinct sense impressions one encounters in daily life – permitting, by way of “consciousness,” an understanding of the events’ underlying continuity. The third chapter examines an analogous process in the writings of Ezra Pound, with “life” and “consciousness” in this case replaced by “nature.” I argue that both Pound’s politics and poetics are defined by an imperative logic, in which (like the categorical imperative of Immanuel Kant) a rule is ethical if it can be said to function like a natural law. Finally, in chapter four I examine how in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake the i notion of a “word” takes on this black box quality, serving a medial role between the undecidability of the Wakeian sign and the singularity of interpretation. As with the previous cases, the black box grounds the resulting interpretive system on an overwritten absence, rending ignorance not merely productive, but necessary. Keywords After Finitude; Agnotology; Black box; Bruno Latour; Correlationism; Ecology; Élan vital; Epistemology; Ezra Pound; Félix Ravaisson-Mollien; Finnegans Wake; Gilles Deleuze; Graham Harman; Henri Bergson; Ignorance; Immanuel Kant; Jacques Derrida; James Joyce; Jane Bennett; Knowledge; Modernism; Mrs Dalloway; Nature; New Materialism; Object Oriented Ontology; OOO; Phenomenology; Quentin Meillassoux; Richard Bucke; Speculative Realism; The Cantos; The Childermass; The Critique of Pure Reason; Time and Western Man; Timothy Morton; To the Lighthouse; Virginia Woolf; Vitalism; Wyndham Lewis. ii Acknowledgments A text may have a single writer, but its authorship will come from many hands: behind the fiction of the single byline is a bottomless debt, perhaps acknowledged but never paid. First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor Allan Pero, whose generous counsel guided this project out of its inchoate beginnings and whose patient, knowledgeable commentary, skillful reading, and endless encouragement enabled my every success and prevented uncountable failures. I also owe a debt to my second reader Alison Lee for her patient, incisive advice, and especially her expertise on Virginia Woolf. Chapter four would not have been possible without Michael Groden, whose courses on Finnegans Wake and Ulysses I had the privilege to take during my early years in graduate school, who supervised the MA project that would lead to my first published article, and whose advice and criticisms have made me a much better scholar. I owe a similar debt to Tim Conley, with whom I took courses on modernism and Joyce at Brock University, and who gave me crucial early direction in the world of modernist studies. Chapter three would likewise have been impossible without Stephen Adams, whose courses on American poetry prompted me to read Ezra Pound’s Cantos for the first time, and whose advice on the Pound chapter was invaluable. Large parts of chapter two exist thanks to Gregory Betts, who introduced me to the work of Richard Bucke. Leanne Trask, Beth McIntosh, and Vivian Foglton have played a crucial, and too seldom acknowledged, role as administrators, ensuring every day that there exists a functioning English department in which to work. Less specifically, but no less crucially, I have tremendous gratitude to all of my friends and colleagues whose thoughts, conversations, advice, and companionship helped make this project what it is: Donnie Calabrese, David Carlton, Courtney Church, Marc Daniel, James DuPlessis, Kevin Goodwin, David Huebert, Fred King, Emily Kring, Nahmi Lee, Phillip Luckhardt, Riley McDonald, iii James Phelan, Gabriel Renggli, Logan Rohde, Kevin Shaw, Nidhi Shrivastava, Tom Stuart, and Jason Sunder. Funding for this project came via two Ontario Graduate Scholarships and a fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. iv Table of Contents Abstract ................................................................................................................................ i Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................ iiii Table of Contents ................................................................................................................ v List of Figures ................................................................................................................... vi Introduction: In Parse of Folly .......................................................................................... vii Chapter 1 ............................................................................................................................. 1 1 The Ghost in the Machine is Also a Machine: Wydham Lewis and the Specter of Monism .......................................................................................................................... 1 1.1 The Demeaning of the Wild Body .......................................................................... 1 1.2 Art Without Men ................................................................................................... 12 1.3 “The Fossilized Residue of a Spiritual Activity” .................................................. 23 1.4 Herod’s Children ................................................................................................... 38 1.5 “A Sort of Sleep” .................................................................................................. 52 Chapter 2 ........................................................................................................................... 58 2 The Shock of Life: Virginia Woolf’s Panpsychic Knowledge .................................... 58 2.1 Moments of Being Continuous ............................................................................. 58 2.2 Objective Interventions ......................................................................................... 77 2.3 The Cosmic Mind of Septimus Smith ................................................................... 84 2.4 Agency and the Gaps of To the Lighthouse .......................................................... 96 2.5 The Stuff of Life ................................................................................................. 108 Chapter 3 ......................................................................................................................... 114 3 Winds that Turn the Arrow: The Ecological Imperative of Ezra Pound .................... 114 3.1 “The whole tribe is from one man’s body” ......................................................... 114 3.2 Political Ecology ................................................................................................. 126 3.3 Poundian Metaphor and Imperative Poetics ....................................................... 140 3.4 Denaturing the Image .......................................................................................... 155 3.5 Demigod Ecology ..............................................................................................