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The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School Department of English ANTISOCIAL MODERNISM: H.G. WELLS, DOROTHY RICHARDSON, WYNDHAM LEWIS A Dissertation in English by Kelly Innes 2008 Kelly Innes Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2008 The dissertation of Kelly Innes was reviewed and approved* by the following: Robert L. Caserio Professor of English Dissertation Advisor Chair of Committee Janet Lyon Associate Professor of English Mark Morrisson Associate Professor of English Jonathan P. Eburne Josephine Berry Weiss Early Career Professor in Humanities Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and English Robin Schulze Professor of English Head of the Department of English *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School iii ABSTRACT Antisocial Modernism: H.G. Wells, Dorothy Richardson, Wyndham Lewis argues that the fiction of the British modernists H.G. Wells, Dorothy Richardson, and Wyndham Lewis comprises a series of attempts to imagine experimental social and political forms precisely in and through formal experiments in narrative. My readings of Wells‟s manipulations of romance, Richardson‟s experiment in antinarrative, and Lewis‟s practice of non-moral satire reveal an intrinsic antisocial and political impulse expressed through modernist aesthetics. In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt describes “the social” as a distinctively modern realm in which concerns for the cyclical reproduction of bare life characteristic of labor and for the teleological projects characteristic of work threaten to destroy the capacity for politics that makes us distinctively human. In Antisocial Modernism, I argue that modernist fiction undertakes aesthetic experiments in order to negate the force of the social in order to open a space for politics. The work of Wells, Richardson, and Lewis, thus exemplifies a modernism in which aesthetic experiments refuse the social constitution of our world and instance the properly political insistence that another world is possible. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ..................................................................................................... v Chapter 1 Introduction: Antisocial Modernism ...................................................................... 1 Chapter 2 “A frightful queerness has come into life”: H.G. Wells‟s Narratives of Futurity .. 27 Chapter 3 Against the World, Against Life: Antinarrative in Richardson‟s Pilgrimage ........ 100 Chapter 4 “The intellect works alone”: Wyndham Lewis‟s Antisocial Satires ...................... 162 Chapter 5 “Novels that are like hand grenades” ..................................................................... 227 Works Cited ............................................................................................................................. 236 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS “We are wont,” Hannah Arendt writes in “On Humanity in Dark Times,” “to see friendship solely as a phenomenon of intimacy, in which the friends open their hearts to each other unmolested by the world and its demands.” But Arendt offers us also a version of friendship as a constant exchange of talk about the world that endows friendship with a properly political importance. Conversation, while charged with the affective pleasure of a friend‟s presence, “is concerned with the common world, which remains „inhuman‟ in a very literal sense unless it is constantly talked about by human beings…. However much we are affected by the things of the world, however deeply they may stir and stimulate us, they become human for us only when we can discuss them with our fellows.” Entitled “Antisocial Modernism,” this dissertation is also about friendship – about modernist writers whose experiments in fiction contest destructive social forms in order to create space for new forms of relation we might call new forms of friendship. And as the lonely business of writing was itself a course in the antisocial, my dissertation would not exist without five cherished friends: Mike Jolley, Jennifer Kates, Jessica Jones, Amy Clukey, and Liz Kuhn. Members of the Modernist Studies Workshop at Penn State read and gave valuable feedback on my writing. Among them, I wish to thank Octavio Gonzalez, Verna Kale, Andrew Pilsch, and Shawna Ross. Thanks, as well, to classmates at Penn State: Jenell Johnson, Julius Lobo, Angela Ward, Joshua Weiss. I am grateful to Paul Allen Miller, Greg Forter, Christy Friend, and Ed Madden at the University of South Carolina for their encouragement during my Master‟s program. Thanks especially to my committee: Janet Lyon, Mark Morrisson, and Jonathan Eburne. This dissertation also would not exist without Robert Caserio, a wonderful mentor I also hope to call my friend. vi DEDICATION For Mom, Dad, James, Kelly, Ashley, Matt, and Katelyn. 1 Chapter 1 Introduction: Antisocial Modernism “A liberated society would be beyond the irrationality of its faux frais and beyond the ends-means-rationality of utility. This is enciphered in art and is the source of art’s social explosiveness.” – Theodor Adornoi It is a queer but not accidental fact that one of the foundational texts of modern sociology takes as its subject an act apparently not social at all: suicide, the negation of oneself, the rejection of the social. Yet Emile Durkheim's 1897 Suicide – a book that forms, along with The Division of Labour in Society, The Rules of Sociological Method, and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim's contribution to what has become known as the classical theory of sociology – undertakes to interpret the apparently personal act of suicide as an epiphenomenon of contemporary social life: a personal act largely overdetermined by the social forces of modernity. If second wave feminism has generated the now worn commonplace that "the personal is political" in order to express succinctly the view that there is a deep and necessary interface between human beings' seemingly private, personal lives and the forms of politics that both script them and issue from them dialectically, then we might imagine that the tacit thesis of Suicide is that the personal is social. This tacit thesis is a gambit by which Suicide attempts to demonstrate the explanatory power of the social sciences. If, for instance, the nascent science of sociology can show that the act of taking one‟s own life instances not simply some wholly personal pathology but instead the machinations of the social at work in and through particular human beings, then sociology in turn can arrogate to itself the ability to explain the totality of human life. If sociology can account for 2 an act that seems properly asocial or antisocial, then it can account for things that don‟t seem social at all. Interestingly, therefore, Durkheim‟s book offers an argument that precisely reverses the arguments of foundational works of psychoanalysis (like Freud‟s Civilization and its Discontents and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego) that insist upon the power of psychoanalytic research into human beings‟ apparently personal psychic lives to explain social life. Though proceeding from contradictory directions, psychoanalysis and sociology both constitute themselves by articulating an interface between the personal and the social. Durkheim‟s book accounts for suicide not by case studies but by counting. Suicide‟s arguments, that is, issue not from personal accounts of particular suicides but instead from Durkheim‟s interpretation of a massive quantitative data set whose statistics report suicides in Denmark, Belgium, France, Bavaria, Austria, and Prussia. Durkheim, moreover, further decomposes this data set in order to correlate rates of suicide with social facts such as gender, marriage and divorce, bachelorhood and spinsterhood, parenthood, levels of education, profession, and religion and with such nonsocial facts as seasonal length of days and even the weather. Coding and interpreting this data set enables Durkheim to describe suicide objectively as a social phenomenon and to posit thereby a scientific theory about its causes. Sociology thus posits an account of suicide in which the act is not primarily subjective but instead the overdetermined outcome of a play of social forces. Suicide, the detachment from the social through the negation of the self, is in Durkheim‟s account a paradoxically antisocial social act. Suicide instances, in this account, not simply the negative outcome of some personal and individual despair but in fact the structural impact of the social order upon particular human beings. Durkheim thus offers a taxonomy of four genera of suicide able, in his view, to account for almost all specific suicides: altruistic suicide, fatalistic suicide, egoistic suicide, and anomic suicide. Each genus describes an empirical discovery in Durkheim‟s quantitative data; each genus defines, moreover, a form of self-negation overdetermined by a human being‟s relation to 3 the social. Durkheim differentiates these genera by presenting them as the results of varied intensities of the social bond, of the social order‟s hold upon the individual. So, for instance, altruistic and fatalistic suicides are acts of self-negation that result from social bonds that are too intense – in which the demands of the social order upon the individual occlude any sense of her mobility or agency. Suicide then offers a minimal zone of action by which to negate the power of the social even as this action is largely enforced by the weight of the social. Conversely,