Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, and Toni Morrison
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, MERCED SHIFTING EPISTEMOLOGIES IN THE AMERICAN NOVEL: VLADIMIR NABOKOV, THOMAS PYNCHON, AND TONI MORRISON by TREVOR ZANE JACKSON A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE INTERDISCIPLINARY HUMANITIES GRADUATE GROUP IN PARTIAL FUFILLMENT OF THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN INTERDISCIPLINARY HUMANITIES PROFESSOR GREGG CAMFIELD, CHAIR PROFESSOR JAN GOGGANS PROFESSOR NIGEL HATTON PROFESSOR KEN YOSHIDA 2018 © Trevor Zane Jackson, 2018 All rights reserved UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, MERCED SHIFTING EPISTEMOLOGIES IN THE AMERICAN NOVEL: VLADIMIR NABOKOV, THOMAS PYNCHON, AND TONI MORRISON by TREVOR ZANE JACKSON A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE INTERDISCIPLINARY HUMANITIES GRADUATE GROUP IN PARTIAL FUFILLMENT OF THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN INTERDISCIPLINARY HUMANITIES ____________________________________ __________ PROFESSOR JAN GOGGANS DATE ____________________________________ __________ PROFESSOR NIGEL HATTON DATE PROFESSOR KEN YOSHIDA DATE ____________________________________ __________ PROFESSOR GREGG CAMFIELD DATE CHAIR 2018 iii I dedicate this project to Rebecca Jackson, who provided me with an anthology of insights, boundless practical assistance, and a variety of constructive and necessary distractions in addition to invariable encouragement and generous love; and to my parents, Phillip and Terri Jackson, whose support, love, and sacrifice are without limit. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………VI CURRICULUM VITA………………VII ABSTRACT………………VIII PART I: INTRODUCTION TO THE PROBLEM………………1 PART II: NABOKOV AND THE PROBLEM OF SELF………………15 §1: NABOKOV’S EKPHRASIS………………16 §2: RIDDING THE SELF: MARY ………………32 §3: THE ULTIMATE ENCOUNTER WITH OTHERNESS: LOLITA AND THE ENCHANTER………………51 §4: A DEMOCRACY OF GHOSTS AND THE PAIN OF STRANGERS: PNIN………………64 PART III: PYNCHON AND THE CARTOGRAPHICATION OF THE WORLD………………76 §1: INTERPRETIVE CONFUSION AND THE ENCYCLOPEDIA ENTRY: THE CRYING OF LOT 49 AS PREFATORY GUIDE………………77 §2: PYNCHON’S CARTOGRAPHICATION………………89 §3: TECHNOLOGY AND THE MUSEUM OF HUMANISM………………100 §4: TOWARD BECOMING OTHER: NAVIGATION AND ESCAPE………………116 PART IV: MORRISON AND THE ETHICAL IMPERATIVE FOR UNDERSTANDING………………129 §1: TOUCHED BUT NOT MOVED: MORRISON’S ETHICAL AESTHETIC………………130 §2: WHOLE LIVES AND VIRILE MATURITY………………138 §3: FAILURES OF IMAGINATION………………148 §4: SPACE TO UNDERSTAND: LOVE, PARADISE, AND THE AFTERWORLD………………158 PART V: CONCLUSION………………175 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………179 v Acknowledgements I owe a great gesture of gratitude to a number of people. Foremost, I wish to acknowledge the professors supporting this project with their immense assistance in advising and directing my research: Professor Gregg Camfield, Professor Jan Goggans, Professor Nigel Hatton, and Professor Ken Yoshida. The University of California President’s Dissertation Year Fellowship provided me ample time to write and revise this dissertation project. The School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts Dean’s Career-Building Award and the inaugural Will Shadish Graduate Fellowship allowed me to travel and interact with other scholars, and, because of this, to think more openly and more precisely about the scope and significance of this research. vi Curriculum Vitae Trevor Jackson School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts University of California, Merced 5200 North Lake Road Merced, CA 95348 Email: [email protected] 209.914.7084 EDUCATION Master of Arts, English, California State University, Stanislaus, 2012 Thesis: Nabokov’s Authorial Agon: Aesthetic Solipsism, Metafiction, and the Expansion of Textual Supremacy Bachelor of Arts, English/History, California State University, Stanislaus, 2009 FIELDS OF STUDY 20th and 21st Century American Literature (Professor Gregg Camfield, Professor Jan Goggans) Literature and Philosophy (Professor Nigel Hatton) Critical Theory and Philosophy (Professor Ken Yoshida, Professor Nigel Hatton) vii ABSTRACT Shifting Epistemologies in the American Novel: Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, and Toni Morrison by Trevor Zane Jackson Dissertation Chair: Professor Gregg Camfield In Partial Fulfillment of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Interdisciplinary Humanities University of California, Merced 2018 This project describes strategies presented in the fiction of three American novelists which alter our relationship to the epistemological codes of modernity, standards in which we are implicated by a vast network of cultural assumptions and institutional apparatuses. Such confinement within an ethical hegemony—a system permitting only a limited range of acceptable conduct, contemplation, and resistance in both public and private spheres—restricts the bounds not only of what can be practiced but also of what can be safely thought. This system I identify as the epistemology of modernity and, ushered in by the advent of modernization, capitalist relations, and the contemporary continuation of enlightenment reason against which any form of expression must situate itself either in opposition or corroboration. Because divergence is permitted to a certain degree, the possibility of epistemological shifting cannot be achieved by outward participation in such a system and thus must be perceptual: achieved through mentality and self-awareness. The strategies involve a shift in epistemological and thus ethical relations to modernity. Briefly, for Nabokov, it is the ridding of focus on the self; for Pynchon, comprehending the influences of totality; and for Morrison, the depiction of the always-othered non-self rather than one reduced to normative social assumptions and interpretive practices. More specifically, each author offers a particular set of insights on which to build. The project at which most of Nabokov’s (1899-1977) written work is aimed involves the generation, almost separate from the fabric of reality, of a purely aesthetic world. While much of his project is (at worst) doomed to fail or (at best) susceptible to the inevitably invasive material of the real, it remains useful in seeing what potential arises when an imaginative mind consciously attempts to work outside of and resist established systems. Pynchon (b. 1937), on the other hand, is far more rooted in the project of describing the systemic effects of a totalizing modernity. His daunting narratives (often labeled encyclopedic) depict the overwhelming saturation of apparatuses under which individuals find themselves situated and interpolated. What Pynchon’s work portrays is the oppressive and interconnected systems conducting the flow of control in modern life and, most important for this project, the realization of this as a social technology along with the means by which, once understood as such, to subversively navigate it. Finally, Morrison (b. 1931) represents the most directly and aggressively destabilizing personality of this trio. Her viii novels adopt as a constituted whole an aesthetic form that seeks to confront and expose the hegemonic systems responsible for the perpetuation of ideologies that come to seem natural but which need not be. Rather than constructing an alternative world or showing the means by which one can navigate the current one, Morrison assails and deconstructions the assumptions that constitute modern reality. Together, these three novelists offer distinct possibilities for epistemological change that can be wrought, and my future work—proceeding this dissertation project—will turn to transforming the literary strategies uncovered here into an actionable praxis that reaches beyond the readership of the novel. ix PART I: INTRODUCTION TO THE PROBLEM “I firmly disbelieve, myself, that our human experience is the highest form of experience extant in the universe. I believe rather that we stand in much the same relation to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing-rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no inkling. They are merely tangent to curves of history the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken. So we are tangents to the wider life of things.” -William James, Pragmatism and the Meaning of Truth (143-4) 1 2 I It is with a mood of mournful lamentation that Toni Morrison closes her second novel, Sula, with the endless and serialized sets of “circles and circles of sorrow” (S 174). With a similar and rebellious frustration at circularity, Vladimir Nabokov opens his autobiography Speak, Memory by stating that aside from suicide he has made every imaginable and creative effort to escape the binds of his spatio-temporal ego “only to discover that the prison of time is spherical and without exists” (SM 20). An overwhelming sense of futility and inescapability—a complex mood many might also associate with paranoia and the writing of Thomas Pynchon— that leads to desperation and even despair accompanies contemplations of circularity. Indeed, these novelists share in their dissatisfaction with this diagnosis and each resists the pervasive sense of confinement that seems to blanket the modern world about which they write. If we have a right to expect novelty under the rubric of beings capable of thinking and acting, and if we have also the right to expect progress as the guarantees of modernity have promised, this so frequently invoked circularity indicates that something has gone wrong. As Mark Grief reveals, the language of crisis has recurred repeatedly to address what constitutes the core of humanity, and the effort—particularly from the revelations of the