Proust's Medusa: Ovid, Evolution, and Modernist Metamorphosis
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 5-2015 Proust's Medusa: Ovid, Evolution, and Modernist Metamorphosis Gregory John Mercurio Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1053 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] PROUST’S MEDUSA: OVID, EVOLUTION, AND MODERNIST METAMORPHOSIS by GREGORY JOHN MERCURIO A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2015 ii © 2015 GREGORY JOHN MERCURIO All Rights Reserved iii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Joshua Wilner 4/24/2015 Joshua Wilner Date Chair of Examining Committee Mario DiGangi 4/28/2015 Mario DiGangi Date Executive Officer Wayne Koestenbaum Mary Ann Caws Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iv Abstract PROUST’S MEDUSA: OVID, EVOLUTION AND MODERNIST METAMORPHOSIS by Gregory John Mercurio Advisor: Joshua Wilner Ovid’s Metamorphoses has served as an indispensible text for Modernism, not least for such foundational Modernists as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis. This dissertation examines how these writers characteristically employ Ovidian metamorphoses with a specifically evolutionary inflection, particularly in a post- Darwinian world informed by varying –often authoritarian– notions of biological adaptation, as well as an increasing emphasis on Mendalian genetics as the determining factor in what would become known as the Modern Synthesis in evolutionary theory. Using the theoretical platforms of both Queer Theory and Object Ontology, this dissertation proposes that a more pluralized, less authoritative appreciation of Darwinian change can be seen in the very different Ovidianism of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, especially in the well-known English translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff. Primarily concerned with the importance of Ovid’s idiosyncratic version of the Medusa- Perseus myth to Proust’s project, this study argues that Proust’s Albertine serves as a singularly Ovidian Medusa, yet one with specifically biological and evolutionary resonances that queer the more rigid and narrow Darwinism of “The Men of 1914.” v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I owe immense debts of gratitude to a number of people in the preparation of this project. First, I would like to thank Wayne Koestenbaum and Mary Ann Caws of the Graduate Center for their advice and enthusiasm, as well as Richard Garner of the Honors College at Adelphi University, Garden City, NY, for his unflagging support and advice. My fellow graduate students James Hatch, Andrew Libby, and Tina Meyerhoff helped in countless ways from the very beginning, as did my many undergraduate students at Adelphi University’s Honors College. Finally, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950-2009) began this project with me, and Joshua Wilner was indispensible in helping me finish it. This dissertation is for them. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements v List of illustrations vi 1. Introduction 2 2. Mr. Eliot’s Eugenical Ovid Evolutionary Narratives and Ovidian Objects in Eliot and Pound 34 3. Golo in the Place of Desire The Genetic Object in Proust: Combray 93 4. Gods and Monsters The Genetic Object in Proust: Balbec 149 Bibliography 278 vii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1. Ernst Haeckel, Discomedusae 32 2. Hector Guimard, table, detail 33 3. Odilon Redon, Temptation of St. Antony, detail 33 4. Wyndham Lewis, Courtesan 66 5. Carravagio, Medusa 88 6. The arches of San Marco, Venice 111 7. Pendentives and spandrels 112 8. John Ruskin, Gneiss Rock, Glenfinlas 136 9. E. Finden, Baalbec Gate 157 10. The Modern Constitution 162 11. James Ensor, The Intrigue 179 12. James Ensor, The Frightful Musicians 183 13. Odilon Redon, Eye-Balloon 195 14. Odilon Redon, The Spider 196 15. Odilon Redon, Plate 13, Temptation of St. Antony 199 16. Odilon Redon, Oannes, Plate 5, Temptation of St. Antony 200 17. Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Frau Adele Bloch-Bauer I, detail 202 18. Paul Dardé, Eternelle douleur 203 19. Gustav Klimt, Judith and the Head of Holofernes, detail 204 20. D'Arcy Thompson, Falling ink drops in water 206 21. Victor Horta, ironwork 208 viii 22. Emile Gallé, vase 210 23. “What an Aquarium Should Be ” 213 24. Ernst Haeckel, Discomedusae 215 25. Ernst Haeckel, Trachomedusae 217 26. Ernst Haeckel, Radiolarians 219 27. René Binet, ROSACE 222 28. Alphonse Mucha, Medusa brooch 227 29. Wallpaper Frieze, Ballarat Mechanics' Institute Smoking Room, detail 228 30. Victor Horta, The Tessel House 230 31. Alphonse Mucha, dance poster 233 32. Hector Guimard, Paris Metro 234 33. Joseph Satler, cover design, Pan 236 34. Winsor McKay, Little Nemo in Slumberland 238 35. Winsor McKay, Little Nemo in Slumberland, detail 239 36. Henry van de Velde, writing desk 241 37. Binet, Radiolarian arch 243 38. “To the Feminist Congress!” detail 249 39. Antonio Gaudi, Sagrada Familia 251 40. Maurice Denis, Madame Ranson au chat 255 41. Binet, La Parisienne 262 Gregory John Mercurio Proust’s Medusa: Ovid, Evolution, and Modernist Metamorphosis Ernst Haeckel, Medusen, 1862 That day, as it happened, was the day after the one on which I had seen the beautiful procession of young girls advancing along the sea-front. I questioned a number of the visitors in the hotel about them, people who came almost every year to Balbec. They could tell me nothing. Later on, a photograph showed me why. Who could now have recognized in them, scarcely and yet quite definitely beyond the age at which one changes so completely, an amorphous, delicious mass, still utterly childish, of little girls who, only a few years back, might have been sitting in a ring on the sand around a tent: a sort of vague, white constellation in which one would have distinguished a pair of eyes that sparkled more than the rest, a mischievous face, flaxen hair, only to lose them again and to confound them almost at once in the indistinct and milky nebula. No doubt, in those earlier years that were still so comparatively recent, it was not, as it had been yesterday when they appeared for the first time before me, the impression of the group but the group itself that had been lacking in clearness. Then those children, still mere babies, had been at the elementary stage in their development when personality has not yet stamped its seal on each face. Like those primitive organisms in which the individual barely exists by itself, is constituted by the polypary rather than by each of the polyps that compose it, they were still pressed one against another. Sometimes one pushed her neighbor over, and then a giggle, which seemed the sole manifestation of their personal life, convulsed them all together, obliterating, merging those imprecise and grinning faces in the congealment of a single cluster, scintillating and tremulous. Marcel Proust, A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur (550) 2 Introduction ☐ ☐ ☐ This project proposes to examine two fluid nodes in a largely unexplored topography in modernist studies. The first is the oddly unremarked Ovidianism of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu and its significance for a more queerly nuanced account of a modernist Ovid. The second is the equally unnoticed Darwinism of a twentieth-century Ovid and its significance for a more pluralized, more agile critical encounter with evolutionary studies as currently practiced, as well as the many “new materialisms” that have used the strange allure of object-oriented-ontology as their central departure. The questions it asks are two: First, how to address the long critical silence on an Ovidian Proust in the broader canon of international modernism? The question seems particularly important, especially when the Metamorphoses can be shown as integral to the Search’s most overtly Ovidian volume, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (1919). Yet the same question can be asked of the equally Ovidian landscapes that structure the Combray of Swann’s Way (1913), as well as the explicitly Perseid story of Albertine’s abduction and flight that comprise The Captive (1923) and The Fugitive (1925) and reach their dénouement in the novel’s final volume, Time Regained. (1927) Secondly, how best to approach a similar critical silence on an evolutionarily inflected Ovid, and how would addresing such a question help rethink the impact of a 3 Darwinian Ovid on the larger moment of modernity? The question seems salient, particularly after the end of the nineteenth century and the fin-de-siècle when one might argue that Ovidian forms, shapes, images, and motifs find some of their most productive encounters with expressly Darwinian and evolutionary art forms in the various objects, architectural details, and interior ensembles usually grouped under proto-modern Symbolist, Art Nouveau and Jungenstil styles. While a nineteenth- century Darwinism has been exhaustively treated in terms of its pervasive influence on such writers as George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy, the lack of any serious investigation into the possibility of a post-Darwinian, specifically twentieth- century Ovid seems all the more puzzling, given