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Vo» the RHETORIC of POSTHUMANISM in FOUR TWENTIETH- CENTURY INTERNATIONAL NOVELS DISSERTATION Presented to the Graduate Counci /vo» THE RHETORIC OF POSTHUMANISM IN FOUR TWENTIETH- CENTURY INTERNATIONAL NOVELS DISSERTATION Presented to the Graduate Council of the University of North Texas in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY By Lidan Lin, B. A., M. A., M. Ed. Denton, Texas August, 1998 Lin, Lidan, The Rhetoric of Posthumanism in Four Twentieth-Century International Novels. Doctor of Philosophy (English), August, 1998,195 pp., works cited, 182 titles. The dissertation traces the trope of the incomplete character in four twentieth-century cosmopolitan novels that reflect European colonialism in a global context. I argue that, by creating characters sharply aware of the insufficiency of the Self and thus constantly seeking the constitutive participation of the Other, the four authors E. M. Forster, Samuel Beckett, J. M. Coetzee, and Congwen Shen all dramatize the incomplete character as an agent of postcolonial resistance to Western humanism that, tending to enforce the divide between the Self and the Other, provided the epistemological basis for the emergence of European colonialism. For example, Fielding's good-willed aspiration to forge cross- cultural friendship in A Passage to India-, Murphy's dogged search for recognition of his Irish identity in Murphy; Susan's unfailing compassion to restore Friday's lost speech in Foe; and Changshun Teng, the Chinese orange-grower's warm-hearted generosity toward his customers in Long River-all these textual occasions dramatize the incomplete character's anxiety over the Other's rejection that will impair the fullness of his or her being, rendering it solitary and empty. I relate this anxiety to the theory of "posthumanism" advanced by such thinkers as Marx, Bakhtin, Sartre, and Lacan; in their texts the humanist view of the individual as an autonomous constitution has undergone a transformation marked by the emphasis on locating selfhood not in the insular and static Self but in the mutable middle space connecting the Self and the Other. The dissertation begins by tracing the emergence and development of posthumanism, locating its essence in the social ontology of the individual. The next four chapters analyze the ways in which the incomplete character engages the posthumanist ethic to empower the Other. I show that while Forster's portrayal of Fielding still wavers between faith in and doubt about a culturally stabilized subject, Beckett's and Shen's figurations of native Murphy and Changshun Teng exhibit far less nostalgia over the individual's lost status as a sufficient signifier, an ethical advance that anticipates Coetzee's creation of Susan who reverses the African slave Friday from the object of writing to the writing subject. /vo» THE RHETORIC OF POSTHUMANISM IN FOUR TWENTIETH- CENTURY INTERNATIONAL NOVELS DISSERTATION Presented to the Graduate Council of the University of North Texas in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY By Lidan Lin, B. A., M. A., M. Ed. Denton, Texas August, 1998 Copyright by Lidan Lin 1998 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Giles Mitchell, Brian May, and David Holdeman for their guidance. I would also like to thank Rebecca Meyer, Director of the International Students and Scholars Office, for her many kind words in times of need. Early versions of the dissertation were published previously in Ariel. A Review of International English Literature (1997) and Semiotics 1995 (1996). I would like to thank the editors for permission to reprint. The dissertation is supported by the R. C. Stoker Dissertation Fellowship awarded by the Department of English, University of North Texas. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION 1 2. DEFINING POSTHUMANISM 16 3. HUMANISM AND PROTO-POSTHUMANISM: FORSTER'S A PASSAGE TO INDIA 53 4. THE ECONOMICS OF POSTHUMANISM: THE RHETORIC OF INDOLENCE IN BECKETT'S MURPHY. 87 5. THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF POSTHUMANISM: THE RHETORIC OF SIMULTANEITY IN COETZEE'S FOE 118 6. EPILOGUE: ONCE MORE ON THE ECONOMICS OF POSTHUMANISM: THE CASE OF CONGWEN SHEN 148 ENDNOTES 166 WORKS CITED 181 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION This study is concerned with developing the idea of "posthumanism" as a new conceptual tool for reshaping twentieth-century literary history by initiating an investigation into the ways in which four twentieth-century international authors foreground the constitutive function of the Other in our meditations on and, constructions of, our selves. Simplified to its extreme, posthumanism in this context designates a distinctive strand of contemporary thought that can be identified in diverse disciplines such as literature, philosophy, sociology, and psychoanalysis. As an interdisciplinary phenomenon, one of the fundamental tenets of posthumanism is a paradigmatic reconsideration of the status of the Other in our understanding of who we are—our self, identity, and individuality. Central to this reconsideration is the process in which power is redistributed: the formerly objectified Other is reversed to take on the signifying power formerly denied him and, as a result, the privilege formerly enjoyed by the Self as a mono-signifier is taken away, the epistemic hierarchy imposed upon the Self and the Other breaks down, and the absolute subject/object division is blurred and replaced by a dialectical relation in which the Self and the Other collectively forge the social bond by which the absolute, immanent, and private Self is endowed with a living dynamic, a concrete substance, and a meaningful existence. Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, a number of Western thinkers 2 working in different academic disciplines have notably contributed to the fostering, shaping, and developing of the concept of posthumanism among whom are Karl Marx, M. M. Bakhtin, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva and others. One of the themes uniting the works of these thinkers is the argument that the individual is an incomplete and insufficient constitution, who will always depend on the participation of the Other for enriching and invigorating his selfhood. The coherence and clarity with which these thinkers articulate the constitutive status of the Other indeed encourage us to delineate a line of development and to sketch out the historical contours of this development. To the extent that no one before Marx has dealt with the problem of alienation with equal insight and depth, and since the cause of alienation, according to Marx, is the erection of barriers that function to separate man from the Other—his fellow folks, Marx may be seen as a pioneering posthumanist, and his theory of alienation provides a useful starting point from which we may begin to formulate and address the problem of Otherness. In analyzing how man is alienated from the Other, Marx identifies its root cause in the capitalist economic system that drives man toward greater and greater abstraction by displacing human value to a series of abstract values in the form of labor, money, commodity, and property. Therefore, for Marx alienation is first of all an economic problem that falls into the domain of infrastructure. However, the posthumanists who came after Marx all seem to agree that it is better to treat the problem of alienation not as an infrastructure problem but as a superstructure problem that falls into the domain of knowledge, ideology, and ethics. Post-Marxist posthumanists thus choose to rework the existing superstructure; in so doing they implicitly suggest that 3 transformations at the level of superstructure will eventually bring about corresponding transformations at the level of infrastructure. Thus in the hands of these post-Marxist posthumanists the argument for the necessity of the Other in the constitution of the subject is supported by a set of new ideas that redefines the ontological and epistemological status of the Other: Bakhtin's "excess of seeing" of the Other, Sartre's approving "look" of the Other, Lacan's "lack" of the Other, and Kristeva's "unnameableness" of the Other. What is innovative, subversive, even revolutionary about the new status assigned to the Other is that in this new status the humanist/structuralist emphasis on the relation between the signifier/subject and the signified/object is discarded and replaced by an emphasis on the relation between the co- signifiers. While I am well aware of the methodological differences between Marx and the late-comers in approaching the problem of Otherness, I am less interested in the differences than in the common interests they have displayed in the dire process of dehumanization and alienation and in the posthumanist solutions they have proposed. Evidently, the posthumanists' project to restore the estranged Other into the process of identity formation poses a challenge to the conventional humanist conception of subjectivity, one that tends to emphasize the physiological and psychological uniqueness of the individual. Such conception, needless to say, goes back to the Renaissance period, when Western humanism first flourished. A fundamental problem that preoccupies the post-Renaissance mode of experience thus becomes the securing of the self-assurance for the modern subject, one that has to constantly assert its identity; in seeking self- affirmation the modern subject needs an Other that can be mastered and appropriated. 4 Post-Renaissance Western thinkers from Descartes through Hegel, Freud, to Nietzsche have all participated in finding ways that will ensure the sanctity, inviolability, and the autonomy of the individual. To do so, they frequently pose an imaginary divide between the individual and an abstract body of culture, and from this oppositional divide they further derive a series of incompatible categories in which the individual is often portrayed as a victim whose nature, autonomy, and individuality are constantly threatened by the encroaching force of culture. Culture, on the other hand, is often seen as a cold and violent imposer of regulating norms and taboos upon the individual. Often, overly attentive to the passivity and vulnerability of the individual, they seem to have neglected an important fact that the individuals are logically responsible for the kind of culture they make.
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