The University of Chicago the Styles of Volition

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO THE STYLES OF VOLITION: TOWARD A THEORY OF THE NOVELISTIC WILL A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE BY MARTIN RAYBURN CHICAGO, ILLINOIS DECEMBER 2018 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………………….iii Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………….1 Chapter I: Moby-Dick, Jonathan Edwards, and the Drama of the Will…………………………50 Chapter II: In the Hiatus of Action: Stranger-Sociality and the Suspenseful Will in the Novels of Patricia Highsmith………………………………………………………………………………91 Chapter III: The Possessed Will and the Gothic Mode in “Ligeia,” As I Lay Dying, and Beloved.......................................................................................................................................149 Conclusion: The Middle Passages of the Novelistic Will……………………………………. 203 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………………211 ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First, I would like to thank my dissertation advisors, Bill Brown and Frances Ferguson. Ever since I began graduate school, I have looked forward to my meetings with Bill, who has unceasingly supported my rather tortuous intellectual trajectory. Frances has been a wonderful reader and perfectly demanding interlocutor. She also kept me focused on the finish line whenever I was tempted to slow down or veer off course. James Duesterberg and Andres Millan are my primary founts of intellectual rigor and conversational virtuosity. James and Andres see through any and all bullshit—personal, philosophical, institutional—and I feel incredibly lucky to have them as close friends and colleagues. Sonia Vora and Aleks Prigozhin were unfailingly generous in helping me structure my thoughts at the initial stages of writing. Sonia was always attentive to my unsolicited riffing, and offered unexpected and often brilliant thoughts in return. Jonathan Schroeder, Alex Jacobs, Jon Proniewski, David Markus, and Alex Farivar have contributed to this project in less formal ways, through their ongoing encouragement and invigorating curiosity. Sean Hutchison and Kortney Dziedzic have afforded me emotional and nutritional sustenance during the darker times. Two other Chicago friends, Patrick Underwood and Tien Shih, have been reliable sources of companionship and stimulation. I would not have finished this project without them. Nathan Brown and Cynthia Mitchell have been kind enough to let me squat in their apartment during a couple long writing excursions in Montreal. No one has had a greater impact iii on my intellectual development than Nathan. He is my primary model for intellectual seriousness and ambition; I’m still in awe of his exacting mind, enormous heart, and political conviction. Kelly Rayburn, Sarah Rayburn, and my mom and dad give me love and support beyond anything I could hope for. I am particularly grateful for my dad for never losing faith in my intellectual and vocational hopes. As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to see my familial happiness as a kind of cosmic aberration without which I’d be lost. My older sister, Laurel Rayburn, is the closest thing I have to a guardian angel. She’s the best editor and the best therapist one could ask for, as well as the most spiritually generous person I’ve known. This project is dedicated to her. iv INTRODUCTION Only by means of promising can the will consolidate itself as will, and only in the act of promising does the will—and nothing else—promise and promise itself as the will. Promising— as the mode of discourse in which one speaks ahead of oneself in view of oneself—dictates the structure of the will. Werner Hamacher, “The Promise of Interpretation” “Maybe I better not tell.” “Why, Jim?” “Well, dey’s reasons. But you wouldn’ tell on me ef I ‘us to tell you, would you Huck?” “Blamed if I would, Jim.” “Well, I believe you, Huck. I—I run off.” “Jim!” “But mind, you said you wouldn’t tell—you know you said you wouldn’t tell, Huck.” “Well, I did. I said I wouldn’t, and I’ll stick to it. Honest injun I will. People would call me a low down Ablitionist and despise me for keeping mum—but that don’t make no difference.” Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn poses innumerable philosophical questions, but I will begin with a relatively simple one: Is there a difference between keeping a promise and not breaking one? Keeping a promise of course implies not breaking one, but one might argue that the converse is not true: not breaking a promise might simply indicate a form of negligence—for example, a happy bout of forgetfulness. Keeping a promise tends to imply something stronger— perhaps, a resolution sustained through an extended act of will. As Nietzsche famously argues in the Genealogy of Morals, the capacity to promise (and thus to keep promises) epitomizes “an active will not to let go, an ongoing willing of what was once willed, a real memory of the will” (40, Nietzsche’s emphasis). Nietzsche’s meditation invokes an even stricter criterion: in keeping one’s promise, one acts precisely because one has promised, actualizing the will implicit in the initial offering of one’s word. But Huck Finn complicates Genealogy’s account of this will, in 1 which the promiser “must have become calculable, regular, necessary, even to his own mind” (40, Nietzsche’s emphasis). In Huck Finn, the eponymous protagonist is so incalculable to himself that he at one point decides to play good Samaritan to a killer in trouble because, who knows, he might end up becoming one himself someday. The novel features two pivotal scenes in which Huck, whose agential principles are as fluid as the river that conducts him, decides not to renege on his word without exactly deciding to keep it, at least in the strong sense that Nietzsche imagines. Huck’s two decisions not to betray his companion Jim, an escaped slave, seem to occupy a nebulous middle ground between keeping and not breaking an earlier promise to not inform on him. In the passage I have cited as my epigraph, Werner Hamacher argues that promising does not merely instantiate one speech amongst others, but dictates the very structure of the will. If Huck simply stops short of breaking a “promise”—he never uses the word—can he be said to will anything at all? Or, alternatively, do his decisions evince what one contemporary philosopher has called, using Huck as an exemplary case, “inverse akrasia”—that is, a kind of beneficent failure to act in accordance with one’s judgment?1 I will suggest that, if one is to adequately respond to these questions, Huck cannot be seen as an individuated moral agent, as philosophical thought experiments devoted to the problem of the will have made him out to be.2 Rather, he is embedded within a complex, stylistically mediated social situation, whereby competing claims barrage him in the form of internalized and literal voices. It may seem obvious to point out that Huck cannot be isolated from the specificities of his literary world, but this is precisely what converting his dilemma into 1 See Richard Holton’s “Inverse Akrasia and Weakness of Will”. 2 See Holton’s essay, as well as Jonathan Bennet’s “The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn,” and Nomi Arpaly’s Unprincipled Virtue: An Inquiry into Moral Agency (75-79). 2 a portable thought experiment does. If one is to understand how Huck comes to act without the aid of “ideas or ideals” (Trilling 248), one cannot seal off Huck as a character or agent from the stylistic and generic contortions to which the novel subjects him. One unfortunate consequence of beginning with Huck as an independent moral agent—in Trilling’s words, as a “heroic character” at “the beginning of […] moral testing and development” (247)—is that this premise marginalizes the force of Jim’s interventions in these scenes. First, Huck’s ironic crisis of conscience—his sense that he has committed a sin by helping to free a slave—does not spring up ex nihilo, but responds to Jim’s ebullient sense of imminent freedom: Huck feels “trembly and feverish” only after “Jim said it made him all over trembly and feverish to be so close to freedom” (133). It is only at this point that Huck recognizes himself as an agent: “It hadn’t ever come home to me before, what this thing was that I was doing” (134). Moreover, because Huck’s action is still in progress—“this thing […] I was doing” is not a thing he has done—it remains open to reversal. But just when he plans to undo its consequences by giving his companion up, Jim’s voice, this time directly quoted, once again perturbs his sense of agency: “Pooty soon I’ll be a-shout’n for joy, en I’ll say, it’s all on accounts o’ Huck; I’s a free man, en I couldn’t ever ben free ef it hadn’t ben for Huck; Huck done it” (136). Jim’s appeal to Huck’s agency here is subtle: he figures an incomplete act as a fait accompli. What is more, he retroactively values this accomplished act as the keeping of a promise: “Dah you goes, de ole true Huck, de on’y white gentleman dat ever kep’ his promise to ole Jim” (136). We have seen that Huck not only has not kept “his promise,” but has never even explicitly said the word. And yet, Jim’s projective construction of what Huck has done decisively shifts the course of Huck’s action, as the boy mobilizes his lying ways not against but on behalf of Jim, telling an elaborate story to a white man so Jim can evade detection. 3 I do not mean to imply that, in order to track the shift from Huck’s “relatively static social attitudes” to “the complications of response” (Poirier 200) he demonstrates, one must begin with Jim instead of Huck.

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