Fiction and the Theory of Action

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by White Rose E-theses Online Fiction and the Theory of Action A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Laurence Piercy School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics University of Sheffield May 2014 Abstract This thesis explores four mid-twentieth century fictional texts in relation to concepts of action drawn predominantly from Anglo-American analytic philosophy and contemporary psychology. The novels in question are Anna Kavan’s Ice, Samuel Beckett’s How It Is, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. The theory of action provides concepts, structures, and language to describe how agency is conceptualised at various levels of description. My exploration of these concepts in relation to fiction gives a framework for describing character action and the conceptualisation of agency in my primary texts. The theory of action is almost exclusively concerned with human action in the real world, and I explore the benefits and problems of transferring concepts from these discourses to literary criticism. My approach is focused around close reading, and a primary goal of this thesis is to provide nuanced analyses of my primary texts. In doing so, I emphasise the centrality of concepts of agency in fiction and provide examples of how action theory is applicable to literary criticism. i Table of Contents Abstract i Table of Contents ii Introduction 1 Chapter One Character Intention: Anna Kavan 41 The Concept of Intention in Theory 44 Fiction and Folk Psychology 51 Alternative Models of Action 62 Interpretation Intention in Fiction 67 Ice and Intention 71 Chapter Two Action and Introspection: Samuel Beckett 84 Beckett and Abstraction 97 Self-Knowledge and Scepticism 104 Agency and Abstraction 113 Chapter Three Judgment and Agency: Vladimir Nabokov 124 Kinbote’s Models of Agency 129 Jack Grey’s Non-Agency 145 John Shade’s Self-Validation 150 Chapter Four Action and Addiction: Malcolm Lowry 163 Addiction and Intention 169 Lowry’s Models of Addiction 174 Free Will 185 Addiction and Conversion 197 Conclusion 204 Bibliography 212 ii Introduction I This thesis circles around a concept of freedom, rather, a number of permutations of an idea of freedom. I make a major theoretical assumption which underpins this study and which relies upon a supporting notion of freedom: This is the common-sense claim that the experience of the feeling of action is the feeling that we are causing our own actions. This is the experience which is described by terms like volition and intention, terms which tether physical action to the agent’s decision to act in a certain way. When we act, there is volition, and the phenomenology of free will seems to emerge from the sense that we actively choose what we do and how we do it. The sense that we are active participants in our actions is tied to the idea that, in a way, our actions represent us. In most cases, we take responsibility for what we do, because we have chosen one course of action over others, and have faith that this course of action is best for us at the time of choosing. Implicit in this is an idea of rationality. An agent is responsible for actions which they have authored, and our common understanding of responsibility relies on the traceability of actions to agents. In part, this relies on free action representing the choices of an agent to act in particular ways. This gives us the term ‘autonomy’, which captures the idea that a free agent is self-governing. These ideas articulate and construct an idea of subjectivity, which is described through a cluster of interdependent terms: agency, autonomy, intention, freedom and responsibility. These are the terms often used to understand and describe action, in everyday life and in academic discourses. Particularly for my purposes, these terms and the idea of agency that they support can be seen to underwrite much of the study of literature, philosophy and the social sciences. Although this idea of agency seems to have intuitive force, it describes a very broad set of experiential features. The articulation of these features in academic discourse is, by necessity, more complex. This often takes the discourse away from what might be seen as a loose folk notion of agency: a description which is based upon assumptions and claims which ordinary people are likely to endorse. The particularities of certain methodological approaches mean that the ideas which are captured by an intuitive folk description are often subject to the standards of competing academic positions. This is the case even if these discourses are attempting to articulate a common-sense concept such as agency. The 1 concept of autonomy within Anglo-American analytic philosophy is a good example of this. Although there are often intuitive – folk – factors involved in the philosophical debate, there are also strong disciplinary norms. The primacy of autonomy within this literature has complex foundations. In one respect, the notion of a person that emerges in this brand of philosophy comes about through a process in which a particular philosophical outlook is defended as the most logically defensible explanation of a given concept. It is common for such approaches to reference, restate or defend historical arguments, and so the conceptual usage of a given term is not only subject to contemporary factors, but is in interaction with a series of historical manifestations of that same idea. In contemporary analytic philosophy, the ideas of autonomy, the will, and practical reason, for example, are often stated in ways which suggest their interaction with historical ideas of the subject. Kant and Hume are particular progenitors of the contemporary debate, largely because of their oppositional stances on whether reason can be thought of as a motivating power. Kant framed his view of free will around practical reason, in which he defends a position which relies upon the idea that human action can be directed by rational control. The classical rejection of this position is Hume’s suggestion that reason alone is unable to provide motivation which can result in action.1 References to the classical treatments of these problems are common in contemporary theory. The construction of an idea of the person, and what attributes a person should have, can be seen as an idea which emerges and continues through a specific philosophical tradition. I will address the main currents in contemporary action theory in detail later in this introduction. One particularity of the analytic philosophical approach is its apolitical focus. Agency, in this discourse, is frequently approached at the micro-level of behaviour, concentrating on the mechanisms of individual action rather than the environmental framework in which those actions take place. This contrasts with disciplines, such as psychology or sociology, which approach the individual agent as embedded in particular social structures. Although this micro-level often dictates the type of description that an argument adopts, this does not mean that philosophising is hermetic. Instead, and especially in recent times, there has been a move to adopt the insights of science and the social sciences at points which bolster or oppose philosophical theorising. In traditional analytic approaches to the question of 1 For an explanation of the classical approaches, see: Christine M. Korsgaard, ‘Skepticism about Practical Reason’, The Journal of Philosophy, 83 (1986), 5–25; See also: Michael Bratman, ‘Review of Korsgaard’s Sources of Normativity’, in Faces of Intention: Selected Essays on Intention and Agency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 265–79, in which Bratman defends a Humean picture of the will against Korsgaard’s Kantian view. 2 action and free will, the opposition which was negotiated through argument was the mutual incompatibility of autonomy, on the one hand, and determinism on the other. In this opposition, determinism stands for a causal view of the world, a broadly scientific view in which actions cannot be free because they are always caused by preceding events ad infinitum. When philosophical debate utilises insights from other disciplines, it is often to give specificity to this idea of causation. A case study from neuroscience might, for example, explain how neurons cause actions before we are aware of making a specific choice, and in this case, bolster the dominance of the determinist cause. The defence of free will in contemporary action theory always has to construct an argument which insulates the concept of autonomy from the threat of determinism. Different manifestations of free will theories generally differ in the specific way in which they protect the concept. The structural opposition between freedom and determinism is pervasive. In The Significance of Free Will, Robert Kane describes the relation as ‘the dialectic of selfhood’, and suggests that our central experience of individual agency emerges through contact with both poles of thought. In this structure, the idea of free will is a response to this dialectic. In his description of the system, Kane posits an originary myth as the first stage in a child’s introduction to the free will problem. In this first stage, the self is constructed as a causa sui; as separate from the world, and the absolute spring of action: [We] come to view ourselves as distinct sources of motion or activity in the world, separate from other things (animate or inanimate), which are moved by forces independent of our wills. We see our selves, on the one hand, as independent sources of motion over against the world, on the other, with its myriad sources of motion that are not directly under the control of our wills.2 This position is not an end point.

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