Sergiy Yakovenko

Ecological Ideologies of Modernity and Their Temporal-Spatial Representations in Canadian, Russian, and Polish Literatures of the Twentieth Century by Sergiy Yakovenko A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Comparative Literature University of Alberta © Sergiy Yakovenko, 2015 ii Abstract The dissertation focuses on the temporal-spatial representations of the ecological ideologies of modernity in the writings of Canadian authors Georges Bugnet, Sheila Watson, and Howard O’Hagan, Russian authors Andrei Bitov and Tatiana Tolstaia, and Polish author Czesław Miłosz. The concept of ecology is used in a broader sense, based on its etymology of “dwelling-saying,” whereby the ecological ideologies of modernity are examined as both explicitly stated and implied in the narratives and descriptions, reflections and beliefs regarding the proper dwelling place of humans, their ethos. Temporal-spatial unity, or “chronotope” in Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory, is posited as the main principle of artistic organization of the ecologically relevant narratives. Chronotope sustains the works’ ecological and ecomimetic field within its given ideological and artistic perspectives (optical, mythological, or philosophical) and points to a wide range of artistic representations. Some of these representations include the paradisiac chronotope of origin fantasies, the cyclic time of nature and of the mythologized construction of natural humans, the places of the meeting of pre-modernity and modernity, along with the symbolism of elements and landscape formations. The eco-ideological stances and perspectives assumed by particular characters, narrators, or by ekphrastic descriptions are unraveled in connection with identified effects of defamiliarization, inherent to the discussed writings that make ecology as human dwelling-saying their key inquiry. The underlying methodological tools for the interpretations of ecological ideologies and the strategies of their defamiliariation are philosophical concepts of Jacques Lacan (the Symbolic, object petit a, Borromean knot, sinthome, foreclosure) and Martin Heidegger (Dasein, Ereignis, concealedness-unconcealedness, physis). Posing the human subject as an entity of time, Miłosz in his poetry and prose (the novel The Issa Valley) is preoccupied with the ontic multiplicity and at the same time individuality of iii beings. His poetic perception is grounded in the corporeal propinquity between subject and object, but he seeks the meaning beyond the earthly domain of Eros in the field of primordial time. Miłosz’s efforts at laying bare the gap between the environment and our perceptions, necessarily subjected to systems of signification, as well as his longing for the mystery of the originary event that marks our transcendence into time, echo in Bitov’s prose (the novellas “Man in a Landscape,” “Birds” and “Dacha District,” and the novel Awaiting Monkeys) as a systematic suspicion with regard to our capacities of unobstructed viewing of landscape, paired with a series of defamiliarizing techniques that, by estranging the environment as our home of being, paradoxically help make it closer and fuller. The origin fantasies, vital in the writings of Miłosz and Bitov, find their ideological counterparts in Georges Bugnet’s novel The Forest, which breaks down the enlightenment colonialist and Romantic ideologies revolving around the idea of the virgin wilderness. The defamiliarization of ecological ideologies in Bugnet, as well as in Watson’s short story “Rough Answer” and her novel The Double Hook, is enriched by genderly marked spatial elements of the environment that procure a peculiar distribution of ecomimetic characteristics of masculine and feminine chronotopes. Characteristic of The Double Hook and O’Hagan’s novel Tay John trickster narratives, deprived of auctorial authority, help uncover the ideological aberrations by contrasting the Symbolic and the pre-Symbolic chronotopes and by demythologizing historically and philosophically significant stances of humans in their relations with environment. The originary event of its appropriation in the discourses of modernity, in which the cyclic time of myth changes to linear time of history and the immediate environment becomes a subject to ecology, rendering the environment as human’s home of being estranged in the Symbolic order, is at the centre of the discussion of Tay John and Tolstaia’s novel The Slynx. The ideologically marked environmental chronotopes, functioning as objects-causes-of-desire, iv and the prevalence of origin fantasies are the main threads that tie together the selected authors and their works. The identification and problematization of ecological ideologies and their temporal-spatial representations in non-related national literatures open literary studies to the new field of interpretational capacities that ecocritique invests into the discipline of comparative literature. v Preface A part of Chapter 2 of this thesis, 2. 2.1. The Power of Silence: The Soundscape in “Rough Answer,” is a revised version of my article published as: Yakovenko, Sergiy. “The Power of Silence: The Genotext in Sheila Watson’s “Rough Answer.” Sheila Watson: Essays on Her Works. Ed. Joseph Pivato. Toronto: Guernica, 2015. 129-48. In Chapter 1, I also use some fragments from the following publication: Yakovenko, Sergiy. “Metafizychna Bioetyka Sensu u Tvorchosti Cheslava Milosha.” [= “Metaphysical Bioethics of Meaning in Czesław Miłosz’s Writings”] Kyïvs’ki Polonistychni Studiï [=Kyiv Polish Studies]. 17 (2011): 158-72. vi Acknowledgements I would like to thank all who have been involved in creating a productive context for my work and without whom my dissertation would not be the same. First and foremost, I express my gratitude to my supervisor Dr. Irene Sywenky for all her help in choosing the area of studies, the research topic, and the corpus, as well as for her invaluable support, optimism and encouragement of my project. Her liberal approach combined with commitment helped me enjoy my research while expanding my academic horizon. I am grateful to my committee members for their specialized input into the project: to Dr. Daniel Fried for his feedback on several of my papers, for his constant support, and for his unforgettable graduate seminar in ontology; to Dr. Jerry Varsava for his questions and comments on my research project, and to Dr. Jelena Pogosjan and Dr. Oleh Ilnytzkyj for their interest in my research and their willingness to join my committee at a later stage. I also would like to thank Dr. German Ritz and Dr. Tamara Hundorova for their support and interest in my work. vii Note on Transliteration and Translation Throughout this dissertation, in the transliteration of Russian text, I have used, whenever possible, a modified Library of Congress Romanization table. The diacritics and ligatures have been omitted. The published English translation of Tatiana Tolstaia’s novel The Slynx follows a different Romanization scheme. Therefore, when citing this publication, I have used its transliteration of the author’s name: Tatyana Tolstaya. However, when referring to the Russian original and throughout the dissertation, I have followed the spelling that has been adopted in recent scholarship: Tatiana Tolstaia. I have used available English translations of works originally published in other languages. All English translations with parenthetical references to original works in Russian, Polish, French, and German are mine. viii Table of Contents Abstract ii Preface v Acknowledgements vi Transliteration and Translation Note vii Table of Contents viii Introduction 1 Chapter 1. The Phenomenology of Environment and the Origin Fantasies 22 1.1 Czesław Miłosz: Temporality and the Hermeneutics of the Ontic 23 1.2. The Estrangement of Natural Objects in Andrei Bitov and Czesław Miłosz 58 1.2.1. The Landscape Fantasy and the Originary Gaze 58 1.2.2. The Ecology of Negativity and Infancy 78 Chapter 2. Genuine Wilderness and Gendered Spaces 99 2.1. The Sword of the Cherubim: The Return to Nature in Georges Bugnet’s The Forest 102 2.2. Sheila Watson’s Environmental Genotext 132 2. 2.1. The Power of Silence: The Soundscape in “Rough Answer” 132 2.2.2. Light and Optics in The Double Hook 148 Chapter 3. The Landscapes of the Trickster Narratives: Howard O’Hagan’s Tay John and Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook 162 3.1. The Figure of Tay John as an Allegory of the Mountain Country 162 3.2. The Landscape of Coyote’s Tale: Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook 195 Chapter 4. The Void of Nature at the Crossroads of Myth and Modernity 224 4.1. The Return of the Symbolic: The Identity Drama of a Natural Man in Tatiana Tolstaia’s The Slynx 224 4.2. Howard O’Hagan’s Tay John: An Initiation to Modernity 256 Conclusions 280 Works Cited 290 1 Introduction I. Statement of Problem The ecological ideologies of modernity are first and foremost phenomenological systems that establish our attitude to the environment and find their expression in particular modes of knowledge and representation. For Michel Foucault and Bruno Latour, modernity is defined in terms of humanism—as an anthropocentric production of man that began in the Enlightenment and ends somewhere in the nearest future. The process of such a production of humanity “overlooks,” as Latour puts it, “the simultaneous birth of ‘nonhumanity’—things, or objects, or beasts—and the equally strange beginning of a crossed-out God, relegated to the sidelines” (13). In this view, modernity

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