Modernism's Critique Du Coeur: the Novelist As Critic, 1885-1925 A

Modernism’s Critique du Coeur: The Novelist as Critic, 1885-1925 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY John Pistelli IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Lois Cucullu, advisor May 2013 © John Pistelli 2013 i Acknowledgements Thanks go first to my committee. My advisor, Lois Cucullu, offered worldly advice, an open mind, and, perhaps above all, a model of scholarly style—provocative and ornamented in equal measure—that served me well in my quest to unite criticism and art. Brian Goldberg’s commitment to reasoned, witty, and sensible debate about literature set an important example, while Richard Leppert’s comprehensive understanding of modern culture in all its aspects provided me with a standard. Tony Brown combined a severe critical eye with exemplary personal generosity—his guidance goes back to my first days in graduate school, and I thank him here at the end of the journey. Both the English Department and the Graduate School at the University of Minnesota offered financial support at times in the form of scholarships and travel grants to conferences. I thank these institutions and their faculty and staff. I would also like to acknowledge the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, which enabled me to participate in the 2012 Oscar Wilde and His Circle summer seminar at UCLA. I thank the NEH, seminar director Joseph Bristow, all my seminar colleagues, and the curators and staff of The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. Without them, the chapter on Wilde would be impoverished. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this study do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. I have had illuminating, productive, educational, and sometimes just plain funny conversations with too many colleagues, early and late, to name here. I must single out two, though: Annemarie Lawless and Keith Mikos. They were always there to share writing, read difficult texts together, discuss everything under the sun, and generally support my work as I hope I’ve supported theirs. One of my greatest intellectual debts, of course, is to the students I’ve had the luck to teach at the University of Minnesota over the last six years. They patiently bore my educative designs and never failed to surprise me with their energetic and imaginative responses to life and literature. Thanks to them, I can say with Stephen Dedalus that I have been less a teacher than a learner. I also want to thank Eric Lorberer, who graciously put me in touch with a living literary culture even as I researched long-dead authors. The Horton-Spahrs and the Davenports provided encouragement from a distance and, late in the process, even gave me a much-needed venue for my creative writing, for which I am profoundly grateful. I acknowledge too Carl Davulis and his family; my earliest talks with Carl about modern literature and politics certainly sowed some of the seeds of this project a decade ago, and our ongoing conversations provide the everyday pleasures of intellectual exchange. I thank my family, who always placed such great emphasis on education: my mother and step-father, Maria and William Dallessandro; my father and step-mother, Paul and Terri Pistelli; my brother, Vincent Pistelli; my aunt, Frances DiPaolo; and my grandmothers, Mary Pistelli and Nunzia DiPaolo. All offered crucial support, material and moral, during these seven years—and long before. What they contributed to this project cannot be expressed in academic prose, but I hope it is felt in every sentence. ii Last (but also first), thanks to my wife, Elizabeth Criswell, to whom I dedicate this dissertation. It would require still another dissertation to repay her patience, kindness, intelligence, hard work, honesty, and wit. Her love and support have sustained me; I couldn’t have undertaken this task without her, and I dedicate its fruits to her, with my love. iii Dedication To Lizzy iv Abstract Modernism’s Critique du Coeur: The Novelist as Critic, 1885-1925 provides a new account of the modernist novel’s famous inward turn toward subjectivity and language. This turn makes the novel of modernism not politically quietist, as prior scholars have assumed, but rather a unique resource for the robust criticism of ideologies that manifest themselves in language and consciousness. My thesis on the critical power of modernist novels promises to renew the theory that aesthetic autonomy is the keynote of modernist innovation. In this, I join the current re-examination of literary aesthetics’ potential to do more than serve as an ideological pretext for vested social interests, as post-structuralist and Marxist theory had argued. I claim instead that the aesthetic has the potential to make its adherents critical and self-critical subjects of modernity. In two theoretical chapters, I survey the theory of the novel as it has addressed two primary issues: the cognitive power of novels to encapsulate a society’s self-conception and the affective power of novels to move their readers toward social reform. In chapters that treat the writings of Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, I show how the modernist novel, by withholding obvious political referents and inhabiting the subjectivity of a central character, forces its readers into the position of textual critics. My approach to the texts of modernism is also meta-critical, examining not only their works but the body of criticism their works have generated in support of my argument that modernist fiction calls for its own critique. These theoretical and critical approaches allow me finally to make a literary-historical argument: by emphasizing aesthetic autonomy as the modernist novel’s mode of radical critique, I am able to identify the under-analyzed novels of British Aestheticism’s founders, Pater and Wilde, as the key Anglo novels of the late Victorian period. Their fictions of Aestheticism inaugurated the novelistic project of modernism. v Table of Contents Acknowledgements i Dedication iii Abstract iv Introduction: Strangeness to Beauty 1 Part I: Critical Cognition: A Mirror of the Age I.1. The Novel as Thinking Form 20 I.2. Almost Modern Romance: Oscar Wilde’s Aesthetecist Antinomies 43 I.3. Always Meeting Ourselves: James Joyce’s Hailing of the Critic 104 Part II: Critical Emotion: The Spirit of Love II.1. The Novel as Feeling Form 148 II.2. Isolated in the Slaughterhouse: Walter Pater’s Neo-Sentimental Aestheticism 167 II.3. Alive in Each Other: Virginia Woolf’s Holy Spirit 223 Bibliography 272 1 INTRODUCTION Strangeness to Beauty A particular novel takes place over the course of one day in London. Relatively plotless, concerned with mind and memory, it is set mostly among the upper classes, both professional and aristocratic. It also introduces characters from the lower class, however, including one, psychologically unstable and potentially dangerous to others or to himself, who forces the novel’s protagonist to weigh the real meaning and worth of life. Finally, this novel addresses itself to contemporary politics, particularly those of war, empire, genocide, and trauma, foregrounding debates about how to manage the anxieties generated by mass violence and how to prevent such violence in the future. The novel in question is not Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway —though, as my summary indicates, it is remarkably similar to it in form and theme. Rather, it is Ian McEwan’s Saturday , published in 2005 to wide acclaim as a narrative unafraid to braid together, supposedly in the manner of Woolf, the exquisite involutions of individual subjectivity with brutally immediate social and political concerns (in McEwan’s case, the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the Bush administration and its allies’ 2003 assault on Iraq). Taking up the day-in-the-life-of-an-ordinary-person motif canonized by Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses , as well as the restricted viewpoint technique—all of Saturday is focalized through its hero, distinguished neurosurgeon Dr. Henry Perowne—that was the hallmark of modernist narrative from Henry James through Saul Bellow (whose Herzog is quoted in Saturday ’s epigraph), McEwan’s novel 2 ostensibly offers itself as a neo-modernist response to the demands of the early twenty- first century. For this reason, I want to consider Saturday at the outset of this study of modernist fiction for what it can tell us about the legacy of this almost century-old movement in the arts. Saturday ’s modernist ornamentation conceals an ideological agenda, one notably at odds with the modernists’ moral and political attitudes. Saturday ’s title refers to Saturday, 15 February 2003, the date of the massive anti-war protests launched worldwide in advance of the U. S.’s March invasion of Iraq. Unlike Woolf and Joyce, McEwan has not chosen an ordinary day for his novel of consciousness, but one with obvious historical significance. Neither the novel’s hero nor anyone in his family goes on the march, however. Instead, Dr. Perowne, uncertain as to whether or not the imminent war is just, criticizes the demonstration from its margins for its not being party to his complex inner deliberations: “Perowne can’t feel, as the marchers themselves probably can, that they have an exclusive hold on moral discernment” (73). 1 Moreover, Perowne, in his capacity as surgeon, has treated a victim of Saddam Hussein’s torture regime. With this deft narrative manipulation (why not, after all, a victim of U. S.-funded Nicaraguan death squads?), McEwan ensures that Perowne will remain ambivalent about the war, torn between skepticism of the Anglo-American allies’ motives and a desire to endorse a humanitarian crusade against the Iraqi dictator.

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