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Mimesis, Romance, Novel: Representation of Milieu in the Monk and Nostromo

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Mimesis, Romance, Novel: Representation of Milieu in the Monk and Nostromo MIMESIS, ROMANCE, NOVEL: REPRESENTATION OF MILIEU IN THE MONK AND NOSTROMO. A Thesis submitted to the faculty of ry < San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for ^3^ thC Degree Master of Arts In English: Literature by Sudarshan Ramani San Francisco, California May 2018 Copyright by Sudarshan Ramani 2018 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL I certify that I have read Mimesis, Romance, Novel: Representation of Milieu in The Monk and Nostromo by Sudarshan Ramani, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Arts in English: Literature at San Francisco State University. MIMESIS, ROMANCE, NOVEL: REPRESENTATION OF MILIEU IN THE MONK AND NOSTROMO Sudarshan Ramani San Francisco, California 2018 ABSTRACT: The century that separates M. G. Lewis’s The Monk (1796) and Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1904) is a century of historical and aesthetic revolution. Paired together, both novels reveal the continuity of the problem of representing reality. Both of these novels are original products of an international outlook that mixes high and low culture, the experimental and the popular, the folkloric and the avant-garde. When viewed in this context, it becomes possible to see the historical and the contemporary in a gothic novel like The Monk, and the gothic and the fantastic in a historical novel like Nostromo. Following the example of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, this thesis focuses on the presence of contingent and dynamic elements in the narrative style of these two novels so as to better explain their originality, and the ways in which both authors continue to challenge the static pillars of tradition and cultural inheritance. PREFACE AND/OR ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The completion of this thesis would not have been possible without the advice, guidance, and support of my professors, my fellow students, and my family and friends who have given me great advice on how to proceed with the project. I would like to thank my thesis committee, Professors William Christmas and Geoffrey Green for their invaluable guidance and support throughout the project. 1 also greatly depended on the advice, support, and inspiration of all my teachers: Professor Julie Paulson, Professor Wai-Leung Kwok, Professor Summer Star, Professor Gitanjali Shahani. My family and friends have been a constant source of support for me throughout this grand adventure, my mother Suchitra Ramani and my father T.V. Ramani; my brother Vikram, his wife Anjana, my nephew Avyan; my relatives - V. S. Kaushik, Chandreka Kaushik, and Arvind Kaushik, and Dr. Mala Pandurang. I especially wish to acknowledge the support given by Suresh and Patricia Chandrashekhar and their children Siddharth and Shantanu, as well as Laxmi Parmeswar and her family; and in addition to this, Anuj Malhotra, Suraj Prasad Mahato, Abdul Nurullah, Zoha Mahdi, Devdutt Trivedi, Suyash Barve, and Arjun Chauhan. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: From Representation of Reality to Representation of Milieu.........................1 Chapter One: The Monk: Escaping the Castle......................................................................31 Chapter Two: Nostromo: History and Legend..................................................................... 59 Conclusion.............................................................................................................................. 87 Works Cited 89 1 INTRODUCTION: From Representation of Reality to Representation of Milieu Edward Said remarked that “a beginning” immediately establishes “relationships with works already existing, relationships of either continuity or antagonism or some mixture of both” (Said Beginnings 3). It is the point from which “the writer departs from all other works,” going on to identify it as, “the first step in the intentional production of meaning” (Said Beginnings 3-5). Knowing when and where to start is a crucial part to any extended critical inquiry especially when the title of the thesis is “Mimesis, Romance, Novel: The Representation of Milieu in The Monk and Nostromo’’''', this selected trinity groups together broad literary concepts that evoke something totalizing and global, while the subtitle narrows the focus on two specific texts. Much of this thesis is dedicated to maintaining that balance while establishing relationships between the two halves; and through a newly formulated synthesis, it hopes to provide a framework by which both novels can be regarded in a new light, one which emphasizes and respects their unique nature even as they are attached to a global perspective. One should regard this thesis as an extended beginning, a considered first step in critical production that seeks to extend already existing traditions, continuities, and antagonisms, rather than resolve them entirely. The reasons for doing so is because the respective texts, products of different authors, genres, and centuries, are not connected to each other in any linear fashion, nor are they typical examples of their periods. Rather, both works should be identified as ruptures in existing traditions. Both novels are singular and original 2 responses to previously established genres and styles of writing, shaped and determined by the tensions of a shifting present. Understood and engaged with as original ruptures in existing traditions, and analyzed in tandem, they complicate many of our assumptions about the novel and the romance; about the categories of genre such as the gothic or historical novel, as well as conventional notions about realism. The original nature of these works necessitates a larger discussion about categorization, if only to put existing debates in a broader context. This introduction will provide a broad outline for the central argument of this thesis, to better explain what can be understood by studying these two books in tandem, what critical questions can be raised in doing so, and the overall value of both posing the questions and the attempt to respond to them in this thesis. The introductory chapter will begin by explaining the importance and value of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis. It will summarize many of its selected arguments from its overall thesis while carefully qualifying the original meaning in his text. This is done to explain how I intend to apply Auerbach’s concepts as tools. It will then proceed by explaining how Auerbach’s ideas connect with existing debates on theories of the novel and the development of realism. Works by Ian Watt, Lennard Davis, Gyorgy Lukacs, and Leslie Fiedler among others on this subject are specifically consulted. At stake here is the linear model of development from the prose romance to the realistic novel, and from the realistic novel to the genre of the gothic and historical novel, the genres to which The Monk and Nostromo can be said to belong. By synthesizing the multiple arguments made there on the formal 3 developments of prose, and linking them alongside Auerbach’s viewpoints, a provisional formulation can be developed for application to the texts at hand. The choice of the texts, the value of the application of this formulation, the historical context that provides a warrant for doing so will then be explained in detail, while providing brief summaries for the chapters that follow and how they extend this argument with regards to specific texts. This thesis engages with The Monk and Nostromo in tandem rather than direct text-to-text author-to-author comparison. The intent is not to compare both works but to examine how they both confronted certain problems, and how their attempt to resolve those problems, whether successful or unsuccessful, sheds light on the issue of representing a dynamic reality against a static backdrop in the novel form. The method of doing so, the use of explication, how it is understood in Auerbach and Watt, and how it is useful for this thesis and valid on both a theoretical and practical level will be mentioned in the concluding part of this thesis. Since its publication in German in 1946 and its translation in English in 1953, Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis has become a seminal work of literary criticism. Writing in 2013, Arthur Krystal notes that the book represents “the apex of European humanist criticism,” and across the decades, it became “the book that students of comparative literature had to contend with” (Krystal “The Book of Books” 1). Edward Said in his “Introduction to the Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition” identifies it as “by far the largest in scope and ambition out of all the other important critical works” of the second-half of the twentieth century (Said “Introduction to Mimesis'’’’ ix). Yet the achievement of this book, 4 the lucidity of its prose, and the wealth of its ideas are at odds with Said’s qualification that it is “not principally a book providing readers with usable ideas” committed as it is to a rigorous exploration of a text in all its details and individual particulars (Said “Introduction to Mimesis” xvi). Mimesis is a book of twenty chapters, each one exploring in detail a selected excerpt from a chosen text, arranged chronologically from the ancient world (Homer, Old Testament) to the early twentieth century (Virginia W oolfs To the Lighthouse). The choice of texts includes poetry, religious texts, historical accounts, dramatic works, romance, satire, and the novel. Each chapter in the book focuses on a text isolated in context but explored in the light of Auerbach’s distinct method, which gives Mimesis its overall unity. It is not a theoretical work with any grand totalizing idea or concept. In Literary Criticism & the Structures o f History, Geoffrey Green acknowledges the “difficulty in assessing Auerbach according to a functional context” by noting that Auerbach grounds his choice of method by highlighting the impossibility of a linear view of historical progress (12). Auerbach states that it is, “no longer possible to represent the history of our life style, that is the history of the last three thousand years, as a process governed by laws” (qtd. in Green 12). A whole picture, Auerbach avers, “can never be expressed in abstract or extra-historical terms, but only as a dialectic dramatic process” (qtd.
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