Embodiment in the Künstlerromane of Bennett, Joyce, and Woolf

“We Are the Thing Itself”: Embodiment in the Künstlerromane of Bennett, Joyce, and Woolf Zarina Maiwandi Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2013 © 2012 Zarina Maiwandi All rights reserved ABSTRACT “We Are the Thing Itself”: Embodiment in the Künstlerromane of Bennett, Joyce, and Woolf Zarina Maiwandi This dissertation is a study of the relationship between the modern Künstlerromane of Arnold Bennett, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf and issues of embodiment. Born of the field of aesthetics, the literary genre of Künstlerroman inherits its conflicts. The chief dilemma of the form is how an isolated artistic consciousness connects with the world through a creative act. Bennett, Joyce, and Woolf offer different and contradictory resolutions. By examining how each writer conceives the body, I discover in Woolf the idea of an ethical aesthetics that contravenes the assumed polarity between mind and body, between self and other, and between material and ideal. Written only a few years apart, Clayhanger (1910), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and The Voyage Out (1915) tell a compelling story of the relationship between embodiment and a creative life. TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures ii Acknowledgements iii Dedication iv Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Aesthetics and the Body 17 Chapter 2: “We must love one another or die” 52 Chapter 3: “We must neither love one another nor die” 88 Chapter 4: “We must love one another and die” 120 Conclusion 185 Bibliography 211 Appendix A: A Selected List of Künstlerromane 229 Appendix B: Narrative Modes of Describing the Body 231 i LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES Table 1. Narrative Modes of Describing the Body 157 Figure 1. The Problem of the Künstlerroman 186 Figure 1a. Bennett’s Solution: Marriage 187 Figure 1b. Joyce’s Solution: Inner World 188 Figure 2. Woolf’s Solution: The Nature of Consciousness 192 Figure 3. Aesthetics: Material, Ideal, and Ethical 195 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I count as my greatest fortune those teachers and friends who have guided me throughout the years. In chronological order: Rory Dwyer, Alia Johnson, Sarah Hannah, Edward Mendelson, D. G. Leahy, Waltraud Ireland, Rennie Moran, Karen Johnson, and Hameed Ali. For their good company and lively interventions, I thank my dear friends: Allan Whiteman, Amy Chan, Ashley Wain, Ayad Akhtar, Bernard Rice, Brendan Barnard, Elsie Dwyer, Eva Salzman, Gail Ward, Gul Jalawan, Ken Porter, Nancy Joly, Noell Goldberg, Parvati Grais, Patricia Simko, Rosanna Magarelli, Russ Hudson, Sandi Gekler, Shivaun Mahoney, Tara Bast, Timothy Adams, Todd Carter, Tom March, and Zvi Ish- Shalom. I am grateful to the Hurley girls—Prudence, Lucinda, and Kathy—in whose cherished family home I began to write this dissertation. I also received generous support for my studies from the Paul and Daisy Soros Foundation. My family, Spogmai, Ahmad, Ajmal and Katrin, patiently listened to all the agonies and encouraged me to get on with it. Their love and support has been my ballast. On my committee, I appreciate the care, attention, and suggestions offered by Sarah Cole, David Damrosch, Elisabeth Ladenson, and Victoria Rosner. Last, and most, I am indebted to Edward Mendelson, without whose support and guidance this dissertation would not exist. I hope what I have written reflects what I have learned from him—that the fulfillment of good thinking is good living. iii For Alia iv The absolutely sharp edge of this beginning is absolutely roomless of other than action; the first transcendental reality—which itself is not unnameable—is absolute act. If it is not action entire, the necessity of the new beginning is infinite self-division, the absolute self-severing of self in the rest which is death. To stand on this absolutely sharp edge of beginning is perpetually to create. D. G. Leahy, Beyond Sovereignty v 1 Introduction In the novels examined in this study, three major twentieth-century writers address the obstacles that young artists face in their quest to create. In the process, each writer faces the same questions. What characterizes the artistic consciousness? What is the nature of art? How does an artist connect with the world through a creative act? Arnold Bennett, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf offer different possibilities for the relationship between an artistic consciousness and the world it encounters. Integral to each of their conceptions of the artist is their understanding of the body. Each of the protagonists of Clayhanger, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and The Voyage Out suffers the same crisis: the conflict between their increasingly disembodied consciousness and their heightened sensory experience of the world. The Künstlerroman: A Definition and Brief History The artist novel arises as a distinct genre in eighteenth-century Germany at the same time as the field of modern aesthetics. A variation of the Bildungsroman, the Künstlerroman focuses on the development of an artistic consciousness from adolescence into adulthood. Questions of identity and relationship dominate the young artist’s sense 2 of self. Oftentimes, these budding artists find themselves in families and societies that either don’t understand them or are openly hostile to them. In the course of their development, the young protagonists usually experience various social and romantic setbacks. Their first sexual experiences are conflicted and sometimes carry a sense of shock. Unlike the endings of traditional Bildungsromane, where the protagonist integrates with prevailing social norms, the endings of artist novels are often ambivalent. All novels that have characters who are suffering artists are not Künstlerromane. The artist figure needs to be young, to be the central consciousness of the novel, and to be developing in his or her awareness.1 The development need not be linear, stable, or complete. In many cases, it proceeds in fits and starts, making incremental and equivocal progress. These, then, are the two markers of the genre: a young artist figure as the central consciousness and some kind of development from beginning to end. Many other conditions might be considered customary to the genre, but these two are essential.2 Various critics find important that Künstlerromane tend to be 1 Some critics define the genre more loosely, deeming the existence of any artist figure in a novel as sufficient for the designation. For the purposes of this study, I mean Künstlerroman in the stricter sense of a development novel—a narrative centered on a young artist figure whose consciousness develops in some way as the novel progresses. 2 Jerome Buckley lists six defining characteristics of Bildungsromane and Künstlerromane: a sensitive child growing up in a provincial setting; an antagonistic father; inadequate education; a move from rural to urban environment; at least two love affairs—one degraded, the other exalted; and a mature return home. Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding, pp. 17-18. 3 semiautobiographical first novels.3 That is the case for Joyce and Woolf. Bennett, though, writes nearly a dozen books before Clayhanger. Bennett also does not set out as explicit a theory of art in his novel as do Joyce and, to a lesser degree, Woolf. All three Künstlerromane do, however, reveal aesthetic preoccupations and allegiances that animate these writers’ future works. The novel widely cited as the prototype of the genre is Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-96). In it, Goethe tells the story of young man who leaves home in search of life, joins an acting troupe, has love affairs, and finally becomes a member of a secret society dedicated to public works. More sentimental than artistic, Wilhelm learns through his adventures and eventually settles into married life. The Künstlerroman adopts this model of development and focuses on characters on the verge of being artists of one kind or another. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the standard example of the genre in English. Other earlier or contemporary examples are: Schlegel’s Lucinde (1799), Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802), Sand’s Consuelo (1842), Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), Browning’s prose-poem Aurora Leigh (1856), Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (1885), Mann’s novella “Tonio Kröger” (1903), Hesse’s Peter Camezind (1904), Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913), Cather’s The Song of the Lark (1915), Maugham’s Of Human Bondage (1915), and Lewis’s satirical Tarr (1918). These novels feature men and 3 See Roberta Seret, Voyage into Creativity: The Modern Künstlerroman; Christine Froula, Modernism’s Body: Sex, Culture, and Joyce; and György Bodnár, “The Künstlerroman as an Early Form of Intertextuality.” 4 women, poets, painters, and singers as their protagonists.4 They vary stylistically from traditional third-person narration to more experimental forms. Their artist-protagonists face different challenges and come to different ends. There are two full-length studies in English of the Künstlerroman: Roberta Seret’s Voyage into Creativity: The Modern Künstlerroman (1992) and Evy Varsamopoulou’s The Poetics of the Künstlerinroman and the Aesthetics of the Sublime (2002).5 Seret defines the Künstlerroman as an autobiographical Bildungsroman, where “the real journey is that of the author-artist, who by writing the Künstlerroman, voyages into the most demanding realm of all—the voyage into creativity.”6 Like the authors, the protagonists undergo psychological, social, and artistic

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