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ABSTRACT Manifestations of Transcendence in Twentieth ABSTRACT Manifestations of Transcendence in Twentieth-Century American Fiction: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Carson McCullers, J.D. Salinger, and Cormac McCarthy O. Alan Noble, Ph.D. Mentor: Luke Ferretter, Ph.D. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the secularization of American society poses a unique problem for fiction writers. As a number of scholars in various fields have established, humans desire and are oriented towards the transcendent, but in an increasingly secular world, the transcendent ceases to be conceivable as a reality irreducible to the material universe and instrumental reason. In response to this tension, American authors of the twentieth century sought alternative visions of transcendence which would not betray or challenge immanent materialism. Looking at the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Carson McCullers, J.D. Salinger, and Cormac McCarthy, this study traces various manifestations of transcendence in literature during this period. The thesis of the study is that a desire for the transcendent is a major preoccupation of twentieth- century American fiction, as authors tried to conceive of the otherworldly in immanent, materialist imagery and language, and that by tracing these manifestations of transcendence we gain a richer understanding of the texts, the literary period, and the social milieu out of which they arise. Copyright © 2013 O. Alan Noble All rights reserved. TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER ONE: Transcendence in the Twentieth Century...............................................1 A Definition of the Transcendent............................................................................7 What the Transcendent is Not................................................................................14 The Receding of Transcendence............................................................................19 What comes After Secularization?.........................................................................24 Methodology..........................................................................................................32 Organization...........................................................................................................37 CHAPTER TWO: F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Tragedy of Wonder..................................39 This Side of Paradise and the Allure of Sensual Materialism...............................40 The Great Gatsby: the Unmaking of Wonder........................................................54 The Banality of Transcendence in Tender is the Night...…...................................69 Dick and Rosemary....................................................................................70 Dick and Nicole.........................................................................................80 Nicole and Tommy....................................................................................82 Conclusion.............................................................................................................87 CHAPTER THREE: Transcendent Communion in Carson McCullers's Fiction..............89 Ascent as a Strategy of Transcendence in "Untitled Piece"..................................92 The Heart is a Lonely Hunter: Expressions of Self as Transcendence…..............99 Mick.........................................................................................................106 Biff...........................................................................................................111 The Member of the Wedding: Isolation and the Impossibility of Membership....115 Membership.............................................................................................117 Incompletion and Dread..........................................................................119 Frankie becomes a Member.....................................................................121 Caught Identities and the Endless Quest for Love...................................124 Frances has Her Membership Revoked...................................................126 Conclusion...........................................................................................................129 CHAPTER FOUR: The Infinite Tension between Love and Squalor in J.D. Salinger...132 The Catcher in the Rye: The Distance between Love and Squalor......................133 Squalor.....................................................................................................134 Love.........................................................................................................136 Love and Squalor.....................................................................................137 The Elevation of Ego in Art Versus the Elevation of the Mundane in "De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period".............................................................................142 "Teddy": Transcendence without Immanence.....................................................150 Franny and Zooey................................................................................................156 Conclusion...........................................................................................................170 iv CHAPTER FIVE: Nihilism and Ineradicable Transcendence in Cormac McCarthy......173 Transcendence as the Individual's Will to Power or as External Good in Blood . Meridian...............................................................................................................178 The Judge.................................................................................................179 The Sublime.............................................................................................187 The Kid....................................................................................................194 The Absurdity of Hope in Cormac McCarthy's The Road...................................202 Conclusion...........................................................................................................226 CHAPTER SIX: The Significance of Transcendence in Twentieth Century American . Literature..........................................................................................................................229 NOTES.............................................................................................................................234 WORKS CITED..............................................................................................................235 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Scott Covell, my former professor, who first introduced me to Cormac McCarthy in a freshman composition class, which was thoroughly inappropriate, but for which I am eternally grateful. Dr. Steven Frye, the director of my Master's thesis on Blood Meridian at California State University, Bakersfield was extremely formative in my understanding of McCarthy. Although he is only cited a few times in this study, Peter Berger had a great influence on it, particularly his work, A Rumor of Angels. The idea for this dissertation began as an expansion of Berger's idea of prototypical human gestures as "signals of transcendence." Ultimately, I took a much less apologetic approach, but his ways of thinking about secularization and transcendence were invaluable to me. Similarly, David Bentley Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite helped me to conceptualize beauty and the infinite in certain important ways, although his great work did not end up directly influencing my argument. Finally, the director of this dissertation, Dr. Luke Ferretter guided my thinking and writing in innumerable ways, foremost of which was his unwillingness to let me get away with sloppy criticism. vi CHAPTER ONE Transcendence in the Twentieth Century A basic aspect of our lived experience is the awareness of and desire for the transcendent. The sense of the transcendent that I am evoking here involves an irreducibly higher or other reality, felt and experienced through finite reality so as to provide orientation to a life. This orientation serves, or can serve, as the basis for individual and social existential justification, the validation of aesthetic and moral claims, a reconciliation of death and suffering with life and love, and the scaffolding of hope. It is a transcendence over sheer materiality, temporality, mortality, suffering, over an undifferentiated and indifferent being in the world. Moreover, this desire appears to be the rule across cultures and times. It is perhaps simply what people do when they seek to make sense of and significance for their lives. While we might think of "transcendence" as a concept under the purview of "theology" exclusively, as we shall see, many scholars across various disciplines see this concept as crossing theology proper and seeping into fields like psychology, sociology, and philosophy. William Johnson writes: The search for transcendence is not simply another one of those intellectual endeavors to resolve problems that no one is posing or to answer questions that no one is asking. The search is one which is prompted by the individual search for a deeper and more profound meaning of life itself and for a sensitizing and intensification of human experience. The impulse to move from the ordinary dimension of life to the extraordinary is not one invented by the theologian but is one which appears to spring up from the deepest levels of consciousness itself. (Johnson 1) 1 Or again, according to Mircea Eliade, telling the story of the Achilpa tribe in Australia which simply died off when they lost
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