Copyright by Christopher Damien Chung 2008
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Copyright by Christopher Damien Chung 2008 The Dissertation Committee for Christopher Damien Chung certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: “Almost Unnamable”: Suicide in the Modernist Novel Committee: Alan Friedman, Supervisor Mia Carter Tony Hilfer Charles Rossman Elizabeth Pomeroy “Almost Unnamable”: Suicide in the Modernist Novel by Christopher Damien Chung, B.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2008 Acknowledgements I owe an incalculable debt of gratitude to my advisor, Alan Friedman, who posed the question that led to this dissertation and whose unflagging encouragement motivated me to persevere when the end seemed unattainable. I am also indebted to Mia Carter, Charles Rossman, Elizabeth Pomeroy, and Tony Hilfer for their perceptive criticism, kind words, and enthusiasm, all of which sustained me throughout the writing process. Unfortunately, Tony Hilfer, an inimitable teacher and human being, died in a car accident while driving to my dissertation defense – a tragic occurrence that saddens me enormously. Tony taught one of my first graduate seminars, and he was the first UT English professor that I esteemed, one who regularly shared with his students his awe- inspiring knowledge of literature, rousing intellectual curiosity, and deep compassion for other people, both fictional and actual. I am delighted that he saw my graduate career commence and cheered me on through its middle stages; I wish he were a part of its conclusion. Friends have kept me sane and honest. My pre-Austin friends – The Society – are invaluable chums, pioneers of soul who, even from a distance, continually help me to filter out noise from signal and stay focused. Whenever I see them, they remind me that one should always go right to the source, for, as they like to say, life is too short to feel remorse or to deal with middlemen. Without my Austin friends, with whom I have shared many singalongs, impromptu and planned, euphonious and cacophonous, writing iv this dissertation would have been a lonely experience. Special thanks to Marc and Erica for bringing me to Austin and feeding me on numerous occasions, Justin and Doug for manufacturing the dazzling wisecracks that lightened all those long hours of work, Jill and Jodi for sharing numerous adventures and misadventures with me, and the members of Spoke – Jason, Chris, and Tyler – for making my rock-and-roll fantasy come true. Mom, Dad, Emily, and Julia deserve more gratitude than I can express. They have supported me throughout the years, never questioning my decision to pursue a doctorate and never doubting that I could write this dissertation. Finally, without Kim, none of this would have been possible. Through her love, companionship, and indefatigable patience, she has kept me grounded and shown me what I can accomplish. I am eternally grateful for her presence, which calls forth a new expression that only she can grasp: tangelic . v “Almost Unnamable”: Suicide in the Modernist Novel Publication No._____________ Christopher Damien Chung, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2008 Supervisor: Alan Friedman Since Presocratic Greece, suicide in the West has been “known” and controlled, both politically and discursively. Groups as diverse as theologians and literary critics have propagated many different views of self-killing, but, determining its cause and moralizing about it, they have commonly exerted interpretive power over suicide, making it nameable, explicable, and predominantly reprehensible. The four modernist authors that I consider in this dissertation – Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner – break completely with the tradition of knowing suicide by insisting on its inscrutability, refusing to judge it, and ultimately rendering it “almost unnamable,” identifiable but indefinable. In For Whom the Bell Tolls , Victory , Mrs. Dalloway , and The Sound and the Fury , respectively, these authors portray illustrative, but by no means definitive, modernist self-killings; they construct a distinctive representational space around suicide, one free of causal, moral, theoretical or thematic vi meaning and, I argue, imbued with the power to disrupt interpretation. “‘Almost Unnamable’: Suicide in the Modernist Novel” examines the power of self-killing’s representational space in early twentieth-century fiction, arguing for its importance not only to the history of suicide in the West but also to the portrayal of death in the twentieth-century novel. vii Table of Contents Introduction: Reading Suicide … 1 Chapter One: Repression, Solidarity, and Suicide in Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls … 49 Chapter Two: Imbalance, Purification, and Suicide in Joseph Conrad’s Victory … 91 Chapter Three: The Aesthetics, Narration, and Interpretation of Suicide in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway … 152 Chapter Four: Silencing Suicide in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury … 195 Conclusion … 234 Bibliography … 238 Vita … 263 viii But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build. — Anne Sexton, “Waiting to Die” Suicide has never been dealt with except as a social phenomenon. On the contrary, we are concerned here, at the outset, with the relationship between individual thought and suicide. An act like this is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art. The man himself is ignorant of it. — Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus” [T]he greatest fallacy about suicide lies in the belief that there is a single immediate answer – or perhaps combined answers – as to why the deed was done. — William Styron, Darkness Visible For what it comes to for them is the total and unmistakable singularity of their situation, the sitauation vécue (lived situation) that can never be completely communicated, so that therefore every time someone dies by his or her own hand or even just tries to die, a veil falls that no one can lift again, which in the best of cases can only be illuminated sharply enough for the eye to recognize as a fleeting image. — Jean Améry, On Suicide ix Introduction: Reading Suicide The four authors whose epigraphs begin this dissertation articulate a view of suicide particular to the twentieth century, one that emphasizes suicide’s inscrutability. Sexton’s “special language” (5), with which the would-be self-killer searches for a way to fulfill most effectively what she earlier calls her “almost unnamable lust” (“Waiting to Die” 3), but which lacks a vocabulary for rationalizing this lust or even the notion that it should be rationalized; Camus’ similar insistence that the origins of suicide, like the origins of art, are not of the mind but of the heart, mute and inexplicable to both the suicidal and their survivors; Styron’s insistence that suicide lacks justification, either simple or complex; Améry’s assertion that self-killers cannot communicate their unique psychic atmospheres, thereby enveloping their suicides in an opacity that the living can glimpse but never pierce – these stances break with the long tradition in the West that suicide can be “known” and controlled, and together they inform two principal premises of this dissertation. I argue, first, that for both suicides and the living, the act of intentionally and willingly taking one’s life is “almost unnamable,” recognizable but beyond comprehension; suicides are cognizant of their desire to die and witnesses know that they have taken their own lives, but neither party can justify the desire or the act, at least in any stable, “objective” way. In Sexton’s terminology, we can know the how but not the why of self-destruction. Second, art – primarily modernist fiction – more than sociology, psychology, natural science, or philosophy, all of which provide epistemological frameworks for understanding suicide, best accepts and depicts the 1 inscrutability I am delineating. As Camus implies, sociological approaches to suicide – and I would add all those approaches generated by the frameworks I just mentioned – fail to capture the individual’s struggle with suicide’s obscurity, aiming instead through their will to knowledge to explain in categorical terms what, like a great work of art, surpasses explanation and classification. Modernist fiction, on the other hand, explores without explaining the contingencies and nuances associated with a self-killing; illustrates without resolving the impossibility of lifting suicide’s enveloping veil; and embraces, as two of its primary conditions, indistinctness and ignorance. One more premise informs this dissertation: within the modernist novel, the break with the tradition of knowing suicide includes the refusal to pass moral judgment, both negative and positive, on self-destruction and on individual self-destroyers. Even Camus and Améry, both of whom display deep insight into suicide’s opacity, moralize about the deed, articulating the common view that self-killing is either an unacceptable surrender to corrosive pressures or a suitable response to a life whose dignity has been destroyed (or is in danger of being destroyed) by such pressures: while Camus calls it a “repudiation” and concludes that the defiant, “absurd man,” rather than accepting the absurdity of existence and killing himself, must “drain everything to the bitter end, and deplete himself” (41), Améry