The Aesthetics of Contingency: Contesting

THE AESTHETICS OF CONTINGENCY: CONTESTING LITERARY MODERNITY IN THE 1930S AND BEYOND A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Sonam Singh May 2012 © 2012 Sonam Singh THE AESTHETICS OF CONTINGENCY: CONTESTING LITERARY MODERNITY IN THE 1930S AND BEYOND Sonam Singh, Ph.D. Cornell University 2012 This dissertation explores the aesthetics and ethics of attempts to formalize and coordinate modern—i.e., disenchanted, antagonistic, contingent—understandings of the self and the social, the sexual and the political. In Part One, “Coordinating Private and Public Contingencies,” I delineate an intellectual genealogy of attempts by cultural and social theorists to account for a modern recognition of the self and society as both riven by innate internal antagonisms and both subject to anarchic contingencies in development. I focus on Marx’s and Baudelaire’s resonant reflections on the popular failure of the 1848 revolution in France, and sketch an ensuing aesthetic-theoretical tradition of reading literary forms as cognate with and offering insights into the ideological totalizations of social and political forms. In Part Two, “The Resistance to Contingency,” I critique the content and critical reception of Walter Benjamin’s highly influential dismissals, on supposedly progressive political grounds, of Baudelaire’s aesthetic and ethical insights, grounding my analysis in a comparative reading of Benjamin’s transcendental historical schemas in his political work against Baudelaire’s decidedly immanent ones in his lyrics. In Part Three, “Contingency and/as Liberty,” I explore this congruence of political and literary aesthetics further in an analysis of three George Orwell novels. I develop an argument about how the critical reception of these novels has not consistently considered their narrative structures’ insinuation that conceptualizations and formalizations of the domestic decisively condition and constrain those of the political. In the conclusion, “Modernity, not ‘Modernism,’” I offer an argument about the need to think of a literary “modernity” more capacious than the conventional confines of literary “modernism” by juxtaposing the “high modernist” Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas with a text of the Weimar-era legal theorist Carl Schmitt. I bring out their shared recognition of innate interpersonal antagonisms and their shared concern for the unprogrammable contingencies of political developments, but note their strikingly contrasting accounts of responsible decision-making given such awareness. Against Schmitt’s aporetic distinction of an organic community of friends, I expound Woolf’s more trenchant ethical vision of political community, one grounded in her less idealistic vision of domestic politics. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Sonam Singh was born in Kullu, Himachal Pradesh, India. He moved with his family to the United States when he was seven years old. He completed elementary school in Norwich, CT, and attended middle school and high school in Niskayuna, NY. He has a B.A. from Haverford College, where he majored in English, and an M.A. from Cornell University in English Language and Literature. iii Dedicated to my mother, without whose support I could not have finished it. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my special committee—Jonathan Culler, Douglas Mao, Timothy Murray, and Neil Saccamano—for the feedback and support they have given during the writing of this dissertation. I am particularly indebted to the models that Jonathan Culler has provided in his scholarship for precise readings of the formal and rhetorical specificity of literary texts. I also owe a great debt to my advisors and teachers at Haverford College—Debora Sherman, Rajeswari Mohan, and Kimberly Benston—for instilling in me the skills to undertake humanities research and the confidence to persevere when matters seemed most discouraging. Friends and family have provided many kinds of help during the planning and writing of this dissertation. Here I can only note the extremely generous emotional, intellectual, and material support provided in recent years by Tyler Anderson, Cheryl Beredo, Rebecca Colesworthy, Jonah Corne, Bradley Dillon- Coffman, Lisa Estreich, Daniel Gomes, Maja Horn, Kevin Lamb, Elisa Lewis, Stephani Pierce, Preeti Singh, Ariana Vigil, and Adelheid Voskuhl. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch ..................................................................................................................... iii Dedication .................................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgments .......................................................................................................................... v Introduction: A Contingent Modernity ........................................................................................ 1 Part One: Coordinating Private and Public Contingencies Chapter 1: Modernity, Contingency, and Political Aesthetics: Marx on 1848, Le Bon, Sorel, Freud, Žižek, and others ...................................... 24 Chapter 2: Modernity, Contingency, and Literary Aesthetics: Baudelaire on 1848, de Man, Rancière, and others ............................................. 67 Part Two: The Resistance to Contingency Chapter 3: Messianism and the Decrepitude of Modernity: Contesting the Aesthetics of Phantasmagoria in Benjamin ............................... 103 Chapter 4: Baudelaire without Benjamin, Lyric without Oracularity: An Ethics and Aesthetics of Contingency .......................................................... 143 Part Three: Contingency and/as Liberty Chapter 5: Some Versions of Pastoral in Burmese Days: Orwell, Empson, and Narrative without Naturalism ......................................... 181 Chapter 6: Liberalism and the Despair of Modernity: Contesting the Orwellian Double Plot of Self and Society ................................ 225 Conclusion: Modernity, not “Modernism”: Woolf, Schmitt, and Political Aesthetics ........................................................... 272 Works Cited ............................................................................................................................... 290 vi INTRODUCTION: A Contingent Modernity Modernity: A Provisional Definition This is a dissertation centered on the challenges inherent in giving form to relations and processes understood to be contingent, and it takes the recognition and conceptualization of such contingency in the formation of the human psyche, the formation of human society, the formation of human language, and the formation of the human species to be the defining feature of modern thought, of what could be called intellectual modernity (as distinct from any developmental ideology of a political-economic modernization and globalization or of a literary- cultural modernism and postmodernism). The giving of form is the domain of aesthetics, so aesthetics will be taken throughout as an apt analytic for understanding the ideological work of and ideological relations between political and literary conceptualizations of such understandings. This dissertation takes as axiomatic that a recognition of the contingent unfolding of human history at its multiple levels, from ontogenesis to phylogenesis and at every scale of relation in between, necessitates a rejection of alternative versions of historical unfolding predicated upon the influence of metaphysical forces or forms. The dissertation does not deny, however, that the difficulty of abandoning such ingrained beliefs and habits of thought at every scale poses a considerable and continuing challenge to even the seemingly most non- foundationalist modern thought. An important corollary to the axiom above, developed in this thought, is that the play of contingent forces will necessarily feature a fundamental antagonism amongst their unguided interactions, a recognition that recourse to metaphysical principles occludes. There is no reason 1 experientially, empirically, or theoretically to believe that harmony, unity, complementarity, or balance—especially when projected backwards upon supposedly “pre-modern” forms of life and society—are anything other than ideological impositions upon the formlessness of the world. Thus, the modern recognition of contingency raises not only significant aesthetic challenges in constructing forms, inevitably provisional whether political or literary, that can keep faith with inherently formless contingencies, but it also raises significant ethical challenges in constructing provisional political and literary forms that can simultaneously be responsive to the psychic and social needs for stability. The ineluctably theological character of much secular-tending thought, what Neil Saccamano reading Jacques Derrida calls “the historical, ideological, and hegemonic traces of religion in what the Enlightenment opposes to religion—universality, humanism, tolerance, mediation, to mention only these few,” attests clearly to these challenges (421). In this dissertation, I will explore the challenge of such aesthetic and ethical labor theoretically in part one and within a set of readings relevant to a discussion of literary “modernism” in parts two and three. In the conclusion, I offer a proposal to retire “modernism,” both the period term and canon, as a marker of what is most usefully modern in twentieth-century literary and political

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