Art and Otherness: Tragic Visions In
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Art and Otherness: Tragic Visions in Modern Literature Hamza Karam Ally A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy GRADUATE PROGRAM IN HUMANITIES YORK UNIVERSITY TORONTO, ONTARIO AUGUST 2018 © Hamza Karam Ally, 2018 ii Abstract My dissertation is entitled Art and Otherness: Tragic Visions in Modern Literature. The two main subjects of inquiry I take up are the figure of the ‘other’—both as an expression of phenomenological alterity and as a postcolonial subject—and the representation of this figure in modern literature. I investigate the intersections between these two subjects, i.e. whether art is an especially insightful medium or discourse to discuss the subject of otherness in the sense that it represents a disruption within the nature of experience that resembles the encounter with the ‘other’. As a basic rationale, my dissertation also accordingly attempts a self-reflexivity grounded in problematizing both the formulation of and interaction between competing conventions of otherness. More succinctly, I attempt herein a methodology that reads across discourses whilst remaining on their margins, with the dual purpose of avoiding the self-confirmation of each iii ratiocination and finding, specifically in art (and in particular literature), a discursive practice that seeks to avoid, or perhaps transcend, a stable definition of otherness. To effectively probe the various political, psychological, existential and phenomenal aspects of otherness, my project and chapters are organized around these separate but overlapping dimensions. My selected texts are predominantly from the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a particular focus on Modernist literature, as the latter’s anxieties about the nature of art and of the other are particularly useful to probe these and other relevant questions. I focus primarily on fiction by Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf, Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Albert Camus, Kamel Daoud, Don DeLillo, Saadat Hasan Manto, Yann Martel and Herman Melville, to which I apply a variety of theoretical lenses. I juxtapose these texts from different literary canons and maintain a correspondingly interdisciplinary critical approach in order to disentangle the figure of the other from various competing ontological and theoretical systems. My premise for this methodology is that pairing and reading these texts in unusual contexts allows for a drawing out of shared symbology, themes and metaphors and opens up a space for a more robust conversation about the relationship between art and otherness. iv Acknowledgements Thank you to my supervisor Dr. Shobna Nijhawan for her guidance and kindness and for believing in me from the outset. Thank you to Dr. Richard Teleky for mentoring and helping me to develop as a researcher, writer and person in the course of this long undertaking. Thank you to Dr. Arthur Redding for his invaluable encouragement, advice and graciousness. And thank you to Dr. Victor Shae for his support and confidence in my work and ability, without which I would surely would not have completed this dissertation. My thanks also to Dr. Elicia Clements, Dr. Garry Leonard and Dr. Susan Warwick for participating in and contributing to my thesis defense. Finally, my deepest gratitude and love to my family and to lifelong friends and companions for enduring and appeasing, and for making life meaningful so that the work might be as well. v Table of Contents Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………………….ii Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………….iv Table of Contents……………………………………………………………………………………v Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………...…1 Things That Happen in the Dark…………………………………………………………..11 Side Eye, or Fun with Words…………………………………………………………………64 Each in His Prison………………………………………………………………………….......112 The Tiger and the Whale………………………………………………………………….…169 Final Thoughts……………………………………………………………………………………218 Works Cited…………………………….……………………………………………………….…226 1 Introduction As an ontological construct, ‘otherness’ is so pervasive across various disciplines and discourses that the term itself seems to behave as a placeholder, taking on and discarding meaning depending entirely on rhetorical context. It is perhaps only a slightly oversimplification to claim that the extremities of ‘other’ are by definition self-referential, in that they are affixed, sustained and confirmed by the epistemological systems that draw them. A project that departs from or takes for granted the existence of otherness as a meaningful, let alone stable, category thus faces an immediate challenge in its rationale, namely how to discursively probe otherness without invoking all the hidden dimensions of the word and, more difficult still, contending with what remains of the appellation of otherness outside (or rather beyond) its innumerable ideological appropriations. 2 Alterity, that is otherness as all that is opposite to or not ‘selfsame’, is an essential component within the philosophical tradition of German Idealism, especially in the work of Georg Wilhelm Hegel and later the phenomenological ideations of Edmund Husserl, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau- Ponty and others. Hegel’s dialectic considered otherness a part of awareness necessary both to the self’s realization and sustained constitution of itself; i.e. for the I of self- consciousness to identify itself and with itself, it needs an other to continually demark its own phenomenal boundaries. Husserl imagined the other as a kind of alter ego, in ordinary language, myself were I in the other’s place, in an intersubjective, symbiotic relationship with my ‘self’ as transcendental ego. For Levinas, meanwhile, the relationship with the other is the beginning of ethics, a metaphysical encounter—beginning with the appearance of other’s face—which compels the self away from dominance and toward justice. Phenomenological alterity exists a priori, in the space ‘before’ identification with I and (therefore) also before the many social relationships that comprise identity. This definition of otherness thus by its very nature pre-empts notions of collectivism; the other whom the self encounters in metaphysical relation is not, so to speak, a social quantity, in that the other cannot be ‘reduced’ to a set of coordinates that 3 are definable or repeatable outside of each experience. This sharply juxtaposes alterity in phenomenological discourse against views of otherness which imagine it as a sociopolitical (or historical etc.) category. The latter, by taking into account the ontological (i.e. that which is not strictly experiential) already presupposes the other as a distinct convergence of social relationships which—on the basis of identity—either belongs to a collective or else is excluded from it. The other of postcolonial scholarship, Orientalism for example, is a figure created by the interaction of societies, cognisant of historical exploitation and defined by bringing to bear the weight and deep currents of historical, racial and ethnological ‘othering’, data that is in a formal sense secondary to the phenomenal experience of alterity.1 The ‘referring’ of the self/ other as exemplifying (or being represented by) a proxy separates the postcolonial other from the phenomenological, while also (thereby) opening up problems of representation and essentialism. Still, significant areas of interaction and intersection exist between these separate paradigms. Frantz Fanon’s critical 1 Simone Drichel explains the insistence on the other as a singular, unrepeatable being in Levinas thusly: “Just as he never proposes maxims for a collectivity of ethical subjects, Levinas never talks of the other as a collective term uniting groups of people on the basis of shared class or other affiliations. He is adamant that this otherness is always singular rather than collective otherness. In fact, he is known to be highly suspicious of any notion of collectivity and its inherent assumptions of community, dismissing it, as he does, on the grounds that it is tied to the language of ontology” (23-24). 4 race discourse is equally a psychoanalysis and phenomenology of race. For Fanon, the subjugation of colonized peoples is enacted within consciousness and in bodily experience; self-awareness (of one’s own body) is formed and sustained through the internalization of racial inferiority, and is thus inseparable from basic, lived experience. Fanon cites W.E.B Du Bois’ ‘double consciousness’ as a fundamental alienation of black self- consciousness from itself, that is, an association of oneself as other for the other. When in Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Fanon writes that “the colonized…becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness, his jungle” (18), the ‘becoming’ he refers to is in phenomenological as well as material (and social) relations with the world. Edward Said’s influential Orientalism (1978) considered the act of academic knowledge production about the ‘east’ to be a consolidation of the European exercise of power, a casting of the ‘gaze’ of ontology—which confers power—over the other. Yet the European subject, the bearer of this Occidental gaze, is itself a dialectical product of this othering, i.e. not a being antecedental or independent of Orientalism but contingent precisely on that imaginary duality. As Said puts it: “[Orientalism is a] major component in European culture… There is in addition the hegemony of European ideas about the Orient, themselves