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The Novel at Work THE NOVEL AT WORK REFLECTIONS ON ART AND POLITICS IN SELECTED COUNTER-TOTALITARIAN NOVELS, 1920-70 Patricia Harris This thesis is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Murdoch University For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them … Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye. (John Milton, Areopagitica, 1644) I declare that this thesis is my own account of my own research. It contains as its main content work that has not previously been submitted for a degree at any university. Patricia Harris Acknowledgements Words fail when you most want them to succeed, and this is no exception. So my following attempts to express my gratitude for the wisdom, support and friendship of those who have assisted me through this thesis remain paltry and inadequate. May I first acknowledge the extraordinary skills and support of my supervisory team. To Professor Helena Grehan, my principal supervisor, thank you many times over for the care and patience with which you have watched over this project; your willingness to read draft after draft of half-finished work; your acute yet sympathetic readings of my arguments; and your willingness to be there in total, when fits of anxiety threatened to throw me off course. To Dr Peta Bowden, thank you for your special gift—perhaps it is a philosopher’s gift—of entering into my fumbling points and making them ‘real’ in a conceptual way, for all our engaged conversations, and your generous comments on my texts. To A/Professor Anne Surma, special thanks for your willingness to read in such detail and perspicacity, always pointing to the literary implications of what I was trying to work out, and always extending my insights. There are also numerous friends who have assisted this project in multiple and varied ways. I would like to go through them all, one by one, but mention only three. To Loraine Abernethie, a special thank you for your careful readings; the backstopping work you did on my bibliography; your willingness to be interested in the project over the years; and your forbearance for my obsessions. To Bridget Leggett, multiple thanks for your always-willingness to listen as we marched the Toodyay hills, your most generous reading of my first draft, and your encouragement throughout. To Mary Dortch, very special thanks for your literary insights and amazing skills as a copy editor. And to my family of course, who not only now, but over the years, have accepted my fits of abstraction, encouraged me when I was down, and attempted to listen to my tangled explanations: thank you. Finally, I would like to thank Murdoch University for the rich and varied opportunities it has offered me both as a staff member and student. This comes i with a special acknowledgment to the administrative staff of the research section, on whose skilled and often invisible work the whole process of commencing, completing and submitting a PhD depends. Here I record a special debt to Julia McMath, whose willingness to go far more than ‘the extra mile’ on numerous occasions is deeply appreciated. _________ ii Abstract The novel’s ability to portray and protest the political is generally well recognized. More controversial is how, and with what effects, the assertive nature of political critique combines with the open-ended qualities of artistic expression. Such is the problem confronting this thesis. My inquiry is based on a selection of early to mid-twentieth century counter-totalitarian novels, drawn from across Western Europe and Russia, and representing a variety of different literary styles and political commitments. In the case of Western Europe, my selected authors are Ignazio Silone, Arthur Koestler and George Orwell; for Russia, they are Yevgeny Zamyatin, Andrei Platonov, Mikhail Bulgakov, Vasily Grossman and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. How we ‘read’ the artistic/political relationship is important as it influences how we approach texts, the kinds of questions we ask, and the nature of the conclusions we reach. These issues find a theoretical home in the debate on politically committed art, where theorists such as Theodor Adorno and Jacques Rancière oppose the overt commitments of authors such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertolt Brecht. My contention is that the abstractions of this debate obscure the density of the relationship, both as it is experienced by authors and as it may strike us as readers. Hence I argue for a grounded approach to the issue: that is, one that is attentive to the detail of texts situated in all the specificity of their political, historical circumstances. For my guide to the literary practices of the novel, I turn to Mikhail Bakhtin, focusing on the dialogic and polyphonic, the parodic and subversive, and the time/space settings of chronotope. These elements show how the political can be expressed in an evocative and/or subversive way. At the same time, Bakhtin’s binary distinctions—the monological and dialogical; the centripetal and centrifugal qualities of language; and the notions of finalizability and unfinalizability—invite further reflection, for they promote an oppositional reading of the artistic/political relationship, and thus form part of the problem iii with which I am critically engaged. In concluding, I expand on the intricate intersections between finalizability and unfinalizability; the carrying power of the texts’ imaginative calls; and the force of their emotional narratives. The inquiry is broad-ranging and interdisciplinary, drawing variously on the insights of literary theory, philosophy and political analysis. It aims to be of interest to all those broadly concerned with fiction’s powers to speak to the political in its distinctive and controversial fashion. ____________ iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements .................................................................................................... i Abstract .................................................................................................................... iii Preface: a biographical fragment ............................................................................... 1 1. Mapping the issues ................................................................................................ 5 Theoretical and methodological considerations ............................................................ 7 The selected texts ......................................................................................................... 10 Historical matters ......................................................................................................... 17 Structure of thesis ........................................................................................................ 29 2. Contested territory: art and politics ...................................................................... 31 The underlying problematic ......................................................................................... 31 Milan Kundera .............................................................................................................. 35 The art/politics debate ................................................................................................. 39 Towards my own position ............................................................................................ 45 Epilogue: fiction on trial ............................................................................................... 48 3. Bakhtin: a perplexing guide .................................................................................. 53 Dialogism and the language of the novel ..................................................................... 54 Polyphony and unfinalizability...................................................................................... 60 The parodic and subversive .......................................................................................... 62 Chronotope ................................................................................................................... 66 On the problem of truth ............................................................................................... 68 From Bakhtin to the texts: possibilities and puzzles .................................................... 71 4. The novel as literary defiance: Platonov and Bulgakov........................................... 77 Context: an era of political and literary dissensus ....................................................... 78 Platonov: The Foundation Pit ....................................................................................... 83 Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita .......................................................................... 92 Concluding points: on ‘doing otherwise’ .................................................................... 104 5. The novel as truth-bearer: Silone, Koestler and Orwell ........................................ 109 Context: ideological crisis ........................................................................................... 111 Silone: Bread and Wine .............................................................................................. 114 Koestler: Darkness at Noon .......................................................................................
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