Through the Siren's Looking-Glass: Victorian Monstrosity of the Male
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Through the Siren’s Looking-Glass: Victorian Monstrosity of the Male Desiring Subject by Marko Teodorski Through the Siren’s Looking Glass: Victorian Monstrosity of the Male Desiring Subject D i s s e r t a t i o n zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades Doktor der Philosophie in der Philosophischen Fakultät der Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen vorgelegt von Marko Teodorski aus Smederevo, Serbien 2016 2 Gedruckt mit Genehmigung der Philosophischen Fakultät der Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen Dekan: Prof. Dr. Jürgen Leonhardt Hauptberichterstatterin: Prof. Dorothee Kimmich Mitberichterstatter: Prof. Dr. Jonathan Pollock Tag der mündlichen Prüfung: 19.12.2014 Universitätsbibliothek Tübingen: TOBIAS-lib 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................... 7 The Levels of Monstrosity ............................................................................................... 11 Combining the Inappropriate ........................................................................................... 14 The Monster of Our Own ................................................................................................. 23 The Object of Our Own ................................................................................................... 27 On Things to Come .......................................................................................................... 33 PROLOGUE ............................................................................................................................ 38 NEVER-ENDING HORROR OF ULYSSES’ ABJECT FACES ....................................... 38 Ulysses’ Abject Self ......................................................................................................... 40 PART ONE .............................................................................................................................. 52 MIRROR: THE NIGHTMARE I INHABIT ....................................................................... 52 The Spectacular Modernity of the Mirror Image ............................................................. 54 The Cornucopia of Selfhood ............................................................................................ 59 The Haunting Strangeness ............................................................................................... 68 FALL 1: EXHAUSTED AT THE LAKE’S SHORE .......................................................... 77 Jouissance as the ‘Pleasure-in-Pain’ ................................................................................ 78 The Context of the Mirror ................................................................................................ 79 Elephantiasis of Ornamentation as the ‘Horror of Sight’ ................................................ 84 Experience of Wonderland as the ‘Horror of Sight’ ........................................................ 92 FALL 2: ALICE IN MIRRORLAND.................................................................................. 99 Stuck at the Border of the Beyond ................................................................................. 100 That Horrifying Materiality ........................................................................................... 106 In the Beyond ................................................................................................................. 110 The Small Shop of Consumerist Curiosities .................................................................. 113 The Violence of the Fall ................................................................................................ 119 PART TWO ........................................................................................................................... 122 4 IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD OF DEATH ................................................... 122 In the Beginning, All Things Shine Bright .................................................................... 124 At the Fish-Tail Apocalypse and Beyond ...................................................................... 135 Mirrors and Souls of Victorian Sirens ........................................................................... 145 The Victorian Subject’s Monstrous Skin ....................................................................... 151 SPIRAL 1: ‘THE LITTLE MERMAID’; OR, SPLIT SKIN FROM THE INSIDE OUT 157 Silence and Sight............................................................................................................ 162 Hide that Monstrous Skin .............................................................................................. 167 SPIRAL 2: ‘THE SIREN’; OR, THE ANGST OF THE SPLIT ....................................... 170 Monstrosity of the Subject ............................................................................................. 172 The Heart as Commodity ............................................................................................... 174 Warning of Death as Jouissance Expected .................................................................... 178 The Fall, and What Happens After ................................................................................ 182 SPIRAL 3: ‘THE SEA LADY’; OR, THE OTHER SIREN ............................................. 187 Becoming a Cripple; or, the Victorian Face of Miss Waters ......................................... 190 The Great Outside of Better Dreams; or, the Post-Victorian Face of Miss Waters ....... 192 PART THREE ....................................................................................................................... 200 THE AGE OF THE WORLD PICTURE: ULYSSES’ ARRIVAL ................................... 200 The Pre-Raphaelite Love ............................................................................................... 202 The Wider Picture .......................................................................................................... 205 The Spectacle of the World............................................................................................ 207 From Naturalism to Exhibitionism ................................................................................ 213 The Arrival ..................................................................................................................... 217 Introducing the Fragments ............................................................................................. 223 FRAGMENT 1: PEEPING OF THE VICTORIAN SUBJECT ........................................ 226 The Fall .......................................................................................................................... 228 The Redeemer of Victorian Modernity .......................................................................... 231 5 The Curse of the World as a Stage ................................................................................. 235 Death by Drowning ........................................................................................................ 237 The Loss ......................................................................................................................... 239 FRAGMENT 2: AT THE GATES OF LANGUAGE ....................................................... 243 The Depths of the Sea .................................................................................................... 243 The Birth ........................................................................................................................ 248 The Void ........................................................................................................................ 252 At the Gates.................................................................................................................... 255 CONCLUSION .................................................................................................................. 261 Today ............................................................................................................................. 262 BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................................. 270 6 INTRODUCTION The terrifying is unsettling: it places everything outside its own nature. What is it that unsettles and thus terrifies? It shows itself and hides itself in the way in which everything presences, namely, in the fact that despite all conquest of distance the nearness of things remains absent 1 Martin Heidegger We live in a world of dreams. It sounds absurd, it is true, to introduce a discourse, especially a critical, academic one, with such a prosaic statement. Written like this, out of the blue, the statement appears thoroughly vague, we might even whisper ridiculous. One cannot live in a dream, or in a number of dreams; one can only dream a dream, at the end of which one is bound to awake. Strictly speaking, dreams are uninhabitable, they cannot be possessed by the dreamer from the outside, they emerge from within, and their uninhabitability comes as a result of the fact of awakening. For if there were no awakening to come, no sober reality to shake the dream off of the dreamer, how could we say that the dream had been dreamed at all? If there were no end to the spectral plight of dreaming, how could we even say we lived in a world of dreams? We would simply say we lived in a world: period. Dreaming, which presupposes