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The “Knockings and Batterings” Within: Late Modernism’S THE “KNOCKINGS AND BATTERINGS” WITHIN: LATE MODERNISM’S REANIMATIONS OF NARRATIVE FORM by JENNIFER E. NOYCE A DISSERTATION Presented to the Department of English and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy June 2014 DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE Student: Jennifer E. Noyce Title: The “Knockings and Batterings” Within: Late Modernism’s Reanimations of Narrative Form This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of English by: Mark Quigley Chair Paul Peppis Core Member Helen Southworth Core Member Randall McGowen Institutional Representative and Kimberly Andrews Espy Vice President for Research and Innovation; Dean of the Graduate School Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Degree awarded June 2014 ii © 2014 Jennifer Noyce iii DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Jennifer E. Noyce Doctor of Philosophy Department of English June 2014 Title: The “Knockings and Batterings” Within: Late Modernism’s Reanimations of Narrative Form This dissertation corrects the notion that fiction written in the late 1920s through the early 1940s fails to achieve the mastery and innovation of high modernism. It posits late modernism as a literary dispensation that instead pushes beyond high modernism’s narrative innovations in order to fully express individuals’ lived experience in the era between world wars. This dissertation claims novels by Elizabeth Bowen, Evelyn Waugh, and Samuel Beckett, as exemplars of a late modernism characterized by invocation and redeployment of conventionalized narrative forms in service of fresh explorations of the dislocation, inauthenticity, and alienation that characterize this era. By deforming and repurposing formal conventions, these writers construct entirely new forms whose disfigured likenesses to the genres they manipulate reveals a critical orientation to the canon. These writers’ reconfigurations of forms—including the bildungsroman, the epistolary novel, and autobiography—furthermore reveal the extent to which such conventionalized genres coerce and prescribe a unified and autonomous subjectivity. By dismantling these genres from within, Bowen, Waugh, and Beckett reveal their mechanics to be instrumental in coercing into being a notion of the subject that is both iv limiting and delimited. These authors also invoke popular forms—including the Gothic aesthetic, imperial adventure narrative, and detective fiction—to reveal that non- canonical texts, too, participate in the process by which narrative inevitably posits consciousness as its premise. I draw upon Tyrus Miller’s conception of late modernism to explicate how these authors’ various engagements with established forms simultaneously perform immanent critique and narrative innovation. This dissertation also endorses David Lloyd’s assertion that canonical narrative forms are instrumental in producing subjectivity within text and thereby act as a coercive exemplar for readers. I invoke several critics’ engagements with conventional genres’ narrative mechanics to explicate this process. By examining closely the admixture of narrative forms that churns beneath the surfaces of these texts, I aim to pinpoint how the deformation of conventionalized forms can yield a fresh and distinctly late modernist vision of selfhood. v CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Jennifer Noyce GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene University of Kansas, Lawrence DEGREES AWARDED: Doctor of Philosophy, English, 2014, University of Oregon Master of Arts, English, 2006, University of Kansas Bachelor of Arts, English, 2001, University of Kansas AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: Modernist Literature and Culture, British and Irish The novel Narrative theory Irish Studies Postcolonial theory PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Graduate Teaching Fellow, University of Oregon, 2008-2014 Assistant Director of Composition, University of Oregon, 2011-2012 Instructor, School of Liberal Arts, Kansas City Art Institute, 2006-2008 Graduate Teaching Assistant, University of Kansas, 2003-2006 GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS: Nominee, Outstanding Composition Teacher Award, University of Oregon, 2010 and 2014 Outstanding Educator Award, Mortar Board Society, University of Kansas, 2006 vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The development and completion of this project would not have been possible without the support and encouragement of many generous mentors, colleagues, and loved ones. I am grateful for Professor Mark Quigley’s kind, dedicated, and respectful mentorship throughout all stages of this project, and throughout my graduate studies. His guidance, scholarly acumen, and rigorous engagement with my work made me a better scholar, writer, and thinker. I wish to thank Professor Paul Peppis for his tough teaching, gracious esteem of my work, and instructive professional example. I also wish to thank my other committee members, Helen Southworth and Randall McGowen, for their thoughtful consideration of my dissertation. I am forever grateful to my partner, Cory Hoover, for his steadfast support and confidence in me; his devotion to our family made possible the accomplishment of this intellectual pursuit. Thanks to my daughters for teaching me invaluable lessons I could never learn in school. A final heartfelt thanks is due to my friends and colleagues in the English Department at the University of Oregon; the community we have built is precious to me, and I am grateful for the insights of so many individuals who helped me along the way. In particular, I wish to thank Jeni Rinner, Marcus Hensel, Bill Fogarty, Matt Hannah, Hannah Godwin, Rachel Bash, Allison Bray, Brian Psiropolous, Katie Riddle, and Phoebe Bronstein for their various and important contributions to the development of this dissertation. vii For my family viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................... 1 II. LATE MODERNIST DISLOCATION AND BOWEN’S EVACUATION OF FORM .......................................................................................................................... 21 III. WAUGH’S GOTHIC SATIRE AND THE “DEAUTHENTICATION” OF LIFE ............................................................................................................................. 78 IV. BECKETT’S DISSOLUTION OF NARRATIVE SUBJECTIVITY THROUGH THE DISASSEMBLY OF FORM .............................................................................. 136 REFERENCES CITED ................................................................................................ 204 ix CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION “I swear that each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant—impossible socially, but full-scale—and that it’s the knockings and batterings we sometimes hear in each other that keeps our intercourse from utter banality” -Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart “It was as though the whole reasonable and decent constitution of things, the sum of all he had experienced or learned to expect, were an inconspicuous, inconsiderable object mislaid somewhere on the dressing table; no outrageous circumstance in which he found himself, no new, mad thing brought to his notice, could add a jot to the all-encompassing chaos that shrieked about his ears” -Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust “And I, what was I doing there, and why come? These are things that we shall try and discover. But these are things we must not take seriously” -Samuel Beckett, Molloy Each of these passages expresses the distinctly late modernist intuition that in the mid-twentieth century, the boundaries of the self are becoming increasingly troubled. In Bowen’s, Waugh’s, and Beckett’s novels from the late 1920s through the late 1940s, selfhood is not a deep well of knowable consciousness residing within; rather, subjectivity is experienced as an affliction with which authors, narrators, and characters must grapple. This depiction of the fraught nature of being is distinct from the autonomous and self-authenticating subjectivity posited and perpetuated in both the works of classic modernist fiction and other canonical narrative forms. By acknowledging the “lunatic giant” that lurks beneath the performance of selfhood that culture and narrative require, Bowen, Waugh, and Beckett pursue subjectivity as a 1 question rather than as an extant and embodied phenomenon. By enlisting and reanimating the forms that coerce this outmoded conception of subjectivity into being, these authors welcome the “all-encompassing chaos” that afflicts those living in the years between world wars. Each of these author’s narrative methods “seeks to discover” a literary means to free that lunatic giant from the constraints of narrative convention. The result is a rigorous dismantling of canonical novel forms that, in turn, dismantles the reified conception of the subject as it had heretofore been configured in fiction. This dissertation attempts to account for the confounding formal strangeness that characterizes this radical reconfiguration of selfhood as represented in fiction. Written in an era when both modernist and pre-modernist narrative formal conventions were clearly delineated and firmly entrenched, Bowen’s, Waugh’s, and Beckett’s novels construct complex interrogations of the problem of narrative conventionality. By deforming and repurposing formal conventions, these writers construct
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