A Portrait of the Artist As a Future Man: Technology, Memory, and the Künstlerroman in Science Fiction

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A FUTURE MAN: TECHNOLOGY, MEMORY, AND THE KÜNSTLERROMAN IN SCIENCE FICTION By REBECCA L. MCNULTY A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2014 1 © 2014 Rebecca L. McNulty 2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS For this project, I cannot give enough thanks to Dr. R. Brandon Kershner and Dr. Phillip Wegner, for their time, help, and guidance. Thank you Dr. Wegner for your willingness to join this project on such short notice, for your invaluable suggestions, and for you background explanations of the Künstlerroman that I could not have gathered on my own. Thank you Dr. Kershner for allowing me to begin this project last summer, for following it through so closely, and for your invaluable, incomparable knowledge of Joycian text, scholarship, and culture. It has been a privilege to work with each of you. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...............................................................................................3 ABSTRACT.....................................................................................................................5 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION.................................................................................................7 2 AN OVERVIEW OF THE KÜNSTLERROMAN IN SCIENCE FICTION BEFORE THE FUTURE SHOCK.....................................................................................21 3 AN OVERVIEW OF THE KÜNSTLERROMAN IN SCIENCE FICTION AFTER THE FUTURE SHOCK.....................................................................................42 4 CONCLUSION....................................................................................................78 WORKS CITED.............................................................................................................82 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH............................................................................................87 4 Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Master of Arts A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A FUTURE MAN: TECHNOLOGY, MEMORY, AND THE KÜNSTLERROMAN IN SCIENCE FICTION By Rebecca L. McNulty May 2014 Chair: R. Brandon Kershner Major: English My thesis examines the narrative line drawn between James Joyce's The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and how it has affected the tradition of Künstlerroman within twenty and twenty-first century science fiction stories. My project explores the ways that Joyce writes the story of a young man's growth into an artist in a society devoid of the technology available in future iterations. By exploring the shift in narrative tradition possible in the rapid technological change described by Alvin Tofler's Future Shock, where we have experienced “too much change in too short a period,” I have traced threads of the same transition as necessary precursors to a systematic progression in the genre as a fusion between the traditions of literary and science fiction stories. Using Stephen Dedalus as model for the young artist's coming of age, I argue that the Künstlerroman in science fiction explicates the rapid change that revolutionized culture and memory during and in response to the massive period of cultural anxiety. I use Portrait as a model of the definitive treatment of what existed in the early twentieth- century and how this baseline has contributed to the definition of the memory and 5 artistic preservation within the basic Künstlerroman. With this basis, I explore the progression of the Künstlerroman in science fiction through the twentieth, into the twentieth-century, and explore the way they expand on the definition of the artist archetype that Joyce so thoroughly defined in 1916. 6 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION In 1904, Dana, A Magazine of Independent Thought rejected James Joyce's first attempt to publish the essay-story "A Portrait of the Artist." Joyce's story began, “The features of infancy are not commonly reproduced in the adolescent portrait for, so capricious are we, that we cannot or will not conceive the past in any other than its iron memorial aspect.” The twenty-two year old aspiring artist was then and continued to be preoccupied with the mechanics of memory, both within his own mnemonic games and the inner dialogues of his narration. John S. Rickard’s comprehensive examination of Joyce’s Book of Memory summarizes the extent to which memory affected Joyce’s personal life, culminating in his memorization of “The Lady of the Lake” as a coping technique in his recovery from painful eye surgery (1). For the young writer intent upon escaping infancy, repressed adolescence, and his own past, the portrait of an artist included an escape from the iron-clad memories that remained encased within his own personal history. In his thwarted essay, Joyce continues, “Yet the past assuredly implies a fluid succession of presents, the development of an entity of which our actual present is a phase only.” Joyce bleakly fantasized over a time when we could “conceive the past in any way other than its iron memorial aspect.” He craved a mechanism by which the past could be explored as a “fluid succession of presents” rather than a stone-clad decree of historical events. After drafts of his essay became the unfinished Stephen Hero, it finally progressed to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which exemplifies the genre of the Künstlerroman – the growth as an artist. As a branch of the Bildüngsroman, the 7 Künstlerroman focuses on how the stories of childhood grow into future artistry; however, unlike the traditional Bildüngsroman, the Künstlerroman concentrates on both character growth and the creation of the art itself: how art turns into memory in order to preserve both characters and their art objects. The Künstlerroman values the truthful creation of art within a narrative. The preoccupation with a truthful past raises the question of where truth fits into fiction, which David Richter summarizes as the obsession of narratologists since “Plato exiled the poets from the Republic for telling attractive lies about gods and men” (3). Richter further argues that if fiction were purely hypothetical, like fantasy, then truth would be impossible. That, however, does little to categorize what Richter calls the “aesthetically designed simulations of real life, autobiographies presented in the form of fiction,” such as Joyce’s Portrait and Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse (5). On occasion, the Künstlerroman falls victim to the autobiographical presuppositions of its readers. Too often, the artist as character is confused with the author as character in what becomes a highly stylistic memoir disguised as fiction. These autobiographical quandaries create a unique question for their author: should Joyce's Stephen, for instance, know the Platonic exile that Joyce himself would have studied as a part of his Jesuit education? Should Stephen grapple with the same concepts of truth in fiction while still at Clongowes, years before his decision to pursue artistry as a profession and identity? One answer is that the Künstlerroman captures the truth of an experience rather than that of individual history. This distinction would violate a definition of the genre proposed by Roberta Seret, who argues that the Künstlerroman must include 8 autobiographical elements of its author as “either an extension or revision of the artist's own personality”(23). Unfortunately, Seret's definition implies an intentional fallacy that unfairly limits the genre. Evy Varsamopoulou notes that Seret's definition can create only a “more or less autobiographical Bildüngsroman”(xiv). This definition inspires a “purely thematic reading” of the genre, leaving no room for the appeal of a fictional narrative. I would instead point to Ernst Bloch's pinnacle essay “A Philosophical View of the Novel of the Artist,” in which he describes our desire to emphasize a character, particularly one whose “life assumes a more colorful aspect than what is usual,” or one whose life creates fictional interest (227). Bloch argues, “Whereas the detective novel requires a process of collecting evidence, penetrating backward to a past crime, the novel of the artist requires recognition of and interest in the creative person who brings out something new instead of something past”(229). Definitions of any literary concept are inherently problematic. Barry Malzberg treats the problem simply, with an old Yiddish proverb where "fifty experts will produce fifty one definitions" (14). However, Künstlerroman lends itself to a generally overarching theme of what will exist between its pages: an artist will grow and his art will change with that growth. Art uses an artist's past experiences to create a new representation of the present. Even art that mimics present reality creates a newly performed artifact that transcends the present of its creation. If we fuse the definitions posited by Joyce and Bloch, the artist “brings out something new instead of something past,” which “implies a fluid succession of presents, the development of an entity of which our actual present is a phase only.” Using this definition of the Künstlerroman, we can begin to see the 9 possibilities of the genre acting as a bridge into stories that speculate on the newness of technological innovations and the possibilities of future forms of artistic preservation. The Künstlerroman depends upon the concept of memory to preserve both the

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