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Fictions of Proximity the Wallace Nexus in Contemporary Literature

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Fictions of Proximity the Wallace Nexus in Contemporary Literature Fictions of Proximity The Wallace Nexus in Contemporary Literature by Tim Personn State Examination, Universität Hamburg, 2010 A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in the Department of English © Tim Personn, 2018 University of Victoria All rights reserved. This dissertation may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy or other means, without the permission of the author. Supervisory Committee Fictions of Proximity The Wallace Nexus in Contemporary Literature by Tim Personn State Examination, Universität Hamburg, 2010 Supervisory Committee Dr. Christopher Douglas, Department of English Co-Supervisor Dr. Stephen Ross, Department of English (CSPT) Co-Supervisor Dr. James Rowe, School of Environmental Studies (CSPT) Outside Member ii Abstract Supervisory Committee Dr. Christopher Douglas, Department of English Co-Supervisor Dr. Stephen Ross, Department of English (CSPT) Co-Supervisor Dr. James Rowe, School of Environmental Studies (CSPT) Outside Member This dissertation studies a group of contemporary Anglo-American novelists who contribute to the development of a new humanism after the postmodern critique of Euro-American culture. As such, these writers respond to positions in twentieth-century philosophy that converge in a call for silence which has an ontological as well as ethical valence: as a way of rigorously thinking the ‘outside’ to language, it avoids charges of metaphysical inauthenticity; as an ethical stance in the wake of the Shoah, it eschews a complicity with the reifications of modern culture. How to reconcile this post- metaphysical promise with the politico-aesthetic inadequacy of speechlessness is the central question for this nexus of novelists—David Markson, Bret Easton Ellis, David Foster Wallace, and Zadie Smith—at the center of which the study locates Wallace as a key figure of contemporary literature. By reconstructing the conversation among these authors, this dissertation argues that the nexus writers turn to indirect means of representation that do justice to the demand for silence in matters of metaphysics, but also gesture past it in the development of a neo-romantic aesthetics that invites the humanist category of the self back onto the scene after its dismissal by late postmodernism. The key to such indirection lies in an aporetic method that inspires explorations of metaphysical assumptions by seducing readers to an ambiguous site of aesthetic wonder; in conversation with a range of contemporary philosophers, the dissertation defines this affective site as a place of proximity, rather than absorption or detachment, which balances out the need for metaphysical distance with the productive desire for a fullness of experience. Such proximate aesthetic experiences continue the work of ‘doing metaphysics’ in post-metaphysical times by engaging our habitual responsiveness to the categories involved. Hence the novels discussed here stage limit cases of reason such as the unknowable world, the unreachable other, the absence of the self, and the unstable hierarchy between irony and sincerity: Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress imagines skepticism as literal abandonment and reminds us of our metaphysical indebtedness to a desired object/world; Ellis’s American Psycho shows the breakdown of communication due to a similarly skeptical vision of human interaction and presents a violence that tries to force a response from the desired subject/person; Wallace’s Infinite Jest creates a large canvas on which episodes of metaphysical and literal ‘stuckness’ afford possibilities for becoming human; Smith’s The Autograph Man, finally, pays attention to gestural language at the breaking point of materialism and theology, nature and culture, tragedy and comedy. iii Table of Contents Supervisory Committee ii Abstract iii Table of Contents iv Introduction: “Varieties of Silence” in Contemporary Literature 1 A Kantian Universe 12 Chiasmus 27 ‘To Aporein’ 43 1. “Deep Nonsense”: Romantic Metaphysics in David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988) 60 Heidegger’s Mistress? 71 Truths of Skepticism 92 Untying of the Tongue 105 2. Literary Seduction in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) 119 The Postmodern Type 128 Irony and Authenticity 133 Fantasies of Purity 145 Anxieties of Resemblance 161 Seduction as Gift and Manipulation 167 3. Ironically Earnest, Earnestly Ironic: Stuckness in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) 175 Ironies of Enlightenment 186 The Contemporary Reception of Irony 196 Reason and Belief 208 What Fire Dies When You Feed it? 217 4. “The Great Unequivocal International Gestures”: Gestus in Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man (2002) 233 The Contemporary Writing Project 240 Ancient Wrestling Matches 250 Benjaminian Constellations 260 Franz Kafka, Angel and Everyman 270 The Right Distance 281 Conclusion: A Physiognomy of Contemporary Fiction 291 A Kantian Priest 299 Works Cited 309 iv Introduction: “Varieties of Silence” in Contemporary Literature Everywhere it was possible to perceive varieties of silence, small pauses in corners, rectangular planes of stillness, the insides of desks and closets (where shoes curl in dust), the spaces between things, the endless silences of surfaces, time swallowed by methodically silent clocks, whispering air and the speechlessness of sentient beings, all these broken codes contained in the surrounding calm. —Don DeLillo, End Zone To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric. —T. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society” Listen to the silence behind the engines’ noise. Jesus, Sweets, listen. Hear it? It’s a love song. For whom? You are loved. —David Foster Wallace, “Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way” On December 10, 1950, a feverish and hung-over William Faulkner stepped up to the lectern in a banquet hall in Stockholm to deliver some remarks upon accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature. World War Two had ended just a few years prior, the fallout from the most murderous conflict in human history still lingering in people’s memory. The first Russian atomic test a year before had begun the Cold War for good, inaugurating widespread fears of nuclear annihilation. A new threat hung over people’s heads, reviving fears that the bombs on Japan had not closed the door to a world of nuclear destruction, shocking humanity into peacefulness, but rather had burst it wide open. Likewise, any hopes for art to respond adequately to the terror of the age seemed to have perished in the bomb raids and suffocated in the gas chambers, as well. What was the power of the book compared to a power equivalent to the many kilotons of TNT in a nuclear blast, thinkers of the age asked. “What good is literature,” the critic Julian Murphet would later summarize this dilemma faced by post-war artists, “if two centuries of masterpieces since Goethe’s birth could not prevent Zyklon B?” (127). When Faulkner spoke to the crowded banquet hall, he gave voice to the most pressing question on people’s minds: “When will I be blown up?” (“Address” 723). Something had 1 gone seriously wrong with modernity, and Faulkner made no pretences to the contrary: “Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now we can even bear it,” he stated (723), identifying a life lived in the shadow of the bomb as one ruled by the numbness that results from an inability to process a trauma too terrible to take in. This traumatic event, of which the end of the war had given but a frightful intimation, was the absolute detachment of nuclear fissure, splitting reality in its innermost core, and the silence enveloping a radioactive wasteland after the mushroom cloud had subsided. The fear of the atomic bomb, then, was not just a fear of the silence of individual human beings, but of a more terrifying, final silence—the silence of humanity as a whole. In Faulkner’s estimation, humanity had matched the detachment of nuclear destruction with an emotional detachment that allowed people to “even bear” this “fear”; at the same time, however, he saw that the same numbness had also diminished their capacity to address “problems of the spirit” (723) and, in doing so, produce high art and literature. At this historical juncture, with humanity shivering under the prospect of an eternally silent nuclear winter, Faulkner addressed whom he saw as the only hope for the future: “the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail” that had occupied serious novelists like himself for ages (723). Only this younger generation of writers, he argued in almost mythical diction, could ensure “that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of [the human being’s] puny inexhaustible voice, still talking” (724). If these young people could find a language that answered to, but was not itself subsumed by, pure abstraction, Faulkner claimed, it was possible that humanity would not only “endure” but might even “prevail” over a modernity at odds with itself. The key to this renewal, he suggested, was in the past: in “the old verities” of “love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifıce” (724). 2 The tenor and tone of this promise is reminiscent of the paratactical description Faulkner had given of his own metaphysics a few years before in the short story “The Bear”: “Truth is one. It doesn’t change. It covers all the things which touch the heart—honor
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