Modernism After Nietzsche: Art, Ethics, and the Forms of the Everyday
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Modernism after Nietzsche: Art, Ethics, and the Forms of the Everyday by Brian C. Valentyn Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Michael Moses, Supervisor ___________________________ Toril Moi ___________________________ Thomas Pfau ___________________________ Thomas Ferraro Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2012 ABSTRACT Modernism after Nietzsche: Art, Ethics, and the Forms of the Everyday by Brian C. Valentyn Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Michael Moses, Supervisor ___________________________ Toril Moi ___________________________ Thomas Pfau ___________________________ Thomas Ferraro An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2012 Copyright by Brian C. Valentyn 2012 Abstract This dissertation uses Nietzsche‟s writings on truth and metaphor as a lens through which to reconsider the contribution that modernist art sought to make to both the understanding and, ultimately, the reconstruction of everyday life. It begins with a consideration of the sentiment, first articulated on a wide scale by the artists and philosophers of the romantic era, that something essential to the cohesion of individual and social experience has been lost during the turbulent transition to modernity. By situating Nietzsche‟s thought vis-à-vis the decline of nineteenth-century idealism in both its Continental and Victorian forms, I demonstrate how his principal texts brought to an advanced stage of philosophical expression a set of distinctly post-romantic concerns about the role of mind and language in the construction of reality that would soon come to define the practice of modernism in philosophy and the arts. Nietzsche‟s contribution to moral philosophy is typically regarded as a skeptical, and even wholly negative, one. Yet a central element of his thought is obscured, I argue, when we fail to account for its positive conviction that “higher moralities are, or ought to be, possible.” Because his philosophy attempts to diagnose “genealogically” the concrete social, historical, and psychological conditions under which truth-relations are generated and maintained within a given cultural framework, it is in fact every bit as constructive as it is deconstructive, involving a sustained and ethically significant reflection on the character of normativity itself. iv This initial confrontation with Nietzsche‟s philosophy sets the stage for the studies of individual artists—the American poets Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens, as well as the Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman—for whom these traditionally epistemological concerns about the nature of representation also shade naturally into the domain of ethics. In these chapters, I demonstrate how aesthetic modernism produces a range of sophisticated responses to the predicament of relativism that Nietzsche articulated while reaching sometimes radically different conclusions than Nietzsche about the nature and extent of human agency in the modern world. This enables us to see how modernism makes an essential contribution to what the philosopher Charles Taylor has characterized as the broader cultural effort to “overcome epistemology” by exploring the structures of intentionality and fostering in us a basic “awareness about the limits and conditions of our knowing”—a project to which modernist art and philosophy both make essential contributions. v Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iv List of Figures ............................................................................................................................. vii Introduction: What We Talk About When We Talk About Modernism ............................... 1 1. “The poets of our life”: Re-constructing Nietzsche’s Modernism ................................... 20 2. “A painted paradise at the end of it”: Humanism and Other Ideas of Order in the Poetry of Ezra Pound .................................................................................................................. 63 3. “Beyond us, yet ourselves”: Wallace Stevens’ Cultural Poetics ....................................... 98 4. Living with Others: Modernist Form and the Problem of Interpersonal Communication in Bergman ................................................................................................... 177 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................. 241 Biography ................................................................................................................................... 255 vi List of Figures Figure 1: Minus as Romantic Artist ........................................................................................ 196 Figure 2: Minus and Karin ....................................................................................................... 204 Figure 3: In the Belly of the Beast............................................................................................ 205 Figure 4: Thomas’ Recitation ................................................................................................... 212 Figure 5: Jonas' Suicide ............................................................................................................. 217 Figure 6: Thomas and Marta in the Schoolhouse ................................................................. 222 Figure 7: A Dichotomous Pair ................................................................................................. 226 Figure 8: Face to Face ................................................................................................................ 229 Figure 9: Tanks Passing ............................................................................................................ 232 Figure 10: Looking In ................................................................................................................ 232 Figure 11: Words in a Foreign Language ............................................................................... 237 vii Introduction: What We Talk About When We Talk About Modernism I understand by “morality” a system of evaluations that partially coincides with the conditions of a creature‟s life. —Nietzsche, The Will to Power The people grow out of the weather; The gods grow out of the people. Encore, encore, encore les dieux… —Wallace Stevens, “Loneliness in Jersey City” No claim in Dostoyevsky‟s Brothers Karamazov, a novel fraught with ideological conflict, has remained as provocative, or as prone to misinterpretation, as Ivan Karamazov‟s conclusion that without God “everything is permitted.” Like Nietzsche‟s contemporaneous pronouncement, “God is dead,” this claim has entered so completely into the cultural imagination that it is often invoked with little regard to its original context and, as a consequence, taken to be either celebratory in character or, equally wide of the mark, a merely disinterested observation that the values which have sustained religious belief have vanished altogether from the Western cultural landscape. Both interpretations fail utterly as characterizations of these thinkers‟ positions. Dostoyevsky, to be sure, flirted with socialism in his twenties and continued throughout his career to exhibit a particular fascination with those aspects of modern life that seemed to present an impediment to religious belief and morality. However, this picture of Dostoyevsky as a political radical is complicated by the religious conversion he underwent during his imprisonment and ten years of political exile for his involvement in the underground 1 Petrashevsky Circle, after which, in 1859, he returned to Saint Petersburg and became openly critical of the utopianism of the progressive political and philosophical movements of the day. And Nietzsche, despite his steadfast opposition to the “life- denying” asceticism he identified at the core of religious belief and practice, took pains to emphasize that it was indeed the Christian notion of the soul, with its emphasis on personal accountability and moral self-surveillance, that generated the profound, if “pathological,” sense of interiority characteristic of modern individualism—out of which he believed a new and powerful form of post-subjective agency might emerge. It may be true that Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky both regarded religion as something marked for extinction, but this is neither where their originality nor their contribution to modern thought lies. Their writings, like those of a handful of their contemporaries—Flaubert, Baudelaire, and Mallarme in France; James in England; Ibsen in Norway; Gogol and Chekhov in Russia; and even the later, candidly skeptical Emerson in America, to name a few of the most prominent—remain relevant not only for their considerable literary and philosophical merits but because such qualities have come to seem inseparable from these authors‟ participation in a deeply ambivalent turn within modernity itself, one marked by a newfound dissatisfaction with the brand of Enlightenment optimism that had peaked in spectacular