THE FEELING OF FORM: EXPERIENCING HISTORIES IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRITISH NOVEL SERIES by Yan Tang MA, University of Victoria, 2015 BA, Xi’an International Studies University, 2013 A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in the Department of English © Yan Tang, 2020 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. We acknowledge with respect the Lekwungen peoples on whose traditional territory the university stands and the Songhees, Esquimalt and WSÁNEĆ peoples whose historical relationships with the land continue to this day. ii SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE The Feeling of Form: Experiencing Histories in Twentieth-Century British Novel Series by Yan Tang MA, University of Victoria, 2015 BA, Xi’an International Studies University, 2013 Supervisory Committee Dr. Stephen Ross, Department of English Supervisor Dr. Nicole Shukin, Department of English Departmental Member Dr. Allana Lindgren, Department of Theatre Outside Member iii ABSTRACT How do we understand our encounter with ambivalent or visceral aesthetic feelings—textual environments, moods, and atmospheres—if they do not solely belong to the representation of individual or collective emotions? This dissertation proposes a concept of “the feeling of form” to approach these aesthetic feelings as formal dynamics, such as restless orientations and rhythmic intensities. How can literary forms have feelings, and where—or is it necessary—to locate the textual body and the subject of these feelings? The goal of my dissertation is not to show what specific neurological procedures are involved in the emotive-cognitive entanglement between the text and the reader, but to understand “form” as a verb—forming, shaping, mediating, transmitting—whose dynamics and actions manifest the narrative form’s visceral aesthetic feelings, and to examine how such feelings bear significant cultural and political currency. Reading formal dynamics as aesthetic feelings also invites us to adjust our usual gaze at “form” away from categories coined by various formalisms, such as “genre,” “structure,” “focalization,” or “style.” In doing so, we are able to reimagine these categories as part of the dynamics of formal reorientations, rhythms, and syntactic intensities, and to open ourselves up to the impersonal agency and criticality of literary forms. Based on these convictions, my dissertation argues that reading for the feeling of form allows us to experience how literary forms transmit and regenerate volatile experiences of history in ways that complicate, supplement, or subvert the explicit representation of historical events and temporality in a literary text. In this dissertation, I focus on the relationship between the feeling of form and the experience of various histories in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (1924–1928), Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair (1932–1934), Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet (1957–60), and Kazuo Ishiguro’s single-volume novel The Unconsoled iv (1995). Chapter One traces how nauseous form in Parade’s End allows us to experience wartime and postwar anxiety through Christopher Tietjens’s self-revolting and incoherent consciousness. Chapter Two examines how the deterioration of rhythm in A Scot’s Quair transmits a historical experience of gradual suffocation intricately linked with Scotland’s political and ecological disasters. In a brief Coda, I conclude my project by looking at how The Alexandria Quartet and The Unconsoled manifest weakened and depleted feelings of form, and how these feelings prompt us to rethink the relationship of the feeling of form to European heteronormative ideology and the ethics of community formation. The Unconsoled (1995), in particular, serves as a twofold limit case of the feeling of form: first, as a limit case of the futile feeling of form, and second, as a limit case of the distinction between the novel form and the novel series form. This twofold limit case speaks to its own historical experience of futility at the end of history, and responds to the aesthetic and ideological legacies of early twentieth-century experimental novel series. v TABLE OF CONTENTS SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE II ABSTRACT III TABLE OF CONTENTS V LIST OF FIGURES VII ACKNOWLEDGMENTS VIII INTRODUCTION: THE FEELING OF FORM, HISTORY, EXPERIENCE 1 I. Significant and Palpable Forms 7 II. Experiencing Histories Through Form: Transmission and Mediation 17 III. Historical Experience and the Feeling of the Novel Series Form 27 IV. Interrelations Between Local and Macro Forms 35 V. Reading for the Feeling of Form 38 CHAPTER ONE: NAUSEA 51 I. The Century of Anxiety: Nauseous Form and the Indigestible “I” 58 II. War and Christopher’s Nauseous Mind 71 III. Collective Nausea, Contamination, and the Indigestible Narrative Time 84 CHAPTER TWO: SUFFOCATION 110 I. Syntactic Rhythm and Respiratory Intensity 120 II. The Deterioration of Rhythm and the Intrusion of Fossil Fuel Infrastructure 125 III. Environmental Toxicity: Coal and Shale Oil Industries in Interwar Scotland 134 IV. Two Geological Time Frames: Standing Stones and Mining 139 V. The Trauma of Chemical Warfare and the Suffocation of Political Futurity 144 vi VI. Gaslighting and Explosion: Syntax’s Mimetic Functions and the Buried History of Interwar Ammunition Industries 152 CODA: FUTILITY 167 I. The Alexandria Quartet: Unease and the Affect of Heteronormative Ideology 169 II. The Unconsoled: Flat Form, Detachment, and A Critique of Affective Community 176 III. A Few Final Words: Limits of Method 182 BIBLIOGRAPHY 185 vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. “Are We Afraid? No!” Postcard, 1915. Source: British Library, 75 https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/are-we-afraid-no Figure 2. Welsbach Oil Lamps 1927. Source: 126 http://www.fulltable.com/VTS/t/tcat/welsbach/a.htm Figure 3. “The Stove,” by Duncan Grant, 1936. Source: 130 https://books0977.tumblr.com/post/47759674878/the-stove-fitzroy-square- 1936-duncan-grant Figure 4. Women climbing ladders to carry coal up a mineshaft. Scotland, 142 early nineteenth century. Wood engraving from L. Simonin “Mines and Miners,” London, c1865. Image ID: D9657N, World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo. Figure 5. Holborn gas explosion, 1928. Source: 160 https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2013/12/20/1928-a-massive-gas-explosion- rips-along-holborn/ Figure 6. Holborn fire due to electric fire with gas and water pipelines, BBC 161 News, 1 April 2015, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london- 32150554 viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The initial sparks for this project were kindled by my experience of reading Beckett’s Molloy in the dampest and coldest time of the year in Victoria. I want to show my appreciation for Beckett’s affectively rich, dark, and comical writing, which made that winter even colder and led me to this project today. Besides Beckett, of course, I want to thank many other people. First, I would like to thank the University of Victoria and its English Department for their generous funding and support for my research project. The current Graduate Adviser of the English Department, Dr. Adrienne Williams Boyarin, has been extremely kind, patient, and supportive. I am deeply touched that she has believed in me since day one. I want to express my immense gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Stephen Ross, who guided me throughout this project and helped me overcome many challenges during the doctoral program; he truly lifted me up when I doubted myself. He is not only a stellar mentor but also has become a dear friend. He also taught me things beyond scholarship: the ethics, commitments, and responsibilities that an academic should have. I wish to extend my special thanks to my committee members. Dr. Nicole Shukin and Dr. Allana Lindgren are extremely insightful and generous, and they have helped me refine my research project in many ways. I also want to thank especially Dr. David James for working so quickly to help me complete on time. Besides my committee, Dr. Erin Kelly, Dr. Magdalena Kay, Dr. Sheila Rabillard, Dr. Jentery Sayers, Dr. Joseph Grossi, and many other professors in the English Department also have supported my research or professional work; I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to all of them. Last but not least, I would like to thank Tracey El Hajj, Natalie Boldt, Janice Niemann, Jonathan Nash, Kevin Tunnicliffe, Alana Sayers, Graham Jensen, and many other amazing friends and colleagues in the English Department. They have supported me within and beyond academia, and their friendship is absolutely beyond measure. I would also like to thank my family for their ongoing support and my partner Carla Osborne, who is a fierce scholar and has tolerated my obsession with this project. ix To Carla x To parody a well-known saying, I shall say that a little formalism turns one away from History, but that a lot brings one back to it. — Roland Barthes, Mythologies 1 INTRODUCTION: THE FEELING OF FORM, HISTORY, EXPERIENCE Example 1 [For] Miss Kilman would do anything for the Russians, starved herself for the Austrians, but in private inflicted positive torture, so insensitive was she, dressed in a green mackintosh coat. Year in year out she wore that coat; she perspired; she was never in the room five minutes without making you feel her superiority, your inferiority; how poor she was; how rich you were; how she lived in a slum without a cushion or a bed or a rug or whatever it might be, all her soul rusted with that grievance sticking in it, her dismissal from school during the War—poor embittered unfortunate creature! For it was not her one hated but the idea of her, which undoubtedly had gathered into itself a great deal that was not Miss Kilman; had become one of those spectres with which one battles in the night; one of those spectres who stand astride us and suck up half our life-blood, dominators and tyrants.