1 the Comedy of Trauma

The Comedy of Trauma: Confidence, Complicity, and Coercion in Modern Romance Item Type text; Electronic Dissertation Authors Crumbo, Daniel Jedediah Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 02/10/2021 20:33:15 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/626362 THE COMEDY OF TRAUMA: CONFIDENCE, COMPLICITY, AND COERCION IN MODERN ROMANCE by Daniel J. Crumbo _________________ Copyright © Daniel J. Crumbo 2017 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 2017 1 2 STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that an accurate acknowledgement of the source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the copyright holder. SIGNED: Daniel J. Crumbo 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank first and foremost my inexhaustibly patient dissertation director, Lynda Zwinger, whose perceptivity and nuance I will always stand in envious resentment of, and to the other members of my committee: the legendary Edgar Dryden and the indefatigable, brilliant, and boundlessly compassionate Meg Lota Brown. I owe a special thank you to the incomparable Judith Roof, who graciously agreed to read and guide this dissertation through its final incarnation. My deepest appreciation is also due to the wonderful scholars, critics, and mentors that were able to tolerate me and much of what eventually evolved to be included here, especially (in randomized order) Thomas P. Roche, Jr., Kathryn Milun, Tenney Nathanson, Susan White, Carlos Gallego, John Ulreich, Fred Keifer, Homer Pettey, and William Epstein. Thank you also to David G. Rand for taking a short break from revolutionizing the foundations how we think of human interactions and helping me with game theory. I would not have finished this, or anything, without Marcia Simon. I am also incredible grateful to have family that not only supported me, but also, on occasion, read for me. Thank you especially (in randomized order) Patricio Ortega, Kim Crumbo, Sean Freston, Cyrus Freston, Becky Crumbo, Jennifer Davison, Carol Ortega, Shirley Aiken, and Zachary Crumbo for your support, insights, and perspective. Shouts to Lizzie, Beezy, Puddles, Bootsy, and Didi for lighting my life. 4 DEDICATION For Thalia. Loud, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low! — FW 2.1.259 5 Table of Contents ABSTRACT.................................................................................................................................................. 8 PREFACE MONUMENTS OF USEFUL STUPIDITY .......................................................................... 9 CHAPTER 1 ON THE ORIGINS OF SPECIOUS ................................................................................ 19 Cognitive Tickling .............................................................................................................................. 23 Virtual Play ......................................................................................................................................... 32 Adjunctive Reasoning ......................................................................................................................... 39 Explanatory Autoshaping .................................................................................................................... 43 CHAPTER 2 AFFECTING IMPOSSIBLITY IN SHAKESPEARE’S THE WINTER’S TALE ....... 55 “May’t be / Affect[at]ion?” ................................................................................................................. 61 “Could man so blench?”: The Secret Stupidity of Tragedy ................................................................ 71 “Apprehend / Nothing but jollity”: The Anatomy of Cony Catching ................................................. 80 The Magic of Complicity .................................................................................................................... 93 CHAPTER 3 THE ETIOLOGY OF COMIC TRAUMA IN RICHARDSON’S CLARISSA ......... 106 A Natural History of Rape-Romance ................................................................................................ 106 Ravishing Lovelace ........................................................................................................................... 118 Reifying Trauma: The Other Rape Fantasy ...................................................................................... 131 Justice, Projects, and Moonshine ...................................................................................................... 144 CHAPTER 4 THE DUPE’S DILEMMA IN MELVILLE’S THE CONFIDENCE-MAN ................ 170 The Problem of Confidence .............................................................................................................. 170 Dissembling Philanthropy ................................................................................................................. 174 The Genial Misanthrope.................................................................................................................... 188 6 The Gentleman Madman ................................................................................................................... 202 CHAPTER 5 THE AFFECTIVE ORIGINS OF COGNITION IN BECKETT’S MIDDLE NOVELS ................................................................................................................................................................... 219 Who Speaks? ..................................................................................................................................... 219 “A change of muck”: Homeostasis and its Discontents .................................................................... 224 “All lies”: The Confabulations of the Retrospective Hypothesis ..................................................... 235 “This cannot possibly last much longer”: Waiting and Endgame .................................................... 246 EPILOGUE AFTER THE FACT .......................................................................................................... 265 WORKS CITED ...................................................................................................................................... 276 7 ABSTRACT Stories engage a form of virtual play. Though they incorporate language and abstractions, stories engage many of the same biological systems and produce many of the same anatomical responses as simpler games. Like peek-a-boo or tickle play, stories stage dangerous or unpleasant scenarios in a controlled setting. In this way, they help develop cognitive strategies to tolerate, manage, and even enjoy uncertainty. One means is by inspiring confidence in difficult situations by tactical self-distraction. Another is to reframe negative or uncertain situations as learning opportunities, that is, to ascribe meaning to them. While both strategies are useful, each has limitations. In William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, a king succumbs to the desire to make meaning where there is none, and nearly ruins himself in a self-composed tragedy. His friend restores his confidence and enables a happy ending—but only by deceiving him. This deception is benign, but the heroine of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa is nearly ruined by her abductor’s confidence game. Her “happy ending” is made possible only by reframing her rape and death as redemptive transfiguration—which, as many of her readers suggest, is a dubious affair. The hero of Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man spends the first half of the novel eliciting his companions’ confidence in order to swindle them, and the second half trying to inspire himself with the same confidence. The novel ends with an ominous impasse: one must trust, but one ought not to. For Samuel Beckett, this impasse is productive. In his middle novels, thought itself emerges from the interplay of spontaneous bouts of irrational confidence and distortive, after-the-fact impositions of spurious meaning. Stories create (illusory) identities, elicit (dubious) hopes, and reinforce (false) assumptions in order to help us cope with the agonies of anticipation and loss, and to transform misfortune, accident, and misery into reward, retribution, and meaning—that is, in a comedy of trauma. 8 PREFACE MONUMENTS OF USEFUL STUPIDITY It is tempting to attribute the unique success of humanity to superior intelligence. As far as we know, no other form of life is capable of sautéing asparagus, solving quadratic equations, composing Star Trek erotic fan fiction, or mass-producing tiny rubber balls. These and related skills have allowed us to compensate for our conspicuous shortcomings and dominate larger, faster, stronger, more nimble animals, many plants, and even some microbes. The key to this intelligence, of course,

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