AGAINST THE EVENT This page intentionally left blank Against the Event Th e Everyday and the Evolution of Modernist Narrative MICHAEL SAYEAU 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Michael Sayeau 2013 Th e moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2013 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available ISBN 978–0–19–968125–9 As printed and bound CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. For Julia and Clara, that their days be as eventful or uneventful as they desire This page intentionally left blank Contents 1. Introduction: In the Anteroom of the Event 1 What is the Everyday? 6 What is an Event? 14 Literature and the Event 28 Anti-Evental Modernism 35 Th e Emergence of Modernist Narrative 3 9 2 . “ Th e Future Was a Dark Corridor”: Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, the Everyday, and Style 49 “As though in the grip of a ghastly terror” 51 A Book about Nothing, an Exercise in Style 55 Th e Nouveau and the Genre 62 Emma’s Everyday 66 Skipping: An Aesthetics of Uneventful Existence 80 Homais’s Cross of Honor: Flaubert and History 9 2 3 . Th e “Odd Consequence” of Progress: H. G. Wells’s Th e Time Machine and the fi n de siècle Everyday 109 Th e Catastrophic Status Quo: Empire, Economics, and Sex at the End of the Nineteenth Century 110 A Universal Tendency to Dissipation: Overproduction and Heat Death 115 “After the Battle Comes the Quiet”: Wells’s Ambivalent Modernity 122 “My Story Slips away from Me”: Th e Narrative Impulse versus Social Stasis 133 Everyday Apocalypse and the Morlocks ex Machina 137 4. “His Occupation Would Be Gone”: Unemployment and Time in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness 147 Th e Invention of Unemployment: Conrad’s Careers 153 Marlow’s Discourse and the Temporality of Work 159 Th e “Helpers”: Th e Belgian Congo, Forced Labor, and the Posthuman 173 Conrad’s Unemployment, the Narrative Event, and Modernism 181 viii Contents 5. Joyce’s Anti-Epiphanies: Th e Atomic Form of Fiction 189 Th e Manuscript Epiphanies of 1900–1903 191 Dubliners: Th e Critique of Pure Epiphany 205 Portrait and the Temporality of Impersonality 217 Back to the Strand: “Nausicaa” 230 Modernism, the Everyday, and Auerbach’s “Very Simple Solution” 245 Bibliography 249 Index 261 1 Introduction: In the Anteroom of the Event A brief exchange toward the end of the 2002 fi lm Adaptation , directed by Spike Jonze and written by Charlie Kaufman, encapsulates at once comi- cally and vividly one of the central contradictions that haunt and animate modern narrative writing. In the fi lm, “Charlie Kaufman” (the character played by Nicholas Cage, and a stand-in for the screenwriter) is suff ering from what can only be called a massive case of writer’s block as he attempts to convert a non-fi ction work (Susan Orleans’s 1998 Th e Orchid Th ief ) into a compelling fi lm script. In the scene below, Charlie has sunk low enough to attend a screenwriting seminar led by Robert McKee, the author of Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwrit- ing , a distillation of its author’s pragmatically hard-nosed approach to fi lmmaking.1 We cut into and out of the conference, listening with Char- lie as McKee dispenses such nuggets of wisdom as “So . what is the sub- stance of writing? First, last, and always the imperative is to tell a story” and “You cannot have a protagonist without desire, it doesn’t make any sense. Any fucking sense!” Finally, at the Q&A session that closes the seminar, Kaufman works up the courage to ask his question: kaufman Sir, what if a writer is attempting to create a story where nothing much happens, where people don’t change, they don’t have any epiphanies. Th ey struggle and are frustrated and nothing is resolved. More a refl ection of the real world— mckee Th e real world? kaufman Yes, sir. mckee Th e real fucking world? First of all, if you write a screenplay without confl ict or crisis, you’ll bore your audience to tears. Secondly: Noth- ing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day! Th ere’s genocide, war, corruption! Every 1 It bears mentioning that the book and its author are both real, though McKee is played by the actor Brian Cox in the scene. McKee’s book Story is often referred to as the “bible of screenwriting,” and can be found regularly on the syllabuses of creative writing courses. 2 Against the Event fucking day somewhere in the world somebody sacrifi ces his life to save somebody else! Every fucking day someone somewhere takes a conscious decision to destroy someone else! People fi nd love! People lose it, for Christ’s sake! A child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church! Someone goes hungry! Somebody else be- trays his best friend for a woman! If you can’t fi nd that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don’t know crap about life! And why the fuck are you wasting my two precious hours with your movie? I don’t have any use for it! I don’t have any bloody use for it! kaufman Okay, thanks. 2 Since we are simultaneously watching a fi lm about Kaufman’s struggle to write the adaptation and the adaptation itself, once the struggling screen- writer has metabolized McKee’s advice, the fi lm turns on itself, abandons its navel-gazing preoccupation with Kaufman’s neuroticism and block- age, and plunges toward a baroque pastiche of a “Hollywood ending” involving an Internet porn site, attempted murder, and a sort of halluci- nogenic aphrodisiac somehow distilled from the essence of the ghost orchid. (McKee again: “Tell you a secret. Th e last act makes the fi lm. You can have an uninvolving, tedious movie, but wow them at the end and you’ve got a hit. Find an ending.”) Adaptation , and in particular the scene above and its aftermath, is an absurdly performative evocation of the vicissitudes of modern writing as it negotiates with the everyday and the event. Th e negotiation is informed by a spectrum of realist mandates—mandates that arrive variously from the literary marketplace, editorial establishments, the strictures of genre, the ethos of verisimilitude, and artistic aspiration. In the dialogue excerpted above, we cannot help but have the feeling that both Kaufman and McKee have a point. On the one hand, a movie in which nothing much happens, in which people do not have epiphanies, does indeed seem to be more “a refl ection of the real world” than the usual sort of Hollywood production. But McKee is right too—there are more than enough examples of genocide and homicide, romantic devastation and natural disasters, to supply as many fi lms as could ever be made. Adaptation plays out this bind for comic eff ect. But, in truth, the dilemma that it takes up in this scene echoes one of the formative contra- dictions of not only modern narrative, but modern experience and thought as well. We have long been taken by a pervasive and contradic- tory sense that our times are somehow characterized by incessant change and dramatic developments and a listless uneventfulness at one and the 2 Spike Jones, director, Adaptation , DVD (Culver City, CA: Columbia Tri-Star Home Video, 2003) . Introduction 3 same time. On the one hand, both the history of the modern era and the personal lives lived within it seem to be subject to an ever-increasing tempo of transformation. On the other, and for a variety of persistent reasons, we as individuals and our culture as a whole have been haunted by a specter of terminal stasis that manifests itself along a scale that runs from personal boredom to one of the many registrations of the “end of history.” Th e coursing acceleration of life seems to provoke, somehow, a corollary sense that the world’s rate of real change has dropped to zero. It is no wonder then that the period’s eff orts to understand itself, as materialized in its intellectual productions, have continually taken up the issue. A central thread of European philosophy and theory has long been preoccupied with the relationship between the event—both its nature and its possibility in the fi rst place—and the ground out of which it arises.