Oral Storytelling in Modernism: Narration, Ideology, and Identity
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ABSTRACT Title of Document: ORAL STORYTELLING IN MODERNISM: NARRATION, IDEOLOGY, AND IDENTITY Jennifer Wellman, Doctor of Philosophy, 2012 Directed By: Brian Richardson, Professor, Department of English Oral storytellers abound in modernist texts – from T. S. Eliot’s inarticulate J. Alfred Prufrock to Djuna Barnes’ desultory Dr. Matthew O’Connor, from Joseph Conrad’s loquacious Charlie Marlow and other men of the sea to Rebecca West’s dainty Harriet Hume. This project theorizes the construction of orality and the figure of the oral storyteller in early to mid-twentieth-century literature, with a focus primarily – but not exclusively – on the British Isles. While the prevalence of such constructions has been surprisingly under-examined by modern literary critics, early to mid-twentieth-century writers were fascinated with oral storytelling, and this fascination provides vital insight into literary modernism’s all-important efforts to redefine self and community through art and artistic innovation. Modernist authors employ written representations of oral storytelling to explore and attempt to negotiate the relationship between cultural authority and the formation of modern subjectivities. I examine modernist representations of oral storytelling in works such as Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller” (1936), Joseph Conrad’s An Outcast of the Islands (1896), Rebecca West’s Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy (1929), Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931), and Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape (1958). By exploring how authors contextualize ideas of orality and the oral storyteller within discourses of nationalism, literary tradition, and technology, I show that the figure of the oral storyteller presents a contact site for the contesting forces that inflect the formulation of self in the early to mid-twentieth-century. These forces include: ideologies of gender and empire; narrative itself as a culturally-inflected schema for understanding experience; and new and recently emergent communication technologies, like the gramophone and radio, which shift early twentieth-century understandings of language, presence, and the limits of the body. Moreover, as inherently self-reflexive moments within texts, scenes of oral storytelling implicitly engage with the defining modernist struggle to both undermine and appropriate the authority of earlier writers and contemporary literary and social traditions. The writers examined in this study use oral storytelling scenes to explore and delineate the relationship between dominant cultural narratives, the material world, and embodied identity. ORAL STORYTELLING IN MODERNISM: NARRATION, IDEOLOGY, AND IDENTITY By Jennifer Jean Wellman Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2012 Advisory Committee: Professor Brian Richardson, Chair Professor Linda Kauffman Professor Peter Mallios Professor Valerie Orlando Professor Christina Walter © Copyright by Jennifer Jean Wellman 2012 Preface: Technically Speaking: Orality and Modernism Would it have been worth while, To have bitten off the matter with a smile, To have squeezed the universe into a ball To roll it towards some overwhelming question To say, “I am Lazarus, come from the dead, Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all” - - T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917) T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” presents a peculiar kind of oral storyteller, one that, as far as the reader can see, never actually tells his story at all. As the speaker of the poem, Prufrock relates his fundamental desire to connect with others, to speak and have his intended meaning understood; yet, again and again, he narrates to the brink of performance, imagines himself entering the room where “women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo,” but cannot push beyond the first few lines of address (Eliot, “Love” 13-14, 35-36). While the exact nature of the speech act Prufrock anticipates is only hinted at (Is it a proposal? A declaration of love?), it seems from Prufrock’s musings – “how should I begin/To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?” – that he feels it requires providing an account of himself, a self-narration of sorts (60-61). However, it is also clear from the disjointed flow of Prufrock’s dramatic monologue – which, although written, invokes a sense of the oral and aural both through its title as a love song and the rhetorical situation of its opening where Prufrock invites the reader (listener?) to join him in walking the city streets – that he cannot articulate this kind of connected narrative, even to himself. This inability is a source of further anxiety. ii This emphasis on voice and on speaking one’s story is characteristic of what even the briefest of surveys demonstrates to be a widespread, yet unaccounted for, fascination with orality and oral storytelling among early twentieth-century British writers. Oral Storytelling in Modernism: Narration, Ideology, and Identity fundamentally claims that a critical focus on such representations opens new avenues of traceable connections among the works of well and lesser-known authors alike. From Eliot’s aged, inarticulate Prufrock to Djuna Barnes’ desultory Dr. Matthew O’Connor, from Joseph Conrad’s loquacious Charlie Marlow and other men of the sea to Rebecca West’s dainty, feminine Harriet Hume – oral storytellers abound in modernist texts. Moreover, interest in the spoken word, in what it signifies and how it relates to other modes of expression, can be seen in the proliferation of works that experiment with what might be called “oral-modes” of written narration and the traditional form of the epic.1 Why are these writers, positioned at or following the beginning of a century in which England achieved what David Vincent calls “full literacy”2 so fascinated with the spoken word and the tellers of oral tales (Vincent 3)? This interest in orality exhibited by writers of literature is part of a larger, culture-wide phenomenon. The late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century saw 1 Writers such as Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett, experiment with what might be called “oral-modes” of narration in works such as The Good Soldier (1915), The Waves (1931), and Texts for Nothing (1950-52), which both capitalize on and complicate the division between the spoken and the written word. Early to mid-twentieth-century works that experiment with the oral-based form of the epic include T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (1922), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), and H. D.’s Helen in Egypt (written 1950-52; published 1961). 2 Vincent’s Literacy and Popular Culture (1989) is concerned with the cultural impact of the arrival of mass literacy in England, a process that Vincent’s research shows took place at an ever-accelerating rate as the twentieth-century approached. Acknowledging the difficulty of establishing clear literacy rates in historical time periods when no official measurement of literacy existed, Vincent bases his assertions on research into marriage records: “In the middle of the eighteenth century, three hundred years after the invention of printing, half the English population could not write. By 1914, over 99 per cent of brides and groom had gained sufficient command over the technology of communication at least to sign the marriage register” (Vincent 1). While Vincent’s assertion brings to bear the question of exactly what constitutes “literacy” (does being able to sign one’s name make a person literate?), his research does at least provide justification for thinking of the early twentieth-century England as a culture where writing, even at a very basic level, was a predominant practice. iii ethnography come into its own as an academic discipline, a sub-field of anthropology in which the study of non-Western societies where the spoken rather than the written word predominated served as a primary interest. In the nineteen-teens Bronislaw Malinowski deployed his research strategy of “participant-observation,” a foundational methodology within ethnographic studies that consists of firsthand field observation, to document in writing the lifestyle and everyday activities of the predominantly oral culture of the Trobriand Islanders.3 Coming from a different corner of the academy, classicists were also engaged in studying the oral or epic qualities in ancient cultures that fed into their own Western heritage. The so-called “Cambridge Ritualists” published copious studies dedicated to tracing the origins of ancient myths to cyclical rituals and oral performances.4 The heated debate over whether The Iliad and Odyssey were orally composed poems led Milman Parry, an American scholar who earned his degree in Paris, to write a thesis connecting the formulation of Homeric epithets to oral composition. This idea influenced later scholars interested in epic cultures including Eric Havelock and Walter Ong. In the 1930’s Parry sought to further strengthen his claims concerning Greek epic composition by traveling to Yugoslavia to create phonograph recordings of traditional Serbo-Croatian oral poetry. The phonograph itself, along with other new and 3 For a description and incisive criticism of Malinowski’s methods, see the first chapter of Gregory Castles’ Modernism and the Celtic Revival (2001), which connects the development of modernism to anthropology and ethnography. For an overview of the interconnections between the rise of anthropology and ethnography as academic disciplines and popular culture in the early twentieth-century, see Jeremy MacClancy’s “Anthropology: ‘The latest form of evening entertainment’” (2003). 4 The Cambridge Ritualists had close ties to literary modernism, particularly through connections to the Bloomsbury Group. One of the principle and most productive members of the group, Jane Ellen Harrison, was a good friend and mentor of Virginia Woolf. T. S. Eliot acknowledges the inspiration provided by the work of another Cambridge Ritualist, J. G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough, at the beginning of “The Waste Land.” For more information on the Cambridge Ritualists and their connections to literary modernism, see Martha C.