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Phenomenal Bodies and Temporality in the Fin De Siècle A

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Phenomenal Bodies and Temporality in the Fin De Siècle A Feeling Out of Time: Phenomenal Bodies and Temporality in the Fin de Siècle A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Wesley Holmes Burdine IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Tony C. Brown December 2016 ©Wesley Holmes Burdine 2016 i Acknowledgements This dissertation could never have been completed without the support of my wife, Dr. Lydia Garver, who provided not only material support, but who offered endless advice on long walks as these ideas came to shape. I am additionally grateful to the University of Minnesota for materially supporting this work. The assistance of the University’s Departmental Dissertation Fellowship and numerous grants from the University’s English Department provided the space and money for researching these ideas. I received inspiration and support from L’Institut Métapsychique International in Paris, particularly from Renaud Evrard, Bertrand Méheust, and Luc Fraisse. My research was also aided by the Cambridge and Oxford Universities’ libraries and archives and the Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet in Paris. Dr. Tony Brown provided a tremendous amount of support and guidance to help bring the ideas out in this text. A host of other advisors and faculty members helped in numerous ways: Drs. Jani Scandura, Siobhan Craig, Lois Cucullu, Stuart McLean, Timothy Brennan, Rebecca Krug, Katherine Scheil, and Joe Hughes. Most of all, this dissertation could also not have been completed without the genius of my colleagues: Mike Rowe, Andrew Marzoni, Robb St. Lawrence, Michael Phillips, Stephen McCulloch, Valerie Behrer, Aaron Apps, Caitlyn McHugh, Katie Sisneros, Hyeryung Hwang, Ben Utter, Isaac Butler, Marie Balsley-Taylor, Dana Meade Cason, and Jennifer Awes-Freeman. Additional thanks to Drs. Joey Horstman and Daniel Taylor and in memory of Dave Roper. Thanks and gratitude also go out to my family, the Burdines and the Garvers. A version of chapter two previously appeared as “‘What Was It?’: The Immaterial Self ii and Nineteenth-Century American Panic.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 61.3 (October 1, 2015): 441–73. Print. iii Abstract This dissertation shows the often-overlooked role that psychical research, or the study of unexplained phenomena, played in the literature of the Transatlantic Fin de Siècle. Examining the works of Fitz-James O’Brien, Henri Bergson, Bram Stoker, and Marcel Proust, I argue that the crises of temporality often discussed in literary modernism can be understood through the parallel theories proposed by psychical research. Alongside these literary primary texts, I examine psychical research from Edmund Gurney, Charlotte Anne Moberly, and Eleanor Jourdain as theoretical texts on temporality and the human self. More than contextualizing fiction with its coeval psychical research, I read these texts—fictional, philosophical, and scientific—as questioning and countering hegemonic forces of modernity. My project argues that questions of temporality and the human self that were the hallmarks of the Fin de Siècle were reactions to the homogenizing forces of capitalism and modernity. Almost every author discussed lived in a marginal position in society for one reason or another—queer, Jewish, Irish, or female. These marginal bodies felt out of sync with the dominant culture of modern society and the theories of time and the self reflect their existence within that society. By paying attention to the heterodox theories of the Fin de Siècle, we can understand the ways in which feeling out of time becomes rendered literarily, philosophically, and scientifically in texts. iv Table of Contents List of Figures ..................................................................................................................... v Introduction: “I Feel Like a Perfect Monster” .......................................................................................... 1 Chapter One: “Phantasms of the Living:” Henri Bergson and Psychical Research ................................ 21 Chapter Two: “‘What Was it?’: The Immaterial Self and Nineteenth-Century American Panic” .......... 62 Chapter Three: “‘Up-To-Date With a Vengeance’: Dracula and Prosthetic Bodies of Text” ................. 102 Chapter Four: “Feeling Out of Time: Bergson, Proust, and An Adventure” ......................................... 154 Conclusion: A Meeting in Paris .......................................................................................................... 200 Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 211 v List of Figures Figure 1 Tables of responses from "Report on the Census of Hallucinations" ................ 31 Figure 2 from the SPR archives: summary notes from Hallucination Census ................. 33 Figure 3 close up of summary notes from Hallucination Census ..................................... 33 1 Introduction “I Feel Like a Perfect Monster” My impression is that it is a part of some monstrous animal, probably a part of a tooth. I feel like a perfect monster, with heavy legs, unwieldy head, and very large body. I go down to a shallow stream to drink. (I can hardly speak, my jaws are so heavy.) I feel like getting down on all fours. -Elizabeth Foote Denton Literary modernism, we have been taught, can best be understood as crises of human self-hood and temporality. As Bill Brown, Bruno Latour, and others have pointed out, we can also recognize literary modernism through the conflicts of things: animate and inanimate, subjects and objects, and people and tools.1 Of course, the human self, time, and human/object relations do not belong to literary modernism alone. Neither do they belong to the narrow category of aesthetics that defines literary modernism. However, in and around the period of the 1890s through the 1930s, the thing called literary modernism drew these conflicts to the surface. In 1863—decades before the birth of what we now call literary modernism—a geologist named William Denton and his wife Elizabeth Foote Denton published a book called The Soul of Things. In it, William Denton argues that the animate and inanimate things carry the influences of one another; people and objects retain traces of time and memory so that a “sensitive” body might experience the feelings of another in the memories congealed onto those things. On its face, the theory of psychometry—later to be called “morphic resonance”—from 1860s United States could not be further than the 1 In chapter three, I discuss Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern and the way he describes the growing objectivity of the scientific laboratory. Bill Brown has written extensively on his “Thing Theory” (see A Sense of Things), which despite never being discussed explicitly in these chapters is an influence heavily felt. 2 literary modernism of the Fin de Siècle. And yet, The Soul of Things contains theoretical germs of temporality and human self that will resonate throughout the Transatlantic Fin de Siècle.2 Time and memory, William believes, are written in the world around us. William and Elizabeth’s research was on the early cusp of what would eventually be called psychical research, or the study of unexplained phenomena. Obsessions with spiritualism—its ghosts and rappings—abounded throughout the Anglophonic Transatlantic. But the Dentons represented a different take on the phenomenal world, a take that would bring empirical research to bear on the unseen world. That The Soul of Things might appear on its face so far removed from Fin-de-Siècle fiction and yet contain so many similar threads of its philosophical interests draws us to the question: why is it that the birth of modernism coincides with the emergence of psychical research? It is no coincidence that a literary period defined by questions of the human self and temporality intertwined with similar questions from the scientific world. In the coming pages, I argue that the crises of temporality that marked the Fin de Siècle cannot be understood outside the context of psychical research of the period. Reading psychical research as theorizing temporality allows us to understand the broader transatlantic histories of thought and science as well as portraying conflicts of racialized, queer, and gendered bodies as “feeling out of time” with Western modernity. The Soul of Things She took upon her prostrate palm, a hard, mineral sliver. There, rigid against her taut skin, she felt her body drawn through the gulf of thousands of years, as if through a 2 Indeed, “the soul of things,” a phrase from William Wordsworth’s Prelude, appears in Milton Pottenger’s Symbolism, subtitled “A Treatise on the Soul of Things.” 3 needle’s eye, all through a tiny chard of mastodon tooth. Elizabeth Foote Denton had received the tooth fragment from her husband, William Denton, as one would a communion wafer—expectant of some transfiguration. Elizabeth was a psychometric medium, someone who professed the ability to channel the affect and memories charged in objects. William was a geologist who believed that psychometry, or the study of “morphic resonance,” allowed scientists to see into the deep past of nature. William believed that memories were inscribed on the world and in people and things. He writes, “Not a leaf waves, not an insect crawls, not a ripple moves, but each motion is recorded by a thousand faithful scribes in infallible and indelible scripture” (31). The book goes on to explain that the world acts like a daguerreotype,
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