Fluid States: Modernism and the Self in the Literature of Port Cities

Fluid States: Modernism and the Self in the Literature of Port Cities Item Type text; Electronic Dissertation Authors Skeffington, Jack 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 30/09/2021 23:03:14 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/223316 FLUID STATES: MODERNISM AND THE SELF IN THE LITERATURE OF PORT CITIES by Jack Skeffington _____________________ Copyright © Jack Skeffington 2012 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 2012 2 THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by Jack Skeffington entitled Fluid States: Modernism and the Self in the Literature of Port Cities and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Department Dr. Tenney Nathanson____________________________________________________ Date: 03/05/2012 Dr. Daniel Cooper Alarcon_______________________________________________ Date: 03/05/2012 Dr. Suresh Raval __________________________________________________________ Date: 03/05/2012 Dr. Eric Hayot______________________________________________________________ Date: 03/05/2012 Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate’s submission of the final copies of the dissertation to the Graduate College. I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement. Dr. Tenney Nathanson___________________________________ Date: 03/05/2012 Dissertation Director: 3 STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of 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 accurate acknowledgment of 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: Jack Skeffington 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank, above all, the members of my committee for helping me to navigate the course by which I’ve become a scholar. More specifically, I would like to thank Dr. Tenney Nathanson for the captaincy that made this endeavor possible. I thank Dr. Suresh Raval for his steadying presence and breadth of expertise. And I thank Dr. Daniel Cooper-Alarcón for bringing an inexhaustible humanity to the often-sterile halls of academia, as well as for being a close and perceptive reader of the early drafts of this project. I must also single out Dr. Eric Hayot for a particular expression of gratitude, for having been onboard not just from the genesis of this project, but also, almost, from the earliest days of my graduate education. It is impossible to fathom the impact he has had not just on my writing, but on my thinking, my teaching, and my understanding of the profession’s contours and possibilities. He is also a fine companion, whether on a two- hundred mile bike ride or over a pint of Arrogant Bastard Ale. The production of this dissertation, however, depends also on many individuals without an official place on my committee. I am thankful, for example, that the Graduate College’s Nancy Lindsay so generously assisted me in navigating the bureaucratic shoals. The Friday-afternoon reading group that enthusiastically read and discussed the introduction to this work first let me know I had charted a fine course. AG kept good company with me in the early writing at all of the conferences where segments of my argument were tried out. Finally, it must be said that without the efforts of the English Department’s irreplaceable (and almost magical) Marcia Marma, it is unlikely that this document would have even seen the light of day. To my friends and family, I owe an additional expression of gratitude. Sarah Hopfer, for example, read every word this text—often at odd and taxing hours—in a years-long show of unflagging support, encouragement, and assistance. To Matt Rotando I owe the gratitude of a hundred thousand miles for being my staunch companion in the classroom, on the bicycle, through our exams, and to the conclusion of this process; his concept of “co-striving” carried me a long way both on campus and on the road. I owe a special thanks, too, to my grandmother, Ruth Shong; she has been, throughout my whole life, my most vocal supporter and confidant. One of my earliest memories is of boarding a plane with her, an act that I think set the tone for my life of curiosity and travel. I give thanks to my wife for providing limitless support, encouragement, and, as she finished her degree three years ahead of me, an excellent model of scholarship to aspire to. Degree notwithstanding, she is perhaps the single best thing I got out of my graduate education. And yet, without my parents, I certainly wouldn’t exist as either scholar or person, and to them I owe perhaps my first thanks. This dissertation can ultimately be traced back to the home they provided—a home full of stacks of books, loving warmth, and a pervasive sense of the value of knowledge and inquiry. My father gave me a full sense of the importance of the pursuit of understanding, the centrality of ethics to existence, and the pride of not taking shortcuts. In my mother I first saw what it might mean to be an intellectual, and in her eyes I first learned to think of myself as someone who might be called a writer. Thank you all. 5 DEDICATION I dedicate this book to both the inspirational memory of my father and to the equally inspirational anticipation of the journey I am about to undertake with my infant daughter. 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT .................................................................................................... 7 INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................... 8 THE PACIFIC ...............................................................................................49 DUBLIN ........................................................................................................88 ALEXANDRIA ...........................................................................................129 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................167 WORKS CITED ..........................................................................................183 7 ABSTRACT The central project of this dissertation concerns itself with the port city, a recurrent setting of the modernist novel. It also seeks to investigate what lies behind the fact that the setting of the port city often coexists with the telling of stories about a malleable or exchangeable self or personal identity. Beginning with an understanding of modernity as a destructive whirlwind, I proceed to trace the various literary modernists who have used the port city as a space that might let one gain some shelter—or even benefit—from that storm. This dissertation begins with the Anglo-Saxon poem The Seafarer before moving through Ezra Pound’s translation of that poem and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. It looks also at Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet as key examples of the modernist port city novel. These texts occupy a broad swath of chronology, and their settings cover a wide area of geography. When combined with the diverse national backgrounds of these authors, this range of time, place, and cultures intends to demonstrate both the pervasive nature of the crisis modernity provokes in our sense of identity and the persistent appeal of the port city as a space in which to grapple with this crisis. 8 INTRODUCTION þæt se mon ne wat þe him on foldan fægrost limpeð, hu ic earmcearig iscealdne sæ winter wunade wræccan lastum, winemægum bidroren, bihongen hrimgicelum; hægl scurum fleag. Sometime in the latter half of the 10th century A.D. a scribe etches the work of a poet or poets unknown—The Seafarer—into vellum pages destined to be bound into a manuscript known later, much later, as the Exeter Book. This grinding of iron-oxide into animal flesh records a seminal moment in what will become the English literary imagination. Here, in its earliest days, this poetry calls attention (perhaps unavoidably) to the intimate relationship of soil and sea for those inhabiting an island; even as he blurred the boundary between nation and ocean, the poet of The Seafarer established another division that will long persist in English literature: the essential division between the man on land and the man at sea. The lines above, translated in the Norton Anthology of Poetry, read “He knows not, / who lives most easily on land, how I, / have spent my winter on the ice-cold sea, / wretched and anxious, in the paths of exile, / lacking dear friends, hung round by icicles, / while hail flew past in showers” (8-9). These bleak verses vividly

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