The Spinozan Strain: Monistic Modernism and the Challenge of Immanence

The Spinozan Strain: Monistic Modernism and the Challenge of Immanence Tim Clarke Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a doctoral degree in English Literature Department of English Faculty of Arts University of Ottawa © Tim Clarke, Ottawa, Canada, 2018 Clarke ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract……………………………………………………………………………..…………….iii Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………………….v Introduction………………………………………………………………………….…………..vii - Section I: Encountering Spinoza………………………………………………………...vii - Section II: Emerson and the Spinozan Strain…………………………………………….xi - Section III: Monistic Modernism……………………………………………………...xxiii Chapter 1: Morbid Vitalism: Modernist Death Writing……………………………………..……1 - Section I: The Unruly Part of Living: Dying as a Life-Style……………………………..1 - Section II: Hopelessness in Emerson and Dickinson……………………………………25 - Section III: Hope, Fear, and the Stylization of Death in Nightwood…………………….44 - Section IV: “The Afflatus of Ruin”: Life and Death in Schwartz and Stevens………….72 Chapter 2: Sub Specie Aeternitatis: Modernism’s Dynamic Eternities ………………….…….106 - Section I: Deus ex machina: From Mechanism to Dynamic Eternalism……...………..106 - Section II: Emerson’s Essays: Eternalism and Immanence………………………….…139 - Section III: “Just chalk…or fire”: The Temporalities of Our Town………………...….156 - Section IV: “Do these things die?”: Dynamic Historicism In the American Grain……194 Chapter 3: “Speeds and Slownesses”: Machinic Mo(der)nism and the Blur of Speed………...227 - Section I: Modernist Speed, Blur, and Space-Time……………………………………227 - Section II: Transcendentalist Monism and Machinic Relations………………………..247 - Section III: “Eyes bicarbonated white by speed”: Blur and The Bridge………………..273 - Section IV: Dromocratic Rhythms in Montage of a Dream Deferred………………….299 Epilogue………………………………………………………………………………………...323 Works Cited…...………………………………………………………………………………..330 Clarke iii Abstract The Spinozan Strain identifies a group of American modernist writers who use elements of Spinoza’s metaphysics, mediated by the writings of the Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, as the basis for an aestheticized monism that explores what Spinoza’s thought makes possible affectively, socially, and politically, rather than philosophically. These monistic modernists use Spinoza and Emerson to disrupt a host of binary oppositions that were important sites of contest in modernist culture, such as life and death, time and eternity, and interiority and exteriority. They imagine these oppositions as derivative effects of a single, self-differentiating force that they portray alternately as an inorganic vitality, a structure of interlinked causes, or a universal blur. In its anti-binarism, monistic modernism offers a middle path between object- oriented and subject-centric or psychological accounts of the modernist movement. The first chapter of this project examines Djuna Barnes’s and Wallace Stevens’s recasting of life and death in terms of flows of affect, by which they articulate a mode of subjectivity that challenges the distinctions between performance and reality, activity and passivity. The second chapter argues that Thornton Wilder and William Carlos Williams advance a critique of progressive or teleological conceptions of time and history that depends on a vision of eternity as an emergent structure of interwoven temporalities, rather than a timeless transcendent state. The final chapter focuses on modern technology and speed, arguing that Hart Crane and Langston Hughes devise a Spinoza-like understanding of the body as a relation of speeds and slownesses in which the body and its surroundings blur together; this sense of corporeality allows them to examine the ways that speed becomes an ambivalent source of political power in modernity that demands—and makes possible—new strategies of political resistance. Clarke iv For John Clarke (1939-1999) —sine qua non. Clarke v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS What is a scholar without debts? As a rule, many hands share in a work of many years and what follows is no exception. The tally of what I owe intellectually, emotionally, and materially to those who surrounded me these past few years is too lengthy to give in full, but there are several debts that cannot go unacknowledged. To my parents and my family, I owe the very possibility of this work, which would be unthinkable without them. Though the monasticism of academic life has often made me poor company, I am endlessly grateful for their love, support, and encouragement. I am thankful too for the people I have been fortunate to call friends at every stage of my education. Of these, I am particularly thankful for Ben Barber and Caroline Holland. Companionship at its best can be an encouragement to joy, a vitalizing exposure to difference— theirs has been these things and more to me. In our innumerable conversations began the rough drafts of this dissertation, or just as well. I am further grateful to Drs. Marc Thackray, Adam Beardsworth, and Lois Sherlow, whose kindness and enthusiasm during my undergraduate years at Memorial University set me on the way toward this point. My thanks also go to Drs. David Jarraway, Thomas Allen, and David Rampton of the University of Ottawa, and Dr. Joshua Schuster of Western University, for their incisive comments and suggestions about how to improve and further develop this project. Special thanks go to Dr. Allen for his comments on my thesis proposal, which encouraged me to think in broader, more ambitious terms about the project I wanted to write. My gratitude also goes to Dr. Craig Gordon for his encouragement, support, and advice on early versions of these chapters. Clarke vi Lastly, I thank Dr. Anne Raine for supervising this project with critical rigour and generosity that I can only aspire to in my own work. I cannot thank her enough for all that she has taught me about academia. To put it shortly, she taught me how to be a scholar and I am better for what I have learned. Though I have more debts by far than these, I proceed hoping my readers know that whatever is good and sturdy in these pages I owe to the good company I shared over the last six years; whatever is not, I owe only to myself. Clarke vii INTRODUCTION "Writers, poets, musicians, filmmakers—painters too, even chance readers—may find that they are Spinozist; indeed, such a thing is more likely for them than for professional philosophers […] a nonphilosopher, or even someone without any formal education, can receive a sudden illumination from him, a ‘flash.’ Then, it is as if one discovers that one is a Spinozist." – Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy1 "No doubt it produced some confusion when Leibnitz, Spinoza, Kant, Göthe, Herder, Schleiermacher, Jean Paul, Jacobi, and the rest, sailed all at once into Boston Harbour, and discharged their freight. Here were crops which we had not grown; they might come in rotation, but as yet the old woods covered their germs." – John Weiss, Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker2 I. Encountering Spinoza In 1844, a young James Elliott Cabot dispatched an article that he hoped could be published in The Dial, the unofficial organ of the Transcendentalist movement in New England.3 The article’s subject was a philosopher whose name still rang with the insinuation of heresy, godlessness, immorality, and charlatanism. The article was addressed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, a dominant figure in one of the movement’s most visible factions, the co-founder and current editor of The Dial, and one of the most prominent men of letters in the United States.4 Unluckily for Cabot, the article arrived not long after the journal had become defunct. And yet, Ralph L. 1 Deleuze 129. 2 Weiss 161. 3 An earlier article of Cabot’s, a study of Immanuel Kant, had already appeared in the April, 1844 edition of The Dial, which would turn out to be its last. Cabot went on to have a long and consequential relationship with Emerson, serving as his literary executor after his death in 1882 and authoring one of the first major biographies of Emerson in 1887. For a more detailed look at their relationship, see Nancy C. Simmons’s “Arranging the Sibylline Leaves: James Elliot Cabot’s Work as Emerson’s Literary Executor.” 4 For an account of the various factions and internal fissures of the Transcendentalist movement, see Philip F. Gura, American Transcendentalism. Gura’s text is a useful corrective to the tendency to conflate Emerson and his circle with Transcendentalism as such, to the exclusion or minimization of figures like Margaret Fuller, Orestes Brownson, and Theodore Parker. Clarke viii Rusk tells us in the introduction to his edition of Emerson’s correspondence that this article, though its audience numbered only a single person, did not go amiss: “Emerson read the tardy paper three or four times and still had by no means exhausted its interest. He thought, when he had finished, that whatever he himself might write would be a plagiarism from it” (lvi). For the writer whose fame rested, in part, on the doctrine of self-reliance, the shock of this affinity must have been severe. In a fascinating historical symmetry, decades later, in 1881, the year before Emerson’s death, Friedrich Nietzsche, an ardent admirer of Emerson’s self-reliant ethos of rejecting slavish imitations of past models and, by many readings, a herald of the modernist period, announced a similar shock on first encountering the ideas of this philosopher: “I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted. I have a precursor, and what a precursor!” (“Postcard to Overbeck” 92, emphasis in the original). The figure responsible for this paradoxical sense both of jolting novelty and familiar recognition, the subject of Cabot’s article and of Nietzsche’s reading, was not a radical philosopher of the nineteenth century, but the seventeenth-century Dutch rationalist Baruch Spinoza. I want to pause on this odd experience of recognition, this sense of anticipation, that is common to Emerson and Nietzsche, who are so often taken as figureheads of their respective periods. It is a vexation, a kind of déjà vu to find oneself anticipated—one has seen something already, but through another’s eyes.

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