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The University of Chicago from Tragic Form to Apocalyptic Reality in Four American Works: Toward an Epistemological Theory and P

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The University of Chicago from Tragic Form to Apocalyptic Reality in Four American Works: Toward an Epistemological Theory and P THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO FROM TRAGIC FORM TO APOCALYPTIC REALITY IN FOUR AMERICAN WORKS: TOWARD AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL THEORY AND PRACTICE OF READING A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY JOHN U. NEF COMMITTEE ON SOCIAL THOUGHT BY LINDSAY MARIE ATNIP CHICAGO, ILLINOIS JUNE 2019 To Elder and Amy Table of Contents Figures ............................................................................................................................................ iv Abstract ............................................................................................................................................ v Preface .......................................................................................................................................... vii Acknowledgments ........................................................................................................................ xii Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Reconceiving Mimesis, Again: Toward a Polanyian Theory of Literature ................. 33 Chapter 2: Norman Maclean and the Search for Modern Tragic Form ......................................... 97 Chapter 3: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and the Apocalyptic Sublime ......................... 161 Chapter 4: The Apocalyptic Elegies of Robert Lowell and Wallace Stevens ............................. 216 Conclusion: Reading At and Against the End of the World ....................................................... 277 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................ 290 iii Figures Figure 1. Time and place of men and fire in Mann Gulch, August 5, 1949................................106 iv Abstract The dissertation aims to articulate a theory of “the truth of literature” and a practice of reading aimed at grasping that truth, and to demonstrate and clarify this theory and practice through readings of works of modern tragedy and an modern “apocalyptic” genre emerging from the wars and horrors of the twentieth century and the imagination of nuclear and ecological disaster. Beginning from the common idea that we come to know something, both tacitly and explicitly, through reading great works of literature, I argue that—specifically—what we come to know are the realities and conditions of human life, conditions which are not just material but ideal— normative, narrative, and historical. Using Michael Polanyi’s theory of tacit knowledge and of “reality” conceived as both the object and condition of inquiry, I argue that in reading and reflecting on literature we are referred to our own largely tacit sense of a ground of sensemaking and judgment more adequate to our experience than the typified and conventional ground of our everyday experience. I then demonstrate a practice of reading aimed at the acquisition of this kind of knowledge, beginning from Norman Maclean’s nonfictional Young Men and Fire which seeks “to transform catastrophe into tragedy,” to find a tragic form adequate to the deaths of thirteen Smokejumpers in a 1949 forest fire. If tragedy represents events so as to show their underlying order, the conclusion of Maclean’s work suggests that modern tragic form must acknowledge the apocalyptic—the dawning possibility or likelihood of human self-destruction— which radically threatens any order. I further develop this idea of the apocalyptic through readings of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Robert Lowell’s “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket,” which imply the need to reconceive the telos of human life in light of its seemingly catastrophic historical trajectory and the impotence of conventional goodness, and Wallace Stevens’ “The Auroras of Autumn,” as well as his poetic theory, which imply the need to recognize the v provisional, constructed, and threatened character of all our sensemaking. Collectively these works refer us to what I call the apocalyptic sublime, the inconceivable enormity of the inhuman forces at work in human history, as an essential aspect of the horizon—or myth—against or in light of which we must comprehend our present situation—to the degree such comprehension is possible. My readings suggest that that situation necessitates an ongoing effort of disciplined attention, dispossession and reorientation—a shift from the telos of individual fulfillment and flourishing (“happiness”) to that of an imperative to consciousness of the tenuous conditions of our humanity—and that a practice of reading and reflecting on literature is integral to such consciousness. vi Preface …absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century. David Wallace-Wells, “The Uninhabitable Earth,” New York Magazine, July 17, 2017 I have written this dissertation in the shadow—or rather, in the rising heat—of our awareness of global warming, or climate change, and its present and future consequences, which are revealed as ever more catastrophic and imminent. This is not the only risk we face. In addition to climate change, The Future of Life Institute lists three other categories of potential “existential risk,” defined as “any risk that has the potential to eliminate all of humanity or, at the very least, kill large swaths of the global population, leaving the survivors without sufficient means to rebuild society to current standards of living”: nuclear war, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence.1 When I first read Norman Maclean’s book Young Men and Fire driving across the American West five years ago, it was the question of tragedy in modernity that arrested my interest. As the project progressed, Maclean’s turn toward the apocalyptic at the end of the book acquired ever-greater gravity and eventually became a dominant theme, pulling in the three other works I discuss. It is hard to say whether it was my increasing consciousness of crisis—of modernity as tragedy—that drove this expansion of the work to include other more explicitly apocalyptic works, or whether conversely it was my immersion in these works that attuned me to crisis, but either way the appalling currency of my theme has become increasingly apparent to me. I would emphasize that I mean not to be speaking of some potential future disaster which may or may not come to pass. It is true that it is the prospect of the human-caused extinction of 1 “Existential Risk.” vii humanity that makes our situation unprecedentedly apocalyptic; and none of the ‘lesser’ possible catastrophes—the collapse of civilization or the degradation of humanity as imagined in dystopias like Brave New World or 1984—are in the same category. The end is the end—as Clint Eastwood says in Unforgiven, “When you kill a man, you take away everything he has and everything he’s going to have”; so with humanity. In any other scenario, at least there is some hope: of pockets of humanity persisting, of individuals resisting, of culture rising again. But the perception which underlies and was strengthened in the course of writing the dissertation is that our situation is, in some significant sense, already apocalyptic, whether or not we manage to “muddle through”—that we are already well underway in undermining the material and cultural conditions of humanity as we have known it, that we find ourselves collectively incapable of responding to the potential disasters that confront us, that history is being determined not by human reason and good will but by the darker forces within us and within the institutions we have created. I cannot argue for this directly in the dissertation, but I believe it to be one of the realities to which we are referred by the works I read, all the more so because they do not explicitly depict “the end of the world” but rather represent historical and more recent events as apocalyptic or as having an apocalyptic dimension. The desire to reflect on the modern crisis, or calamity, in its various facets is only half of what motivates this study. The other driver is the question of why we find literature—and art more generally—so compelling; why a great novel or poem is an object of eros and of fascination— and the corresponding intuition that this eros and this fascination derive from our apprehension in art of some profound reality with which our everyday lives does not often put us in contact. viii Numerous thinkers, beginning in the eighteenth century, have of course answered this question, some brilliantly and thoroughly. But it is my perception that even the best of those answers stand in need of new formulation, that literature’s relation to truth requires a new conceptualization and new defense adequate to the current historical situation and in light of the past half century of corrosive (if necessary) deconstructionism and the increasingly pervasive climate of relativism. For the past ten years I have been working closely with Charles Thomas Elder, whose unpublished manuscript, The Normativity of Grammar, articulates and argues for a conception of the normative basis of modern human life as the imperative to consciousness—deriving this imperative from what he calls, in a broadly Wittgensteinian sense, "the grammar of our humanity"—with the implication that our engagement with
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