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Modernism and the Paradox of Self-Reference

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Modernism and the Paradox of Self-Reference Snake’s Tail: Modernism and the Paradox of Self-Reference by Jeffrey Scott Blevins A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English and the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Charles Altieri, Chair Professor C.D. Blanton Professor Kent Puckett Professor Anthony Cascardi Summer 2016 1 Abstract Snake’s Tail: Modernism and the Paradox of Self-Reference By Jeffrey Scott Blevins Doctor of Philosophy in English Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory University of California, Berkeley Professor Charles Altieri, Chair This dissertation explores how modernists envisioned thinking, judging, and acting in conditions of paradox. I hold modernism up against historical developments in logic, mathematics, and analytic philosophy to argue that T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, and I.A. Richards generated distinctive aesthetic, phenomenological, and affective responses to paradoxical situations. I anchor the work of these modernists in twentieth-century intellectual contexts with which they were all familiar, including the transition out of classical logic into a supposedly unparadoxical new symbolism; the waning of idealism and subsequent waxing of analytic philosophies; and the drive to “complete” mathematics. I demonstrate how modernists drew from these contexts the overarching problem of the liar paradox, whose paradoxical self-reference resisted all of logic’s attempts to resolve it. Articulating an aesthetics of paradox that is shaped by, yet often resistant to, these nascent new philosophies that were themselves defined by the liar paradox, modernists attend to the lived consequences, stylistic repercussions, and emotional tonalities of judging and acting in paradoxical situations. I argue that they bear witness to logic’s struggles against paradox with profound consequences for narrative, poetics, form, and style. And I claim that they deepen approaches to logical thinking with a focus on what self-reference looks and feels like as an aesthetic experience: on paradoxes that link stylistic fragmentation with bodily harm (Eliot); self-referential structures that model human suffering (Frost); circular predicates that mimic processes of thought (Stein); and the metalinguistic consequences of self-reference in the context of close reading (Richards). Affective and stylistic dimensions of paradox mediate between the scales of concept, art, and intellectual history: Eliot’s poetic illusions and hallucinations emerge from grammatical self- reference and a graduate-level study of logic; Frost’s depictions of marital strife root in “unvicious circles” that mirror ones Frost studied at Harvard; Stein’s drive to capture consciousness in a totalizing self-referential style carries on a mathematical dream of completeness learned from A.N. Whitehead; and Richards’s metalinguistic project borrowed from logic to develop many of the formalist tools that literary scholars use to this day. 2 Throughout I draw connections between these aesthetic presentations of paradox and our current literary practices, offering updated accounts of inference, evidence, figuration, and especially form—as logical concept, linguistic quodlibet, literary-critical object, and stylistic protocol. i Table of Contents Introduction. The Liar’s Art: Modernism, Metalanguage, and the Paradox of Self-Reference . ii I. The Logic of Eliot’s Art . 1 II. Unvicious Circles: Logic’s Wildness and the Poetry of Frost. 40 III. Stein, Wittgenstein, and the Loop of Reference . 64 IV. Believing in Belief: Paradox and the Birth of Close Reading . 110 ii introduction the liar’s art: modernism, metalanguage, and the paradox of self- reference iii Adam and Eve like us Stood up to watch the sun; Like us, Eve and Adam Lay down under the moon. Like Adam and Eve we ask Our questions of the sun; And lie, like Eve and Adam, Unanswered under the moon.1 This is a book of lies. That is not true. Rather, this is a book on the liar paradox. More specifically it is about the liar’s resurgence in the early 20th century, when the paradox thrived as a crisis for set theory, a constraint for mathematics, a contradiction for logic, a puzzle for semantics, a litmus for artificial intelligence, a tool for marketing, a catalyst for occultism, a subject for visual art, a conceit for fiction, and a motive for poetry.2 These last three occasion the present work, which examines an aesthetic, rhetorical, stylistic, and altogether literary pivot in the liar’s history, a pivot that illuminates many of the paradox’s other uses in the early 1900s. Like the liar itself, my claim cuts two ways: perplexity over the paradox transformed philosophers into artists, while wonder at it converted artists into philosophers. How can we comprehend, both wondered, language that refers to itself—like the sentence that begins this paragraph? What to do, both asked, with references whose scope either exhausts itself upon or else circles back to include those very references? What if this circular self-reference causes a contradiction? Is it possible to have a meaningful sense of reference with such cases? Can we have a complete one without them? Oscar Wilde in “The Decay of Lying” (1891) proposes that “a fine lie ... is its own evidence,” identifies art as just such a lie by dint of its “beauty” or “style,” and describes the “paradox” that “life imitates art” precisely to the degree that art stylizes life.3 Wilde concludes by calling for a revival of “this old art of Lying” that would quickly be answered by Henry James’s Colonel Capadose, his own Dorian Gray, and then modernism’s many famous liars, from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby to Joseph Conrad’s Charles Marlow to Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull to Isaac Asimov’s Herbie.4 If Wilde foresaw a burgeoning correlation of art and life in the lie of beauty, then Bertrand Russell perceived in the liar an impending threat to the “supreme beauty” of both “real life” and “the greatest art.”5 Russell lacks neither philosophical predecessors nor successors in this perception. Plato’s Republic banished poets for “lying” by the scrim of “style and narrative” that simultaneously disproves and yet makes more convincing their “imitations.”6 Roman Jakobson said that poetry ambiguates the truth of reference by implying the same “exordium” as “fairy tales”: “It was and it was not.”7 Lying per se, or the possibility of telling a iv lie, has plagued western metaphysics and theology at least since Adam and Eve succumbed to Satan in the Garden of Eden (as in the poem by Theodore Spencer that begins this introduction); centuries later René Descartes postulated that his memories and sensations were all the “lies” of a “malicious demon.”8 But what inspires Wilde and troubles Russell is not the way in which the unspoken possibility of lying lays waste to our metaphysical or religious confidence in memory or sensation, so much as how lying’s provision of “its own evidence” displaces the traditional referential dependencies holding self and world together—a displacement that for Wilde heralds a new aesthetics and for Russell demands a new philosophy. If lying was a metaphysical flaw for Descartes, it became a semantic rift for both artists and philosophers at the turn of the 20th century. In this sense Wilde’s ideas about lying’s self-evidence resonate deeply with Russell’s own identification of the liar, with its involuted semantics, as the apex predator in a thriving ecosystem of insolubilia having to do with “self-reference or reflexiveness”—including the Burali- Forti contradiction, Richard’s paradox, and Russell’s own famous paradox.9 It is neither curious that Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1922 rooted the self-centered condition of solipsism in “the limits of language” nor surprising that T.S. Eliot in 1916 imagined solipsism as a “circle described about each point of view” (nor odd that Eliot tried to escape solipsism by a theory of “common reference”).10 Both had inherited a curiosity about the intrinsic link between language and self from Russell’s originary commitment to self-reference as the signal issue for 20th-century philosophy—over against more classical dilemmas of self-consciousness and self- knowledge. And if self-reference supersedes self-knowledge, then the “internal relations” of language itself become the new arena for Cartesian doubt.11 Descartes’s lying demon becomes Russell’s liar paradox. What Josiah Royce called Russell’s “Logic of Reflection” emerged in reaction to Georg Cantor’s seminal paper on transfinite sets, or sets that are infinite but nonetheless vary in size.12 Russell wrote to Gottlob Frege of an error in this idea that also infected Frege’s work on the foundations of arithmetic: “Let w be the predicate: to be a predicate that cannot be predicated of itself. Can w be predicated of itself? From each answer its opposite follows.”13 The more famous formulation of this idea is Russell’s paradox about a set of all sets that do not include themselves—does such a set include itself? As Russell would discover, these are simply variations on the theme of the liar paradox, a classical aporia that generally has three ingredients: a self-referential variable like “this” or “I,” a negation, and a predicate that circles back upon the original variable.14 Crucially, these three ingredients mix on the grounds of semantics, with appeal neither to empiricism nor to metaphysics. Philosophy has long had no problem dealing with variations of the liar like the barber who shaves all and only those who do not shave themselves (does he shave himself?); we can simply point out that no such barber exists.15 “I am lying” cannot be so easily dismissed, since the paradox occurs inside a well-formed semantics with no reference to anything beyond that semantics: it is de dicto rather than de re.
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