An Esthetics of Injury: the Narrative Wound from Baudelaire to Haneke
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An Esthetics of Injury: The Narrative Wound from Baudelaire to Haneke The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Fleishman, Ian Thomas. 2013. An Esthetics of Injury: The Narrative Wound from Baudelaire to Haneke. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:11108710 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA An Esthetics of Injury: The Narrative Wound from Baudelaire to Haneke A dissertation presented by Ian Thomas Fleishman to The Committee on French and German Languages and Literatures In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of French and German Languages and Literatures Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May 2013 © 2013 — Ian Thomas Fleishman All rights reserved. Dissertation Adviser: Professor Judith Ryan Ian Thomas Fleishman An Esthetics of Injury: The Narrative Wound from Baudelaire to Haneke Abstract Examining literary and filmic representations of the open wound, this dissertation reveals injury to be an essential esthetic principle in the work of seven exemplary authors and two filmmakers from the French and German-language canons: Charles Baudelaire, Franz Kafka, Georges Bataille, Jean Genet, Hélène Cixous, Ingeborg Bachmann and Elfriede Jelinek, as well as Werner Schroeter and Michael Haneke. As a kind of corporeal inscription, the wound must be read, I argue, as a model for the variety of esthetic experience each artwork aspires to provoke—indeed, to inflict. Art for art, in these authors’ and filmmakers’ œuvres, becomes an injury for the sake of injury, and this dissertation traces the inheritance of Baudelairean decadence and estheticism into and throughout the twentieth century. Each of the seven chapters reads an emblematic wound from the literary corpus under consideration, revealing injury as both the topic of these texts and as their guiding structural procedure. For all of the writers and directors treated in this dissertation the wound is more than a mere metaphor: paralleling textual dismemberment, on a formal level it is the site of both a breakdown of meaning and of its possible reconstitution and reconfiguration. At stake, then, in this examination is nothing less than the heritage of narrative after it has incorporated fragmentation into its structure—the very capacity of the ‘wounded’ artwork to continue to make meaning through an act of figural violence and deliberate deconstruction. With its broad selection of representative figures, the project seeks to suggest a literary history, and it is my contention that this peculiar textual violence becomes the key esthetic impulse of an important strain of European literary modernism. iii C ont e nts Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................................... vi Introduction .................................................................................................................................................... 1 An Esthetics of Injury: Decadence and Estheticism ........................................................................ 6 The Textual Orifice: Autobiography and Eroticism ........................................................................ 8 The Filmic Cut: Mediated Reality ......................................................................................................12 Part 1: An Esthetics of Injury Chapter 1 ........................................................................................................................................................17 The Literary Wound on Trial: Poetic Decadence and Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal (1857) Literary Censorship: Amputation or Disfiguration? ......................................................................20 Ni queue ni tête [1]: Structural Fragmentation as Literary Decadence .....................................36 Injurious Allegory: The Semiotics of the Wound ..........................................................................42 Chapter 2 ........................................................................................................................................................55 “Sinnbild der Wunde”: The Ambivalent Estheticism of Kafka’s Ein Landarzt (1917) Textuality: Esthetic(ist) Injury ...........................................................................................................60 Semiotics: Sinnbild der Wunde ..............................................................................................................69 Narrative: Fragmentation as a Textual Strategy ...........................................................................73 Genre: The Modernist Miniature .......................................................................................................78 Chapter 3 ........................................................................................................................................................86 Bataille’s Bruise: The Mutilated Writing of Le Bleu du ciel (1927/1935/1957) Ni queue ni tête [2]: Headlessness as a Textual Strategy ..............................................................90 Inner Experience: Bataillian Estheticism ...................................................................................... 104 Communication: Bataille’s Literary History ................................................................................. 115 Part 2: The Textual Orifice Chapter 4 ..................................................................................................................................................... 121 The Textual Orifice: Holes in Genet’s Pompes funèbres (1947) The Erotic Orifice: The Sex(te) ....................................................................................................... 123 The Textual Orifice: Genet’s Wounded Works ........................................................................... 135 iv Chapter 5 ..................................................................................................................................................... 146 “Ce qui est coupé repousse”: Cixous’s Souffles (1975) and the Poetics of Omission The Cut: Omission and Suppression ............................................................................................... 149 Regrowth: Graft and Amputation ................................................................................................... 153 Ni queue ni tête [3]: Textual Reconstitution ................................................................................. 159 Part 3: The Filmic Cut Chapter 6 ..................................................................................................................................................... 163 The Woman on the Wall: Bachmann’s Malina (1971) — Jelinek’s and Schroeter’s Malina (1991) ‘Mit dem Kopf gegen die Wand’: The Literalization of the Idiomatic .................................... 165 “…die stille Frau an der Mauer”: The Disappearance into Text ............................................. 176 Chapter 7 ..................................................................................................................................................... 192 The Filmic Cut: Jelinek’s Die Klavierspielerin (1983) — Haneke’s La Pianiste (2001) The Semiotics of Estheticism: A Self-Mutilating Striptease ..................................................... 197 The Ontology of Estheticism: Mediated Reality ......................................................................... 206 The Ethics of Estheticism: Raped into Reality ............................................................................ 213 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................................. 223 Works Cited Primary Texts ............................................................................................................................................. 228 Secondary Texts ......................................................................................................................................... 233 v Acknowledgements It was Kai Evers who first introduced me, then an over-eager undergraduate at Middlebury College, to many of the texts and authors treated here—to Kafka, Jelinek and Haneke—and to questions of literary and filmic violence. Alongside an admitted fascination with the morbid, from him I have inherited the understanding that it is often the uncomfortable subjects that can be the most illuminating; he has my profound gratitude. This project issues more directly from an essay on Baudelaire and Kafka written for a seminar in literary modernism taught by Maria Tatar in the fall of 2009; I would like to thank her here for her humbling enthusiasm and for pointing out the holes in my initial thinking: those gaps that left room for potential growth. It is largely as a response to her insightful challenges that the current dissertation came to be. I am greatly indebted to a thesis committee as demanding as they have been supportive. Oliver Simons was unrelenting in his requests for clarifications of key