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Durham E-Theses Durham E-Theses The Faust Myth in William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon: Postmodern Negotiations of Western Modernity MOSCH, MATTHIAS How to cite: MOSCH, MATTHIAS (2012) The Faust Myth in William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon: Postmodern Negotiations of Western Modernity, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/5901/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk 2 Abstract Matthias Mösch “The Faust Myth in William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon: Postmodern Negotiations of Western Modernity” This thesis examines the Faust myth in post-war American fiction, giving special consideration to works of William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon. The main texts analysed are Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955) and Pynchon’s V. (1963) and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). I present these works, which are underrepresented in broader studies of the literary tradition of the myth, as substantial contributions to the latter, while demonstrating how their thematic and stylistic proximity can be explained through their use of the myth itself. I thereby meet two desiderata: a location of Gaddis’s and Pynchon’s Faustiana in specific currents of twentieth-century intellectual history and a qualitative comparison between both authors against the background of postmodern mythography. Locating their works in the tradition of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Thomas Mann, I analyse how both authors employ the myth in order to satirise the underbelly of Western modernity. In turning the myth against the founding principles of America itself, they suggest that the vision of a New Eden has been a Faustian wager from the start. In doing so, they transform the image of the heretical soul-seller into that of a representative of the dominant forces of their time. Playfully demonising the reckless individualism, technicism, and voracious materialism of their contemporaries, they provide an astonishingly differentiated portrait of human self-aggrandisement that reverts into mechanisms of dehumanisation, a feat that is reflected in their manifest use of the works of Oswald Spengler, Max Weber, Eric Voegelin, Norman O. Brown, and Herbert Marcuse. While Gaddis’s and Pynchon’s early novels remain a matter of negative theology in refraining from providing totalising suggestions as how to fare with the sold ‘soul’ of the West, I argue that these satirical disputes, via their use of apophaticism, indirection, and allusive complexity, convey a distinctly ethical message that speaks against the alleged nihilism and relativism of postmodern fiction. The Faust Myth in William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon: Postmodern Negotiations of Western Modernity Volume 1 of 1 Matthias Mösch Ph.D. Department of English Studies, Durham University 2012 Table of Contents Introduction 6 Part I: The Dialectic of Demonization Chapter 1: Faust and the Forces of Modernity 14 Chapter 2: Faust in America 36 Part II: Faustian Themes in William Gaddis’s The Recognitions Chapter 3: Heretical Negotiations in the Work of William Gaddis 51 Chapter 4: Culture as Bargain: Art, Society, and Alienation in The Recognitions 78 Part III: Faustian Civilization in Thomas Pynchon’s V. and Gravity’s Rainbow Chapter 5: Thomas Pynchon’s Faust, Part One: V. 152 Chapter 6: Pynchon’s Faust, Part Two: Gravity’s Rainbow 179 Chapter 7: Life against Death: Slothrop and the Quest for Redemption 220 Conclusion: Satire, Myth, and Ethics 247 Illustrations 253 Bibliography 255 List of Abbreviations AA Gaddis, William. Agapē Agape and Other Writings. London: Atlantic Books, 2002. CH Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966. CR Roberts, Alexander, and James Donaldson, eds. Ante-Nicene Christian Library: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers Down to A.D. 325, vol. 3, Tatian, Theophilus, and the Clementine Recognitions. Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1867. DE Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by John Cumming. London/ New York: Verso, 1997. DF Mann, Thomas. Doctor Faustus. Translated by John E. Woods. New York: Vintage, 1999. DW Spengler. Oswald. The Decline of the West. Translated by Charles Francis Atkinson. 2 Vols. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926-1928. EC Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. London: Routledge, 1998. F Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust: Part One. Translated by David Luke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. ---. Faust: Part Two. Translated by David Luke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. GR Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. London: Penguin, 1995. JR Gaddis, William. J R. London: Atlantic Books, 2003. LB Brown, Norman O. Love’s Body. New York: Vintage, 1966. LD ---. Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1970. MM Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain. Translated by H.T. Lowe-Porter. Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1973. ODM Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Introduced by Douglas Keller. London: Routledge, 2002. TR Gaddis, William. The Recognitions. London: Atlantic Books, 2003. WMA Huizinga Johan. The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of the Forms 1 of Life, Thought, and Art in France and the Netherlands in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries. Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1976. V. Pynchon, Thomas. V. London: Vintage: 2000. 2 Statement of Copyright The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without the author’s prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. 3 Acknowledgements So much has been written about me that I no longer know who I am. —Paul Valéry, My Faust1 I would like to thank Professor Peter Paul Schnierer for a decisive piece of advice. Thanks also to Professors Julián Jiménez Heffernan and Joseph Tabbi for encouraging me to embark on this journey that initially started as an examination of Faustian connections in William Gaddis. Furthermore, I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Samuel Thomas and Professor Patricia Waugh for being such excellent, responsive, and supportive supervisors, Professor Bruce Lincoln for amazing sessions on mythology, and Dr. Christian Tico Seifert for an illuminating conversation about Flemish art. Eventually, I am indebted to the German National Merit Foundation for their financial and pedagogic support. Special greetings go to the community of Gaddis and Pynchon scholars, especially Professor Hanjo Berressem, Dr. Doug Haynes, Dr. Crystal Alberts, and Dr. Birger Vanwesenbeeck for their kind help and stimulating work. I am also very grateful for friends, loved ones, and students who reminded me why I started this in the first place. This is for Conny, who might guess why. 1 Paul Valéry, Plays, trans. David Paul and Robert Fitzgerald (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), 14. 4 Chapter attributions Sections from chapters 1, 5, 6, and 7 are published as “The Spectre of Faust in the Early Work of Thomas Pynchon”, Profils Américains: Thomas Pynchon, ed. Gilles Chamerois and Bénédicte Fryd. Montpellier: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée (in print). 5 Introduction [I]n the absence of any ethical standards external to your belief and love in God, the danger is always lurking that you will use your love of God as the legitimization of the most horrible deeds. —Slavoj Žižek, The Monstrosity of Christ2 But the novel’s task, unlike that of history, is to stretch our intellectual, spiritual and imaginative horizons to breaking point. —Christine Brooke-Rose, “Palimpsest History”3 My thesis traces the employment of the Faust myth in American postmodern fiction, specifically the works of William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon. This project is a scholarly desideratum in two respects. Firstly, Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955), Pynchon’s V. (1963), and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) are hardly treated in overviews of American Faustiana despite their obvious connection to the myth. 4 Secondly, despite their thematic and formal proximity, these works have not yet been compared sufficiently in qualitative terms. While critics, for instance Tony Tanner, have frequently pointed to Gaddis’s possible influence on Pynchon, actual examinations are sparse.5 Given the copious intersections between the latters’ thematic focal points, 2 Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?, ed. Creston Davis (Cambridge, Mass./ London: MIT Press, 2009), 270. 3 Christine Brook-Rose, Stories, Theories and Things (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 189. 4 The only overviews of the literary Faust tradition including discussions of Gaddis and Pynchon are Paul Goetsch, Machtphantasien in englischsprachigen Faustdichtungen: Funktionsgeschichtliche Studien (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh,
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