University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 5-2014 The "Vast and Terrible" Trauma: American Literary Naturalism, Ethics, and Levinas Tyler Joseph Efird University of Tennessee - Knoxville, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the American Literature Commons, American Material Culture Commons, American Popular Culture Commons, Continental Philosophy Commons, Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons, and the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Efird, Tyler Joseph, "The "Vast and Terrible" Trauma: American Literary Naturalism, Ethics, and Levinas. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2014. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/2687 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Tyler Joseph Efird entitled "The "Vast and Terrible" Trauma: American Literary Naturalism, Ethics, and Levinas." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. Allen R. Dunn, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Mary E. Papke, William Hardwig, Harry F. Dahms Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) The “Vast and Terrible” Trauma: American Literary Naturalism, Ethics, and Levinas A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Tyler Joseph Efird May 2014 DEDICATION To my family – my parents and grandparents, who have made this work possible. Without your help, I would have died poor in a ditch a long time ago, another graduate student casualty. And to Kat, my beautiful wife. Your support has been my motivation. You, I love. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would be remiss if I did not thank my committee members for their help in the process of composing this dissertation. A special thanks goes to Drs. Mary E. Papke, Bill Hardwig, and Harry F. Dahms of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. And last, but certainly not least, I would like to extend my most humble (and unabashed) gratitude to Dr. Allen R. Dunn of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, a man who has put up with my Levinas obsession more than any other human being on the face of the earth. Without his help, this dissertation would be a mere idea rather than a reality. iii ABSTRACT In an 1896 essay, Frank Norris wrote that the reading world should abandon those “teacup tragedies” to which it had grown accustomed and embrace a new literature that would depict a “vast and terrible drama.” Realism, Norris claimed, could not be used to achieve an earnest portrait of the conditions that mark individual lives under capitalism. Instead, the world needed a romantic wrestling with the forces of existential inscrutability. Also, the perceived need for literature to depict a clear ethical system needed revising from the perspective of American literary naturalism, a school long denigrated for apparent moral vacuity. Through excruciating “drama,” naturalism therefore confronted the economic conditions that subject individual lives to the whims of a world wherein moral values seemed either the business of religious groups or of rationalist Enlightenment thinkers. The writings of Norris and Stephen Crane, as well as later naturalists like John Dos Passos and Nathanael West, refuse moral systematization and depict human beings in extraordinary predicaments that question reductive evaluations of human relationships. These traumatic encounters offered by naturalist fiction provide a route for us to think about the works of the French ethicist, Emmanuel Levinas. In Levinas, we find the ethical encounter traumatic, gut-wrenching, and overwhelming. No course of action is provided because every person demands of us a unique response that cannot be met. Levinas offers a means for us to expand our understanding of literary naturalism and think of its relevance in our own day, wherein value relativism makes moral response increasingly difficult. Such an approach allows us to find the similarities between such disparate authors as Norris and Crane, Dos Passos and West, all of whom find the ethical relationship troubling and painful. In naturalism's scenes of trauma, inarticulacy, and paralysis, we find the origins of a radical ethical alternative, one that does not deny ethical possibility in its refusal to systematize, but, rather, finds it in the the breakdown of language and cognition – in other words, the complete dissembling of the self and the familiar structures that tend to give it precedent in the ethical relationship. iv “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.” - Immanuel Kant v TABLE OF CONTENTS I. Introduction.............................................................................1 II. Capitalism, Commercialized Discourse, and the Naturalist Moment....................................................................................29 III. Levinas and the Ethics of Trauma...........................................48 IV. The Unbearable Burden of the Other: The Ethics of Inarcticulate Subjectivity in the Works of Frank Norris..........71 V. Stephen Crane and Indiscriminate Judgment..........................111 VI. Surfin' U.S.A.: John Dos Passos, Promiscuous Discourse, and the War on Totality...................................................................153 VII. The Trauma of Address: Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts and Writer's Block....................................................................194 VIII. Conclusion................................................................................228 Works Cited..............................................................................234 Vita...........................................................................................242 vi I. INTRODUCTION In the dead of a Nebraska night, a young Swedish man falls lifeless in a saloon from the flash of a blade. Outside, the snow looms quiet and as lifeless and cold as a corpse. Just hours before, this youth, whom Stephen Crane refers to as “the Swede” in his “The Blue Hotel,” appeared before a hotel on the outskirts of town, wild-eyed and nervous, easy to excite and not far from a state of agitation. Slowly familiarizing himself with his fellow guests, the Swede is lured into a game of cards. The Swede soon becomes convinced that one of his competitors, Johnnie, the owner's son, is cheating, and aroused to anger, has no qualms about condemning his foe in front of the other contestants. This accusation, as if an act of fate, sets off a chain of events that leads to a seemingly irrevocable outcome, finally ending in the Swede's death. Overcoming Johnnie in a battle of man-against-man outside the hotel, in the freezing cold, as the other guests look on, the Swede storms off into the night, his sense of invincibility heightened by his victory. The Swede finally finds himself inside the saloon, where he drinks too much, makes oaths, and ends up on the wrong side of a knife. Most revealing, however, is the account that Crane leaves us with, months later, after the trial of the gambler (who stabbed the Swede to death), of the dialogue between the Easterner and the Cowboy, two of the participants in the card game that fatal night. The Easterner finally reveals to the still vindictive Cowboy (perturbed by the Swede's wild declamations that night) that Johnnie was indeed cheating but that he did not reveal this fact at the time because he was “afraid to stand up and be a man” (29). According to the Easterner, all parties involved in the card game were responsible for the Swede's outcome and not just the Swede himself. “We are all in it!” (29) he exclaims in a definitive summary of the event's outcome. American literary naturalism not only makes us uncomfortable witnesses to the disastrous 1 (and often brutal) endings of characters caught in the vicious cycle of “dog-eat-dog” that characterizes a competitive modern world, it also implicates us, most importantly, in their agony and suffering. And while the Easterner's stark realization in Crane's story may be far more morally explicit than other examples of his work as well as that of his cohort, reading naturalism is, nonetheless, a process of locating our own complicity – our own responsibility – in the suffering of our fellow human beings. Conventional readings of naturalism, however, find it convenient to overlook this complicity. These readings typically assume that naturalism's harsh depiction of life offers no valuable statement on the seemingly significant tragedies we sometimes face, that there is no inherent value in life and that we must resign ourselves only to a passive acceptance. Many of these critiques claim that naturalism's unwieldy determinism underwrites a staunch nihilism that negates any real moral potential in naturalist texts. Certainly these critiques cannot be overlooked or easily cast aside. Claims