Fiction and the Shivering Reader

Fiction and the Shivering Reader An Existential Analysis of the Realist Novel and the Reader’s Search for Answers to Questions of the Meaning of Life. Brett Jenkins Bachelor of English with Honours (First Class) Murdoch University This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of Murdoch University, 2010. i Declaration I declare that this thesis is my own account of my research and contains as its main content work which has not previously been submitted for a degree at any tertiary education institution. .................................. ii Abstract The aim of this thesis is to examine two ―large‖ and somewhat diffuse questions: the first is the question of why the novel reader reads; the second, the question of what the meaning of life is. The former is not often asked by contemporary literary theorists, although it does still have a ―quiet‖ presence amongst critical and theoretical works. The latter question, despite its somewhat anachronistic and ―unfashionable‖ nature, remains a cause of anxiety in the secularised post/modern world, where God is often defined as ―dead‖ and the answers to the question of meaning are no longer given. It will be argued that the answers to both questions are very much related: the novel reader is what Walter Benjamin somewhat offhandedly calls a ―shivering reader‖—an existentially anxious reader—and his or her motive for reading is to better understand the meaning of life. The shivering reader searches for answers to the question of meaning by looking to the novel‘s fictional characters from which the reader derives the warmth of wisdom and insight into the creation and revelation of meaning. These insights are derived from the characters either explicitly—from their direct, authoritative, dying revelations—or implicitly—from the reader‘s evaluation of the characters‘ choices of meaningful projects and their actions. These insights enable the reader to better inform his or her own meaningful choices. Moreover, as Benjamin claims, the reader looks primarily to fiction because of the modern world‘s privatisation of death—a world in which death and the dying‘s revelations are no longer omnipresent. This thesis will argue that Benjamin‘s claims regarding the shivering reader are still very relevant for the contemporary reader, and have continued scholarly relevance in contemporary literary criticism. However, despite these claims of contemporary relevance, it will also be argued that the novel form does have its limitations, such that not all novels, particularly postmodern novels, can be regarded as ―valuable‖ for the shivering reader: it is the possibilities of the realist novel which are of most value because realist fiction iii best reflects how the individual ordinarily understands his or her own life and its meaning—an understanding which is often purposefully disrupted by the postmodern novel. Although the reader can look to real people and non-fictional representations of real people (such as auto/biography), the realist novel‘s representations of fictional characters is more valuable to the shivering reader, primarily because of the manner in which these characters are represented and because of the freedom the novelist has in his or her representation of their characters. Finally, this thesis examines the rhetoric of the novel and discusses the ways in which the novelist influences and shapes the reader‘s evaluation of a character‘s life by his or her choice to either exclude or include certain events from the character‘s story—choices which promote the meaningfulness of some events whilst deflects others. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction: The Death of God and the Shivering Reader 1 1. The Evaluation of Meaning and the Fictional Other 27 2. The Explicit Revelations of the Dying 65 3. Implicit Interpretation and Evaluation 117 4. Beginnings in Personal Narratives and Fiction 140 5. The Middle as the Shaping of Meaning 213 6. The End as Death and Closure 261 Conclusion 315 Bibliography 322 v vi Acknowledgements I would like to thank Professor Vijay Mishra for his continued academic support, his positive feedback, and constructive criticisms. I would also like to thank my wonderful partner, Dr. Melanie Newton, for her emotional support and for raising my confidence and esteem in my lower moments. Finally, I would like to thank my family and my fellow academics and students for sharing a coffee or a chat with me and for disrupting the periods of stagnation and solitude. vii viii Introduction: The Death of God and the Shivering Reader Introduction: The Death of God and the Shivering Reader You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life. —Albert Camus If God did not exist, everything would be permitted. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov I must choose. —Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea his thesis begins with a question—in itself not immediately or eminently T profound—which has been both asked and answered many times. The question is: What is the value of the novel to its reader? The same question may be posed more simply: Why does a novel reader read? Of course, since the latter half of the twentieth century, questions such as these have often been avoided by literary theorists; indeed, questions of motives for reading are rarely raised by contemporary literary scholars. These questions are also problematised by the continued practice of questioning the concept and criteria of evaluation itself. And yet, as Rita Felski suggests, they still retain a ―shadowy presence among the footnotes and fortifications of academic prose.‖1 This would imply that questions relating to why a reader reads still do have scholarly relevance and answers can still be proposed. To begin such an investigation, we can look to two literary theorists—Q. D. Leavis and Felski—for their proposed answers. In 1 Felski, Uses of Literature, 14. 1 Introduction: The Death of God and the Shivering Reader Fiction and the Reading Public—a book published almost eighty years ago—Q. D. Leavis proposed four general reasons why people read.2 The first two are ―to pass time not unpleasantly,‖ and ―to obtain vicarious satisfaction or compensation for life.‖3 Both answers are very common and need little explanation; suffice it to say reading for aesthetic pleasure is a universal pastime, and reading to obtain vicarious satisfaction is a well-documented phenomenon, evidenced by characters such as Don Quixote, Catherine Morland, and Madame Bovary. Arguably more interesting, however, are Leavis‘s third and fourth reasons for why a reader reads. The third is that readers had a desire to ―obtain assistance in the business of living‖4—assistance which was ―formerly the function of religion.‖5 This reason can be understood as the consequence of the ever-increasing secularisation of modern society, bringing with it the further consequence that readers no longer know the answers to the various questions of ―life.‖ Leavis claims that readers of all strata of literature are alike in very little but a genuine sense of something wrong with the world. They expect the novelist to answer real questions (in the form of What should I . ? and How should I . ? and Is it right to . ?)—in effect, to help them manage their lives by dramatising their problems and so offering a solution, by lending his support to their code of feeling and generally by expressing their own half-conscious or perplexed ―feelings about‖ Life.6 This is to say that readers read to answer the questions and the problems of everyday situations encountered in their everyday lives; questions which may relate to moral or ethical problems, but which may also relate to how they are to understand their own emotions and feelings. 2 Q. D. Leavis derived her answers from a survey sent to sixty novelists of which twenty-five replied. 3 Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public, 48. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 69. 6 Ibid., 69–70. 2 Introduction: The Death of God and the Shivering Reader The fourth and final reason described by Leavis is that readers read ―to enrich the quality of living by extending, deepening, refining, coordinating experience‖7: The best that the novel can do, it may be suggested, is not to offer a refuge from actual life but to help the reader to deal less inadequately with it; the novel can deepen, extend, and refine experience by allowing the reader to live at the expense of an unusually intelligent and sensitive mind, by giving him access to a finer code than his own.8 This description can be understood in at least two ways. Firstly, Leavis implies that the novelist—the skilled and revered novelist—sees both the world and other human beings through an ―unusually intelligent and sensitive‖ lens—a lens to which novel readers do not have access except when they are reading the novelist‘s novels. Indeed, it is often assumed that the skilled and revered novelist reads and understands human beings‘ idiosyncrasies and nuances better than most.9 In this way, the novel can be seen as a means to a new insight for the reader into a perplexing world but also helps formulate sustained and coherent images of others in the world and understand how they too ―experience‖ the world. The second way of understanding how the novel extends, deepens, refines, and coordinates experience relates to the common assumption that the novelist has had many experiences—life-experiences—which he or she in turn conveys to their readers through their novels and their characters. In other words, the ―intelligent and sensitive mind‖ of the novelist is also a fount of life- experience from which readers can draw upon and enrich their own life-experience.

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