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The Modernist Novel Speaks Its Mind by Paul Robert

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The Modernist Novel Speaks Its Mind by Paul Robert The Modernist Novel Speaks its Mind By Paul Robert Kerschen A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Michael André Bernstein, Chair Professor Katherine Snyder Professor Alva Noë Spring 2010 1 Abstract The Modernist Novel Speaks its Mind by Paul Robert Kerschen Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley This study conceives the modernist novel as arising from a problem in genre. The end of the nineteenth century left English literature with a rich tradition of narrative prose describing the social and material worlds. At the same time, its aesthetic discourse was dominated by a Romantic poetics which described artworks as staging an opposition between spirit and matter, nature and freedom; and which placed lyric poetry, as an expression of spirit rather than a mimesis of nature, uppermost in its ranking of genres. The difficulties in reconciling this aesthetic to novelistic form account for the strangeness of the modernist novel, whose linguistic form aspires to the condition of lyric at the same time that its plot stages the failure of such an aspiration, the inability of Romanticism to imagine its own fulfillment. I begin with Henry James as a transitional figure; continue with William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf as exemplars of a Romantic-lyric poetics of the novel; and conclude with James Joyce, whose fictional forms resemble those of his contemporaries but ultimately reject many of their Romantic commitments. Some reference is made to twentieth-century philosophers, in particular Ludwig Wittgenstein, as thinkers with points of concordance. i Table of Contents Preface ii 1. Henry James: Imagination and Bondage 1 2. William Faulkner: Analogy and Silence 35 3. Virginia Woolf: Viewpoint and Veil 50 4. James Joyce: Word and Flesh 73 Bibliography 114 ii Preface What follow are some notes on the modernist novel in English. In sequence they tell a kind of story. In assembling this story I have had to ask myself the same narrative questions that confronted the figures who are its subjects: where to start, where to stop, what balance to give empirical detail and imaginative pattern, how to draw a shape which both reflects facts as they are and displays intelligible form. If my answers are not always the best, I hope they cast some light on the answers the modernists found. I conceive the modernist novel as arising from a problem in genre. The end of the nineteenth century left English literature with a rich tradition of narrative prose describing the social and material worlds. At the same time, its aesthetic discourse was dominated by a Romantic poetics which described artworks as staging an opposition between spirit and matter, nature and freedom; and which placed lyric poetry, as an expression of spirit rather than a mimesis of nature, uppermost in its ranking of genres. The difficulties in reconciling this aesthetic to novelistic form account for the strangeness of the modernist novel, whose linguistic form aspires to the condition of lyric at the same time that its plot stages the failure of such an aspiration, the inability of Romanticism to imagine its own fulfillment. I begin with Henry James as a transitional figure; continue with William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf as exemplars of a Romantic-lyric poetics of the novel; and conclude with James Joyce, whose fictional forms resemble those of his contemporaries but ultimately reject many of their Romantic commitments. While I am conscious that these experiments took place in particular historical moments, I have chosen not to structure this as a historicist study. For better or for worse, it is best classed with Charles Tansley’s dissertation in To the Lighthouse as being about the influence of something upon somebody. My working method has been to assume that literary forms carry within them philosophical commitments about language and its relation to other areas of human experience, and that criticism can do the work of elucidating these commitments, even—or especially—if the commitments prove incoherent. My own views on philosophical questions of language and knowledge have been influenced by modern philosophers including Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wilfrid Sellars, Donald Davidson, John McDowell, and Cora Diamond. Here and there I make reference to these philosophers, and over the course of my narrative it will become apparent that I see Joyce’s fictional forms as providing an especially close fit to their views. It should go without saying that this concordance does not imply a critical judgment for Joyce and against others. To treat philosophy, including the subset of philosophy known as “theory,” as an orthodoxy for the evaluation of literature is to obscure all literary interest. Nor would anything be at stake in such a judgment, since we are fortunate to occupy a historical moment in which a question like Lukács’s “Franz Kafka or Thomas Mann?” does not make sense. A view that is incoherent as philosophical doctrine can become a productive tension in literature; at least I have assumed so. Over the course of this project I received financial support from the Graduate Division and the English Department. Without the further support of Molly and Tom Erwin and Ed Kerschen I would have been unable to pursue doctoral study. I am grateful for the kind attention of my committee members, Michael André Bernstein, Katherine Snyder and Alva Noë; and especially for the encouragement and wisdom of John Bishop, who served as chair for most of the project. Some material was read in earlier versions by Brett Bourbon, Carolyn Porter, Ann Banfield and Dorothy Hale. Steven Goldsmith and Kevis Goodman were early guides on iii Romanticism, as was Nada O’Neal on Wittgenstein. Joshua Kortbein pointed me toward a title. From Jessie Ferguson I have learned many things, not all to be categorized. 1 One Henry James: Imagination and Bondage There are two familiar ideas about the late Henry James, not easily reconciled to each other. On the one hand, James’s attention to individual consciousness and point of view seems to indicate a single-observer epistemology and a corresponding perspectivism—a “relativistic universe” of “monadic isolation,” in one formulation,1 whose inhabitants have lost all common interpretive ground for making sense of the world. At the same time, James is understood as a paradigmatically social novelist concerned above all with nuances of interpersonal relations, a novelist for whom consciousness itself is “made to take shape—indeed, to become social—as an intersubjective phenomenon,” who portrays minds as “locked into such tight relations of dependence and mutual reflection… that such minds themselves seem nothing but the tissue of their relations.”2 Of course these two Jameses, the observer of individual consciousness and the dramatist of social relations, are not necessarily incompatible; but to combine them will require a particular kind of account. I attempt such an account here, reading the late James as staging a repeated contest between public and private claims, which has the apparent effect of splitting his centers of consciousness into public and private selves. The “oddity of a double consciousness”3 which burdens Lambert Strether among many others is a condition whose etiology reaches back to Romanticism, but which James presents in a particularly modern light. James restages the Romantic contest of nature and freedom not as a struggle between heaven and earth, as in Faust’s two souls, nor as Emerson’s “double consciousness” spanning “the two lives of the Understanding & of the Soul,”4 but as a struggle between the private imagination and the public persona. Against his protagonists’ need “to meet the requirements of their imagination”5 James pits all the exigencies of the social and material worlds. The imagination can preserve its freedom only by detaching itself from the outside world, which entails a corresponding detachment from that portion of the mind practically engaged with the world—that is to say, the abandonment of personal will. Such are those gestures in James typically glossed as renunciation. And the darkest streak in James is the fear that even such extreme detachment will turn out not to provide sufficient protection, that the exercise of imagination will itself prove to be another determining force. To see the public world not as the milieu in which one finds the ends of life, but rather an active impediment to reaching those ends, is to distrust the public discourse of history. The stylistic idiosyncrasy of James’s later work, like that of the modernist fiction which follows him, is largely a result of rejecting the quasi-historical narrative style of the nineteenth-century novel and replacing it with a Romantic aesthetic that derives its values from lyric poetry. The Golden Bowl, as an example of a novel written under this aesthetic, also serves a bellwether of the philosophical and moral problems that arise once this aesthetic is adopted. The Romantic outlook carries with it a provisionality, an inability to imagine its own fulfillment within history—and 1 Frederic Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974) 357. 2 Sharon Cameron, Thinking in Henry James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) 77; and Robert P. Pippin, Henry James and Modern Moral Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 68. 3 Henry James, The Ambassadors (New York: Norton, 1964) 18. 4 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume VIII, 1841- 1843, ed. William H. Gilman and J.E. Parsons (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970) 10-11. This passage, one of several in Emerson on double consciousness, was later worked into “The Transcendentalist.” 5 Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (New York: Norton, 1975) 160.
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