Under the Sign of Suicide

Wayne State University Wayne State University Dissertations January 2019 Under The Sign Of Suicide Theodore Emmanuel Prassinos Wayne State University Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_dissertations Part of the American Literature Commons, and the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Prassinos, Theodore Emmanuel, "Under The Sign Of Suicide" (2019). Wayne State University Dissertations. 2334. https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_dissertations/2334 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@WayneState. It has been accepted for inclusion in Wayne State University Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@WayneState. UNDER THE SIGN OF SUICIDE by THEODORE EMMANUEL PRASSINOS DISSERTATION Submitted to the Graduate School of Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 2019 MAJOR: ENGLISH Approved By: ____________________________________ Advisor Date ____________________________________ ____________________________________ ____________________________________ DEDICATION For Leah ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the Graduate Committee of the Wayne State University Department of English for accepting my proposal and for continuing to support my work throughout my graduate career in the forms of my assistantship, various travel and yearly grants, and fellowship. Thomas C. Rumble and Co., thank you. I thank the Wayne State University Humanities Center for their fellowships, and also Professors Maun and Pruchnic for offering me work opportunities toward the end. My committee has been indispensable in the creation of this dissertation: Professors Jonathan Flatley, renée hoogland, Sarika Chandra, and Dana Seitler. My master’s advisors, Professors Nicki Tarulevicz and Wenqing Kang, and also Professor Drew Daniel have all emboldened me in ways I cannot overestimate. Two even taught me to cook. Members of my cohort, namely, Drs. Peter Marra and Vincent Haddad have provided me with valuable lessons, feedback, fellowship, and entertainment. John Landreville has been a careful, formidable, and valuable interlocutor. Jon Plumb, you are welcome at our place any time. The unreasonably generous empathy of Dr. Marcus Merritt has not only helped me recognize myself but continues to help me recognize myself. I would like to thank my family, especially the women: Robin Schlatterbeck, Leah Boslaugh, also Charles Boslaugh, William Schlatterbeck, and Dino Prassinos. Their support has taken many, crucial forms. Asha, I hope we may reunite. The friendship of Eric Gallippo, John Stiger, and my cousin-brother, Dean Sauer is unmatched. Although not cited, the curiosity, playfulness, solicitude, and mere presence of Addie, Zurich, Karl, Henry, and Pam have pushed my dumb body over many hurdles. Kimberly Sue Dalton, thank you. And lastly, as Spit For Athena would have it, “God Bless the Suicides…” iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication____________________________________________________________________ii Acknowledgements____________________________________________________________iii Introduction___________________________________________________________________1 Chapter 1 “A Mysterious Antithesis”: Capitalism and Suicidality________________________28 Chapter 2 “A Kind of Mimesis of Death”: Modern Suicidality as Critical Mimesis__________54 Chapter 3 The Affective Value of Suicidal Fantasy: Feeling the “Insane Truth” in Mrs. Dalloway____________________________________________________________________94 Chapter 4 Suicidal Fugitivity: Another Country and its “Powers of Darkness”_____________157 Coda “Until Further Notice…”__________________________________________________188 References__________________________________________________________________193 Abstract____________________________________________________________________213 Autobiographical Statement____________________________________________________215 iv 1 INTRODUCTION One could make a remarkable collection of quotations from famous authors and of poems written by despairing people preparing for their death with a certain ostentation. During the marvelously cold-blooded moment which follows the decision to die, a kind of infectious enthusiasm is exhaled from these souls and flows on to paper, even among classes which are bereft of all education. While they compose themselves for the sacrifice, whose depth they are pondering, all their strength is concentrated so much as to gush out in a warm and characteristic expression. Jacques Peuchet, quoted in Karl Marx, “Peuchet: On Suicide,” 1846 We find in modern literature an intense and sustained preoccupation with suicide. In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Svidrigailov shoots himself. In Demons, Kirillov follows suit while Stavrogin, like Smerdyakov in The Brothers Karamazov, hangs. In “The Judgment” and “The Bridge,” Franz Kafka’s protagonists drown themselves while in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus Smith impales himself on a fence. In The Waves, Rhoda jumps off a cliff. Within the United States, we find Faulkner’s Quentin Compson and Salinger’s Seymour Glass and Teddy McArdle. Miller’s Willy Loman ends his life by car crash. In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Tod Clifton suffers suicide-by-cop while in Nella Larsen’s Passing, Clare jumps out a window? Perhaps. Maybe she’s pushed? We aren’t sure, but suicide cannot be excluded. Both James Baldwin and Toni Morrison open novels with a protagonist’s suicide. This list is not exhaustive. Suffice it to say, writers of our modern era have been preoccupied with suicide.1 Yet modernist representations of suicide distinguish themselves from romantic ones. Unlike Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, for instance, modernist writers like Dostoevsky, Woolf, and Baldwin, for instance, do not represent suicide as a gesture toward some romantic achievement of selfhood or toward some fantasy of individual transcendence of life’s cruel circumstances. In this regard, Dostoevsky’s Demons may be described as the first modernist 2 suicide novel because it directly critiques dominant European discourses about human subjects as objects of scientific knowledge that came to influence Russian thought toward the end of the nineteenth century. Although Kirillov’s suicide might be framed as romantic, insofar as the “duty” of his suicide is to “proclaim self-will to the fullest point” in the service of recognizing that “there is no God,” thereby “open[ing] the door” to a new era of human development, Stavrogin’s suicide cannot.2 The circumstances surrounding Stavrogin’s suicide and its fallout are quite different. As Dostoevsky closes his novel: “Our medical men, after the autopsy, completely and emphatically ruled out insanity.”3 While the predominance of romantic suicide had come to a close, mental illness had emerged a direct opponent for many modernist writers, ceasing to sufficiently explain the cause of suicide in our modern era. Modernist representations of suicide offer reflections on one’s situatedness within one’s history, one’s way of relating to and being-with others, and most importantly, one’s response to the various forms of power under which we suffer capitalist modernity. This dissertation examines two propositions about modern representations of suicidality, neither of which ought to surprise anybody. Or, at least that’s what I risk. Neither are new. They have been culled, extended, and developed, in turn, from the critical works of four theorists of modernity—Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Virginia Woolf, and James Baldwin—all of whom criticized modern capitalist power either directly or indirectly by way of representations of suicide. First, this dissertation argues that the suicidality represented in much of modernist literature rehearses contradictions rooted in the capital relation. Such contradictions are found not only within the immediate processes of production and circulation, but also within the various institutions that interpellate subjects into bourgeois ideology. By suicidality, I mean representations of corporeal suicide, the act of purposefully ending one’s life, and also various 3 forms of suicidal ideation, moments of imagining one’s self-inflicted death or another’s. And by “rehearsal,” I mean mainly two things. As a theatrical metaphor, a rehearsal presupposes a script or various scripts with which the performer is already familiar. Chapter one traces the bourgeois script that capitalist subjects are asked to embody and perform, one characterized by the absurd commodification of reified human energy. Day in and day out, we are asked to rehearse, to re-enact, to re-present ourselves to one another and to ourselves in various scenes in which our “value” is, as Marx argues, “fixed in advance.”4 Instead of seeing our activity as something that makes us human, as the very source of our humanity and our capacity to connect both with others and with the world around us, capitalism forces us to view our energy as a “thing” that must be sold in exchange for the resources we need to survive. As if we were commodities, something Marx came to call “dead- labour,” we then rehearse our circumscribed roles in their creation and find our “value” realized only in relation to them. In many ways, as Boots Riley has it, we are to “Stick to the Script,” as if our rehearsals, bound as they are to the capital relation, are themselves those of dead labor.5 We then only see the effect return to

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