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A Thesis Entitled Space, Time and the Self in 20Th Century Literature By A Thesis entitled Space, Time and the Self in 20th Century Literature by Jordan Ellington Cook Submitted to the Graduate Faculty as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts Degree in Philosophy _________________________________________ Dr. Ammon Allred, Committee Chair _________________________________________ Dr. Jeanine Diller, Committee Member _________________________________________ Dr. Benjamin Grazzini, Committee Member _________________________________________ Dr. Amanda Bryant-Friedrich, Dean College of Graduate Studies The University of Toledo May 2018 Copyright 2018, Jordan Ellington Cook This document is copyrighted material. Under copyright law, no parts of this document may be reproduced without the expressed permission of the author. An Abstract of Space, Time, and the Self in 20th Century Literature by Jordan Ellington Cook Submitted to the Graduate Faculty as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of the Arts Degree in Philosophy The University of Toledo May 2018 The following is an investigation into representations of temporal and spatial relations in literature and how they change the conception of the self. I compare literary discourses of time and space with those found in philosophical metaphysics and epistemology, most prominently Kant and Poincaré. The thesis provides evidence for a relationship between scientific and philosophical epistemology and the way time, space, and self are expressed in fiction. I detail this relationship using the work of Borges, Proust, and host of other authors to emphasize that the use of epistemology in literature is not limited an isolate case concerning a few authors, but a general tendency within fiction. iii I memory of Pippen. Acknowledgements I would like to thank my Grandmother, Mother, Father, Uncle Lloyd, Aunt Lydia, Uncle Tony, Aunt Donna and the rest of family. I would also like to thank Dr. Allred and Dr. Muntersbjorn for their patience in helping me formulate this thesis. I must also extend my gratitude to Dr. Diller who helped me with this thesis on such short notice. Lastly, I would like to thank Dr. Graziani for his helpful suggestions as a worked on my thesis. v Table of Contents Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iii Acknowledgements ..............................................................................................................v Table of Contents ............................................................................................................... vi 1 Chapter 1: Introduction ............................................................................................1 1.1 What is Literature ..............................................................................................7 1.2 Butor and Kundera ...........................................................................................10 1.3 Philosophical Critique in Literature .................................................................15 2 Chapter 2: Space ....................................................................................................20 3 Chapter 3: Time .....................................................................................................28 3.1 Proust ........................................................................................................30 3.2 Borges ........................................................................................................37 4 Chapter 4: The Self ................................................................................................41 4.1 Borges, Malaparte, Qian ..................................................................................42 References ..........................................................................................................................51 vi Chapter 1 Introduction Thomas Mann, in his novel The Magic Mountain, describes the subjective sense of time though his character Hans Castorp. The beauty of this “Excursus on the Sense of Time” as he calls it, is the seamlessness with which it fits in the novel. The Magic Mountain takes place in a sanatorium, all the characters there are in a sense condemned to death. While in the 20th century modernists the themes of time, space and the self become more pronounced, we will soon see that without at least some vague understanding of time and space a novel cannot successfully be composed. Temporality and spatiality are grounded in human thinking and it is not possible to conceive of an art which does not take that into account, even if it is only in a rudimentary fashion. To return to Mann, his “Excursus” details some of the themes we will be discussing. The first idea which is of importance to us for now is the relationship between spatial and temporal relations and how it is related to our emotions. Ennui or boredom, according to Mann, can both compress and expand time. Or rather, emotions are important when discussing our subjective experience of time. Mann describes a situation 1 in which our habits influence how we experience time. Without continual reinvigoration, our life may pass us by in what feels like an instant: …A great many false ideas have been spread about the nature of boredom. It is generally believed that by filling time with things new and interesting, we can make it “pass,” by which we mean “shorten” it; monotony and emptiness, however, are said to weigh down and hinder its passage. This is not true under all conditions. Emptiness and monotony may stretch a moment or even an hour and make it “boring,” but they can likewise abbreviate and dissolve large, indeed the largest units of time, until they seem nothing at all...What people call boredom is actually an abnormal compression of time caused by monotony—uninterrupted uniformity can shrink large spaces of time until the heart falters, terrified to death. When one day is like every other, then all days are like one, and perfect homogeneity would make the longest life seem very short, as if it had flown by in a twinkling. Habit arises when our sense of time falls asleep, or at least, grows dull; and if the years of youth are experienced slowly, while the later years of life hurtle past at an ever-increasing speed, it must be habit that causes it. We know full well that the insertion of new habits or the changing of old ones is the only way to preserve life, to renew our sense of time, to rejuvenate, intensify, and retard our experience of time—and thereby renew our sense of life itself.1 This at first may appear to have primarily a literary function. Of course, Mann is describing the relativity of time in the colloquial sense. It is still a reflection of a certain mode of thinking which persisted and continues to persist due to the achievements of philosophy and science during that time and the proceeding period. There are certain developments within narrative fiction which make this possible. The first of which is the abandonment of pure story telling. The novel becomes a space where the novelist may engage in theoretical speculation as well as storytelling. There will be more on this point in the section on Don Quixote, which is widely considered to be the first western novel. The second development which makes the novel (and by extension the modern short story) important is that from the beginning it seeks to assimilate the knowledge of other 1 Mann, Thomas, and John E. Woods. The Magic Mountain. New York: Everyman's Library, 2005, 122-123 2 disciplines to construct a coherent fictional world. As we can see from Mann, temporal and spatial conditions have an impact on our conception of self. Regardless of the many forms it takes, a central preoccupation of modernist literature is space and time. I will argue that this preoccupation expresses itself by creating a continuity between the way in which the artist expresses time and space and the way which epistemologists conceptualize time and space. This continuity created a situation in which literary figures contributed something valuable to our conception of time and space because they were in direct engagement with the broader intellectual tradition. If time and space are fundamental to the way the self interprets the world; it should come as no surprise that they are important to the narrative and pictorial arts. Art in many ways is about the peculiar perception of those that create it. When discussing art, we are talking about perception and perception begins in space and time. Artists, whether explicitly or implicitly, have made time and space their subject in many interesting ways. Naum Gabo, the Russian sculptor, for instance, thought that his work had been revitalized by Einstein’s theory of relativity. Linda Dalrymple Henderson records Naum’s impressions: “Space and time are re-born to us today… The realization of our perceptions of the world in the forms of space and time is the aim of our pictorial and plastic art.”2 Henderson goes on to write: As the first sculpture in the history of art to incorporate motorized motion, Gabo’s Kinetic Construction is a milestone in the development of the tradition of kinetic art that would reach its height in the 1950s and 1960s. In a 1957 interview, Gabo 2 Galison, P. L. (2008). Einstein and 20th-Century Art: A Romance of Many Dimensions. In Einstein for the Twenty-first century: His legacy in science, art, and Modern Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 111. 3 affirmed his
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