Reconfiguring Untidiness: the Ethics of Remembering History

RECONFIGURING UNTIDINESS: THE ETHICS OF REMEMBERING HISTORY IN NOVELS BY VIRGINIA WOOLF, D. M. THOMAS, AND IAN MCEWAN A Dissertation by SEUNG-HYUN KIM Submitted to the Office of Graduate and Professional Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Chair of Committee, Mary Ann O’Farrell Committee Members, Marian Eide David McWhirter Theodore George Head of Department, Maura Ives August 2019 English Copyright 2019 Seung-Hyun Kim ABSTRACT This dissertation examines representations of ideas about untidiness in modern and contemporary British novels. Reading works by Virginia Woolf, D. M. Thomas, and Ian McEwan as memory texts that engage historical atrocities, I investigate the ways in which the attention to small-scale violence of the everyday as manifested in the novels’ conceptualizations of the untidy is entwined with their articulation of violence perpetrated on a massive scale, the wars and the Holocaust. As both a thematic and a formal concern, the trope of the untidy illuminates paradigms established on exclusion, acts of boundary-setting that obliterate the face of the Other even as it puts into play literary elements that dispel such brutalizing operations. I make the case that the reconfiguration of untidiness as a form of relinquishing the self’s autonomy to relate to the Other is integral to how the novels explore the ethics of remembering history. This dissertation rethinks Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway as a historical novel that intervenes in the author’s contemporary discourse about remembering the recent past of the Great War. Disrupting dominant culture’s homogenizing affective economy, the novel’s thematization of untidiness through two women’s love figures a nonappropriative mode of relating to the Other that transfers onto the novel’s metacritical ruminations upon engaging a violent past in ways that preserve the unassimilability of the subject matter. Blatantly plunging into the matter of women’s untidy sexuality, Thomas’s The White Hotel puts under critical scrutiny culture’s dealing with the uncontrollable aspects of human existence to broach the barbarity of the Babi- Yar massacre. My discussion highlights the ways in which the excesses of sexuality and textuality are mutually constitutive in the novel’s configuration of a dialogic space in search of ii idioms to bear witness to the disempowered victims. Interpreting the subject of atonement in Ian McEwan’s Atonement as encompassing the private enterprise of Briony Tallis and the novel’s task of ethically remembering atrocities of the Second World War, I discuss the metafictional elements of the novel that break through the tidy narrative to elicit readers to partake in its concrete moments of deliberation upon past violence. iii CONTRIBUTORS AND FUNDING SOURCES Contributors This work was supervised by a dissertation committee consisting of Professor Mary Ann O’Farrell [advisor], Professors Marian Eide and David McWhirter of the Department of English and Professor Theodore George of the Department of Philosophy. All other work conducted for the dissertation was completed by the student independently. Funding Sources Graduate study was supported by funding and a fellowship from Texas A&M University. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT .............................................................................................................................. ii CONTRIBUTORS AND FUNDING SOURCES .................................................................... iv TABLE OF CONTENTS .......................................................................................................... v CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................... 1 Imagined Histories and Ethical Remembering .............................................. 9 Untidy Women, Untidy Texts ........................................................................ 14 The Chapters .................................................................................................. 21 CHAPTER II UNTIDINESS AS VIBRANT TRASH: VIRGINIA WOOLF’S AESTHETICS OF LIFE IN MRS DALLOWAY ............................................ 25 The Sexual as the Social: The Interlacing of Two Women’s Love and the Self’s Ethical Orientation to the World ......................................................... 36 An Untidy City and the Writing of History ................................................... 48 Clarissa’s Party and the Ethics of Reading .................................................... 62 CHAPTER III TOWARD AN ETHICS OF UNTIDINESS: COMMEMORATING THE HOLOCAUST IN D. M. THOMAS’S THE WHITE HOTEL ....................... 78 Lisa’s Documents and Sigmund Freud’s “Frau Anna G.” ............................. 92 Reconfiguring Untidiness: Contesting the Principle of Thrift ....................... 106 “The Camp” and the Ethics of Untidiness ..................................................... 119 CHAPTER IV ATONEMENT AND ATTUNEMENT: UNTIDINESS AND THE MEETING OF TWO WORLDS IN IAN MCEWAN’S ATONEMENT ....... 136 Tidy World and Virtue Rewarded .................................................................. 148 Cecilia’s Untidiness and the Ethics of Undoing ............................................ 165 Metafiction: the Text as World and the World as Text ................................. 181 CHAPTER V CONCLUSION .............................................................................................. 195 NOTES .............................................................................................................................. 199 WORKS CITED ....................................................................................................................... 218 v CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Memory’s truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies and vilifies also; but in the end, it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s version more than his own. – Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (1981) Each journey conceals another journey within its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle. These are the journeys I wish to record. -- Jeannette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry (1989) These passages from the novels by Rushdie and Winterson address a widely acknowledged assumption about postmodern historical fiction: the past that it recounts is a narrativized construct rendered by a narrator with a limited range of perspective. Significantly, the passages also broach the awareness the narrators evince about what comes to be left out in their accounts, termed “someone else’s version” in Rushdie’s novel and an “another journey” in Winterson’s. This somewhat less emphasized feature of postmodern historical fictions—the alterity that they bear witness to within their limited narratives—is what this dissertation attends to, considering it as an enabling dimension pivotal to the novels’ thinking about the ethics of remembering history. This dissertation studies the subject of remembering mass violence as engaged in the British historical novels of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Temporally, the 1 resurgence of the historical novel in Britain from the last decades of the twentieth century is concurrent with the emergence of discourses that have articulated and fostered a complex self-consciousness about historiography and about the ideological molding of the narrator in historical narratives.1 How have these discourses and the fictional narratives that engage the historical past informed each other? How are these discourses useful in contextualizing the pronounced changes within the historical novel in its content and narrative form? What new modes and dimensions of relating to the past have these fictional discourses opened up? How do we account for the ongoing appeal of these narratives both for scholarly consideration and for the lay reader? What is the particularly British relevance of the renewed interest in historical novels for the writer as well as for the reader? I would like to bring up the element of self-reflexivity in postmodern historical novels as an entry to thinking about these questions before making a more specific articulation of my project. Self-reflexivity, the act or mode by which the narrative calls attention to the contrived nature of its utterance, is a noted feature in many contemporary historical novels.2 This element reflects a significant aspect of the genre’s altered understanding of itself that sets it apart from its classic forbears.3 Rather than presume to present an all-encompassing portrait of a given point in history, a self-reflexive historical fiction repeatedly reaffirms its status or role as proffering a way of viewing the past: in this sense, it would not be wide of the mark to say that the textual process theorizes an approach to the past. These novels, in other words, understand themselves as partaking in a process, as engaging in a multi-voiced discourse about how to remember the past. 2 In A Poetics of Postmodernism, Hutcheon tellingly correlates this feature to the way in which the historical novel opens the past “up to the present . [and] prevent[s] it from being conclusive and teleological” (110). The past, far from being autonomous and closed off, is conceived as being opened up to interpretations and as intervening in the present. Bespeaking a space of alterity to interrogate

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