Samuel Beckett Whose Radical Reimaging of Literary Geography Not Only Questioned the Space of Fiction but the Ethics of Looking for a Fictional Subject
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
A University of Sussex PhD thesis Available online via Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/ This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Please visit Sussex Research Online for more information and further details 1 The reconnoiter inward: interiority and spatial aesthetics in the novels of Don DeLillo and J. M. Coetzee Doctor of Philosophy Katherine Da Cunha Lewin University of Sussex May 2017 2 I hereby declare that this thesis has not been and will not be submitted in whole or in part to another University for the award of any other degree. Signature:……………………………………… UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX KATHERINE DA CUNHA LEWIN DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY The reconnoiter inward: ‘The reconnoiter inward: interiority and spatial aesthetics in the novels of Don DeLillo and J.M. Coetzee. The novel, as I will show, has an historic association with the interior. In its emergence through what Ian Watt refers to as ‘realist particularity,’ the novel allowed new access to the interior lives of human beings. As I discuss, this interiority is both real and imagined, a means of giving shape to life in modernity. This shaping, however, not only affects the depiction of interior spaces in fiction, but the space of fiction itself. In this, I suggest, we find a complex literary architecture that is foundational to the western canon. I trace how this elastic interiority has been imagined in the work of Don DeLillo and J. M. Coetzee. My project reads the work of my chosen others together as a way of drawing attention to their shared investment in literary architecture. I will firstly outline the history of interiority in the novel from the house of fiction of Henry James and the interior architecture of Edith Wharton, to the modernist dismantling of novelistic geography in Franz Kafka. I focus on the work of Samuel Beckett whose radical reimaging of literary geography not only questioned the space of fiction but the ethics of looking for a fictional subject. In my second and third chapter, I outline the legacy literary architecture has had throughout DeLillo and Coetzee’s oeuvre. In my conclusion, I read two novels—Point Omega and Disgrace respectively—as a way of mapping their challenge to the boundaries of contemporary global politics and its invasion into interior life. 3 Table of contents Introduction…………………………………………………………………….……7 Space and interiority in the novel……………………………………………………12 The spatial in DeLillo and Coetzee…………………………………………………..22 Thesis outline…...……………………………………………………………………29 Chapter 1 - Thinking through the novel: the house and the interior in realism and modernism……………………………………………………………...….…..34 Realism’s house of fiction………………………………………………...................39 The modernist house of fiction………………………………………………………47 Samuel Beckett: ‘The big world’ and the ‘little world’…..…………………………52 Murphy………………………………………………………………………………57 The trilogy…………………………………………………………………………...62 Still: After The Unnamable………………………………………………………….73 Encoding space: Beckett’s architecture of displacement……………………………77 DeLillo and Coetzee’s Beckettian displacement…………………………………….79 Chapter 2 - Don DeLillo: ‘The room is inside’ …………………………………..83 Plots building inward: End Zone, Great Jones Street and Ratner’s Star…………... 89 Being an American: Americana and Libra…………………………………………116 Imagining an other: The Angel Esmeralda………………………………………….130 Space becoming art: Zero K………………………………………………………...147 Conclusion: Other rooms…………………………………………………………...155 Chapter 3 – J. M. Coetzee: Text and topography……………………………….158 History, land and blankness: Dusklands and Waiting for the Barbarians…….........166 The farm and gardening: In the Heart of the Country and Life and Times of Michael K……………………………………………………………..………………………180 Reading the space of the other: Age of Iron and Slow Man…………………….…...205 4 Conclusion: Empty cube…………….………………………………………….….228 Conclusion: Disgrace and Point Omega…………………………………………230 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………246 5 Acknowledgements Thank you to the School of English for their support during my time at the University of Sussex. Thank you also to New York University for hosting me for a term, Peter Nicholls for supporting my trip there, and Perry Meisel for his seminars. Thank you to the British Library for providing me with workspace and resources. I’ve met many great people at Sussex and made wonderful friends. I’m very grateful to have spent time in the shared office where many excellent conversations were had. Camilla Bostock and Laura Fox Gil, who have provided me with such laughs and such support; it was so wonderful to share the experience with you both. Kiron Ward, my partner in crime, it’s been so wonderful collaborating with you, and I look forward to continuing our work together. Thank you to you and Mike Rowland for letting me crash on your sofa. Katherine Kruger has been so encouraging and so fun. You’ve all made this experience worth it. To the staff in the wonderful English department who have helped me along the way, including Pam Thurschwell, John Masterson, Tom Wright, and Rachel O’Connell. Mostly, many many thanks are due to my wonderful supervisor Professor Peter Boxall for his kindness, his encouragement and his support. Thank you to my friends for their continued help, particularly Susanna Martin for proofreading and for being so cool; Olivia Capadose, for providing me with much needed respite; Dominic Jaeckle for phone calls and encouragement; and John Dunn, Ghazouane Arslane, Ralf Webb and Ellen Jones (last-minute proofer) for being my British Library buddies. Thank you to my family, my grandparents, my uncle Victor and cousin Amber, my sister Caroline and my mum and dad. Thanks to my sister for sweet whatsapp messages, my dad for his support and my mum for everything. She has read every piece of my work, including this thesis. Also, tonnes of thanks are due to the Powells for kind words and fun walks. And to Ryan Powell who I couldn’t have done this without: thank you for my cup of tea everyday and all your love and support. And finally Bartleby for being a consistently excellent cat. 6 I dwell in Possibility – A fairer house than Prose – More numerous of windows – Superior – for doors - 1 ‘I see fields where others see chapters. And so I am forced to use another method to try and place and define events. A method which searches for co- ordinates extensively in space, rather than consequentially in time.’2 ‘You talk about bringing the inside close to the outside. I’m talking about taking the whole big outside and dragging it in behind me.’3 1 Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems, ed. by Thomas H. Johnson (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), p. 657. 2 John Berger, G. (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 167. 3 Don DeLillo, End Zone (London: Picador, 2004), p. 223. All references are hereafter taken from this edition and are abbreviated to EZ. 7 Introduction ‘I’m not outside, I’m inside, I’m in something, I’m shut up, the silence is outside, outside, inside, there is nothing but here, and the silence outside, nothing but this voice and the silence all round, no need of walls, yes, we must have walls, I need walls, good and thick... ’4 In order to think about the ethics and politics of contemporary fiction, we must engage with the shifting terrain of the contemporary world. The writing of Don DeLillo and J.M. Coetzee may emerge from different contexts but there is a clear overlap in their intellectual interests and fictional strategies. I will elucidate the questions that both authors posit throughout their oeuvres in the course of this thesis, primarily through thinking about the complexities of their philosophies of space. Their work asks: how is space figured in fiction, and how does it operate? How does spatial thinking correspond to the politics of writing? Their work is also necessarily intertextual, not only because they incorporate the work of various writers into the texts themselves, but also through the generative conversations they have with canonical writers. Both are interested in where fiction has come from and where fiction is going. In the quote above taken from Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable, the slippage between inside and outside suggests the necessity of spatial knowledge, of being able to place oneself somewhere. The voice describes the desire for a wall, a demarcator between physical space that would make literal the inside and the outside. The additional clauses which turn from ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ suggest a frightening lack of clarity between those two physical positions; the only certainty is that there is ‘here’, wherever that may be. As I suggest throughout this thesis, Beckett’s writing provides a 4 Samuel Beckett, The Beckett Trilogy: Molly, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (London: Picador, 1979), p. 378. All references are hereafter taken from this edition and will be abbreviated to M, MD, and TU respectively. 8 destabilising literary architecture through which DeLillo and Coetzee’s work is brought to bear. But in what ways do I conceive of the spatial and the architectural in fiction? I suggest, firstly, that we can locate a spatialising impulse in the very basis of storytelling. In a discussion between John Berger and Susan Sontag, Berger suggests that to tell a story is to imagine the safety and seclusion of being inside.5 He notes: ‘If I think about telling a story, I think of a group of people huddled together, and around them a vast space, quite frightening.’6 He makes a distinction between the physical space in which a story is told, and the enclosed space of the story itself, in which we also find a kind of ‘home.’ Berger unites the physical place of storytelling and the metaphorical spaces of fiction together in a location of seclusion and containment, a space in which fiction finds its basis and through which it comes into being.