National Library Bibliothèque nationale 1+1 of Canada du Canada Acquisitions and Direction des acquisitions el Bibliographie Services Branch des services bibliographiques 395 Wcllnglon Slreel 395. rue Wellington Ottawa. Onl.lfIQ Ollowo (Onlorio) KIA ON4 K1AON4 NOTICE AVIS The quality of this microform is La qualité de cette microforme heavily dependent upon the dépend grandement de la qualité quality of the original thesis de la thèse soumise au submitted for microfilming. microfilmage. Nous avons tout Every effort has been made to fait pour assurer une qualité ensure the highest quality of supérieure de reproduction. reproduction possible. If pages are missing, contact the S'il manque des pages, veuillez university which granted the communiquer avec l'université degree. qui a conféré le grade. Some pages may have indistinct La qualité d'impression de print especially if the original certaines pages peut laisser à pages were typed with a poor désirer, surtout si les pages typewriter ribbon or if the originales ont été university sent us an inferior dactylographiées à l'aide d'un photocopy. ruban usé ou si l'université nous a fait parvenir une photocopie de qualité inférieure. Reproduction in full or in part of La reproduction, même partielle, this microform is governed by de cette microforme est soumise the Canadian Copyright Act, à la Loi canadienne sur le droit R.S.C. 1970, c. C-30, and d'auteur, SRC 1970, c. C-30, et subsequent amendments. ses amendements subséquents. Canada '. GUY DAVENPORT'S LITERARY PRIMITIVISM séan A. Q'Reilly Department of English McGill University, Montréal May 1995 A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts • National Library Bibliothèque nationale 1+1 of Canada du Canada Acquisitions and Direction des acquisitions et Bibliographie Services Branch des services bibliographiques 395 Wellington Sl,eel 395, rua Wellington Ottawa, Onlario Ollawa (Onlll,lo) K1A ON4 K1AON4 0u",1" Notlll ,lItclll'tlC''' The author has granted an L'auteur a accordé une licence irrevocable non-exclusive licence irrévocable et non exclusive allowing the National Library of permettant à la Bibliothèque Canada to reproduce, loan, nationale du Canada de distribute or sell copies of reproduire, prêter, distribuer ou his/her thesis by any means and vendre des copies de sa thèse in any form or format, making de quelque manière et sous this thesis available to interested quelque forme que ce soit pour persons. mettre des exemplaires de cette thèse à la disposition des personnes intéressées. The author retains ownership of L'auteur conserve la propriété du the copyright in his/her thesis. droit d'auteur qui protège sa Neither the thesis nor substantial thèse. Ni la thèse ni des extraits extracts from it may be printed or substantiels de celle-ci ne otherwise reproduced without doivent être imprimés ou his/her permission. autrement reproduits sans son autorisation. ISBN 0-612-12066-X Canada • ii ~bstract This thesis shows how literary primitivism is the pivot around which Davenport's literary designs spin. Thematically as well as technically the material in his first four collections of short stories is all derived from a desire to explore the beginnings, or the primitive wellsprings, of writing and art. The collage-like construction of picture and sentence will be shown to evolve from a knowledge of palaeolithic cave painting, humanity's first writing system, while Davenport's use of cataloguing and paratactic systems will be shown to evolve from ancient Greek. His primitivism also reveals itself in a Rousseau-like concern to highlight the advantages of primitive civilization on a modern industrial one and how the lessons learned from that are invaluable for present-day society• • • Hi Résumé Cette thèse démontre comment le primitivisme littéraire est le pivot autour duquel évoluent les projets littéraires de Davenport. Tant sur le plan thématique que technique, la substance de ses quatre premières séries de nouvelles procède d'une volonté d'explorer le commencement ou la source primitive de l'écriture et de l'art. La construction en collage des images et des phrases dérive d'une connaissance des peintures rupestres paléolithiques, premier système d'écriture de l'humanité, alors que Davenport emprunte à la Grèce antique les systèmes de catalogage et parataxiques. Son primitivisme se révèle également comme une préoccupation rousseauiste de mise en valeur de la supériorité de la civilisation primitive sur la civilisation moderne industrielle et de démonstration du caractère essentiel des leçons que nous avons à en tirer pour la société contemporaine• • • iv Acknowledgements The impetus and inspiration for this thesis grew out of a course given by Peter Quartermain at the University of British Columbia entitled Literary Primitivism. As such chapter One is largely indebted to him as is the section on parataxis in chapter Two. l would also like to thank my thesis supervisor at McGill, William Wees, who provided support and encouragement throughout the project• • • v Contents Abstract ii Résumé iii Acknowledgements iv Contents . .. v List of Abbreviations vi Introduction . .. 2 chapter One The Construction of the Text: Guy Davenport's Assemblage 10 Chapter Two The Influence of Primitive Modes of Communication • •• 30 Chapter Three Cultural Failure 52 Bibliography 81 • • vi List of Abbreviations b & P: booles and Pears. San Francisco: North Point, 1984. DaV's B: pa Yinci's Bicycle. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979. ~: Eclogues. San Francisco: North Point, 1981. Force: Eyery Force Evolves a Form. San Francisco: North Point, 1987. Geog: Geograohy of the Imagination. San Francisco: North Point, 1981. Tat!: Tatlin! Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982 • • • Introduction In order to reach far, one must first return to first principles Apollinaire1 According to Guy Davenport the creative triumph in the arts of the modernist movement was due to a "renaissance of the archaic" (Geog 20) in which "the twentieth century••. looked back to a deeper past in which it••. imagined it sees the very beginnings of civilization" (Geog 21). For Davenport, this means the impulse in the modernists to evoke the past as inspiration for the present and as a way of creating order and meaning in a century devoid of a teleological centre, be it Joyce's use of the Odyssey as a structural device, Hilda Doolittle's adaptation of archaic Greek fragments, Yeats' mythopoetics, or Picasso's use of primitive African fetishes. This "passion for the archaic••• is a longing for something lost, for energies, 'This quote oriqinates in a letter written to Breton on March 10, 1916. Quoted in Katie Samaltanos' Apollinaire: Catalyst for Primitivism. • Picabia, and Quchamp. 3 • values, and certainties unwisely abandoned by an industrial age" (~ 24) and expresses the idea, found often in Davenport's short stories, that "primitivism is a mode cf sentience, a creed springing inevitably from a state of cultural failure" (Baird 3) that was manifest as a reaction against the failure of scientific rationalism whose "sciences began to explain the mechanics of everything and the nature of nothing" (Geog 27). In Davenport "the idea of the modern age as a return to the primitive--to the 'Palaeolithic Vortex'--is••• central to Chis] philosophy" (Bawer 10) and represents a "return to first principles" as advocated by Apollinaire. Like his modernist precursors Davenport utilizes primitivism as a way of voicing displeasure with the present state of culture and society which he believes has fundamentally failed in its attempts to be a civilizing force and has left "us all gypsies and barbarians camping in the ruins" (Geog 19). The immediate consequence of this belief is apparent in his short fiction where literary primitivism is the overarching and uniting method which evolves from a belief that, what has been most modern in our time was what was most archaic, and that the impulse to recover beginnings grew out of a feeling that man in his alienation was • drifting tragically away from what he had first made as 4 • pcetry and design and as an understanding of the world. (QgQg 28) This method has lead to Davenport's classification as "the last modernist" by John Barth (quoted in Olsen 148) and a "lateborn modarnist" (87) by Alan Williamson, indicating hi!! essentially modernist stance as reflected by his concern with primitivism, along with "the modernist belief. in a transcendental signified of fragments shored against the ruins, in the omnipotence of language, in the :'lrchaic" (Olsen 149). Davenport's literary purpose is to unearth the vitality and essence of the past to find "an idyllic world in the deep archaic past which rests on attention, alertness, and unselfconsciousness" (Quartermain 175). The term literary primitivism as applied to Davenport's work reveals itself thematically and technically, manifesting itself through the conscious philosophical and aesthetic practice of his stories which work to evoke a complex of images positing the values and creativity of the primitive over that of the present era with its "murderous, despairing, narcotic way" (Geog 382). Previous studies have touched upon primitivism in literature2 and various critics Iprimarily in Michael Bell'e Primitivism, on D.H. Lawrence and Herman Melville; James Baird's Isbmael on Melville. Marianna Torgovnich'. ~ Primitive, and James F. Knapp's "Not Wholeness but Multiplicity. Th. • Primitivism of william Carlos Williams." 5 3 • have considered it in the visual arts , but in a study of Davenport one needs to consider both approaches in order to adequately gauge how primitivism is an aspect of his discursive strategies. Attempts to define literary primitivism place it into two categories: cultural primitivism and chronological primitivism. chronological primitivism asserts that the past is superior to the present and future and that the further one recedes in time the more likely that humanity lived a harmonious existence.