Impersonality and the Cultural Work of Modernist Aesthetics Heather Arvidson A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2014 Reading Committee: Jessica Burstein, Chair Carolyn Allen Gillian Harkins Program Authorized to Offer Degree: English ©Copyright 2014 Heather Arvidson University of Washington Abstract Impersonality and the Cultural Work of Modernist Aesthetics Heather Arvidson Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Associate Professor Jessica Burstein English Department This dissertation reanimates the multiple cultural and aesthetic debates that converged on the word impersonality in the first decades of the twentieth century, arguing that the term far exceeds the domain of high modernist aesthetics to which literary studies has consigned it. Although British and American writers of the 1920s and 1930s produced a substantial body of commentary on the unprecedented consolidation of impersonal structures of authority, social organization, and technological mediation of the period, the legacy of impersonality as an emergent cultural concept has been confined to the aesthetic innovations of a narrow set of writers. “Impersonality and the Cultural Work of Modernist Aesthetics” offers a corrective to this narrative, beginning with the claim that as human individuality seemed to become increasingly abstracted from urban life, the words impersonal and impersonality acquired significant discursive force, appearing in a range of publication types with marked regularity and emphasis but disputed valence and multiple meanings. In this context impersonality came to denote modernism’s characteristically dispassionate tone and fragmented or abstract forms, yet it also participated in a broader field of contemporaneous debate about the status of personhood, individualism, personality, and personal life. This dissertation asserts impersonality’s conceptual plasticity and makes a case for its paradigmatic importance in literary and cultural discourse of the 1920s and 1930s. Through literary texts that engage impersonality formally and thematically, the dissertation contextualizes narrative experiments in point of view within the broader questions about effaced individuality that the word impersonality condenses. By elaborating specific narrative criteria for impersonal fiction, “Impersonality and the Cultural Work of Modernist Aesthetics” also addresses a critical gap in formal understandings of impersonality. New readings of canonical as well as less often studied modernists—Virginia Woolf, Wyndham Lewis, Tess Slesinger, Djuna Barnes, and Nathanael West—suggest that modernism is invested in not only performing impersonality but also interrogating it as a contemporary mode of sociality. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Nobody’s View.......................................................................................................1 The Vanishing Individual in Print........................................................................................7 The Platinum Standard......................................................................................................21 Impersonal Narrative.........................................................................................................30 Chapter Overview..............................................................................................................39 Conclusion.........................................................................................................................43 Chapter 1: Wyndham Lewis, Anti-Impersonal Artist.............................................................45 The Person as Hero...........................................................................................................48 Ballyhoo and the Popular Press........................................................................................53 Workers, Newspaper Readers, and Other Machines.........................................................66 On “the Non-Impersonality of Science” ...........................................................................74 Aesthetic Impersonality......................................................................................................80 Personified Detachment in Snooty Baronet.......................................................................91 Conclusion.......................................................................................................................101 Chapter 2: Virginia Woolf and “the Difficult Business of Intimacy” ..................................107 Public Interiorities...........................................................................................................113 Alone together in Night and Day.....................................................................................128 Narration from Mind to Mind..........................................................................................145 Conclusion: Strange Travelling Companions..................................................................163 Chapter 3: Tess Slesinger’s Numb Modernism.......................................................................167 Contemporaries, Critics...................................................................................................171 Radical Discourse in an Age for Objectivity...................................................................179 On Unpossession..............................................................................................................190 Why We Can’t Have a Magazine.....................................................................................206 Conclusion.......................................................................................................................217 Chapter 4: Nightwood, Miss Lonelyhearts, and the Impersonality of Suffering..................221 Personality in the Twilight...............................................................................................227 Miss Impersonality...........................................................................................................253 Conclusion.......................................................................................................................279 Bibliography...............................................................................................................................283 i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Against all odds, this dissertation has an I, and, behind it, many indispensible persons besides. At the University of Washington, I have been extremely fortunate to work under the direction of Jessica Burstein. With a modus operandi equal parts rigor and wit, she has been an exemplary guide and advocate at every stage of the project. I have benefited immensely from her capacious, endlessly inventive mind, inimitable prose, and incisive feedback on countless drafts. On first meeting me, Jessica warned that she puts her graduate students through the mill: she kept her word, and the process has been both generative, and transformative. It was also, dare I say, fun. Carolyn Allen offered unfailing encouragement over the years, blended with precisely the right amount of skepticism. Amid a wealth of wisdom, her foremost advice was to write about something to which I felt affectively connected, which was crucial not only for selecting a topic but for continuously re-orienting the project along the way—indeed the dissertation’s production attests that, contrary to popular belief, impersonality does not preclude feeling. Gillian Harkins offered exceedingly smart and candid responses at every turn and deftly suggested ways to link my work to wider worlds of relevance. I am grateful to her for pressing for fuller conclusions while also appreciating the merits of careful scholarship. With great practicality and warmth, Collette Moore not only helped me anchor this project using narrative theory and stylistics but also to clarify my purpose in engaging these tools, and thus to clarify the parameters of the project over all. At Modern Language Quarterly, Marshall Brown gave me a swift but invaluable education in academic editing, literary history, and the well matched virtues of precision and sparkle. ii At the University of British Columbia Adam Frank sponsored my first encounters with modernism and scholarship as a creative enterprise. The benefits of his friendship and invitation to collaboration have carried through my subsequent work and continue to shape my aspirations. I am also grateful to Janet Giltrow, Patricia Badir, and Stephen Guy-Bray for their generous mentorship. Colleagues and friends at the University of Washington have provided both stimulus and sustenance. Lindsay Rose Russell and Sarah Cohen invited me to join their writing group, which proved an unparalleled arena for developing a project and coming to believe in its value. Lindsay’s passionate opinions about astonishingly specific things and Sarah Cohen’s perennially sunny mode of reframing and reformulating allowed me to begin. Thanks, too, to Andy Myer, Annie Dwyer, Alice Pedersen, D. C. Nelson, Jennie Allen, and Will Arighi for many, many hours of conversation and, beyond the University of Washington, to John Redpath for suggesting all that can be done in twenty-five minutes. My family’s extraordinary support, patience, humor, and conviction made it possible to see my way to the end. Their unrelenting optimism and ability to champion my endeavors against