Aspects of Intimacy: Authority and Integrity in the Modernist Novel by Andrew Bingham A thesis submitted to the Graduate Program in English Language and Literature in conformity with the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada November, 2018 Copyright © Andrew Bingham, 2018 “Some ideas exist that are unexpressed and unconscious but that simply are strongly felt; many such ideas are fused, as it were, with the human heart.” (Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, “Environment,” 1873) “Special methods of thinking. Permeated with emotion. Everything feels itself to be a thought, even the vaguest feelings (Dostoevsky).” (Franz Kafka, Diaries 1910-1923, 21 July 1913) “One must write from deep feeling, said Dostoevsky. And do I? Or do I fabricate with words, loving them as I do? No, I think not. In this book I have almost too many ideas. I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticise the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense. But here I may be posing.” (Virginia Woolf, Diary, 19 June 1923) “One can, correctly and immediately, comprehend and feel something deeply; but one cannot, immediately, become a person; one must be formed into a person. It is a discipline.” (Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, February 1877) “Each spiritual stance creates its own style.” (Witold Gombrowicz, Diary, 495) ii Abstract In the following thesis I strive to offer renewed ways of construing “one’s own,” authority, integrity, and intimacy as literary themes, and appropriate form, provisional tonality, and approximate, inexhaustible address as formal aspects of literary works or methodological tools for literary scholars. Part One involves a consideration of contexts for our current understanding of the self, identity/integrity, theology, tradition, and intimacy, which I cast in a fresh light through critical readings of Nietzsche, Freud, Charles Taylor, Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, Thomas Mann, H.-G. Gadamer, Jaroslav Pelikan, Vladimir Lossky, and others. Part Two contains my development of these ideas, in tandem with passages from Bakhtin, as they lead to and are augmented by my own original considerations of prosaic form, tradition, integrity, intimacy. Part Three is devoted to close readings of novels by Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence. I have deliberately chosen to address these two central authors whose work has proved defining in significant ways for modernist literature and its legacy. As I am working to fundamentally reconsider aspects of modernity and our comprehension of it, I focus on the prosaic centre of its English literature, so to speak. Beginning with Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), I consider how friendship (friendly intimacy) is conditioned by social and individual ethics, the effect of the weight of political (civil) tradition on the individual’s comportment, and how heightened “moments of being” alter a person and translate into grounds for individual character and activity. Second, in Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920), I consider how eros (erotic intimacy) is conditioned and threatened by cultural traditions, how the weight of assumed aesthetic and ontological forms challenge individual freedom, and how certain habitual absolutes by which a person may live can take an abstract, “deathly” form. In both cases, I am interested in how the novelist depicts the struggles between absolutes and temporal forms of authority and iii specific characters, how this confrontation and struggle is conditioned by the intimate spheres of the characters’ lives, and how this shared, relational intimate sphere becomes the arena for the process of integration, which in turn allows the character (and reader) to make sense of their own self and helps to determine their relationships with other characters in the work. iv Acknowledgements Considering the course of this work’s gestation and then composition, many people deserve my profound gratitude. First, thank you to my Supervisor Professor Gabrielle McIntire, whose patient encouragement, keen intellectual counsel, and fine sense of flow and contour helped this study emerge into the light. Her generous, steady, thoughtful spirit is a main reason this work came to completion. Thank you to my Second Reader Professor Pat Rae, who closely read two whole drafts and whose response was immediately definitive and immensely helpful. Thank you to Professor Christopher Fanning, whose teaching, mentorship, and delightful conversation did so much to make the Queen’s English Department (and, of course, SPLASH) a warm and interesting place to be. Thank you to Professor Ana Siljak, with whom I have had and continue to have the privilege of hours of warm conversation about Russian and Orthodox literature and thought. Thank you to Professor Gary Saul Morson, whose work and personality have been an essential reason for me to maintain hope in the present and future of Bakhtin scholarship in particular and the humanities in general. My regard for and dialogue with his work in this thesis is second only to my dialogue with Bakhtin. Thank you to Professor Ian Angus, an exemplary Socratic mind in a decidedly unSocratic time; thank you to Professor Jerry Zaslove, who first and indelibly impressed Bakhtin upon my spirit; thank you to Professor James Fleming, for both Milton and Gadamer. Thank you to Queen’s English Department Graduate Assistant Lovorka Fabek-Fischer for her kind patience, considerate aid, and administrative clarity. More than anyone else, thank you to my parents for their long-suffering fortitude, patient love, and generous demeanour. Thank you to Vl. Lazar Puhalo, my first teacher of the riches of tradition. Thank you to my colleagues and friends Julia Gingerich, Dale Tracy, and Patrick Bois, for hours of energetic and heartening conversation. Thank you to Peter Drobac, the finest ear I v know, for feeling the pulse of our tradition with me. Thank you to Nick Hauck, my good friend and Modern Horizons coworker, my longtime partner in dialogue and thinking, for much more than I can convey here adequately. Thank you to Michael Bourke, erstwhile teacher and now colleague and friend, for introducing me to so many of the authors addressed in this study, and for his enduring keenness and openness of mind and spirit. Thank you to David Goa, to whom I owe more than anyone else regarding the intellectual ideas and spiritual dispositions contained in this study. Any possible insight in the following pages partakes of our years of conversation. Thank you to the Marquis, for our discussions about common sense and confidence. To Irene, good night. Thank you to my good friend Ahmed Saad – nothing but love – who gave me Bach, and therefore cadence: the soil and the toil. Finally, and deeply, thank you to Sara Futsum Mokonen, without whom not. vi Table of Contents Abstract iii Acknowledgements v Part One: Contexts Chapter 1. Introduction 1 Chapter 2. One’s Own Ideas of the Self 13 Chapter 3. Authority The Novel (or: A Short Excursus on Georg Lukács) 27 Theology 46 Chapter 4. Integrity Tradition 81 The Ordinary (or: Anticipating Intimacy and the Prosaic) 129 Part Two: Thinking with Bakhtin Chapter 5. The Enduring Significance of Bakhtin’s Mode of Thinking What is Essential: One’s Own Draws Near Another 136 vii Grounds of Bakhtin’s Thinking Thinking as Dialogue 141 Thinking as Desire 145 Bakhtin’s Theological Cast of Mind: Some Active Principles Theology as Considered Discourse on Experiential Insight 148 Personality, Unfinalisability: Presence, Prism, Participation, Dialogue 150 Personality, Relation: Spirit, Soul, Freedom, Inexhaustibility, Integrity 153 Personality, Intimacy: Love 156 Bakhtin and Tradition: Some Active Principles Ultimates: Creative Memory, Great Style, Faith, Superaddressees 157 Eschatology: Future, Presence, Fullness, Communion, Great Time 169 Integrity: Comportment, Non-coinciding, Wholeness 176 Chapter 6. One’s Own Tradition The Living Theological Tradition of Bakhtin’s Time and Place The Possibility of Personal Participation 182 Theology, Tradition, Articulation 187 viii Scholarly Comprehension 190 Aspects of Orthodox Theology Informing Bakhtin’s Work Absolutes: God as Trinity 196 Absolutes: God as Incarnation 198 Absolutes: “Image of God” 199 Tradition: Knowing, Apophatic Stance, Personal Ineffable 203 Tradition: Dialogue, Communion, Integrity 207 From Concrete Theology to Prosaic Ethos 211 Part Three: Close Readings Chapter 7. How Revelation in Time Structures Character in Mrs Dalloway 217 Chapter 8. The Perils of Abstraction: Culture, Ecstasy, and Eros in Women in Love 278 Conclusion 360 Works Cited 394 ix Part One: Contexts 1. Introduction Writing about literature today, the conscientious critic may take note of a widespread (although not ubiquitous) tendency in recent and contemporary scholarship in the humanities at large to see particular ideas and works through the prism of a certain critical trajectory that occurred in parts of Europe over the last several hundred years—a prism that favours the significance of, say, the Renaissance over medieval art and life, or the Enlightenment over the Protestant Reformation, or secular developments over religious concerns, or poetic modes of artistic making over prosaic forms. This trajectory almost inevitably leads through the Romantics to the triumvirate of Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud and what follows in their converged wake. While I refrain from making any immediate claims regarding the validity and usefulness of such a prism and trajectory,