Disconsolate Subjects: Figures of Radical Alterity in the Twentieth Century Novel, From Modernism to Postcolonialism. by Timothy Wright Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Michael Valdez Moses, Supervisor ___________________________ Ian Baucom ___________________________ Srinivas Aravamudan ___________________________ Ranjana Khanna Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2012 ABSTRACT Disconsolate Subjects: Figures of Radical Alterity in the Twentieth Century Novel, From Modernism to Postcolonialism. by Timothy Wright Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Michael Valdez Moses, Supervisor ___________________________ Ian Baucom ___________________________ Srinivas Aravamudan ___________________________ Ranjana Khanna An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2012 Copyright by Timothy Wright 2012 Abstract This dissertation focuses on a group of 20 th and 21 st century novelists writing in English – Samuel Beckett, J.M. Coetzee, and Kazuo Ishiguro – whose fiction is populated by figures of disconsolation: characters who resist, evade, or – in the case of Ishiguro’s protagonists – assiduously attempt to conform to the constitutive social formations and disciplinary technologies of late modernity, among them, notably, the novel itself. These characters thus question the possibilities and limits of political critique and ethical life within a global modernity. I delineate a history of the disconsolate subject that cuts across the categories of modernist, postmodernist, and postcolonial literatures in order to reveal a different literary genealogy, in which an exilic postcoloniality becomes the paradigmatic sensibility for a global late modernist novel. Georg Lukács argued that the transcendental homelessness of modernity is registered most emphatically in the novel, a form he imagined functioning as a surrogate home for rootless modern subjects. The tradition I describe, whose characters trouble the representational technologies of the novel, disrupts an easy identification with the textual realm as home. I borrow from the critic Neil Lazarus the notion of a vital modernist literary practice that persists after the death of modernism, “a writing…that resists the accommodation of what has been canonised as modernism and that does what at least some modernist work has done from the outset: namely, says iv ‘no,’; refuses integration, resolution, consolation, comfort; protests and criticises.” This is a writing whose project, he suggests, following Adorno, is “disconsolation.” With this in mind, I depart from the conception of an emergent cosmopolitan literature and examine instead a global literature of disconsolation, a literature that allegorizes a radically reconfigured global space whose subjects are no longer at home in the familiar world of nation-states. A discontentment with the parameters of late modernity was already apparent in the high modernists, many of whom responded by embracing political positions on the radical right or left. However, the catastrophic political experiments of the century led to a sense that attempts to either refine or resist modernity had been exhausted. The works I examine mount critiques of such large-scale nationalist projects as the Irish Free State, the Japanese Empire, or apartheid South Africa – projects that emerged in opposition to a regnant world-system and saw themselves in utopian or liberatory terms. Yet these fictions are unable to affirm more than provisional or imaginary alternatives. A doubly exilic position consequently emerges in these novels, in which a rupture with the nation- state finds no compensation in another form of community such as a global cosmopolitan order. Through their attention to the gaps and fissures opened by the alterity of these disconsolate subjects, these texts function as waiting rooms or holding spaces for a utopianism that is unrealizable in a world of political disillusionment. v Acknowledgements I have had the good fortune while at Duke to work with a superb dissertation committee. Michael Moses has guided this dissertation from the start, and his broad knowledge, perceptiveness, and continual support have sustained this project through many crises. He has set an example of intellectual seriousness that has never let me lose sight of the crucial questions at stake. Srinivas Aravamudan’s insight, creative suggestions, and theoretical agility have nudged this project in new and surprising directions. Ranjana Khanna has been extremely generous with her time and attention, and has been a model of profound and rigorous questioning. I am indebted to Ian Baucom’s prescient ability to discern the larger scope of my ideas well before I have. I am also deeply grateful to Nancy Armstrong for stepping in at the end and helping to clarify and focus the argument presented here. I would also like to thank the many colleagues and friends who have provided intellectual community over the years. In particular, the members of my writing group, Gerry Canavan, Calvin Hui, and Lisa Klarr: their consistently generous suggestions, comments, and questions have added immeasurably to the quality of this work. Azeen Khan, Kris Weberg, Nathan Hensley, Ioanna Zlateva, Joel Schlosser, Matthew Eatough, Adetunji Osinubi, and Rae Chao have all found their way into this project in one form or another. Finally, I would like to thank my family for their support – it is to my deep regret that my father Sydney did not live to read this. vi Contents Abstract .................................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................ vi Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 1 One. Style and Sovereignty in the Early Novels of Samuel Beckett .................................. 48 Two. The Art of Evasion: The Novel and the State in J.M. Coetzee ................................ 114 Three. No Home-Like Place: Kazuo Ishiguro and the Lesson of History ........................ 174 Afterword ............................................................................................................................. 237 Bibliography ......................................................................................................................... 249 Biography ............................................................................................................................. 257 vii Introduction …anyone over whom Kafka’s wheels have passed has lost both his sense of being at peace with the world and the possibility of being satisfied with the judgment that the course of the world is bad: the moment of confirmation inherent in a resigned acknowledgement of the superior power of evil has been eaten away. -Theodor Adorno The Art of Non-Belonging In a 1919 short story Kafka imagines a country doctor – living what seems to be a comfortable bourgeois life in an amply furnished house, with a servant, a personal carriage, and, until its untimely death during the night, a horse – called out in the dead of a snowy winter night to make a house visit in a nearby village (“A Country Doctor”). He arrives to find his patient, a young man, “gaunt” but “without any fever, not cold, not warm” and concludes that “the boy was quite sound, something a little wrong with his circulation…but sound and best turned out of bed with one shove” (221-2). As he is about to leave, however, he impulsively decides to take another glance at the boy: and this time I discovered that the boy was indeed ill. In his right side, near the hip, was an open wound as big as the palm of my hand. Rose-red, in many variations of shade, dark in the hollows, lighter at the edges, softly granulated, with irregular clots of blood, open as a surface mine to the daylight. That was how it looked from a distance. But there was another complication. I could not help a low whistle of surprise. Worms, as thick and long as my little finger, themselves rose-red and blood- spotted as well, were wriggling form their fastness in the interior of the wound toward the light, with small white heads and many little legs. Poor boy, you were past helping (223). Kafka’s story gives imaginative form to the sense of some concealed horror growing in the very center of modern Europe’s sense of its place in the world. This sense of a wound festering at the very nerve center of human belonging is complicated by the doctor’s perceptible fascination, his slightly too-evocative descriptions, as if entering into the wound were to enter a parallel world more vivid and real than this one. The “low whistle of surprise,” whose dread-filled wonder at the strange disease that grips it functions to distance the subject from the affliction, could stand for what came to constitute a more general response to the political catastrophes of the twentieth century. But there is a second part to this story. Returning home, the doctor finds that his own house has been usurped