Karagouni, Villy (2012) Voices of dissent: Interpenetrations of aesthetics and socio-politics in three modernist case-studies. PhDthesis. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/3713/ Copyright and moral rights for this thesis are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge 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 Glasgow Theses Service http://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] Voices of Dissent: Interpenetrations of Aesthetics and Socio- politics in Three Modernist Case-Studies Villy Karagouni PhD University of Glasgow School of Critical Studies Department of English Literature May 2012 © Villy Karagouni 2012 1 Table of Contents Abstract 3 Acknowledgments 5 Introduction: Theoretical Backgrounds and Foregrounds 6 Chapter One: Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer 34 Chapter Two: Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark 79 Chapter Three: Samuel Beckett’s Murphy 126 Post-Scriptum: On the Importance of Theory and the Retrieval of Dissent in 171 Modernist Literature Bibliography 176 2 Abstract This thesis explores the interpenetrations of aesthetic and socio-political issues in three modernist novels by John Dos Passos, Jean Rhys, and Samuel Beckett. It aims to argue for the importance of theory and the retrieval of voices of dissent in contemporary modernist studies. Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic theory, Raymond William’s cultural critique, and the contemporary conceptualizations of Jacques Rancière, Isobel Armstrong, and Jean-Michel Rabaté are applied to the primary texts in an attempt to uncover dissenting qualities at both a textual and contextual level. In this process, the thesis also addresses the ways in which each text and author can be seen to challenge the socio-literary landscape of their time. One of the premises upon which this study has been predicated is that the particularities of modernist form can be reconsidered and reappraised with the help provided by theorists who remind us of the political import and even the radicalism of literary aesthetics. Numerous texts could be refreshingly reassessed in contemporary modernist studies, if approached from reconciliatory angles that acknowledge the value of contradiction as an intrinsic feature of critique in the process of reevaluating the socio-political relevance of modernist aesthetics. In particular, the retrieval of voices of dissent against the social, economic, and political contexts of modernist narratives is indispensable to the attempt to envisage and nurture a socially responsive and responsible modernist studies in the twenty-first century. In the three chapters of this dissertation, Manhattan Transfer, Voyage in the Dark, and Murphy are seen to critique the status quo within modern capitalist metropolises and give dissent a variety of voices. The overarching aim of this thesis is to account for the elements that compose this variety. At the same time, all three of the case-studies have been approached from analytical perspectives that recognize and emphasize not only the necessity, but also the radical limitations and failures of dissent. These limitations and failures are often seen to be enciphered in the interpenetrations between the texts’ aesthetics and socio-politics, as well as conditioned by the textual and semantic effects of contradiction. Within a newly envisaged, socially responsive and responsible modernist aesthetic, the radicalism of critique can be illuminated by the radicalism of aesthetic frameworks. It is my hope that the analyses undertaken in this thesis, 3 along with the aesthetic and critical theories that have assisted them, can be seen to partake of such contemporary concerns. 4 Acknowledgments I am deeply indebted to my supervisors Bryony Randall and Alex Benchimol for their sustained guidance, insightfulness, helpfulness, and dependability throughout the composition of this thesis. I would like to extend my gratitude to each and every one, from within the University of Glasgow as well as from my personal life, who has given me feedback and broadened my intellectual horizon in a multitude of ways throughout the last three years. The inspiration and support I have received from my dear parents are behind every step that led to the completion of this thesis. 5 Introduction: Theoretical Backgrounds and Foregrounds 1. Overarching Concerns and Thematic Continuities in the Primary Texts In the first decade of the twenty-first century, literary theory and criticism’s renewed attention to a socially charged aesthetics, to the idea of approaching literary form from perspectives attuned to ideology critique, was being addressed and reinstated by several contemporary theorists.1 Marjorie Levinson in her 2004 essay ‘What is New Formalism?’ addresses the main tendencies included in the New Formalism label; she identifies both an effort to upgrade literary form to a position of sovereign rule, as it were, and a less militant view according to which it is crucial that form be regarded as performing synergistically with content.2 Along these lines, the axiom according to which ‘close reading’ is not an end in itself but a means that enables scholarship to do justice to a work’s ‘complexity’−i.e. the intricate fusion of features of form and features of content−is newly emphasized: [t]hat complexity (a leitmotif throughout New Formalism) which is attributed to the artwork and recoverable only through a learned submission to its myriad textual prompts, explains the deep challenge that the artwork poses to ideology, or to the flattening, routinizing, absorptive effects associated with ideological regimes.3 1 Works by Marjorie Levinson, Isobel Armstrong, Jean-Michel Rabaté, and Jacques Rancière, all written and/or published in the 2000s, engage with the subject of an alleged return to viewing literary aesthetics as socio- politically charged and even radical. Levinson locates this theoretical trend within what she defines as New Formalism; in contemplating theory’s future role, Rabaté points towards a reconciliatory approach between close engagement with the aesthetics of the text and acknowledgment of the text’s mimetic properties that testify to the sociohistorical conditions in which it was produced; Rancière defines literary politics and elaborates on its role within contemporary culture by theorizing an expanded notion of the aesthetic, able to radicalize our perception; and Armstrong offers her vision of a ‘radical’ aesthetic whose cognitive/critical dimension does not exist in spite of affect but is in fact inseparable from it. 2 Marjorie Levinson, ‘What is New Formalism?’, PMLA, Volume 122, Number 2, March 2007, pp. 558–569. 3 Ibid, p. 560. I need to clarify at this point that my understanding of the term ‘complexity’ with regard to literary works is aligned with the one Levinson attributes to the ‘activist’, as opposed to the ‘normative’, formalists. To summarize Levinson, ‘normative’ formalists consider contradictions to be faults in literary works and distinguishable from the quality of complexity. ‘Activist’ formalists, on their part, regard complexity as 6 It is this dual emphasis on ‘complexity’ (a complexity recoverable through attentive close reading) and ‘challenge’ (a challenge testifying to the fact that literary form actually does literary politics) that underscores the ongoing need for contemporary literary scholarship to rethink form contrapuntally and synergistically with content and that ultimately shapes the general methodological principles of my research. My literary analyses aim to suggest that, in the texts in question, the relationship between aesthetics and sociopolitical critique is not merely one of intricate interpenetration but also laden with, and grounded in, irresolvable contradiction.4 I will show how particular aesthetic traits of my case-studies can be seen to corroborate and confirm, ironize and problematize their social critique, thus highlighting the connection between formal and critical aspects within a literary text as one of characteristic intricacy. The primary texts that will be explored in this thesis are: John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, in the first chapter; Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark, in the second chapter; and Samuel Beckett’s Murphy in the third chapter.5 I explore the contradictions born of the conflicted relationship between, on one hand, the inevitable reflection of the social and ideological landscape from which each textual world emerged−i.e. that of modern capitalist metropolises−and, on the other, the critique of that landscape via the politics of literary aesthetics. The pivotal role of contradiction in this dissertation and the will to trace it in case-studies of literary modernism has been largely inspired inseparable from (or even synonymous with) contradiction: ‘On their reading, contradiction arises from the dialectical situation of the work both “in itself” or regarded as a gesturally or institutionally integral structure and as it exists in dynamic exchange with its diverse environments. Far from discrediting the artwork as an instance of false consciousness, contradiction authenticates it’. (Levinson, 568) 4 My understanding of the term ‘ideology’ is Althusserian