MEMORY, INTERPELLATION, AND ASSEMBLAGE: MULTIVALENT SUBJECTIVITY IN THE NOVELS OF VIRGINIA WOOLF, GEORGE ORWELL, AND EVELYN WAUGH A Dissertation Submitted to the College of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Department of English, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada By MICHAEL J. HORACKI © Copyright Michael J. Horacki, October, 2018. All Rights Reserved. PERMISSION TO USE In presenting this thesis/dissertation in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a Postgraduate degree from the University of Saskatchewan, I agree that the Libraries of this University may make it freely available for inspection. I further agree that permission for copying of this thesis/dissertation in any manner, in whole or in part, for scholarly purposes may be granted by the professor or professors who supervised my thesis/dissertation work or, in their absence, by the Head of the Department or the Dean of the College in which my thesis work was done. It is understood that any copying or publication or use of this thesis/dissertation or parts thereof for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. It is also understood that due recognition shall be given to me and to the University of Saskatchewan in any scholarly use which may be made of any material in my thesis/dissertation. Requests for permission to copy or to make other uses of materials in this thesis/dissertation in whole or part should be addressed to: Head of the Department of English University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7N 5A5 Canada OR Dean College of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies University of Saskatchewan 116 Thorvaldson Building, 110 Science Place Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7N 5C9 Canada i ABSTRACT This project assesses assemblage theory and attempts to optimize it for the study of modernist literature. The first stage of this process examines contemporary assemblage theory to determine the extent to which it is able to account for the various inter-relationships between individuals, the groups they form, and the power structures that emerge from but act as constraints upon interpersonal relationships, especially as they appear in modernist texts; the second stage uses this modified version of assemblage theory to respond to the critical discourses surrounding the writing of Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, and Evelyn Waugh. Ultimately, this project argues that assemblage theory needs to be modified in four ways to account for the depictions of subjects navigating multiple assemblages that Woolf, Orwell, and Waugh provide. First, assemblage theory requires a more robust model of interpellation than is implied by the term “territorialization” – one that accounts for the semiotic element of interpellation, wherein the individual interprets his or her social setting to decide what type of action is most appropriate. Second, this semiotic element suggests the need to disregard Manuel DeLanda’s insistence that only “valid historical actors” should be treated with assemblage theory, as Woolf, Orwell, and Waugh all show individuals acting on behalf of assemblages that do not exist as ontologically valid entities according to DeLanda’s standards. Third, the three modernist authors show the value of treating Nietzsche’s account of the Apollonian and Dionysian as a model of assemblage by enabling a discussion of the motivations behind several of the most powerful forms of interpellation. Finally, these modernist texts suggest it is important for assemblage theory to distinguish between different scales of personal and collective memory to be able to account for the different registers of individual and collective experience that motivate group activity and signal assemblages’ temporal parameters. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you to my family for decades of support in too many ways to mention. Thank you especially to my confidant, proofreader, and wife, Sarah van Houten, and to my first teacher, perpetual advocate, and mother, Betty Horacki. I would also like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Ann Martin, who has done more to help me and this project than I could ever acknowledge or repay. I would also like to thank my committee members, whose feedback and advice have been invaluable to me and will continue to be so for years to come: Dr. Vincent Sherry (External Examiner, Washington University in St. Louis), Dr. Marcel DeCoste (Specialist Examiner, University of Regina), Dr. Lindsey Banco (Departmental Examiner and Graduate Chair), Dr. Mark Meyers (Cognate Examiner, Department of History), Dr. Yin Liu (Examining Committee Chair), and Dr. Simon Lambert (CGPS Dean’s Designate). Additionally, I would like to thank all of the professors who have gotten me to this point, especially Dr. Susan Johnston (University of Regina) whose Introduction to Literary Theory course and years of generous advice have been instrumental to my professional, intellectual, and personal development. Thanks also to the University of Saskatchewan, the Department of English, the Interdisciplinary Centre for Culture and Creativity, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for their generous support. Thanks, too, to the Department of English at the University of Regina and to Luther College for the much-needed teaching opportunities and office space during the final two years of this project. iii DEDICATION For Sarah van Houten and Hannah Horacki, without whom this project would have been neither worthwhile nor possible. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS PERMISSION TO USE i ABSTRACT ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii DEDICATION iv TABLE OF CONTENTS v INTRODUCTION 1 SECTION ONE – THEORETICAL APPROACH Assemblage Subjectivity: Toward a Theory of Modernist Group Membership and Modes of Remembering 7 SECTION TWO – VIRGINIA WOOLF Introduction 54 Chapter 1: Elegiac Assemblage: Subjectivity and Group Ontology in Jacob’s Room 57 Chapter 2: Discourse, Assemblage, and Epiphany in Mrs Dalloway 93 Chapter 3: Conventional, Oppositional, and Existential Assemblage in Between the Acts 136 SECTION THREE – GEORGE ORWELL Introduction 167 Chapter 1: Isolation and the Attempted Founding of a New Community in Burmese Days 172 Chapter 2: Assemblage, Community, and Subjectivity in Homage to Catalonia 203 Chapter 3: Isolation and Assemblage in Nineteen Eighty-Four 231 SECTION FOUR – EVELYN WAUGH Introduction 259 Chapter 1: Taxonomic Tyranny and Arbitrary Assemblage in Decline and Fall 262 Chapter 2: Multivalent Emergence in the Sword of Honour Trilogy 298 Family and the Failure of Corps Subjectivity in Men at Arms 299 The Failure of Micro-Scale Order in Officers and Gentlemen 313 Family and Faith in Unconditional Surrender 327 SECTION FIVE – CONCLUSIONS 346 Works Cited and Consulted 364 v INTRODUCTION This project utilizes assemblage theory in order to better understand the dynamic of reciprocal relationships between individual identity and group membership in modernist novels by Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, and Evelyn Waugh. All three authors are concerned with depicting individuals navigating assemblages on a variety of spatiotemporal scales at a time when debates around the proper relationships between individual and group were at the heart of continued global conflict. For instance, fascism promoted unity and cumulative utility over individual rights to the extent that personal desires were seen as trivial compared to the supposed group needs of the so-called Thousand-Year Reich, and Soviet communism’s obsession with abstract ends rendered the personal implications of the means used to achieve those ends irrelevant. Additionally, as DeLanda notes in War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, new ideas about the nature of individual and group even changed the mode of warfare during this period, so that the precisely timed advances across “no man’s land” that characterized WWI gave way to the largely autonomous platoons of WWII that were increasingly given particular objectives rather than being ordered to proceed in a precise way at a specific moment (59-72). In the novels of Woolf, Orwell, and Waugh, such political and martial abstractions about the relationship between individual and group result in layered processes of interpellation that depict not only “a subjected being, who submits to a higher authority” (Althusser 123), but a subject who navigates multiple authorities (both the identity and number are in flux) on countless spatiotemporal scales that make various (often contradictory) claims to his or her allegiance. Assemblage theory makes it possible to address such interdisciplinary concerns by providing a framework that can examine the interactions between individuals and groups in terms of the spatiotemporal parameters of these groups. Additionally, it provides a way to account for the personal and collective 1 discourses (memory, shared memory, collective memory, and history) used to make sense of the current identity of individuals and groups as these discourses code the conditions of group membership. In my theory-focused chapter, I will examine contemporary assemblage theory to determine the extent to which it can account for Woolf’s, Orwell’s, and Waugh’s depictions of the inter-connections among individuals, the groups they form, and the power structures that emerge from interpersonal relationships yet act as constraints upon them. Further, I will study how meaning is generated, exchanged, and modified in such systems, and will discuss how assemblage theory can be applied to interactions between memory,