City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 2-2019 The Subject of the Novel: Aphra Behn, Charlotte Brontë, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Samuel Beckett Jin Chang The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/3018 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] THE SUBJECT OF THE NOVEL: APHRA BEHN, CHARLOTTE BRONTË, FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, AND SAMUEL BECKETT by JIN CHANG A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Comparative Literature in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2019 © 2019 JIN CHANG All Rights Reserved ii The Subject of the Novel: Aphra Behn, Charlotte Brontë, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Samuel Beckett by Jin Chang This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Comparative Literature in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Date John Brenkman Chair of Examining Committee Date Giancarlo Lombardi Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Evelyne Ender Nico Israel THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT The Subject of the Novel: Aphra Behn, Charlotte Brontë, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Samuel Beckett by Jin Chang Advisor: John Brenkman Aesthetic theory arose as a response to the fragmentation of areas of life in early modernity. As the discourse that could recuperate the senses for the larger project of knowing the world, aesthetics also provided a grammar of the subject, a way of conceiving the troubled relationship between subject and object. In Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts, aesthetic discourse found its strongest and most totalizing form as that which supplanted the object of aesthetic theory – the work of art. Thus Hegel’s infamous statement that “art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past” (Aesthetics 1: 11). The consignment of art to the past is simultaneously a theory of the modern subject as he remakes the world into a home. There is, however, a strange absence that troubles Hegel’s Aesthetics: the novel. The novel’s self-conscious self-appointment as the form capable of subsuming older genres and providing the historical, ethical, and social narratives by which peoples could understand themselves coincides with Hegel’s lectures; yet even as Hegel lays out his vision of the place of art in the development of Spirit he bypasses the hybrid form that could be seen as the key to his contemporary moment. What Hegel saw as the dissolution of art as the primary mode of Spirit’s expression culminating in his contemporaneous moment can be seen as no less than the emergence of the novel as the dominant Western art form of the long 19th century. What I suggest is that the rise of the novel iv and the rise of philosophical aesthetics are two responses to the collapse of the sensus communis and as such cannot be properly understood without regarding the ways in which they intersect, ignore, and vie with each other. The following study examines Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and Samuel Beckett’s How It Is to articulate the outlines of a subject that opposes the dominating subject of philosophical aesthetics and, more generally, philosophical modernity. I retrace the Hegelian dialectic of subjectivity from the viewpoint of the disruptions of the novel to witness what is excluded: the vulnerability of female flesh to sexual inscription, the weakness of subjectivity to subdue the externality that confronts it, the non-identity that cannot be sublated by self- consciousness into the coherence of self-reflection, the exhaustion of flesh. This is not to present an analysis of novelistic subject as the failure of the Hegelian subject but to recover the novel’s bodiedness of weak subjectivity in the outlines of an identity that is otherwise than the Hegelian apogee. v The Subject of the Novel: Aphra Behn, Charlotte Brontë, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Samuel Beckett Introduction: Aesthetics and the Novel ...……….………………………………..……... 1 Chapter 1: The Body-Self The Phenomenal Soul in Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister …………………..………..………………………………………..…. 26 Chapter 2: The Weak Subject Nowhere to Go in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette …………………………………………... 77 Chapter 3: The Responsible Subject Kicking against the Pricks in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov ……….... 146 Chapter 4: The Stupid Subject Pim’s Un-progress in Samuel Beckett’s How It Is ……………………………………… 203 Conclusion: The Wandering I …………………………………………………………... 261 Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………….......... 270 vi Table Repeating names in The Brothers Karamazov ………………………….……… 201-202 vii Introduction: Hegel’s Aesthetics and the Novel Art perceived strictly aesthetically is art aesthetically misperceived. (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 6) Perhaps nothing is more urgent – if we really want to engage the problem of art in our time – than a destruction of aesthetics that would, by clearing away what is usually taken for granted, allow us to bring into question the very meaning of aesthetics as the science of the work of art. (Agamben, The Man Without Content 6) Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art has almost nothing to say about the novel. A strange state of affairs, given that the emergence of the novel as the dominant genre of the West marks an intervention in the long-standing tension between art and philosophy.1 The novel’s self-conscious self-appointment as the form capable of subsuming older genres and providing the historical, ethical, and social narratives by which peoples could understand themselves coincides with Hegel’s lectures; yet even as Hegel lays out his vision of the place of art in the development of Spirit he bypasses the hybrid form that could be seen as the key to his contemporary moment.2 Why does the Aesthetics, otherwise exhaustive in its examination of works from diverse periods and genres, pass over in relative silence the new art form that had already proven itself popular, influential, and seemingly infinitely flexible?3 It is perhaps unfair to ask Hegel posthumously for 1 Romanticism’s project of writing the new mythology of reason was to have healed precisely that rift. 2 The timeframe of Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics, 1818 to 1829, saw the publication of novels by Austen, Scott, Fenimore Cooper, and Goethe, to say nothing of the novels that had come before. 3 Guido Mazzoni’s definition of the novel nicely captures the sense of the novel’s openness: “Starting from a certain date, the novel became the genre in which one can tell absolutely any story in any way whatsoever” (16). 1 an account of the novel. The genre’s cultural dominance was still nascent, and there are a few remarks on the novel scattered through his work. Then again, in the 1,200 odd pages of Lectures on Fine Arts the novel as novel does not have enough of a presence to warrant a place in the index of the Knox translation; for the sake of contrast it could be noted that while an entry for “novel” is absent, “nose, character and significance of” can be looked up on pages 729-30 and 735 (Hegel, Aesthetics 2: 1273). Given Hegel’s comprehensive systematicity, the lack of an account of a major genre of prose literature is on first blush baffling. It is even more striking in that Hegel’s historical analysis of the arts aims at discovering the transformations within art culminating in his own moment, and so seems not only felicitously positioned to grapple with the form that had emerged within his historical purview but called on to do so. The argument in the Aesthetics announces that the time of art has passed; what better elegy for art than a critique of that bastard genre, “prototype” of “less noble mixed genres … born to satisfy the exigencies of bad taste, [which] ended up occupying enter stage in literary production” (Agamben 21)? If, as in Danto’s reading, the end of art is the liberation of art from overarching narratives and the democratization of styles, there is perhaps no genre as meet as the novel for analysis along these lines. Instead of which, Hegel disperses discussions of the novel into the larger analyses of romantic art. The novel occupies a strange place in Hegel’s Aesthetics, both insistent insofar as it is the type of literature bearing the name (roman) of the last stage of art (Romantisch) and peripheral in that it does not – perhaps cannot – coalesce into a defined object of analysis. Hegel’s references to romantic art, especially in volume I, include what can be read as commentaries on the roman. However, a discussion of the novel qua novel is significantly absent in volume II, which analyses genres (sculpture, painting, music) as well as the differences 2 between poetry and prose. This forces the question: what is the meaning of the absence of the novel in Hegel’s history of art? Hegel’s Aesthetics Hegel’s analysis of art into three stages – the symbolic, classical, and romantic – is precisely the thought that the content, form, and role of art, its meaning, must be different at different historical moments. While the three stages are all attempts to instantiate the Absolute as sensuous image – to create the works that reflect a people’s form of life and its communally held values and commitments – they are radically different since Spirit is always in the process of development: “[S]ymbolic art seeks that perfect unity of inner meaning and external shape which classical art finds in the presentation of substantial individuality to sensuous contemplation, and which romantic art transcends in its superior quality” (Aesthetics 1: 302).