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Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand corner and continuing firom left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back of the book. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6" x 9" black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. UMI University Microfilms International A Bell & Howell Information Company 300 North Zeeb Road. Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 Order Number 9105162 Tragic story, tragic discourse: Modem and postmodern narrative tragedies Lynd, Margaret Robinson, Ph.D. The Ohio State University, 1990 Copyright ©1991 by Lynd, Margaret Robinson. All ri^ts reserved. UMI 300 N. Zeeb RA Ann Arbor, MI 48106 TRAGIC STORY, TRAGIC DISCOURSE: MODERN AND POSTMODERN NARRATIVE TRAGEDIES DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of the Ohio State University By Margaret Robinson Lynd, B.A., M.A. ***** The Ohio State University 1990 Dissertation Committee: Approved by James Phelan Walter Davis Adviser Debra Moddelmog Department of English To My Brother Glen ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Whatever may seem thoughtful, cogent, or insightful about this dissertation, I owe to the questions and advice of the members of my committee, Walter Davis, Debra Moddelmog, and especially-my main adviser, James Phelan, for his invariably helpful comments throughout the long process of writing. I thank them all. I would like also to thank Judy Bielanski for her help in the high-tech world of inkjet printing. To my husband, Chuck, I offer my thanks for his patience and his encouragement, and to my daughters, Julie, Megan, and Rose, for their patience and their presence. iii VITA 1970 ........................... B.A., Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio 1984 ........................... M.A., Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 1982-Present ................... Graduate Teaching Associate, Graduate Research Associate, and Lecturer, Department of English and Department of Comparative Studies, The Ohio State University FIELDS OF STUDY Major Area : English Minor Areas : Critical Theory, James Phelan The Novel, Walter Davis Eighteenth-Century British Literature, James Battersby Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Les Tannenbaum iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...............................................iii VITA ......................................................... iv INTRODUCTION ............................................... 1 N o t e s ......................................................... 20 I. MARLOW'S DILEMMA: MAKING THE CASE FOR HONOR IN LORD J I M .......................................... 22 N o t e s ................................................69 II. IMAGE AND DREAM: NICK AND THE STATUS OF GATSBY IN THE GREAT G A T S B Y .................................. 72 N o t e s ...............................................114 III. QUENTIN AND SHREVE: HISTORY AND TRAGEDY IN ABSALOM. ABSALOM! .................................. 117 N o t e s ...............................................203 IV. WRITING TRAGEDY: ART AS FAILURE IN L O L I T A ............. 210 N o t e s ...............................................246 V. FEMINISM AND AESTHETICS: THE FAILURE OF M AMERICAN DREAM....................................... 249 N o t e s ...............................................282 VI. ROCKETS AND READERS: WAITING FOR THE FALL IN GRAVITY'S RAIN B O W................................... 285 N o t e s ...............................................360 CONCLUSION .................................................. 365 WORKS CONSULTED...............................................374 INTRODUCTION Despite their diversity of form, the novels I have chosen to discuss here all elicit, or at least have some potential to elicit, a tragic response. Judged against some "standard" of what tragedy is or is not, they cannot be called tragedies, yet many, if not most readers have found them to be tragic in some broader sense. In the following discussion I attempt to define, or at least to describe, that "broader sense," that is, to understand how and why, despite their generally accepted status as m o d e m or postmodern texts, these novels seem to work as tragedies. I have tried to do this by exploring the narrative techniques, the thematic issues, and the nature of reader involvement that characterize them. That, in turn, has involved what I hope is a reasonably careful scrutiny of both the story and discourse levels of each novel, or, perhaps more accurately, an examination of the intricate relationship between the two and the ways in which that relationship seems to influence readers' responses to the text as a whole. At the same time, these are all writerly texts, and as such have incited widely divergent and highly contradictory interpretations. In each case, interpretation depends in large part upon the reader's choices and values, and reading these novels as tragic actions 2 requires the reader to make certain judgments that will either encourage or discourage such a reading. In the analyses that follow, I make no claim to having resolved differences among interpretations, but I would contend that reading them as tragic actions can account for certain characteristics of each text that are otherwise difficult to explain. Notwithstanding the post-structuralist idea that interpretation and meaning cannot be fixed for any text, part of the reason for controversy about these particular novels is their apparently intentional openness to interpretation. Unlike Hardy's Jude the Obscure. the tragic status of which is questionable because of the overt content of the story itself (and perhaps because of certain aesthetic flaws), not because of the instability of the discourse, these texts are resistant to interpretation: how they will be read depends much more that it does in Jude upon the broader range of choices unstable discourse inevitably offers the reader. At the same time, these narratives do place constraints upon interpretation, and in these cases those constraints guide readers more strongly toward tragedy than toward ambiguity. I think my analyses of these novels offer not a definitive reading but an angle of vision upon them that allows us to see both the uniqueness of each novel and several continuities of technique and theme among them. The texts I have chosen for this project were, of course, selected on the common basis of their inclusion among a group of novels that evoke a tragic response.^ Apart from that similarity of 3 effect, they were chosen because they seemed to me to be diverse in terms of content and formal features, and also sufficiently representative of a range of techniques characteristic of this particular branch of twentieth-century narratives. Such a range, in turn, seemed to allow for discussion of the variety of techniques authors have used to generate tragic effects. Nevertheless, I make this claim of representativeness quite warily, in part because it seems to imply a genre of tragic novels, and that is a claim I am reluctant to make.^ These novels are much too diverse to be associated genetically as a formally distinct class; their representativeness is by no means exhaustive, and an analysis of other novels--The Sound and the Fury. Nostromo. A Farewell to Arms, for example--would undoubtedly have identified strategies and issues other than the ones these raise. The value of the project lies, I think, in the possibilities it offers for interpretation that can account for a unified effect without denying the centrifugal characteristics of each text or the multiplicity of interpretations such characteristics invite. Underlying this ostensible purpose of the project is a larger issue of contemporary critical theory, one that I will address here only indirectly, and that is the question of what it means to read a literary text. It is not news that many contemporary theorists-- psychoanalytic, feminist, Marxist, New Historicist, deconstructionist--have in common serious objections to the idea of the text as an autonomous aesthetic object, while rhetorical and 4 historical theorists object to the loss of the text's integrity to intertextuality or thematics. It has remained an underlying desire of this project since its inception to analyze these novels on the basis of their effects in order to begin to understand how artists of this