Things Passed Over: The Modernist Novel and the Scandal of Revision By Charles Franklin Sanders Creasy A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English and the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in Charge: Professor C.D. Blanton, Chair Professor Judith Butler Professor Martin Jay Professor Kent Puckett Summer 2017 © Charles Franklin Sanders Creasy, 2017 Abstract Things Passed Over: The Modernist Novel and the Scandal of Revision by Charles Franklin Sanders Creasy Doctor of Philosophy in English With a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory Professor C.D. Blanton, Chair This dissertation argues that some of the most important 19th- and 20th-century experimental novels are simply not all there. Why did the 1857 obscenity trial of Madame Bovary obsess over precisely the passages that were editorially cut from the text on trial? Why did Wilde proclaim The Picture of Dorian Gray’s timeless perfection in a preface that tacitly quotes but does not acknowledge the newspaper controversy that shaped the novel’s 1891 revisions? What do the asterisks that litter Barnes’s Ryder (1928) mean? Why did Beckett intentionally embed a referential dead-end in a persistent erratum within many editions of Watt (1953)? Quandaries like these, I claim, are the sites where the modernist novel transforms both its aestheticism and its relation to the social world. In each case, what begins as a query about histories of composition, revision, and reception ends up reframing large and consequential questions about literary form and its relation to history. I take up some of contemporary scholarship’s increasingly central methodological tools—reception history, textual theory, genetic criticism—to grasp the consequences, at once formal and historical, of these minute and questionable details. In the process, Things Passed Over gives a different history of the modernist novel’s emergence out of 19th-century aestheticist avant-gardes and their scandals, arguing that the modernist novel’s material connection to its social background lurks in its techniques of formal omission and their worldly repercussions. In part one I attend to the scandals of 19th-century aestheticism, suggesting that its moral transgressions derive from but also confess a deeper pattern of formal omissions. Strangely, what is most controversial proves to be the very revisions that incorporate such scandals as intrinsic parts of the work’s “final” public form. In part two I argue that, drawing directly on Flaubert and Wilde, Barnes and Beckett turn aestheticism’s intransigent authorial intentions inside out, thereby internalizing its scandals. They seize this social dynamic as a formal principle: in high and late modernist novels, the scandalously social turns up in cancelled and erroneous elements, in aporias of textual genesis and authorial intention, that become integral to the work even before it appears in public. This forces us to study of genetic history and manuscripts, but also to move beyond the horizons of textual and genetic scholarship. The most experimental and hermetic works harness the prosaic charge of earlier social scandals, in order to alter novelistic reference and figuration at the most basic level. Across this history, aestheticism’s social scandals are metabolized in modernism’s textual ones. To grasp this trajectory, I bring careful formal analysis to bear on textual details that go missing but nonetheless engage the social forces that shape their meaning. I show that revision by omission develops from an effect of social scandal into a key experimental modernist principle. It enables the novel to touch the world without representing it—expressing itself by enfolding more than it says. Things Passed Over thus generates, from out of the small bibliographic matter of textual losses, a materialist aesthetics of the experimental modernist novel. 1 Table of Contents Acknowledgments ii Introduction 1 I. Impossible: Flaubert and the Ensemble 25 II. Out of the Picture: Wilde and Sins of Omission 58 III. Time to Play Possum: Barnes and the Style of Censorship 108 IV. Work of Unabandonment: Beckett and the Series 128 Bibliography 167 i Acknowledgments The research and composition of this dissertation was supported by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/Council for European Studies Dissertation Fellowship (Columbia University) and by grants from the Center for British Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Archival research for chapter two was facilitated and funded by a Harry Ransom Center Humanities Research Fellowship (jointly funded by the Creekmore and Adele Fath Charitable Foundation and the University of Texas at Austin Office of Graduate Studies). Material from chapter one was presented at the 2013 Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium in Richmond, Virginia. I am indebted to the participants for their questions and comments. A portion of chapter two was presented at the 2015 Modernist Studies Association Conference in Boston, Massachusetts. I am particularly grateful to Donald Calabrese, Finn Fordham, Michael Groden, Riley McDonald, and Hannah Sullivan for the lively discussion; additional thanks to Finn for the subsequent suggestions. Part of chapter four was presented at the 2014 Modernist Studies Association Conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I would like especially to thank Leah Flack, Sarah Keller, and Beth Blum for their questions and comments. This project would be nothing had it not been for the gracious care, wise advice, and sheer brilliance of C.D. Blanton, Judith Butler, Martin Jay, and Kent Puckett. I am in their debt in ways beyond words. Kent has been an unequaled mentor, interlocutor, and friend since I arrived at Berkeley. His intellectual capaciousness is nearly incredible, and his ability to move effortlessly in conversation from the nineteenth-century novel to nineties noise rock kept me refreshed. Marty, too, has been there since the beginning. I cannot thank him enough for his keen editorial eye, for his ability to catch me just before I went down a conceptual rabbit hole not worth the effort, and most of all for his patient kindness. Judith once told me that she would be my “Hegelian reflection” and she has more than done so—quietly awaiting me at the end of every dialectical labyrinth I thought I had plumbed, ready to show me yet another twist. Who could ask for more? I am likewise obliged to her for encouraging me to write on Kafka and then being so gracious when I wrote so much that it would not fit in this dissertation. And Dan—what to say about Dan? He was always there to read every ill-conceived piece of trash I committed to paper or word document, as though he did not already have more than a fair share of demands on his time. And his comments always managed to be at once encouraging and incisive. He knew where I was going long before I did, and he knew how to give me just what I needed in order find my own way in the dark. His faith that I would was sometimes hard to credit; but he was right, as ever. Thank you. Once I made the reckless decision that academia would suit me better than manual labor had done, I was fortunate to find at Reed College the support of a group of amazing teachers who continue to inspire me, and without whom I would still be laying carpet, rather than being amongst those who “wear the carpet with their shoes.” For showing me the true meaning of education—for all that they have done for me—I am grateful to Jay Dickson, Nathalia King, Robert Knapp, Jan Mieszkowski, Roger Porter, Bill Ray, and Catherine Witt. Over the past eight years I have been aided and abetted by many other teachers, mentors, colleagues, and friends who have read and responded to my work, given me advice, and in myriad other ways helped keep my soul from flying off. My time at Berkeley has been enriched by Elizabeth Abel, Ted Alexander, Charlie Altieri, Oliver Arnold, Ann Banfield, Jeff Blevins, Emma Buffton, Pheng Cheah, Spencer Coldren, Jesse Cordes Selbin, Jessica Crewe, Eliot D’Silva, Katrina Dodson, Ian Duncan, Hannah Ehrlinspiel and Will Gemma, Eric Falci, Katie Fleishman, Catherine Flynn, Anne-Lise François, Andrea Gadberry, Mark Goble, Kevis Goodman, Jordan Greenwald, Jane Gregory, Suzanne Guerlac, LiHe Han and Derek Deroche, Lyn Hejinian, Daniel Hoffmann, Alek Jeziorek, Sarah Jessica Johnson, Katie Kadue, Andy Key, Maya Kronfeld, Dave Landreth, Jos ii Lavery, Jess Ling, Jennifer Lorden, Michael Lucey, Leila Mansouri, James Marks, Ramsey McGlazer, Christopher Patrick Miller, Emina Mušanović, Ramona Naddaff, Megan O’Connor, Emily O’Rourke, Sam Otter, Gina Patnaik, Nathan Pippinger, Samia Rahimtoola and Lisa Bartfai, Sue Schweik, Jonathan Shelley, George Starr, Spencer Strub, Cate Talley, Elisa Tamarkin, Bradford Taylor, Luke Terlaak Poot, Michelle Ty, Althea Wasow, Brandon White, Wendy Xin, Irene Yoon, Damon Young, and Isaac Zisman. Beyond the confines of the Berkeley community (although some of them also spent time here), I would like to thank for their various kindnesses Chris Ackerley, Yasna Bozhkova, Marshall Brown, Eric Bulson, Maria Luise Caputo-Mayr, Stanley Corngold, Vic Fusilero, John Havard, David Hollingshead, Audrey Jaffe, Julia Jarcho, Mike Jennings, Ewan Jones, Sophie Mayer, Bill Olmsted, Laurence Porter, Zach Samalin, Vince Sherry, David Simon, and Cecily Swanson. I owe a few people even greater debts of gratitude for their wisdom, sympathy, and patience. Why they let me hang around is beyond me, but I am grateful—without them I never would have made it. I first came to know Kathryn Crim in Berlin, where she was kind to an unpleasant person in need of a friend. Her friendship—and her reliable, compassionate but skeptical intelligence—have been indispensable since. Also in Berlin, Alex Dubilet and Jessie Hock took me in like a stray cat and have cared for me in countless ways.