Author: Richard Carter Smith
Publisher:
Published: 2011
Total Pages: 200
ISBN-13:
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The critical history of Modernism has long asserted a connection between Modernist literature and war. Studies as diverse as Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory, Vincent Sherry's The Great War and the Language of Modernism, and Modris Ecksteins' Rites of Spring all maintain that Modernism responds, whether in subject matter or poetic structure, to the conditions of worldwide conflict. This dissertation contends that Modernist literature encountered a fundamental deadlock in its attempt to address the violence that surrounded it, a deadlock experienced because the act of writing is itself founded on violence. The compositional necessity of prioritization and selection means that writing is, in principle, based on what poet and critic Allen Grossman has called a "bitter logic" of representation--a way of writing in which "this must be before that, or such that this be because of that, or such that this be and not that"--A logic that participated in the economy of violence to which many Modernist writers were opposed. I contend that one of the key, if unacknowledged, features of Modernist literature is its attempt to manage this "bitter logic" and that the structural congruity between the violence of writing and the violence of war makes its successful management an especially urgent concern in literature of the time. The three figures on which Failing Better focuses--Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein, and Jacques Lacan--deactivated the violent logic of representation by adopting an aesthetics of failure. Placing these writers in the intellectual climate of interwar Paris, I argue that the work of each accepts the fact that language necessarily misses its mark and thus turns to seriality--the possibility of beginning again after a failed attempt--as a strategy for alleviating the anxiety of leaving something out. In focusing on the literary possibilities of a gesture that must be repeated because it fails, my project offers an alternative to the longstanding view of Modernism as a collection of large-scale literary projects whose all-inclusiveness is at odds with the compositional necessity of prioritization and selection. Arguing for the complementarity, during the interwar period, of fields as diverse as psychoanalysis and literature, my research also contests critical approaches that simply apply the insights of one to the other. I argue, instead, that Beckett, Stein, and Lacan were engaged in compatible projects that, in their capacity to tarry with the productive potential of failure, recalculate the speaking subject's power to say what she wants. The dissertation opens by locating this tendency in the person of the female paranoiac, who was of particular interest to Lacan at the beginning of the 1930s. The chapter traces, in the essays that Lacan published throughout the decade, the development of a "Lacanian poetic." Where previous attempts to explore the consequences of Lacanian theory of literature have either taken it out of its historical context or treated it as an extension of the Surrealist movement (with which Lacan was associated), I claim that the psychoanalyst's work is well-suited to a broader study of Modernism because it engages the same problem of violence that haunts literature of the period. Writing under the pull of Alexandre Kojève's interwar lectures on Hegel, Lacan modified the Hegelian conflict between master and slave by introducing an imaginary dimension that he had first observed in cases of female paranoia, one that would allow for a subject's psychic identification with an other. While Lacan acknowledged that identification bears within it the potential for rivalry, his emphasis on the imaginary register transforms a dynamic originally based on violence, in which the master overpowers the slave, into a theory of representation. Theorist Joan Copjec has argued that Lacan's seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis elaborates a view of the imaginary in which the other serves as an ideal that language can never adequately signify; this chapter shares that position and traces its roots back from Seminar VII to Lacan's first theorization of the mirror stage and his 1936 essay "Beyond the 'Reality Principle.'" By recasting the subject's torsion between mirror image and self, or between pleasure and reality, as a problem of representation, Lacanian psychoanalysis allows us to shift the object of study from the literary text as an accomplishment of expression to writing as an ongoing negotiation between subjectivity and reality. Central to Lacan's work on the mirror stage were the notions of Innenwelt and Umwelt, terms that he borrowed from a contemporary naturalist, Jakob von Uexküll, to designate the subject's division between inner world and environment. My second chapter examines the importance of this split in Samuel Beckett's Murphy, a novel that I read as a critique of the sharp distinction between animality and humanity drawn by continental philosophy. At a time when philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Kojève relied on the animal in order to distinguish from it the higher functions of the human, Beckett's 1938 novel troubled that distinction with a vision of the human driven by its incommensurability with the world around it. Reading the book alongside contemporaneous works like Uexküll's "A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men" and Heidegger's Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, I argue that Beckett neither animalizes the human nor anthropomorphizes the animal. Instead, he develops a zone in which they are strangely proximate, a gesture that prefigures the concerns of his later fiction, where the customary features of narrative are ground down into a text for one voice. While studies of Beckett's work tend to align such a refinement with the author's deconstruction stance, this chapter demonstrates that it is actually indicative of a desire and persistence that Murphy relates to animal life. In Chapter 3, I argue that Gertrude Stein's meditation on identity--an undertaking propelled by the fame she achieved following the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and her lecture tour of America--also complicates the distinction between human and animal. As I suggest in the previous chapter on Beckett, the interwar philosophies of Kojève and Heidegger used the animal to theorize the difference between bios and logos, a distinction more and more collapsible the greater the distance one takes from Descartes. And while the speakers of Stein's texts are not stripped down or minimalized in the way of Beckett's vagabondish Murphy or Molloy, her practice of "beginning again and again" bears a remarkable resemblance to the "drivenness" under investigation in Beckett's writing and Lacan's theory. Examining texts in which Stein's poodle, Basket, confronts her with an irreducible otherness, I suggest that that drivenness results not only in an oeuvre anchored in the productive possibilities of repetition, but also in an authorial stance emphatically located between. Between subject and object, between inside and outside, between talking and listening: this is the position that at once allows Stein to write in her inimitable style and that keeps that particular mode of writing from achieving closure. It is also a position that she used for the figure of the saint that occupied her work in the 1920s, one analogous to the Lacanian concepts of extimité and object-voice, which are, as I will suggest, further way of understanding Stein's métier as a diffusion of the violence of representation.
