Fictions of the Afterlife: Temporality and Belief in Late Modernism

381 Pages·2009·29.05 MB·English

Fictions of the Afterlife:
Temporality and Belief in Late Modernism
by
Alexander Ruch
Program in Literature
Duke University

Date:_______________________
Approved:

___________________________
Fredric Jameson, Co-Chair

___________________________
Michael Valdez Moses, Co-Chair

___________________________
Toril Moi

___________________________
Kenneth Surin

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of Doctor
of Philosophy in the Department of
Literature in the Graduate School
of Duke University

2009
ABSTRACT
Fictions of the Afterlife:
Temporality and Belief in Late Modernism
by
Alexander Ruch
Program in Literature
Duke University

Date:_______________________
Approved:

___________________________
Fredric Jameson, Co-Chair

___________________________
Michael Valdez Moses, Co-Chair

___________________________
Toril Moi

___________________________
Kenneth Surin

An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial
fulfillment of the requirements for the degree
of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of
Literature in the Graduate School
of Duke University

2009
Copyright by
Alexander Ruch
2009
Abstract
This dissertation analyzes the period of late modernism (roughly 1930-1965) by
attending to an understudied subgenre: fictions that depict the experiences of the dead
in the afterworld. The project originated from my observation that a number of late
modernist authors resorted to this type of writing, leading to the question of what made
them do so. Such a project addresses the periodization and definition of late modernism,
a period that has received relatively little critical attention until recent years. It also
contributes indirectly to the study of European culture before and after the Second
World War, identifying clusters of concerns around common experiences of belief and
time during the period.
To approach this question, I adopt a situational approach. In this type of reading,
I attempt to reconstruct the situations (both literary and extra-literary) of specific authors
using historical and biographical material, then interpret the literary work as a response
to that situation. Such a methodology allows me to ask what similarities between
situations led to these convergent responses of afterlife writing. My primary objects are
afterlife novels and plays by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Wyndham Lewis,
Flann O’Brien, and Samuel Beckett.
I find that the subgenre provided late modernists with the literary tools to figure
and contest changes in experiences of belief and time in mid-20th century Europe. The
situation of modernism is marked by the loss of belief in the world, a failure in the faith in
action to transform the world, and the serialization of time, the treatment of time as static
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repetition and change as something that can only occur at the individual rather than the
systemic level. While earlier modernists challenged these trends with the production of
idiosyncratic private mythologies, late modernists encountered them as brute facts,
leading to a shift in aesthetic sensibilities and strategies. Belief was split between private
opinion and external submission to authority, and change reappeared under the figure
of catastrophe.
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Contents
Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iv
List of Abbreviations ................................................................................................................ viii
List of Figures ................................................................................................................................ x
Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................... xi
Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 1
Situations of Late Modernism ............................................................................................... 4
Subgenre as Middlebrow Mediator ................................................................................... 4
Antinomies of Late Modernism ....................................................................................... 11
Suspicion, Skepticism, and Belief in the World ......................................................... 14
The Serialization of Time .............................................................................................. 32
The Image of a Fully Built World ................................................................................ 36
Fictions of the Afterlife: Ancestry and Definition ............................................................ 45
Chapter 1: The Sense of No Ending: Meaning and Finitude in Sartre and Beauvoir ........ 67
Death, Finitude, and Meaning in Heidegger and Sartre ................................................. 67
Sartre: Huis clos ..................................................................................................................... 78
Sartre: Les jeux sont faits........................................................................................................ 97
Beauvoir: All Men are Mortal ............................................................................................. 109
Dead Life and Occupation ................................................................................................ 134
Chapter 2: Deals with the Devil: Publics and Genre in Wyndham Lewis’s Human Age 141
The Childermass: “the rivolooshums-highbrow-lowneck-racket” ................................ 145
From Childermass to Human Age I: The Letters ............................................................... 169
From Childermass to Human Age II: The Paintings ......................................................... 174
vi
Human Age: The Devil’s Bargain ...................................................................................... 193
“A Creator who had forgotten how to create”: Men Without Art ............................ 197
“The strangest supernatural company”: Against the Background of the Absolute 204
“A very fragile environment”: Lewis’s Heavenly Welfare State ............................... 210
“Acting in a valueless vacuum”: The Narrative Logic of The Human Age ............... 214
“‘You are not used to time, sir’”: Deferral and Apophasis ......................................... 227
“To scorn to isolate yourselves”: Publicity and Genre ................................................ 235
Chapter 3: “Hell Goes Round and Round”: The Modernist Fantastic in The Third
Policeman ..................................................................................................................................... 237
Situation ............................................................................................................................... 238
A Latecomer in the Land of Joyce .................................................................................. 238
The View from Nowhere ................................................................................................. 248
The Third Policeman ............................................................................................................. 256
Genre and the Literary Fantastic .................................................................................... 262
De Selby and Damnation ................................................................................................. 285
Bad Faith and Free Will ................................................................................................... 294
Chapter 4: “If only I could think, There is no sense in this…”: Beckett and the
Impossibility of Disbelief ......................................................................................................... 306
Play ........................................................................................................................................ 309
Le dépeupleur ........................................................................................................................ 334
Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 346
Epilogue ...................................................................................................................................... 349
References .................................................................................................................................. 351
Biography ................................................................................................................................... 369
vii
List of Abbreviations
Common abbreviations used throughout the text. For full citations, see the bibliography
at the end of the text.
AMM All Men Are Mortal (Beauvoir)
ASTB At Swim-Two-Birds (O’Brien)
BM The Best of Myles (na Gopaleen)
BN Being and Nothingness (Sartre)
BT Being and Time (Heidegger)
CD The Chips are Down (Sartre)
CM The Childermass (Lewis)
CSP Collected Short Plays (Beckett)
CSPr Collected Short Prose (Beckett)
D Le dépeupleur (Beckett)
DA The Dalkey Archive (O’Brien)
EA The Ethics of Ambiguity (Beauvoir)
EN Être et neant (Sartre)
HA The Human Age: Books 2 and 3 (Lewis)
HC Huis clos (Sartre)
JSF Les jeux sont faits (Sartre)
MF Malign Fiesta (Lewis)
MWA Men Without Art (Lewis)
viii
NE No Exit (Sartre)
PMA Pour une morale de lámbiguïté (Beauvoir)
PW Philosophical Writings (Beauvoir)
RA Rude Assignment (Lewis)
RH Rotting Hill (Lewis)
SP Stories and Plays (O’Brien)
ST Sartre on Theater (Sartre)
THM Tous les hommes sont mortels (Beauvoir)
TP The Third Policeman (O’Brien)
TS Un théâtre de sitations (Sartre)
WLA Wyndham Lewis the Artist (Lewis)

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List of Figures
Figure 1: Wyndham Lewis, One of the Stations of the Dead (1933, Michel P50, Edwards
245). Oil on canvas. 127 x 77.5. City of Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums Collections.
..................................................................................................................................................... 177
Figure 2: Wyndham Lewis, Red Scene (1933, Michel P52, Edwards 246). Oil on canvas. 71
x 91.5. Tate Gallery, London. ................................................................................................... 178
Figure 3: Wyndham Lewis, Group of Suppliants (1933, Michel P48, Edwards 244). Oil on
canvas. 76.5 x 61. Private collection. ....................................................................................... 180
Figure 4: Wyndham Lewis, Inferno (1937, Michel P72, Edwards 247). Oil on canvas. 152.5
x 101.8. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Felton Bequest, 1964. .......................... 183
Figure 5: Wyndham Lewis, Portrait of T. S. Eliot (1938, Michel P80, Edwards 271). Oil on
canvas. 132 x 85. Municipal Art Gallery, Durban. ................................................................ 188
Figure 6: Wyndham Lewis, Portrait of an Englishwoman (1913, Michel 146, Edwards 78).
Pen and ink, pencil, watercolor. 56 x 38. The Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford,
Connecticut (Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection). ......................... 189
Figure 7: Wyndham Lewis, Jehovah the Thunderer (1941, Michel 975, Edwards 302). Pencil,
ink, and watercolor. 37 x 25.5. Private collection.................................................................. 191

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