Introduction
The Formation of the Modern Subject in Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf
In his essay "The Problematics of European Modernism," Richard Sheppard observes that critics have often found it difficult to define the modernist era in relation to past eras. For this reason, he says, modernism cannot be said to have a unitary set of critical objectives. Even with the recognition of modernist art as being fundamentally different from that of the previous age, modernism has often been shrouded in critical vagueness, with scholars presenting opinions at odds with one another. One assertion critics seem wholly in agreement on is the difficulty of defining the modernist enterprise. Jan Mukarovsky's statement that "the notion of modernism is very difficult" agrees with Monroe K. Spears's definition of modernism as "an impossible subject." A few years later, in a widely read volume on the subject, Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane stated: "The name [modernism] is clear; the nature of the movement...is much less so. ... To distill from the multiplicity an overall style or mannerism is a difficult, perhaps even impossible task." A factor contributing to the difficulties involved in defining modernism is its lack of distinct historical borders. While the exact range of the modernism period varies among critics, most people agree that this period lasted roughly from 1885 to 1935.
In 1981 the critic William J. Brazill Jr. defined modernist works according to their "emphasis on subjectivity [where] feelings of alienation and loneliness [combined with] an ever-present sense of chaos [to produce] an experience of panic and terror." Yet when removed from the contextual framework of modernist literature, it is clear that these characteristics are not exclusive to the modernist period. Most often, the modernist period has been labeled as a moment of rebellion where the creators of a new literary paradigm generated a new narrative structure through the reconfiguration of older narrative forms. In this respect, modernism has been understood as the antithesis of romanticism, a backlash against aestheticism, a foil for the code of realism, an alliance with futurism and surrealism, or as antecedent to postmodernism. Alan Wilde notes that the modernists "simultaneously used and reacted against conventions which marked earlier artistic movements."
Sheppard believe the First World War, while not thew direct progenitor of modernism, promoted a skeptical view of moral reality and a deeply pessimistic view of human nature; this viewpoint had already been present in the works of neo-modernist artists in the nineteenth century. In her essay "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," Virginia Woolf said that this change preceded the outbreak of the war, and she named December 1910 as the moment when human nature and all human relations changed. While the precise date is subject to speculation, by the second decade of the twentieth century, certainly, many artists and intellectuals were sharing a powerful sense that an ongoing transformation was shaping the sphere of human existence. At the heart of modernism was the feeling that the culture of Europe, which was the foundation of liberal humanism, was giving way beneath the weight of this metamorphosis.
Since the dawn of the modern era in the seventeenth century, Western civilization has been characterized by an inability to create subjects who can find knowledge in the specific cultural forms they were born into. In the modern world, says the critic Tony Jackson, self-knowledge requires a separation from one's being. While these concepts are not specific to the modern era, with naturalism and early modernism they become pervasive, at least in the West. With modernism, says Jackson,the rational thought that became empowered through the institutionalization of the Cartesian subject brings about the negation of that which it was supposed to make evident, the onto-theological sense of the real. In reaction to these changes, critical thinking since the late 19th century has been concerned with the end of the Cartesian subject. A number of thinkers, including Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Bakhtin, Lacan, Foucault and Derrida, each furthered the project of the erosion of the subject as constructed at the time of Descartes. Of particular importance to our investigation is Martin Heidegger's view of Nietzsche as the philosopher who marked the end of the metaphysical subject and so brought the metaphysical order to its prescribed limit.
The weakening of the Cartesian subject takes effect after a discovery take place at the interior of being. In Heidegger's view, the subject has been constituted as a drive to experience, as a necessarily binding stricture of existence, itself an ontologically solid being. "The modern metaphysics of subjectivity," he says, "is consummated in Nietzsche's doctrine of the will to power as the essence of everything real; in this way Nietzsche remains at the boundary of an outmoded form of thinking." Having abstracted a philosophical outline of the history of subjectivity from Heidegger's critique of Nietzsche, my study of literary history has led me to believe that a similar relationship occurs in relation to the modernist fiction of Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf. I propose that the relationship between Nietzsche and Heidegger in analogous to the relationship between Conrad and Woolf, as similar steps are taken in the history of subjectivity and the narrational representation of the subject. Specifically, I will attempt to show that the work of Joseph Conrad constitutes a limit-point in the history of the subject and, in the wake of these changes, Woolf recognizes and reconfigures the dimensions of literature in a radically new way.
Conrad's early modernism appears as a function of realism coming to recognize itself by discovering its own desire and, similarly, Woolf's late modernism appears as a function of modernism discovering desire by recognizing itself. Realism established itself by the rejection of Romanticism, a literary form whose plot-structure, according to M.H. Abrams, reflected the desire of the subject to arrive at "a higher mode of the original unity with itself from which, by its primal act of consciousness, it has inescapably divided itself off." Realism nonetheless remains structured by the essential shape of the romantic plot; the difference between realism and romanticism is that the protagonist in realist works of literature often arrived at a unity that is morally or spiritually distinct due to the realist character's greater humility. Since the narrative form of realism remains with the Cartesian forms of subject and object, the realist novel never calls into question the nature of the subject. Even though literature passes through these various periods, Jackson says, the manner in which the subject is formed remains consistent.
The realist text discovers that the romantic plot-structure, typified by the subject's journey to knowledge through a painful education, is untrue to the real human situation and is naively sentimental. Searching for a more truthful forms of representation, Jackson continues, the literary artist came to reject romanticism in favor of realism, which in turn gave way to naturalism. Naturalism rejects the moral ending of realism in the same way and form the same reasons that realism rejected romanticism; naturalism boldly shows that no moral meaning if necessary and, in consequence, no meaning at all can be derived from the universe. Jackson says that this succession of literary forms is marked by a gradual reduction in the moral force of authorial intentions. While one might expect naturalism to negate the subjectivity that had been a structuring support of the realist novel, it only reinforced the certainty of the Cartesian subject. While the subject presupposed by realism remains presupposed by naturalism, the novels of Joseph Conrad incorporate features of romanticism, realism and naturalism in order that the plot-structure and subjectivity common to all three develop into modernism.
The novels of Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) and Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), two bookends of the shelf of twentieth-century British Literature, tell a story of the formation of the modern subject. Although my use of the term modern subject risks diminishing what has been a vast and problematic issue for literary studies to the scope of just two authors, I do not advocate such a reductionist viewpoint; rather, I plan on showing how the work of these two authors constitutes a significant development in this issue. Reading the work of Conrad and Woolf as a joint effort to dissolve three great world-historical illusions, this project will explore the similarities and differences between these two authors. This will be the main focus throughout my first three chapters, in which I shall analyzes three novels by Conrad and three by Woolf. Ultimately, their styles of writing will be shown to affect their radically different interpretations of the self. This thesis will also explore how Conrad and Woolf contextualize the mental world from which the self develops. This will be illustrated in the final chapter, in which a comparison will be made between a final pair of novels. Also, in each of the four chapters, I will focus on a major philosopher and/or critic whose reflections on the nature of the self will be shown to coincide with the set of novels under discussion. This will be done not only to get a better sense of the philosophical concerns of Conrad and Woolf, but also to get a better sense of the factors influencing the development of the modern subject.
The first chapter begins with a comparison of Conrad's Lord Jim (1899-1900) and Woolf's Jacob's Room (1922), two works the debunk the illusion of a transcendent self. Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1916) bears relevance to our discussion in that each of these novels warns of the danger that confronts the individual who attempts to force the logic of language onto the logic of life. This theme resonates well with Wittgenstein, who cautions against the metaphysical urge to say that which cannot be said. Jim and Jacob are heroes who, due to their metaphysical need to transcend their physical realities, slip away into history and mythology--finally disappearing from view altogether.
The second chapter compares Conrad's Heart of Darkness (serialized 1898; published 1902) and Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925), books that reveal a splitting of the modernist self, as depicted in two sets of doubles, the binary figures of Marlowe-Kurtz and Clarissa Dalloway-Septimus Smith. Our explication of these novels will highlight a second illusion, that is, how Septimus and Kurtz have fallen prey to the illusion of a unitary self and how Clarissa and Marlow resolve to see past this illusion. In this chapter I will examine the work of French structural psychologist Jacques Lacan who, in his essay "The Mirror Stage" (1966), argues that consciousness may be understood as a mirror where an encounter take place between the self and its image; this encounter determines the stability of the ego. A similar reaction will be found to occur in the pages of Conrad and Woolf, in that these two sets of doubles resemble the binary features of the modern self.
In the third chapter, a final illusion breaks down as Conrad and Woolf depict how the illusion of a universal love between a man and a woman is revealed to be an impossibility. This chapter will highlight Friedrich Nietzsche's thoughts on love between the sexes, including On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), which sees the renunciation of such a love as a necessity. Both Conrad's The Secret Agent (1907) and Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927) show how, in the martial relationships of Adolf and Winnie Verloc and Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, a state of harmonious interaction between husband and wife constantly sublimates into a relationship of dominance and subjugation. In this way the illusion of a universal love is renounced and Nietzsche's admonitions are confirmed.
The final chapter will show how Conrad and Woolf take separate paths in their attempts to overcome the binary nature of the modern subject. Our analysis of the final pair of novels, Conrad's Nostromo (1904) and Woolf's The Waves (1931), will each incorporate a critical tool developed by the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin. While Conrad's multi-voiced text indicates a shift of authorial attention to exterior and superstructural elements in his epic novel, Nostromo, Woolf retreats to the interior base of the authoring self by engaging in the multiple consciousness of The Waves. Our discussion of Waves will incorporate Bakhtin's theory of the novel as a legitimately polyphonic genre [Problematics in Dostoevsky's Poetics (1929)], while our discussion of Nostromo will highlight Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope, the lens through which the author communicates the spatial and temporal features of the narrative universe ["Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel" (1937-38)],
While these two authors share a similar vision of the formation of the modern subject, they take decidedly different paths when it comes to overcoming the problems they encounter. While I do not claim that Woolf was directly influenced by Conrad's work, I do believe, as this thesis shows, that Woolf's work derived significant benefits from having Conrad has her literary precursor. It is for this reason, then, that I feel that a non-chronological appreciation of Conrad's works may be justified. Through an analysis and critical reading of four pairs of novels by Conrad and Woolf, combined with illustrations from the history of modern philosophy, I intent to argue that the novels of Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf display a shared locus of concern, the formation of the modern subject.
In his essay "The Problematics of European Modernism," Richard Sheppard observes that critics have often found it difficult to define the modernist era in relation to past eras. For this reason, he says, modernism cannot be said to have a unitary set of critical objectives. Even with the recognition of modernist art as being fundamentally different from that of the previous age, modernism has often been shrouded in critical vagueness, with scholars presenting opinions at odds with one another. One assertion critics seem wholly in agreement on is the difficulty of defining the modernist enterprise. Jan Mukarovsky's statement that "the notion of modernism is very difficult" agrees with Monroe K. Spears's definition of modernism as "an impossible subject." A few years later, in a widely read volume on the subject, Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane stated: "The name [modernism] is clear; the nature of the movement...is much less so. ... To distill from the multiplicity an overall style or mannerism is a difficult, perhaps even impossible task." A factor contributing to the difficulties involved in defining modernism is its lack of distinct historical borders. While the exact range of the modernism period varies among critics, most people agree that this period lasted roughly from 1885 to 1935.
In 1981 the critic William J. Brazill Jr. defined modernist works according to their "emphasis on subjectivity [where] feelings of alienation and loneliness [combined with] an ever-present sense of chaos [to produce] an experience of panic and terror." Yet when removed from the contextual framework of modernist literature, it is clear that these characteristics are not exclusive to the modernist period. Most often, the modernist period has been labeled as a moment of rebellion where the creators of a new literary paradigm generated a new narrative structure through the reconfiguration of older narrative forms. In this respect, modernism has been understood as the antithesis of romanticism, a backlash against aestheticism, a foil for the code of realism, an alliance with futurism and surrealism, or as antecedent to postmodernism. Alan Wilde notes that the modernists "simultaneously used and reacted against conventions which marked earlier artistic movements."
Sheppard believe the First World War, while not thew direct progenitor of modernism, promoted a skeptical view of moral reality and a deeply pessimistic view of human nature; this viewpoint had already been present in the works of neo-modernist artists in the nineteenth century. In her essay "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," Virginia Woolf said that this change preceded the outbreak of the war, and she named December 1910 as the moment when human nature and all human relations changed. While the precise date is subject to speculation, by the second decade of the twentieth century, certainly, many artists and intellectuals were sharing a powerful sense that an ongoing transformation was shaping the sphere of human existence. At the heart of modernism was the feeling that the culture of Europe, which was the foundation of liberal humanism, was giving way beneath the weight of this metamorphosis.
Since the dawn of the modern era in the seventeenth century, Western civilization has been characterized by an inability to create subjects who can find knowledge in the specific cultural forms they were born into. In the modern world, says the critic Tony Jackson, self-knowledge requires a separation from one's being. While these concepts are not specific to the modern era, with naturalism and early modernism they become pervasive, at least in the West. With modernism, says Jackson,the rational thought that became empowered through the institutionalization of the Cartesian subject brings about the negation of that which it was supposed to make evident, the onto-theological sense of the real. In reaction to these changes, critical thinking since the late 19th century has been concerned with the end of the Cartesian subject. A number of thinkers, including Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Bakhtin, Lacan, Foucault and Derrida, each furthered the project of the erosion of the subject as constructed at the time of Descartes. Of particular importance to our investigation is Martin Heidegger's view of Nietzsche as the philosopher who marked the end of the metaphysical subject and so brought the metaphysical order to its prescribed limit.
The weakening of the Cartesian subject takes effect after a discovery take place at the interior of being. In Heidegger's view, the subject has been constituted as a drive to experience, as a necessarily binding stricture of existence, itself an ontologically solid being. "The modern metaphysics of subjectivity," he says, "is consummated in Nietzsche's doctrine of the will to power as the essence of everything real; in this way Nietzsche remains at the boundary of an outmoded form of thinking." Having abstracted a philosophical outline of the history of subjectivity from Heidegger's critique of Nietzsche, my study of literary history has led me to believe that a similar relationship occurs in relation to the modernist fiction of Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf. I propose that the relationship between Nietzsche and Heidegger in analogous to the relationship between Conrad and Woolf, as similar steps are taken in the history of subjectivity and the narrational representation of the subject. Specifically, I will attempt to show that the work of Joseph Conrad constitutes a limit-point in the history of the subject and, in the wake of these changes, Woolf recognizes and reconfigures the dimensions of literature in a radically new way.
Conrad's early modernism appears as a function of realism coming to recognize itself by discovering its own desire and, similarly, Woolf's late modernism appears as a function of modernism discovering desire by recognizing itself. Realism established itself by the rejection of Romanticism, a literary form whose plot-structure, according to M.H. Abrams, reflected the desire of the subject to arrive at "a higher mode of the original unity with itself from which, by its primal act of consciousness, it has inescapably divided itself off." Realism nonetheless remains structured by the essential shape of the romantic plot; the difference between realism and romanticism is that the protagonist in realist works of literature often arrived at a unity that is morally or spiritually distinct due to the realist character's greater humility. Since the narrative form of realism remains with the Cartesian forms of subject and object, the realist novel never calls into question the nature of the subject. Even though literature passes through these various periods, Jackson says, the manner in which the subject is formed remains consistent.
The realist text discovers that the romantic plot-structure, typified by the subject's journey to knowledge through a painful education, is untrue to the real human situation and is naively sentimental. Searching for a more truthful forms of representation, Jackson continues, the literary artist came to reject romanticism in favor of realism, which in turn gave way to naturalism. Naturalism rejects the moral ending of realism in the same way and form the same reasons that realism rejected romanticism; naturalism boldly shows that no moral meaning if necessary and, in consequence, no meaning at all can be derived from the universe. Jackson says that this succession of literary forms is marked by a gradual reduction in the moral force of authorial intentions. While one might expect naturalism to negate the subjectivity that had been a structuring support of the realist novel, it only reinforced the certainty of the Cartesian subject. While the subject presupposed by realism remains presupposed by naturalism, the novels of Joseph Conrad incorporate features of romanticism, realism and naturalism in order that the plot-structure and subjectivity common to all three develop into modernism.
The novels of Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) and Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), two bookends of the shelf of twentieth-century British Literature, tell a story of the formation of the modern subject. Although my use of the term modern subject risks diminishing what has been a vast and problematic issue for literary studies to the scope of just two authors, I do not advocate such a reductionist viewpoint; rather, I plan on showing how the work of these two authors constitutes a significant development in this issue. Reading the work of Conrad and Woolf as a joint effort to dissolve three great world-historical illusions, this project will explore the similarities and differences between these two authors. This will be the main focus throughout my first three chapters, in which I shall analyzes three novels by Conrad and three by Woolf. Ultimately, their styles of writing will be shown to affect their radically different interpretations of the self. This thesis will also explore how Conrad and Woolf contextualize the mental world from which the self develops. This will be illustrated in the final chapter, in which a comparison will be made between a final pair of novels. Also, in each of the four chapters, I will focus on a major philosopher and/or critic whose reflections on the nature of the self will be shown to coincide with the set of novels under discussion. This will be done not only to get a better sense of the philosophical concerns of Conrad and Woolf, but also to get a better sense of the factors influencing the development of the modern subject.
The first chapter begins with a comparison of Conrad's Lord Jim (1899-1900) and Woolf's Jacob's Room (1922), two works the debunk the illusion of a transcendent self. Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1916) bears relevance to our discussion in that each of these novels warns of the danger that confronts the individual who attempts to force the logic of language onto the logic of life. This theme resonates well with Wittgenstein, who cautions against the metaphysical urge to say that which cannot be said. Jim and Jacob are heroes who, due to their metaphysical need to transcend their physical realities, slip away into history and mythology--finally disappearing from view altogether.
The second chapter compares Conrad's Heart of Darkness (serialized 1898; published 1902) and Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925), books that reveal a splitting of the modernist self, as depicted in two sets of doubles, the binary figures of Marlowe-Kurtz and Clarissa Dalloway-Septimus Smith. Our explication of these novels will highlight a second illusion, that is, how Septimus and Kurtz have fallen prey to the illusion of a unitary self and how Clarissa and Marlow resolve to see past this illusion. In this chapter I will examine the work of French structural psychologist Jacques Lacan who, in his essay "The Mirror Stage" (1966), argues that consciousness may be understood as a mirror where an encounter take place between the self and its image; this encounter determines the stability of the ego. A similar reaction will be found to occur in the pages of Conrad and Woolf, in that these two sets of doubles resemble the binary features of the modern self.
In the third chapter, a final illusion breaks down as Conrad and Woolf depict how the illusion of a universal love between a man and a woman is revealed to be an impossibility. This chapter will highlight Friedrich Nietzsche's thoughts on love between the sexes, including On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), which sees the renunciation of such a love as a necessity. Both Conrad's The Secret Agent (1907) and Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927) show how, in the martial relationships of Adolf and Winnie Verloc and Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, a state of harmonious interaction between husband and wife constantly sublimates into a relationship of dominance and subjugation. In this way the illusion of a universal love is renounced and Nietzsche's admonitions are confirmed.
The final chapter will show how Conrad and Woolf take separate paths in their attempts to overcome the binary nature of the modern subject. Our analysis of the final pair of novels, Conrad's Nostromo (1904) and Woolf's The Waves (1931), will each incorporate a critical tool developed by the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin. While Conrad's multi-voiced text indicates a shift of authorial attention to exterior and superstructural elements in his epic novel, Nostromo, Woolf retreats to the interior base of the authoring self by engaging in the multiple consciousness of The Waves. Our discussion of Waves will incorporate Bakhtin's theory of the novel as a legitimately polyphonic genre [Problematics in Dostoevsky's Poetics (1929)], while our discussion of Nostromo will highlight Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope, the lens through which the author communicates the spatial and temporal features of the narrative universe ["Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel" (1937-38)],
While these two authors share a similar vision of the formation of the modern subject, they take decidedly different paths when it comes to overcoming the problems they encounter. While I do not claim that Woolf was directly influenced by Conrad's work, I do believe, as this thesis shows, that Woolf's work derived significant benefits from having Conrad has her literary precursor. It is for this reason, then, that I feel that a non-chronological appreciation of Conrad's works may be justified. Through an analysis and critical reading of four pairs of novels by Conrad and Woolf, combined with illustrations from the history of modern philosophy, I intent to argue that the novels of Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf display a shared locus of concern, the formation of the modern subject.
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