UUnniivveerrssiittyy ooff NNeebbrraasskkaa -- LLiinnccoollnn DDiiggiittaallCCoommmmoonnss@@UUnniivveerrssiittyy ooff NNeebbrraasskkaa -- LLiinnccoollnn Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research: English, Department of Department of English April 2006 AAlllluussiivvee MMeecchhaanniiccss iinn MMooddeerrnn aanndd PPoossttmmooddeerrnn FFiiccttiioonn AAss SSuuggggeesstteedd bbyy JJaammeess JJooyyccee iinn HHiiss NNoovveell DDuubblliinneerrss Kynan D. Connor University of Nebraska-Lincoln Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishdiss Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Connor, Kynan D., "Allusive Mechanics in Modern and Postmodern Fiction As Suggested by James Joyce in His Novel Dubliners" (2006). Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research: Department of English. 2. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishdiss/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the English, Department of at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research: Department of English by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. Allusive Mechanics in Modern and Postmodern Fiction As Suggested by James Joyce in His Novel Dubliners by Kynan D. Connor A DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of The Graduate College at the University of Nebraska In Partial Fulfillment of Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Major: English Under the Supervision of Professor Robert F. Bergstrom Lincoln, Nebraska May, 2006 ALLUSIVE MECHANICS IN MODERN AND POSTMODERN FICTION AS SUGGESTED BY JAMES JOYCE IN HIS NOVEL DUBLINERS Kynan D. Connor, Ph. D. University of Nebraska, 2006 Adviser: Robert F. Bergstrom James Joyce in his novel Dubliners conducts a series of narrative experiments with allusion, and in doing so suggests a new literary criticism based upon the allusive process. This new criticism of allusive mechanics considers the text in terms of its allusive potential for character—that is, the character is treated as capable of signification. Because Joyce can mimic the process of signification, it repositions the author to the act of writing and the reader to the act of reading. Character is greatly expanded through allusive mechanics because narrative elements like allusion in a text are treated as having a character-oriented value, thus repositioning the reader to both character and the text, enriching the entire reading experience. As a mode of interpretation, allusive mechanics organizes a text from the point of view of character. In Joyce’s “The Dead” allusive mechanics reveals that Gabriel Conroy, emerging from loneliness and self-absorption, can use allusion as a vehicle to understand and value the people and the world around him; in effect, to manage his own mind. In Melville’s “Benito Cereno” allusive mechanics focuses on the judgment of Amasa Delano and his personal allusion of blackness and the role they play in the formation and maintenance of slavery. In Cather’s The Song of the Lark allusive mechanics reveals how Thea Kronborg uses the unifying power of allusion to bring together the people and places into the creation of art, allusion being a container. In Fauset’s Plum Bun allusive mechanics traces how Angela Murray uses the allusion of blackness to first “pass” as white and then construct a viable identity in a racist, class- conscious, and gender-based world. Finally, in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 allusive mechanics reveals how the allusive process and the act of reading can become pitfalls of thought, imprisoning readers within the act of signification. Acknowledgments I wish to recognize and thank all of the people who went into this project. For the living: Darren Adams, Robert Bergstrom, Thomas Caramagno, Kerry Carl, Floyd Carpenter, Alan Connor, Katie Connor, Kimberly Connor, Kretha Connor, Krynna Connor, Mike Connor, Sharon “Trudi” Connor, Francis Ford Coppola, Carroll Cross, Jacques Derrida, Matts Djos, Ed Forsman, Ray Gates, Jason Gildow, Stephen Hilliard, Al Johnsen, Harper Lee, Mike Meens, Ennio Morricone, Tana Morris, Joe O’Hara, Thomas Pynchon, Thomas Rinkevich, Heather Rose, Jim Rosowski, Ralph Schmidt, Ridley Scott, John Somer, Nick Spencer, Jack Stephens, Mel Storm, Pearl “Auntie” Usher, Kurt Vonnegut, Leslie Whipp, David Yoder, Angus Young, and Jack Zeigel. And the dead: Delwyn Adams, L. Frank Baum, Beethoven, Humphrey Bogart, Italo Calvino, Lewis Carroll, Willa Cather, Hazel and Lyle Connor, Ron Connor, Joseph Conrad, Dante, Leonardo Da Vinci, Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Albert Einstein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Theodor Geisel, Ernest Hemingway, Homer, Robert E. Howard, James Joyce, Stanley Kubrick, Led Zeppelin, John Lennon, Sergio Leone, Herman Melville, Michelangelo, John Milton, Jim Morrison, Mozart, Kenneth Otzenberger, Pablo Picasso, Plato, Jackson Pollock, Sue Rosowski, Melba Schmidt, William Shakespeare, Mildred and Sterling Smith, Socrates, Wallace Stevens, Robert Louis Stevenson, J.R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Leo Tolstoy, Vincent Van Gogh, Orson Welles, William Carlos Williams, and William Butler Yeats. Table of Contents Introduction Page 1 Chapter One: Selections from the Allusive Community Page 13 Chapter Two: James Joyce’s Dubliners: Narrative Experiments in Allusive Mechanics Page 28 Chapter Three: James Joyce’s “The Dead”: An Introduction to Allusive Mechanics Page 49 Chapter Four: Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno: Allusion and Linguistic Construct in the Slavery Hegemony Page 78 Chapter Five: Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark: Allusion and the Art of Unification Page 93 Chapter Six: Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun: Allusion and the Act of Passing Page 106 Chapter Seven: Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49: The Allusive Process and the Prison of Referentiality Page 117 Appendix Page 133 Allusive Taxonomy: Dubliners Page 134 Allusive Taxonomy: Benito Cereno Page 140 Allusive Taxonomy: The Song of the Lark Page 147 Allusive Taxonomy: Plum Bun Page 158 Allusive Taxonomy: The Crying of Lot 49 Page 163 Notes Page 165 Bibliography Page 172 1 Introduction In writing Dubliners James Joyce suggests a new way to read and consider allusion, and in doing so, encourages a new literary criticism. This new criticism, which will henceforth be called allusive mechanics, has at its heart the re-imagining of allusion. Broadly speaking, allusion is thought of as a literary device, like alliteration or simile, a tool for the poet or author to invite a specific kind of aesthetic experience, leading to the creation of a kind of textual object/moment. What Joyce accomplishes through a series of narrative experiments with allusion in Dubliners is to shift the focus away from the textual object and towards the process that creates the object. His characters have allusive experiences, and it is this simple fact that repositions the reader to the text, ultimately reshaping and redrawing the potentials of the critical experience. With Dubliners Joyce suggests that allusions can have a character-oriented value. At its most basic level allusion functions more or less as an invitation, placed by the author for the benefit (or sometimes detriment) of the reader. But what if the allusive value of this invitation is not confined to the creation of a textual object by the reader in the act of reading? What if the invitation for allusion is present in the fiction for a character to “create” a textual object? Obviously, literary characters do not experience consciousness independent of the reader, but they are placed within a system or systems of signification. If Saussure’s idea of the signifier is taken to its natural conclusion; that is, the individual exists in a world of signifiers and consciousness is merely the production of signs, then it stands to reason that an author could mimic that activity of production. It is this mimication of the process of signification that makes Joyce’s use of allusion in Dubliners different from conventional usage, where allusion acts as a minor 2 textual enhancement. If characters are treated as capable of signification, then the approach to allusion, the very shape of the allusive act itself, changes. Instead of processing an allusion in a more or less traditional manner—recognition, acquisition of allusive contents, importation of allusive contents, comparison of allusive contents with host context, and conclusion—readers would look for these steps within the narrative itself. In other words, the character processes the allusion and the reader processes the character processing the allusion. Of course, not all allusions will have a character- oriented value, but the introduction of another interpretive thread does raise some interesting possibilities. The most obvious and perhaps the most important gain is the expansion of character. In “Araby,” for example, the young narrator is desperately trying to get to the bazaar in order to purchase a gift for his love-interest, a love that is one- sided at best. What is left unclear and unstated is why the young man feels like a “creature driven and derided by vanity” (35) at the end of the story. It has been speculated that the young man feels this way because he realizes that he has been a fool. What allusive mechanics does is remove some of the speculation by identifying specific cognitive causes for the young man’s reported behavior. By viewing the textual world as an allusive world through which a character passes, two competing allusions emerge in the mind of the young man. One, a personal allusion to courtly love and the grail-quest, occurs when the young man is talking with Mangan’s sister and “she turned a silver bracelet round and round her wrist” (32). The young man perceives this moment as an invitation to adventure, where braving the world of Araby in order to secure a gift is the right thing for a knight to do for his lady. The other allusion is to the Crucifixion. When the young man gets to the bazaar, he sees “two men counting money on a salver” (35). 3 He feels like a “creature driven and derided by vanity” (35) because he realizes that he was not only selfish, but that he had been a willing dupe in his own seduction. Only when he sees the sacrilege of the men counting money where the body of Christ is supposed to lay does he see his truth. In addition to treating the text as an allusively significant environment for character, allusive mechanics also throws into question traditional concepts of allusion that form the bases for interpretation and criticism. The bracelet in “Araby” would never be considered as having any allusive value because it does not hold any obvious cultural resonance for the reader. But that is selling the creative value of the allusive process short. When Mangan’s sister plays with her bracelet, it could be understood as part of the overall presentation of seduction—the posture of the body, the dialogue, the careless twirling of the bracelet upon the wrist. But if considered through allusive mechanics, that is, from the point of character, certain cognitive imperatives, in this case the sub-cultures of love and religion, come into light. The courtly-love tradition is an established paradigm in the mind of the young man—“When she came out my heart leaped” (30), “and her name was like a summons” (30), “I imagined that I bore my chalice” (31)—and when Mangan’s sister twirls the bracelet, he may read/misread it as a doorway into that tradition. The only knowledge a young man would have on the subject of love would be the kind from books. What’s worse, and perhaps even more to the point, is that Mangan’s sister knowingly gives him that potential doorway. She doesn’t have to twirl the bracelet while she talks to him, but she does, and that makes it at the very least a covert attempt at suggestion. That does not mean that Mangan’s sister is consciously trying to ensnare the young man with the courtly love tradition—there is not enough 4 textual evidence for such a conclusion—but her invitation does take place within his cognitive space of the courtly love template as evidenced in the subtext. In order to make the argument that Mangan’s sister is using the bracelet allusively to entrap the young man, a person would demonstrate that both characters had a working knowledge of the tradition, and that the agent was aware. If she knew that the young man had attended Rossini’s opera La Cenerentola, where a bracelet is used as a sign of recognition (78) instead of a slipper, for example, then a case could be made for entrapment .1 Allusive mechanics is a significant literary accomplishment for Joyce because it creates the possibility for a different interpretative thread—i.e., value system—by which to consider allusion. There will always be authorial and reader-defined values for allusion, but the existence of character-defined value for allusion alters the relationship between reader and text because it advocates another point of view, another sounding- board by which a reader can create meaning. In “Araby,” for example, Joyce was able to move outside his portrayal of the Irish paralysis—the overall theme in Dubliners—to suggest that seduction and salvation are allusive acts. By incorporating a narrative structure based on the allusive process into his fiction, Joyce redefines allusion and allusive interpretation, and in doing so, remakes textual relationships. The act of reading changes because the reader can now ask if an allusion has a character-oriented value. The act of writing changes because the author can imitate associative aspects of consciousness without having to describe them, thus enriching character formation. Of course, the burden is still on the reader to create meaning, but allusive mechanics raises the possibility for shining a light on some of the more nebulous aspects of interpretation, such as with the feelings of vanity in the “Araby” example. Whether taken as an Irish