'For Silences Have Their Character': Ethics, Subjectivity and the Modernist Poetics of Reserve in James, Conrad and Woolf.

摘要

"For Silences Have Their Character" is a study of the intersections of language, ethics and subjectivity in the modernist novel. In this project, I examine four novels by Henry James, Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf, arguing that these texts demonstrate "a poetics of reserve." I suggest that reserve is a particular kind of silence, one that creates a narrative bifurcation, engaging and subsequently refusing the construction of the subject in language. I situate this discussion of reserve within the recent theoretical turn to an ethics of alterity, engaging primarily with the work of Emmanuel Levinas. In the first chapter, I establish the difference between silence conceived as repression, exploitation or emptiness and silence as "reserve," imagined as a resource and a signifier of value, particularly the value of subjectivity outside of language. Chapter two examines the abundance of economic language in James' The Golden Bowl, taking issue with interpretations of the novel as uncritical of commodifying forces. I propose instead that the central presence of gifts in The Golden Bowl, and the association of reserve with gift, calls for a revisioning of the novel as challenging the discursive production of subjects through economic and linguistic exchange. Chapter three explores the significance of bodily reserve in Conrad's Under Western Eyes. In this chapter, I explore phenomenological accounts of bodily experience and theories of gesture, suggesting that embodied subjectivity represents an incommunicable excess beyond the parameters of language. Chapter four discusses reserve in the form of resistance to narrative. I suggest that the refusal to narrate the self in Woolf's The Voyage Out and The Waves functions as Woolf's challenge to the epistemological and representational violence perceived as inherent in certain genres, most notably biographical narrative. I read the formal experimentation of The Waves as the aesthetic manifestation of concepts of reserve first explored in The Voyage Out, demonstrating Woolf's profound and prolonged concern with this kind of silence. Reading against interpretations that emphasize the loss of subjectivity, I propose that we read the characters' and Woolf's refusals to narrate as a straining toward as yet undeveloped possibilities of the subject.