The Art of Distances The Art of Distances Ethical Thinking in Twentieth- Century Literature Corina Stan northwestern university press evanston, illinois Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2018 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2018. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Stan, Corina, author. Title: The art of distances : ethical thinking in twentieth-century literature / Corina Stan. Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017049335 | ISBN 9780810136854 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810136861 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810136878 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: European literature—20th century—History and criticism. | Ethics in literature. | Social distance—Philosophy. Classification: LCC PN49 .S674 2018 | DDC 809.93353—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017049335 Except where otherwise noted, this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. In all cases attribution should include the following information: Stan, Corina. The Art of Distances: Ethical Thinking in Twentieth-Century Literature . Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2018. The following material is excluded from the license: Previously published material described in Acknowledgments. For permissions beyond the scope of this license, visit http://www.nupress. northwestern.edu/. An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative de- signed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. More informa- tion about the initiative and links to the open-access version can be found at www. knowledgeunlatched.org. To Alex, Eliza, and Mihai Today . . . it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home. —Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia Contents Acknowledgments ix List of Abbreviations xiii Introduction: Adorno and Barthes on the Question of the Right (Di)stance 3 Part I. The Pathos of Distances in “a World of Banished People” Chapter 1 George Orwell’s Critique of Sincerity and the Obligation of Tactlessness 33 Chapter 2 The Inferno of Saviors: Notes in the Margin of Elias Canetti’s Lifework 69 Chapter 3 A Socialism of Distances, or On the Difficulties of Wise Love: Iris Murdoch’s Secular Community 115 Part II. “The World in Me”: The Distantiality of Everyday Life Chapter 4 In Search of a Whole Self: Benjamin’s Childhood Fragments 155 Chapter 5 Annie Ernaux’s Diaries of the Outside 171 Chapter 6 Günter Grass’s Century 197 Chapter 7 Damon Galgut on Emptying Oneself for Sleep 217 Conclusion 235 Notes 245 Index 297 ix Acknowledgments This is a book about distance and proximity, community and tact; in a cer- tain sense, people whose paths crossed with mine over the past few years have written it with me by offering renewed inspiration through gestures of kindness, friendship, and hospitality. It is hard to thank everyone, but here is a beginning: I could not have wished for a more exquisite balance between involvement and detachment from my committee while I was writing the dissertation in the Duke Literature Program. I am very grateful to my adviser, Toril Moi, for her generosity throughout the years. She has spent much time reading each of the chapters, writing detailed comments, reading new versions, and writing more comments. Her advising truly is an “art of distances,” balanc- ing criticism, encouragement, and praise, engaging with the ideas, paying careful attention to her students’ prose, and encouraging nuance. I must list my other committee members in some order, but what I have appreciated is how they have each offered something unique, therefore invaluable, to shape and support this project. After spending many delicious hours reading and discussing the poetry of Wallace Stevens and W. B. Yeats, or following closely the meanderings of Leopold Bloom in Frank Lentricchia’s seminars, something about the imponderable temporality of fondling textual details in a quiet classroom is attached, in my mind, to his name, inextricable from an unfailing sensitivity to the practicalities of everyday life. Geoffrey Harpham’s work on ethics inspired, in part, my own project. His claim, in The Character of Criticism , that ours is “a human practice of reflection and meditation that enlists every intellectual, affective, and experiential resource that a person has” made a deep impression on me as a student, as do, always, his unwaver- ing commitment to the humanities, the thrilling nuances of his anecdotes, and the gracious, subtle ways of his tact. Ian Baucom and Fredric Jameson were the members of my committee most interested in asking the “big questions,” hence the readers who encouraged me to think harder about the stakes of the project. Ian Baucom’s elegance as a scholar, his professionalism, and the gen- tlest manner of guiding his students’ thinking through difficult questions are still a model for me. Fred Jameson’s intellectual range and dedication to the life of the mind are, as all of his students know, beyond impressive; I still think of him as my most demanding “implied reader.” I also owe thanks to Michael Hardt, Alice Kaplan, Barbara Herrnstein-Smith, Valentin Mudimbe, James Applewhite, and Stephen Jaffe, who made intellectual life at Duke interesting x Acknowledgments in so many ways. And I return frequently to the work and ideas of Antoine Compagnon, my former adviser at the Sorbonne; and to what I learned from Paul Volsik and Catherine Bernard (Paris 7), as well as from Stefan Bor- bély and Sanda Berce (Babes-Bolyai). There is much gratitude suffused with sadness in the memory of Tudor Ionescu—my former French tutor, painter, novelist, and humorist—who modeled so compellingly the importance of not taking oneself too seriously. I have discussed ideas and parts of this book with former students at Leiden University College the Hague (the moving excitement of Anna-Liisa Springham, Kristian Kristensen, Liam Klein, Jasper Ginn, and Barend de Rooj, among others, gave meaning to my time at LUC), the lovely graduate students at Duke who participated in the Community and Migration semi- nar (Taylor Ross, Jo Nopper, Austin Sarfan, Emma Goehler), and with the members of the research groups convened by Knut Stene-Johansen and Lars Saetre around Barthes’s late lectures, and whose hospitality I have benefited from on more than one occasion, in Paris and in Bergen. Several colleagues in the English Department at Duke have read chapters or the entire manuscript, and I am deeply grateful for their support and collegiality: Sarah Beckwith, Thomas Pfau, Michael Moses, Tom Ferraro, Rob Mitchell, and Priscilla Wald. I feel privileged to call Duke my intellectual home, and I am appreciative of the funding that supported the completion of my graduate studies, offered by the Literature Program and the Evan Frankel Foundation. The dean’s subsidy for the publication of a first book was instrumental in getting the manuscript into print. I also wish to thank the editors at Northwestern University Press, Henry Carrigan, Trevor Perri, and Nathan MacBrien; the two anonymous readers; the very efficient copyeditor, Christi Stanforth; the indexer, Steven Moore; and the team who made the publication of the book possible. A question Fredric Jameson asked during my dissertation defense made me realize just how deeply personal this project was to me: “Why this preoccu- pation with distances? Is it distance from politics?” I grew up in Communist Romania, and while I was too young to truly understand this at the time, in such a context, a well-calibrated distance from politics, ostensibly not an option, is often a matter of the survival of one’s soul. Later on, it was Milan Kundera’s characters, especially Sabina in The Unbearable Lightness of Being , who shed light on the impatience I sensed around me as a child with the claustrophobic pressure of a society that requires full transparency— hence the need for distance, for the respect of privacy and of individuals’ singularity. My parents’ encouragement that I should learn foreign languages came from a subversive impulse, part of that histrionic practice that Czeslaw Milosz calls, in The Captive Mind , Ketman. This book is therefore also about sliding (often slipping) in and out of the languages I came to frequent over the years, in encounters and intimacies with words, books, people, and places. The schooling that Benjamin believed was required in order to “lose one’s way in a city” (and also in another culture, I would add, including that of Acknowledgments xi academia) happened in cahoots with friends and colleagues who had a great sense of humor and intriguing ideas and life-projects, and who often seemed too good to be true (yet they were). I learned much in conversations with my fellow graduate students in English and Literature; thank you, Tess, Rachel, Erin, Arnal, Magda, Anu, Shilyh, Michelle, Luka, Abe, Serhat, Veena, Brian, Alex, Sarah, and Russ. And then, there are the friends who are always there: Cecilia, Béatrice, Cristina and Brett, Luminita and Ioan, Chantal, Anne- Gaëlle, Gabriel, Daniela, Ksenia, Yi-Ping, Chunjie, Krista and Ish. The last thought of gratitude here (but otherwise always the very first) goes to my family: to Eliza, Alex, and Mihai, for our haven of unconditional love; to my parents, for all the dreams they invested in me and the infinite care they took that some of them, at least, might come true; to my brother Sorin, for being such an inspiration and a priceless friend, in spite of the geographic distance; to my extended family, always so supportive, gracious, and light-hearted. Abbreviated versions of chapters 1 and 3 have appeared previously in print, as follows: “A Sociality of Distances: Roland Barthes and Iris Murdoch on How to Live with Others,” in Modern Language Notes 129, no. 5 (2014): 1170– 1198; “England (as if) through the Eyes of a Foreigner: George Orwell’s Masquerade among the Poor of London,” in Études britanniques contempo- raines , no. 49 (2015); and “A Passionate Misunderstanding: Orwell’s Paris, Miller’s China,” in English Studies 97, no. 3 (2016): 298–316. I thank the editors of these journals for their permission to reprint this material. xiii Abbreviations The following abbreviations are used throughout the text and notes: B Iris Murdoch, The Bell BC Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood CF Virginia Woolf, “Character in Fiction” CP Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power CVE Roland Barthes, Comment vivre ensemble DOPL George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London EM Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics ISR Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room IW George Orwell, “Inside the Whale” JD Annie Ernaux, Journal du dehors (Exteriors) L Paul Morand, Londres LT Virginia Woolf, “The Leaning Tower” LVE Annie Ernaux, La vie extérieure MC Günter Grass, My Century MEC Elias Canetti, The Memoirs of Elias Canetti: The Tongue Set Free, The Torch in My Ear, The Play of the Eyes MJ Günter Grass, Mein Jahrhundert MM Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia N Roland Barthes, Le neutre: Cours au Collège de France PIW Henry Miller, Peace! It’s Wonderful! RWP George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier S Walter Benjamin, Schriften TC Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer The Art of Distances 3 Introduction Adorno and Barthes on the Question of the Right (Di)stance In 1976–1977, Roland Barthes gave a course at the Collège de France under the title Comment vivre ensemble: Simulations romanesques de quelques espaces quotidiens , in which, refusing both didactic authority and a pre- scriptive moral standpoint, he intimated the idea of a community guided by the elusive principle of délicatesse , which he borrowed, intriguingly, from the Marquis de Sade. 1 A quest, an investigation, rather than the pursuit of a premeditated line of argument, the lectures were an attempt to answer the question “À quelle distance dois-je me tenir des autres pour construire avec eux une sociabilité sans aliénation et une solitude sans exil?” (At what distance should I keep myself from others in order to build with them a socia- bility without alienation and a solitude without exile?). 2 Barthes claims that at the origin of his lectures lies the fantasy of a utopian community, a fantasy he explores as a collector of ideas, images, and passages mostly excerpted from favorite books like Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Zola’s Pot- Bouille , a Greek travelogue or a tome on Japanese culture— all cherished companions during summer holidays in the country- side. In the lectures, he orders his themes alphabetically as always expandable dossiers: “Akèdia, Anachôrèsis . Clôture, Colonie, Couplage, Distance, . . . Éponge . . . Marginalités . . . Proxémie . . . Règle, Saleté, Xénitéia, Uto- pie.” It is as if Barthes created from the outset a space for the student—or the reader— to ponder his thoughts and pursue them in directions he could not have anticipated. The only caveat is that the subject of living together has to remain an open one: the “comment” (how) of the title registers a puzzling question, or even the impatient affirmation of impossibility, hence of utopia’s necessity, and not a programmatic, or even descriptive, intention. Barthes offers much in the lectures, but then he retreats behind the openness he cre- ates. He labels his inquiry “non-method” and readily qualifies it, because the negation appears too simple: “Il vaudrait mieux dire: pré-méthode. C’est comme si je préparais des matériaux en vue d’un traitement méthodique; comme si, à vrai dire, je ne m’inquiétais pas de quelle méthode ils vont être saisis. Tout est possible” (One had better say: premethod. It is as if I were 4 Introduction preparing materials in view of a methodic treatment; as if I were not really concerned how they were going to be used. Anything is possible) ( CVE , 183). What to make of Barthes’s open-ended divagations so they do not remain, like Mallarmé’s white water lily, only an “imaginary trophy”? 3 Research inspired by them begins under the auspices of an unconditional hospitality: tout est possible , he says in his concluding remarks. The present book was inspired by Barthes’s thought that we need “a sci- ence, or perhaps an art, of distances.” The problem of distance is central to his “fantasme” because it involves eight to ten people, a number sufficiently small to allow for the cultivation of personal relationships that respect the singularity of each individual, but also large enough to require some prin- ciples that would facilitate their life together. In other words, his utopia straddles two intersecting philosophical territories: that of friendship, in which the number of people involved has always been a crucial question, and that of community, with its social and political dimensions. Barthes’s use of the term le vivre- ensemble , often capitalized, which he ostensibly prefers to “community,” suggests that his interest lies not in what these individuals have in common; rather, in what principles would make possible their harmoni- ous coexistence. In this light, the theme of distance acquires in his lectures an aura that makes it impossible to miss its recurrence in the literature on friendship from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra , in the work of philosophers of community inspired by Martin Heidegger, in the sociology of class and distinction, and in the various grammars of anthro- pology, psychology, and political theory. Even the briefest overview of these clusters of texts shows that such an “art of distances” exists already in the interstices of a broader reflection on how to live with other people; and to highlight it is to emphasize the enduring importance that Barthes’s question about the right distance has had, particularly in the last century. When Zarathustra commends “love of the farthest” in “Neighbor-love,” Nietzsche turns his back on a tradition of thought that for the most part took for granted the similarity of dispositions, tastes, and projects bringing together individuals in friendship. 4 Fissures in this expectation appear with Emerson’s figure of the friend who comes from afar and thus disrupts the reassuring comfort of one’s home, both because he is an event that “hinders [the host] from sleep” and because, once the novelty wears off, he is bound to disappoint in the trivial ways humans fail one another. A philosopher of process, Emerson reclaims his right to change and thus to be permanently at a remove from himself: after feverishly anticipating and preparing for a most special encounter, he praises the ideal connection with a friend who remains a spirit ensconced in distance, “forever a sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, devoutly revered, and not a trivial conveniency to be soon outgrown and cast aside.” True friendship is conducive to self-transcendence and is paradoxi- cally unafraid of solitude: “I cannot afford to speak much with my friend. Adorno and Barthes on the Question of the Right (Di)stance 5 If he is great he makes me so great that I cannot descend to converse.” With this, Emerson insists on self-reliance as the condition sine qua non of genuine friendship: “There must be very two, before there can be very one.” Mon- taigne, whom Emerson had read and felt inspired by, also emphasized the irreducible singularity of each friend (“because it was him; because it was me”), but the distance that magnifies the figure of the other person is, in his case, imposed by death. “Of friendship,” a eulogy honoring the memory of Étienne de la Boétie, also introduces in the philosophical conversation the idea of textual mediation—the discourse in language that interposes itself between oneself and another, interpellating one with the prophecy of a possi- ble friendship to come. On certain readings, friendship is always the domain of the future, the à- venir that Derrida so often invokes in his lectures, reading and rereading Aristotle’s paradoxical apostrophe: “O, my friends, there are no friends!” 5 In The Nicomachean Ethics , however, Aristotle casts friendship at the core of his vision of human happiness ( eudaimonia ), to be pursued both individually and collectively through an active cultivation of the vir- tues. Similarity of moral purpose—and thus proximity—is what holds the community together; distance, not so much. 6 Responding with characteristic eloquence— and a good measure of defiance— to this century-long conversa- tion, Nietzsche was the first to denounce openly “communities of proximity,” 7 although his example was not the Greek polis, but the so-called stuffy horde mentality cultivated by the Judeo-Christian ethos which, Nietzsche claimed in The Genealogy of Morals , denied the diversity of life-forms and encouraged a narrow-minded, complacent form of love. In passages that echo Emerson’s portrayal of the ideal friend as a “beautiful enemy,” Zarathustra goes as far as to denounce the love of the neighbor as the “bad love” of oneself and advises “love of the farthest”—that as yet unfathomable difference that chal- lenges, disrupts, and thrills the one committed to an ambitious project of self- fashioning. This conversation among philosophers, in which “distance” carries so many meanings and connotations—difference, respect, idealiza- tion, avoidance, futurity, death, self-overcoming, autonomy, mediation, and no doubt others—might have been at the back of Barthes’s mind while pre- paring the lectures; if it was, he does little to show it. He only quotes briefly from Twilight of the Idols , moved by Nietzsche’s attachment to the “pathos of distances” characteristic of any strong age, which he goes on to (mis)read in a creative manner that bears his stylistic interpretive signature. 8 Barthes was not a philosopher, but his approach to living-together does have philosophical echoes in more systematic efforts to rethink community, most notably among his contemporaries Jean-Luc Nancy and Emmanuel Levinas, who engaged with the thought of Martin Heidegger. In Sein und Zeit , the German philosopher famously insisted on the ontological primacy of Mitsein (Being- with), critical of the philosophical tradition inherited from Descartes that contemplates the subject “with its skin off,” and then only piles up attributes onto its “substance,” inevitably failing to give access to 6 Introduction the involvements and modes of solicitude that make up human existence. Ontology is no concern to Barthes, but his subtitle, Simulations romanesques de quelques espaces quotidiens , does highlight the crucial link between living together and space that Heidegger describes as the spatiality of Dasein . Sug- gestively, seeing and hearing are in his account distance-senses ( Fernsinne ), “not because they are far-reaching, but because it is in them that Dasein as deseverant mainly dwells.” 9 The vocabulary of distance is implied in deseverance ( Entfernung ) and directionality ( Ausrichtung ), in Zuhandenheit (readiness- to- hand— instrumental), and Vorhandenheit (presence- at- hand— reflexive). 10 Zuhandenheit , for example, foregrounds the immersion in the world, which exists as a repertoire of possible involvements with which any Dasein is familiar by virtue of living in a social environment, in a certain culture. 11 The world is always “on its way” to one, a movement which also characterizes social interaction, which Heidegger suggestively describes in terms of leaping (yet another spatial representation): für jemanden einsprin- gen (to leap in for someone, a mode of solicitude in which the Other can become dominated), and jemandem vorausspringen (to leap ahead of some- one, not taking away the “care,” but helping the Other become free to engage with it). 12 Perhaps even more important in the rapprochement with Barthes’s concerns are the critiques of Heidegger by Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Nancy: arguably, their conversation is not about community, increasingly deemed an inadequate term that refers to idyllic or dangerously ideological forms of living together, but about ethical relationality. Levinas, for instance, was bothered by the primacy of the “we” in Heidegger’s notion of Dasein , claiming that by emphasizing the commonality ( mit ), it obliterates the Other. 13 Levinas thus places metaphysics before ontology and draws attention to the danger of Heidegger’s closed community of Blut und Boden , which divides humanity into “natives and strangers.” 14 His solution is to strip the Other of all singularizing features so that the ethical relation can be imagined in the infinite distance that separates one from (what becomes) a figure of radical difference. Nancy, on the other hand, found that “Heidegger’s Dasein , far from being too communal, is by no means social enough” (Bax) because he failed to think through the notion of mit (with), the most basic feature of Being, its relational character. This absence, coincidentally, is what bothers Nancy in Levinas’s account as well: in an effort to ensure unconditionally the utmost respect for the deindividualized Other, Levinas has diluted the social in the infinite distance of the ethical relation. The capitalized “Other,” Nancy points out, appears to be in a relation of difference from the world, rather than an “alteration of the world”; his alternative, être singulier pluriel (being singular plural), signals the “contradiction in terms” that is a singular being, and leaves behind the term “community,” the idealization of a form of social life that was never real in the first place. 15 Like Nancy, Barthes thinks singu- larity is crucial, hence his insistence on an interpersonal distance that stays safe both from the alienation of sociability and from the exile of solitude.