Djuna Barnes: melancholy, body, theodicy

Thesis

My thesis formulates an account of melancholy as a soteriological crisis in the writings of the queer American avant-garde writer, Djuna Barnes. A critical account of melancholy is set up via a theoretical intersection of psychoanalysis, philosophical anthropology, and theology. I unfold the ontological structures that support theories of the divided subject across these fields to establish the theoretical ground where they are brought into meaningful contact. Melancholy is established as an existential predicament of the divided subject, implicating it in, i. the Fall and Original Sin (with its secular analogues); and, ii. a host of corporeal effects and affects from laughing and crying to hybridization across sex- and species-difference. The purpose here is to formulate how the psychosomatic suffering of the melancholic subject is presented in Barnes’s art, and to articulate such suffering with the aesthetic and metaphysical response it provokes in each instance. This response is elaborated in relation to the question of theodicy – that is, is God (or the God-adjuncts, the ‘Creator’ and ‘Creation’) justified in the face of suffering and evil?

Melancholy is thus unfolded in dialectical relation to the question of theodicy: the problem of suffering prompts questions concerning its purpose/non-purpose, vindication/non-vindication, meaning/non-meaning, and ultimately, the value of life itself. I present Barnes’s meditations on this motif in systematic theology in her letters and her various references to Proust, Joyce, and Dostoevsky, to develop an account of a weak theodicy. I synthesize the insights of narrative theory (Paul Ricoeur, Hayden White, Northrop Frye) and the theory of worlds (Martin Heidegger, Jonathan Flatley) to unfold how a response to the question of theodicy is encrypted in the work of art, as its theodistical unconscious. This response is understood as a fundamental ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the Creator and the work of Creation – otherwise put, a comic or a tragic judgement on the value of life, alongside its prosopopoeic trace, God. In encapsulating a world of suffering, each work of art exhibits an authorial reckoning on the value of life – that it is worth living, or it is not. The theodistical or anti-theodistical unconscious of each literary world is thus reconstructed via close-reading.

This thesis pivots on the possibility of reconciliation as the crux of the theodistical question. It is divided accordingly into two halves: the first considers the comic response to suffering as a minimal, or maximal, affirmation of life; the tragic response repudiates this. The body in pain that focalises this question is thus presented in different terms in each chapter, moving from dysmorphia to disassemblage, deferred recovery to a new orientation to the resurrection, or a commitment to death and a reversal into the negative.

Authors: Ng, ZF

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-o8jp4gbp0
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Laughing and Crying; Literary Worlds; Psychoanalysis; Tragedy; Theology; Avant-Garde; Queer; Comedy; Women's Writing; Modernism
• Subjects: Queer theory; Psychoanalysis; Modernism (Literature); Theology; Avant-garde (Aesthetics); Comedy; Tragedy; Literary form