Finitude, alterity, and the novel: Nabokov, Gadda, Beckett

Thesis

Finitude has become a controversial word in French thought since Meillassoux’s Après la finitude (2006). Beyond finitude’s literal meaning (‘boundedness’) and its philosophical connotations, we can speak of the finitude of a literary form: the novel. Narrative manifests the desire to conclude, rushing inexorably toward its end, yet also demonstrates the desire to prolong itself, showcase infinite discourses, and exert what Barthes calls literature’s ‘mathetic’ power (‘l’écriture fait du savoir une fête’). I equate the first drive with narrative’s ontological dimension, and the second with its epistemological dimension. My premise is that these twin drives vie more acutely in the novel than in any other literary form, since it is the novel which most consciously follows the trajectory and timeflow of a life, as well as the mind’s accumulation of knowledge over that life. This thesis considers finitude in and of seven mid-twentieth century novels across the œuvres of Vladimir Nabokov, Carlo Emilio Gadda, and Samuel Beckett, three authors whose struggle with the finite novelistic form becomes their novels in a peculiarly self-conscious way. I seek to illuminate interrelationships between finitude, alterity, and the novel by drawing on philosophical concepts of finitude from Heidegger, Levinas, Blanchot, MerleauPonty, Derrida, Bakhtin, Nancy, and Meillassoux. Each of my five chapters examines at least one major feature of textual finitude against a corresponding figure of human finitude: from chapters on Gadda’s La cognizione del dolore, Beckett’s Trilogy, Nabokov’s Sebastian Knight and Pnin, to Gadda’s Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana, and finally back to Beckett’s Trilogy. In this chiasmic return, I contemplate Nabokov’s unworking of textual reality, Gadda’s writing-toward-irresolution and constrained creative process, and Beckett’s decomposing tendencies and attempt of ‘unthinkable’ analepses and prolepses across the Trilogy. Ultimately, the thesis asks whether the novel, in its pretensions to ‘be’ and ‘know’ where we are not (‘que nous soyons ou pas’, in Meillassoux’s words), becomes something other to itself through its selfreflexive grappling with finitude.

Authors: Steinepreis, AJ

• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford