Impossible Narration: The Unknowable Other and the Ethical Imagination in Modernism

This dissertation explores the ethics of impossible narration in its struggle to represent an unknowable other as a thread in modernist novels. I coin the term ‘unknowable’ other in response to Emmanuel Levinas’ ethics as first philosophy and his claim on ethical subjectivity based on her responsibility toward the Other. Levinas suggests the ethical potential in language by distinguishing an ongoing practice of the Saying and its ethical disruption from the absolute of the Said. I demonstrate how the ethical failure of narrative in certain modernists’ works conversate with Levinasian ethics in that their texts precisely address the problem of a modern subjectivity in relation to others, given the differences of class, gender, and race, at the collapse of empire. I argue that some modernist writers—Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, and J. M. Coetzee as an inheritor— achieve the Levinasian Saying by staging that their narration is impossible in the encounter with an other. Chapter Two analyzes how the three early modernist novels of colonial exploration, Heart of Darkness, A Passage to India, and The Voyage Out, commonly foreground the impossible narration through Western characters who become disillusioned and fail to consummate a heteronormative marriage in result of facing the unknowable alterity. Chapter Three examines Woolf’s antifascist aesthetics and ethics in Between the Acts, through Levinasian notion of the Saying. By framing a revised English pageantry, Woolf betrays the genre’s nationalist rhetoric, and ultimately demystifies the ideal of Englishness that has justified British imperial history. Chapter Four examines how Coetzee’s Foe, a postcolonial rewriting of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe deconstructs the power of authorship by making Susan Barton the endlessly self-doubting narrator in telling the unrepresentability of Friday. Likewise, modernist writers stage their struggle with impossible narration by featuring artist figures and the process of their artistic creation. The failure of narration at the narrators’ level echoes and parallels the impossible narration of the frame novel. These metanarrative elements in modernist novels disrupt conventional knowledge production and deconstructs a totalizing impulse in representation, while also engaging us in the reader’s position from outside to inside the story