Things Passed Over: The Modernist Novel and the Scandal of Revision

This dissertation argues that some of the most important 19th- and 20th-century experimental novels are simply not all there. Why did the 1857 obscenity trial of Madame Bovary obsess over precisely the passages that were editorially cut from the text on trial? Why did Wilde proclaim The Picture of Dorian Gray’s timeless perfection in a preface that tacitly quotes but does not acknowledge the newspaper controversy that shaped the novel’s 1891 revisions? What do the asterisks that litter Barnes’s Ryder (1928) mean? Why did Beckett intentionally embed a referential dead-end in a persistent erratum within many editions of Watt (1953)? Quandaries like these, I claim, are the sites where the modernist novel transforms both its aestheticism and its relation to the social world. In each case, what begins as a query about histories of composition, revision, and reception ends up reframing large and consequential questions about literary form and its relation to history. I take up some of contemporary scholarship’s increasingly central methodological tools—reception history, textual theory, genetic criticism—to grasp the consequences, at once formal and historical, of these minute and questionable details. In the process, Things Passed Over gives a different history of the modernist novel’s emergence out of 19th-century aestheticist avant-gardes and their scandals, arguing that the modernist novel’s material connection to its social background lurks in its techniques of formal omission and their worldly repercussions./nIn part one I attend to the scandals of 19th-century aestheticism, suggesting that its moral transgressions derive from but also confess a deeper pattern of formal omissions. Strangely, what is most controversial proves to be the very revisions that incorporate such scandals as intrinsic parts of the work’s “final” public form. In part two I argue that, drawing directly on Flaubert and Wilde, Barnes and Beckett turn aestheticism’s intransigent authorial intentions inside out, thereby internalizing its scandals. They seize this social dynamic as a formal principle: in high and late modernist novels, the scandalously social turns up in cancelled and erroneous elements, in aporias of textual genesis and authorial intention, that become integral to the work even before it appears in public. This forces us to study of genetic history and manuscripts, but also to move beyond the horizons of textual and genetic scholarship. The most experimental and hermetic works harness the prosaic charge of earlier social scandals, in order to alter novelistic reference and figuration at the most basic level./nAcross this history, aestheticism’s social scandals are metabolized in modernism’s textual ones. To grasp this trajectory, I bring careful formal analysis to bear on textual details that go missing but nonetheless engage the social forces that shape their meaning. I show that revision by omission develops from an effect of social scandal into a key experimental modernist principle. It enables the novel to touch the world without representing it—expressing itself by enfolding more than it says. Things Passed Over thus generates, from out of the small bibliographic matter of textual losses, a materialist aesthetics of the experimental modernist novel.

Advisor: Blanton, C.D.