en

Maurizia Boscagli

2018

OpenAlex

“What is it about the human condition that allows us to conceive of and question nothing itself, and to create various signifiers of nothing, such as zero? . . . Does nothing exist: or is existence ontologically antithetical to nothing?” (1). With these questions, Meghan Vicks opens her book Narratives of Nothing in Twentieth-Century Literature. Vicks makes clear from the beginning that she is not talking of negativity, negation, or nihilism: by pursuing the question of nothing and of its inscription in twentieth-century textualities, she immediately positions her discussion in one specific theoretical camp, Heideggerian philosophy and Derridean deconstruction, marginally filtered through the discourses of the neurosciences and of narrative theory. Vicks’s focus, carefully elaborated through the informed explications of the philosophies that sustain her perspective and through intelligent and exhaustive analyses of literary texts, is nothing’s relation to narrative and nothing as “essential to the creation of narrative.” Nothing is ineffable, and yet it is readable and perceptible as the presence of absence in the literary examples Vicks discusses, from Maxim Gogol and Herman Melville to Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, and Viktor Pelevin. Nothing, as a foundational void, is understood as immanent. Vicks maintains, nothing becomes crucial in modernity: “Nothing becomes the transcendental signifier in the 20th century” (173). Like Jacques Lacan’s phallus, key to a philosopher she never mentions, nothing is the necessarily inaccessible, ungraspable center around which everything gravitates and from which the entire order of reality and meaning derives.The introduction and first chapter are dedicated to the noteworthy reconstruction of the history of nothing, from Odysseus’s self-presentation as outis (no one or no man) in Homer’s Odyssey, to the khora in Plato’s Timaeus, “the blank in the system that allows for . . . identity to take place” (5). Later, the khora is taken up by both Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva in their work. While Odysseus’s outis becomes the source of “the modern novel and by proxy, modern subjectivity” (7), the khora as “receptacle, nurse, or mother” (6) is the trait d’union that, in chapter 1, leads Vicks to discuss Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Derrida as the most prominent theorists of nothing in the twentieth century. The chapter opens with a fascinating history of zero as a mathematical concept and sign from the Babylonians to the Greeks (Vicks notes Aristotle’s dismissal of infinity and void), to India and the Arab world, to Christian Europe’s diffidence about adopting the sign 0 until the fourteenth century, when, in Italy, double entry bookkeeping was adopted: “If one’s account is balanced, the difference is 0” (35). The section on Heidegger’s Dasein and on Sartre’s nothingness hinges on their different articulation of the relationship between the human being and nothing. The texts examined here are Heidegger’s lecture “What is Metaphysics?” (1929) and Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943). While Dasein, human existence, “only occurs by being held out in the nothing” (35), so that human beings are compelled “to transcend the whole of being and thereby come into selfhood,” Sartre proposes an anti-Hegelian, anti-dialectical view of this articulation. Nothingness and being are not opposites; rather, nothingness is brought into the world by human beings themselves. Sartre’s idea of nihilation, in Vicks’s reading, refers to Nietzsche’s idea of forgetfulness and perspectivism in the essay “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (1873). In turn, Nietzsche opens the path to the investigation of Derrida, the most important philosophical voice in the book.At this point, having established the theoretical foundations of her argument, Vicks enunciates her central axiom: the essential relation between nothing and narrative (47). Narrative is understood as “any meaning-making structure” that depends on nothing. In order to elaborate on the emergence and the source of narrative, Vicks invokes three unexpected bedfellows: Sartre, Fredric Jameson of The Political Unconscious (1981), and neuroscience (48). Here the question of Nietzschean forgetfulness and perspectivism, so relevant for postmodernism and its post-grand-narratives relativism, becomes the stepping stone toward Derrida’s essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (1966). The essay affirms, in Vicks’s words, that “the absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain of interplay of signification ad infinitum” (50). She carries the concept of Derridean play over into Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque element of language as “cut loose from the rigidity of dominant modes of discourse, from the eternal stability of the transcendental signified” (45). The world of carnival, set free from official discourse and hierarchy, becomes a form of nothingness, endlessly at play. The grafting of Bakhtin’s carnival onto Derrida’s play as figurations of nothing, a nothing capable of generating a whole narrative system, takes Vicks to Julia Kristeva and her theorization of poetic language as centered (or decentered) on the khora, the void, the receptacle that Kristeva envisions as maternal, an otherness akin to nothing and its iconoclastic productivity.Once Vicks’s theoretical frame has been laid out, the book proceeds to examine different figurations of nothing in modern fiction. Each of the five solidly researched chapters opens with the presentation of the most relevant criticism of the specific texts examined, with Vicks offering an exhaustive, reasoned bibliography on the authors she studies. Very often her explications and close readings of the fiction are the most striking and memorable elements of the book. Always guided by her theoretical and critical expertise, she embarks on brilliant and often original analyses of the texts she has chosen. She shows how Nikolai Gogol’s story “The Overcoat” and Herman Melville’s novella Bartleby the Scrivener precede the more extreme images of nothing of the twentieth century. The stories, both centered on language or, better, on the refusal of language, are constructed around a void that Vicks, following Giorgio Agamben, considers the locus of potentiality. Both Akaki Akakievich and Bartleby, caught in their “silence, inaction, colorlessness” (61), are still capable of generating narrative for others, such as the lawyer in the case of Bartleby.The work of Vladimir Nabokov, the focus of chapter 3, seems to best express the author’s understanding of nothing as the transcendental signifier. The readings of Nabokov’s criticism and fiction—for instance, “Signs and Symbols” (1948), The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), Pale Fire (1962), Transparent Things (1972), and Look at the Harlequins (1974), rather than the inevitable Lolita (1955)—trace the process that “construct[s] the knowable world” (100). The world, as much as meaning, language, and the subject, emerge not in contrast to but from nothing, a space where all these elements are always already virtually contained: “It is the gap in the system, and the non-existence of absolute significance that enables the proliferation of meaning-making patterns. . . . This is an idea that touches a deep chord in various theories concerning systems that construct the knowable world.” As in the case of zero in modern mathematics, or of the nothing on which Dasein is founded, or of the infinite play of signifiers in Nabokov’s fiction, reality can only appear in quotations marks: nothing, on which reality is founded, remains inaccessible and can only be glimpsed at through its signifiers. Reality laid bare cannot be reached, only inferred: “Reality without quotation marks is non-existent. . . . There is only ‘reality,’ which is generated through some kind of reflection, contemplation, imagination, subjectivity, fictionalizing” (90).Chapter 4, “Samuel Beckett, Immanence, Language, Nothing,” together with the chapter on Melville, is of special interest to scholars of Anglophone literature. In Beckett’s “aesthetic of lessness” in the novels Murphy (1938), Molloy (1951), and Malone Dies (1951), “the unnameable,” that is, reality without quotation marks, becomes fully unsignifiable, and language is reduced to a minimum “in a highly ambiguous and disconcerting discourse” (106). Beckett, affirms Vicks, reaches “an immanent plane,” the point where both narrative and being are laid bare. Here Gilles Deleuze’s “plane of immanence” is refunctioned as nothing. Once again, immanence, via Beckett and Deleuze, is not pitted against transcendence but, rather, is presented as an infinite and undifferentiated reality, a reservoir for potentiality. This is the territory where subject and object, life and death, can no longer be kept separate; similarly, Vicks notes, “the distinction between human and animal, animal and vegetable, organic and inorganic . . . does not exist” (114). All these binaries come to inhabit a magmatic terrain from which reality in quotation marks will emerge. In a particularly rich and thorough reading of Molloy, Vicks presents the protagonist as the anti-Joycean Ulysses, an impoverished version of Bloom. In Beckett’s text, James Joyce’s ebullient mastery of language, affirms Vicks, is streamlined to a semantic minimalism. We could add that the intermingling of separate categories such as subject/object, human/ nonhuman—an interconnection that has recently become the chief object of inquiry for both new materialism and environmental studies in Joyce’s text—is possible only as hallucination, as, for example, in the intoxicated and altered state of the characters in “Circe.”Not all moments of fusion between opposites are to be understood in terms of immanence: in the context of “Circe,” the melting of the self into the other, of masculinity into femininity, are the oneiric product of intoxication and hallucination. In Molloy, the plane of immanence and its melting of binary oppositions has become the normal experience for the Beckettian nonsubject. Still, as in the case of Akaki Akakievich and Bartleby before him, Molloy feels compelled to speak and to tell: as Vicks points out in one of the most salient passages of the book, “Molloy is the place of infinite nothing that languages” (126). Another moment of Ulysses comes to mind here, one that makes an interesting comparison with Beckett’s management of language, and that the book does not mention: the “Ithaca” episode in which the narrative assumes the question-answer format of Catholic catechism. The narrative voice, which Fredric Jameson interrogates so incisively in The Modernist Papers (2007), seems to be originating from nothing and from nowhere, and not from any specific human character or narrator. This comparison would have complicated the idea of Joyce’s “masterful control of language” (121) that Vicks invokes, or perhaps it could have revealed Beckett’s own mastery, rather than the absence of it, on his text. In any case, for Vicks nothing is never a sign of nihilism but, rather, “a plentiful void, pure potentiality of infinite being” (126).The final chapter, “Victor Pelevin’s Void and the Post-Soviet Condition,” is the most interesting and striking of the book. Here the question of nothing is, on the one hand, studied in its connection with “the postmodern condition” and postmodernism and, on the other, treated as part of a specific historical and political moment, that of post-Soviet Russia. For the first time history and culture emerge as part, albeit only part, of Vicks’s discussion, after having been, in the rest of the book, swept under the rug of a transhistorical and immanent view of language and philosophy. The title of Pelevin’s novel, Generation P, where “P” stands for Pepsi, has been translated into English as Homo Zapiens, an allusion to the modern Russian individual zapping through the newly available myriad of TV channels. The deep void of post-Soviet society is historicized as the void of consumerism: Russian culture is now besieged by commodities and emptied of any value and meaning, as, according to Pelevin, the decline of literary production and readership reveals. Under these conditions the literary work can only parody, if not simulate, the culture that produced it. Cultural void is dramatized by the void of the text, where “men are conglomerations of images and brands” (146). Pelevin’s work, “aware of the simulative nature of reality and the notion of a divine absurdity structuring existence” (137), centers on postmodern self-reflexivity. Vicks points out that his work illustrates three different types of void: that invoked by Western postmodernism, that of the experimentalism of the Russian artistic avant-gardes of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and, finally, that of Zen Buddhism. While the extremely interesting issue of Zen Buddhism is unfortunately not developed, we hear much more about a new brand of nothing, the capitalist “nihilistic nothing, rendering its subjects empty vessels through which to channel money (which of course, is another type of nothing), and reducing all meaning and truth to a consumer rating or a price-tag” (143–44). In this perverse version of a Buddhist perspective on nothing (one could also think of the Taoist mu, emptiness), the human subject does not feel at one with the universe, as a Zen version of nothing would prescribe. Rather, the subject becomes one with the commodity, while reality has been taken over by simulation, for instance compulsive TV-watching. Even more interesting and illuminating is the discussion of Russian avant-garde art, particularly conceptualism. Vitaly Komar and Aleksander Melamid’s SOTS-ART, Russia’s answer to Andy Warhol’s pop art, as well as Ilya Kabachov’s work, debunk the imagery of socialist realism by overexposing it and therefore simulating it. The void of these images is pitted by the avant-garde artist against a more optimistic view of nothing as capable of acting as a creative force.The originality of Vicks’s book lies in her choice to reflect on nothing, rather than taking up the better known critique of negativity or nihilism. In so doing, Vicks situates her analysis in a specific theoretical field: that of Heideggerian and Derridean philosophy, focused on ontology and openly antagonistic to the dialectic and to transcendence. At the same time, Vicks’s stress on language and narrative excludes any materialist reading of nothingness, that is, she leaves out the materialism that is built into the problem on which her entire discussion hinges: this is the question of how reality comes into being, on which Western philosophy has speculated since its beginning. The specificity of Vicks’s theoretical and methodological choice is both the strength and the weakness of her book. This becomes particularly evident in the chapter on Beckett. In order to explain “Beckett’s plane of immanence,” Vicks turns, briefly, to Deleuze and Spinoza, without mentioning a whole other tradition of Western philosophy that privileges a materialist view of immanence. This tradition takes us back to the pre-Socratic atomism of Democritus and Lucretius, to Spinoza, Vico, Marx, as well as to certain aspects of Heidegger’s thought, as Louis Althusser explains in Philosophy of the Encounter (2006). In turn, this line of immanent materialism takes us to the more recent speculations of new materialism and posthuman theory, for instance in Donna Haraway’s and Bruno Latour’s work, and even more to the theory of the event in the work of Deleuze and Alain Badiou. This theoretical frame would have productively challenged and complicated Vicks’s method and argument. If the book had presented the question of immanence in these terms, and shown reality to be the product of the encounter of different, historically traceable elements, the book would have avoided its unwitting occasional slippage into the language of transcendence: see, for instance, the “Truth with capital T” Vicks argues about in the case of Nabokov, when nothing as a form of postmodern immanence becomes hypostatized as the Truth, capitalized to signal its absolute, nonhuman-made value.Widening her theoretical repertoire to include the discourse of post-atomism and of the event would have allowed Vicks to think about nothing historically. As things stand, the language that emerges from the khora is transhistorical and, as such, immutable. Gogol and Melville are introduced as predecessors of the twentieth-century interest in nothing, without any specific reason suggested for the appearance of such narratives in the middle of the nineteenth century in two very different countries. A few questions are in order: Why does the book focus on the twentieth century as the century of nothing in literature? How does the modern interest in nothing measure up, by contrast, with the horror vacui of Baroque seventeenth-century culture? Why does the paradigm of nothing, of void, get reversed about three centuries later? How would the book deal with the destruction of the self elaborated by Georges Bataille or by Jean Genet, arguably another important figuration of nothing in the twentieth century?At several points Vicks seems open to the necessary historicization of her problematic. In the introduction, for example, she mentions a number of artists and their aesthetics in terms that call for a discussion that goes beyond formalism and philosophy: post–World War I Dada, Vladimir Mayakovski, Andrei Platanov, the composers Arvo Pärt, John Cage, Keith Jarrett, as well as Mark Rothko, Yves Klein, and Andy Warhol, all seem to open the space for a cultural critique that never materializes. This is the case with the work of Victor Pelevin, which both the writer himself and Vicks relate to the economic and cultural condition of post-Soviet Russia. Another consequence of the lack of historicity in the book and of Vicks’s choice to present nothing as transhistorical is her turn to postmodernity and postmodernism as mainly a matter of language and style. Even if the author mentions “the postmodern condition” and “the crisis of modernity in the West” (136), hardly any attention is paid to the historical and cultural aspects of postmodernity. Here the work of David Harvey, in addition to that of Derrida, Maurice Blanchot, and the barely mentioned Jean Baudrillard and François Lyotard, would have been useful to give postmodernity a more substantial representation. The fact that nothing “is the transcendental signifier of the 20th century” (175), and that “nothing [is] the truest reality that cannot be registered by human ways of knowing,” are the most exciting and problematic points of this original book: on the one hand, these statements invoke Lacan, and, on the other, they echo Jameson’s lament of the loss of totality, as well as of the possibility to recognize it and map it. At the same time, the totality of nothing, rather than embodying the full reality and image of capital that Jameson is after, tends to become a form of the sublime. As such it manifests itself in fragments, gaps, silences, and “the abyss.” Ultimately, it is caught in the all-too-airless space of aesthetics, here a sort of postmodern art for art’s sake, as harbinger of the ineffable, and of an immanence that is not part of human temporality.

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Twentieth Century Literature

Absurdism | Art | Contradiction | Epistemology | Literature | Meaning (existential) | Narrative | Nothing | Philosophy