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978-1-108-49602-5 — Tragedy and the Modernist Novel

Manya Lempert
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TRAGEDY AND THE MODERNIST NOVEL

This study of tragic fiction in European modernism brings together

novelists who espoused, in their view, a Greek vision of tragedy and a
Darwinian vision of nature. To their minds, both tragedy and natural
history disclosed unwarranted suffering at the center of life. Thomas
Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus, and Samuel Beckett broke
with entrenched philosophical and scientific traditions that sought to
exclude chance and undeserved pains from tragedy and evolutionary
biology. Tragedy and the Modernist Novel uncovers a temporality
central to tragic novels’ structure and ethics: that of the moment.
These authors made novelistic plot the delivery system for lethal
natural and historical forces, and then countered such plot with
moments of protest – characters’ fleeting dissent against
unjustifiable harms.

  is Assistant Professor of English at the University

of Arizona. She specializes in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century
novel, ancient and modern tragedy and philosophy, and theories of
evolution.

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978-1-108-49602-5 — Tragedy and the Modernist Novel
Manya Lempert
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© in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press
978-1-108-49602-5 — Tragedy and the Modernist Novel
Manya Lempert
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TRAGEDY AND THE

MODERNIST NOVEL

MANYA LEMPERT
University of Arizona

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Manya Lempert
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Manya Lempert
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For my mother

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Manya Lempert
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Contents

Acknowledgments page ix

 Introduction: Modernist Tragedy 

Attic Novelists 
Tragedy versus Philosophy 
Tragic Nature 
Modernism versus Nihilism 
Tragic Sociality and Overview of Chapters 

 Hardy’s Theory of Tragic Character 

Neo-Greek Modernism 
Hardy versus Plato and Aristotle 
Two Tesses 
Sue’s Reversals 
Scapegoating 
Nightmare Skies 

 Woolf and Darwin: Tragic Time Scales and Chances 

Immitigable Trees 
Darwinian Tuchē 
Jane Ellen Harrison’s Ritual 
Gilbert Murray’s Tragedy 
Friedrich Nietzsche’s Love of Fate 
Not “Amor fati” but “It is enough!” 
Woolf’s Tragic Chances 

 Camus’s Modernist Forms and the Ethics of Tragedy 

Camus’s Idea of Tragedy 
The Moment in Camus and Woolf 
Camus versus Sartre 
Janine: A Moment of Being 
Jacques and Jessica: Tragic Affirmation 
The Absurd Meursault 
The “good modern nihilist” Clamence 

vii

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viii Contents
 Beckett: Against Nihilism 
The Unnamable: “alleviations of flight from self” 
Losing Species: From Mahood to Worm 
Beckett’s Oedipus and Lispector’s Mystic 
Nihilism and Recoil from Nihilism 
Beckett’s Ancient Philosophy 
No Counter-Tragic Calm 
Company: “That was I. That was I then.” 
Palliative Moments 

Notes 
Bibliography 
Index 

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Acknowledgments

With their incomparable support, Dorothy Hale, Ann Banfield, and

Catherine Gallagher have made this book possible. Dori, exemplar and
mentor, has been my lodestar. Virtuosic and giving, Ann has shown me
the way. Cathy has been the finest interlocutor and ally.
At Stanford, Brett Bourbon and Josh Landy kindled my interest in
modernism and philosophy early on. At the University of California,
Berkeley, Debarati Sanyal and Chenxi Tang crystallized my thinking in
their French and German seminars. Juliana Chow, Spencer Engler-
Coldren, Seulghee Lee, Rosa Martinez, Rasheed Tazudeen, and Sunny
Xiang have been my muses and confidants. I am grateful to the Mabelle
McLeod Lewis Memorial Fund for affording me the time to finish my
dissertation. Ian Duncan has fostered this work with his sparkling conver-
sation and unstinting generosity. Maura Nolan has been an unparalleled
advisor on tragedy.
At Tilburg Philosophy Summer School, Simon Critchley inspired and
encouraged me. At the University of Arizona, Laura Berry championed
this work. David Sterling Brown, trusted comrade, wrote with me. Paul
Hurh and Lynda Zwinger were crucial readers in departmental review.
Homer Pettey commented on drafts shrewdly and indefatigably. For their
invaluable guidance, I also relied on Dan Blanton, Jennifer Jenkins, Doug
Mao, Ander Monson, Trudy Obi, and Johanna Skibsrud. Ronan McDo-
nald and Ato Quayson were vital and indispensable manuscript readers.
Catherine Flynn and Cindy Weinstein gave pivotal advice, and Arum Park
and Sarah Weinstein provided decisive assistance with manuscript prepa-
ration. Carolyn Vega at the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection
helped me a great deal. I would also like to recognize the labor of Stephanie
Sakson, and that of Edgar Mendez at Cambridge University Press. Earlier
versions of parts of Chapters  and  have appeared as “Virginia Woolf,
Charles Darwin, and the Rebirth of Tragedy,” Twentieth-Century Litera-
ture , no.  (): –, and as “Thomas Hardy’s Theory of Tragic
ix

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x Acknowledgments
Character,” Studies in the Novel , no.  (): –. I owe much to
these journals’ editors; I appreciate their permission to incorporate that
material here.
Craig Hoyt at the University of California, San Francisco, has been my
lifelong proponent. I am indebted to Jeff Deutsch and David Lewis for
their friendship and collaboration. Charlotte Goodwin, Maria Robinson,
and Miriam Rosenfeld have buoyed me up since childhood. From college
to Cal to the desert, Peter Nilson has been my sine qua non. He is the
sustaining force behind this work.
To Ray Ryan, who endorsed and welcomed me at Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, and who saw this book to completion, I owe every thanks.

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