Embodiment and the Cosmic Perspective in Twentieth-Century Fiction

235 Pages·2020·3.131 MB·English

by  Marco Caracciolo

Embodiment and the Cosmic
Perspective in Twentieth-Century
Fiction
In dialogue with groundbreaking technologies and scientific models,
twentieth-century fiction presents readers with a vast mosaic of perspec-
tives on the cosmos. The literary imagination of the world beyond the
human scale, however, faces a fundamental difficulty: if, as researchers
in both cognitive science and narrative theory argue, fiction is a prac-
tice geared toward the human embodied mind, how can it cope with
scientific theories and concepts—the Big Bang, quantum physics, evo-
lutionary biology, and so on—that resist our common-sense intuitions
and appear discontinuous, in spatial as well as temporal terms, with our
bodies? This book sets out to answer this question by showing how the
embodiment of mind continues to matter even as writers—and readers—
are pushed out of their terrestrial comfort zone. Offering thoughtful
commentary on work by both mainstream literary authors and science
fiction writers (from Primo Levi to Jeanette Winterson, from Olaf Sta-
pledon to Pamela Zoline), Embodiment and the Cosmic Perspective in
Twentieth- Century Fiction explores the multiple ways in which narra-
tive can radically defamiliarize our bodily experience and bridge the
gap with cosmic realities. This investigation affords an opportunity to
reflect on the role of literature as it engages with science and charts its
epistemological and ethical ramifications.
Marco Caracciolo received a PhD in Comparative Literature from the
University of Bologna, Italy, in 2012. He is an Associate Professor of
English and Literary Theory at Ghent University in Belgium, where he
leads “Narrating the Mesh,” a collaborative project on contemporary
narrative and the nonhuman. His work has appeared in journals such
as New Literary History, Contemporary Literature, Poetics Today,
and Narrative. He is the author of three books: The Experientiality of
Narrative: An Enactivist Approach (De Gruyter, 2014; honorable men-
tion for the Perkins Prize of the International Society for the Study of
Narrative), Strange Narrators in Contemporary Fiction (University of
Nebraska Press, 2016), and A Passion for Specificity (co-authored with
psychologist Russell Hurlburt; Ohio State University Press, 2016).
Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature
Baroque Lorca
An Archaist Playwright for the New Stage
Andrés Pérez-Simón
Hope and Aesthetic Utility in Modernist Literature
Tim DeJong
Exploring the Horror of Supernatural Fiction
Ray Bradbury’s Elliott Family
Edited by Miranda Corcoran and Steve Gronert Ellerhoff
Aesthetic and Philosophical Reflections on Mood
Stimmung and Modernity
Birgit Breidenbach
Modernism and Modernity in British Women’s Magazines
Alice Wood
Queering Modernist Translation
The Poetics of Race, Gender, and Queerness
Christian Bancroft
Modernist Literature and European Identity
Birgit Van Puymbroeck
Embodiment and the Cosmic Perspective in
Twentieth-Century Fiction
Marco Caracciolo
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com
Embodiment and the
Cosmic Perspective in
Twentieth-Century Fiction
Marco Caracciolo
First published 2020
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an
informa business
© 2020 Taylor & Francis
The right of Marco Caracciolo to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections
77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
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trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-51720-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-05493-1 (ebk)
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Living within Narrow Limits 1
1 Strange Spaces 25
2 The Cosmology of Everyday Life 51
3 Sex and the Cosmos 81
4 Posthuman Time Faces the Hard Problem 109
5 Bodies from Outer Space 141
6 The Wide, Wide Cosmos 169
Coda: And So What? 199
References 205
Index 221
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Acknowledgments
The first draft of this book was completed during a fellowship at the
Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS), University of Freiburg,
Germany. I am grateful to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for
making my stay at FRIAS possible. As for Alexander von Humboldt
himself—the German naturalist to whom we owe the word “cosmos” in
its modern usage—I can hardly hope to have done justice to his startling
vision of the totality of things. But FRIAS proved to be an immensely
productive context in which to worry about Humboldt’s legacy. It has
been a pleasure to spend close to two years in such a stimulating and
friendly environment, under the gentle shade of the nearby Black Forest.
Thanks go to the director of FRIAS, Bernd Kortmann, and the insti-
tute’s Fellows in 2015–17, particularly Alice Blumenthal-Dramé, Luca
Corlatti, Benoît Dillet, Julia Elsky, Sabine Hake, Kate Rigby, and Evi
Zemanek. I was lucky enough to be a member of this interdisciplin-
ary community and participate in many inspiring and wide- ranging
conversations—some of them about issues discussed in this book.
I would also like to thank the administrative team (in particular, Nik
Binder, Petra Fischer, Britta Küst, Helen Pert, and Katharina Seibel)
for their patience, humor, and keen interest in the Fellows’ ideas and
background.
Many friends and colleagues in the field of narrative theory contrib-
uted, directly or indirectly, to the ideas laid out in this book. Monika
Fludernik, my Humboldt host, was truly a wonderful host both per-
sonally and intellectually. Porter Abbott offered—as ever—insightful
comments on parts of this book; conversations or correspondence with
Ridvan Askin, Lars Bernaerts, Marco Bernini, David Herman, Luc Her-
man, Liesbeth Korthals Altes, Karin Kukkonen, Merja Polvinen, David
Rodriguez, Bart Vervaeck, and Eva von Contzen shaped my understand-
ing of narrative, embodiment, and the nonhuman in ways that can un-
doubtedly be traced in these pages.
Sections of Chapter 4 build on my article “Posthuman Narration as a
Test Bed for Experientiality: The Case of Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos,”
which appeared in Partial Answers 16, no. 2 (2018). Mark Harman
graciously granted me permission to use his translation of Franz Kafka’s
viii Acknowledgments
“A Message from the Emperor” in this book’s introduction. The transla-
tion, which first appeared in The New York Review of Books in 2011, is
forthcoming in Harman’s Annotated Kafka (Harvard University Press).
I put together the final version of this manuscript while at Ghent Uni-
versity. I would like to acknowledge the European Research Council
for funding “Narrating the Mesh,” my current research project, which
was conceived in Freiburg alongside this book and develops its focus
on the narrative imagination of the nonhuman. I am grateful to Shan-
non Lambert for her thoughtful comments on this book and to many
other colleagues at Ghent University for creating such an enjoyable and
welcoming academic environment. Over the course of this book’s some-
what complicated peer review history, four anonymous readers offered
perceptive feedback. At Routledge, Michelle Salyga’s enthusiasm and
professionalism provided key encouragement to bring this project to
fruition.
Above all, I am indebted to Wibke Schniedermann for getting me out
of the carp pond.
Introduction
Living within Narrow Limits
He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things,
and not in the significances. Fifty degrees below zero meant eighty-
odd degrees of frost. Such fact impressed him as being cold and
uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead him to meditate
upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man’s frailty
in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and
cold; and from there on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of
immortality and man’s place in the universe.
(London 1998, 342)
Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” tells the story of a man who sets out to
explore the Yukon Territories in the dead of winter, accompanied only
by a husky. The man experiences the extreme cold but fails to realize
how life-threatening it can be; his foolish decision to venture out in this
frozen landscape results, in the space of a few pages, in an unceremo-
nious death under the dog’s puzzled gaze. In the above-quoted passage,
London explicates the man’s recklessness via two linked counterfac-
tual scenarios (“It did not lead him…and from there on it did not lead
him…”). The man’s fate is doubly defined by his failures: first, the failure
to acknowledge the physical limits of his body, and how even minor
variations in temperature pose a mortal danger to the kind of animals
that we are; and second, the failure to abstract from this condition and
appreciate “his frailty as a creature of temperature.”
The physical constraints that determine the man’s death reflect the evo-
lutionary history of our species: natural selection fine-tuned our bodies to
survive not just on Earth, but on a fraction of its crust at (or close to) sea
level. Even in less dramatic circumstances than those faced by London’s
character, our experience of the body is, fundamentally, an experience of
“narrow limits.” We can push back some of these limits—we can learn
to swim, for example, and we can probably train our bodies to run a
marathon—but whatever progress we make remains, in the grand scheme
of things, quite modest: without technology augmenting our bodies, we
can’t run as fast as cheetahs, or extract oxygen from water like fish, or
take flight like birds. Throughout our lives, our bodies are defined by