Postmodern Nihilism: Theory and Literature

336 Pages·2006·1.95 MB·English

by  Will Slocombe

Postmodern Nihilism: Theory and Literature

Will Slocombe

What follows was originally presented to the University of Wales, Aberystwyth for the
qualification of PhD in English in September 2003. A revised version has subsequently been
published, w ith m ajor changes prim arily to the ―Literature‖ section, as Nihilism and the
Sublime Postmodern: The (Hi) Story of a Difficult Relationship (Routledge, 2006).
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Table of Contents

Table of Contents ii

List of Tables and Diagrams iv

Acknowledgements v

Abstract vi

‘T he Preface’ 1

Part I: Theory
1. Ex nihilo: Constructing Nihilism 5
Generating Nihilism 10
Humanist Nihilism (1799-1851) 16
Anti-Authoritarian Nihilism (1852-1871) 20
Anti-Humanist Nihilism (1872-1888) 26
Authoritarian Nihilism (1889-1945) 31

2. Stylising the Sublime 40
Sublime Texts and their Contexts 42
The Burkean Formulation of the Sublime 47
The Kantian Formulation of the Sublime 55
The Romantic Sublime 67

3. Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern 75
A Postmodern Enlightenment? 77
The Sublime Postmodern I: Lyotard and the Unpresentable 84
Nihilism and the Lyotardian Sublime 94
The Sublime Postmodern II: Baudrillard and the Hyperreal 101
Nihilism and the Baudrillardian Sublime 109

4. Postmodern Nihilism 114
‗Truth is untrue‘: N ihilism , Relativism , and Pluralism 116
‗N othing w as w hat it is‘: N ihilism and Poststructuralism 122
‗E verything looked and sounded unreal‘: N ihilism and Postm odernism 134
Postmodern Nihilism 147

Part II: Literature
5. ‘W elcom e to the Fall’: N ihilism and Apocalypse 157
(Post)Modern Apocalypses 160
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The Writing of the (Postmodern) Disaster 171
Nuclear Criticism and Nuclear Writing 180
The Apocalyptic Desert 186

6. There is Nothing at which to Laugh: Nihilism and the Absurd 198
Twentieth-Century Tragedy and Existential Absurdity 199
Postmodern Absurdity 212
The Quotidian and the Quixotic: Writing Postmodern Fictions 225

7. B eing ‘Absent-M inded’: T ow ards an ‘E thical’ N ihilism 236
Blank Fiction: The ‗E thical N ihilism ‘ of Postm odernity 240
(En)Gendering Absence 250
Being ‗A bsent-M inded‘: Silence in Postm odern Literature 265

8. ‘N everland’: T he Space of N ihilism 273
Everything is Constructed: From Time to Space 275
Nothing is Constructed: From Space to Non-Space 284
N ihilism ‗at the D oor‘ of the Textual House 290
Haunting the Textual House: The Space of Nihilism 299

‘T he Preface Again’ 310

Bibliography 317
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List of Tables and Diagrams

Tables:
3.1 Nihilistic and Sublime Moments within Ideologies 83

4.1 Nihilisms before Postmodernism 148

Diagrams:

4.2 Modernist Nihilism 150

4.3 Postmodern Nihilism 151

6.1 The ‗Both/A nd‘ 234

8.1 Nihilism and Narrative Proliferation 289
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Acknowledgements

A debt of thanks goes to my supervisor, Dr Tim Woods, who frequently pointed out those
things that I, had I any intellectual ability, should have thought of myself. His guidance and
criticisms have been invaluable and the ego massages that his comments have sometimes
provided have seen me through this project when my own confidence has faltered. His
attempts to instil some form of academic respectability in me during my seven years at
Aberystwyth may not have been entirely successful, but most of my ability is due to his
patient tutoring. Aside from him (Him?), further thanks must also go to Dr Damian
Walford Davies for his sublime summation of the sublime – a not-so-ironic je ne sais quoi –
and to Malte Urban for his invaluable assistance in translation during our numerous coffee
mornings (and afternoons) at the Arts Centre.

The University of Wales, Aberystwyth kindly provided the research studentship required to
see this project to fruition and the members of department of English have provided much
appreciated support in all manner of ways. Without these, this product of teenage angst
would have remained just that, and I am grateful for the opportunity to prove myself more
than merely another aging teen-nihilist. My final thanks go to my fiancée, Jennie Hill, who
has struggled to proofread what was often Greek to her, despite having plenty of her own
work to do, and who has pointed out that no matter how many theses I complete, I will still
always be a teen-nihilist at heart.

It is with considerable shame that I must therefore admit that this thesis is dedicated to none
of these. It is, and can only ever be, ‗to no-one in particular‘.
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Abstract

This thesis examines the relationship between nihilism and postmodernism in relation to the
sublime, and is divided into two parts: theory and literature. Beginning with histories of
nihilism and the sublime, the Enlightenment is constructed as a conflict between the two.
Rather than promote a simple binarism, however, nihilism is constructed as a temporally-
displaced form of sublimity that is merely labelled as nihilism because of the dominant
ideologies at the time. Postmodernism, as a product of the Enlightenment, is therefore
implicitly related to both nihilism and the sublime, despite the fact that it is often characterised
as either nihilistic or sublim e. W hereas prior form s of nihilism are ‗m odernist‘ because they
seek to codify reality, postmodernism creates a new formulation of nihilism – ‗postm odern
nihilism ‘ – that is itself sublime. This is explored in relation to a broad survey of postmodern
literature through a series of interconnected themes. These themes – apocalypse, the absurd,
absence, and space – arise from the debates presented in the theoretical chapters of this
thesis, and demonstrate the ways in which nihilism and the sublime interact within
postmodern literature. Because of the theoretical and literary debates presented within it, this
thesis concludes that it cannot be a thesis at all.
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‘T he Preface’

This thesis can be summarised as an exploration of nihilism in relation to postmodern theory
and literature. This is not to say that it is a survey of all occurrences of nihilism within
postmodern literature, however, because there is more at stake than merely observing what
others have already observed: what is at stake, the ‗ante‘ that is put forw ard, is, broadly
speaking, the future of nihilism . There is m uch m ore to nihilism than m erely ‗rage against
Being‘ or ‗the destruction of Being‘, and so the future of nihilism is not sim ply a ‗nihilism of
the future‘, a perception of the future in w hich all is bleak, but the m eans by w hich w e adm it
G ianni V attim o‘s call for philosophy today ‗to recognise nihilism is our (only) chance‘.1
A lthough the argum ent presented here is different from V attim o‘s, the fact nevertheless
remains that nihilism – the philosophy of absence and nothingness – must remain
paradoxically ‗present‘ w ithin philosophy and culture. Its eradication w ould hail a new
fundamentalism, a new Enlightenment perhaps even more damaging than the first. Nihilism
is our (only) chance.
The approach to nihilism that this thesis proposes is a new formulation of nihilism
based upon postmodern theory – a ‗postm odern‘ nihilism . A lthough m any critics argue that
postmodernism is nihilistic, others argue that postmodernism is a response to an earlier
‗m odernist‘ nihilism . These tw o argum ents are incom m ensurable and so this thesis does not
hope to resolve them, but to instead move them into the arena of the sublime. Although a
number of studies link postmodernism and nihilism, and others link postmodernism and the

1 David Levin, The Opening of Vision: Nihilism and the Postmodern Situation (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 5; Gianni
Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-modern Culture, trans. by Jon R. Snyder
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), p. 23.
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sublime, none have yet explicitly linked nihilism and the sublime within postmodernism
despite the fact that the Enlightenment origins of nihilism and the sublime suggest a link
between the two. Nihilism, assumed by most to be a negative signifier, an adjective to
describe that which is bleak and hopeless, and the sublime, frequently interpreted as the
positive signifier, rich in potential for ethics, are not as distinct as might be assumed. It
would be facile and obvious to conclude that both nihilism and the sublime mean different
things to different people. Rather, we must establish why these divisions occur, and so this
thesis is as much an excavation of the cultural etymology of these signifiers as it is about
how they function in relation to postmodern literature.
The first half of this thesis is concerned with the theoretical aspects of nihilism,
postmodernism, and the sublime. Histories of nihilism (chapter one) and the sublime
(chapter two) will be discussed and compared, and will then be used in the construction of
postmodernism. Nihilism and the sublime exist as parallel movements throughout the
history of modernity. Postmodernism, as the culmination of that movement, therefore
incorporates both nihilism and the sublime. This association of postmodernism with nihilism
does not mean that postmodernism is (nihilistically) negative because postmodernism is both
sublim e (w e should talk about the ‗sublim e postm odern, not the ‗postm odern sublim e‘) and
nihilistic. Perceived in this way, postmodernism merely inverts the oppositional hierarchy of
nihilism and the sublime seen during the Enlightenment period. Thus, nihilism and the
sublime form the divisions of the final two theoretical chapters, although rather than
histories, these are accounts of how the two concepts interact within contemporary theory
and postm odernism . This study is separated into chapters on the ‗sublim e postm odern‘
(chapter three) and ‗postm odern nihilism ‘ (chapter four), thereby defining the differences
between nihilism and the sublime within the postmodern. This construction suggests a
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‗postm odern‘ form ulation of nihilism , distinct from earlier form s, that is itself sublim e,
w hich is also called ‗reflexive nihilism ‘ or ‗deconstructive nihilism ‘.
The second half of the thesis concentrates on how ‗postm odern nihilism ‘ appears in
postmodern literature. It is intended as a broad survey that, rather than emphasising a
particular author or set of authors (although this does occur in places), covers a broad cross-
section of postmodern writing in order to demonstrate a number of concepts and their
developm ent w ithin the literature of postm odernism . A lthough the ‗literature of
postm odernism ‘ is a problem atic label, this thesis form ulates it quite broadly. It includes not
only texts that exhibit a postmodern aesthetic, but also those that are produced under the
econom ic and social ‗conditions‘ of postm odernity. Thus, w hilst authors such as Paul A uster
and Thomas Pynchon are considered postmodern because of the forms their novels take –
demonstrating intertextuality, ontological instability, and openness, for example – we may
also consider authors such as Bret Easton Ellis and Denis Johnson postmodern in the sense
that they are writing both about and within a condition of postmodernity.
For the purposes of this thesis, postmodernism will be argued to be both historic,
suggesting the interpretations of critics such as Fredric Jameson and David Harvey, and
aesthetic, suggesting the interpretation of Jean-François Lyotard. In fact, the theoretical nature
of the first part of the thesis w ill show that postm odernism is a ‗historicised aesthetic‘. For
this reason, the second half of this thesis does not follow the loose chronological structure
of the first half, but suggests a number of themes that emerge from the conflation of
nihilism and the sublime: apocalypse (chapter five), the absurd (chapter six), absence
(chapter seven), and ‗space‘ (chapter eight). A ll literary texts cited in these chapters include
years of publication with their first mention in the body of the thesis (note that if published
in a foreign language first, it is this year, and not the year of the first English translation, that
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is used). These are included because although the literary chapters do not follow a
chronological structure this does not necessarily preclude a shift in emphasis as the concept
of postmodernism develops. Thus, such a measure will enable the reader to gauge whether
such a shift occurs.
A disclaimer is also required at this point: no translations in this thesis are mine. The
history of both nihilism and the sublime are often entwined with the predominantly French,
German, and Russian languages and cultures that produced them. Where possible, non-
English phrases are explained through different translations of texts and translators of
certain phrases are indicated for the sake of the clarity. Thus, some of the readings presented
in this thesis will already have been filtered through a translator before the analysis presented
here. This is an intractable problem, but one that does not invalidate the readings presented.
Any different translations indicated within the thesis are therefore the result of contrary
translations and any mistakes noted by the reader are purely my own.
Parts of C hapter E ight, ‗―N everland‖: The Space of N ihilism ‘, appear in the essay
‗‗This is not for you‖: N ihilism and the House that Jacques Built‘, in Nihilism: Theory and
Praxis, ed. by Alan Pratt (forthcoming from SUNY Press).