Power in the tongue

This dissertation challenges the well-worn claim that literary modernism eschewed ethics in favor of aesthetics, devoting itself single-mindedly to art for art's sake. Far from ignoring ethical concerns, many modernist authors evacuate them from their traditional spheres of character and event and relocate them into different aspects of the novel, particularly speech and conversational dynamics. The nineteenth-century novel expressed moral judgments of characters' actions, and so conveyed a kind of moral code, through the vicissitudes of plot as it bears on character: rewarding virtue and punishing vice. Modernists famously entertained a "suspicion toward plot" (Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot ), crafting narratives to represent the arbitrariness of a fragmented world in which all guarantees of ultimate justice are void. This suspicion toward plot, however, is hardly tantamount to an abandonment of the ethical work that plot used to perform. Rather, modernist authors relocated ethics into new and perhaps subtler realms, particularly that of speech and conversational dynamics. Scholarship has paid insufficient attention to this relocation of ethics because of an instrumental bias in our view of speech; that is, the assumption that speech functions chiefly as a relay system between internal thought and the external world rather than as a realm of action unto itself and thus a fitting stage for moral action. The dissertation offers readings of works by disparate modern authors who have challenged this assumption and accorded speech a special role in the ethical work their fictions perform. I take especial interest in contexts where speech and thought are unusually separate (i.e. immigrant speech, demonic possession), for these cases most readily demonstrate the power of speech as an independent realm of moral action. The Yiddish fables of Eliezer Shteynbarg, offer an ideal study in the subversive modernism possible in a traditional folk genre. Isaac Bashevis Singer presents speech as a potent and usually destructive force independent of thought or human will. This chapter considers both fantastic and naturalistic works, arguing that for Bashevis Singer, the underworld of demons and dybbuks that inhabit and speak through innocent maidens is perilously close to the fashionable moral bankruptcy to which the salon culture of conversation inexorably leads. A chapter on Vladimir Nabokov argues that this consummate aesthete grounds a system of moral relations in speech. Finally, we turn to Saul Bellow to illustrate an alternate relocation of ethics into the human body, where bypass verbal communication in their ethical interactions.