Resisting the Reader: Textual Recalcitrance in British Novels, 1917-2011

Abstract

In “Resisting the Reader: Textual Recalcitrance in British Novels, 1917-2011,” I focus on a radical, underexamined type of difficulty which presents irreducible interpretive dilemmas at fundamental narrative levels—for example, a reader may be required to fill in gaps to complete the narrative but is unable to. Unlike what James Phelan calls “the difficult,” recalcitrance does not yield to our interpretation. Existing scholarship has mostly focused on the canonical works of “the difficult” in modernist and postmodern literature. I intervene in the scholarship by investigating the wide appeal to recalcitrance across the century, including previously overlooked late modernist and contemporary literature. Moreover, I analyze various forms of recalcitrance in different types of fiction, not just canonical or highbrow. This large scope allows me to trace how later authors repurpose modernist techniques, including recalcitrance, for new ends. I argue that recalcitrance is an effective strategy to lay bare the workings of a text. For example, in Molloy, Samuel Beckett taps into the recalcitrant lists and catechism in James Joyce’s Ulysses to fashion his lists and in turn critique traditional emplotment. Moreover, in The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes uses unreliable narration to keep readers interested in tracing the narrator’s reevaluation of his past. Recalcitrance is equally powerful in foregrounding social issues that are so complex that they can never be fully solved. For instance, Joseph Conrad’s underappreciated wartime story “The Tale” uses recalcitrance to register the public’s antithetical attitudes toward wartime rumors of submarine attacks. In the afterword, I analyze how Malaysian-Taiwanese novelist Yong-Ping Li’s The End of the River critiques colonial exploitation of Indigenous women by reworking Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. Through my afterword, I gesture toward future work on 1) additional sites of recalcitrance beyond British or Anglophone literature and 2) the transformations of modernist narrative techniques, including those bearing on recalcitrance, in global novels. My dissertation contributes to the New Modernist Studies by accounting for transnational exchange (such as Li’s rewriting of Conrad) and drawing attention to authors who are largely unfamiliar to American academia, namely Anna Kavan, Ann Quin, and Li.