Modernity after holiness: Time and its other in Herman Melville and Victor-Levy Beaulieu.

Abstract

The first part of the present work elaborates the "problem" that concerns the study as a whole, namely the crisis in historical consciousness that figures prominently in the fiction of Herman Melville and Victor-Levy Beaulieu. This crisis has as its zero degree the humiliation of historical paradigms and the failure of traditional theodicy that Pierre, or The Ambiguities and Sagamo Job J narrativize. The apprehension of a nonsensical totality of being results in the "horror of history" (Eliade), which dread precipitates various modes of forgetfulness and uchronia. A stalemate emerges from the readings in Chapter One: on the one hand, a solipsistic textual infinite is opened by the death of the fiction of the end; on the other hand, the will to sainthood and eternity portends a form of Western nihilism. It is this "dead wall" of metaphysics that inspires the effort to think more and differently in the chapters that follow. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)