Modernism and the Event: Lawrence, Lewis, and the Agency of the "Evental Subject"

Abstract

This dissertation examines D.H. Lawrence’s and Wyndham Lewis’s exploration of the evental subject, and asks how their work might help us understand agency in a way that does not discount powerful forms of socio-historical determinism. Examining a variety of their critical and fictional writing from the first three decades of the twentieth century, I argue that Lawrence and Lewis explore ways of thinking about the subject’s relationship to radical novelty without occluding the constraining forces of mass culture. Challenging conventional modernist forms of novelty which seek to except themselves from forces of historical and social determination, they pursue a form of novelty that emerges from these forces, yet radically reconfigures the world that history has produced. Similarly, even though the “evental subject” is conditioned by the forms of relation encoded by society, its agency lies in the power to transfigure the modes of being that have been normalized. The evental subject is not an autonomous source of agency that is exempted from the social order, but derives its agency from reconceptualizing the nature of social embeddedness—understanding social relations as unpredictably generative rather than narrowly limiting. In this regard, the forms of subjectivity articulated by Lawrence and Lewis substantially anticipate, and are illuminated by, Alain Badiou’s theory of the event. Chapter 1 argues that Lawrence’s Study of Thomas Hardy and Studies in Classic American Literature approach the problem of the evental subject largely in terms of affect, understanding the subject not as the preexistent and stable bearer of affective experience, but as the processual product of mutually-constituting affective relationships. Chapter 2 examines Women in Love to find Lawrence negotiating love as an affective site of radical subjective possibility that reconfigures the cultural norms through which intimate relationships are coded and constrained. Chapter 3 turns to Lewis’s The Enemy to ask how his version of the evental subject largely inhabits the tension between personality and selfhood, where the former suggests social performance and the latter denotes an autonomous, ontological category. Contra the conventional turn to the autonomous self as the source of agency, he seeks to understand the subject, and its agency, as the product of social performance. Finally, Chapter 4 argues that Tarr articulates the possibilities of a radically exteriorized understanding of personality; through Lewis’s ironic portrayal of the ineluctable ways in which even the perception of choice is coded by the situation, he presents fiction and authorship as the spaces in which to imagine an evental subject.