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• Title: Self Enlightenment in Woolf, Joyce, And Nietzsche (Critical Essay)
• Author : Gabriel V. Rupp
• Release Date : January 01, 2010
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 81 KB

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The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were witness to an explosive set of dramatic and historically unique and complicated transformations in society and technology. Underlying these changes was a discernible shift in the manner in which we understood and presented who and what the human is. Stephen Kern, in The Culture of Time and Space: 1880-1918, writes that "From around 1880 to the outbreak of World War I a series of sweeping changes in technology and culture created distinctive new modes of thinking about and experiencing space and time. Technological innovations including the telephone, wireless telegraph, x-ray, cinema, bicycle, automobile, and airplane established the material foundation for this reorientation: independent cultural developments such as stream-of consciousness novel, psychoanalysis, Cubism, and the theory of relativity shaped consciousness directly. The result was a transformation of the dimensions of life and thought" (1-2). My objective in the present study is to examine a number of texts drawn from the said critical period of change in which some of "the transformations of the dimensions of life and thought" of which Kern speaks are brought to the fore. My argument is that in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, in James Joyce's Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and in Friedrich Nietzsche's last three "strangely beautiful but mad" letters (Kaufmann, "Letters" 684), these writers' self enlightenment of a unified and discrete self is disrupted, calling into question simultaneously the constructed nature of that unity of self while also exposing certain limits inherent in such a chaotic, polyvocal, and "schizophrenic" conception of consciousness. By applying Niels Bohr's complementarity as a potential reframing of those limits, I argue that that a form of ethical subjectivity, i.e., self enlightenment, can be recovered in the texts analyzed. My choice of Bohr's concept of complementarity--a kind of post-Newtonian framework--is based on a number of considerations. First, Bohr, in many ways a "father" of modern quantum physics, begins to develop his framework to account for new findings in the hard sciences at roughly the same time writers such as Woolf, Joyce, and Nietzsche do their work and thus Bohr is located within the same culture characterized by changes in the sense of space and time of which Kern speaks. Second, Bohr's complementarity, like Werner Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty, Kurt Godel's incompleteness theorem, or even J.S. Bell's theorem, is a post-Newtonian response to increasingly numerous experimental and conceptual anomalies, to use Thomas Kuhn's term. Where Bohr differs from the others is in his more sustained effort to go beyond attempts to account for perplexing experimental observations and extend his framework to the very ways we know the world, and the various truth-value constitutions in which those ways of knowing are implicated. Alhough I am not ready to argue, as Arkady Plotnitsky does in his Complementarity: Anti-epistemology after Bohr and Derrida, that Bohr's complementarity is an anti-epistemological system that combines George Bataille's general economic model with Jacques Derrida's post-structural deconstruction. Rather, I am operating on the assumption that complementarity operates distinctly differently than other systems of representation in the sciences, including Albert Einstein's general relativity in that it responds to what Kern calls the "Abundance"--in developments and transformations in the arts, sciences, technologies, economies--of the late Enlightenment and modern periods, and that Ronald Schleifer argues demanded "new ways of making sense out of experience, whose confusions weren't the result of need and dearth ... but whose confusions stemmed from those difficulties that arise from abundance and plenty" (36). Schleifer situates Heisenberg's mode of understanding suggested by the uncertainty principle within the larger co

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