UC Irvine

Miserable Capitalism develops a new theory of the twentieth-century experimental novel by exploring how works of modernist Anglophone fiction connected fictional representations of emotional suffering to the historical fact of politico-economic misery. In the work of Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, and Kathy Acker, I identify a form of writing that registers a distinctly political account of immiseration—the relative decline in living standards wrought by capital accumulation—through its attention to intersubjectivity. Within these works, I explore the shifting political function and social content of formal strategies—such as free indirect discourse, apostrophe, polyphony, and intertextuality—alongside and in relation to depictions of socioemotional isolation and the physiological consequences of impoverishment. In these texts, the realization of the desire for intimate social connection and meaningful attachment is foreclosed, but never fully destroyed, by capitalist alienation. Ultimately, I argue that in a century of economic crisis, the psychological and physiological misery recorded by the modernist novel acts in dialectical relation with political depression, both registering and informing an apparent impasse. Connecting the affects of melancholy to political destitution, these literary works conceptualize suffering as the anguish provoked by thwarted attempts to change or transform the given world.My dissertation and book project examines an unconscious lost object: not just the possibility of being-together, but what that being-together might bring. It is both a mode of emancipated being, and the means of achieving that unabstracted life through solidarity. While revolution forms part of their coordinates, fearing impossibility and trapped in stasis, together Woolf, Beckett, and Acker mourn a total social transformation that might never happen. In Chapter One, I show how Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931) uses multiple narrative voices to mourn the dissolution of shared life, examining how her text formalizes the horrors of British colonialism and the emancipatory limitations of the women’s suffrage movement. Retaining the structural causality of Woolf’s despair, in Chapter Two I turn to Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable (1953/1958), in which the paradigmatic expression of capitalism’s instrumentalized rationality in the mass-extinction events of Auschwitz and Hiroshima results in the disintegration of the individual. Through an aesthetics of subtraction, Beckett creates a novel after the liquidation of the subject, when language does not signify, material resources have dried up, and time is stuck. Extending Beckett’s total disintegration of the subject, in Chapter Three I read Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School (1978/1984) as indexing the period of full-blown capitalist crisis. Acker’s novel is not only about economic precarity and its violence on the level of content; it also uses characteristically postmodern formal strategies such as pastiche and fragmentation to explore the psychosocial and bodily breakdowns caused by economic suffering. Intervening in the history and theory of the novel as well as gender and sexuality studies, and social epidemiology, Miserable Capitalism illustrates how the modern novel continued to seek the forms needed to counter the structurally imposed, heterogeneous suffering that dominated twentieth-century life. Through their formal and rhetorical experimentation, the three novelists thus elongate the novel’s history of confronting intellectual and social crisis simultaneously, depicting a growing desperation in the modern Anglophone novel to contend with the remorse of severed social connection and basic communication, and the felt impossibility of societal transformation.