The quest to fail: Kafka, Celine, and Beckett

This dissertation explores the structural and aesthetic role of failure in the modernist quest narrative, focusing on Kafka's Das Schloss (1922), Celine's Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932), and Beckett's Molloy (1951). I investigate the ways in which each author borrows themes from the medieval grail quest narrative in order to depict excessive deadlock and hopelessness, or a world in which knowledge of the grail is no longer possible. While such an attention to failure reflects the historical and intellectual crises of the early 20th century, my argument is that the modernist quest presents a new way of thinking about what redemption might look like. The modernist hero discovers a satisfaction in the act of failing itself, or in the act of questing but never arriving at a goal. The "prize" of the modernist quest narrative is this moment of "inversion" in which the criteria of success shifts dramatically. Key to my identification of this "modernist grail" is Benjamin's formulation of Kafka's aesthetics in a letter to Gerschom Scholem. Benjamin claims that Kafka sought to present a kind of redemption "on the inside lining" of nothing: "I endeavored to show how Kafka sought - on the nether side of that `nothingness,' in its inside lining, so to speak - to feel his way toward redemption." Benjamin's word for this moment of redemption in Kafka is "reversal" (Umkehr), an experience in which "life becomes scripture." Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom argue that the Romantics turned the medieval grail quest into an idealistic search for imaginative freedom. The genre of modernist quest narrative, however, has either been dismissed or received little attention by literary critics. Likewise, the plethora of allusions and structural and thematic echoes of the grail myth in these three novels has been virtually ignored. I read these quest narratives as modernist "continuation-texts" of Chretien's incomplete Perceval (c. 1181), the first extant grail text. Kafka, Celine, and Beckett "fail better" than Chretien, offering a "stalled" version of the grail story in which moments of victory (Kafka), glimmers of the divine (Celine), or redemptive experiences of silence (Beckett) occur in moments of stopping along the way.