Creating a monster: Myth, machines, and the naturalist invention of modernism

This dissertation ties the mythic dimension of modernist narrative to a critical development in the nineteenth-century realist tradition. Beginning with a paradox of naturalism---the eruption of "unnatural" elements in novels ostensibly devoted to an empirical, documentary realism---I ask why novels which respond explicitly to scientific development inevitably represent the machine (the favored figure of that development) as a mythic monster. In Norris' Octopus, the railroad engine is the Octopus, Cyclops, and Leviathan; in Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, the agricultural machines are diabolical; and the coal mine is a "squatting god" in Zola's Germinal. Naturalism, as formulated by Zola, is a genre responsive to scientific principles, and motivated, like science, by the desire to master what it studies. Yet the mythic machine exposes a dialectical problem with the pursuit of mastery. In the naturalist novel, the attempt to dominate the natural world ends in a condition of subjection. Dominating the natural world with the machine ends in prostration to the machine, and the novel internalizes this paradox of experience as a paradox of form. The eruption of "unnatural" elements in the ultra-realist novel demonstrates the extent to which its attempt to master the realist form ends in a shift to mythology which dramatizes the impossibility of such mastery.; Subsequent chapters examine the historical progression of the problem of social and narrative mastery in modernism. Focusing on a series of D. H. Lawrence's novels and on James Joyce's Ulysses, I consider the modernist use of myth as a self-reflective strategy for the disruption of the mechanical aspects of narrative and social experience. Lawrence, I argue, uses myth to subvert the dominant, reified forms of the realist text, which he identifies with the "symmetrical monster" of the machine. And Joyce, recognizing the extent to which the text itself---owing its existence to the machines that "Rule the world today" in Ulysses---is implicated in the mechanical processes of industrial modernity, deploys myth as the structural guarantee of a practice of textual anarchy whereby the text acknowledges and renounces its own controlling structures.