Reading in the dark: Modernism and the absence of God (Henry James, Marcel Proust, Arnold Schoenberg, France)

The innovations and difficulties of modernist artistic texts have often been interpreted as a reaction to the reported death or perceived absence of God. But God did not totally disappear from modernist texts, and indeed can be found inscribed and disguised within their very structures and ideologies. My dissertation reexamines several high modernist works by engaging with recent theories of "negative theology" to interpret this absent/present God.; Although God and religion, like traditional literary criticism and theory, are generally regarded as forces against chaos, negative theology (ancient, medieval, and postmodern) reveals the disruptive side of the God-idea. I locate modernism's "atheology"---a position between atheism and theology---as a force of disjunction. Modernism's replacements for God, although they often attempt to control or totalize complex and fragmented texts, also contain this negation and become forces of rupture. These (a)theological ruptures can be found in a paradoxical need for absolute knowledge and a subjective doubt in its possibility, the textual tension between unity and fragmentation, and a contradictory belief and distrust in traditional logical syntax.; By defining theological forms of negation from the medieval Christian mystic Pseudo-Dionysius through Hegel, and then examining postmodern negative theology, I show how modernism's relationship to the divine can be positioned between a determinate god and an indeterminate god. This contradictory god is expressed by recent theorists like Jacques Derrida---his god is a totalizing interpretive force of logocentric unity in Of Grammatology and a radical openness towards impossibility in later works such as The Gift of Death---but is also found embedded in imaginative works of the early 20th century, producing a tension between an onto-determinate theology and a negative-indeterminate atheology. My project examines how these negative and contradictory god-ideas manifest themselves in the subversive metaphorical structures of a Henry James novel, in the art and music of Marcel Proust's writings, in the development of atonality and the twelve-tone row in the music and essays of Arnold Schoenberg, and in the disruptive, divine, and repressed presence of the literary vampire throughout the 20th century.