Abstract

Both Kant and the nineteenth-century idealistic philosophers whom influenced proposed the artist as a heroic replacement for Christ as humanity's revealer of metaphysical truth. My study explores the ways in which Lawrence, Joyce, and Beckett dismantle this model in their artist-hero novels by questioning the artist's ability to respond to "subjective relativism"---a term I use to denote the modern phenomenon of existential uncertainty that results from the loss of religious conviction. Unlike Maurice Beebe, the author of the only other book-length analysis of the artist-hero, I focus exclusively on modernist artist-hero novels and see them in terms of the critiques of modern metaphysics found in Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Adorno. Moreover, in stressing intellectual history as a determining factor in modernist artistic production, my study differs from recent Marxist and poststructuralist works on aesthetics. ;Lawrence, Joyce, and Beckett demonstrate their engagement with nineteenth-century aesthetic philosophy in their artist-hero novels. In Sons and Lovers , Lawrence engages in a Nietzschean critique of idealism in which his artisthero, Paul Morel, strives to develop a redemptive aesthetic philosophy that accounts for the incarnation of the human body in the aesthetic object. Lawrence then considers the social implications of aesthetic incarnation in Aaron's Rod and ultimately returns to idealism in his portrayal of Ramon's authoritarian aestheticization of himself as the god Quetzalcoatl in The Plumed Serpent. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce rejects Flaubert's theory of artistic detachment, tracing Stephen Dedalus' failed attempt to create an objective art. In the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode of Ulysses and the "Shem the Penman" chapter of Finnegans Wake, he proposes Nietzschean and Heideggerian models of artistic creation that locate the ontological universality and social relevance of literary art in the writer's poetic use of language and participation in discourse and phenomenological reality. Influenced by Schopenhauer, Beckett criticizes the idealistic notion of the artist in Watt, contemplates the possibility of authoritarianism and total subjectivity of literary creation in Molloy and Malone Dies, and achieves a negative approach to universality in The Unnamable that recalls the theories of Heidegger and Adorno