Literary Transmissions and the Fate of a Topic the Continental Spa In
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Literary Transmissions and the Fate of a Topic The Continental Spa in Post-1840 British, Russian and American Writing Benjamin Morgan University College London Thesis for the PhD in Comparative Literature ! 1! Abstract of Thesis: Around 1840 the Continental watering place took off as a destination of international appeal—and as a topic in an internationalizing print culture. My thesis, drawing on a broad range of theories of intertextuality, uses the case of the waters to model the farrago of transmissions, contacts and collisions that go into the making of a common-place in discourse. In particular I show how writing from multiple genres and national literatures helped establish the spa's identity as a deeply ambivalent locus of encounter—a venue that both tickled and deflated cosmopolitan ambition. Key points of reference include Dostoevskii's The Gambler, Edmund Yates's sensation novel Black Sheep (both 1867) and Henry James's spa fiction (‘Eugene Pickering’, Roderick Hudson and Confidence)—but also Punch and the Russian satirical journal The Alarm Clock (Budilk’nik), the travel writing of Joel Tyler Headley and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, and Murray's Handbook for Travellers on the Continent. The elaboration of a topic is above all an exercise in collective (if not concerted) sign-making; and like any potent sign, I suggest with reference to temporally outlying works of resort fiction by Bruce Chatwin, Mikhail Tsypkin and W.G. Sebald, the nineteenth century's 'watering-place text' stubbornly refuses confinement to the age that produced it. ! 3! Acknowledgments Thanks are first of all due to my supervisors, Philip Horne and Maria Rubins. I am also grateful to my examiners, Galin Tihanov and Matthew Beaumont, for their careful attention to my work. But lots of other people have been involved. At the Library of Congress I had all sorts of support but Mary Lou Reker and Thomas Mann were exceptional. In Mount Rainier, Anne, Leroux and Mouna Lecuyer and Diane Shandor gave me a home life, while Rosalie Parcelli and Leonard Ubatz of Hyattsville showed me love and fake meat. In Baden-Baden, Renate Effern took me round the casino and Dr. Dagmar Rumpf of the Stadtmuseum helped me understand who came and when; Dr. Astrid Krüger was of similar assistance at Bad Homburg. In London Julian Graffy lent much-needed moral support and Sarah Young was a considerate teaching supervisor. David Low went through it with me on both sides of the Atlantic. In Loiba Monica Iglesias Vale was and is very special. A lot happens in four years and some names are missing, but for fifteen months now there has been Eve. I would not have made it without her. ! 4! Table of Contents Introduction: The Fate of a Topic— and the Expediency of the Spa 9 1. Getting There: Topographical Contexts 33 2. ‘The scenery is good but the people are detestable’: Duality Laid Bare 73 3. ‘What the Devil?’ Allegory and Perplexity in Watering-Place Texts 113 4. ‘The Often-Described Scene’: Mediation and Resort Experience 169 -- 5. ‘A Pleasant Reunion of All Nations’: The Transnational Spa 219 6. ‘A Striking Admission of Human Equality’: Class Trouble at the Waters 273 Conclusion 311 Bibliography 319 ! 5! A Note on the Text In citing Russian (and occasionally French and German) works, I give the English followed by the original in parenthesis. All translations of quotations are mine unless indicated. In transliterating Russian I use the Modified Library of Congress System. As a result, familiar names are sometimes rendered in unfamiliar ways (e.g. Tolstoi, not Tolstoy; Gogol’, not Gogol). ! 6! […] Description is Composed of a sight indifferent to the eye. It is an expectation, a desire, A palm that rises up beyond the sea, A little different from reality: The difference that we make in what we see. 1 If any man has a right to feel proud of himself, and satisfied, surely it is I. For I have written about the Coliseum, and the gladiators, the martyrs, and the lions, and yet have never once used the phrase "butchered to make a Roman holiday." I am the only free white man of mature age, who has accomplished this since Byron originated the expression.2 ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 Wallace Stevens, ‘Description without Place’, in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (London: Faber & Faber, 1955), pp. 339-347 (p. 339). 2 Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (1869), intro. by Tom Quirk, notes by Guy Cardwell (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 207. ! 7! ! Baden-Baden, ca. 1890 (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division) ! 8! Introduction: The Fate of A Topic—and the Expediency of the Spa “Ella Maclane is dying to come to Baden-Baden. I wish you'd write to her. Her father and mother have got some idea in their heads; they think it's improper—what do you call it?—immoral.”3 Around 1840—Europe’s bourgeois revolutions of 1848 interrupted the vogue but also laid the ground for its consolidation—the Continental watering place took off as both a destination of international appeal and as a topic in an internationalizing print culture. For stay-at-home readers as much as for those who went to take a cure, spa culture quickly became a known quantity, its saliencies sketched in fiction and in many of the era’s other defining popular narrative forms: travel writing, periodical journalism and the guide book. The elaboration of a topic in discourse is an exercise in collective (if not concerted) sign making. This study, an analysis of how a ramifying print culture codified and transmitted the ideas that the second half of the nineteenth century got into its head about European spas, takes as part of its object concrete literary relations: what Dostoevskii’s Roulettenburg (in The Gambler, 1867) owes to Thackeray’s ‘gay, wicked’ Rougetnoirbourg (in The Kickleburys on their Travels, 1851), for example. But attending to the (trans)cultural production of space also means confronting that most nebulous of referents, representational convention (the staidness of the term threatens to obscure the farrago of contacts, misprisions and collisions—between the documentary and the fictive, the empirical and the rhetorical, past and present, memory and the imagination, the personal and the social—whose counterintuitive upshot is our significantly shared sense of the world). !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 3 Henry James, Confidence, ed. with an introduction by Herbert Ruhm (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1962), p. 27. ! 9! As the Maclanes’ difficulties indicate, the fate of a place that becomes a common-place can be an ambivalent one. On one hand textual mediation (not to speak of the interminable bounce of re-mediation characteristic of an age of digests, miscellanies and copy-hungry provincial and colonial papers) is the antithesis of an exact science. Out of presumably similar reading material— magazine articles, perhaps, or letters from friends—Ella and her parents have conjectured two very different Baden-Badens—or made the same place mean different things. Yet as Francis Mulhern suggests, an unavoidable by-product of topicality is cliché—redeemable as a criterion of intelligibility: A topic in old, strict usage is not merely what is spoken of—an object real or imagined: it is an established object of discussion with established terms of treatment. Thus, a topic is always already a convention, implying a settled relationship between those who participate in it. The most successful topics achieve the status of commonplaces, a metaphor we do well to take literally.4 Topic status is a condition of coherent discourse on a theme. But topic status also ‘others’ the object—not in the positive, aestheticizing sense of estrangement (ostranenie) first theorized by Viktor Shklovskii in ‘Art as Technique (‘Iskusstvo kak priem’, 1917), but, conversely, by precluding the intimacy and limpidity of perspective that the shock of the new can confer. What sometimes passes for a genius loci is always more accurately an unruly complex of horizons beaten into narrative shape. But spa culture as it emerges from popular print culture in the second half of the nineteenth century also collocates difference in a manner that makes the watering place a particularly suggestive spatial analogue for the dialogic principle at work in and between texts. If any narrative, to cite Julia Kristeva’s influential gloss of Bakhtin, can be read as an ‘intersection of textual surfaces rather than a point (a fixed meaning), as a dialogue among several writings’, then resorts like Baden-Baden— ‘Europe’s summer capital’ was a commonly applied epithet—exhibit a comparable !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 4 Culture/Metaculture (London: Routledge. 2000), xiii. ! 10! capacity to gather (fleetingly) human material and to fashion social meanings out of the mêlée.5 Resorts would thus seem to lend themselves to the working-out of an intersubjective ethics.6 And, undoubtedly, as transnational spaces in the age of the nation state, watering places performed vital narrative and ideological work on behalf of a range of literary communities, helping clarify their approaches to various species of other (see below). But, I suggest in the course of my attempt to map the complex of literary relations that installed the spa as a topic in discourse, nineteenth-century writing is usually readier to turn the narrative expedient represented by Baden-Baden to the service of chauvinistic and national- microcosmic discourses than cosmopolitan ones; and, in fiction in particular, spas are as often showgrounds for contestatory prejudice as they are proving grounds for experimental ethical scenarios. Its potential problem-solving function in narratives notwithstanding, the watering place’s functional inscrutability tested the elucidatory mettle of popular print culture. ‘Pray, what do they do at the springs?’, asked the American humorist John Godfrey Saxe, author of ‘The Blind Men and The Elephant’, about Saratoga Springs in another poem of and about divulgence (and written in the 1840s).