UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Interiority and Counter
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Interiority and Counter-Interiority in 19th and 20th Century U.S. Literature and Culture A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Graham Hall June 2021 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Susan Zieger, Chairperson Dr. Steven Axelrod Dr. Emma Stapely Copyright by Graham Hall 2021 The Dissertation of Graham Hall is approved: Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside Acknowledgments I’d like to express my immense gratitude for my committee chair, Susan Zieger, who has been an invaluable source of guidance and support throughout this project. I am grateful that she was willing to humor my flights of thought – while also typically offering me a tether to the ground, as it were – and trust me enough to encourage this somewhat unconventional project. Over the course of the last few years Emma Stapely has also been a crucial example for me as a scholar and teacher. Thank you for showing me how to approach my subject with kindness and openness, and providing valuable and driving insights and questions. I’d like to thank Steven Axelrod for his continuous kind support, and John Kim for indulging in and fostering theoretical musings. I’d like to also thank Sherryl Vint and Rob Latham for their support with the first stages of this project and their mentorship in my early time at UCR. Finally, this project would not have been possible without the support provided by the English department and the University Writing Program at UCR, or the tireless efforts of the staff who make both run smoothly. iv Dedication To my parents. Thanks for sticking by me. v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Interiority and Counter-Interiority in 19th and 20th Century U.S. Literature and Culture by Graham Hall Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in English University of California, Riverside, June 2021 Dr. Susan Zieger, Chairperson In this dissertation, I analyze “interiority,” which refers to a particular mode of conceptualizing and living in space, as well as a mode of understanding and forming senses of subjectivity and agency. I argue that a unique understanding and practice of subjective and spatial interiority manifested and evolved in a post-Romantic cultural formation in the 19th and 20th century U.S. The interiority that I’m interested in involved an understanding of the subject as hermetic, autonomous, and relatively autochthonous, and an understanding of space as something to be fashioned as a neatly demarcated, insulating, and comforting enclosure. Furthermore, it mutually defined both space and subjectivity through resonances between these understandings and practices of what it vi meant to be “inside.” This subjective and spatial interiority, as I’ll show, both called for a movement inward and demanded a transcendence of interior spaces and subjectivities, and this ambivalence had real stakes for narratives and practices of freedom, mobility, and agency. I examine this interiority in the writing of authors like Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and David Foster Wallace, and in the cultural practices and discourse of suburban white middle class Americans. I also outline a resistance to this mode of spatial and subjective discourse and practice that I call “counter-interiority,” which involve alternative articulations of and orientations to subjective and spatial interiors. I’ll show how this counter-interiority, which emerged in the work of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Bob Kaufman, and William S. Burroughs, and in the discourse and practice of post-suburban punks, threatened interiority by encouraging the cultivation of practices and understandings of space and subjectivity that favored discomfort, fragmentation, and an interpenetration between inside and outside. vii Table of Contents Introduction: What Does it Mean to Be Inside? 1 Chapter 1: Shelters of Enslavement: White Interiors, Transcendence, and Black Counter-Interiority 23 Chapter 2: “Looking for an Out Place”: The Beats and the Racialized Freedom of the Outside 67 Chapter 3: “Home is Where We Hide”: Post-Suburban Punk as a Rejection of the Interior 120 Chapter 4: “Are You Immensely Pleased. [sic]”: David Foster Wallace’s Interior Ad Infinitum and the Performance of Genius 165 Conclusion: What Does it Mean to Leave the Inside? 209 viii List of Figures Chapter 2 Figure 1: Beats in a “well-equipped pad” 92 Figure 2: North Beach Beats “on tour” 102 Figure 3: North Beach Beats in their “tour bus” 103 Figure 4: Closing image of “silence to say goodbye” 114 Chapter 3 Figure 5: The suburban bedroom moved outside 139 Figure 6: A penetrated dwelling 143 Figure 7: A split dwelling 143 ix Preface Though part of my objective in pursuing this project was to move away from an inward looking writing practice toward a counter-interior writing practice geared toward openness, discomfort, degrees of selflessness, and transversality, it would be disingenuous – and against the principles of this project, in fact – not to confess that there is inevitably much of my self and the spaces I’ve dwelt in suffused throughout the writing that follows. On these pages there are traces of suburban bedrooms and share-house closets, warehouses and halfway houses, and myriad other interiors that I’ve treated as trap and refuge over the years. However, this is not necessarily a detriment. Walter Benjamin said that the truth of history can only be arrived at from within a historical position, and – though I must confess I’ve wished this project was a collaboration on many occasions – as a middle-class white boy who spent the first part of his life moving from interior to exterior back to interior with delusions of grandeur, it is perhaps appropriate that I should be the one to write this story about the relationship between interiority, transcendence, and myths of singular individuality, and even to ask what it means to resist them. It has felt important to pursue a project like this not from a posture on the outside – as though from the objective stance of some transcendent intellectual – but also not entirely from a self-absorbed posture on the inside either. I hope that I’ve proven equal to that more daunting task. x Introduction What Does it Mean to Be Inside? Gaston Bachelard quipped in The Poetics of Space that “we bring our lairs with us.” In his Arcades Project Walter Benjamin observed that our lairs bring us with them too. However, perhaps most importantly, each of these thinkers clarified to an extent that our lairs make us as we make them. The purpose of this study is to plot the ways that, in dwelling, “the sheltered being gives perceptible limits to its shelter” (Bachelard) just as the shelter gives perceptible limits to the sheltered being. Philosophers like Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Gaston Bachelard, Henri Lefebvre, and Peter Slotterdijk help us think about “dwelling” as an ongoing production of subjectivity in tandem with sociospatiality, while nonetheless participating in the production of modes of dwelling themselves. In his work on space, Henri Lefebvre refines earlier accounts of dwelling by analyzing the production of “spatial codes,” which involve the ongoing incorporation and inscription of both “concepts” and “experiences” of space. For Lefebvre, these cultural codes allow for the very production of space – alongside culture – as a thing to be experienced by a distinct body and subject. My goal is to understand the particular way that what I’ll call “interiority” emerged as a mode of dwelling in the literature and culture of the United States in the 19th century, and became the dominant set of spatial concepts and practices that inflected freedom and power along axes of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Likewise, I hope to map how resistance to this mode of dwelling emerged as what I call counter-interiority. Interiority, I argue, demanded the production of subjective and spatial interiors as both 1 refuge and trap to create the supremacy of white propertied men, by first consolidating wealth and privilege in the space of the interior and then disavowing the advantages of this consolidation through postures of transcendence. However, counter-interiority, as I’ll show, emerged as a potent rejection of interiority as an organizing social principle and instead demanded an embrace of mutuality and interpenetration. Though my project tracks interiority and counter-interiority through American literary and cultural figures like the transcendentalists, early Black American autobiographers, the Beats, the punks, and postmodern authors, I consider this constellation a “post-romantic” 1 formation because its most relevant ancestors are probably Thomas De Quincey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The closest thing that interiority has to an origin story is actually two stories: De Quincey’s recollection of time spent at Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage and the highly mythologized story of the inspiration of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” Each of these involves a poet having escaped a fraught urban environment – where they were exposed to discomfort and disease – to a cozy and isolated rural interior. De Quincey’s time at Dove Cottage was an escape from urban destitution, which he referred to as a “hurricane and perfect hail-storm of affliction” (7). Coleridge’s retreat, on the other hand, was caused by an unspecified illness. The comfort 1 As will become clear, the figures I’m interested in are all inheritors of a Romantic tradition that lauds the beauty of a sublime that seems to exceed its ability to be represented or “captured” and critiques organized life in an industrial society as a kind of “trap.” This tradition paradoxically nonetheless prided itself on giving voice to – i.e. representing – that sublime and finding comfort in the fruits of industrial society in cozy cottages. I specifically have in mind De Quincey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth here.