Nowhere Places and the Poetics of Landscape: Temporality, Literary Atmosphere, and the Ethical Arena in Colonial Modernity
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Nowhere Places and the Poetics of Landscape: Temporality, Literary Atmosphere, and the Ethical Arena in Colonial Modernity. by Mark Deggan A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in The Faculty of Graduate Studies (English) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) January 2013 © Mark Deggan, 2013 ABSTRACT This study introduces a multi-disciplinary ecocritical approach to fictional evocations of place in colonial modernity between 1890 and 1940. Drawing together both modernist and contemporary theories of cognition, spatio-temporality, cinema, and the literary and human geographical assimilation of unfamiliar places, it analyzes the literary and visual poetics by which modernist depictions of landscape produce analogues for the crisis of the individual in the face of the other. Quarrelling with the sometimes recursive formulations of the spatial turn in culture studies, it reconceives the spatio-temporal arena through which literary representations of consciousness are staged through setting depictions. In order to track the dislocating of the subject in “exotic” environments an analytic frame is introduced, aesthetic duration, describing the narrative poetics by which epiphanic human experiences come to be mounted through tropes of aporia or ‘blockage’ – the temporal process by which the ambient aspects of concrete topographies are transformed into ideational or affective atmospheres. While the initial chapters introduce a model of theatricalized temporal ambience in fiction through Joseph Conrad’s An Outcast of the Islands, the study goes on to include close readings of Conrad’s Lord Jim as well as exoticist works by the problematic ‘modernists’, Lawrence, Forster, and Woolf. More fully, the scenographic dynamics of topographical depiction in these fictions of the imperial periphery are used to reveal how texts utilize durational forms and their primary vehicle, atmospheric appearing, in order to evoke interiority. Additionally, the present-time experience of cognitive crisis, where grounded in representations of landscape, is shown to constitute a performative forum for consciousness and narration. To this end the spatio-temporal frames of William James, Henri Bergson and Walter Benjamin are explored for their insights into the dynamics whereby the moment of signification is held open in order to enable thematic, affective, and cognitive transfers. The study thus begins by theorizing the ecologically nuanced strategies by which colonial places offer themselves as stand-ins for the decentred subjects of European modernism, and concludes by establishing a theatricalized model for the synaesthetic processes by which the places in colonial modernist fiction communicate significance via their performative poetics. ii PREFACE Portions of this thesis were developed for single-author or theory based conferences. Parts of the second section of Chapter One, and much of Chapter Four was developed from a conference paper delivered at the University of Cape Town as part of the international conference entitled ‘Outposts of Progress’, convened by Gail Fincham, Jeremy Hawthorn, and Jakob Lothe (06- 11.12.2011). The material on Conrad’s shipboard depictions in the Patna section of this latter chapter has also benefitted from a paper given at the Modernist Studies Association’s annual convention at Victoria, B.C., in November 2010: “Shipboard Beings: Cognition, Identity and the Marine Poetics of Modernism”. The analytic platform of the last section of Chapter Four was worked out in a paper given at The Modern Languages Association annual conference at Seattle in January of 2012, “Not Bleeding, Singing: Operatic Form and the Individual in Conrad’s ’Twixt Land and Sea”, as well as in a recent conference paper for the Joseph Conrad Society of the United Kingdom at Bath, England (07.2012), “Ships in the Night: Intimacy, Narration, and the Endless Near Misses of Conrad’s Chance”. The third section of Chapter Five on D. H. Lawrence has been published in somewhat altered form in D. H. Lawrence Studies (Vol. 20, No. 2 October 2012: 85-111) as edited by Virginia Hyde, Michael Bell, and N-C Paik: its title there is “Nowhere Will Now Say A Few Words: The Aesthetics of Landscape in D. H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo”. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................................. ii PREFACE .................................................................................................................................................... iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................................................................. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................................... v DEDICATION ............................................................................................................................................. vi CHAPTER ONE Introduction: On the Poetics of the Modernist Landscape ....................................... 1 Preamble on Mental Landscapes .......................................................................................................... 1 Place and the Metaphysical: An Outcast of the Islands ..................................................................... 25 Landscape as Event: A Critical Overview .......................................................................................... 40 Chapter Outlines .................................................................................................................................. 50 CHAPTER TWO Modernism's Communicative Places: Theory, Terms, Aesthetics ....................... 54 ‘For the sake of the possible’: Structure and Excess ........................................................................... 54 Modes of “Impossibility”: Impressionism and Epiphanic Knowing ................................................. 64 Literary Atmosphere – or What the Impression Conjures? ................................................................ 81 CHAPTER THREE Colonizing Duration: Time, Phenomenology, & the Loss of the Subject ....... 96 Time and the Places of Consciousness ............................................................................................... 96 Unreal: Modernist Durations, Modernist Stasis ................................................................................ 111 Contemporary Phenomenology, and the Real of the Present ........................................................... 130 Stasis, Meaning, and the Temporal: Two Readings on Conrad ....................................................... 134 CHAPTER FOUR Lord Jim: Nowhere is a Place ................................................................................ 139 Towards the Performative ................................................................................................................. 139 Sailing the Fold: Time, Motion, and Lord Jim’s Oceanic Abyss ...................................................... 148 Patusan as the Gates of the Real ........................................................................................................ 175 The Interview with Stein: The Theatrical Heart of the Novel ........................................................... 188 CHAPTER FIVE “A Cardboard Background on the Stage”: Foster, Woolf, Lawrence ................ 206 How “Modern” is the Modernist Landscape? ................................................................................... 206 Touching Darkness in The Voyage Out ............................................................................................. 209 Nowhere Will Now Say a Few Words: Landscape in Kangaroo .................................................... 227 Aural Atmospheres in A Passage to India ........................................................................................ 243 Colonial Modernism and Performing Difference: A Summation .................................................... 259 WORKS CITED ........................................................................................................................................ 276 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I have been fortunate in my committee: The role of my supervisor, Professor John Xiros Cooper, extends much further in time than the doctorate, and the debt I owe for the warmth of his approach, and his intellectual and personal support is a large one. Similarly, without the conversations I have had with Dr. Barbara Dancygier this study would have been not just thinner, but smaller in its notifications. I am grateful to her, as well, for making possible my acquaintance with leading figures in the language stream of English studies, and this wealth has likewise enhanced the range of my dissertation. I must also thank Dr. Stephen Taubeneck for the interdisciplinary generosity of his thinking, as well as his editorial advice concerning the project – he does not know how appreciative I am of his detailed responses. I am also grateful to the University of British Columbia for its several fellowships, without which the demands of graduate scholarship would have been unthinkable. On this subject, too, I need to acknowledge the financial and moral support of my extended family. Without the patience, kindness, and fortitude of my wife and her parents especially, the luxury of time required for academic