The Imagery of Interior Spaces

the imagery of interior spaces Before you start to read this book, take this moment to think about making a donation to punctum books, an independent non-profit press, @ https://punctumbooks.com/support/ If you’re reading the e-book, you can click on the image below to go directly to our donations site. Any amount, no matter the size, is appreciated and will help us to keep our ship of fools afloat. Contri- butions from dedicated readers will also help us to keep our commons open and to cultivate new work that can’t find a welcoming port elsewhere. Our ad- venture is not possible without your support. Vive la Open Access. Fig. 1. Hieronymus Bosch, Ship of Fools (1490–1500) the imagery of interior spaces. Copyright © 2019 by the editors and authors. This work carries a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International license, which means that you are free to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and you may also remix, transform and build upon the material, as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors (but not in a way that suggests the authors or punctum books endorses you and your work), you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoever, and that for any remixing and transformation, you distribute your rebuild under the same license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ First published in 2019 by punctum books, Earth, Milky Way. https://punctumbooks.com ISBN-13: 978-1-950192-19-9 (print) ISBN-13: 978-1-950192-20-5 (ePDF) doi: 10.21983/P3.0248.1.00 lccn: 2019937173 Library of Congress Cataloging Data is available from the Library of Congress Book design: Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei The Imagery of Interior Spaces Edited by Dominique Bauer & Michael J. Kelly Contents Michael J. Kelly Preface: History and the Interior Space 13 Dominique Bauer Introduction: The Imagery of Interior Spaces and the Hazards of Subjectivity 21 Dominique Bauer From the Enclosed Individual to Spatial Notions of a “Beyond”: Spatial Imagery in the Work of Jules Romains 35 Marcus Breyer Sensualizing the “Over There”: The Dissolving of Exteriority and Interiority in “Geo-thoughts” and “Geo-song” 57 Aude Campmas Evisceration: Exposing Internal Spaces in La curée 77 Stijn De Cauwer The World as Seen through a Window: Interiors and the Crisis of Morality in the Work of Robert Musil 97 Erin E. Edgington Artful Arrangements: Interior Space in Edmond de Goncourt’s La maison d’un artiste 117 Gabrielle E. Orsi In Her Chambers: Spaces of Fiction in Elsa Morante 139 Stefanie E. Sobelle The Inscapability of Dwelling in Yoknapatawpha County 171 Lindsay Starck “The (Dis)Possessed”: Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and the Modern Museum 193 Álvaro Santana-Acuña Interior Spaces in Literature: A Sociological and Historical Perspective 219 Contributors 237 Acknowledgments I would like to express my gratitude to many colleagues and friends, from French studies, literary and cultural history, who supported and encouraged us to edit this volume. I would like to thank them for their enthusiasm, their advice and critical reading, in particular Anne-Françoise Morel of the Faculty of Archi- tecture, Leuven. — Dominique Bauer Throughout the extended process of writing, editing, revising and reviewing the chapters for this volume, friends and colleagues have provided valuable input and I would like to thank all of them for their support. I would also like to thank the contributors for their participation and, especially, Dominique Bauer for inviting me to be part of this intellectually enriching project. — Michael J. Kelly preface History and the Interior Space Michael J. Kelly “Long habit created in me a duty to it.” — Isidore of Seville, Synonyms, 1.45 I would like to preface this volume with a short elicitation and interrogation of a trope quilted throughout its essays: history. From this, I analyze the exposed relationship in modern literature between interior space and history via the encounter with the past, in contrast to the exteriority of the present. The liminal space between these locations is where becoming materializes, where the subjective process formally begins. Interior space, history and subjectivity form the ontological trinity that frames and informs the critical theories and literary problems present- ed and interrogated in The Imagery of Interior Spaces. As made apparent across the texts analyzed in this volume, interior space represents a desired present ever at risk of being shattered by a subconsciously known exterior reality. The interior is a space without time, the perpetual (present), and, as Bauer says in her Introduction, a “logic of pure presence” that is always in fear of the rupture of historical continuity engendered by the external. In Stijn De Cauwer’s “The World as Seen Through a Win- dow: Interiors and the Crisis of Morality in the Work of Robert Musil,” it is evident that, in (Western) literature, the concept of interior space, as it relates to the subjective process and history, doi: 10.21983/P3.0248.1.02 13 the imagery of interior spaces is inextricably entangled with the development of modernity and its tremendous changes. Interior space offers characters a site for conservative reaction to modernity, a place to hide from it, to ig- nore it, to occult it, a place to deny the (re-)emergence of politics and to construct an alternate modern history. We see a diversity of interior spaces functioning in this way. In “In Her Chambers: Spaces of Fiction in Elsa Morante,” Gabri- elle Orsi discusses how Elisa de Salvi, the protagonist of Men- zogna e sortilegio (1948), says that her writing “is inextricable from the chamber in which she dwells.” In it she will unravel “the enigma of the past” in the pursuit of uncovering “actual history.” The interior space serves as the site for Elisa to escape from actualized history. It is the “originating space” of both the novel and of Elisa’s subjectivity. Referring to Morante’s late and last novel, Orsi notes that the gardens of Aracoeli “combine space and time into a lost unity.” In Aracoeli (1982) the protagonist, Manuele, imagines the Gar- den of Eden effectively as an interior space where human being was whole. In it was the object allowing the preservation of that being, the perpetual present, the apple. The apple was timeless and could retrieve the past unbound by memory, but its consumption shattered human being (humans suffered an ontological break) eliciting human subjectivity. Orsi argues that “the classically Morantian plot is the evasion of an often grim or dis- appointing reality via a secret dream world of fantasy, memory, and reading.” Aracoeli plays here on this theme by presenting the cruel and “provocative” divine game in which the interior space and its objects deny the whole of humanity the dream of memory, and the fantasy of the unity of existence. In “The Inscapability of Dwelling in Yoknapatawpha County,” Stefanie Sobelle examines the uses of interior space in a number of works by William Faulkner, including As I Lay Dying (1930) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). She demonstrates Faulkner’s use of interior space as a way for characters to deal with complex social transformations of the exterior, as a place where selfhood either is or may become, and where past and present can merge. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” Faulkner claims in 14 preface Requiem for a Nun (1951). He coalesces time and space into his own literary spatial form, argues Sobelle, who concludes by de- scribing “Faulkner’s theory of history as infinitely interiorized.” In “Evisceration: Exposing Internal Spaces in La curée,” Aude Campmas argues that Émile Zola’s La curée (1871) “is a tragedy that still deals with dramas of heredity and lineage. The tragic scene is the exposed place where the true origins of the family are revealed.” Campmas explores Zola’s violation of interior spaces, whether memories, the womb or the household, and shows how interior spaces correlate to artifice, to the at- tempted preservation of a historical situation and the exotic beyond within a constructed interior. The ensuing metaphor is the nineteenth-century hothouse, a place where what was desired from the external could be cultivated in the interior space. Here amidst the plants the private life of women could flourish, while preserving the illusion of social continuity. The exposure of the woman and the hothouse, of the interior, represent a sacrifice that destroys the illusion. In “‘The (Dis)Possessed’: Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and the Modern Museum,” Lindsay Starck focuses her critical review of Barnes’s “novel” Nightwood (1937) on the interior space of the museum gallery where time literally is “set aside”. She reads the novel as itself a museum, as an interior space uniquely modern. As such it is used to expose and examine the dynamic relation between modern literature, modernity, and history. One of the main characters, Nora, who hopelessly seeks her lover’s com- mitment, desires to be inside the metaphorical (ship in a) bottle. There she can live in the world and its history in a state of being of perpetual present, a continuum in which she can attain im- mortality. In desiring to be part of the wider metanarrative of history, Nora frames it as a closed interior space. In “Artful Arrangements: Interior Space in Edmond de Gon- court’s La maison d’un artiste,” Erin E. Edgington elaborates the association between history and interior space through a reading of Goncourt’s catalogue volume. In La maison (1881), the trinkets and stuff of the house represent an attempt by Edmond, the central (present) character, to conserve the presence of his 15 the imagery of interior spaces late brother Jules.

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