Written Somewhere: the Social Space of Text Written Somewhere: the Social Space of Text

WRITTEN SOMEWHERE: THE SOCIAL SPACE OF TEXT WRITTEN SOMEWHERE: THE SOCIAL SPACE OF TEXT BY DAVID WILLIAM COUGHLAN DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH GOLDSMITHS' COLLEGE THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE AWARD OF PHD TO THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON MARCH 2002 SUPERVISOR DR JOSH COHEN Abstract This thesis is concerned with the space of text, with the composition of that space, its form and substance, and also with the perception and experience of that space. The argument takes in existing theoretical attempts to explain the spatiality of texts, particularly Joseph Frank's 1945 essay "Spatial Form in Modem Literature," and tests their ideas against literary texts which, it will be argued, make a vital contribution to our comprehension oftextual space. The keys texts studied are John Banville's Kepler, Paul Auster's City of Glass, Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, and the works of Thomas Pynchon. As an understanding of the space of text develops, the work of Henri Lefebvre, and especially his 1974 text The Production of Space, comes increasingly to the fore. Criticising traditional philosophical concepts of space, which tend to view space in either purely physical or mental terms, Lefebvre's work enables us to place the discussion on textual space within a wider context. Textual space is seen to emerge as a social space, and thus a social product, capable of being employed in different ways within society, as a representation of space, aligned with mental space, or as a representational space, allied to lived spaces. The final sections of the thesis explore the reader's experience of this lived textual space, and question the role and place oftextual space in the social realm. 3 Contents List of Illustrations 6 Acknowledgements 8 Introduction 10 I Writing the Space of Text: Physical and Mental Space 14 Volumes and area: physical spacings 20 Gaps and repetitions: internal distribution 24 Telling things in John Banville's Kepler 39 Placing signs and sound: visual fonns 45 Connections and relations: spatial fonn 56 Time and the world: the limits of spatial fonn 70 Treading the line between world and space 80 Wandering through Paul Auster's City of Glass 88 II Writing the Space of Text: Social Space 101 Henri Lefebvre and the production of space 103 Approaching a Lefebvrean space of text 115 Harmonice corporis: spatial rhythms 127 III Reading the Space of Literature 140 Shifting spaces: Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled 144 4 Uncanny parallels: an experience of the space ofliterature 168 IV Citing Textual Space 201 The edge of somewhere: the paratext 203 Mapping the intertext: Thomas Pynchon 208 Suppression and subversion: intertextual spaces 215 Conclusion 232 Works Cited 236 5 List of Illustrations Figure 1. A map of Quinn's path through New York City 187 Figure 2. An annotated map of Quinn's path through New York City 189 6 for fiona Acknowledgements I would like to thank sincerely my supervisor, Dr Josh Cohen, for his insight, advice, help, and encouragement. My thanks also to Dr Lucia Boldrini, Prof. Bill McCormack, and Dr Helen Carr for all they've done during my years in Goldsmiths' College, and to my family, for their love and support. 8 Then what hope do I have of attaining the thing I push away? My hope lies in the materiality of language, in the fact that words are things, too, are a kind of nature - this is given to me and gives me more than I can understand. Just now the reality of words was an obstacle. Now, it is my only chance .... Everything physical takes precedence: rhythm, weight, mass, shape, and then the paper on which one writes, the trail of the ink, the book. Maurice Blanchot, "Literature and the Right to Death" INTRODUCTION In Henri Lefebvre's short essay "A Vision," he describes his experience of a swim out to sea, perhaps going further than was wise for he "was out alone and the water was rather choppy" (127).1 Because Lefebvre's work informs much of what will follow, this essay on a vision, though brief, provides an excellent overview of the concerns of the coming argument. In this thesis, the discussion is always on the space of the text, dealing firstly with the composition of this space, its substance and structure, but later analysing how the space is perceived, asking how, indeed, we can ever achieve a vision of the space of the text. The final question concerns the location of textual space, where it lies, and what happens there. The first part of this discussion, looking at the form of the space of text, takes in the first two chapters, and deals with the physical, mental, and social aspects of textual spatiality. This tripartite division is a Lefebvrean strategy, for the undisturbed binarism is a rarity in Lefebvre's work, as seen in "A Vision" where the first few lines place Lefebvre in a space of three elements, water, wind, and earth. The last of these, seen in the distance as "the pebbled slope of the beach ... the yellow strip of sand," extending "up steeply" and back from the shoreline as land, solid ground, and yet also sloping down, below the water, as the sea-bed, is a suitable image for the physicality ofthe text, its material existence, which underlies all textual space (127, 130). The first chapter begins with this physical dimension, with the book as an object to be held in the hand, with the printed word on the page, but the space of the text soon emerges as something less familiarly solid, produced by disturbances in the line of the text which curl the pages back upon themselves, marking the printed line with points which intersect, coincide, and repeat. As Lefebvre says: This becoming is not a commonplace flux, an ever-flowing river, a shapeless mobility, a never-ending fluidity, a linear movement in which ephemeral happenings appear and disappear. It is a remorseless repetition of sameness which is never quite the same, of otherness which is never quite other than what it is, since the repetitions grow larger or smaller, reach a crashing, convulsive climax or fade peacefully away. (129) The space of the text becomes now a product of "this mixture of the real and the imaginary: repetition" where to read a text is to swim in the sea where "wave follows 1All quotations in the Introduction are from Lefebvre's "A Vision." 11 wave, each wave like the other, and yet the waves which have passed are completely different from the waves which are to come" (129, 127-28). Suddenly, the aim of the swim is not simply to return to the distant shore, but to take in the surface of the sea itself, where "in fascinating simultaneity, present, past and future are juxtaposed" (128). In the second chapter, this seemingly natural space, the vast sea, assumes a social aspect. The reader, wading through the text page by page, is seen in the context of a sea which, ridged with waves "like an incalculable number of backbones," is oriented towards the body at its heart, the rhythms of the water seen to support or oppose this "minute organism caught up in these undulating movements which is fiercely defending its precarious frontiers - teeth clenched, eyes closed, lips sealed tight" (127, 129). The "multiple, polyrhythmic" movement of the water, ofthe text, plays out "before my eyes and my lips," so that "at the centre of this chaos of repetition, within this gigantic being, I maintain an order, my order" (129, 128). Though the reader may strive to comprehend the text as an existing whole, this vision of the text in its entirety is incomplete without recognising the place of the reader in the text also, without identifying the part that the reader plays. This discovery may, for the reader, ultimately prove the most significant one: "through this vision of simultaneity reality becomes restructured, a shifting totality, roaring, buffeting, overwhelming: the sea. The vision is of something intangible, something elusive, a strange and liberating truth. This simultaneity exists for me and because of me" (128). The third chapter, recognising the importance of the vision ofthe space of the text, confronts the difficulties in gaining this vision, for, as a reader, "I am surrounded .. by a fluidity which I can touch, which I can control; yet I cannot grasp it in my hands" (128). In particular, the discussion revolves around those points where "a wave lifted me up," where the reader seems granted some special insight into the space of the text, but always with the awareness that "not everything is visible to me. There is always something else, always something unexpected, always something which seems to be a fragment but is suddenly a whole" (127, 129). The contradictory or seemingly divergent effects of the textual space are analysed, where the text "enfolds me like a mother, gently stroking the back of my neck, but still trying to smother me;" "if! cannot overcome it, I shall die" (129, 128). If, "from anxiety, the vision was born," then this chapter takes a suitably psychoanalytical approach, its argument converging at the end on two extremes, life and death, and suggesting that it is in the tension between the two 12 that we find the unique experience of textual space: "never before have I experienced my own strength and willpower so clearly. And the hesitant emergence of consciousness" (127, 131). The fourth and final chapter attempts to analyse the place of textual space in the world, finding that the text is not something easily contained on the shelf, but something indeed fluid and extensive.

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