DOCTORAL THESIS No Walls in Eden: Architecture in Twentieth-Century Fiction Farquharson, Katherine Award date: 2015 General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ? Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 01. Oct. 2021 No Walls in Eden: Architecture in Twentieth-Century Fiction by Katherine Farquharson BA, MA A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD Department of English and Creative Writing University of Roehampton 2015 1 Abstract This thesis offers a range of novels and short stories as evidence that architecture, in twentieth-century fiction, is interrogated with a peculiar intensity. In these texts walls are untrustworthy, and access problematic; and as a result rooms are anxiously sealed, unsealed and re-sealed, and wallpaper pattern, graffiti, even marks on paintwork, endlessly deciphered. Alternately alarmed and excited by the modernist project to cast off the encumbrances of previous centuries, the twentieth-century protagonist seems to suffer from a range of spatial phobias, which is reflected in his relationship with architecture. The thesis considers these, and also identifies an alternative literary type – an heir, perhaps, to the nineteenth-century flâneur – who copes better with architectural permeability and is, therefore, better adapted to the modern world. In addition to investigating the figurative significance of architecture, the thesis explores and evaluates the discursive interplay between text and architecture, both within twentieth-century fiction, and between fiction and seminal works of architectural theory. The first and last chapters focus on marriage and domestic architecture in texts by Edith Wharton, Mona Caird, Thomas Hardy, Chuck Palahniuk and Mark Z. Danielewski. The second and fourth chapters consider the man (or woman), alone in a room, in texts by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Henri Barbusse, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Elizabeth Bowen, Albert Camus and Alain Robbe-Grillet; and enquire whether his sedentary stance is endorsed by the texts. The third chapter analyses two politically antithetical texts by Ayn Rand and Ann Petry, in which a protagonist struggles to find the point of equilibrium between self and world. The fifth chapter focuses on texts by J.G. Ballard and Doris Lessing with a view to pursuing a proposition, raised in Chapter 4, that post-war authors are using architecture as a figure through which to interrogate the inside/outside dichotomy. The final chapter continues to explore this issue, and also considers walls and skin as related tropes in late twentieth-century fiction. 2 Contents Introduction 1. Stained Floors and Superseded Rooms: Marriage and Domestic Architecture in Three Fin-de-Siècle Fictions Edith Wharton: “The Reckoning” (1902) Mona Caird: “The Yellow Drawing Room” (1892) Thomas Hardy: Jude the Obscure (1896) 2. “I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it”: Modernism Indoors Charlotte Perkins Gilman: “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) Henri Barbusse: Hell (1908) Virginia Woolf: “The Mark on the Wall” (1917) Franz Kafka: The Metamorphosis (1915) 3. Walking Giedion’s Tightrope: The Quest for Equipoise in Two New York Novels Ayn Rand: The Fountainhead (1943) Ann Petry: The Street (1946) 4. “Solitaire ou Solidaire” Inside, or Outside, the Whale Elizabeth Bowen: The Heat of the Day (1949) Albert Camus: “Jonas” (1957) Alain Robbe-Grillet: Jealousy (1957) 5. “How can you fight something as concrete, as concretey as this?” Deconstructing the High-Rise J.G. Ballard: High-Rise (1975) Doris Lessing: The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) 6. Sealed Rooms and Yawning Hallways: Marriage and Domestic Architecture in Two Millennial Fictions Chuck Palahniuk: Diary (2003) Mark Z. Danielewski: House of Leaves (2000) Conclusion 3 Introduction This thesis will offer a range of novels and short stories as evidence that twentieth-century fiction is peculiarly preoccupied with walls and their trimmings – doors and windows, wallpaper and paint, wall cavities, and the wires, pipework and insulation with which they are packed – and also with rooms and their contents. It will then closely analyse these texts with a view to establishing what it is about architecture that so captivates the twentieth-century literary imagination. The texts selected are examples of fiction in which architecture plays a particularly prominent part, and in which structure and surface are scrutinised with particular fanaticism. It is intended to be a representative selection, however, and the thesis will draw, throughout, on extracts from other twentieth-century works that display a marked architectural orientation. I start from the position that twentieth-century modernism and postmodernism were trans-European and North American phenomena, and the same is true for the theoretical discourses with which I, and my authors, engage. Consequently I will be drawing on texts from a variety of European countries, and also from North America. The first chapter will consider marriage and domestic architecture in texts by Edith Wharton, Mona Caird and Thomas Hardy; the second will explore the twentieth-century protagonist, alone in a room, in texts by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Henri Barbusse, Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka; and the third will consider two politically antithetical texts by Ayn Rand and Ann Petry, in which a protagonist struggles to find the point of equilibrium between self and world. The fourth chapter will return, in texts by Elizabeth Bowen, Albert Camus and Alain Robbe-Grillet, to the retreat of the protagonist, and will consider whether these texts are endorsing his sedentary stance. This chapter will also begin to investigate whether post-war authors are using architecture as a figure through which to interrogate the inside/outside dichotomy – a proposition pursued in Chapter 5, which will focus on novels by J.G. Ballard and Doris Lessing. The final chapter will consider walls and skin as related tropes in novels by Chuck Palahniuk and Mark Z. Danielewski, and will investigate whether both are now connective membranes, rather than instruments of separation. It will also pick up a thread which will run through the thesis: the relationship between architecture and writing in twentieth-century fiction. My principal objective is to explore the relationship between literary architecture and the development of what might be deemed a twentieth-century 4 sensibility, and it is this that has determined the chronological arrangement of the texts. I will seek to identify architectural tropes that they share, but will also explore whether these tropes change, as the century progresses. Architecture as process will be considered, as well as architecture as product. The thesis will examine the architect as protagonist, and also the decorator (professional and amateur), the stonemason, the builder and the caretaker. In 2007 Michael Berliner – senior adviser to the Ayn Rand Archives and editor of her letters – published an essay intended to “settle the issue of Wright’s relationship to Roark”, the architect-hero of The Fountainhead (1943) (Berliner 2007: 41). In it he forages through biographies, interviews and correspondence for clues that Frank Lloyd Wright was the model for Howard Roark. Having established that their “life stories” and “personalities” have “virtually nothing in common”, he eventually concludes that while Wright might not quite have been the “model” for Rand’s architect, he was certainly the “inspiration” (51-2, 58). The evidence he provides for his verdict is that Rand “pleaded with [Wright] for an interview, bought clothes she could ill afford when first meeting him, sent him the manuscript of her novel, was hurt when he brushed her off, [and] was overjoyed when he wrote to her about the book” (60). Like Berliner’s essay, this thesis will pay some attention to the connection between the fictional architect and the real. Rather than relying on biographical conjecture, however, it will look to Wright’s writing on architecture in order to evaluate any similarities between his views and the position of the novel. Rand’s primary concern, I will argue, is the relationship between man and world, and to what extent he should compromise and cooperate to live in it. It is a philosophical, and political, concern; and the hypothesis I will be testing is that Rand is not the only twentieth-century writer to use architecture to explore it. In her Lectures in America (published in 1935 following her acclaimed “homecoming” lecture tour), Gertrude Stein situates American avant-garde writing in general, and her own work in particular, in the context of European literary history. When she characterises the nineteenth century as a period “when the inside had become so solidly inside that all the outside could be outside and still the inside was all inside”, she is outlining the assumptions of the literary realist, for whom there was no confusion between subject and world – no leakage, or border area (Stein 1935: 28). What happened in the twentieth century, she says, was that writers “suddenly began to feel the outside inside and the inside outside and it was perhaps not so exciting but it was very interesting. Anyway it was quite exciting” (205). With interior and exterior reality 5 less rigidly demarcated, writers were granted the creative freedom to experiment with the way both were represented. Paradoxically, as this thesis will demonstrate, one of the ways they did so was to shut up their protagonists in rooms.