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Encounters with the Modernist Food-Object Jennifer A. Malone A

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Encounters with the Modernist Food-Object Jennifer A. Malone A Encounters With the Modernist Food-Object Jennifer A. Malone A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2018 Reading Committee: Brian Reed, Chair Mark Patterson Kathleen Woodward Program Authorized to Offer Degree: The Department of English ©Copyright 2018 Jennifer A. Malone University of Washington Abstract Encounters With the Modernist Food-Object Jennifer A. Malone Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Brian Reed The Department of English This interdisciplinary dissertation seeks to remedy scholarly neglect of the topic of food within literature and art of the early twentieth century, particularly within transatlantic forms of modernism. I argue that the topic of food—or, as I will call it, the food-object— has been additionally neglected within recent scholarly work on objects and material encounters, including “thing theory” and other object-oriented ontologies. I examine the treatment of food—particularly in terms of the food-object—within Rebecca West’s “Indissoluble Matrimony” and The Judge, arguing that these works provide rich examples of a new centrality of food within modernist literature, particularly in terms of objecthood and the everyday, as they variously portray the act of food consumption as one of play, sensory encounter, pleasure, overintimacy, abjection, violence, and coercion, notably with regards to gender and the limits of the human body. After arguing for a reassessment of art historical narratives that treat the artistic category of the readymade as one of dematerialization, I then suggest that the readymade instead actually emphasizes the specific materiality of objects, as well as embodied encounters with these objects, which leads to discussion of small-scale “readymade” sculptures across modernist avant- garde artistic movements such as Dada and Surrealism, mid-century artistic movements such as Pop Art, and beyond. Focusing particularly upon Marcel Duchamp’s Why Not Sneeze, Rose Sélavy?, Méret Oppenheim’s Object and My Nurse (Ma Gouvernante), and Claes Oldenburg’s Pastry Case I, I examine the ways in which these sculptures interrogate both the concept of food as object and the act of food consumption, particularly as these things relate to forms of bodily encounter that expose the lack of distance between the human (or animal) body and the food-object, and that also emphasize human-food interactions that are not necessarily about edibility. The vulnerabilities and possibilities of the modernist scene of eating within public settings such as restaurants, cafés, and automats are considered through painter Edward Hopper’s The Automat, Chop Suey, and Nighthawks, as well as through Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Waves. My discussion of these works foregrounds such acts of food consumption as spectacle, particularly as they take place within eating establishments that emphasize visibility. Also explored, within a brief coda, are the ways in which “modernist cuisine” has become a category of food within the high-end restaurants of the early twenty-first century, one which emphasizes—much as do twentieth-century modernist works of literature and art, and scenes of eating which are culturally modernist—forms of body-object play, spectacle, and, ultimately, both the objecthood of food and the complexity of the human encounter with food. Acknowledgements Thank you to my family for all of their support and encouragement. Special thanks go to my mother, who not only ensured that we had endless access to books and art when growing up in a small Midwestern town, but who has read (and proofread, sometimes again and again) nearly every word I have written throughout my academic career. As well as to my brother, for teaching me (amongst many other things) that food could be art. Thank you to my very dear and supportive friends, many of whom I was fortunate enough to meet here at the University of Washington, and all of whom enrich my life and work tremendously. Thank you to my UW students, past and present, who have taught me much about who I am. Thank you to those within the English department here at UW, particularly Kathy Mork for her unending cheerleading throughout the dissertation process, and Ali Dahmer for her steadfast support and kind encouragement when it was much needed during the final stages of this project. I am overwhelmingly grateful to my committee: the tremendously astute and incredibly helpful Professors Kathleen Woodward and Mark Patterson, and my supportive and interested GSR, Phillip Thurtle. There are truly not enough words to thank Professor Brian Reed for his support, encouragement, mentorship, kindness, intellectual generosity, and remarkably delightful and engaged comments on the drafts of the following chapters. And finally, I will always be indebted to Professor Stephen Arata, whose casual remarks on Proust caused a shy undergraduate to prick up her ears and realize that she was finally in the right place, and whose kind encouragement (and championing of Woolf’s The Waves) changed the course of my academic career. TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1. Introduction: Food-Object Matter(s) 1 Chapter 2. Pleasure and Control: Encounters with the Food-Object in Rebecca West’s “Indissoluble Matrimony” and The Judge 23 Chapter 3. Ready(made) to Eat? In/edible Encounters with Marcel Duchamp, Méret Oppenheim, and Claes Oldenburg 88 Chapter 4. Spectacular Vulnerability: Negotiating the Modernist Scene of Eating with Edward Hopper and Virginia Woolf 159 Coda. Consuming “Modernist” Food in the Twenty-First Century 252 Bibliography 264 Malone 1 CHAPTER 1 Introduction: Food-Object Matter(s) I would like to begin with the problem of Cézanne’s apples. After all, scratch the surface of nearly any discussion of modern visual art—and of literary modernism, for that matter—and one is liable to find mention of Paul Cézanne, the French Post-Impressionist and proto-Cubist painter to whom art critic Peter Schjeldahl has recently referred (perhaps glibly, though not inaccurately) as “the godhead of modernism” (“Game Change”). Cézanne began painting apples whilst in the middle stages of his career, in the 1870s, and frequently returned to this subject matter throughout the final decades of his career.1 Cézanne’s apples may tumble forth into the picture plane, scattering themselves amongst almost-sculptural folds of fabric (as in The Basket of Apples [1895]). They may share compositional space with other fruit or vegetables, and/or dishes and other food-adjacent objects (as in Still Life with a Ginger Jar and Eggplants [1893- 94]). They may be alone, varying numbers of brush-stroked globes in close-up upon a wooden table (as in Four Apples [c. 1881]). They present themselves repeatedly to the viewer of Cézanne’s body of work, piled up, turned upon their sides, smooth or mottled, green and red and yellow and brown. But how are we to apprehend these apples? After brief consideration of two of the most influential and enduring answers to this question, I will discuss the ways in which these apples might be generatively read in relation to recent object-oriented theories—that is, as Malone 2 objects—and, more than this, as part of the undertheorized but particularly rich and complex category of food-objects that I will address throughout this dissertation. Is it enough, for example, to mark the place of Cézanne’s apples within the long history of the “still life” within the visual arts, a category of painting dating back to Roman times which reached its apotheosis in the Dutch and Flemish styles of the seventeenth century?2 After all, one might note, drawing from modernist critic and painter Roger Fry’s work on Cézanne, the ways in which these apples mark a tremendous stylistic departure from earlier still life paintings by other artists, even those painted within a nearly contemporary time period, particularly in terms of ‘unrealistic’ perspective and Cézanne’s handling of paint upon the surface of the canvas, and it is likely such stylistic departures that led the artist to supposedly remark that he wished to “astonish Paris with an apple” (Lanchner 5).3 According to Fry, whose 1927 volume on Cézanne remains remarkably influential, Cézanne’s choice to portray “robust and long-enduring fruits” such as apples was a practical one; instead of needing to attend to the rapidly-fading freshness of “ephemeral flowers” as subject matter, filling his studio table with apples simply allowed Cézanne to “pursue till it was exhausted his probing analysis of the chromatic whole,” such as the ways in which “changes of colour corresponded to movements of planes” and the “idea of colour as revealing plasticity” (38). Fry’s analysis of Still Life with Compotier (1879-80) focuses purely upon the formalist elements of Cézanne’s apples: the “small touches of a full brush” which layer pigment into “an extreme richness and density,” the “rectilinear lines of the napkin and knife” that create the “horizontal extension” of the composition that “supports the spherical volumes” of these apples, the repetition of spheres and oblong shapes that contribute to the “formal harmony” of the piece, and the oft-“exceptional clearness” of the brush-hatched contour that lends each spherical volume (apple) “impressive solidity and weight” (43; 47; 48-9; 50; 51). Malone 3 Fry continues his discussion of several of Cézanne’s other apple-involving paintings in the same vein, and then notes, “how constantly spherical forms absorb [Cézanne’s] attention” marking the very few Cézanne still life paintings involving skulls as evidence that “a skull was merely a complicated variation upon the sphere” (53). On Fry’s model, then, the differences in artistic subject matter between an apple and a skull are negligible at best—these objects are important only for the opportunities they provide an artist such as Cézanne to experiment with different “variations” of spherical shapes.
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