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Neopastoral Artifacts and the Phenomenology of Environment in American Modernist Poetics

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Neopastoral Artifacts and the Phenomenology of Environment in American Modernist Poetics REFUSE TO RELIC: NEOPASTORAL ARTIFACTS AND THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ENVIRONMENT IN AMERICAN MODERNIST POETICS Douglas ii Refuse to Relic: Neopastoral Artifacts and the Phenomenology of Environment in American Modernist Poetics Thesis format: Monograph by Jeffrey Daniel Douglas, B.A., B.Ed., M.A. Graduate Program in English A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The School of Graduate Studies McMaster University Hamilton, Ontario, Canada © Jeffrey D. Douglas 2013 Douglas iii Abstract Building on concepts of the pastoral, the picturesque, the “vernacular ruin,” and frontierism in an American context, this thesis explores the interest in ruin and commodity- oriented refuse within rural, wilderness, and what Leo Marx in The Machine in the Garden calls “middle ground” environments. Chapter one analyzes how “nature,” as both scenery and the natural environment removed from civilization, has been conceptualized as a place where human-made objects become repurposed through the gaze of the spectator. Theories surrounding gallery and exhibition space, as well as archaeological practices related to garbage excavation, are assessed to determine how waste objects, when wrested out of context, become artifacts of cultural significance. Chapter two turns to focus on the settler experience of the frontier in order to locate a uniquely American evolution of the interest in everyday waste objects. Because the frontier wilderness in American culture can be regarded as a site of transition and malleability, it is argued that the (mis)perception of object matter within this transitional space helped to shape modernist poetics and its association with everyday objects. Chapters three and four return to the rural and the pastoral to focus on Marx’s concept of the “middle ground,” borderlands of quasi-natural space that are located “somewhere ‘between,’ yet in a transcendent relation to, the opposing forces of civilization and nature” (23). In dialogue with Marx’s theories, I propose a definition of the “neopastoral” as that which evolves from the interjection of domestic waste into these middle spaces to the aesthetic appropriation of everyday, common objects in modernist American poetry. The final chapter focuses on selected poems by modernist writers such as Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, and W.C. Williams to analyze their explicit references to everyday waste in conjunction with the mythologized American pastoral. These poets provide evidence for how the drive to poeticize an abandoned, human-made object’s proximity to a natural environment plays a significant role in the perception of the fragmented object-subject relationship in modernity. Douglas iv Acknowledgements First, I would like to thank my father, to whom much of this work is dedicated, and whose appropriation of random commodity trash to be reconfigured in enigmatic mélanges was the spark for this study. If I had not encountered what I like to think of as an updated “Anecdote of the Jar”—a Mayonnaise jar placed on a wooden pallet in the middle of a grassy pasture (an assemblage for which my father was responsible)—I might not have experienced the jolt that reinvented my all-too-familiar surroundings. Suddenly there was poetry everywhere. I would also like to acknowledge my grandmother, Hilda Mae Douglas, and my uncle, Melvin Douglas, both of whom passed away while I was writing the dissertation, and who were parents to me. They helped me get to where I am in more ways than they might have imagined. Of course I would like to thank my committee members for their timely and detailed feedback on this project, and for helping me to navigate the sometimes labyrinthine path through to the end. My supervisor, Mary O’Connor, gave me some of the most thoughtful feedback I could hope to have; Joseph Adamson offered not only academic guidance, but also moral support; and Jeffery Donaldson put up with my random incursions into his office to talk garbage and natural space, and directed me toward some great material for use in my thesis. Mary’s archive course also offered an indispensable theoretical and structural foundation for my study, as well as the opportunity to participate in my first real exhibition at Hamilton Artists Inc. in Hamilton, Ontario. This thesis exists only because I had the best committee with which to work on such a project, one that offered thoughtful advice while allowing me to take a creative approach. I would also like to thank artists Scott McKay and Paul Jacobsen for their participation and interest in my project. Their contributions add a dimension to my thesis that attests to the Douglas v popular interest surrounding tech-waste perceived in, and appropriated from, natural and rural settings. And it goes without saying that I need to thank my longsuffering partner, Jennifer Butkus, for her love and support throughout this process. Finally, I would like to thank Bill Brown and Peter Schwenger. If it wasn’t for the theoretical structure they provided in the way of “things,” I would have been doing a lot more groping about than I did. I got the chance to meet Schwenger at a conference on horror fiction at the University of Guelph in 2010. A devoted teacher and academic, he went above and beyond his duties as a professor to advise me—a student whom he had just met, enrolled at a different university—on what turned out to be my first academic publication. For his selfless guidance, I cannot thank him enough. I also met Brown at a conference on Material Cultures at the University of Ottawa in May, 2011. With Brown being one of the foremost living authorities on “things” in American culture, a colleague and myself felt it fitting to send a drink we concocted on the spot called the “Wild Thing”—an amorphous mixture of blueberry liqueur with gin and something else experimental—over to his table at the reception dinner. We were sure to tell the waitress to emphasize the “thingliness” of its name when she served him the drink. When he found out who had sent the anomalous libation, he came over to our table, promptly informed us that he was drinking scotch, and we exchanged introductions. I told him that I was appropriating parts of his theoretical corpus to use for my project. He told me to do with it what I will. “Make it your own,” he said. Brown’s openness to allow his work to be grabbled through and applied to new contexts gave me the confidence to continue my interdisciplinary approach. So, I made it my own, and for the encouragement to do so, I am grateful. Douglas vi Contents Abstract iii Acknowledgements iv List of Figures viii Chapter 1: Artifacts of the Middle Ground 1.0. Introduction: Stumbling Over Things in (Neo)pastoral Space 9 1.1. The (Washing) Machine in the Garden: Wilderness Space as Gallery Space 30 1.2. Artifactualization of the Common: Old World and Modern Traditions Compared 45 1.3. The Artifactualization of Waste in Archaeology and Modern Aesthetics 59 1.4. The Aesthetics of Waste and Historical Connections to Green Space 67 Chapter 2: Waste Lands and Wilderness Frontiers: Interstices of Uncanny Space 2.1. Waste as Landscape – Waste as Refuse: An Introduction 71 2.2. Uncanny Materiality and Origins of the Middle Ground in the American Frontier 80 2.3. The Frontier and Middle Ground in Dialogue with Material Cultures 87 2.4. Uncanny Objects, Hallucinatory Narratives: Hybridizing Frontier Artifacts 102 Chapter 3: Dynamics of Decay: The Irony of Neopastoral and the Artifactual in Environmental Aesthetics 3.1. Potatoes in Cellars, Clods in Fields: Lumps of Inert Matter and Scenic Vision 120 3.3. What Is Neopastoral?: The Irony of Pastoral Amplified 127 3.2. The Washing Machine in the Garden Revisited: Interjections of the Domestic and Eden Ironized 142 3.4. Intersections of Waste Aesthetics and Natural Aesthetics: A Survey of the Scholarship, or Considerations of the Conspicuously Absent 161 3.5. The Picturesque, Mock-Nostalgia, and Artifact-oriented Ecophenomenology 180 Douglas vii Chapter 4: Fragments of Modernity, Domestic Ruin, and Neopastoral Aesthetics in Modernist American Poetry 4.1. “Boys and Bad Hunters”: Archives and Violence 183 4.2. Fragments of Modernity, Fragments of the Pastoral 203 4.3. Picturesque and Vernacular Ruins: Remnants of the Domestic and Their Influence on Modern American (Neopastoral) Poetics 230 4.4. “Hidden in the Instep Arch of the Old Cedar”: Broken Goblets, Shattered Dishes, and Vernacular Waste in Robert Frost 254 Epilogue 5.1. Frontiers of the Neopastoral 273 Works Cited 283 Douglas viii List of Figures Chapter 1 Figure 1.1. Cold Pastoral. Jeffrey Douglas, 2009. 15 Figure 1.2. Preservation and Decay. Jeffrey Douglas, 2011. 15 Figure 1.3. Anecdote of the Jugs. Jeffrey Douglas, 2009. 16 Figure 1.4. Countryside Car Wreck. Banksy, c. 2010. 30 Figure 1.5. Water Lilies. Banksy, c. 2010. 34 Figure 1.6. The Final Record of the Last Moment of History. Paul Jacobsen, 2008. 58 Chapter 2 Figure 2.1. It Will Go On Growing Except at That Point. Giuseppe Penone, c. 1968. 108 Figure 2.2. Trowel II. Claes Oldenburg, 1976. 119 Chapter 3 Figure 3.1. The Mythic Stone—Hidatsa. Edward Sheriff Curtis, 1908. 120 Figure 3.2. Beetown, Wisconsin. Paul Vanderbilt, 1962. 144 Figure 3.3. The Last Spectacle. Paul Jacobsen, 2005. 148 Figure 3.4. Untitled photograph. Frank Gohlke, n.d. 152 Figure 3.5. Reflection of the Interloper. Jeffrey Douglas, 2012. 176 Chapter 4 Figure 4.1. Highway Scenes: A1.S1. Jeffrey Douglas, 2011. 188 Figure 4.2. Highway Scenes: A1.S2. Jeffrey Douglas, 2011. 189 Figure 4.3. Rural Abstract 4. Jeffrey Douglas, 2011. 191 Figure 4.4.
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