A House Performs Lisa Flanagan Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected]
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Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2008 A house performs Lisa Flanagan Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the Communication Commons Recommended Citation Flanagan, Lisa, "A house performs" (2008). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 2744. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/2744 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. A HOUSE PERFORMS A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College In partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy in The Department of Communication Studies By Lisa Flanagan B.A., University of Texas, 1990 M.A., Louisiana State University, 2002 August 2008 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thank you to my advisor, Ruth Bowman, for being both a mentor and a friend over the years. Your dedication, patience, and experience have benefitted me greatly in all areas of performance studies. Thanks to the other members of my committee as well: Michel Bowman and Patricia Suchy, repeat players and valued mentors and friends; Miles Richardson, whose Poetics of Place class and awesome teaching style provided so much of the inspiration for what I wrote and how I want to be; and Marchita Mauck, who did me a favor as a late addition dean’s representative, and contributed her knowledge of art and design to the discussion of my research. Big thanks to all my Communication Studies/Performance Studies mentors and colleagues, as well as my friends both in and out of school. Y’all have made my time at LSU enjoyable and enlightening: Andy, Antony, Ben, Brianne, Bruce, Charlotte, Chris K, Cora, Dan, Danielle, Danny, David, Dee, Demetrius, Derek, Dre, Dr HopKins, Dr King, Dr P, DT, Elton, Gary, Ginger, Gretchen, Hillary, Holley, Jason, Jessica, Jen A, Jenny, Joel, Joey, John, Josh, JT, Linda, Lisa L, Lewis, Louis, Mark, Melanie, Mindy, Nick, Nirmala, Pramila, Pye, Rachel, Randee, Rebecca, Ross, Rowdy, Sarah, Tracy, Treat, to name a few. Thanks to family who have supported, encouraged, nudged, and harassed me as needed throughout this process – all my love and gratitude. To my parents, Robert and Judith, you enabled me to get here through your initial investment and continued belief in my studies. To my siblings, Laura and Chris, for continuing to be an inspiration for me as we take our various paths in life and add to our extended family. To Gloria, you are an important support and addition to my family. To my husband, James, thanks for being there and taking care of me while waiting patiently for me to finish up. (Your turn!) To Devon and Liam, you boys are one reason I have worked so hard; I thank you for understanding my occasional absences and distractions, for being supportive of what I had to do, and for growing into such wonderful people. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ……………………………………….……….……………………. ii ABSTRACT ……………………………………………………………………………………. iv CHAPTER ONE PERFORMING HOUSE WORK ………………………………………………...1 TWO POP UP HOUSE ………………………………………………………………...20 THREE HOUSE OF WAX ..........................................................................................…...45 FOUR DOLL HOUSE …………………………………………………………………..75 FIVE HOUSE OF CARDS …………………………………………………………….99 SIX A FULL HOUSE……………………………………………………………….127 WORKS CITED …………………………………………………………….……..…………..142 VITA ………………………………………………………………………….………………..148 iii ABSTRACT This study analyses and performs a series of histories about a semi-abandoned Victorian house located in downtown Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I engage Gregory Ulmer’s inter-discursive and inter-subjective process of historiography, the mystory, as a way of viewing and doing research. Mystory allows for research through diverse perspectives of professional, popular and personal discourses, which activates the pleasures and problems of knowledge production by urging invention and creative expression. Significance is discovered in less determined, more localized, ways of knowing that avoid fixing the house in terms of predetermined “historic” values. Material culture and archives like the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps discussed in Chapter Three are viewed as active or performance processes that affect and are affected by the shifting circumstances of history and culture. The partialities of all language forms function as miniatures of what they represent. Texts and performances are constructed through bricolage of the materials gathered. These metonymic expressions call attention to certain details, while eliding or ignoring others, and are essential to the knowledge and structures produced from them. In constructing 310 Convention on the page and stage, I understand performance in Richard Schechner’s terms as “restored behavior,” an action or expression that draws on and refers to its past. I call on Martin Heidegger’s notions of dwelling and building as fundamental states of human experience through which we learn about the world around us, make meaning from it, and understand our place(s) in it. Gaston Bachelard furthers the Heideggerian impulse with topophilia, or the desire to protect and preserve loved spaces if only in imagination. Jacques Derrida provides ways to structure arguments though chora, the spacing of text upon the page, and also contributes to the archive as a site that overflows with excess through its collection, composition, and coding. Through these and other discourses, I discover and produce ways to iv view this “insignificant” house differently by acknowledging its many histories. I also recognize how performance on the page and stage, already embedded in loss through what cannot be restored, reflects the possibilities and limitations of its metonymic expression. v CHAPTER ONE PERFORMING HOUSE WORK The grand opulence of high ceilings, ornately carved crown mouldings, Georgian sash windows, and operable cypress shutters offer a rare kind satisfaction. And when the plaster of those high ceilings has a few cracks, the crown mouldings develop a crazed finish, the sash rattles wildly in the wind, and the shutters lose some of their louvers, we feel the inevitable effects of age and are enraptured by the gravity of human experience that all those telltale signs evoke. One develops a rapport with and discrimination about old things: whereas the termite infestation may need to be dealt with at any expense, perhaps the peeling paint can be integrated into the motif – Richard Sexton and Randolph Delehanty New Orleans: Elegance and Decadence (3) Figure 1. House at 310 Convention Street April 7, 2003 (photo by the author) I saw the house over fifteen years ago now, sitting in a state of splendid decay, a strange anomaly between a high rise and a parking lot in downtown Baton Rouge. The building seemed to be abandoned until the owner made cosmetic changes to the exterior a few years ago, leaving it otherwise untouched. The texture of the ashen wood and chipped paint façade, the lacy scalloped shell of cornice molding, the floral top curls of Corinthian columns, and the rhythmic undulation of the building as it shifts from regular right angles to trapezoidal juts of bay windows 1 create patterns of attraction that draw me to it. I am compelled by its beauty. I am also compelled by the stories the house tells of its heyday in the early twentieth century when it was one of many homes thriving amidst the bustle of a mixed use city center. My attraction is of a familial nature too. In my lifetime, I have lived in many older houses, but never ones with roots beyond my immediate family. Nevertheless, I frequently speculate as to the stories they carry within their walls and search for traces of the previous inhabitants in the nooks and crannies of each dwelling. Having no homestead for my family‟s genealogy, I often wonder why those connected with this particular place would seem both to shut it away and abandon it to the whims of time. As I watch (over) the house, I am “hooked” by its story and survival, by the way the house makes me think, feel, and imagine, and by the archival documents, literary texts and popular materials, anecdotes and photographs I have drawn on to help me understand the house and my relationship to it. The house and the materials I have collected and composed over the years lure me into a space for dwelling on the significance of a place that in conventional terms is relatively insignificant. The house bears no connections to a famous person and, rundown as it is and impure in architectural style, it is not a house of historic importance. Save for legal documents, conveyance records and the like, nothing has been written about it. Further, I have never been in the house and, since its cosmetic update in 2003 when a chain link fence was installed around it, I find it difficult to get close to it. I tend to the house from afar. I dwell on it, in the sense of “sparing and preserving . its nature” and in the sense of my “stay” as a mortal “on this earth” (Heidegger 147). Prompted by the house, my choice to dwell is enacted in this document, which is as much about the process of dwelling as it is about the actual dwelling itself. Profound as that may sound, I also understand my dwelling as akin in process and 2 temperament to a big fish story (or a big fish out of water story) in so far as the subject comes into being by how the tale – a research tale in this case – is told. THE PROJECT My project centers around a semi-abandoned Victorian house located at 310 Convention Street in downtown Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I have no direct connection to the place, but my feeling of attachment is strong just the same.