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2809644829 REFERENCE ONLY UNIVERSITY OF LONDON THESIS Degree f Vv Year ^ Nanie of Author5 \ T )r\ [)^ o^A \ 3-A COPYRIGHT This is a thesis accepted for a Higher Degree of the University of London. It is an unpublished typescript and the copyright is held by the author. All persons consulting this thesis must read and abide by the Copyright Declaration below. COPYRIGHT DECLARATION I recognise that the copyright of the above-described thesis rests with the author and that no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author. LOANS Theses may not be lent to individuals, but the Senate House Library may lend a copy to approved libraries within the United Kingdom, for consultation solely on the premises of those libraries. Application should be made to: Inter-Library Loans, Senate House Library, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU. REPRODUCTION University of London theses may not be reproduced without explicit written permission from the Senate House Library. Enquiries should be addressed to the Theses Section of the Library. Regulations concerning reproduction vary according to the date of acceptance of the thesis and are listed below as guidelines. A. Before 1962. Permission granted only upon the prior written consent of the author. (The Senate House Library will provide addresses where possible). B. 1962-1974. In many cases the author has agreed to permit copying upon completion of a Copyright Declaration. C. 1975-1988. Most theses may be copied upon completion of a Copyright Declaration. D. 1989 onwards. Most theses may be copied. This thesis comes within category D. This copy has been deposited in the Library of This copy has been deposited in the Senate House Library, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU. ffv/ic mu The Presence of Materiality and Material Culture in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine: Rethinking a Narrative Text as Constitutive of a Material World. Daniel Smith Slade School of Fine Art PhD Fine Art 1 UMI Number: U592426 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U592426 Published by ProQuest LLC 2013. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Abstract Within H. G. Wells’s (1866-1946) short novel The Time Machine (1895) a peculiarly resonant sense of materiality is articulated. The novel can be defined in terms of the ways in which not just objects, but rather a more encompassing sense of materiality has been meticulously arranged so as to convey a detailed, familiar environment into which a fantastic element is introduced. This sense of a graspable everyday setting is dependent on a solidity of detailed materiality, as are the fantastic elements that disrupt them. This suggested quality of materiality and material culture relates not only to recognisably object-based artefacts but also to notions of selfhood. From this single text, I will attempt to construct a speculative notion of material culture, or rather, I will be analysing the presence of material culture and materiality, and attempting to build upon it. In this way, I will move towards the construction of a speculative notion of material culture, making the case for the novel as a valuable and privileged form as a generator of hermeneutic possibility. 2 Table of Contents Introduction p.4. Chapter 1: Purloining Material Culture p.9. Chapter 2: Text and Utopia. Materiality and Portent p.47. Chapter 3: The Material Presence of Bodies in The Time Machine p.84. Chapter 4: Time and Temporality p. 142. Chapter 5: The Spatial Zones of The Time Machine p. 189. Chapter 6: Writing and Possibility p.252. Notes p. 271. Bibliography p.287. Illustrations p.296. 3 Introduction In the final version of Berlin Childhood around 1900, Walter Benjamin recalls how he was able to stage an adventure within the confines of his own room through the exploration of his wardrobe. He would delve inside among the nightshirts and undergarments, until he was able to find and remove pairs of socks, rolled up and turned inside out. Each of these became for him a small pocket, which contained ‘the little present’.1 Benjamin describes first grasping this present within, composed of a woollen mass, and then unveiling and unwrapping the present as it is pulled out from within the interior. Disconcertingly, as the present was revealed, the pocket would, of course, disappear. Yet rather than linger on this often repeated process as a confession of a psychically revealing compulsion, Benjamin recalls this memory to demonstrate its pedagogical impact, and the importance of this odd game in relation to his thinking in later life. This present is not like a toy wrapped in shiny paper, but rather is the tangible sense that inside the rolled up sock, is indeed, more sock. Within the interior space of the exterior is something that is indivisible from exterior. This is not just an infantile aporia, but is, according to Benjamin, the means by which he learnt about how to practice criticism: I could not repeat the experiment on this phenomena often enough. It taught me that form and content, veil and what is veiled, are the same. It led me to draw truth from works of literature as warily as the child’s hand retrieved the sock from ‘the pocket.’2 There is on the one hand a specificity of interior and exterior that inform this thesis, in part on the level of indivisibility of form and content, but also the thematising and enacting of a dissolution of boundaries. However, there is a more pertinent instruction in Benjamin’s memoir. This is the not to say that an object should act as an illustration of discourse, but that the pleasure one takes in an object can embody, perform and instruct acts of critical agency. 4 My own object of illumination is H. G. Wells’s (1866-1946) short novel The Time Machine (1895). The novel can be defined in terms of the ways in which not just objects, but rather a more encompassing sense of materiality has been meticulously arranged so as to convey a detailed, familiar environment in which a fantasy narrative can play out. This sense of a graspable everyday setting is dependent on a solidity of detailed materiality, as are the fantastic elements. This suggested quality of materiality and material culture relates not only to recognisably object-based artefacts but also to notions of selfhood. From this single text, I will be analysing the presence of material culture and materiality, and building upon it. In this way, I will move towards the construction of a speculative notion of material culture, making the case for the novel as a valuable and privileged form as a generator of hermeneutic possibility. This thesis has emerged out of a process of thinking about artworks as forms of material culture. Implicated in this are considerations of a broader cultural and historical set of realms in which artworks operate. Simultaneously this process seeks to generate an understanding of material culture that may contribute to new ways of encountering artworks. This has led to a consideration of material culture from a vantage point located outside of, but looking inwards at, its more generally-accepted dominant disciplinary forms within anthropology, archaeology and museum studies. Therefore this is a project concerned with providing a new and hitherto neglected account of the notion of material culture, and sets out to expand the use and understanding of the term beyond its current definitions and limitations. Whereas the dominant uses and descriptive accounts of material culture as a form of knowledge and set of disciplinary concerns relate to the inalienable artefact in space and time - in particular one that is available through an analysis of its context through fieldwork - it is my contention that interpretations of phenomenological encounters with and manifestations of material culture should not be determined by an ontological privileging of physical objects. While the disciplinary origins of this thesis can be located in a fine art context, the object of analysis can not. This standpoint, of being able to consider material culture from within a fine art context, is significant in that it has allowed a 5 process of analysis and reflection that while learning from the disciplinary frameworks that constitute the field of material culture studies, can enable a kind of cognitive audacity. I would describe this project as audacious in that it is defined as a discussion and analysis of a material world that is in fact constituted by a work of narrative fiction. Such a choice might also seem contentious for a fine art thesis. If any such contention exists, it is necessary to remember that this is not a thesis written in an art history department, but rather as a piece of research undertaken at The Slade School of Fine Art recognises the potential that the School’s PhD programme enables for interdisciplinary approaches to the subject of fine art. In such an environment, where there is no concrete disciplinary form as such, it is necessary to acknowledge that the forms of knowledge that now (but not only now) surround and permeate artworks are in fact shared with and built upon a much larger set of epistemological fields.