Psychogeography and the Novel: Fictions of Place, Motion and Identity, 1920 to 1965
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Psychogeography and the novel: fictions of place, motion and identity, 1920 to 1965 Ella Mudie A thesis submitted to the University of New South Wales in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy School of the Arts and Media Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences September 2015 2 3 4 Contents List of Figures ................................................................................................................................... 6 Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................... 7 Abstract ...........................................................................................................................................................8 Key dates .........................................................................................................................................................9 Glossary of terms ..........................................................................................................................................10 Note on the use of French language materials ...............................................................................................11 Introduction ...................................................................................................................................................12 1. The Surrealist City Novel ..........................................................................................................................39 1.1 Experimental autobiography and the roman-à-clef ............................................................................41 1.2 The uncanny politics of Paris .............................................................................................................45 1.3 Paris Peasant and the liminal city .....................................................................................................50 1.4 Leonora Carrington: mapping madness .............................................................................................59 1.5 Surrealism, psychogeography and the novel ......................................................................................65 2. Lost bearings: delirious narrativity from Lowry to Lettrist psychogeography..........................................71 2.1 Unitary urbanism: redesigning subjectivity .......................................................................................73 2.2 Micropolitics of the dérive .................................................................................................................83 2.3 The influential game of Lowry ...........................................................................................................92 3. An atlas of allusions: Guy Debord’s Mémoires ......................................................................................106 3.1 The perverse methods of détournement ...........................................................................................109 3.2 The lessons of London: Anglophone literature and the critique of urbanism ..................................116 3.3 Reigniting the Fronde: polemicising the romance genre ..................................................................126 4. “A Sum of Possibilities”: The Situationist fiction of Michèle Bernstein ................................................139 4.1 All the King’s Horses and the critique of separation ........................................................................140 4.2 Humour, masks, mythology .............................................................................................................152 4.3 The dérive and the mobility of desire ...............................................................................................161 5. Adrift in the sixties ..................................................................................................................................174 5.1 Alexander Trocchi: Cain’s Book, psychogeography and inner space ..............................................177 5.2 Anti-literature and the play ethos .....................................................................................................186 5.3 Things: A Story of the Sixties ...........................................................................................................192 5.4 “Apart together”: drift and the problems of belonging ....................................................................198 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................................209 WORKS CITED ..........................................................................................................................................222 List of Figures 1.1 Plate 3 from Nadja (1928). Photograph of the statue of Etienne Dolet. 1.2 Plate 17 from Nadja (1928). Photograph of the Humanité bookshop with billboard “Sign up Here.” 1.3 Map of Santander from Down Below (1944) by Leonora Carrington. First published in VVV 1944 (no 4). Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 2.1 Publicité, advertisement for a dérive first published in Les Lèvres nues #7 December 1955. Scan courtesy Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 3.1 Page from Mémoires by Guy Ernest-Debord and Asger Jorn 1959. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 3.2 Page from Mémoires by Guy Ernest-Debord and Asger Jorn 1959. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 3.3 Page from Mémoires by Guy Ernest-Debord and Asger Jorn 1959. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 4.1 Portrait of Michèle Bernstein in the galley proof of Internationale Situationniste # 2 December 1958. Reproduced in The Night by Michèle Bernstein. Trans. Clodagh Kinsella. London: Book Works, 2013. 4.2 Photograph of Michèle Bernstein, London 2013, playing chess with “Everyone Agrees.” Published in Frieze magazine 157, September 2013. Note on copyright: Permissions to reproduce the above figures have not been sought and all third party copyrighted material has been removed from the digital public version of the thesis. Acknowledgements This thesis is the outcome of a full-time PhD candidature undertaken at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) within the English Department of the School of the Arts and Media (SAM). Particular thanks to my primary supervisor, Dr Fiona Morrison, whose astute and incisive feedback and robust discussions have proved invaluable at each stage of the project. The thesis has also benefitted from the responses of the project’s co-supervisor, Associate Professor Brigitta Olubas, and from Dr Sean Pryor as reader for the annual progress reviews. Thanks to Dr Dorottya Fabian for fostering a supportive and collegial culture among the School’s PhD cohort during her tenure as postgraduate coordinator. I am grateful for funding awarded under the Postgraduate Research Support Scheme administered by the Graduate Research School, which facilitated travel to the UK to present work in progress at the 2014 Poetics of Space in Twentieth and Twenty- First Century Culture postgraduate conference at Portsmouth University and a visit to inspect Situationist materials in the John McCready Archive at Liverpool John Moores University. I also wish to acknowledge the financial support I have received as a recipient of an Australian Postgraduate Award (APA) for the full term of my candidature. 7 Abstract Psychogeography first emerged in France in the 1950s as an avant-garde experimental behaviour concerned with contesting the alienations of modern urbanism with a praxis of embodied responses to the city. As it was practised by the Lettrist International (1952-57) and later the Situationist International (1957-72), psychogeography and the purposeless drift of the dérive engaged the category of space as a means to supersede the separation of art from the politics of everyday life, thereby reflecting a broader tension within the historical avant-garde concerning the relationship between aesthetics, representation and radical social critique. Notwithstanding its anti-literary beginnings, in recent years psychogeography has evolved into a highly ambiguous form of literary endeavour with an ambivalent relationship to its original avant-garde formulation. In this thesis, I am concerned to reassess the contested and contradictory role of the novel during the avant-garde phase of psychogeography with a view to not only complicating generalised treatments of literary psychogeography but also to consider the full extent of the critique of the classical novel and literary production that the praxis of psychogeography performs. Spanning the antecedents of psychogeography in the “false novels” of the Surrealists to the détournement, or turning around, of novelistic sources in key Situationist texts such as Guy Debord’s Mémoires and the novels of Michèle Bernstein, case studies are drawn from French and British authors at the intersection of the historical moment of the SI who sought to repurpose and redirect existing elements of literary culture to critical ends. By focusing on this overlooked period in literary history during which the negation of the novel and of cultural production more broadly played a crucial role, this study seeks to reposition psychogeography