Collecting As Self-Exploration in Late 19Th-Century French Literature
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Collecting as Self-Exploration in Late 19th-Century French Literature Kirsten B. Ellicson Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2012 © 2012 Kirsten B. Ellicson All rights reserved ABSTRACT Collecting as Self-Exploration in Late 19th-Century French Literature Kirsten B. Ellicson Collecting, as it was practiced in the 1880s, meant cultivating a comforting and busy, but also disorienting and disconcerting domestic, and mental, interior. This study examines how this meaning was developed in French literature at the end of the 19th century. I consider how collecting investigates the self, exercises the powers of the mind, inquires into the individual's relationship to society and to texts. The study takes, as its point of departure, comments about the cultural significance of collecting, as a widespread taste for domestic interiors filled with objects, made by Paul Bourget and Edmond de Goncourt, two writers of the 1880s. I then focus on fictional texts from the 1880s by J.-K. Huysmans and Pierre Loti, who, more than any other writers at the end of the 19th century, depict collecting as an earnest activity of self-exploration. The specific collections involved are Huysmans' protagonist's whimsically decorated house outside of Paris, Loti's protagonist's collection of Japanese objects in Japan, Loti's protagonist's floating museum on board his ship, and the author Loti's home museum in Rochefort. Through close readings of my two texts—paying attention to repeated words, descriptions, imagery, figurative language, ironies, contradictions, juxtapositions, ambiguities, tone and intertextual references, textual form and structure—I analyze how collecting is a process of defining the self, an apprentissage. The arc of my study draws its inspiration from the theme of collecting itself. From the self and mind of the collector, I proceed to examine how he organizes space, to how he interacts with other people, to how he approaches literature. Huysmans and Loti prefigure the modernist turn toward the superfluousness of objects, insofar as the collector's elaborate reflection on his objects dominates the two texts discussed in this study, A Rebours (1884) and Madame Chrysanthème (1887). As the collector comes to be at home with objects, objects become, increasingly, catalysts for inner mental exploration. Yet the collected objects of des Esseintes and Loti are still, often, special and rare; these characters are not yet exulting in the trivial, universally available object, as later modernists will do. In Huysmans and Loti, there is still great faith in material objects and the artful arrangement of them to satisfy desires, to be the answer to the quest, to fill the lack, to lead one inward, to solve problems. Already, by the end of the 1880s, the window of earnest self-exploration through collecting, as exemplified by Huysmans and Loti, will close. In Oscar Wilde's 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, which became well-known and widely read in France at the time of its publication, collecting in Wilde's text becomes implicated in hiding the truth of oneself. In Huysmans' and Loti's depictions of collecting art, art objects and other elements, there is, in contrast, a sense of profitable, fruitful exploration of self, rather than a fear of self- exploration. The collecting they portray is a way of coming to be at home in one's own mind–– seeking not originality but simply the articulation of one's own perspective. Table of Contents Introduction ... p. 1 Historical Context ... p. 1 Literary Context: Balzac and Flaubert ... p. 7 Literary Context: Goncourt and Bourget ... p. 13 Huysmans and Loti ... p. 22 Extant Scholarship ... p. 24 Chapters ... p. 28 I. Defining the Self ... p. 32 Negative Collecting: Banishing People ... p. 32 Complications of Withdrawal from Society ... p. 41 Reflecting on Paris in Tranquility ... p. 48 Collecting as Metaphor for Literary Movements ... p. 56 II. Compositional Experiments ... p. 64 Traveling Without Moving: A Marine Mess ... p. 64 Controlling Memory, Time and Desire ... p. 73 Surpassing Salomé ... p. 79 Moving Without Traveling: An Over-Taxed Turtle ... p. 84 III. Dealing with Other People … p. 97 Between Home and the Foreign ... p. 98 Detachment From and Attraction To Japan ... p. 108 Collecting Japan, Japanese Collecting ... p. 118 A Third Way: Loti's Floating Collections ... p. 130 Becoming a Woman Bibelot ... p. 138 IV. Domesticating Texts ... p. 143 Weighing in on Academic Tradition ... p. 144 Materializing Literature: Reading Niches ... p. 154 The Collection Keeps Literature Out ... p. 157 Perfume Making: the Collector as Writer ... p. 161 Return to Texts Via the Collection ... p. 167 Collecting Versus Writing in Loti ... p. 176 Conclusion ... p. 188 Bibliography ... p. 196 i Acknowledgements I thank my advisors, Antoine Compagnon, Joanna Stalnaker and Elisabeth Ladenson for reading and commenting on versions of this project. I thank them, as well as Anne Higonnet and Mark Anderson, for reading the final version and participating in my defense committee. I thank Steven Turner Hart for his vital guidance. ii ! 1 INTRODUCTION Historical Context This study is not about collecting as hunt, chase, or obsession. It is not about, in La Bruyère's words, a taste for what is rare, unique, what others lack ("pour ce qui est rare, unique, pour ce qu'on a et ce que les autres n'ont point").1 It is, rather, about collecting as a process of apprentissage. In late 19th-century France, collecting art and other decorative objects became more popular than ever before. An interest in the collection appears in numerous French literary texts. As an example, the very popular 1881 play by Jules Clarétie, Monsieur le ministre, overflows with references to decor and aesthetic objects, reflecting just how much the collection mania had by then permeated the culture, and entered literature. A century earlier, the French Revolution had resulted in the dispersion of royal collections, and the birth of the modern museum. The rise of the bourgeoisie and industrialization led to further circulation of an unprecedented number of objects in society. A new democratization of art had begun to take effect. New national pride, and the development of science and technology, along with France's status as a colonial power, all contributed to the establishment of universal exhibitions displaying France's progress through domestic and foreign goods. By the end of the 19th century, collecting, associated with a new access, on the part of each bourgeois individual, to aristocratic, scientific and colonial values had become a widespread cultural activity. Bourgeois interiors became filled with heterogeneous decorative objects. 1 La Bruyère, "De la mode," Chapitre 13, Les Caractères (1688), p. 502. ! ! 2 To understand fully the significance of the new bourgeois pastime of collecting, it helps to understand a major, and specifically 19th-century distinction between two kinds of collections. Krzystof Pomian, historian of collecting, writes about these two types of 19th-century collections, the public (musées) and the private (collections particulières): "Tout comme les musées, les collections particulières se multiplient, elles aussi, et elles se diversifient de plus en plus parallèlement à l'accroissement du nombre d'objets qui se prêtent à y être inclus."2 Both types of collections become more and more numerous over the course of the 19th century. The ancestors of the modern, post-Revolution museum were grand, princely collections. The ancestors of the 19th-century private collection were the curiosity cabinets of previous centuries. Pomian describes the cabinet as the "petite collection dont le rôle principal sinon le seul, est d'être pour son propriétaire un instrument d'enrichissement intellectuel ou culturel, ou simplement une distraction."3 In the 19th century, private collections could, to an even greater extent, acquire purposes other than spreading knowledge ("enrichissement intellectuel ou culturel"), which was now the domain of museums. Private collections became "déchargées de la fonction cognitive s'agissant de tout ce qui est muséalisé, sauf lorsqu'elles appartiennent à des savants professionnels."4 What, then, did the new kinds of private collections represent? Thanks to the development of museums, private collections could now express more personal meaning than ever before. Referring to the private collection, Pomian writes: "Elle peut traduire non seulement son savoir et son goût mais aussi ses nostalgies, ses rêves, ses fantasmes."5 Collecting––in the form of domestic decor, including art as well as other kinds of objects––could now express individuality and personality more than ever before. Knowledge and 2 Pomian, "Collections: une typologie historique," p. 17. 3 Pomian, "Collections: une typologie historique," p. 18. 4 Pomian, "Collections: une typologie historique," p. 18. 5 Pomian, "Collections: une typologie historique," p. 18. ! ! 3 taste are outward expressions of individuality and personality. These new private collections could do something different: they could invite the inhabitant or collector to look more deeply inward, toward nostalgia, dreams, and fantasies. If collected objects could now lead individuals inward, it is not only because of the sheer abundance of collections in homes. Several historical factors of the 1880s and 1890s are important for contextualizing collected objects' significance