History and Storytelling in a Libidinal Mode
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HISTORY AND STORYTELLING IN A LIBIDINAL MODE: The Space of the Hotel in Postmodern Fiction A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Comparative Literature by Carly Suzanne Kaloustian August 2012 © 2012 Carly Suzanne Kaloustian ii ABSTRACT From Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales to Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Franz Kafka’s The Castle, the inn has served as an important setting in world literature. Following this literary lineage, this thesis attempts to locate the space of the hotel in postmodern literature. By exploring the short works of Julio Cortázar’s “La puerta condenada” and Jorge Luis Borges’ “Agosto 25, 1983” and the novels of Murakami Haruki’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and D. M. Thomas’ The White Hotel, I pursue two main questions: first, following Foucault’s enigmatic observations on the relationship between time and space to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I ask why in modernity generally and postmodernity more specifically are historical problems dealt with in spatial terms? Secondly, how do literary constructions of the hotel participate in this phenomenon, and above all, what does the space of the hotel foreclose? I show how the hotels of postmodern fiction illustrate “history in a libidinal mode,” a concept I use to describe the imminently postmodern understanding of history that reflects radical twentieth- century developments in psychoanalysis and physics by privileging the comingling of energy and drives over linear chronology. In Freud’s view of the unconscious mind, repressed elements are constantly reemerging. Similarly in Einstein’s principle of mass-energy equivalence, no object is ever lost or destroyed; it just changes form. Put together, these theorems destabilized the paradigm of chronological time. As such, history no longer unfolds along a line towards a trajectory; it is more like an enclosed system where energies are always recirculating and assuming new forms. The spaces of the hotel in postmodern fiction are literary constructions designed to accommodate this new “architecture” of both thought and being. Using critic Tzvetan Todorov’s classification of literary genres, I deploy his descriptions of the “fantastic,” “marvelous,” and “uncanny” to describe the mechanics of space in each hotel. Put simply, all the hotels are peculiar—they are places where strange things happen, where time seems to follow different rules. The short stories of Cortázar and Borges present the hotel as a familiar place but through a series of strange events it becomes a fantastic space. The fantastic is never resolved, and so the hotel is laid out as a space where time seems to wander, but the mechanics of its movement remain undefined. Both of the novels, however, are invested in producing spatial depictions of libidinal history that map out the relationship between the individual and the larger society he or she occupies by applying the basic structure and drives of the psychoanalytic mind to link the individual to his or her socio-historical context. Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle posits what the psychoanalytic structure of the mind looks like when applied to the real world and uses the hotel to represent a model for the collective unconscious. The protagonist of D. M. Thomas’ The White Hotel produces a poem set at a white hotel while undertaking analysis with a fictionalized Sigmund Freud. Her white hotel is a microcosm of interwar Europe and hysterically anticipates the Holocaust, which effectively renders an uncanny view of the future. The application and expansion of classical Freudian psychoanalytic theory to socio-historical concerns allows for a theorization of confronting and possibly even healing historical trauma (rooted in both cases in the Second World War). In each of these works, the authors experiment with the structure of the hotel to define the mechanics of what libidinal history, but perhaps more importantly, to provide a model for how we might learn to cope with living history in a libidinal mode. iii BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Carly Kaloustian received her Master of Arts in Comparative Literature from Cornell University in August 2012. While at Cornell, she taught a course on literary politics in the context of the Nobel Prize and World Literature and also worked at the Writing Walk-In Service, a tutoring center on campus. Before coming to Cornell, she studied English and Spanish literatures at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor where she wrote an honor’s thesis on National Geographic and U. S. colonialism and then completed a Fulbright/Austrian-American Educational Commission English Teaching Assistantship in Graz, Austria. A native of Metro-Detroit, Carly will be moving to Mainz, Germany, where she will teach English and begin studies in Psychology. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to the Department of Comparative Literature for providing me with the opportunity to pursue this project and the space to write it. With great appreciation and admiration to my advisor, Debra Castillo. With my deepest thanks to Heidi, my best friend and reader. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Checking into the Hotel of Postmodern Fiction 1 – 13 Chapter 1 The Unsettling Hotel: The Fantastic in Julio Cortázar’s “La puerta condenada” and Jorge Luis Borges’ “Agosto 25, 1983” 14 – 42 Chapter 2 A Detective Story of the Japanese Mind: The Hotel as Collective Unconscious in Murakami Haruki’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle 43 – 80 Chapter 3 Mapping the Social World onto Freudian Psychoanalysis: D. M. Thomas’ The White Hotel 81 – 112 Towards a Conclusion: Checking out of the Hotel 113 – 122 Bibliography 123 – 131 vi Introduction Checking into the Hotel of Postmodern Fiction The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis and cycle, themes of the ever- accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world…The present epoch [twentieth century] will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity, we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed… Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” (22) In Foucault’s observations in the introduction to “Of Other Spaces,” (1986) he posits a set of apparent oppositions between the ages: at the crux of the nineteenth century, “history” stood as the dominating question, but at the center of the twentieth, however, lies the issue of “space.” As it would appear, the former is a question of chronology, the latter of geography and spatiality. The “obsession” of “history” during the nineteenth century is understood by Foucault as history in a chronological dialectical mode. Within the chronological progression of the thesis of “development” and the antithesis of “suspension” comes the push of progression towards a resolution in synthesis. History, then, passes through a set of expected stages. In this mode, history is predictable because the model is repetitive: it cycles through periods of crisis and resolution. And since the “chronology” of history follows a foreseeable pattern, what begins is also something that can be concluded. There should be an end of the road, an end of a story. As Foucault argues though, the paradigm of chronological “history” becomes less central in the transition from nineteenth- to twentieth-century thinking—the moment where we now focus our attention. Instead, the concerns of the twentieth-century “epoch of space” hinge upon issues Kaloustian 1 like “juxtaposition,” of placing things next to one another, of the “near” and the “far,” of distance and proximity. The so-called “spatial turn” in intellectual and philosophical circles, which gained traction in the 1970s1, is a consequence of a shift in the zeitgeist from the zeit (time) towards the geist (the spirit which gives shape and space to time). Why is it now, during the twentieth century of all times, all about space? What is it about the modern era that so specifically relies upon these spatial concepts? Chronology, chronicle. The “chronicle of history” is to write the story, narrative, or the account of history, at the heart of which is the ancient Greek for time, kronos. To write a history is to tell the story of time’s progression, of the events which unfold, one after the next. To consider history is to necessarily think of this idea of chronology. We might also follow the suggestion of “histoire.” The French “histoire” (and Spanish historia) carry a double valence of meaning that also exists deep within the etymology of its English equivalent, but has been lost in colloquial usage. “Histoire” implies both the traditional sense of the account of the past through chronological “history,” but also the idea of narrative, of story, and storytelling. In French as in Spanish, both meanings are expressed with the same signifier. If we then phrase Foucault’s observations in light of this occulted meaning, history, storytelling, and literature itself are all revealed as being inescapably inflected with this notion of chronological time. If we look to literature with respect to these general observations on the state of each century, it comes as no surprise, then, that realism reigned as the formal paradigm of the nineteenth 1 Jo Guldi summarizes the spatial turn in the humanities in a short article: “What is the Spatial Turn?” According to Guldi, from the 1840s, the issue of land reform gripped much of Europe and scholars in the mid to late nineteenth century searched for a conceptual vocabulary to depict “spatial experience and its artificial manipulation.” Early twentieth-century interest in ethnography and ethnology attempted to describe different worldviews and treatments of space.