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A University of Sussex PhD thesis Available online via Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/ This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Please visit Sussex Research Online for more information and further details 1 Child’s Play, Toys and Pure Games: Revising the Romantic Child in Henry James, Elizabeth Bowen and Don DeLillo Katherine Kruger Submitted for the examination of Doctor of Philosophy in English University of Sussex July 2018 2 I hereby declare that this thesis has not been and will not be submitted in whole or in part to another University for the award of any other degree. Signature:……………………………………… 3 University of Sussex Katherine Kruger Doctor of Philosophy in English Child’s Play, Toys and Pure Games: Revising the Romantic Child in Henry James, Elizabeth Bowen and Don DeLillo Summary This thesis analyses the opportunities that child’s play presents for language, style and reading practices in the works of Henry James, Elizabeth Bowen and Don DeLillo, and the consequent forms of literary knowledge that this relationship between play and writing produces. I argue that James’s work represents a shift in literary and cultural relationships with “childhood” and trace the ways in which, following his work, childhood becomes a resistant performance of obliviousness, an unreadable subjectivity reluctantly tied to, and at points struggling against, the objects and activities associated with the child at play. In the introduction I delineate a shared history of representations of “childhood” and theories of play in order to locate what versions of the Romantic child still exist in modernist and postmodernist literature and theory. Engaging with work by Jacqueline Rose, Robin Bernstein and Daniela Caselli on the difficulty of delineating or interpreting childhood, I explore a literary preoccupation with the aesthetic value of an elusive childhood knowledge, and forms of not knowing such as innocence, located in child’s play. Chapter one proposes that for James, the difficulty with reading the child is tied to the child as reader. In What Maisie Knew, James encourages what I term a childlike reading practice, which develops in response to an adult suspicion of childhood. The second chapter considers the ways in which imaginative child’s play in Bowen’s novels, and the work of the Romantic figure of the writer- as-child which emerges from the compulsion to appropriate this form of play, is continually disrupted by the materiality of toys. Often rendered impotent, these toys, such as tricycles and kaleidoscopes, interrupt modernity’s narratives of progress, and rupture the value systems of the modernist novel that privilege difficulty and subjectivity. My final chapter identifies the ways in which DeLillo’s novels attempt to redeem language by bringing pre- linguistic childhood babble into discourse to render accessible the secrets of childhood knowledge. DeLillo experiments with the pure games of poststructuralism only to contrast them with the play of the postmodern wild child able to navigate a post-apocalyptic wilderness of hyper-real simulacra. These scenes in which writers engage with toys and child’s play to conceptualise the work of writing a novel and their relationship with their readership, form a narrative about the changing versions of literary knowledge that are produced in attempts to represent “childhood” in the face of its loaded Romantic literary history and twentieth-century shifts in cultural fantasies invested in the idea of the alterity of child’s play. 4 Acknowledgments This project is deeply indebted to my supervisor Pam Thurschwell for her consistent patience, guidance and support. Without Pam’s attentive, insightful readings of my work and her unwavering enthusiasm for this project, it would never have come to fruition. Additional thanks are due to my peers and members of faculty (both academic and administrative) in the School of English at Sussex for their advice and support throughout the project, and especially to my co-supervisor, Natalia Cecire, for her incisive comments on my work. For their friendship and encouragement, thank you to Edward Delamare, Katie Da Cunha Lewin, Ellie Green, Chelsea Olsen, Charlotte Terrell and Adam Whitehall. Thank you to my mum, Irene, and brother, Chris, for their unrelenting patience and for always having confidence in me. Finally, thank you to Omar Raii for being there with me. Funding This work was funded by CHASE (Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-East England). 5 Table of Contents Declaration 2 Summary 3 Acknowledgements 4 List of Figures 7 1) Introduction: Theorising the Child and Her Play 8 1.1 Theoretical Concepts 1.1.1 The Romantic Child 11 1.1.2 The Writer-as-Child: Appropriating Child’s Play 16 1.1.3 Pure Games 28 1.1.4 Toys in Time 32 1.2 From Innocent to Deceitful Child 36 1.3 Methodology 49 1.4 Chapter Outlines 53 2) Reading as Child’s Play: 55 Jamesian Style and Literary Knowledge in What Maisie Knew 2.1 Interpretative Games: 60 Childhood’s ‘Supreme Simplicity’ and Performances of Transparency 2.2 Toy Words and Truth Games 92 2.3 Secrecy and Self-making in Doll-play 102 3) ‘Dangerous Pastimes’: 114 Writing Toys and Temporality in Elizabeth Bowen’s Novels 3.1 The ‘Querying Innocence’ of Fiction-making 118 3.2 Occupational ‘Pattern-arriving-at’ 140 3.3 Capital Games 148 6 3.4 Exhausting the Reckless Tricyclist 158 4) The ‘Gamesmanship of Fiction’ 167 and the Pure Games of Don DeLillo’s Postmodern Wild Child 4.1 ‘Play-talk’ and Paranoia 172 4.2 Whispers of Childhood 196 4.3 Timeless Play: Running and Games of “Tag” 201 4.4 Plotting Without Destination and ‘Pinwheels that Never Stop Spinning’ 216 5) Conclusion 229 6) Bibliography 234 7 List of Figures Figure 1: Sir Joshua Reynolds, The Age of Innocence, 1788. Oil on Canvas, 11 765 x 638 mm. Tate, London. Figure 2: Richard Rothwell, Novitiate Mendicants, 1837. Oil on canvas. 43 V&A, London. Figure 3: Pieter Bruegel, Children’s Games, 1560. Oil on wood, 118 x 116 cm. 205 Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. 8 1. Introduction: Theorising the Child and Her Play There is nothing serious in mortality. All is but toys.1 Staged through an encounter with the death of a child, William Wordsworth’s boy of Winander presents a story of the failure of reading. Wordsworth introduces this bewitching, death-driven wild child by situating him alone at night beneath the trees And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands Pressed closely palm to palm, and to his mouth Uplifted, he as through an instrument Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls That they might answer him. And they would shout Across the wat’ry vale, and shout again, Responsive to his call, with quivering peals And long hallos, and screams, and echoes loud, Redoubled and redoubled – concourse wild Of mirth and jocund din. And when it chanced That pauses of deep silence mocked his skill, Then sometimes in that silence, while he hung Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprize Has carried far into his heart the voice Of mountain torrents2 In pauses between the owls’ responses the boy is carried into the silence of the surrounding environment: ‘the visible scene / Would enter unawares into his mind’. The poem moves 1 William Shakespeare, Macbeth, A. R Braunmuller (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), stated by Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 3, p. 154. 2 William Wordsworth, The Prelude of 1805, The Prelude 1977, 1805, 1850, Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams and Stephen Gill (eds.) (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1979) p. 172, Book Fifth, lines 370-384. 9 from this description of the silence invading the boy’s mind to a blunt declaration of his death and Wordsworth’s recollection of regular visits to the boy’s grave. Taken by Geoffrey Hartman as the ur-Romantic child, this story of the boy’s attempts to commune with nature, and the unanswered question of whether the owls were in fact ever responding to him, has been taken as a model for the ‘missed encounter’ of reading.3 This model attends to the difficulty of reading the “innocent” child as him/herself a reader and leads to a writerly insight which associates this form of negativity or failure of response with a particular version of innocence. This negative innocence which circulates around ideas of writing and reading fiction has compelled my exploration of what happens when the presumed Romantic “innocence” of the child meets various sophisticated modernist or postmodernist versions of play. Interpretative difficulty orbits around representations of children. This relationship between interpretative difficulty and childhood does not just relate to the difficulties that children experience in interpreting discourse, but also applies to the difficulty of theorising or delimiting the child. Since Jacqueline Rose’s work on the subject in her ground-breaking book The Case of Peter Pan (1984) an increasing amount of critical attention has been paid to grappling with the difficulty, even impossibility, of representing or interpreting the child. This problem takes the form of the question: how do we represent and interpret the child without retrospectively constructing a mythologised version of childhood? Considering the impossibility of distinguishing between the voices of childhood and the discourse used to represent childhood, I will ask what forms of intimacy or dialogue can occur between adulthood and childhood? How close can we get to childhood, if at all? The mythologised version of the child as a vulnerable innocent, which has been criticised by queer and feminist critical work on the subject of childhood, has become known 3 Geoffrey Hartman, ‘Reading and Representation: Wordsworth’s “Boy of Winander”’, European Romantic Review, 5:1 (1994) pp.