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Beyond Ekphrasis: Visual Media and Modernist Narrative

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Beyond Ekphrasis: Visual Media and Modernist Narrative Beyond Ekphrasis: Visual Media and Modernist Narrative Cara Lynn Lewis Decatur, Georgia A.B., Harvard University, 2006 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Virginia May 2014 © Copyright by Cara Lynn Lewis All rights reserved May 2014 iii Abstract “Beyond Ekphrasis” argues that literary modernism’s convergence with visual media drives its formal experimentation and integrally structures its narratives. Reading texts by Henry James, Mina Loy, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein in dialogue with sculptures, paintings, and photographs, this dissertation offers a capacious account of the intersection between the verbal and visual arts in the early twentieth century. My study encompasses references to fine-art objects and evocations of painterly genres, as well as visual motifs and modes of viewing visual and plastic art, and in so doing, my account departs from the longstanding critical focus on ekphrasis—the verbal representation of an artwork—which has so often guided discussions of the “sister arts.” Instead, I examine more diffuse forms of inter-mediation, which may escape the strict confines of the term ekphrasis because they are, for example, verbal representations of no real-world art object. These unframed, unhung pictures are scattered throughout literary modernism, and they demonstrate that modernists’ formal experiments do not merely include inter-mediation as one kind of play among others, but are instead centrally determined by it. Specifically, I contend that modernist narratives are informed and even structured by moments of engagement with the fine arts. In this way, “Beyond Ekphrasis” counters the established understanding of the relationship between the visual and verbal arts, which holds that on those occasions when literature borrows from or evokes the visual and plastic arts, the progress of narrative halts, and the passage of visual-verbal imbrication becomes a static object in its own right. In a related fashion, I question the common theorization of iv description—perhaps the most common way in which literature seeks to imitate painting— as a narrative stoppage or interruption. As I demonstrate, visual-verbal encounters prompt modernists’ experiments in a variety of narrative genres, including the novel, the long poem, and the autobiography. The works at the heart of my study show how textual passages inter- mediated by the visual arts—and many passages of description more generally—can be fully integrated into the plot, inflect subsequent events in the fabula, and even structure the overall form of the narrative. Re-viewing modernist narratives from the frustrated circularity of James’s late-period novels to the chatty, wandering anecdotes of Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, “Beyond Ekphrasis” thus insists upon the capacity of visual media to shape literary forms. v Table of Contents Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................................... vi Introduction ........................................................................................................................................... 1 1. Plastic Form and Viewing in the Round: Sculpture and The Golden Bowl ........................................................................................................... 24 2. “The form on which form is based”: The Aesthetics of Nudity and Denuding in the Work of Mina Loy and Constantin Brancusi ...................................................................... 71 3. Still Life and Other Elegiac Touches: Mortal Form in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse ...................................................................................... 134 4. Looking at People Looking at Pictures: Portraiture, Painting, and Photography in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas ........................ 196 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................................... 250 vi Acknowledgments My work on this dissertation has been aided, first and foremost, by the wisdom and encouragement of the faculty at the University of Virginia. Michael Levenson’s extraordinary enthusiasm and gentle guidance have been crucial, especially at those moments when chapters changed course, and I am deeply grateful to him. This project had its beginning in an independent study with Jessica Feldman, whose nuanced knowledge of the visual and verbal arts and thoughtful notes have consistently improved my work. I have benefitted similarly from the incisive comments of Rita Felski, especially her prompts toward clarity and theoretical accuracy. I also owe my thanks to Sarah Betzer, from the Department of Art History, for her help in the final stage of this project; to Steve Arata and Victor Luftig, for many illuminating conversations about teaching, which continue to reverberate for me; and to Jahan Ramazani, for his patience and flexibility and for modeling a thoroughly admirable work ethic. The Department of English and the Culture of London Summer Program funded a research trip to London that allowed me, among other things, to view Paul Cézanne’s Pommes in person. The University of Virginia Society of Fellows honored me in 2010–11 with a Junior Fellowship, and in 2013–14 with a dissertation completion fellowship that allowed me to devote the last year of this project to research and writing: the Society’s support for interdisciplinary discussion is at the root of this project. The chapter on Virginia Woolf was shaped by the helpful comments of the readers at Twentieth-Century Literature. vii I want to thank two friends—Elizabeth Ott and Emily Richmond Pollock—for many heartening talks, and my extended family—Greg Chetel, Carolyn Graybeal, and Lauren Chetel—for their interested questions and their understanding. For their unflagging support, boundless love, and great humor, I thank my parents, Scott and Cappy Lewis, and my sister, Amanda Lewis. And most of all, I thank Dan Chetel, for everything. 1 Introduction “Now undoubtedly we are under the dominion of painting,” declared Virginia Woolf in 1925, in an essay simply titled “Pictures.” “Were all modern paintings to be destroyed,” she went on, “a critic of the twenty-fifth century would be able to deduce from the works of Proust alone the existence of Matisse, Cézanne, Derain, and Picasso; he would be able to say with those books before him that painters of the highest originality and power must be covering canvas after canvas, squeezing tube after tube, in the room next door.”1 Woolf’s claim about the sway of painting over the aesthetic world probably comes as little surprise to readers familiar with the state of the visual arts in 1925, when Woolf’s essay was published in The Nation & Athenaeum. After all, by then, in Britain alone, Roger Fry had introduced the public to Post-Impressionism and Cubism with his two exhibitions in 1910 and 1912, and within the Bloomsbury circle, there were frequent artistic visits to Europe and discussions with artists working on the continent: in fact, Clive Bell, Virginia’s brother-in-law, was Picasso’s intimate friend and frequent correspondent.2 But the reign of painting over the creative life of Woolf’s family and friends—to say nothing of its dominion over all of modernism—was far from secure, and upon closer inspection, Woolf’s certainty about pictures reveals itself to be something more like ambivalence. On the one hand, in the essay Woolf admits that “pictures are very pleasant things,” and that “there is a great deal to be learned from them”; she even concedes that writers have already learned from painters, since 1 Virginia Woolf, “Pictures,” in The Moment and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1974), 173, originally published in The Nation & Athenaeum 25 April 1925, 101-2. 2 “the eye [. .] has fertilised their thought.”3 But on the other hand, by the end of “Pictures,” Woolf has abandoned such concessions in favor of a mocking tone, in which she bemoans her fate: “the most extreme of penalties, the most exquisite of tortures—to be made to look at pictures with a painter.”4 Moreover, her initial assertion of painting’s supreme status is predicated on an example that describes its annihilation, and even in her future critic’s re- imagination of painting, it remains separated from the world of writing, confined to “the room next door” with its tubes of pigment. I begin with Woolf’s essay not in order to reiterate the familiar characterization of the relationship between the visual and verbal arts as a paragone, a battle for primacy.5 Nor am I interested in retracing or extending the other longstanding line of criticism that underwrites her comments in “Pictures”: the ut pictura poesis argument, which holds that “as is painting, so is poetry,” and which has been employed to demonstrate the kinship of the so-called “sister arts,” usually on the basis of their related capacities for image-making and their shared visual appeal.6 Instead, my aim in this dissertation is to investigate the questions that Woolf’s essay 2 Mary Ann Caws and Sarah Bird Wright, Bloomsbury and France: Art and Friends (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 80-88, 155. 3 Woolf, “Pictures,” 175-76. 4 Ibid., 178. 5 James Heffernan specifically casts this rivalry in gendered terms: see James A. W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago:
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