Buildings in Modernist Literature and Film

City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 6-2014 Reclaiming Space: Buildings in Modernist Literature and Film Sreenjaya Ria Banerjee Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/165 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] Reclaiming Space: Buildings in Modernist Literature and Film by Sreenjaya (Ria) Banerjee A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, the City University of New York 2014 Banerjee ii © 2014 Sreenjaya Banerjee All Rights Reserved Banerjee iii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Nico Israel April 30, 2014 ____________________________ Chair of Examining Committee Mario DiGangi April 30, 2014 ______________________________ Executive Officer Richard A. Kaye Ivone Margulies Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK Banerjee iv Abstract Reclaiming Space: Cities in Modernist Literature and Film by Sreenjaya Banerjee Adviser: Professor Nico Israel This dissertation argues that modernists like Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and Alain Resnais construct literary and filmic works that rely on interruptions and elliptical narration to gesture towards an aesthetics of modernity that counters the interest in monoliths concurrently shown by architectural modernism. This is particularly evident in the context of the war memorial, where regimented public memory is countered by the artistic works discussed through their emphasis on private memorials that are changeable, contingent, and mutable. This is a fundamentally altered vision of twentieth century modernity than that embraced by the architectural mode. Banerjee v Acknowledgements To my parents In memory of Professor Eddie Epstein Thank you to my Dissertation Committee, Nico Israel, Richard Kaye, and Ivone Margulies for your help and guidance. Thank you also to Raymond Strom for always setting the alarm clock. Banerjee vi Table of Contents Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... v Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................... vi I. Reclaiming Space: Buildings in Modernist Literature and Film ................................................. 1 Personalizing the City: Modernist Depictions of Public Space .................................................. 1 Literary Antecedents: The Modernist Imaginary in Poe, Rilke, and Benjamin .......................... 9 Place and the Urban Imaginary in Twentieth Century Architecture ......................................... 22 Dwelling in the “Commonly Thought Small”: Memorialization in the Modernist City ......... 34 II. Jacob’s Room: Affective Reason and the Failure of Reeducation ........................................... 38 World War I Memorials: The Cityscape and Modernist Melancholia ...................................... 39 Cambridge: Forms of Fiction and the Flattening of Affect ....................................................... 51 London: The Threat of Sex and Jacob as an Edwardian Relic.................................................. 61 The Parthenon and the Moors: Linguistic Resistance to the Commodified Aesthetic .............. 78 III. Dismantling Patterns: Combating Modernist Architecture in T. S. Eliot’s Middle Plays ...... 87 Literature versus Architecture: Built Spaces and a Critique of Modernity ............................... 90 The Myth Shattered: Ricoeur and the Onstage Eliot .............................................................. 103 Waiting: Dismantled Buildings and the Dissolution of Egotism ............................................ 106 Unbarring the Door: Listening to the Houses that Listen ....................................................... 117 Dismantling the Theatre: From Eliot to the Avant-garde ....................................................... 123 IV. Contingency and Mutability of Memorials in Alain Resnais’ Early Films ......................... 130 Resnais’ “Caméra-stylo”: Rewriting the Conventions of the City Film ................................. 140 Night and Fog: Ethical Contingency and the Holocaust Narrative ......................................... 148 Muriel, or The Time of Return: Dismantled Narratives and Affective Buildings ................... 156 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................ 167 Banerjee 1 I. Reclaiming Space: Buildings in Modernist Literature and Film Personalizing the City: Modernist Depictions of Public Space The twentieth-century city is an idea made concrete, anonymous built space turned into places that provoke citizens’ recognition and affective responses. London, Paris, Berlin: the names stand in a metonymic relationship with the larger concept of Western European modernity. These places are inseparable from the specter of modernity to the extent that an examination of the urban landscape is always already an attempt at delineating the characteristics of modernity as a whole. The city’s built spaces simultaneously generate significations on two levels: the public, where they convey bigness and grandeur of built space, multitudes of humanity; and the private, in which an individual experiences places in a smaller level— inhabiting rooms on certain streets, visiting libraries and shops, stopping into a disused church, or bicycling down streets that are known, no longer anonymous or disorienting. Conceptions of modernity as a mode of urban life in the first half of the twentieth century stem from the interaction between these two levels of experience, the public and private. Following Benjamin, modernity is characterized as a series of shocks to the psyche, but whether that alienates the ordinary man to the breaking point, or opens him up to the ineffable multiplicity of lived experience, depends in large part on the role allotted to the personal within representations of public urbanity in the twentieth-century metropolis. By devoting much attention to the city, especially its physicality and built structures, modernist literature elevates space into place, from mere setting into a generative device for reflection about the city as a contingent, endlessly renewed site of memory. Particularly looking Banerjee 2 at literary and filmic works that respond to the two World Wars in the interwar and postwar period from 1922-1963, this study pays attention to the ways in which buildings, interiors, and the urban landscape are characterized in selected works by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and Alain Resnais as sites of personal memory that offer a corrective to officially sanctioned memorials of the interwar and postwar periods. These works are mutable in form, and in them, memory itself is contingent or fallible rather than a reliable and unproblematic act of bringing past events to mind. These works insist that any knowledge of the past is a memory-image (to borrow Henri Bergson’s term) that is intrinsically influenced by the present circumstances of recalling. Their linguistic and formal experiments, particularly the use of elliptical and disjunctive narrative, emerge out of a modernist suspicion that language is interpolated into extant structures of socio- cultural and economic power; hence, to evade linguistic registers is in a sense to circumnavigate the axes of authority and set up alternate potentialities. In other words, to offer a different story (history) is a process of reinterpretation (of the past) that is fundamentally political and oppositional. The early twentieth century saw a drive to define this new era in literature, the arts, socio- cultural and scientific life in ways that were often at loggerheads with each other—for instance, the fragmentary, diffuse descriptions of the remembered past in literary and filmic modernism counters the clarity and precision of a materialist view in which the mysteries of the physical world are increasingly cleared away. In light of empirical discourses that valorize progress above all else, the works I examine in subsequent chapters can be usefully read as arguments for a particular type of modernity that provides room for aspects of lived experience that are ineffable, inchoate, and felt in extra-linguistic ways. Rather than reactionary sentimentality or nostalgic fuzziness, this is a forward-thinking political, ethical stance (clearly with Woolf and Resnais, less Banerjee 3 so in the case of Eliot, whose political opinions develop and change significantly over the 1930s and ’40s). Against narratives of progress driven by scientific and technological advances which accrue around principles of transparency and clarity, in which the average city dweller is an anonymous part of large systems beyond her control, modernism pits its collection of flâneurs and beggars,

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