Modernist Aesthetics and the Artificial Light of Paris: 1900 to 1939 Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Leicester by Emma Elizabeth Reddy (MA Cantab) School of English University of Leicester February 2017 2 ABSTRACT Modernist Aesthetics and the Artificial Light of Paris: 1900 to 1939 Emma Elizabeth Reddy In this project the fields of modernist studies and science converge on the topic of lighting. My research illuminates a previously neglected area of modernism: the impact of artificial lighting on American modernist literature written in Paris between 1900 and 1939. Throughout that period, Paris maintained its position as an artistic centre and emerged as a stage for innovative public lighting. For many, the streets of Paris provided the first demonstration of electricity’s potential. Indeed, my research has shown that Paris was both the location of international expositions promoting electric light, as well as a city whose world-class experiments in lighting and public lighting displays were widely admired. Therefore, I have selected texts with a deep connection to Paris. While significant scholarship exists in relation to Parisian artificial lighting in fine art, a thorough assessment of the impact of lighting on the modern movement is absent from recent critical analysis. As such, this thesis seeks to account for literary modernism in relation to developments in public and private lighting. My research analyses a comprehensive range of evocations of gas and electric light to better understand the relationship between artificial light and modernist literary aesthetics. This work is illuminating for what it reveals about the place of light in the modern imagination, its unique symbolic and metaphorical richness, as well as the modern subject’s adaptability to technological change more broadly. This account of modernism considers artificial lighting in fiction and poetry and culminates in a final chapter on electrically illuminated literary epiphanies. The implications of technologized lighting for form and content are fused in that particular device. This thesis confirms that the dissemination of artificial modes of lighting coincided with, shaped and contributed to literary experiments that span a number of modernist characteristics: fragmentation, stream of consciousness, spatial representation, literary epiphany, formal self-awareness and imagism. Tracing the history of lighting technology and its aesthetic dimensions unearths parallels between lighting and writing which justify my claim that modern lighting was a symbol for and constituent part of the direction and execution, content and form of American modernist literary innovation. 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My first thanks must go to my supervisor Professor Martin Halliwell who provided unfailing support at every step of this thesis. I could not have asked for a better supervisor than Professor Halliwell, whose academic rigour and high expectations have been enormously motivating. He has offered critical reflection on everything I have written and has been alive to ways in which I could further my career. I cannot thank him enough for all he has done during the last four years. I also thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council who funded my research and awarded me a Research Training Support Grant for my research in Paris. Special thanks goes to Pierre-Alain Tilliette, Conservateur en chef at the Bibliothèque de l'Hôtel de Ville, for his invaluable help in gaining access to materials in December 2015, a very difficult time for the city. I am equally indebted to Séverine Montigny at the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris. I would like to thank Jean Jacques Le Moëllic of M.E.G.E (Mémoire de l'Electricité du Gaz et de l'Eclairage Public) who pointed me in the right direction in my early forays into French lighting history. I wish to thank Michael Chambers who has spent hours proofreading my thesis. I am forever indebted to his fine-tooth comb, generosity and kind words of support. Thanks to my father and to Liz for their consistent encouragement, suggestions, and faith in me. A special thanks goes to Kim Hegarty, my MA classmate, running buddy and constant sounding board. I thank Annabel, Lottie and Joe for patiently trying to understand mummy’s unusual ‘job’ and my husband Jim, who is my most enthusiastic supporter. The thesis is inspired by my Parisienne mother, whose hand I held when I first surveyed illuminated Paris from the big wheel of the Foire du Trône. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract 2 Acknowledgements 3 Table of Contents 4 INTRODUCTION: CITY OF LIGHTS 6 CHAPTER 1: GASLIGHT, THE LIGHT OF STYLE ITSELF, AND THE 30 STYLISATION OF LIGHT Section 1 Edith Wharton Section 2 Henry James Section 3 T. S. Eliot Conclusion CHAPTER 2: COMMUNICATING UNFULLFILMENT THROUGH THE 72 MEDIUM OF ELECTRIC LIGHT Section 1 Edith Wharton Section 2 F. Scott Fitzgerald Section 3 Henry Miller Conclusion CHAPTER 3: THE NEXUS OF SIGHT, ELECTRIC LIGHTING, AND 115 POETIC FORM Section 1 Ezra Pound Section 2 William Carlos Williams and H. D. Section 3 Gertrude Stein Conclusion 5 CHAPTER 4: ELECTRIC EPIPHANIES 158 Section 1 Light in Epiphany Section 2 Lighting in Prose Epiphany Section 3 Illuminating the Poetic Epiphany Conclusion CONCLUSION: ELECTRIC LIGHT: A MODERNIST HOLDING FIELD 200 OF OPPOSITIONS APPENDIX OF ILLUSTRATIONS 211 BIBLIOGRPAHY 222 6 Introduction City of Lights BOSWELL. “Then, Sir, what is poetry?” JOHNSON. “Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is.”1 Hello lamppost, What cha knowing? I’ve come to watch your flowers growing. Ain’t cha got no rhymes for me? - Simon and Garfunkel2 In the first epigraph Samuel Johnson voices the affinity between poetry and light. They are comparable phenomena, he implies, because both are familiar while immeasurably complex. One hundred and seventy years later Simon and Garfunkel married the elusive nature of street lights to rhymes in the second quotation. One cannot help but note the irony of the lexicographer declaring, in Johnsonian monosyllables, the futility of attempting to ‘tell’ what something is; or the irony of the songwriter’s rhyming plea for help with his craft. This shared irony implies a tacit understanding among artists across the centuries about the connectedness of light, art and human limitations. Light, words and knowledge remain entwined even in the face of dramatic changes in the materiality of light. Neither the eighteenth century nor the 1960s are central to my study, but the epigraphs exemplify the consistency with which light functions as a serviceable and unlimited artistic metaphor. They also prompt the question at the heart of this thesis: can thinking about light help us understand writing? More specifically, how does electric lighting intersect with the modernist literature written at the time of its emergence as a distinctly twentieth-century technological form? When devising my thesis, it became apparent that this had been a hitherto overlooked area. If light, in its many natural and 1 James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classic, [1791] 1998), p. 744. 2 Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, ‘The 59th Street Bridge Song’, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme (Columbia Records, 1966). 7 artificial guises, has, and continues to have, a powerful artistic presence, why is there a paucity of critical analysis of the impact of lighting technology on modern literature? This thesis takes a new look at modernism, illuminating a previously neglected area: the impact of artificial lighting on American modernist literature written in or about Paris between 1900 and 1939. One might anticipate that Sara Danius’s The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception and Aesthetics (2002), which proposes that technology became a component part of art rather than just its context or the thing to which it responded, would devote space to artificial light. I agree with her contention, but the lack of reflection given to lighting is noticeable. Danius is interested in technologies which ‘address, involve or interfere with the sensory apparatus’, triggering questions regarding truth, knowledge, and verification.3 Her list of relevant technologies includes photography, radiography, telephony, and the automobile, but does not include mass electric lighting, which is startling since electric light does, and did, interfere with the sensory apparatus of sight. In addition, truth, knowledge, and verification, are concepts for which light has been a symbol for centuries, and therefore an assessment of modern expressions of these concepts should give consideration to light in its gas and electric forms. Similarly, Hana Wirth-Nesher, whose book City Codes: Reading the Modern Urban Novel (1996) explores the conflation of public and private spaces, neglects the role of city lighting in that process.4 Yet, it seems obvious that successful public lighting brought the private out into the street. Wirth-Nesher also proposes that city dwelling ignites the imagination since the urbanite ‘is faced with a never-ending series of partial visibilities’, and thus the city dweller ‘reconstructs the inaccessibility in his imagination’.5 But her fascinating consideration of occlusion versus visibility does not consider light, whose presence makes things visible and whose absence can result in missed opportunities. However, urban novels frequently use lighting to frame missed opportunities and inaccessibility. One such example is the ending of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920) (one of the texts discussed in Chapter 2) in which the protagonist is excluded from an artificially lit event. More recently, in Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life (2010) Mark Goble assesses how modernist 3 Sara Danius, The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception and Aesthetics (New York: Cornell, 2002), p. 5. 4 Hana Wirth-Nesher, City Codes: Reading the Modern Urban Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 5 Ibid., p.