Copyright by Marcela Malek Sulak 2005 The Dissertation Committee for Marcela Malek Sulak Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Ligatures of Time and Space: 1920s New York as a Construction Site for Modernist “American” Narrative Poetry Committee: ____________________________________ Adam Zachary Newton, Supervisor ____________________________________ Elizabeth Cullingford, Co-Supervisor ____________________________________ Kurt Heinzelman ____________________________________ Thomas Cable ____________________________________ Cesar Salgado ____________________________________ Kathryn Hellerstein Ligatures of Time and Space: 1920s New York as a Construction Site for Modernist “American” Narrative Poetry by Marcela Malek Sulak, B.A.; M.A.; M.F.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August, 2005 This dissertation is dedicated to my grandparents Agněžka Šulák n. Chytková Pavel Šulák Marcella Malek n. Slíva Edward T. Malek II And to my mother, Judith Sulak n. Malek Acknowledgments This dissertation was supported in part by language and research fellowships from the Center for Russian and Eastern European Studies, the College of Liberal Arts, and the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin. I would like to thank my dissertation committee: Adam Zachary Newton, Elizabeth Cullingford, Kurt Heinzelman, Thomas Cable, Cesar Salgado and Kathryn Hellterstein. Grateful acknowledgements to Nina Warnke, Jerald Frakes, David Wevill, Esther Raizen, SethWolitz. Katherine Arens, Samuel Baker, Khaled Mattawa, Brian Bremen, and also Allison Perlman, Sandra Frink, Eliana Schoenberg and Scott Blackwood. v Ligatures of Time and Space: 1920s New York as a Construction Site for Modernist “American” Narrative Poetry Publication No.____________ Marcela Malek Sulak, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2005 Supervisors: Adam Zachary Newton & Elizabeth Cullingford This dissertation examines spatial-temporal aspects of modernist, self-consciously “American” narrative poetry set in 1920s New York. Because many cultural considerations and languages get left out of popular theories of modernism, I fashion an alternative characterization using Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope to account for modernist poetry written in minor languages, such as Yiddish, Black dialect, and Spanish. Five poems—Hart Crane’s The Bridge (1929), Moyshe-Leyb Halpern’s In Nyu- York (1919), Langston Hughes’ The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927) and Federico Garcia Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York (completed in 1929, published in 1936)—exploit the lack of a normative sense of time and a wholeness of place that characterizes modernist literary depictions of the city to establish a position in which to write with authority. Distinguishing between poetry as a “form” and poetry as a “social force” allows me to apply a theory that had been developed for prose narrative in order to discuss the chronotopic significance of such purely poetic features as rhyme, meter, and rhythm. vi Table of Contents Chapter 1 “At Home in Homelessness” 1 Chapter 2 ”New York as the Ghost Town of the Future: Hart Crane’s The Bridge” 48 Chapter 3 “Off-Beat in the Golden Land: Moyshe-Leyb Halpern’s In Nyu-York” 84 Chapter 4 “I Too Sing America: Federico García Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York Langston Hughes’s The Weary Blues 117 Conclusion 158 Appendix A Halpern: Translator’s note Transliterations of In Nyu-York 162 Appendix B Lorca: original texts of Poeta en Nueva York 169 Bibliography 175 Vita 195 vii Chapter 1 At Home in Homelessness This dissertation examines representations of discontinuous time and abstract space in modernist, self-consciously "American," narrative poetry set in 1920s New York City. Five texts— Hart Crane’s The Bridge (1929), Moyshe-Leyb Halpern’s In Nyu-York (1919), Langston Hughes’ The Weary Blues (1924) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1926) and Federico Garcia Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York (completed in 1929, published in 1936) will exemplify my argument that the lack of both a normative sense of time and a wholeness of place sets the stage for what I wish to identify as a distinctive chronotope, or literary time/space, for 1920s New York and the modernism it reflects. Although accounts of modernism are both disparate and often at odds, they tend to converge around a preoccupation with time. Nearly all descriptions share, to some extent, Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane’s overarching claim that twentieth-century modernism represents one of those “overwhelming dislocations, those cataclysmic upheavals of culture, those fundamental convulsions of the creative human spirit that seem to topple even the most solid and substantial of our beliefs and assumptions, leave great areas of the past in ruins…question an entire civilization or culture, and stimulate frenzied rebuilding.”1 Consequently, modernism brings about “a Great Divide between past and present, art before and art now” (21). Whether this upheaval is celebrated or mourned, its driving force might be described as an obsession with time, and the certainty that time has somehow changed substantively and experientially from what it once was.2 My study 1 Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, “The Name and Nature of Modernism,” Modernism. A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (1976; London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1991) 19. 2 The idea that time is somehow different now than it once was is not really a twentieth- century novelty. One finds it, for example, in Wilde (“The Decay of Lying”), in Carlyle (“The Sign of the Times”) and Romantic writers generally, and even much earlier, for example, during the fall of the Holy Roman Empire (See Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past 1 pushes off Bradbury and Macfarlane’s temporal metaphor of a modernist “Great Divide between past and present” by resituating it in terms of spatial dislocations, specifically immigrant experience, along with turn-of-the-century technological innovations that change the way people perceive both space and time. I look especially at the physical erasure of history from the landscape of New York (the grid system, recreational areas filled with transplanted flora) and its replacement with reconstructions of pasts that never existed (in the form of anachronistic architecture) for concrete examples of the modernist displacements I seek to explicate. In the following chapters, I consider how city dwellers, both native and foreign born, represent these characteristics of modernist metropolis life. The most novel feature of such literary representations of 1920s New York is the depiction of various temporalities, rather than a unitary frame of time, and a subsequent self- consciously manufactured sense of spatial continuity. The concomitant ability of the poem’s figural narrators to weave disparate temporalities into a livable present will determine their ability to make a home in America. I find it particularly helpful to talk about the new style of writing that emerges in 1920s New York in terms of genre, as defined by the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin in his 1937-8 essay “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” for this will clarify what I mean by the adjective “modernist.” As Bakhtin’s translators, Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, point out, “a genre is neither a collection of devices nor a particular way of combining linguistic elements;” rather, it is “a specific way of visualizing a given part of reality.”3 Taking inspiration from Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, Bakhtin realized that the context for actions and events is shaped primarily by the kind of space and time that operate within them. Thus, literary genres are distinguished predominantly (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985) 21-38). However, for better or for worse, obsession with the nature of time itself has come to be seen as an indispensable feature of modernism. 3 Gary Saul Morson & Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin. Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990) 275. 2 according to the ways they configure the shape and depicted experience of time. In other words, depicted time and space unite in very distinct and particular ways in different literary genres, corresponding, more or less, to specific historical periods which mirror their lived, phenomenal counterparts. Morson and Emerson summarize the relationship between literary genre and historical reality in the following manner: “Literary genres do not simply ‘transcribe’ into artistic form discoveries made elsewhere; they themselves make discoveries” (366). Michael Holquist describes the relationship between artistic depictions of time and space and lived experience as “two different registers of dialogue that can be conceived only in dialogue. They are both forms of representation; therefore they are different aspects of the same imperative to mediate that defines all human experience."4 To this literary intersection of time and space (what Einstein—whom Bakhtin cites—called “the space-time continuum” in his famous 1920 papers on the special and general theories of relativity) Bakhtin gives the name chronotope: “In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and