COPYRIGHT AND USE OF THIS THESIS This thesis must be used in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. Reproduction of material protected by copyright may be an infringement of copyright and copyright owners may be entitled to take legal action against persons who infringe their copyright. Section 51 (2) of the Copyright Act permits an authorized officer of a university library or archives to provide a copy (by communication or otherwise) of an unpublished thesis kept in the library or archives, to a person who satisfies the authorized officer that he or she requires the reproduction for the purposes of research or study. The Copyright Act grants the creator of a work a number of moral rights, specifically the right of attribution, the right against false attribution and the right of integrity. You may infringe the author’s moral rights if you: - fail to acknowledge the author of this thesis if you quote sections from the work - attribute this thesis to another author - subject this thesis to derogatory treatment which may prejudice the author’s reputation For further information contact the University’s Director of Copyright Services sydney.edu.au/copyright Reading the City, Walking the Book: Mapping Sydney’s Fictional Topographies Susan M. King A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English August 2013 Preface I hereby declare that, except where indicated in the text and footnotes, this thesis contains only my own original work. Acknowledgements Thanks to my fellow students and academic staff in the English Department for their assistance and constructive criticism, particularly Post-Graduate Co-ordinator, Associate Professor Vanessa Smith. Thanks also to my friends and family for their encouragement, technical assistance and good will. To my supervisor Dr Peter Kirkpatrick, poet and literary historian, I owe a debt of gratitude not only for the stimulation provided to me by the depth of his knowledge of and love for Sydney and its literature, but also for encouraging me to ‘go astray’ creatively while always keeping the main academic path in view. To my husband Tim Fahey, fellow urban walker, my heartfelt thanks for your support, patience, multiple critical readings and cups of tea. Abstract This thesis locates itself on the contested double ground of Sydney’s fictional and material topographies. My purpose is to read and write the city’s spatio-temporal dimensions through four novels: Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934), M. Barnard Eldershaw’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1947), Patrick White’s The Vivisector (1970) and David Ireland’s City of Women (1981). Deploying a hybrid methodology informed by critical and creative approaches to the city in literature and modernity, the thesis investigates the manifold ways in which the novels draw on Sydney’s material topographies to shape and structure their narratives spatially, not only in an abstract and symbolic sense but through the materiality of urban places. Each novel thus creates a city which offers new perspectives on the relationships between text, place and writer. My approach and methodologies draw on J. Hillis Miller’s work on literary topographies, in particular novelistic creations of figurative maps. This textual approach is complemented by Walter Benjamin’s conceptualisation of the modern city as a landscape to be read critically with a ‘topographical consciousness’ which I interpret as a set of modes for reading the city as text and the text as city. Intertwined with these literary and material approaches is an ‘on the ground’ methodology for ‘walking the book’. Influenced by Benjamin and borrowing from the Surrealists and the Situationists, I reconceptualise the dérive or urban drift as a critical and creative practice for literally and figuratively walking fictional and material Sydney. Through juxtaposition and interweaving of creative non-fictional dérives with analytical and interpretative chapters, I seek to enact Benjamin’s art of straying in the city as the thesis, through its circling thematic movements, creates its own topographies. Reading the city and walking the book I conclude, allows familiar urban spaces to be imaginatively and critically opened up as past, present and future, the fictional and the material, collide and re-assemble into new configurations: alternative cartographies. Contents Introduction 1 City as text 6 Reading the city 12 Walking the book 20 Reading the texts 23 Dérive I 28 Chapter One Mythic visions in the modern city: Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney 50 Myths of modernity 56 Writer and city 58 Entering the city 61 Political terrain 66 Passionate topographies 74 Storied city 87 Dérive II 90 Chapter Two The world inside out: carnivalesque in David Ireland’s City of Women 121 The world inside out 127 Writer and city 132 Entering the city 136 Anatomical localisation 140 Inversion and reversals 147 Beastly places 153 Debasement and renewal 159 Dérive III 163 Chapter Three Edges of the urban: Patrick White’s The Vivisector 194 Edges of the urban 201 Writer and city 204 Entering the city 210 Uncanny houses 212 Urban encounters 231 Sensibilities of the edge 238 Dérive IV 240 Chapter Four Voyaging through the ruins: M. Barnard Eldershaw’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow 274 Writer and city 279 The ruins of modernity 288 Entering the city 292 Voyaging through the ruins 298 Sydney’s apocalypse 308 Creative destruction 316 Conclusion 320 List of photographs 325 Bibliography of citations 334 1 Introduction 2 That street washed with violet Writes like a tablet Of living here; that pavement Is the metal embodiment Of living here1 Kenneth Slessor Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance – nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city – as one loses oneself in a forest – that calls for quite a different schooling … Paris taught me this art of straying.2 Walter Benjamin. 1 Kenneth Slessor,‘Last Trams’ in Poems [First published as One Hundred Poems 1944] (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1969), 95. 2 Walter Benjamin,‘A Berlin Chronicle’, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, Peter Demetz, ed. and intro., Edmund Jephcott , trans. (New York: Schocken Books [1978], 1986), 8-9. 3 Introduction This thesis locates itself on the double ground of Sydney: its material and fictional landscapes; its contested topographies. My purpose is to read and write these spatio-temporal dimensions of the modern city through four novels: Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934), M. Barnard Eldershaw’s [Marjorie Barnard and Florence Eldershaw] Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1947), Patrick White’s The Vivisector (1970) and David Ireland’s City of Women (1981). In each novel, I argue Sydney is a presiding literary presence, and each has a central concern with the experience of modernity in an antipodean city at varying stages of its struggle to emerge from a residual colonial past. Each text takes risks with language and form and I am interested in tracing these innovations within the contexts of the multiple material geographies of modernism.3 Deploying a hybrid methodology which borrows conceptually and theoretically from various critical and creative approaches to the city in literature and modernity, I aim to show that these novels have the potential to make the city a text, not simply a representation, but a creation which brings with it new perspectives on the relationships between text and place and opens up other possibilities for re-imagining urban geography. Among other related areas, I investigate the manifold ways in which each of the fictive cities draws on the landscapes and topographies of Sydney to shape and structure narratives spatially, not only in an abstract symbolic sense, but through the materiality of urban places: buildings, streets, houses, gardens, the harbour, the sea, the bush. To paraphrase Philip Mead, through such re- readings of the local, I attempt to understand and articulate the complexities of imaginary places in the literary texts, and their recursive relations to the multi-faceted experience of actual, lived places.4 Two thinkers have been most influential in helping to frame my approach: American literary critic and theorist, J. Hillis Miller (b.1928), and German-Jewish philosopher, literary critic, urban wanderer and cultural historian of the materiality of modernity, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). I will briefly indicate what some of these core ideas are and how they inform the approach and methodologies of this study before proceeding to a more detailed and nuanced account. 3 Andrew Thacker, Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester UK: Manchester University Press, 2003). 4 Phillip Mead, ‘Nation, Literature, Location’ in Peter Pierce, ed., The Cambridge History of Australian Literature (Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 551. 4 Hillis Miller in his 1995 book Topographies investigates sets of relationships between landscape and topography in literary works including novels.5 Literary critics and theorists, he argues, do not pay as much attention to landscape and descriptions of places as they do to other narrative features such as time and character and this raises questions for him which also resonate with this thesis. Some of these questions cluster around the function of landscape and cityscape ‘descriptions’ in novels and whether they go beyond providing realistic settings and metaphorical adornment. Other questions focus on how the materiality of the landscape which pre-exists the novel becomes a set of fictional topographies and how these then operate within the narrative, in particular, how figurative maps are created through the movements between places. Of particular interest to this thesis are the kinds of stories which are generated by particular landscapes, the figures which rise up from them, and the nature of the signs which gather around them and travel through the narrative.