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Modernist Leisure

Question

This list attempts to revise the scholarly truism that modernism privileges time over space. As a literature of travelers, cosmopolitans, and exiles, and as a literature heavily focused on artists, free spirits, and rebels who generally avoid �home� as sedulously as they avoid the disciplined work-spaces of capitalism, modernism not infrequently takes place in leisure spaces: bars, caf�s, music-halls,clubs, hotels, tourist destinations, seaside resorts, baths, nursing homes, sporting fields, parks, museums, galleries, and cruise ships. Keeping in mind critical space theory�s central claim that space shapes human behavior, and extending this attitude towards literature�in the words of Franco Moretti, �geography is not an inert container, is not a box where cultural history �happens�, but an active force, that pervades the literary field and shapes it in depth��what is the �shape� of modernist narratives underwritten by leisure spaces? Using at least three modernist novels, explain how characteristically modernist aesthetics and values develop in concert with the leisure spaces these works feature.

Material

• Refer to Rojek: history of leisure has been one of the ideology of freedom, self-expression, etc
  • But modernism has already made this critique: a critique of the ideology of freedom and self-expression in leisure, which corresponds to their anxieties over selfhood, escape, etc.
• “In the mountains, there you feel free”
  • T S Eliot, Waste Land
  • Levenson calls it a “conversational banality” tsk tsk he doesn’t recognize how Eliot himself only got his groove back in the Lausanne mountains and could therefore finish the dang poem
  • Novel like Forster’s A Room with a View can truly be called Edwardian b/c of the faith in leisure spaces (vacations, touring) to engage the subject with an otherness that propels personal growth, as well as social and spiritual fulfillment.

Sources

• Some venerable authors you’d get excited about
  • Malcolm Bradbury, Atlas of Literature 1996
    • bland fetishization of the regions where literature “happened,” as if the spaces were a stage
  • Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” 1945
    • The modernists have the capacity to form new wholes from the fragmentation of daily experience. By breaking up chronology, they react to modernity; by ordering their works spatially (by a juxtaposition of events rather than a smooth progression through time), they manage to make a new order
    • Yet time itself is not invalidated; only the firm chronology made by bourgeois culture, and what he refers to by space is actually a special way of treating time itself
    • The author creates new wholes by transcending the limitations of progressive time
    • Space is reduced to a solution for time, and the space of the PAGE; rather than space qua space
  • Steve Bradshaw, Cafe Society 1978
    • A fascinating book that gives the history of the cafes that modernists patronized, with references to the cafes that helped to make Surrealism a coherent group, the ABC teashops that the New Age editors used, the ones that organized expatriate culture in Paris, etc
    • But it’s just actually a literary history, a type of “Biography” that only cares about authors insofar as they are frequenting cafes….
• Andrew Thacker, Moving through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism 2003
  • This is like a primer for modernism and geography, little more than a series of precis about various spatial theorists.
  • Tho’ he promises to show �resistant narratives attempt the rewriting of imposed cartographies�
  • Nifty b/c he uncovers some latent space stuff in our major figures: his reinterpretations of Ford’s The Soul of London and Lewis’ Time and Western Man reveal space to be an obsession for these figures
    • Thacker: �modernist texts are creating metaphorical spaces that try to make sense of the material spaces of modernity�
  • His aims are very high: wants to talk about inner and outer spaces (ie the body as a space, mental space); how modernism contests the official representations of space; how modernist forms are created in part as a result of the rewriting of spaces; about how space is really about moving among various spaces
    • His shiny new word �textual space� �this interaction between spatial forms and social space in the literary text�
    • �such a literary geography would seek out the historical links between modernism and the production of particular material spaces in modernity�
• Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1998
  • Kind of laughably naive method if you’ve been paying attention to the history of geography, where the 70s did their best to demolish the positivism of understanding mapping as satisfactorily representing literature
  • Really fascinating results: Whereas the real crimes always happened in the East End, Sherlock Holmes always investigates crimes done in the West End; and while Jane Austen’s books begin and end in the happy stasis of a fictional town, the complications of her plots always take place in actually existing towns (Bath, Lyme, London, Portsmouth)
    • And it actually ends up reinforcing “postivist” literary criticism: that is, he is led to re-uncover Vladmir Propp and his analysis of the fairy tale with its finite number of actors and steps in the plot: gee, I’m not surprised this is what you found.
  • Method: Select data, map it, analyze the �shape� of the data, find out something new (something �more� than the data you input): positivism
• Victoria Rosner, Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life 2005
  • �This book proposes that the spaces of private life are a generative site for literary modernism. These spaces compose a kind of grid of social relations that shifts and slips, uncovering such discursive connections makes possible a kind of material genealogy of some of literary modernism�s apparently autonomous elements, imagining a post-Victorian reorganization of private life to accord with changing social customs, exposes the fundamental role of the build environment in creating the categories we use to organize and understand who we are”
  • Wow, what’s missing here is power and the lack of agency. She imagines a fantasy world where the Bloomsberries can create a world from scratch.
  • Home as �a laboratory for social experimentation� (5), a �workshop for interior design and social change� (13), bringing the avant-garde into the private space of home to create �proposals for a new domesticity� (13)
    • She is too generous towards domesticity as plastic.
  • Space determines identity, but the good news is, you can change your space to take control of that process.
  • She thinks the right environment will �set the objects free to express their natures,� not �drain the life from aesthetic objects� (20)
  • �For Woolf, the kitchen table represents not what the modernist artist must discard but what she must transform into the basis of her work.� (4)
  • Woolf in A Room of One’s Own being able to “lock the door means the power to think for oneself” and also the redecoration of Howards End means it is “rechristened” and available to for a new identity
    • My rebuttal: Woolf, but Woolf recognizes that there are outer social conditions that must be met to reach it: education, cash, etc
    • My rebuttal: Forster, but what you aren’t saying is that Margaret Schlegel herself was changed by Howards End before she changed it

Novels

• Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks and Death in Venice
  • Mann’s work as transitional attitudes towards leisure spaces b/c it’s still for awhile seen as transformative and only unmasked or made impotent by the end
    • No matter what relation the characters have to leisure spaces, these spaces are seen as a key space for gauging physical and psychological health, attitudes towards work and the creation of mass public spaces, etc, which work as heterotopia in that they reflect or context other spaces
    • For many modernist works, the leisure space is a moment in time, like “There you feel free” that critiques other spaces, D. H. Lawrence Women in Love (the Alps, death, wrench free from Crich) and Lucy in A Room with a View, or where something new begins and will therefore be able to penetrate “real life” (To the North; Dracula)
    • as pastoral, modernists still use it as pastoral, a convenient place for character change of the improbable
  • Death in Venice shows how Aschenbach can get one last fling in, with the adorable Tadzio
    • he finds comfort in the rituals and routine of Venice as a seaside resort: “He meant to say on and on; he rejoiced in the prospect of wearing a silk suit for the hot morning hours on the beach and appearing in acceptable evening dress at dinner. He was quick to fall in with hte pleasing monotony of this manner of life, readily enchanted by its mild soft brilliance and ease.”
      • it’s a rehearsal for death, a liminal space between life and death
      • and indeed its the communal aspect of such resorts that make not only social miracles occur (the dying man’s unlikely last stirring of romance), but also the lack of distance is a vector for illness, and therefore death.
    • before Aschenbach had always remained conscious of the coming work that he’d have to return to; however this is the logic of rest itself (quote the James preface to Golden Bowl about the lure of Venice)
      • the fact that he is now actually achieving leisure does indeed point to his death
    • Cholera: “source was the hot, moist swamps of the delta of the Ganges…” 62 and spread (it’s from the other)
      • and notice that Mann’s description of it actually describes a world tour as well as sickness: the circulation of people and goods is the same as that of illness and death
      • and why Venice? b/c of the sea itself: what has been seen as healing and relaxing is the vector of illness, and then traveling through the contaminated food
      • and the movement makes people anti-social, just like the sea usually makes them social: “intemperance, indecency, crime” “Gangs of men…murder” “professional vice”
  • “he who is beside himself revolts at the idea of self-possession” and therefore the actions that will keep you healthy
    • so his decision to stay in Venice and die is the “nausea” he feels at “the thought of returning home, returning to reason, self-mastery, and ordered existence” 65
      • and so his obsession with Tadzio, he also lets it go crazy, watching at him with a “fixed and reckless stare”
    • and so he begins to array himself with jewelry, finery, just like the regular seaside holiday, trying to look youthful, and gets his hair died and skin worked on and eyebrows plucked and his lips reddened
      • he becomes humiliated at his actions and thinks how is this the person who wrote a famous book and had wisdom and knowledge; but now he has embraced irrationality, desire, etc
    • But finally Tadzio’s family leaves from rumors of pestilence
      • and remember his passion for Tadzio was only spectacle in the end
      • the final time he decides to follow Tadzio, just before he is to leave Venice, that is his death
  • Buddenbrooks
    • The rise and fall of a North German grain dealer
    • Tony falls in love with a university student while on holiday at the seaside
      • She falls in love with a socialist, republican agitator
    • “We want freedom,” he says, and he wants equality (upset that Tony is a part of the ruling classes, so the impossiblity of their marriage is for him just one more manifestation of the larger problem)
      • he talks about the “obsolete, idiotic, decadent class which everyone knows will be destroyed anyway” 113
      • ie he wants constitutional rights that were denied more and more in Prussia
    • She has the memories that will last her a lifetime: one summer gives her enough imaginative fodder that lets her marry one after the other men who will apparently help the interests of the family firm: political marriages
      • the rhythm is established: “You should always take honey; at least one knows where it comes from” which is an interesting link between the republican son and his proto-”eat local” mother
      • he had talked to her about how you can find out the “Chemical components of foodstuffs” a popular inroad for the critique of capitalism
      • and the other rhythm: “on the rocks” means when she and Morten were able to hang out at the rocks and talk freely about philosophy and life
    • For Tony, then, the leisure space did exactly what Adorno says it will do: it will refresh you enough to do your bourgeois duties
    • For her nephew, however, it’s something different: seen as a utopia, he bites into the ideology without having the belief in the system underlying it
      • Little Hanno, his mother a prize from a musical family instead of a political prize (which his dad was upset about)
      • he is one the dangerous extreme of the leisure space: he doesn’t have a mind for work, won’t work at the firm, and Mann makes it clear that the little boy psychically chooses to die b/c he doesn’t have the will to live b/c his father doesn’t love him (b/c of his own “leisure class” temperament)
      • His absorbed, overwhelming need to be at the seashore suggests that the family will fall
    • Finally, the exhaustion of the family by the Senators collapse in the street is prefigured by the desperate choice to go to the seashore to restore his rapidly failing health
      • After an illness, he’d started reading philosophy and nearly was able to integrate work and non-work, but he isn’t used to making that sort of effort, and it fails
      • After his family insists, he goes out for a week at the seaside, this time with a man’s pleasures: hints of booze, women, shows, betting, horse-racing, etc
      • But he can’t do it. A man who can’t take leisure can’t take work, either. The need to rest is significant, esp becasue he himself was the one to turn the family business from a slow-paced organization whose rules were inherited and which supported the community in its need to a brutal, Taylorist organization of efficiency
  • In Buddenbrooks, the seaside is a vital measure or reflection of the family’s progress and health
    • Their failure to adjust properly from the transition from mercantile capitalism to finance capitalism does them in. The old style is dead, and they don’t have the grit for the new one.
      • His inability to take the bloodless cutthroat capitalism to its limit makes him obsolete
  • (The seaside was called Travemunde)
  • (“Work isn’t a virtue!” the degenerate brother Christian, who has too much leisure b/c they’re an aristocracy but not a leisure class, yells at Senator Tom.)
• Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier
  • Our ability to understand John Dowell as an archetypal modernist character, the one doomed to rootlessnes and clueless about how to figure out how to “ground” his sense of reality (the goodly apple thing), depends on our reading of the leisure space
  • This experience doesn’t happen except at such a watering hole!
  • Other Modernity themes: passing of feudalism, nostalgia, the downfall of the narrative form, unreliability of memory, lack of roots, creative power of speech (speech can create interpretations and desires), lack of moral guidance, the unconscious, appearances v reality, love and sex (being suspicious and yet trying to be open-minded, being prudish but trying to understand passion), opacity of other folks (people are unknowable), rottenness of chivalry and English manhood: all come together in the image of the bad heart, whose stage is the restorative seaside, the health resort with all of its spas, baths, and rituals
  • Bad Nauheim
    • Leisure can create bad health (ie, gout, dyspepsia), or does bad health lead to leisure (like Ed and Flo want it to)?
      • Edward�s problems lead Leonora�s spiritual advisors to take him to Monte Carlo for some fun: it will �save� marriage, apparently
    • They use bad health as an excuse to pursue affairs (Edward with Maisie; Florence with Jimmy)
    • The routine of the spa allows the dalliance to go on
      • Florence is always out of his sight, but yet he thinks she isn�t
      • Always away in baths or with doctors or exercising or manicures or�
    • The structured environment helps them keep up the �minuet�
    • Patients �get a home feeling,� so it makes artificial roots � but everyone else feels stripped
    • Sober atmosphere: Bad Nauheim is one that pretends to be all about health but really about pleasure
    • They actually prescribe trips, the trips which make for drama
    • Travel and Leisure: you are run by inviolable, easy-to-see habits (the long list of things they do punctually, eating and drinking, etc)
      • Leisure is kind of structured
    • Hotels: Means that you don�t really have domestic space, private: it�s only all public space
      • Cf Florence seeing Leonora smacking Maisie b/c the hall is public
    • It pretends to fix, but there, it all falls apart.
  • The rituals and schedules let you take everyone for granted, he tells us, but there are costs: you eat food you don’t like, have to take the cure, have to cover up your religious background, etc
    • It lets you tag people: he says “to the anybodies that you meet in hotels, in railway trains, and to a less degree, perhaps, in steamers, but even, in the end, upon steamers. You meet a man or a woman and, from tiny and intimate sounds, from the slightest of movements, you know at once where you are concerned with good people or with those who won’t do.”
    • Yet “you never really get an inch deeper than the things I have catalogued”
    • Dowell is okay with it as long as he has security: “She could find her way, with the sole help of Baedeker, as easily about any old monument as she could about any American city where the blocks are all square and the streets all numbered, so that you can go perfectly easily from Twenty-fourth to Thirtieth.” 41
      • but when he realizes that his “goodly apple” had a “Worm” in it all along, he realizes the price he had paid to maintain his feeling of security
      • it turns out you had no real knowledge whatever, but instead just a process of habits
    • And habits can be bad: Florence getting involved w/Edward Ashburnham but still trying on the surface to reunite Florence and Edward, “from a sheer, imbecile spirit of district visiting” which makes her hypocritical
      • “How could I have known that, during all the years of our married life, that little brown flask had contained, not nitrate of amyl, but prussic acid?” 102 b/c you just trust; you follow the label (it says “Nitrate of amyl” on the label, and the bottle stays the same): it’s the arbitrary relation of signifier and signified
      • Life itself becomes signifier/signfied disjunction. And the leisure space enables it. (The meeting of strangers who you have to judge are “good or bad” by their outer appearances.) Modernity is kind of like a leisure space, but leisure space is a convenient metaphor for it.
• Elizabeth Bowen, The Hotel
  • This is my arch-book about leisure spaces. It features the space and talks openly about its virtues, rituals, and limitations
  • Leisure: it reveals that people are having a difficult time finding leisure; leisure is not actually already in the sapce already b/c you have to be ready for it
    • Sydney hadn’t wanted to; only w/threat of nervous breakdown would she leave off work
    • the young war veteran couldn’t find any work and had to suffer a life of forced leisure, and poeple comment that he had been “cheated” out of his ability to work
    • Theodor Adorno, “Free Time”
      • Free time is reified as the structural opposite of work, and therefore positions it firmly within industrial culture
      • And indeed the habits of the body in the mind are becoming the same as those at leisure
    • it even turns out the the manipulative, apparently self-sufficient Mrs. Kerr had a problem with leisure and preyed on young women like Sydney just in order to give her leisure shape, purpose, by filling it up
  • Leisure spaces are capable of becoming instrumentalized, as Sydney found out she’d used it to find a wife for her son: herself!
    • Even though Sydney had clearly been experimenting with a romantic relationship with Mrs. Kerr
    • It’s a violation of the rules, where we see from the very beginning scene between Miss Fitzgerald and Miss Pym that it is a site where homoerotic relationships are tolerated and even encouraged (b/c of the lack of men around)
    • It turns out to be commodified: buys Sydney off with an afternoon at the fashionable, expensive patisserie and a necklace of gigantic amethysts: to pay her off once she realized she couldn’t pay off her leisure debt to Sydney by finding her a husband, her son
  • It ironically brings Sydney into an Austen-like narrative of the watering place, Bath, where you find a husband, confront your fake suitors, etc
    • She ends up getting engaged to the minister, just as a revolt against the treatment she’s received
  • Leisure spaces put modernists in an environment where modernism can get articulated: you have to explain yourself b/c there are all sorts of people coming and going
  • The dialectic of private and public creates a singular type of comedy and creates new possibilities for social arrangements
    • And it also creates the possibility for Hakim Bey’s temporary autonomous zones
    • with the “lust for spectacle” aroused by the sheer topography of the room (a row of plate glass windows that face the outside where people are parading)
  • It is an acceleration of the social: far from being a break from the social, it actually encourages events to happen faster and faster even though people constantly seem to be bored. Paradox
  • The obligatory “Sick day” on the ship is a “rainy day”
  • Politics of space evidence: private clubs within hotel culture spring up by monopolization of specific spaces (all the married women taking up the drawing room for themselves), class marked (the Honorable Miss and Mrs. Pinkertons blockade a private bathroom for themselves)
  • Because everyone is technically at leisure here on the Italian riviera (other than the invisible staff), there’s a lot of time to dispense with. And this time is dispensed with, with great difficulty: leisure becomes a problem
    • Sydney our heroine only came out because of the threat of a nervous breakdown by overwork was made so imminent by her family’s threats that they would force her to take a break
      • Her Modernism: she’s awkward, doesn’t think relationships should occupy center of your life, studying to be a doctor, moody/self-alienating
      • Because she is put in a whole coterie of other people, who are of different social classes and different regions of England, she is forced constantly to take stock, mentally and in conversation, of her own “modern” ways (her difference from the jolly, sporty
      • Her coolness is exposed when she realizes Mrs. Kerr was using her and not homosocially or homoerotically, as she had wanted; and to take revenge, she suddenly becomes charming and hospitable, displaying her new beads (“That’s not the girl who wouldn’t marry me,” and “this is what she was worth,” James Milton thinks with concern, for he wants to find a relationship beyond mere possession of one another)
  • She’s finally dismissive of the concept of happiness: why do we have to be happy all the time?
    • A positive evaluation of the lack of progress, crisis, etc. “I’m not the stuff of fairy tales,” she says, and admits that she’ll be happy to leave the vacation spot. And she says she’d rather having shouting and noise than calm silence.
  • End: traffic problems preventing her from leaving make her “feel life more sharply” than she had ever done before, “life as keen as death” while looking at the view, down at the hotel
    • And then she breaks off the engagement. She got life back, and saved herself from conservative, reactionary repetition of the leisure space ideology: “the shock of being alive” hits her
    • Her view on the role of the space: “I think we must have been asleep here; you know in a dream who quickly and lightly shapes move, they have no weight, nothing offers them any resistance. They are governed by some funny law of convenience that seems to us perfectly rational, they clash together without any noise and come apart with no injury” “we’ve been ruled by this funny law”
      • In this area “We have taken nothing into account…. It was just a dream.”
      • “the law of convenience” was governing her behavior there
    • And b/c of the accident, they go back to the Hotel
  • Mrs. Kerr, who was the popular one, the one manipulating everyone, finally ends up realizing she it is she who is the lonely one with no real friends
    • Victor Ammering: he’s a victim of leisure, elicits everyone’s automatic sympathy that the psychological effects of his experience in the War prevent him from finding work, an occupation
  • “How complete the Riviera was…one could even die there”
  • Surveillance: the schedule, plus the limited number of spaces, the publicity of one’s room, plus the somewhat democratic availability of tourist spaces and excursions; the public entrances and exits make stuff that’s not usually public public
  • Miss Pym and Miss Fitzgerald, the ones having a terrible lover’s tiff at beginning scene, in end scene recall the tiff in the “security” of their recovered trust and love.
  • Veronica stages a faux-confidant best friend’s talk with Sydney (whom she typically ignores) to have a stage to talk about her engagement with
    • Sydney ends up trying to talk to her about w t f do you think you have to marry, and attributes Veronica’s sudden friendliness as the aftereffect of “an overindulgence of pastry”
    • it’s a meeting of types of people who normally a novelist would be at pains to join and juxtapose
    • here it happens as if naturally!
  • The Lunch mean where no one is hurried b/c of the drawn out web of obligations and rituals. “a web infinitely fine and fragile from which it was yet impossible to break without outrage…meek under the rool of precedent, to fulfill a hundred small engagements. Leisure, so linked up with ennui, had been sedulously barred away. Each arm-chair, each palm, each bureau had become a trysting-place where couples met to hurry off our groups were reunited” 20
    • And “nearly all were English”
    • “nobody was hurried or constrained”
    • afternoon “seemed to stretch, brightly blank. Over it, however, habit had spun her web of obligations”
    • Also, some good stuff about geographer Neil Smith, Mapping the Futures: �the use, in certain theoretical discourses, of spatial metaphors � such as mapping, margins-centre, deterritorialisation, or location � operate at the expense of analysing the material spaces of, for example, the city� so space as �empty containers in which all objects or events can be located;” instead, metaphorical and material meanings of space are �mutually implicated;� and indeed space is ��social space,� produced according to social aims and objectives, and which then, in turn, shapes social life�
    • this is what Bowen beautifully dramatizes
  • “drama of lunch”
  • everyone is watching you, you cannot let yourself go: “But don’t let me keep you, Sydney, if you want to go and talk to Mrs. Kerr.” “Why should I want to go and talk to Mrs. Kerr?” as everyone knows Mrs. Kerr is gradually ousting her rom her inner circle
  • habit as bad: 37
  • exclusion: 37