Dynamic Form: How Intermediality Made Modernism 9781501749193

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DYNAMIC FORM

DYNAMIC FORM H OW I NTER M E D I A L I TY M A D E M O D E R N I SM

Cara L. Lewis

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2020 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2020 by Cornell University Press Every reasonable effort has been made to identify rights holders and supply the complete and correct credits for the figures in this book. If there are errors or omissions, please contact Cornell University Press so that corrections can be addressed in any subsequent edition. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lewis, Cara L., 1983– author. Title: Dynamic form : how intermediality made modernism / Cara L. Lewis. Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019040743 (print) | LCCN 2019040744 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501749179 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501749186 (epub) | ISBN 9781501749193 (pdf ) Subjects: LCSH: Modernism (Literature)—Great Britain. | Modernism (Literature)—United States. | Modernism (Art)—Great Britain. | Modernism (Art)—United States. | Art and literature—Great Britain—History—20th century. | Art and literature—United States—History— 20th century. | Formalism (Literary analysis)—History. | Formalism (Art)—History. | Literary form—History— 20th century. | English literature—20th century— History and criticism. | American literature— 20th century—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PR478.M6 L49 2020 (print) | LCC PR478.M6 (ebook) | DDC 820.9/0092—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040743 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040744

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

vii ix

Introduction: Reformulating Modernism

1

1. Plastic Form: Henry James’s Sculptural Aesthetics and Reading in the Round

18

2. Mortal Form: Still Life and Virginia Woolf ’s Other Elegiac Shapes

53

3. Protean Form: Erotic Abstraction and Ardent Futurity in the Poetry of Mina Loy

93

4. Bad Formalism: Evelyn Waugh’s Film Fictions and the Work of Art in the Age of Cinemechanics

135

5. Surface Forms: Photography and Gertrude Stein’s Contact History of Modernism

178

Epilogue: The Consolations of Form Notes

231

Bibliography Index

305

287

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Illustrations

2.1 Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Apples (Pommes), 1877–78 2.2 Roger Fry, cover for Cézanne: A Study of His Development, 1927 2.3 Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Skull (Nature morte au crâne), 1896–98 3.1 Wyndham Lewis, Two Women, also called The Starry Sky, from the Dial, 1921 3.2 Constantin Brancusi, Golden Bird, 1919–20 3.3 Constantin Brancusi, View of the Studio: Bird in Space and Princesse X, 1924 3.4 Constantin Brancusi, Brancusi, Tristan Tzara, Berenice Abbott, Mina Loy, Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson in the studio, ca. 1921 3.5 Constantin Brancusi, Golden Bird, photograph ca. 1920 4.1 Page 281 from the first edition of “The Balance,” in Georgian Stories 1926 4.2 Page 290 from the first edition of “The Balance,” in Georgian Stories 1926 4.3 Page 287 from the first edition of “The Balance,” in Georgian Stories 1926 5.1 “Alice B. Toklas at the door, photograph by Man Ray,” from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933 5.2 “Gertrude Stein in front of the atelier door,” from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933 5.3 “Pablo and Fernande at Montmartre,” from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933 5.4 “Gertrude Stein in Vienna,” from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933 5.5 “Gertrude Stein at Johns Hopkins Medical School,” from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933

54 61 62 100 103 112

114 116 151 152 157

188 191 192 193

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I L LU S T R AT I O N S

5.6 “Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in front of Joffre’s birthplace,” from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933 5.7 “Room with Gas (Femme au chapeau and Picasso Portrait),” from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933 5.8 “Room with Oil Lamp,” from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933 5.9 “Room with Bonheur de Vivre and Cézanne,” from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933 5.10 “Homage à Gertrude, Ceiling painting by Picasso,” from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933 5.11 “A Transatlantic, painting by Juan Gris,” from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933 5.12 “Bilignin from across the valley, painting by Francis Rose,” from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933 5.13 “Alice B. Toklas, painting by Francis Rose,” from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933 5.14 “Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in front of Saint Mark’s, Venice,” from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933 5.15 Interior, 27 rue de Fleurus, 1912 5.16 “Bernard Faÿ and Gertrude Stein at Bilignin,” from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933 5.17 “First page of manuscript of this book,” from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933

197

199 200 201 206 207

207 208

212 218 219 224

Ack nowledgments

The idea for this book began at the University of Virginia as I was trying to get beyond ekphrasis. That I got there at all—and anywhere since—is due to the enthusiasm and guidance of Michael Levenson, and I feel immensely grateful to have him in my corner. It is also thanks to Rita Felski’s incisive commentary: she knew what this book was about before I did, and to her I owe the title. To Jessica Feldman I owe its genesis in conversations that attempted to think literature and art together: thank you for your confidence in this book at the very beginning, and for reading chapters near the end. Thanks also to Victor Luftig for the heartening perspective checks and the chats about teaching, and to Jahan Ramazani and Stephen Arata for the steady encouragement. For their support in matters large and small during my time in Charlottesville and since then, I am indebted to Alison Booth, Stephen Cushman, Elizabeth Fowler, Bruce Holsinger, Clare Kinney, Victoria Olwell, Cynthia Wall, and the UVA Society of Fellows. I am grateful for the assistance provided by three Summer Faculty Fellowships at Indiana University Northwest, and to my colleagues in the English Department there, especially Bill Allegrezza, Kate Gustafson, and Doug Swartz. Extra thanks go to Garin Cycholl and Brian O’Camb for sustaining conversations and for their feedback on some of these chapters. Mahinder Kingra, Mary Kate Murphy, Bethany Wasik, and everyone else at Cornell University Press have been wonderful to work with: helpful, game, and responsive. The comments and suggestions offered by Michael Thurston and an anonymous reader for the press were invaluable in getting this book into its final form, as was Florence Grant’s careful copyediting. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University provided crucial assistance with images. For their help with illustrations, I also wish to thank Kerry Annos at the Barnes Foundation and Emma Darbyshire at the Fitzwilliam Museum. Tremendous thanks to Roger Conover, both for his own work to preserve Mina Loy’s legacy and for permission to quote from her work. Part of chapter 2 appeared in a slightly different version as “Still Life in Motion: Mortal Form in Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse,” Twentieth-Century ix

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Literature 60, no. 4 (2014): 423–54. Excerpts from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf copyright © 1927 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, renewed 1954 by Leonard Woolf. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Excerpts from “Pictures” from The Moment and Other Essays by Virginia Woolf copyright © 1948 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, renewed 1976 by Marjorie T. Parsons. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Excerpts from The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume I 1915–1919 by Virginia Woolf published by The Hogarth Press are reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. © 1977. Excerpts from The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume III 1925–1930 by Virginia Woolf published by The Hogarth Press are reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. © 1980. Excerpts from A Change of Perspective: The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume III 1923–1928 by Virginia Woolf published by Chatto & Windus are reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. © 1977. Permission to quote from the work of Virginia Woolf in the e-book has been granted by the Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf. Excerpts from The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, and images of three pages from the first edition of “The Balance” by Evelyn Waugh copyright © 1927, 1976, and 1980 by Evelyn Waugh, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC. Excerpts from Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh, copyright © 1958, reprinted in the United States by permission of Little, Brown and Company, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc. Excerpts from Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh (Chapman and Hall 1930, Penguin Books 1938, 1996), copyright © Evelyn Waugh, 1930, notes and introduction copyright © Richard Jacobs, 1996, reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd. Excerpts from The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh, copyright © 1976, reprinted in the United States by permission of Little, Brown and Company, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc. Excerpts from The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh (Chapman and Hall 1948, Penguin Books 1951, Penguin Classics 2000), copyright © 1948 by Evelyn Waugh, reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd. Excerpts from The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh by Evelyn Waugh, copyright © 1998, reprinted in the United States by permission of Little, Brown and Company, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc. Excerpts from “The Balance” and “Excursion in Reality” from The Complete Short Stories by Evelyn Waugh (Penguin Classics 2011), copyright © The Estate of Laura Waugh, 2011, reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd. Many friends provided help and inspiration as this project was getting underway and as it was getting finished. Thanks to Emily Richmond Pollock

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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for always believing I could get this done, and for nearly eighteen years of steadfast friendship. Thanks to Emily Hyde, Emily Setina, and Lily Sheehan for numerous talks and emails that helped me over the finish line. Wonderful conversations about visual art and literature with Alix Beeston and Amy Elkins have shaped my thinking, and their clear-eyed commentary significantly improved earlier drafts of these chapters. To Madigan Haley: it is a joy to think with you, and your generous friendship and careful reading have been indispensable in helping me to finish this book and to embark on new projects. Thanks to Kyle Frisina for being one of my favorite people to read with since the fourth grade: it is a pleasure and a privilege to have shared the making of this grownup book with you, and it has benefitted enormously from your sharp intelligence and your well-timed words of encouragement. Thanks to my extended families—Greg Chetel and Carolyn Graybeal, Lauren Chetel and John Lawson, Evelyn Graybeal, David Kronig, Stephen Nantier, Dick and Robin Porter, Russell and Ansley Campbell-Porter, Marguerite and West Bishop—for putting up with my work and for being proud of me. To my parents, Scott and Cappy Lewis: I owe you more than I could possibly account for here. Thank you for the unwavering love and support, and for making me a reader in the first place. To my sister Amanda, the instigator, motivator, and eternally buoying morning conversationalist: you are awesome, and I would care only half as much about art without your influence. Dan Chetel’s cooking and driving are the dynamic forces that have made this book possible. This book is better—as am I—because of your love: thank you, Dan, for everything.

DYNAMIC FORM

Introduction Reformulating Modernism

“Now undoubtedly we are under the dominion of painting,” declares Virginia Woolf in a 1925 essay simply titled “Pictures.” “Were all modern paintings to be destroyed,” she goes on, “a critic of the twenty-fifth century would be able to deduce from the works of Proust alone the existence of Matisse, Cézanne, Derain, and Picasso; he would be able to say with those books before him that painters of the highest originality and power must be covering canvas after canvas, squeezing tube after tube, in the room next door.”1 The essay is, on the one hand, a rehearsal of the agon between literature and painting: Woolf pronounces “a writer whose writing appeals mainly to the eye” to be “a bad writer” (174), and she insists that “painters lose their power directly they attempt to speak” (176). Each artist should pursue the effects native to her medium, she implies, and not attempt to borrow the properties of other art forms. Perhaps this is why Woolf ’s assertion of painting’s supreme status is predicated on an example that describes its annihilation—and why even in her future critic’s reimagination of painting, it remains separated from the world of writing, confined to “the room next door” with its tubes of pigment. Yet “Pictures” is also, on the other hand, an invitation to think about intermedial exchange and influence. Woolf observes that “no painter is more provocative to the literary sense” than Paul Cézanne, “because his pictures are so audaciously and provocatively content to be paint that the very pigment, 1

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INTRODUCTION

they say, seems to challenge us, to press on some nerve, to stimulate, to excite” (175–76). A Cézanne landscape “stirs words in us where we had not thought words to exist; suggests forms where we had never seen anything but thin air” (176). That Woolf lights on Cézanne is hardly surprising, since he was a favorite of the painters in her circle. What is curious is that Woolf fixates on the materiality of painting—a Cézanne is just paint, and is happy about it—and signals that somehow painters’ increased medium specificity is exactly what generates writing, what produces form. The novelist’s encounter with Cézanne is exhilarating, even vaguely erotic—evidence that the modernist writer is invigorated by “The Loves of the Arts” (173). “Probably some professor has written a book on the subject,” says Woolf to open her essay, “but it has not come our way” (173). This is that book. “It is extremely difficult,” Woolf admits, “to put one’s finger on the precise spot where paint makes itself felt” in modernist writing (173). This book argues that we can locate that spot by acknowledging the provocations of Cézanne: if painting “stirs words” and “suggests forms,” then those words and forms demand our attention. To be more precise: painting “makes itself felt” in modernism’s literary forms, in modernism’s fascination with form itself. Here I expand my claim beyond the territory marked out by Woolf, who distinguishes painting as the art of the modern, just as “sculpture influenced Greek literature, music Elizabethan, architecture the English of the eighteenth century” (173). This book shows how the visual and plastic arts of the early twentieth century—painting, yes, but also sculpture, film, and photography—excite literature, shaping what we call modernism. In one regard, mine is not a radical claim. Modernism has long been understood as a particularly active period for interarts exchange, and recent interventions have made clear exactly how deeply modernism engaged with new and popular media from film to radio and phonography.2 But it is an argument that depends for its force upon a new and more specific understanding of what this exchange and engagement look like—on a detailed, expansive account of the encounter between literature and visual and plastic media in the first half of the twentieth century. To be sure, these encounters are biographical and collaborative, as when we think about Woolf ’s interactions with the visual artists of the Bloomsbury group. Many similar personal connections can be traced in the references to fine-art objects and descriptions of real artworks scattered throughout modernist texts, such as Gertrude Stein’s anecdotes about her portrait painted by Pablo Picasso. All the writers at the heart of this study—Woolf, Stein, Henry James, Mina Loy, and Evelyn Waugh—were intimately familiar with the arts that surrounded them. Woolf was the sister of a painter and the close friend of several others;

INTRODUCTION

3

Stein, a famous salon host; and James, a notable author of art criticism. Both Loy and Waugh trained as visual artists before they ever became writers. They all went to the cinema. And precisely for this reason, we cannot limit our location of intermedial influence only to those spots where we find artworks name-checked. Modernist intermediality extends beyond biography and beyond ekphrasis, and visual and plastic media can make themselves felt without reference to preexisting, definable artworks. They do so, as this book demonstrates, in visual motifs, evocations of specific genres (such as the painted still life), and considerations of how we experience art (the sonic aspect of viewing a film in a theater, or the temporal dimension of viewing a sculpted object in the round). To present a finely textured description of these and other modes of intermediality is both to read literature more closely and to be fully cognizant of the histories and conventions belonging to nonliterary arts, as these writers were. For that reason, I take Woolf ’s colloquial synesthesia seriously (even to the point of reading her highly visual essay against the grain): when nonliterary media can make themselves felt in the work of modernist writers, then it is not only “the eye that has fertilised their thought,” but other senses, too (174). This book therefore emphasizes visual art alongside threedimensional, plastic art and modes of encountering art that involve touch, hearing, and other senses. My attention to what is not exclusively visual, or not visual at all, seeks to address the neglect of these art forms in recent years, when visuality has become a key approach to modernist intermediality.3 Similarly, by embracing a range of old and newer nonliterary media— sculpture, painting, photography, and cinema—this book complements recent studies focused only on new media and technologies and simultaneously revises earlier studies limited only to the arts.4 This book shows how such an expanded, nuanced sense of modernist intermediality produces an altogether different understanding of modernist form from the one that circulates today. Literary critics have no difficulty recognizing that poets such as Ezra Pound heave over the conventions of verse by “break[ing] the pentameter,” isolating the image, or fracturing the epic.5 Nor is it controversial to remark James Joyce’s dilation of a single day out to the length of a novel, or, from an art historian’s perspective, to note the collective turn toward abstraction, as cubism, futurism, and constructivism pursue the possibility of nonrepresentational, nonobjective art.6 These and other specific examples of modernists’ challenges to received forms are easily articulated and readily accepted. By contrast, the notion that modernism itself is a period of exceptional formal experimentation and investment is acknowledged and then sidestepped.

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Often, the idea is redescribed, as modernism becomes commensurate with a strict formalism that scholars need to reject or revise. As Mark Goble observes, “rigorously formalist assessments of early-twentieth-century art and literature, which nobody has much championed for years, still manage to inform a model of modernism that persists as an object of skepticism and disfavor in modernist studies: an aesthetic of pristine self-regard and hypertrophied opacity that denies the historical conditions and politics of the period and assumes that the work of art should never permit itself merely to communicate with its audience.”7 Method and object, in other words, have come to inform each other: old-fashioned methodology created a modernism in its own image, and now both kinds of formalism—critical practice and artistic style—have together fallen into disrepute. Such “skepticism and disfavor” are evident in the series of descriptors that critics use to elucidate the relationship between modernism and form. Urmila Seshagiri, for instance, refers to “the longstanding modernist worship of form” and “the wonted sacredness of literary form” within modernism, a movement she defines as “the generation of authors who esteemed form to the near-exclusion of other considerations.”8 Both these scholars expertly turn away from the models of modernism as formalism that they invoke. Seshagiri elaborates the defeat of form within a text that exemplifies late modernism’s imbrication with incipient postcolonial writing. And again pivoting away from the “aesthetic,” Goble pursues the possibilities of communication that emerge from modernism’s attraction to “the idea of the medium”—an attraction that he assures us “need not be an impoverished aesthetic reifying an expired formalism and repudiating, in advance, those histories that have returned to modernism with a rightful vengeance.”9 The problem with form and formalism on the basis of these accounts is clear. Form blocks out a clear view of “other considerations” writers may have had; formalism prevents scholars from contending with “historical conditions and politics.” Within modernist studies, formalism occupies a position opposite historicism and opposite political commitment, even opposite its traditional counterterms, content and matter. As the current conversation would indicate, form stands opposite what really matters. There is, it turns out, a historical reason for formalism’s disrepute. As Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz outline in their introduction to Bad Modernisms, early twentieth-century appraisals of modernism stressed its confrontational quality, its “affront” and “antagonism” toward inherited standards of value for literary works, including “approbation of the social order” and “uncritical endorsement of traditional forms.”10 In this account, modernism casts itself as a youthful rebel, rudely discourteous to the styles,

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hierarchies, and customs that it inherits. But while modernism is initially “bound up with bad times, bad feelings,” and “bad manners,” its status is quite different by the middle of the twentieth century, when modernism’s various affronts have been enshrined by those educational institutions—the art museum, the university—charged with elucidating and “transmitt[ing] modernist values as twentieth-century standards.”11 By the midcentury, then, modernism is middle-aged, enjoying comfortable institutional security. Within this setting, “T. S. Eliot, the New Critics, and their heirs” show how “modernism was not at war against but rather continuous with tradition” and thereby engineer a transformation in modernism’s reputation, “from bad outsider to far-too-good insider.”12 Rebellion is converted into dignity and respectability—even doctrine. Thus modernism begins “to suggest a persistent orthodoxy rather than a deliberate challenge,” and as Michael Levenson summarizes, modernism arrives “at the beginning of the twenty-first century [. . .] circumscribed as a history of techniques, a species of formalism.”13 Modernist studies as a field—and especially the new modernist studies— defines itself against this model of modernism. Just as Bad Modernisms, an inaugural volume for the field, aims to recognize modernism’s original badness (or to make a goody-two-shoes modernism bad again), the field as a whole seeks to revive modernism’s buried histories and suppressed politics— or to refashion modernist studies from a passé formalism into an enlivened historicism. The field accomplishes this goal in two interrelated ways, first by redefining the word modernism and “transforming the term from an evaluative and stylistic designation to a neutral and temporal one.”14 Stripped of any trappings of class or snobbery, modernism now has no necessary relation to high culture or to difficulty, and the term has even been divested of its aesthetic meaning. Second, under this banner, scholars have made repeated historicist interventions that seek to complicate or explode notions of modernism as formalist totality. As Christopher Bush puts it, “the field’s dominant tendency” is “to valorize historical context against that aesthetic autonomy said to have been valued in the bad old days.”15 In its present incarnation, modernist studies is “a field that defined itself as a break from a broadly New Critical consensus toward a New Historicist consensus, bridging the great divide of low and high cultures and sending scholars to the archives of the BBC, the FBI, and 1920s Vogue.”16 With the field thus expanded vertically (to embrace low, middlebrow, and high culture) and horizontally (to encompass a wider geography), scholars of modernism can study virtually all cultural production from the first four decades of the twentieth century (and even this date range is artificially limited).17 Bringing new texts and artworks to light, important

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work in modernist studies frequently attends to its objects within particular contexts: critics locate and situate rather than explicate or evaluate. More culturally attuned and “historically responsive understandings of the period” have thus replaced old-fashioned, “‘purely’ formalist definitions of modernism.”18 And as modernism has come to mean history, not form, so too has form been transmuted into archive, into medium. At the present moment, then, scholars of modernism generally invoke form with little fanfare (if they invoke it at all) and simultaneously disdain formalism. This maneuver is especially crucial to those studies invested in intermedial examinations of modernism and in those topics immediately adjacent to form, such as medium specificity and aesthetic autonomy.19 Here it is especially obvious that modernists’ formal credos double down on the turn-of-the-century investment in the aesthetic as a separate sphere, as when Clive Bell defines “significant form” as “lines and colours combined in a particular way” to arouse specifically “aesthetic emotions”; when T. S. Eliot claims that “the poet has, not a ‘personality’ to express, but a particular medium”; when Clement Greenberg tracks the avant-garde’s “revolt” against subject matter as the arts are “hunted back to their mediums.”20 Taken together, these credos offer, at best, a strict formalism. At worst, such a formalism seems morally or politically suspect—so sequestered from the human that art becomes reified and inert, with the politics that underwrite its autonomy tending to fascism. And with modernism still lingering in living memory—unlike the more distant pasts of earlier literary periods— there is perhaps a more acutely perceived risk in dredging up its formal commitments. It is exactly this conflation between bad formalism and modernism, I contend, that has kept the new modernist studies mostly at arm’s length from the new formalist studies. Although the two fields are roughly coeval, with precursor studies in the 1990s and a more significant presence after 2000, the new modernist studies has focused its attention on a global, multimedia expansion of the archive, while the new formalist studies has been elaborated in relation to earlier literary fields such as Romanticism.21 This book joins these two approaches together and shows them to be mutually beneficial. I aim both to insert an account of modernism within the new formalist studies (where most discussions address nineteenth-century and earlier texts) and to demonstrate the utility of new formalist methods within modernist studies (where theories of media and visual culture dominate). Specifically, I propose to bring the insights of the new formalist studies to bear on an intermedially defined modernism. Doing so, I argue, helps us to see that any formalist phobia is ill-founded, for two primary reasons.

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First, as we have seen, formalism’s bad reputation conjures up exclusionary critical practices and immovable critical objects, an aloofness from politics and from history. Formalists are, as W. J. T. Mitchell so evocatively writes, either “drudges who spend their days counting syllables, measuring line lengths, and weighing emphases,” or “decadent aesthetes who waste their time celebrating beauty and other ineffable, indefinable qualities of works of art.”22 The new formalist studies has revised this picture so that “reading for form,” as the title of a key essay collection has it, is no longer synonymous with mere accounting or with unthinking reverence: rather, increased “sensitivity to the complexity of literary form” can attune us to “its various and surprising work, its complex relation to traditions, and its interaction with extra-literary culture.”23 That such a program—if it indeed it is a program, since the new formalist studies remains a diffuse field—is highly compatible with the work that scholars of modernism have been doing should be obvious.24 Indeed, the handful of exceptions to the generalized formalist phobia in modernist studies makes this compatibility plain. In the early years of the new modernist studies, Jesse Matz, for one, examined the impression’s unique capacity to generate form by focusing “hope for the kind of unity that has long been the aspiration of the ‘aesthetic.’”25 Taking advantage of how the impression “promise[s] totality” without quite delivering it in an unmediated or unadulterated way, literary impressionism in the modernist period “engage[s] before the fact in [. . .] feminist and neo-marxist forms of critique” and thereby offers “a highly productive record of the linkage, in representation, between perception and politics.”26 Modernist studies may have trended away from the formalist leanings that Matz thus demonstrated in 2001, but he has retained a special concern for aesthetics and, in 2016, traced impressionism from its origin as “a late-nineteenth-century period style of art” to its contemporary manifestations in a variety of “forms of discourse and visuality.”27 By explicating and historicizing the impression—by seeking both “to explain what really makes contemporary culture impressionistic” and “to redefine impressionism in terms of its fuller life as a transhistorical mode”—Matz aims, as in his earlier work, to combine the new modernist studies’ contextually sensitive approach with highly specific, aestheticizing readings.28 David James has likewise offered a view of modernist form refracted through contemporary literature. Recent fiction, he has shown, reinvigorates modernist techniques, especially “the device of interior focalisation,” which remains useful for “evoking the sensation of social worlds.”29 This widespread revival demonstrates form’s political and ethical ramifications, since contemporary novelists prompt critical understandings of the worlds

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they depict and make “form into a process of participatory engagement” with the reader.30 James is more explicit in his formalist commitment than Matz—and more willing to use the word form—and he recognizes that his insistence upon the centrality of “the particularities of form” might not “sit well with the contextualizing impulses of the New Modernist Studies.”31 James therefore defends his project and his practice of close reading with the assertion that “a more thorough comprehension of the interaction between ‘technicist’ understandings of how fiction operates and the new modes of attention it demands [. . .] is surely the foundation for obtaining a firmer grasp of the novel’s capacity for critical work.”32 Thus James, like Matz, makes the case that formalist reading is compatible with the political and social ambitions of the new modernist studies. In this regard, their work aligns with one of the primary interventions of the new formalist studies, which has been to demonstrate repeatedly that formalism and historicism are not as far apart as we might think. Susan J. Wolfson, for one, has shown how Lord Byron’s heroic couplets, like other Romantic poetic structures, “test the force of dominant forms (social and literary) in the poetics and politics of opposition.”33 In the traditional, ostensibly rigid form of the couplet, Byron stages “questions about subjective autonomy, systems of political power, and protocols of gender,” and only by attending to his forms can we see how “the energies of freedom and eruption are set against the demands of constraint and conservatism.”34 Wolfson is the primary proponent of “an historically informed formalist criticism,” and by investigating how “formalist poetics and practices can set the grain of aesthetics against dominant ideologies and their contradictions, even as (in the story we hear today) they are shaped by them,” she points out that reading for form is congruent with historicist aims.35 Formalist reading can permit the critic to answer questions rooted in historical context and saturated with political and social import. So too can the historicist critic’s desire to consider politics, to critique ideology, to account for context, be enhanced with considerations of the aesthetic. Their separation is a matter of sedimented habits that can be altered, since “formalist criticism, either New Critical or post-New Critical, is not necessarily inimical to the analysis of referentiality desired by the historicist.”36 The new formalist studies, in fact, is careful to declare certain of its continuities with New Historicism, and to point out New Historicism’s own dependence on formalism.37 No scholar has made this case with more clarity or force than Caroline Levine, who reads Cleanth Brooks against Mary Poovey in order to reveal that “where the New Critical Brooks is too little a formalist, the historicizing Poovey is far more a formalist than she is willing to recognize.”38 Brooks

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evinces “surprisingly little interest in the conspicuous differences among the forms he invokes,” while Poovey “shows a profound interest in the power of forms to organize and contain.”39 Levine offers this reading in the course of making her case “for expanding our usual definition of form in literary studies to include patterns of sociopolitical experience”—a move that has the advantage of dissolving “the traditionally troubling gap between the form of the literary text and its content and context.”40 If, as Levine holds, formalist thinking is “as valuable to understanding sociopolitical institutions as it is to reading literature,” and if “forms are at work everywhere,” then modernist studies’ rejection of formalism has been shortsighted, or superficial.41 We have needed formalism, or we have been unconscious formalists, all along. The second way in which the new formalist studies can assist scholars of modernism has less to do with history and politics and more to do with definitions of form. As Levine’s expansion signals, one of the primary moves in recent formalist work has been to adjust, widen, or multiply the definition(s) of form. Marjorie Levinson notices this phenomenon when she comments that essays in this vein proliferate “synonyms for form (e.g., genre, style, reading, literature, significant literature, the aesthetic, coherence, autonomy).”42 Longer studies tend to begin similarly, with extended etymologies or histories of the word form. Levine uses this tactic at the beginning of her book Forms to highlight how “over many centuries, form has gestured to a series of conflicting, sometimes even paradoxical meanings.”43 Angela Leighton makes the same move at the beginning of On Form to illuminate how “the word is utterly familiar, yet also unspecific, abstract, aloof. [. . .] One reason for this complexity, even confusion of purpose, is that form, unlike other abstract nouns in English, has a multitude of meanings. There are more than twenty dictionary definitions of the word.”44 Ali Smith enumerates many of these definitions in a lecture also titled “On Form”: Form, from the Latin forma, meaning shape. Shape, a mold; something that holds or shapes; a species or kind; a pattern or type; a way of being; order, regularity, system. It once meant beauty but now that particular meaning’s obsolete. It means style and arrangement, structural unity in music, literature, painting, etc.; ceremony; behavior; condition of fitness or efficiency. It means the inherent nature of an object, that in which the essence of a thing consists. It means a long seat, or a bench, or a school class, and also the shape a hare makes in the grass with its body for a bed.45 That form is so slippery a concept, so multifaceted a word, should ease the minds of those concerned about its reification. As Smith’s list makes clear,

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INTRODUCTION

“form has never belonged only to the discourse of aesthetics.”46 And if the common element in all these definitions is that “‘form’ always indicates an arrangement of elements—an ordering, patterning, or shaping,” then we should see already that these arrangements are not necessarily the totalizing structures that are so frequently derided.47 As Levine especially has made plain, not all forms are equal, nor do all operate in the same way. She uses the term affordance to call our attention to the fact that “each shape or pattern, social or literary, lays claim to a limited range of potentialities,” a set of latent “uses or actions.”48 Different forms, in other words, can do different things, and so we ought to specify the particular organizational capacity that a given form enacts when we discuss it: much of the meaning of a form derives from how its theoretical capabilities are put into action. Some forms, like the enclosure or the bounded whole, can seem to confirm the suspicions of modernist scholars by displaying a “willingness to impose boundaries, to imprison, to create inclusions and exclusions.”49 This kind of perimeter might shut out history, politics, or context and thereby establish the work of art as a self-contained, autotelic art object. But these are by no means the only affordances of such forms, or of form in general. Although form does constrain, and although it can be hard to see its other affordances, these other affordances are crucial: “forms can be at once containing, plural, overlapping, portable, and situated.”50 Form, in other words, describes many possible actions and relations that can obtain at the same time, or within the same social or cultural sphere. Literary texts, in particular, have the power “to set forms against one another in disruptive and aleatory as well as rigidly containing ways.”51 Distinct forms may work against each other, or in concert with each other, and any account of the full formal complexity of a literary work should acknowledge these shifting dynamics. As Smith puts it, “in its apparent fixity, form is all about change”; “form, the shaper and molder, acts like the other thing called mold, endlessly breeding forms from forms.”52 These qualities of form are particularly clear in cases of ekphrasis, as Brian Glavey has recently demonstrated. Characterized by its imitative, generative nature, ekphrasis is for Glavey a fundamentally queer mode, in that it produces “illusions” of iconic form at the same time that its attempts at mimesis must always fail.53 “To think of the queerness of form,” Glavey writes, “is to recognize that, despite its association with stability and closure, it always also involves a sort of identity crisis.”54 Glavey’s conception of form therefore emphasizes its multiplicity: chimerical and unstable, form is for him “a vision of impossible coherence produced via iterations of imitation and failure.”55 And formalism, accordingly, cannot be synonymous with the exaltation of

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the art object, nor with the sequestration of art away from the world. To the extent that ekphrasis is inherently formalist, it demonstrates that we should understand “formalism as a relational rather than an ontological category: a way of attaching to objects rather than a testament to their autonomy.”56 Tracing multiple, sometimes conflicting, types of attachment, Glavey’s argument is congenial to my own. Our accounts of modernist form itself are rather different, yet in our shared attempt to wrestle with the complexities and contradictions of modernist form—our shared desire to replace the “tendency to read modernist formalisms in all-or-nothing terms,” as “either as promising redemption or transcendence, on the one hand, or as symptoms of ideology or professional prestige, on the other”—I take Glavey’s sensitive accounts of intermedial modernist form as exemplary.57 Indeed, as I have outlined, form’s mobility and malleability are the qualities that the new formalist scholarship is only just beginning to articulate and explain, even if “the play of form in cultures of reading” has always been “nothing if not mobile, variable, unpredictable.”58 Accounting for these affordances requires a responsive, flexible formalism—just the kind of method best suited to engaging with the wide range of formal experiments in modernism. Employing my own such method in this book—a blend of close reading, historical analysis, and art and media criticism—I aim to describe something akin to the moldy—or molding—form that Smith calls up: a kind of modernist form that is surprisingly dynamic. To be clear: like those scholars who eschew formalism, I am not interested in returning modernist studies to the ahistorical, apolitical posture of the mid-to-late twentieth century, nor do I want the pendulum to swing fully from historicism back to formalism. (As we have already seen, historicism and formalism may not be so distant from each other anyway.) It is my contention, rather, that an account of modernism’s many intermedial forms is crucial to but missing from the new formalist studies.59 Furthermore, the new modernist studies’ expansion of the archive and excellent historical work on new media need to be complemented by a reevaluation of modernism’s forms as forms, by a reassessment of modernism’s formalism instead of a wholesale rejection of it. I have hinted that dictionary deep dives are symptomatic of writing on form, that there is something about form that sends literary critics rushing back to the dictionary, to first principles. The first principles that anchor this study are three formal explanations or paradigms that have long grounded our understanding of modernism: spatial form, pure form, and formlessness. The first two categories represent critical commonplaces—one literary, the other art historical—about modernist form at its most orthodox and

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INTRODUCTION

ahistorical; the third refers to the hazard that arises when that orthodoxy is abandoned and history reenters the picture. Most familiar to literary scholars of modernism is the spatial-form thesis. Its influence dates from 1945, when Joseph Frank noted the suspension of narrative progress and syntactic flow in the work of T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, and asserted that these features defined a new “spatial form in modern literature.”60 Though Frank was not himself a New Critic, his argument coincided with their interest in aligning poetic meaning with “a synchronic structure in some metaphorical space,” where the poem’s “energies” are contained “in matrices of architectonic tension.”61 Frank’s theory of spatial form managed to make the modernist novel into something like a very large poem, a “crystalline structure” that could be apprehended all at once in a moment of insight that followed reading.62 Literature could be conceived as having a motionless, atemporal form like those named in the titles of two exemplary New Critical volumes, Cleanth Brooks’s The Well Wrought Urn and W. K. Wimsatt’s The Verbal Icon—titles that testify to the midcentury “desire to endow literature with the spatiality of an art object [. . .] as an attempt to preserve text from context.”63 The spatial-form thesis thus operates at the nexus of modernism, New Criticism, and intermediality. Rebecca Beasley summarizes this juncture: “the canonisation of certain texts under the term ‘modernism’ in the midtwentieth century was achieved by a criticism that emphasised ‘spatial form’” and derived its terms “from modernism’s own account of itself, an account [. . .] that drew heavily on modernism’s encounter with the visual arts.”64 As I have already indicated, this account of modernist form is still with us, but by drawing a more nuanced picture of modernist intermediality, we can revise the theory of spatial form. Chapters 1 and 2 propose such a revision by engaging in sustained readings of single novels, James’s The Golden Bowl (1904) and Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse (1927). Chapter 1 shows how James’s sculptural aesthetics, elaborated through a series of ornate metaphors, encompasses not only sculptural objects (such as bowls, statues, and pagodas) but also the viewing practices and temporalities associated with sculpture. Such viewing in the round, with its frequent retreading of old ground, creates the surface texture of James’s at times almost impenetrable prose. Viewing in the round also activates a narrative temporality that renders the novel as a dynamic form to be processed over time, revisited, and reviewed. The Golden Bowl thus helps us to see that novelistic engagement with the fine arts does not produce self-contained, static, spatial form. Instead, shifts in perspective and point of view as James’s characters circle sculptural objects—and as we readers make our way around the novel—reinvent the novel as an experiment in plastic form.

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Chapter 2 extends this revision of the spatial-form account of modernist narrative. Turning from James’s intermedial metaphors to Woolf ’s intermedial descriptions, the chapter diverges from the critical commonplace that aligns the form of To the Lighthouse with Lily Briscoe’s painting and claims instead that the novel unfolds the iconographic implications of a still-life composition. The carefully arranged dish of fruit and a seashell on the Ramsays’ table signals the novel’s interest in minor, everyday objects and also establishes a vanitas motif—a reminder of mortality and the impermanence of human life. Woolf ’s still life metamorphoses into various vanitas forms throughout the novel, precipitating later turns of the plot and linking up with the novel’s elegiac project. All these vanitas motifs are thus mortal forms that help to determine the shape and flow of the narrative, which is itself a mortal form—hopelessly entangled with human emotion, fated to reckon with mortality, and challenged to mourn the dead. In this way Woolf, like James, requires us to modify the notion that the modernist novel is best approached as a spatial form. Like The Golden Bowl, To the Lighthouse demonstrates that we should more closely heed the cues received from art objects in the novel (the bowl, the still-life centerpiece) because, by referring to specific artistic traditions (sculpture viewed in the round, vanitas or memento mori iconography), these objects can teach us how to read the novels themselves. Understanding the specificity of artistic form allows us to see the dynamism of larger forms, such as the descriptive paragraph or the novel itself. And the art objects we most expect to launch us upon spatial-form readings actually, when examined closely, very strongly forestall such readings. Chapter 3 takes up a different formal orthodoxy, pure form, which circulates for modernists as a term to describe abstraction in the visual arts and simultaneously takes hold in a series of experiments in “the meta-form of form: poetry.”65 The chapter focuses on Mina Loy, a writer enmeshed in the avant-garde conversation about abstraction and invested in identifying a purity of form in the work of those she admires: Wyndham Lewis, Gertrude Stein, Constantin Brancusi, and the futurists. Responding to her contemporaries, friends, and lovers, Loy lauds recognizably mainstream aspects of abstract form—the particulate core, the fundamental element, the essential shape—in the service of surprising ends, most notably an emphasis on the body and emotional intimacy. Thus poems such as the autobiographical Songs to Joannes (1917) and the ekphrastic “Brancusi’s Golden Bird” (1922), among several others, encourage us to reframe the interarts notion of pure form as something other than entirely sterile, since Loy’s work consistently demonstrates how abstraction can coincide with affect and sexuality. Loy asks us to revel in the erotics of formal purity found in the denuded body

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INTRODUCTION

and self, text and art object; her protean forms are always on the verge of merging with other forms or generating new forms. Loy’s ardent futurity accordingly represents a strain of maximalist abstraction that counters the colder modernism of F. T. Marinetti, Ezra Pound, and others. The final two chapters attend to the possibilities for formal dynamism— and the risks of formlessness—presented by the newer media of film and photography. Chapter 4 considers a wide range of work by Evelyn Waugh— the novels Vile Bodies (1930) and The Loved One (1948) and the stories “The Balance” (1926) and “Excursion in Reality” (1932)—in order to show how Waugh develops an overarching narrative aesthetic out of his relationship with film. Engaging with the epistemology of the camera eye and the complexities of film viewing, this broader film writing constantly oscillates between two poles of formal extremism, sometimes risking a mechanical, formulaic rigidity and at other times courting a dissolution into chaotic formlessness. Waugh’s aesthetics can therefore be described as bad formalism: one side of this dialectic develops too much form, while the other establishes too little. Neither manages just the right amount of formal production to count as “good” modernist formal innovation. Taken together, these extreme forms attest to the extent to which Waugh’s work consistently allegorizes the condition of the late modernist writer struggling to survive a changed media ecology dominated by the cinema, as Waugh’s satires take the form of—or rather deform—the Künstlerroman, twisting its narrative into a different shape with a less than heroic end. Like Waugh, Gertrude Stein plays with the Künstlerroman, and in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), she offers her own assessment of the position of the artist in a saturated media marketplace. Reading The Autobiography alongside Stein’s other work, chapter 5 examines Stein’s deployment of photographic illustrations, tropes, and techniques as a crucial strategy in her attempt to picture the history of modernism and to secure her spot within it. In particular, The Autobiography’s underexamined photographs show how an ostensibly formless form—the surface—becomes the instrument of Stein’s experimental history, as she skims across major developments in modernist and avant-garde art and literature and touches on as many famous figures as possible. In this way, while earlier chapters discuss the forms that populate modernist texts or the formal theories that purport to elucidate them, chapter 5 turns to the forms taken by modernism itself, which takes shape in the “contact zone” of The Autobiography.66 Across these chapters I aim to provide a sample of the widespread, radical formal experimentation undertaken by writers encountering nonliterary arts and media in the first half of the twentieth century. In this account,

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as forms and formal theories cross from one artistic realm to another and back again, as writers mold their narratives with sculpture in mind and pattern their memoirs after photography, it becomes clear that modernism is obsessed with form—is even at times a formalism itself—but that form is far more dynamic than we have given it credit for. Thus form in this book has many various, overlapping meanings. (Here now my own deep dive—or rather, my own sprawling catalogue.) I use form to describe the overall shape taken by an artwork—sculpture, painting, poem, narrative—whether that shape is spatial (the composition of a painting) or temporal (the sequence of events in a story). Form is thus pattern and plan, order and arc. Some configuring structures that I discuss, such as the surface, are less frequently described as forms than others, such as the autobiography. (The surface is perhaps one of what C. Namwali Serpell deems “weird forms,” forms that are “inconsistent” and “hard to work within.”67) Form refers, too, to those smaller objects within larger works that possess recognizable “sensuous configurations.”68 James’s golden bowl, for instance, is a clear example of a class of art objects that share a particular shape; the bowl is a special container, a round, three-dimensional form like other urns, jars, and vessels. I also use form to indicate fundamental meaning or purpose, as in the phrase “mortal form,” and to describe social conduct, as in the phrase “bad form.” My usage of form thus draws on both of the root definitions of the term identified by Leighton and Nicholas Gaskill: form designates both “the material aspects of a thing”—its shape—and “the immaterial nature that makes a thing what it is”—its essence.69 As this catalogue indicates, writing about form is a tricky proposition: the term is famously slippery and especially difficult to pin down. Yet reading for form at all—and reading for dynamic modernist forms in particular— necessarily entails some slipperiness and some difficulty. These critical challenges are markers of the dynamic formalism that is required to properly account for modernism’s formal variety. Rather than seeking to locate and explicate examples of a static, a priori conception of form, our formalism should be nimble and limber. Such a formalism is capable of responding to form’s inconstancy—to its contradictions—as I trace, for instance, the operation of the dialectic of bad formalism in Evelyn Waugh’s fiction. There, the strict formula instantiates too much form and risks tipping over into chaos, into too little form. Much the same kind of dialectic emerges from my reading of Mina Loy’s poetry, where both rarified aestheticism and base material—the extremities of abstraction—exemplify pure form. Other chapters consider less schematic formal conflicts and complexities, but to some degree, all suggest how form can be “a kind of productive confusion.”70

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INTRODUCTION

More than just a property of art objects, then, form is also an operation— a verb as well as a noun. Shaping is just as important as shape here. In this way Dynamic Form responds to David James’s hope that we might think about modernist form “as a performative process rather than a means to an end.”71 What we gain from this kind of thinking, I argue, is a vision of form not only as a state of being but also as a kind of doing—less an “ontological category,” as Glavey puts it, than what Henri Focillon in 1934 evocatively called “the graph of an activity.”72 Such an action-based understanding reminds us that form—“primarily a mobile life in a changing world,” in Focillon’s phrase— is not only synchronic but also diachronic.73 Forms can and do assemble, become evident, and persist through time. For this reason, our formalism must be capacious enough to accommodate the possibility of revision and change, even as it is also flexible enough to address modernism’s many formal experiments. In this regard, like the account of intermediality that I hope to provide, the formalism I seek to enact means that the strength of my argument will derive from the specificity of individual readings. To recognize “a creativity of forms,” one must attend to their particulars.74 In all these ways I mean to broaden our conception of form in relation to modernism, because out of all the possible meanings of form that I have detailed, scholars of modernism have most often focused on only one subcategory. In this regard, we are hardly unusual: within “literary study today,” as Langdon Hammer points out, there is a general “tendency to fix on certain instances of form as emblematic of form as such.”75 For modernist critics, form has usually meant the bounded container or, paradoxically, its opposite: fragments—sometimes shored, like Eliot’s, against ruins—that dramatically fail to coalesce into a whole. (For both Matz and James, form is usually synonymous with the bounded whole.76) One of modernism’s signal achievements, in fact, is to make the fragment into the whole, as in Joyce’s epiphany, Woolf ’s moment, or H. D.’s natural image. I would never wish to deny that the luminous, self-contained whole is an important form for modernism; indeed, this book engages with the whole—by rethinking and reworking it—throughout the chapters that follow. My revision of the spatial-form thesis in chapters 1 and 2 is a reassessment of the modernist novel as a whole. By replacing spatial-form accounts of The Golden Bowl and To the Lighthouse with accounts of plastic form and mortal form—two descriptors that more accurately explain the operation of these narratives—I aim to show how the whole can never really be autotelic. Constituted by viewer and reader, the artwork changes with every encounter— even within an individual encounter—and remains subject to the passage of time. Chapter 3 considers what is perhaps the apotheosis of autonomous

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form: abstraction. The abstract artwork manifests such purity of form that it is only form, form above all else. Yet for Mina Loy and her associates, abstract, pure form is not only conceptual but also material—and not impersonal at all, but enmeshed in friendship and romantic relations. Elemental forms can be charged with social and erotic power. By reframing modernist formal orthodoxies associated with whole shapes, the first three chapters of this book thus help us to see new modes of formal dynamism—modernist form as plastic, mortal, protean. The downside of this dynamism is the subject of chapter 4, which asks what formal choices are available to the late modernist writer arriving after such innovation. What ought a writer to do whose formative years occur after the height of form has been reached? The options, I argue, are the two extremes of bad formalism limned by the cinema: either the bounded container becomes a restrictive, repetitive format, or the whole (and the fragment-as-whole) cannot hold, and all dissolves into a formless muddle. But as I demonstrate, this formlessness is itself a kind of form, rather than form’s inversion. Chapter 5 adopts similar terms, scaling the inquiry up to the whole of modernism in order to ask what we might learn by seeing the dynamics of modernism at play across the formless form of the surface. Photography brings us closer to modernism’s sociality, within reach of its domestic intimacy, so that we might almost touch the entire network of innovation. In these ways, the following chapters do grapple with the important form of the whole, but they also consistently remind us that form appears in many guises and takes on various functions. By tracking the movement and metamorphosis of the whole, and by elaborating the dynamics of still other forms of modernist intermediality, this more capacious account of what form looks like will, I hope, shift our understanding of what form can (and does) do.

Ch a p ter 1

Plastic Form Henry James’s Sculptural Aesthetics and Reading in the Round

In a letter written on August 10, 1904, Henry James professed his terror about a sculptural group of nude figures around a fountain. Their scale, he said, struck him as evidence of “madness (almost),” and he “yearn[ed] too, for the smaller masterpiece; the condensed, consummate, caressed, intensely filled-out thing.”1 James’s intense distaste for artwork executed on such an ambitious scale and his corresponding desire for a smaller masterpiece seem ironic now, since James was mere months away from the publication of The Golden Bowl that autumn. His own immense masterpiece had been at the forefront of his mind, and as he wrote in a letter to Scribner’s that would be incessantly quoted in advertisements for and reviews of the novel, he extolled The Golden Bowl as “the most done of my productions—the most composed and constructed and completed. [. . .] I hold the thing the solidest, as yet, of all my fictions.”2 As James’s assessment of his novel makes clear, despite the curious echo of the earlier letter in his alliteration, his final major work is no small masterpiece. The Golden Bowl may be solid, but it is not at all condensed. The novel remains tremendous, unwieldy: it is the most difficult and most figure-laden novel of James’s major phase. According to Robert Gale’s count, in fact, it contains 1,092 images, about two hundred more than appear in any other work by James.3 More to the point, perhaps, is the way in which the figurative language of The Golden Bowl makes itself felt. James’s images and 18

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figures in The Golden Bowl are many and lengthy, perplexing and persistent, and they—even more than the thematic “substance” of marriage, adultery, and incest—constitute the heart of the novel. As such an elaborately wrought object, so “composed and constructed” and “done,” The Golden Bowl seems nearly to epitomize the “aesthetic principle” famously articulated within its pages: Adam Verver’s “idea [. . .] of plastic beauty, of the thing visibly perfect in its kind.”4 In this chapter, I ask what Adam Verver’s “aesthetic principle” might tell us about the novel that contains it, but my concern is not exactly Adam’s notion of visual perfection. As any reader of The Golden Bowl knows, most visually flawless objects (and people and situations) are, like the titular bowl, marred beneath the surface. More provocative instead is his “idea [. . .] of plastic beauty,” which prompts two related lines of inquiry. First, this ideal calls up an art form that remains underexamined in the critical conversation about James’s oeuvre: sculpture, the classic art of plastic beauty and “the solidest” of the fine arts. In fact, despite the convergence of Adam’s principle with James’s early estimation of his own work, there exists no extended examination of sculpture among the many critical considerations of the novel’s images and metaphors.5 This critical oversight is especially surprising given that in the first decade of the twentieth century, James engaged with the medium repeatedly, writing fictions about one sculptor, a biography of a second, and intensely affectionate letters to a third.6 A sculptural reading of The Golden Bowl, I contend, not only provides a necessary reinvigoration of the general conversation about James and the visual arts, but also significantly renovates our understanding of this specific novel’s relationship to visual and material culture, which has been described in terms of collection, connoisseurship, and commodity culture, virtually to the exclusion of other possibilities.7 Second, and more important, a sculptural reading of The Golden Bowl illuminates from a new angle one of the longstanding paradigms for understanding form in modernist literature: the spatial-form thesis. According to this influential line of thinking first elaborated by Joseph Frank, modernist novels “require a reader to approach them as a spatial configuration rather than as a temporal continuum” because they so frequently dispense with the ordinary progression of plot in favor of simultaneity or juxtaposition.8 With narrative deemphasized, other kinds of structural patterning dominate, so that the shape of the modernist novel—its mode of being and meaning, which is to say its form—is fundamentally spatial. For Frank, spatial form indexes the intermediality of modernism: he writes that the point at which the spatial elements of the novel “become completely dominant [. . .] is the

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point at which modernism begins,” and that “spatial form in modern literature [. . .] is the exact complement in literature, on the level of aesthetic form, to the developments that have taken place in the plastic arts. [. . .] Contemporary literature is now striving to rival the spatial apprehension of the plastic arts in a moment of time.”9 Viewed through this theoretical lens, the modernist novel attempts solidity by means of its spatial form, with “all literature,” in Brian Glavey’s phrase, “aspiring to the condition of ceramics”— or all novels aspiring to the condition of golden bowls.10 I propose to use a sculptural reading of The Golden Bowl to question and then revise the spatial-form account of modernism, more or less at the moment when spatial form might seem to dominate and modernism might be said to begin. As I will demonstrate, we can learn how to read the form of the novel from the sculptures that we encounter within it, including the titular bowl and the statues and sculptural objects that constitute the vehicles for James’s elaborate metaphors, like the descriptions of Charlotte Stant as an “old bronze” Florentine sculpture (35), of Maggie Verver as a “slight, slim draped ‘antique’ ” statue (138), and of Maggie’s problematic “situation” as a decorative ivory pagoda (299). Reading these art objects, which seem at first like stable, spatially apprehended forms, we discover that no art object can be “grasped as a unity” or apprehended in “one moment of time”—and not just because The Golden Bowl has no interest in the moment.11 James instead calls our attention to the long, repetitive, unstable process of viewing in the round, the standard mode of appreciating sculpture in the modern museum era. As Herbert Read notes, art appreciation manuals recommend that viewers “walk round a piece of sculpture,” and we are then supposed “to allow all the various points of view to coalesce in our imagination. This difficult feat, if successful, might conceivably give us a ghostlike version of the solid object.”12 Read’s emphasis on the difficulty of these instructions and the ghostliness of our ultimate understanding proves particularly apt for describing the challenges presented by James’s sculptures. As we walk around a sculpted object, a form in space, our impressions change depending upon our point of view, so that any sense we might have of a singular form seems tenuous at best. With this in mind, I place James’s golden bowl in a long line of rounded literary sculptures that have served critics as examples of form at its most totalizing—formalist topoi such as John Keats’s Grecian urn and Wallace Stevens’s jar in Tennessee.13 Examined closely, these isomorphic containers are less autotelic—less self-contained— than they seem. Expanding outward from the golden bowl to The Golden Bowl, from sculptural object to “solidest” novel, this chapter also shows how a sculptural

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reading that recognizes the power of viewing in the round—that reads the novel in the round—can likewise challenge the insistence upon bounded, whole forms that lies at the heart of the spatial-form thesis. Frank repeatedly invokes a conception of the novel as a “totality”: “A knowledge of the whole is essential to an understanding of any part,” he writes, and “such knowledge can be obtained only after the book has been read, when all the references are fitted into their proper places and grasped as a unity.”14 In this account, a “unified, spatial” arrangement is displayed before us, laid out like the map of James Joyce’s Dublin or, perhaps, the composition of Lily Briscoe’s painting (though I shall trouble this latter example of spatial form in the next chapter).15 We apprehend this arrangement all at once, and it proves fully explanatory, rounding the novel into a bounded, whole form. Such ideas have often shaped the discussion of The Golden Bowl as a self-contained totality— “James’s static bowl of a novel,” as Angela Leighton puts it.16 Mark McGurl, too, has argued for a correspondence between the bowl as a “well-wrought urn” and the “novel-as-art-object,” an ideal toward which James strives with his “efforts to find a ‘perfect’ structure and ‘rounded’ shape for the novel as a whole.”17 But acknowledging the roundedness of The Golden Bowl, like acknowledging the roundedness of the bowl it contains, requires us to reckon with the dynamism of the novel. Because the form of the artwork continually alters as the viewer circumambulates it, viewing and reading in the round cannot really create an impression of the object’s spatial form characterized by totality, unity, and simultaneity. Instead, viewing and reading in the round communicate a clear sense of what I will call plastic form. Of course, sculpture has long been referred to as a plastic art because it includes “shaping or modelling” and emphasizes “three-dimensional forms.”18 The term plastic form thus reminds us of sculpture’s connection to that which is “able to be moulded,” to substances and ideas that are “impressionable, pliable; susceptible to influence; fluid, flexible,” to contents that “that readily take a new form.”19 Plastic form underscores the changeability of sculptural forms as we circulate around them; unlike spatial form, its attendant sense of dynamism recalls to us the temporality of experiencing art. Indeed, because walking around a sculpture is “a process unfolding over time,” viewing in the round necessarily arouses “a heightened sense of temporality” that can undercut the notion of sculpture as a predominantly spatial rather than temporal form.20 Emphasizing the time-sense of the sculptural encounter also helps to renovate our understanding of the narrative temporality and progression of The Golden Bowl. Sculpture displayed in the round encourages the viewer to change vantage points and experience the work from different positions over

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a period of time; sometimes such viewing includes retracing one’s steps. In this manner, The Golden Bowl builds a narrative rhythm on the practice of reflection as its characters often circle back to describe an object or event or to reconsider a scene. Such re-viewings indicate that James hardly dispenses with narrative momentum, or with plot, even though his novel is not strictly linear. (Neither is it as innovative in its temporal structure as, say, the work of Virginia Woolf, which occupies the next chapter of this book.) To insist that the novel is a time-dependent form may seem obvious; to challenge the spatial-form thesis may seem to return the arts to the territories demarcated by Gotthold Lessing, who argued in his Laocoön (1766) that sculpture is a spatial art, while literature is not, that the former is processed in space and the latter over time.21 But what I am suggesting is something else. This chapter shows how the modernist novel does take its formal cues from the fine arts, but this influence does not necessarily indicate that the novel is striving toward these art forms’ spatiality. Examining the small art objects in the novel with an art historical and art theoretical lens allows us to encounter them as sculptures instead of as emblems of sculpture’s spatiality. In so doing, we can see how they are always already, pace Lessing and Frank, temporally changeable objects. Their plasticity informs the plasticity of the novel that houses them, even as no object as small as the golden bowl can fully account for one as massive and unmanageable as The Golden Bowl. In the absence of any expectation that we might discover a totality, form can emerge less stably as we read, not least because reading The Golden Bowl remains a difficult enterprise. The sculptural images and metaphors that abound in The Golden Bowl are partly responsible for the impenetrable surface texture of the late style, and such a style requires us to reread and revise, much as James did as he worked on the New York Edition of his novels and their attendant prefaces. Rereading seems like a practice that should be compatible with the formalist practice of Frank and the New Critics, but as I show, when we read very closely for form and then reread, we discover that form is less unified and enduring than we thought. To reread is to read in the round, to revisit prior views and viewpoints, to reestablish a series of shifting, limited perspectives on the artwork. Demanded by James’s late style and especially by the sculptural aesthetics of The Golden Bowl, this critical practice demonstrates that we can most accurately approach and account for modernism’s dynamic forms—for the plastic form of the modernist novel—with a dynamic formalism: one that acknowledges partiality and incompleteness, that admits the need for revision. There is one additional benefit to a sculptural reading that emphasizes viewing in the round. Such viewing acknowledges that sculpture “intrudes

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on the surrounding space, and has to be walked round rather than just looked at,” for, unlike painting, it does not face the viewer “as a surface hung flat against the wall.”22 Whether we encounter it in the gallery or in the pages of The Golden Bowl, sculpture activates not only “a disembodied gazing, but a process involving the viewer spatially and kinaesthetically and intellectually, as well as visually.”23 In this way, a sculptural reading of The Golden Bowl reminds us that the world of fine art, and its influence on literature, cannot be reduced to mere visuality. As “an art of palpation—an art that gives satisfaction in the touching and handling of objects,” sculpture shows how sight is often haunted by touch, and both senses prove vital to this plastic novel and the formal revolutions that it prompts the reader to take.24 Peter Brooks has suggested that the management of knowledge constitutes the central matter of James’s fiction, which offers “a nearly epistemological drama, where what we think we know is always open to contest and reversal, without any sure principle for finding a firm, immovable optic.”25 With its sculptural aesthetics, The Golden Bowl suggests that “optic” might be the wrong word here. In James’s oeuvre, and especially in his late novels, epistemology is tied to two frequent turns of phrase—“I see” and “I feel,” which characters use to declare and describe their knowledge. These phrases are dead metaphors that James brings back to life by repetition and vibration. In some ways, they suggest competing epistemological modes: “I see” gives us the evidence of the visual fact, whereas “I feel” offers an assertion of certainty in the absence of evidence.26 “I feel” is usually what James’s characters say when they are attempting to predict future actions: “There are times when I seem not to mind a bit what I’ve done, [. . .] when I feel that I’d do it again” (273), asserts Fanny Assingham in the long conversation that concludes the first volume, in contrast to the alternative connotations of her earlier declaration, “I did see—I have seen. And now I know” (269). The radical move of The Golden Bowl is to combine the two modes through its deployment of sculptural metaphors and moments of viewing in the round, which prompt both senses, even perhaps the synesthesia of the two. This epistemological combination amounts to a major change even in the late period, for the grand moments of realization in The Wings of the Dove and The Ambassadors are still purely visual, intermediated by paintings—the Bronzino portrait before which Milly Theale confronts her own mortality, and the Lambinet landscape through which Lambert Strether realizes Chad Newsome’s affair with Madame de Vionnet. The sculptural epistemology of The Golden Bowl, by contrast, ensures that any similar realization arrives with the certainty of sight undercut by the conjectures of feeling. Knowledge is

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tenuous at best, and viewing in the round never results in stability. Reading The Golden Bowl with an eye (and a feel) for sculpture allows us, as I will show, to bring together considerations of epistemology, ethics, narrative, and metaphor, which are so often treated separately in discussions of James’s oeuvre. But the point in this chapter is less the sculptural object itself than the kind of viewing—and the kind of reading—that it engenders. In our reading, we will not find prior insights, nor a singular, atemporal spatial form. To read The Golden Bowl is also to retrace one’s steps; to rediscover and reexperience is to reassert the claims of plastic form.

Novel Statuary: Pygmalion and the Beginnings of Plastic Form The plasticity of The Golden Bowl arises first and foremost from its style—the dense, ornate figurative language that, as we shall see, takes on a life of its own instead of aiding our understanding of the world James’s characters occupy. The novel is James’s most metaphor obsessed, and it teems with passages that are, as one critic puts it, “adorned by some of James’s most baroque extended metaphors for consciousness, or for how things seemed to a consciousness.”27 As these consciousnesses ruminate, James’s figures frequently undergo midpassage metamorphoses, shifting so that we glimpse figural sculptures. When Charlotte Stant first arrives at Cadogan Place, for example, Prince Amerigo is struck by how familiar her appearance is to him, and her entrance prompts him to conduct a visual inventory of her attributes, which includes her statue-like arms: [I]t was, strangely, as a cluster of possessions of his own that these things, in Charlotte Stant, now affected him; items in a full list, items recognised, each of them, as if, for the long interval, they had been “stored”—wrapped up, numbered, put away in a cabinet. [. . .] He saw the sleeves of her jacket drawn to her wrists, but he again made out the free arms within them to be of the completely rounded, the polished slimness that Florentine sculptors, in the great time, had loved, and of which the apparent firmness is expressed in their old silver and old bronze. (35) Charlotte makes her first appearance in the novel as a statue unpacked after storage and unwrapped for the viewing pleasure of its owner. But this unwrapping remains incomplete: Charlotte’s sleeves extend all the way to her wrists, covering her arms entirely, so that the Prince cannot see them

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and must instead infer their shape, “rounded” and “slim,” as well as their finish, their “polished” surface. These features—as tactile as they are visual— make it insufficient to say that the Prince is merely looking at Charlotte. He engages instead in a kind of looking-as-if-touching, a nearly synesthetic mode of apprehension that characterizes most of the characters’ real and imagined interactions with sculptural objects in The Golden Bowl. Looking and touching prove so intertwined that Charlotte’s appearance, as James describes it, becomes inseparable from the material aspects of the Florentine statues. We slide easily from her “polished slimness” to the statues’ “apparent firmness,” so that, by the end of the sentence, her flesh disappears, replaced by the Prince’s perception of “old bronze.” This effect reverses Galatea’s change in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: the Prince’s tactile vision transforms the living woman into a statue—at least in part—and, as a sculpture, she is more easily included in his mental tally of his possessions.28 We find another woman transfigured by a reverse-Galatea metaphor later in the novel, when James describes a similar female statue in order to give us Adam Verver’s image of his daughter—his most prized possession. Like the Prince’s vision of Charlotte, Adam’s picture of Maggie emerges from the aesthetic sensitivity of the collector: [Maggie] stood there before him [Adam] with that particular suggestion in her aspect to which even the long habit of their life together had not closed his sense, kept sharp, year after year, by the collation of types and signs, the comparison of fine object with fine object, of one degree of finish, of one form of the exquisite with another—the appearance of some slight, slim draped “antique” of Vatican or Capitoline halls, late and refined, rare as a note and immortal as a link, set in motion by the miraculous infusion of a modern impulse and yet, for all the sudden freedom of folds and footsteps forsaken after centuries by their pedestal, keeping still the quality, the perfect felicity, of the statue; the blurred, absent eyes, the smoothed, elegant, nameless head, the impersonal flit of a creature lost in an alien age and passing as an image in worn relief round and round a precious vase. (138–39) Whereas Charlotte evokes a Renaissance statue, Maggie recalls a classical sculpture from late antiquity.29 Although Adam might have become accustomed to her appearance over time, his museum-building project and his connoisseur’s eye prevent his overlooking Maggie, whose particular “form of the exquisite” arises from her silent “suggestion” of “some slight, slim draped ‘antique’ of Vatican or Capitoline halls.” James’s language here is

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more explicit in its reference to the story of Pygmalion: the “rare,” “immortal” statue to which Maggie is compared has been “set in motion by the miraculous infusion of a modern impulse,” liberated from its pedestal “after centuries,” and possessed of a new “sudden freedom of folds and footsteps.” This statue comes to life like the Galatea of Ovid’s story, with “veins [that] throb under the thumb” and may be proclaimed “real indeed.”30 Both cold and warm, Galatea is an apt figure for Maggie, who evokes for her father (and other observers such as Mrs. Rance) both “nymphs and nuns” (139).31 Despite this eruption into modernity and this capacity for movement, however, the statue’s metamorphosis proves incomplete. Unlike Galatea, this statue does not leave the chill of marble completely behind for the warmth of human flesh: even as she moves, she retains “the quality, the perfect felicity, of the statue; the blurred, absent eyes, the smoothed, elegant, nameless head, the impersonal flit of a creature lost in an alien age.” ( James’s prose even encourages us to pause briefly before we reach these parts of the sentence, to rest on our sense that the statue is “keeping still.”) The statue remains anonymous, unanimated by consciousness, and incapable of full human existence. With the final, subtle phrase of James’s sentence, as he turns the metaphor once again, the “creature lost in an alien age” ceases even to be a freestanding statue in the round: she becomes instead a figure “passing as an image in worn relief round and round a precious vase.” Rather than being apprehended in her own roundness, the figure is subjugated to the roundness of the vase—not transported into modernity but trapped in a loop, condemned always to circle the object. This last twist of the metaphor comments, quietly, on the impermanence of art, by countering the “happy, happy boughs” and “for ever young” marble maidens that remain eternally on John Keats’s Grecian urn with a picture of decay over time, in which the “late, and refined, rare” features of the classical female image become less distinct, eroded by the ages into a “worn relief ”—a very cold pastoral scene indeed.32 The spectral image of Keats’s urn is hardly an accident: as Leighton notes, “timeless and well-wrought, the urn has always been considered the perfectly formalist form,” and as such, it represents a prototype for James’s golden bowl.33 I shall examine those connections in the next section of this chapter, but for now, I want to draw our attention to how James’s repetition—“passing as an image in worn relief round and round a precious vase”—underscores the importance of roundness to Keats’s poem. There, the famous end of the poem— “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—piles round form upon round form with its deployment of tautology and chiasmus.34 Although we can read against it (and many scholars have), the construction’s logical-rhetorical roundedness

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seeks to foreclose any questions and any possibility of change. Although we might be able to locate an “overwrought” passion in the urn’s suspended visual narratives—the yearning that marks the incomplete “kiss” and the unconsummated touch—Keats finds the urn remarkable because of the stability and endurance of its images.35 Such self-sufficiency and eternality would seem to class the urn with other “visibly perfect” items in Adam Verver’s museum of “plastic beauty.” Yet James’s response to Keats emphasizes change over time and imperfection—even perhaps a weariness called up by the connotations of the “worn relief ”—which we should associate with the images and metaphors of his novel. Seemingly stable, round, spatial forms are never as durable as we might believe because they are subject to the passage of time. Furthermore, as James continues the metaphor into the next sentence, the vehicle comes to dominate the tenor so that Maggie herself becomes “blurred, absent.” She nearly disappears from the comparison: “She had always had odd moments of striking him, daughter of his very own though she was, as a figure thus simplified, ‘generalised’, in its grace, a figure with which his human connection was fairly interrupted by some vague analogy of turn and attitude, something shyly mythological and nymph-like” (139). Adam attributes his inconstant “human connection” with his daughter to her particular sculptural “attitude,” but it is his vision that drains her of humanity.36 The metaphor of the classical statue, intended to evoke Maggie more completely—and especially to describe her specific relationship to her father—concludes by doing precisely the opposite. Instead of presenting a picture of Maggie in her particularity, Adam’s vision gives us “a figure thus simplified, ‘generalised.’ ” This vague statue replaces any previous sense we might have had of Maggie, and gives the lie to Adam’s insistence that he cares “for special vases only less than for precious daughters” (139). The trouble with this statue metaphor, as with the description of Charlotte as a Renaissance bronze, is that it emerges from a patriarchal vision of possession. Yet its insistence on making Maggie “blurred,” “absent,” and “generalised” also points to a broader difficulty with the novel’s figurative language that can be further elucidated by the story of Pygmalion and Galatea. For J. Hillis Miller, this tale, like all Ovid’s Metamorphoses, shows us “what aberrant figurative language can do” by giving us “a change of shape that in its most general form can be defined as the literalization of a metaphor.”37 The story of Pygmalion and Galatea is, he argues, a “literalizing allegory” of prosopopoeia, the trope which “ascribes a face, a name, or a voice to the absent, the inanimate, or the dead,” and Galatea is “brought to life by the urgency of prosopopoeia.”38 By extension, a statue that comes

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only partially to life is, I want to suggest, an instance of incomplete prosopopoeia. James’s statue metaphor gives us only a partial metamorphosis, and the frustration of this transformative process accounts, in part, for the stylistic complexity, density, and opacity of The Golden Bowl. The “form of the exquisite” that should explain Maggie, should bring her to life for us, never quite does, and James’s extended metaphor becomes a form of exquisite frustration. Tacking on endless appositives and adjectival clauses, James dilates the sentence—note that my first quotation about Maggie is only one sentence—and transforms it into a generator of formal excess. As I have already suggested, The Golden Bowl is often treated as the apotheosis of James’s late style, and while recent critics have engaged in a more studied consideration of its features, early and influential scholars of James contended that the novel evinced an author who was not at the height of his powers, but past his prime. For these scholars, the metaphors of The Golden Bowl “provoke a feeling of arbitrariness and extravagance, a sense of an uncomfortable break in the organic connection of things,” and perhaps the most notable registration of this discomfort occurs in F. R. Leavis’s assessment of the late metaphorical style: “We are conscious in these figures more of analysis, demonstration and comment than of the realizing imagination and the play of poetic perception. [. . .] The imagery is not immediate and inevitable but synthetic.”39 Such critical discomfort with the late style—and especially with its manifestation in The Golden Bowl—centers on its difficulty, its labored quality, and these characteristics remain undeniable. These metaphors offer the reader no easy access to the world of the text but only a “break in the organic,” something “not immediate and inevitable but synthetic.” Too much form, and too little life, in short. Contemporary reviewers of The Golden Bowl also criticized its “unreality,” and they were not wrong: the metaphors of the late style are artificial, and elaborately so.40 For the reader, they are akin to the Galatea-esque statue to which Maggie is compared: incompletely alive, a bit too cold. With all their ostentatious embellishment, the metaphors of The Golden Bowl are not easily integrated into the reader’s vision of the characters’ world in London, but this is hardly an authorial error or a stylistic shortcoming. The figures in the novel— including the metaphors that describe Charlotte and Maggie as statues— signal that description, metaphorical expansion, and allusion to the plastic arts have a purpose other than the creation of reality effects.41 In The Golden Bowl, these stylistic features do not contribute to the creation of the novel’s fictional world but instead begin to reinvent the novel as an experiment in plastic form.

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“The Charm of Its Shape”: Viewing Sculptural Objects in the Round Despite James’s early play with the story of Pygmalion in The Golden Bowl, the novel’s central sculpture is not a “precious daughter” but rather a “special vase”: the titular bowl. Like James’s metaphorical statues, the bowl seems initially to be an art object easily apprehended and possessed as a formal unity, but its stubborn plasticity forces a longer encounter that unfolds slowly, and unstably, over time. We first encounter the bowl in a Bloomsbury antique shop as Charlotte and Prince Amerigo search for a wedding present that she might give him. The shopkeeper shows them a profusion of unsuitable items, and only after the dealer has displayed these objects does he tell Charlotte that she has “seen [. . .] too much” and produce the bowl (83). The bowl’s appearance is theatrical: it arrives not only as the singular answer to the mass of smaller objects that the shopkeeper has already shown the pair, but also as the answer to Charlotte’s pointed questions about his linguistic fluency. For the shopkeeper has interrupted the conversation between Charlotte and the Prince—carried out in Italian, in order to “cover” what their words reveal about their relationship—with his assertion that Charlotte has “seen [. . .] too much,” and his interjection in Italian makes plain that he has understood the implications of their exchange (82–83). Charlotte asks him whether he is Italian, and he replies negatively, in English; she asks whether he is English, and he replies affirmatively, in Italian, while simultaneously “waiv[ing] the question” (84): The dealer waived the question—he practically disposed of it by turning straightaway toward a receptacle to which he had not yet resorted and from which, after unlocking it, he extracted a square box, of some twenty inches in height, covered with worn-looking leather. He placed the box on the counter, pushed back a pair of small hooks, lifted the lid and removed from its nest a drinking-vessel larger than a common cup, yet not of exorbitant size, and formed, to appearance, either of old fine gold or some material once richly gilt. He handled it with tenderness, with ceremony, making a place for it on a small satin mat. “My Golden Bowl,” he observed—and it sounded, on his lips, as if it said everything. He left the important object—for as “important” it did somehow present itself—to produce its certain effect. Simple, but singularly elegant, it stood on a circular foot, a short pedestal with a slightly spreading base, and, though not of signal depth, justified its title by the charm of its shape as well as by the tone of its surface. It might have been a large

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goblet diminished, to the enhancement of its happy curve, by half its original height. As formed of solid gold it was impressive; it seemed indeed to warn off the prudent admirer. Charlotte, with care, immediately took it up, while the Prince, who had after a minute shifted his position again, regarded it from a distance. (84) The bowl thus arrives as a revelation and, simultaneously, as a secret, corresponding both to the antique dealer’s disclosure of his understanding and to his silence about what, exactly, he has understood. Emerging from a box within a box, the bowl is “impressive,” “important,” capable of “produc[ing] its certain effect.” It seems wholly obvious, and as the dealer describes it— “My Golden Bowl”—his words seem to say “everything” that we might need to know about the object. But even in its round self-containment, the bowl proves less than fully discernible and less than entirely replete: with its “happy curve” and its “circular foot,” it somehow seems “to warn off the prudent admirer” and to force the Prince to “regard it from a distance.” There remains something uncomfortable about the manner in which the bowl “disrupts the ideal of a self-sufficient and fully realised wholeness,” as Alex Potts suggests that most sculpted objects do, with an unsettling “mode of address,” a “pose both confidently at ease and cautiously guarded” so that it seems not to be “set apart in its own world, but aware of being constituted in someone else’s gaze.”42 This ambiguous mode of address prompts the bowl’s viewers to engage in a particular kind of interaction with it. They retreat for a better view, then approach it again, indirectly, attempting to surround the object with astute questions from different angles, or to suss it out with repeated glances. In the shop, for example, the Prince backs up to a safer distance and then exits the store entirely before “finally fac[ing] about” for a last glance (88). For her part, Charlotte tries to touch the object’s secrets repeatedly in her conversation with the dealer, only to be rebuffed again and again. He tells her that the bowl is presumably—though not certainly—“cut out of a single crystal” and that its gilt covering was “put on I don’t know when and I don’t know how. But by some very fine old worker and by some beautiful old process” (85). The dealer’s ambiguity about the bowl’s making is matched by his artfulness in challenging Charlotte’s insistence that the bowl must have some flaw which explains its low asking price: [The dealer, playfully but pointedly:] “What is the matter with it?” [Charlotte:] “Oh, it’s not for me to say; it’s for you honestly to tell me. Of course I know something must be.”

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“But if it’s something you can’t find out, isn’t it as good as if it were nothing?” “I probably should find out as soon as I had paid for it.” “Not,” her host lucidly insisted, “if you hadn’t paid too much.” (86; emphasis original) The dealer voices Charlotte’s unspoken question—which he knows that she cannot answer—and when she tries to turn the question back against him, he parries her thrust with another question: “But if it’s something you can’t find out, isn’t it as good as if it were nothing?” Couching his response in the negative and the conditional, he craftily refuses to allow that the bowl has any fault and, as their exchange continues, similarly rejects the premise that she might find any such flaw after her purchase. Each time that Charlotte attempts a new line of questioning, the shopkeeper prevents her from gaining access to the bowl’s secrets, and she must try again. In sum, the bowl presents epistemological difficulties for both Charlotte and the Prince that prompt a particular mode of viewing. Far from fully legible on its own, the bowl appears to have been hewn from a single block of crystal and covered with gilt overlay, but it doesn’t attest unequivocally to that process in its final form. This ambiguity produces uneasiness in its viewers, who find their eyes forced to circle it repeatedly, draw back, and find a new angle of vision. As James presents it, the bowl is less created “by some very fine old worker” than it is “activated,” like a sculpture, “in the phenomenal encounter between viewer and work.”43 The bowl does not register as a spatial form in Frank’s or Lessing’s terms, then, but instead as a plastic form—a kind of form that takes shape at, and out of, the meeting of viewer and bowl, that must be reworked as new angles of vision are established and new knowledge is acquired. Precisely this kind of encounter between the bowl and its beholder occurs when we next see it, at Portland Place, after Maggie has purchased the bowl, been visited by the antique dealer, and learned about its previous viewing by her husband and Charlotte. She has realized the extent of their relationship and invited Fanny Assingham to view her evidence: “a capacious bowl, of old-looking, rather strikingly yellow gold, mounted, by a short stem, on an ample foot” (415). In the Bloomsbury shop, the “impressive,” “important” bowl “produce[d] its certain effect” (84), and it achieves the same effect in the room at Portland Place from its “central position above the fireplace, where, to allow it the better to show, a clearance had been made of other objects” (416). Afforded so much space, the bowl proves “striking” to

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Fanny: “Mrs. Assingham took it, the bowl, as a fine thing; but the question was obviously not of its intrinsic value, and she kept off from it, admiring it at a distance” (416). Clearly “a fine thing” to Fanny’s eyes, the bowl nevertheless leaves her unsettled, so she stays away, exactly as the Prince did in the shop. The very space that the bowl has been given—ostensibly “to allow it the better to show,” to stand out on its own—indicates that the bowl holds some significance other than itself, beyond its “intrinsic value.” Accordingly, Fanny attempts to understand it in much the same way that Charlotte did—by mentally circling it, attempting to understand it in context and from new angles of approach: Her eyes rested on this odd acquisition and then quitted it, went back to it and again turned from it: it was inscrutable in its rather stupid elegance, and yet, from the moment one had thus appraised it, vivid and definite in its domination of the scene. Fanny could no more overlook it now than she could have overlooked a lighted Christmas-tree; but nervously and all in vain she dipped into her mind for some floating reminiscence of it. At the same time that this attempt left her blank she understood a good deal, she even not a little shared, the Prince’s mystic apprehension. The golden bowl, put on, under consideration, a sturdy, a conscious perversity; as a “document”, somehow, it was ugly, though it might have a decorative grace. (419–20) The bowl cannot be “overlooked,” for it seems to organize the space of the room around it. “Vivid and definite in its domination of the scene,” the bowl asserts itself and demands Fanny’s visual attention. Yet at the same time, the bowl also repels her glances repeatedly by refusing to explain itself: since the bowl’s impenetrable gilt overlay prevents visual access to its interior, it remains “inscrutable in its rather stupid elegance,” possessed of “a sturdy, a conscious perversity.” The fascinated eyes that cannot penetrate this surface—whether they belong to Fanny, to Charlotte, or to the Prince— must go around, tracing the contours of its “happy curve” again, repeatedly circling the bowl in a necessarily three-dimensional practice of viewing. The bowl, in sum, operates within the novel as a sculptural object less because of its composition than because of its “round” situation. Even Maggie and Fanny’s long conversation, as Miller puts it, “circles around the bowl, which is spoken of as ‘the incriminating piece,’ as ‘her damnatory piece,’ as ‘representing’ the Prince’s infidelity, as ‘that complicating object on the chimney.’ ”44 At Portland Place, the bowl is a sculpture “staged so as visibly to confront the viewer, and force her or him to attend to a dynamic of encounter that is now too vivid to ignore”; it creates “a psychic dynamic [. . .] by its

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physically intruding on or reshaping the viewer’s sense of ambient space, and from the vague feelings of contact the viewer has with the shaping and texturing of the stuff from which it is made.”45 As Fanny’s nervous glances— and Maggie’s highly calculated, emotionally charged actions—attest, the confrontation is an anxiety-producing one, since the stuff of which the bowl is made is not really crystal and gilt. Made rather from the “intimate” history between Maggie’s husband and her stepmother, from the extent to which “Amerigo knew Charlotte—more than [Maggie] ever dreamed” (416), the bowl becomes “proof ” (417), “witness” (419), “document” (420), and “evidence” (421). Its very existence fills the room with “queer torment” (421) that mounts until Fanny cannot tolerate it any longer: “she dashed it boldly to the ground, where she had the thrill of seeing it, with the violence of her crash, lie shattered” (430). Neither a mere decorative object nor an unspecified thing—and not at all “inertly object-like”—the bowl prompts and sustains attention as a sculpture that requires viewing in the round.46 As a perverse but powerful focal point, the golden bowl at Portland Place strongly anticipates another difficult, ugly object that dominates its own scene, Wallace Stevens’s jar in Tennessee: I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill. The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild. The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air. It took dominion everywhere. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee.47 Stevens’s jar is formally similar to both James’s golden bowl and Keats’s Grecian urn—all are rounded wholes, containers typically associated with totality and unity. Considering these isomorphs together helps us to see that James deploys the bowl not only as a sculptural object in a round situation, but also, crucially, as an example of form qua form. This particular type of whole, containing form is, as Levine notes, often “synonymous with form itself,” including the form of the literary work: “To speak of the form of a work of art is to gesture to its unifying power, its capacity to hold together

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disparate parts.”48 This is the same idea of form to which Adam Verver’s “aesthetic” (or aestheticist) “principle” refers: his “idea [. . .] of plastic beauty, of the thing visibly perfect in its kind,” invokes the totalizing unity that gathers constituent parts together into a beautiful, perfect, whole work of art (146). A similar celebration of the unifying capacity of form lies at the heart of Frank’s spatial-form thesis and the New Criticism affiliated with it. For this line of thought, Keats’s urn was a totem. Cleanth Brooks, for example, writes that the critic should explicate “the world-view, or ‘philosophy,’ or ‘truth’ of the poem as a whole in terms of its dramatic wholeness,” just as he should, when writing about Keats’s ode, “consider the urn itself once more as a whole.”49 This double imperative to apprehend whole art objects is, of course, really a single commandment, because for Brooks, poems and urns are the same kind of structure—even, in John Donne’s “The Canonization,” the exact same form: “the poem itself is the well-wrought urn.”50 Brooks uses Donne’s evocative phrase as the title for his book The Well Wrought Urn, which is one of the critical texts responsible for the New Critical formalism that understands the height of literary achievement to be the creation of works like the one Keats addresses: “the urn itself as a formed thing, as an autonomous world.”51 Rounded into an enclosure, the literary work should be as self-contained as the urn (or the bowl or the jar). But as more recent critics have shown, urns, bowls, and jars are not nearly so self-sufficient. Angela Leighton, for instance, holds that the bowl, cracked under its gilding, responds to the discontinuity of Keats’s aestheticism: “very explicitly, James prises open the gap between beauty and truth. They are not identical, though the bowl has, until now, nearly disguised the difference. It is as if James had taken Keats’s Grecian Urn and smashed it at its weak point.”52 Neither urn nor bowl, Leighton implies, is philosophically rounded-off and autotelic. Along the same lines, other scholars have shown how Stevens’s jar, round and contained though it seems, actually exists in complex relation to its environment. W. J. T. Mitchell observes that the jar “is no ‘mere’ object, but a highly charged form” that repurposes the conventions of ekphrastic poetry by making the image into “a ‘black hole’ in the text, [. . .] fruitfully multiplying its own sterility throughout its dominions.”53 Lisa Siraganian responds to the same paradox, writing that the poem “alternately purports a notion of the autonomous art object and then questions the very premise of that autonomy by declaring poetry’s use in the world.”54 In a related vein, Jahan Ramazani uses Stevens’s poem to interrogate the paradigm that understands form as foreign and content as local.55 In sum, the rounded container remains an irresistible topos for formalist thinking, and Keats’s urn and Stevens’s jar still function as fetish objects

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today because of their association with an outmoded New Critical understanding of form. As recent critics revise this paradigm and work through new ideas about form, they have deemed it necessary to reread Keats and Stevens—in scholarly revolutions that can seem very much like considerations of sculpture in the round. I propose that the same is true of James, and as I suggest later in this chapter, The Golden Bowl demands reading in the round, or rereading. We should also take from these critics’ interventions their shared contention that even though Stevens’s jar appears to be more self-contained, more round, more formalist a form than Keats’s urn, it fails to achieve timeless isolation from its environment—and in so doing, it tells us something vital about form. The “round” is always constituted in relation to what “surround[s]” it, what is “around” it. Understanding James’s bowl as a midpoint between Keats’s urn and Stevens’s jar, we can see that part of what James does is to shift the grounds of interest from the urn (or bowl or jar) itself to what surrounds it. The form isn’t made by the creator and then perceived by the viewer: rather, what matters about the form—we might even say the matter of the form—is the viewer’s perspective.

A “Way Round” the Novel: Encountering Sculptural Metaphors Viewing forms in the round emerges in The Golden Bowl not only in relation to actual sculptural objects, like the bowl, but also in relation to the imagined sculptural objects that constitute the vehicles for some of James’s extended metaphors. For example, Adam Verver’s impression of his son-inlaw as “a great Palladian church” dropped into the piazza of his relationship with his daughter has traditionally been understood as an exclusively architectural metaphor: “their decent little old-time union [. . .] had resembled a good deal some pleasant public square, in the heart of an old city, into which a great Palladian church, say—something with a grand architectural front—had suddenly been dropped” (99).56 James focuses the metaphor on the church’s site in the cityscape and the extent to which it affects the circulation of the air and the public. At first, with the intrusion of the Prince-asPalladian-church, “the rest of the place, the space in front, the way round, outside, to the east end, the margin of street and passage, the quantity of overarching heaven, [is] temporarily compromised” (99). Over time, however, as this space is negotiated, more appealing views and vantage points emerge: “the air circulated, and the public not less; the limit stood off, the way round was easy, the east end was as fine, in its fashion, as the west, and there were also side doors for entrance” (100). Despite James’s brief mention of

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the possibility of “entrance,” the church never materializes as a building with an interior that might actually be entered. He stresses instead the interaction between the church and outside viewers so that it becomes little more than a very large sculptural object to be apprehended in three dimensions: “the Prince, for his father-in-law, while remaining solidly a feature, ceased to be, at all ominously, a block” (100). The key question here, as with the bowl, is “the way round.” The extent to which James has rooted the image of the church in that of the smaller, more obviously sculptural bowl becomes clear as Adam’s consideration of Prince Amerigo continues.57 Rather than impressing Adam with “the sharp corners and hard edges, all the stony pointedness, the grand right geometry of his spreading Palladian church,” the Prince offers “a contact that, beguilingly, almost confoundingly, was a contact but with practically yielding lines and curved surfaces” (101). Like the bowl, Prince Amerigo offers up to the viewer a “happy curve,” which prompts his father-in-law to proclaim, “ ‘You’re round, my boy, [. . .] you’re all, you’re variously and inexhaustibly round, when you might, by all the chances, have been abominably square’ ” (101; emphasis original). Somewhat to his own surprise, then, Adam has found his son-in-law to be a pleasant and easy addition to the family, and James continues the metaphor’s transition from the architectural to the sculptural by suggesting the ways in which the round figure representing the Prince attracts Adam’s touch: “ ‘You’re inveterately round,’ ” Adam tells the Prince, “ ‘It’s the sort of thing, in you, that one feels—or at least I do—with one’s hand’ ” (101–2). Rather than being “formed, all over, in a lot of little pyramidal lozenges like that wonderful side of the Ducal Palace in Venice,” with all its “cut diamonds that would have scratched one’s softer sides,” the Prince is made of more amiable stuff (102). He is nothing less than “a pure and perfect crystal,” as Adam exclaims, with a surface over which “golden drops” flow evenly: “They caught in no interstice, they gathered in no concavity” (102). James’s extended metaphor for Adam’s understanding of Prince Amerigo thus moves, over the course of several pages, away from the architectural and toward the sculptural, as James uses the specific quality of roundness to shift the comparison: no longer a church with “yielding lines and curved surfaces,” the Prince becomes a crystal with an impervious surface of “uniform smoothness” exactly like that of the golden bowl (102). Like both the bowl and the statue metaphors, this description of the Prince exhibits the connection between being viewed in the round and possessing an impenetrable surface, the two qualities associated with all sculptural objects in the

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novel, including its most celebrated metaphor: the ivory tower or pagoda that appears at the beginning of the second volume, as Maggie contemplates the complexities of her domestic situation. Like the sculptural metaphors that come before it, the pagoda invites its viewer to experience it in the round and rebuffs any attempt to suss out its secrets. In many ways, the passage is a rewriting of the Palladian church metaphor, and it merits quoting in full: This situation had been occupying, for months and months, the very centre of the garden of her life, but it had reared itself there like some strange, tall tower of ivory, or perhaps rather some wonderful, beautiful, but outlandish pagoda, a structure plated with hard, bright porcelain, coloured and figured and adorned, at the overhanging eaves, with silver bells that tinkled, ever so charmingly, when stirred by chance airs. She had walked round and round it—that was what she felt; she had carried on her existence in the space left her for circulation, a space that sometimes seemed ample and sometimes narrow; looking up, all the while, at the fair structure that spread itself so amply and rose so high, but never quite making out, as yet, where she might have entered had she wished. She had not wished till now—such was the odd case; and what was doubtless equally odd, besides, was that, though her raised eyes seemed to distinguish places that must serve, from within, and especially far aloft, as apertures and outlooks, no door appeared to give access from her convenient garden level. The great decorated surface had remained consistently impenetrable and inscrutable. At present, however, to her considering mind, it was as if she had ceased merely to circle and to scan the elevation, ceased so vaguely, so quite helplessly to stare and wonder: she had caught herself distinctly in the act of pausing, then in that of lingering, and finally in that of stepping unprecedentedly near. The thing might have been, by the distance at which it kept her, a Mahometan mosque, with which no base heretic could take a liberty; there so hung about it the vision of one’s putting off one’s shoes to enter, and even, verily, of one’s paying with one’s life if found there as an interloper. She had not, certainly, arrived at the conception of paying with her life for anything she might do; but it was nevertheless quite as if she had sounded with a tap one or two of the rare porcelain plates. She had knocked, in short—though she could scarce have said whether for admission or for what; she had applied her hand to a cool, smooth spot, and had waited to see what would happen.

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Something had happened; it was as if a sound, at her touch, after a little, had come back to her from within; a sound sufficiently suggesting that her approach had been noted. (299–300; emphasis original) James presents the pagoda as the figure for the complicated domestic situation that Maggie now faces, and he deploys the metaphor in a highly peculiar way. He offers what several critics have interpreted as multiple vehicles: a “tower of ivory,” a “pagoda,” and a “Mahometan mosque.”58 All these possible vehicles can be traced to historical structures with which James would have been familiar.59 Yet James’s style here, as in the case of the Palladian church metaphor, aims less to give us three distinct metaphors than to offer what is functionally a single comparison, which James twists and turns to examine from different angles. The effect is that of a renovated metaphysical conceit, and these shifts in emphasis in the vehicle result in a particularly opaque figure. Of course, “situation” is an equally opaque tenor. It describes Maggie’s marriage to Prince Amerigo, Adam’s marriage to Charlotte, the Prince and Charlotte’s past and present affairs, Adam and Maggie’s incest, and all the ways in which each of these relationships licenses, or accommodates, or covers, the transgressions of the others—yet at the same time, the word refuses to name any of these subjects.60 This refusal to name constitutes a refusal both to ground the metaphor in any specific referent from the world of the novel and to admit that any of these matters are real. “Situation,” in other words, operates in the same way as those characteristic Jamesian exclamations—such as Maggie’s assertion near the end of the novel that Charlotte is “too splendid”—which are bottomless in their meaning (often having equally applicable contradictory connotations, none of which is positively the best one) and also, collectively, constitutive of the impenetrable surface texture of the late style (567). The word encapsulates a particular difficulty with the late novels that critics have long struggled with. Writing about them “demands that we implicitly summarize what is said and draw inferences from what, in late James at least, so often is not,” but this critical act results in a “translation” that risks “doing violence to what is most idiosyncratic and exciting” about these novels and “making their peculiarly fluid and unsettling reality something far more stable and conventional.”61 Translating James’s opacity is no small matter, and here rises the specter of a frequently employed but loudly criticized practice: paraphrase. Styled by Cleanth Brooks as a “heresy,” paraphrase is anathema to New Criticism, to be avoided because it risks splitting a literary work between form and content. Propositional statements—for example,

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The Golden Bowl is about family affairs—cannot, in Brooks’s view, “represent the ‘inner’ structure or the ‘essential’ structure or the ‘real’ structure” of a literary work.62 The designated task of the critic is to pay proper respect to this structure—which exists in advance of any reading—by elucidating it fully. In this way Brooks’s “structure” functions like Frank’s spatial form, arrayed before the reader in a moment of clarity. For both, reading is mimesis: the critical reading should replicate the preexisting form of the text. More recently, Ellen Rooney has also denounced paraphrase from a formalist perspective—but her understanding of reading and form is diametrically opposed to that of Brooks and Frank. For Rooney, reading without recourse to paraphrase allows form to emerge from the process of reading. Form is not waiting to be found in the text—planted by the author or known already by the theorist—and reading is “a practice without guarantees.”63 As she writes so persuasively, when form is “seen as the enabling condition and the product of reading, form is neither the external and superficial mold into which content is poured nor the inner truth of the text, expressed in its organic shape. It is neither an icon nor a fixed or static structure; it is in the most fundamental sense ‘not given.’ ”64 In other words, while Brooks’s distaste for paraphrase leads him to reassert the centrality of the work’s singular structure, Rooney’s aversion leads her toward the opposite conclusion: neither “inner” nor “essential,” form gives rise to and results from the action of reading. In this view, there is no such thing as a stable spatial form: truly formalist reading refuses to fetishize the text and thereby acknowledges the contingency of any one reading.65 Reading is a dynamic process that allows form to emerge from the encounter between the reader and the text, and the metaphors of The Golden Bowl help us to see what this dynamic, revisionary formalist reading looks like. The pagoda metaphor foregrounds the difficulty of reading under the conditions that Rooney describes—of forming a reading at all. Both tenor and vehicle forestall easy discussion, impressing the reader with their individual opacity in a metaphor that is, in fact, all about opacity. For the single most apparent feature of the pagoda here is its impenetrable surface. James underscores for the reader Maggie’s frustrated attempts to apprehend the structure and find any opening at all. Though the question here is more explicitly one of entrance than was true of the Palladian church metaphor, this structure raises the possibility only to deny it. As Maggie looks, she finds that “no door appear[s] to give access” and “never quite mak[es] out, as yet, where she might have entered had she wished.” Thus at the same time that the pagoda might appear to be a more narrowly architectural figure, James reasserts his interest in its sculptural features again and again.66 The pagoda

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seems to possess a kind of surface armor: “plated with hard, bright porcelain, coloured and figured,” it offers a “cool, smooth” exterior to Maggie without divulging any of its secrets. Like the opaque metaphors of the novel itself, the pagoda’s “great decorated surface” remains “consistently impenetrable and inscrutable.” Maggie’s only recourse is to attempt to understand the pagoda exactly as James’s characters grapple with the golden bowl—by circling it, viewing it in the round, touching it, and constantly attempting to find new angles of purchase. This viewing in the round strongly echoes that of the metaphor of the Palladian church. Like her father, with his considerations of “the way round” and the circulation of the air and the public around the “grand architectural front,” Maggie also must discover how to navigate the presence of the pagoda. She opts not only “to circle and to scan the elevation,” but also to “tap one or two of the rare porcelain plates” and to “appl[y] her hand to a cool, smooth spot.” This juncture between her hand and the pagoda’s surface is, Jonathan Freedman writes, “mediated by the sense of touch between things in the world and the bodily being that touches them, one that takes us outside the familiar Jamesian dialectic of consciousness and vision into a different relation between being and world.”67 Instead of looking-as-iftouching, as the Prince does when he looks at Charlotte, or as Charlotte does when she looks at the bowl, Maggie touches the metaphorical pagoda directly. The pagoda has prompted from her a “directly physical and bodily engaged response”—typical of sculpted objects apprehended in the round— that necessarily exceeds the visual.68 Touch indicates, in particular, the difficulty of Maggie’s relation to the pagoda. Even as she tries to understand it, the sculptural object resists her attempts and prevents Maggie from interacting with it on her own terms. Having “reared itself ” up in front of her, the pagoda takes dominion in much the same way as the golden bowl, organizing the space around it and unnerving its viewer: “She had walked round and round it—that was what she felt; she had carried on her existence in the space left her for circulation, a space that sometimes seemed ample and sometimes narrow.” Maggie’s circulation here “in the space left her” attests to the extent that the pagoda has come to dominate her fields of vision and of movement. Maggie can only walk “round and round” the pagoda in the space it allots her, and in addition to echoing the Palladian church metaphor, her limited circulation here recalls the earlier metaphor in which her father’s sculptural vision transforms her into an image “passing [. . .] in worn relief round and round a precious vase” (139). Similarly, Maggie’s pacing foreshadows the movement and tension of the later figure in which she “walk[s] round” a wire cage, gilt like the golden

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bowl, that contains Charlotte in “eternal unrest” (466). Placing Maggie on the defensive, the pagoda compels Maggie to adopt a reactive posture. James stops short of attributing some sentience or animation to the pagoda that has “reared itself ” and occupied the garden, but it seems somehow insurgent, or insubordinate, as though it could not possibly belong in the subservient state proper to a sculptural object or a metaphorical vehicle, even though that is precisely its function. In fact, the pagoda’s stubborn domination of the garden proves so inescapable that critics have referred to a “pagoda scene” in The Golden Bowl, as though Maggie’s “walk[ing] round and round” the pagoda were one of the events in the novel’s diegesis.69 This scholarly slip of the tongue is symptomatic of the novel’s strangest effect— the degree to which it is constituted by its metaphors. The pagoda conceit is “an odd form of catachresis—the arbitrary, performative representation of something for which no literal representation exists,” but it nevertheless seems highly physical, insistently present.70 This status means that, as Bill Brown writes of another metaphor, “it isn’t easy to determine whether the image should be read, on the one hand, as a figure for Maggie’s thinking or, on the other, as that thinking’s own figure.”71 In other words, if, as I have already argued, the metaphors of The Golden Bowl are inadequate as description or as reality effect, then we might now attribute this artificiality to their uncomfortable position, their suspension “between diegesis and simile” in a novel characterized by “the blurring of registers,” the interpenetration of the literal and the figurative.72 The images and metaphors of The Golden Bowl only seem to describe and explain the substance of its fabula: “James embarks upon images as if they will illustrate something in the primary story, but he gradually edges away from the subject and begins to examine his metaphors and similes themselves, and even to imagine seeing those illustrative images rather than what they illustrate.”73 In short, the metaphors of The Golden Bowl assert their own dominion over the image-world of the novel, and the pagoda functions less to illuminate Maggie’s “situation” than to create something else to apprehend: a difficult sculptural object to be assessed in three dimensions, an uncalled-for new form.

“To Circle and to Scan”: Narrative Temporality, Structure, and Reading in the Round We might link the difficulty of this object and the insurgency of James’s sculptural metaphors to the form that they take for the reader—that is, to the enormous blocks presented by the paragraphs of the late style. (The extraordinarily long passage quoted above does not even present the entirety

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of the paragraph that begins the second volume.) Formidable indeed, the paragraph containing the pagoda conceit rears itself up in front of the reader just as the pagoda rears up in front of Maggie, demanding our attention and blocking out all else—including the novel’s diegesis—so that we may find ourselves awed, or cowed, by the dimensions of a “fair structure that spread itself so amply and rose so high.” (The same is true, of course, of the dimensions of the novel itself: no small masterpiece, the “solidest” of all James’s fictions.74) Yet neither the visual form of the paragraph on the page nor the sculptural form of the pagoda in the metaphor has an entirely fixed form; they do not indicate that the structure of The Golden Bowl might best be understood with the spatial-form thesis. Crucially, Maggie does not walk “round and round” a stable object. As James continually elaborates the metaphor, so too does he shift the vehicle— from “tower of ivory” to “pagoda” to “Mahometan mosque”—in the ways that I have already discussed. These apparently arbitrary shifts represent, for Ruth Bernard Yeazell, “a world in which connections are not easily made,” so that as Maggie “circles around the tower, so she circles around the metaphor itself—tentatively exploring each of its implications in turn, only to shrink back in fear when that exploration leads her in directions more dangerous than she is yet prepared to move.”75 “Exploration” is the right word here, since James uses the increasing exoticism of the vehicles to mark the strangeness of Maggie’s relation to the metaphor and what it represents. Viewing in the round is the only way for Maggie to grapple with—or for James to evoke—such a difficult puzzle, and James’s multilevel metaphor refers not only to Maggie’s opaque “situation” but to all the challenges that arise when she attempts to think about it. The pagoda metaphor can seem like an insistently spatial figure; indeed, James uses the word “space” to describe the difficulty of Maggie’s predicament.76 But like the novel’s other sculptural objects, the pagoda demands to be viewed in the round, and this metaphor is much more accurately described as a figure for thinking about how to think, for formulating an understanding. Maggie’s circling shows us metacognitive processing over time—“months and months,” in fact. The other metaphors about circulation that James echoes here likewise possess insistent temporal registers: the classical sculpture of Maggie fades, over the years, into “worn relief,” and the gilded cage of delusion imprisons Charlotte in “eternal unrest,” at least until she can think her way out of “baffled consciousness” (466). Ostensibly spatial, the walk round is always a temporal form. Viewing in the round requires, or provokes, a particular kind of temporality. As an art form, sculpture hardly ignores temporal concerns. Rosalind Krauss asserts that “the history of modern sculpture is incomplete without

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discussion of the temporal consequences of a particular arrangement of form,” for “sculpture is a medium peculiarly located at the juncture between stillness and motion, time arrested and time passing. From this tension, which defines the very condition of sculpture, comes its enormous expressive power.”77 Because time so strongly informs the condition and composition of sculpture, we can go even further, as Potts does, to argue for an “insistently temporal dimension of viewing sculpture,” since “taking in a sculpture is manifestly not just a matter of looking and scanning but also, as Serra emphasise[s], of taking time to walk round it too.”78 Though Maggie’s pagoda is no Snake or Tilted Arc, it nevertheless activates, with its monumental intrusion into the garden, a temporality not unlike that of Richard Serra’s work, which makes the question of viewing sculpture into precisely what the title of a Serra installation at the Guggenheim in Bilbao says it is: a Matter of Time. Viewing in the round is, moreover, not only a local temporality, but also a key element in the scenic construction of the entire novel—a narrative strategy employed throughout The Golden Bowl. James’s narrator always presents Maggie as if she were somehow circling the pagoda, or another similar dilemma, and we can go so far as to say that the novel is narrated in the round. This narration in the round rests, first and foremost, on the privileging of metaphor over diegesis, reflection over event. The Golden Bowl is not a novel characterized by what we might consider to be an investment in the stock events of the genre: neither Maggie’s marriage to Prince Amerigo nor her father’s to Charlotte occurs onstage, and the existence of Maggie and the Prince’s son, the Principino, is acknowledged almost as an aside. These events are, as one critic puts it, “unnarrated,” or “skipped over” and then “described, or sometimes only referred to, in retrospect”; in The Golden Bowl, in short, “events do not occur; occurrences are reflected upon, which creates an effect of temporal delay, as if happening lagged behind itself in time.”79 James himself acknowledges this oddity partway through the novel, when, after setting the scene for Mrs. Rance’s aggressive pursuit of Adam Verver with page upon page of backstory, his narrator finally voices his arrival “at Fawns, with the billiard-room and the Sunday morning, on the occasion round which we have perhaps drawn our circle too wide” (111; emphasis mine). At no point does The Golden Bowl demonstrate an interest in an overall scheme dotted with easily recognizable milestone events, but neither does the novel entirely suspend sequence in favor of simultaneity, as Frank would argue that an unconventionally narrated, event-phobic novel does. Sequence remains, but it operates differently by incorporating reflection—and the time required to reflect—into the progress of narrative. James’s reflective

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narrative thus dismantles the temporal structure that Glavey identifies as authorizing Frank’s account of the modernist novel. The simultaneity that Frank describes is always, for the reader, “yet to come,” and the “atemporality” of the formalist novel or poem “is secured by investment in a fantasized future.”80 The Golden Bowl, by contrast, dwells upon and reviews the past. Instead of punctuation, juxtaposition, or forecasting toward an imagined future, James offers us a circular narrative rhythm built on the habit of looping back around to view something again. Narration in the round thus depends upon “a double temporal scheme” that is made most apparent at the opening of the second volume. Dorrit Cohn has shown how the entire section—including the pagoda metaphor— is “experienced from the temporal perspective of a later moment.” This perspective is highlighted by the interjections from the narrator that follow the pagoda metaphor. In these strikingly “unusual interventions [. . .] in certain turns of phrase,” the narrator displays an “attitude toward his material that is clearly at odds with Maggie’s role as the central consciousness of volume 2 as a whole and especially with her focalizing role in the chapters with which we are concerned.” These turns of phrase include “She was to remember afterwards,” “she was to preserve, as I say, the memory,” and “Such things, as I say, were to come back to her”—all interjections in a peculiar verb tense (311–12). Cohn identifies the form as “future in the past,” or “analeptic prolepsis,” in which “the narrator looks forward to a future moment when the experience described will have come to lie in the past for the remembering consciousness.” In this way, James is able to convey both “the immediacy of Maggie’s experience,” which she apprehends in a “precognitive” stage “without drawing definitive conclusions,” as well as the later “moment of full comprehension” and cognition. Narration in the round presents “by turns the retrospective perspective of the remembering Maggie and the focalized perspective of the experiencing Maggie.”81 These two moments and two perspectives occur in a curious, mutually imbricated fashion, so that we see Maggie across a span of time and cognition, with her future self embedded in reflection upon past events. This presentation of Maggie’s consciousness makes her quite similar to John Marcher in James’s story “The Beast in the Jungle,” which he published the year before The Golden Bowl. Marcher’s reveries produce the “effect that he seemed to wander through the old years with his hand in the arm of a companion who was, in the most extraordinary manner, his other, his younger self; and to wander, which was more extraordinary yet, round and round a third presence—not wandering she, but stationary, still, whose eyes, turning with his revolution, never ceased to follow him, and whose seat was his point,

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so to speak, of orientation.”82 Marcher’s wanderings with his younger self become Maggie’s temporally doubled thinking; his occasional revolutions become the general modus operandi of her consciousness. And Marcher’s single orienting presence—his continual haunting by May Bartram—becomes the many difficult objects that preoccupy Maggie Verver. Throughout The Golden Bowl, Maggie moves around her object—whether pagoda or bowl, or the method by which she will confront her husband, or the steps she will take to ensure that her father remains ignorant of his wife’s betrayal. As she circulates, considering and reconsidering, she retraces her own steps so that her vantage point at any one moment embodies both that of “the remembering Maggie” and that of “the experiencing Maggie.” Narration in the round offers James a means of presenting these perspectives in the narrative jointly, so that we are always impressed with Maggie’s naivete and her knowledge, her frustrated helplessness and her calculated, even cruel machinations. This ethical valence of viewing in the round has important implications for the novel (and I shall examine it in my next section), but I want now to go one step further in tracing the impact of such rounded temporality and narration on the overall form of The Golden Bowl. Like all the novels of the New York Edition, The Golden Bowl follows a preface by James, and this preface thematizes the “double temporal scheme” activated by viewing in the round. Taking revision as his central topic, James begins the preface with his reflections upon the importance of perspective and confidently reasserts the value of his focalizing characters: “among many matters thrown into relief by a refreshed acquaintance with The Golden Bowl [. . .] is the still marked inveteracy of a certain indirect and oblique view of [the] presented action” (xli). He remains pleased that he has hewn closely to his favorite method, ensuring that “the whole thing remains subject to the register, ever so closely kept, of the consciousness of but two of the characters,” the Prince in the first volume and Maggie in the second (xlii).83 Since the selection of point of view constitutes the most important compositional decision for any novel, James cannot help but remark upon his own in the course of writing the preface—both that of “refreshed acquaintance” with this particular novel and that of this preface’s position in the production of the New York Edition, at the end of years of revision and preface writing. The preface to The Golden Bowl provides James with the opportunity to reflect at length upon the experience of reviewing all his oeuvre, and its language is saturated with words of repetition—not only “reflect,” “review,” and “repeat,” but also “re-perusal” (xlviii), “re-representation” (xlix), “reappropriation” (l), “reappearance” (l), “renewal” (liv), “re-issue” (liv), “reviving

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and reacting” (lvi), “re-dreaming” (lviii), and “reconstituted” (lxi), among others. The proliferation of hyphens attracts our eyes to the repetition of the syllable “re,” which itself constitutes a kind of refrain for the preface, and for James the work of revision necessarily possesses a highly visual component. As he writes, with uncharacteristic simplicity, “to revise is to see, or to look over, again—which means in the case of a written thing neither more nor less than to re-read it” (lii). To reread, to revise, to re-see—these are the kinds of looking compatible with the practice of viewing in the round. This reading practice does not aim for mastery—for viewing a text all at once, from the critic’s high position of privilege—but rather acknowledges the productivity and the pleasure of “a certain indirect and oblique view.”84 From this vantage, form—especially any possibility of spatial form— becomes what Stephen Arata calls a “phantasm,” since we can never quite “confront it directly.”85 We do not know exactly what form we will find when we return to the text to revise it, to look over it again. The same formal flux occurs during an encounter with a sculpture in the round, which “dissipates the fixed image we might have of it because of the different aspects it presents from different angles.” When we come close to scrutinize a sculpture with the same attention that James devotes to revising the New York Edition, “our sense of the work as a whole shape literally gets displaced by the spectacle of continually shifting partial aspects it presents.”86 Reading The Golden Bowl in the round, then, crucially reshapes our understanding of the novel’s relationship to form and formalism in two ways. First, though Adam Verver might profess to uphold his “aesthetic principle”—“the idea [. . .] of plastic beauty, of the thing visibly perfect in its kind” (146)— the partiality of our view suggests that no sculpture (or novel) of plastic beauty could ever be seen as “visibly perfect” all at once. We might have already extrapolated this insight from Maggie’s wish for “a brilliant, perfect surface [. . .] the golden bowl—as it was to have been [. . .] the bowl with all the happiness in it. The bowl without the crack” (456; emphasis original). But reading in the round makes clear that even without a crack, the bowl could never be apprehended as a stable whole form; three-dimensional viewing makes perfection impossible. The same is true for perfect formalist readings—and this is the second important effect of reading in the round. This reading practice acknowledges the provisionality of the formal understanding gained at any single moment in the reading process or even— because reading dilates out into the long process of rereading and repeated viewing—at the conclusion of any reading circuit. Reading as James asks us to, in other words, precludes the possibility of arriving at a fixed understanding of the novel’s spatial form.

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The kind of rereading recommended by James in the preface thus directly counters the concept of rereading that Frank puts forth in his essays about spatial form. Frank notes in his original essay that “Joyce cannot be read— he can only be reread” and in a later piece clarifies his meaning: “unified spatial apprehension cannot occur on a first reading.”87 Later still, he notes the convergence between his own understanding of rereading and form and that provided by Gérard Genette, who writes that “to read as it is necessary to read such works [. . .] is really to reread; it is already to have reread, to have traversed a book tirelessly in all directions, in all its dimensions. One may say, then, that the space of a book, like that of a page, is not passively subject to the time of a linear reading.”88 To only reread, to already have reread—these activities sound very much like the kind of reading in the round that I have described. However, both Frank and Genette hold that the process of rereading will serve to fix a spatial form in the critic’s eye— to help him arrive at a “unified spatial apprehension.” By sharp contrast, the process of rereading that is described by James in the New York Edition preface—and theorized in the novel’s many presentations of sculptural objects and metaphors—hinges upon review, revision, and other modes of seeing again that dissolve fixed forms. Jamesian rereading—reading in the round—is precisely the practice most likely to foreclose the possibility of spatial-form reading. It is worth noting that, in keeping with our understanding of sculpture as a medium that exceeds the visible and visual, the New York Edition preface to The Golden Bowl evokes the viewer’s experience of sculpture in more than visual terms: James seems, at other moments in the preface, to hint at the “vividly embodied physical and perceptual responses activated by viewing three-dimensional work.”89 For him, rereading becomes an act of retreading old ground, like Maggie’s examination of the pagoda by “walk[ing] round and round” it along the same path: “the march of my present attention coincides sufficiently with the march of my original expression” (xlix). His prior authorial self leaves tracks for him to follow: “Into his very footprints the responsive, the imaginative steps of the docile reader that I consentingly become for him all comfortably sink” (xlix). Even James’s syntax here underscores his sentiment, with his authorial footprints leading the way and his readerly steps obligingly sinking into them. Rereading, he relives the process of the book’s original composition: “The ‘old’ matter is there, re-accepted, re-tasted, exquisitely re-assimilated and re-enjoyed” (liii).90 With diction that so strongly emphasizes sensual, even gustatory, experience, James’s language escapes the confines of mere repetition to suggest revived visceral experience so that he becomes, like Maggie, both the remembering James and the

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experiencing James. (To put the same point in the opposite order: the most Jamesian reader in the novel—the character who attains a vision closest to James’s own—is Maggie. In her circuitous passage “round and round a precious vase” and her trips around the pagoda of her problems, Maggie reads her object in the round, and in so doing becomes the only character in the novel to acquire Jamesian re-vision and its double temporality.91) From this beneficial, doubly focalized perspective, James may “retrace the whole growth of [his] ‘taste,’ ” to explore “the how and the whence and the why these intenser lights of experience come into being and insist on shining” (liii). Revision allows James not only to see his work again but also, in the process of rereading it, to recall the experience of writing it and the growth that has occurred since then. The task of revision thus concretizes the unconventional temporality that operates at the beginning of the second volume, and James’s thematization of this temporality draws our attention finally to the odd temporality of the preface itself, which occurs both before and after the novel, before The Golden Bowl as it appears in the New York Edition (and all other editions that reprint its text) and after the time of its composition and James’s revision of all his work. In turn, The Golden Bowl itself is doubly focalized through the preface so that it comes into view—or review—as a novel in plastic form.

Vicious Formalism and Ethics in the Round Viewing and reading in the round, as I have argued, disrupt ideals of formal unity and unchanging spatiality by involving us with art objects over time, by making us “more aware of instabilities inherent in our perceptual encounter.” As Potts writes of this viewing practice, “the ever changing and variously focused partial views we have” of the work “can never entirely be condensed in a single stable image.”92 Such changeability undercuts the solidity of the artwork seen or read in the round. Pottery and statuary, ivory pagodas and “solidest” fictions—the durable materiality of all these is transmuted into more malleable stuff through perception in the round.93 Plastic by virtue of this process, such art objects seem more “fluid, flexible,” more susceptible to being “moulded or shaped”—even as though they might “readily take a new form.”94 Viewing in the round does not, of course, transform stone into animate matter: this mode of interacting with art prompts no Galatean metamorphosis. But this kind of viewing and reading does highlight the mutability of our understanding—and therefore also the plasticity of the object’s form, because that form emerges from the act of perception.

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Similar instability characterizes the treatment of ethics across the entire narrative arc of The Golden Bowl. Unmoored by the absence of a stable anchor, ethics emerges as an explicitly formal challenge and a temporal process subject to revision and review. Just as Maggie gains a series of partial views as she moves around the pagoda, the characters’ view of their “epistemological drama” and the terms of their ethical knowledge are constantly shifting.95 As Amerigo tells Maggie near the beginning of the novel, “You see too much— that’s what may sometimes make you difficulties. When you don’t, at least, [. . .] see too little” (9). The rest of The Golden Bowl bears Amerigo’s warning out and manifests the extraordinary degree to which these characters will only ever possess a fleeting sense of the entirety of their difficulties. Much of this partiality and provisionality arises from the fact that, as Miller reminds us, “the ethical life, for James, is made up of solitary confrontations of one person with another person” in stichomythic conversations.96 In these conversations, Robert Pippin has shown, “what looks like ‘an awareness’ ” of another person “turns out to be much more provisional and temporally unstable, [. . .] an uncertain, hesitant anticipation of another’s understanding.”97 These unsettled—and unsettling—two-person encounters can hardly do justice to the complexity of an ethics that should accommodate the many intersecting relationships among the characters, which Fanny Assingham classifies as inescapable in her first conversation with her husband: “Our relation, all round, exists—it’s a reality, and a very good one; we’re mixed up, so to speak, and it’s too late to change it. We must live in it and with it” (65; emphasis original). Fanny’s colloquial use of “all round” nudges the characters’ relations to each other toward materiality, as though it were something like a house, or Maggie’s pagoda, a “reality” that they must live “in” and “with.” Like the pagoda, too, this predicament might seem to be a spatial phenomenon, but the characters must “live in” their round relations because of the time they inhabit—a moment when it is already “too late to change” their mixed-up connections. To put it differently, their relations exemplify the too-late temporality of decadence (a subject to which I shall return in chapter 4), giving us a whiff of soured bonds, spoiled associations, and forms that have gone bad. Indeed, the decadent relations of people who have been “mixed up” hint at the special ethical complications that arise because The Golden Bowl is, as so many critics have noted, highly incestuous.98 The novel’s attribution of multiple familial roles to the same character—with Charlotte in relation to Maggie, for example, as friend, stepmother, and mistress of Maggie’s husband—can almost seem like an economy of design. As James writes in

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the preface to the New York Edition of Roderick Hudson, “Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.”99 The best way to draw a circle around relations that stop nowhere may be to make them incestuous, so that they always lead to other persons and relations within the same, very small circle. Such a “relation, all round” ensures that the incestuous family remains both a bounded whole—which, like all bounded whole forms in the novel, is flawed or marred—and simultaneously a plastic form, animated by the role-shifting that incest enables. The dynamism created by the bounded circle also obtains in the characters’ ethical relations to each other across the novel. Fanny offers another formulation of this idea at the end of the first volume, when she articulates the difficulty of the characters’ ethical dilemma. Their problem, she tells the Colonel, is “the vicious circle”: “It’s their mutual consideration, all round, that has made it the bottomless gulf; and they’re really so embroiled but because, in their way, they’ve been so improbably good” (289; emphasis original). This image, of the characters “embroiled” in a “bottomless gulf ” of their own making, trapped in “the vicious circle” created by “their mutual consideration, all round,” seems to foreshadow the image of Maggie circling the pagoda, which comes immediately after the Assinghams’ conversation, at the beginning of the next volume. The circle is vicious not only because the characters remain trapped in it, but also because “it generates its own endless and fruitless self-compounding circulation,” as the characters continue “their mutual consideration,” their “good” behavior to one another that both is and isn’t good in any conventional sense of the term.100 Miller expresses the problem eloquently, writing that Fanny’s use of the term “vicious circle” “expresses the way each one-on-one relation forms a separate ‘case’ incommensurate with all the others” so that “my fulfillment of my obligations to one person, in a given case, causes me to neglect and betray my obligations to all the others.”101 These various partial views compose the circle and enlarge it: the circle “leads those caught into it to betray one another, to perjure their oaths of fidelity, to act viciously [. . .] through their efforts to fulfill their equally exigent obligations to the others in the circle” so that, paradoxically, “the effort to act justly causes the others to act viciously.”102 All these efforts ensure that the given configuration of the circle at any one moment is in flux, much like the viewer’s “continually changing and shifting” engagement with a sculpture.103 The circle may initially appear lasting and solid: made of “relation” and “mutual consideration,” “all round,” the circle approaches materiality, as I have noted. Insofar as it affords enclosure

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and exclusion—like other bounded wholes—the circle seems to constitute a spatially secure form.104 But the circle runs up against the problem presented by its other affordances: incestuous inclusion makes internal relations the matter of constant change, of temporal flux. This vicious formalism renders the establishment of a stable ethics in the round practically impossible in The Golden Bowl. The ending of the novel manifests exactly this conclusion. Here Maggie stresses the fact that Charlotte is “splendid” in her discussion with her husband: “That’s our help, you see,” she added—to point further her moral. It kept him before her therefore, taking in—or trying to—what she so wonderfully gave. He tried, too clearly, to please her—to meet her in her own way; but with the result only that, close to her, her face kept before him, his hands holding her shoulders, his whole act enclosing her, he presently echoed: “ ‘See’? I see nothing but you.” And the truth of it had, with this force, after a moment, so strangely lighted his eyes that, as for pity and dread of them, she buried her own in his breast. (567; emphasis original) These final lines prevent any easy delineation of James’s moral. The Prince is now finally “close” to Maggie, but “his whole act enclos[es] her”— or attempts to. Yet Maggie and her actions somehow exceed enclosure: Amerigo has trouble taking in what she gives. Her offering is tremendous no matter how we read it: either she benevolently extends her forgiveness for her husband’s adultery, or—in a reading that draws on the possibility that “wonderfully” ought here to be read as evoking awe and terror—she has simply completed the last of her machinations. Amerigo might see only Maggie because he attempts to pledge his fidelity, or because he understands the extent of her calculated behavior, her status as the prime manipulator. The indeterminacy of their relation, as well as the fluctuations in the balance of power between them, here establish marriage as a plastic form, one that accommodates, indeed requires, negotiation and change. At the beginning Maggie clearly has the upper hand—over Charlotte, over the Prince, over their entire “vicious circle”—but as the Prince’s hands hold her shoulders, we sense a shift. She encourages the Prince to see as she sees, but he does not; rather than seeing like his wife, the Prince sees “nothing but” her. Reflected in her husband’s gaze, Maggie hides her eyes in “pity and dread” and extinguishes her vision. Like the Prince’s language, which “echoe[s]” his wife’s diction, this ending resounds with the conclusion of James’s disquieting early story, “The Last of the Valerii,” in which a wife buries the statue with which her husband has

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become obsessed in order to regain his love. With the marble mistress buried, as Miller writes, Count Valerio “returns all affection to his wife in a long look into her eyes and in an act of obeisance that repeats his earlier gesture of bowing before the statue.”105 We find here, too, the ending of “The Beast in the Jungle,” where John Marcher waits for the beast and “the leap that was to settle him”: “His eyes darkened—it was close, and instinctively turning, in his hallucinations, to avoid it, he flung himself, on his face, on the tomb.”106 The sense of restricted movement and impending doom, the language of burial, the rejection of vision—all these elements are present in The Golden Bowl as well. So too are the ethical implications that attend the moment of selfawareness: in The Golden Bowl, with Charlotte shipped off to a figurative burial in the United States, the Prince’s difficult “taking in” what his wife presents—and what she represents as well—suggests an expanded treatment of the challenges of viewing another person, all round. Something like a sculpture that cannot be apprehended in its entirety, Maggie here is “a little strange and elusive as well as being insistently present.”107 Indeed, Maggie’s final action in The Golden Bowl evokes a kind of sculptural experience. Her burying of her eyes in Amerigo’s breast gives the reader a last moment entirely dependent upon gesture and posture.108 Sight and touch coexist in the time of James’s final sentence, and the characters’ bodily connection places them into something like a mutually dependent sculptural pose. Like Maggie’s, our view here at the end remains partial, and James leaves us, wonderfully, with only an “elusive and provisional sense of wholeness,”109 as he gives us a novel in plastic form, concluded in the round.

Ch a p ter 2

Mortal Form Still Life and Virginia Woolf ’s Other Elegiac Shapes

Late in the evening on March 28, 1918, a government car rolled to a stop at the bottom of a lane near the town of Lewes, in East Sussex, and deposited a single passenger and a quantity of luggage. The passenger, John Maynard Keynes, had just returned from Paris, where he had helped London’s National Gallery to acquire thirteen works by major European artists at the sale of the estate of Edgar Degas, which proceeded despite the wartime bombardment of the city. In fact, the sounds of the exploding shells from Big Bertha had depressed prices at the auction to such an extent that Keynes was able to purchase a few items for himself, and he returned to England with all this artwork in tow. Unable to carry it all up the lane to Charleston farmhouse, though, he paused to hide a parcel in the hedge near the gate.1 Then, with his more manageable burden, he began to walk toward the house, where, upon his arrival, he declared to the great surprise of its inhabitants, “If you’d like to go down to the road, you’ll find there’s a Cézanne just behind the gate.”2 As Vanessa Bell told Roger Fry in a letter she wrote the following week, this eccentric greeting caused a bit of upheaval: “We had great excitements about the pictures. Maynard came back suddenly and unexpectedly late at night, [. . .] and said he had left a Cézanne by the roadside! Duncan rushed off to get it and you can imagine how exciting it all was.”3 The excitement over the painting in the hedge still reverberated years later, and the event 53

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Figure 2.1 Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Apples (Pommes), 1877–78. Oil on canvas, 7½ × 105/8 in. (19.0 × 27.0 cm). Keynes Collection, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. © Reproduced by permission of the Provost and Fellows of King’s College, Cambridge

lent its title to a collection of reminiscences about Bloomsbury, A Cézanne in the Hedge, in which Quentin Bell suggested that “surely there ought to be some little monument, a small obelisk, a pillar or at least a post. After all, there cannot be many other English hedgerows which have actually housed a Cézanne.”4 But in 1918, the excitement over the manner of the painting’s arrival soon gave way to the thrill of examining a Cézanne up close and in color. It had been six years since the last exhibition of postimpressionist work at the Grafton Gallery, and at that time, no private collection in England included a Cézanne painting; none was to be seen, as Quentin Bell explains, “except in black and white photographs, usually very bad, in avantgarde magazines.”5 Little wonder, then, that Vanessa Bell wrote to Roger Fry with such enthusiasm about the small still life, titled Pommes (figure 2.1): “The Cézanne is really amazing and it’s most exciting to have it in the house. It’s so extraordinarily solid and alive.”6 When Virginia Woolf saw the painting a few days later, once it had been brought to London, she noted the same liveliness, writing about it at length in her diary: There are 6 apples in the Cézanne picture. What can 6 apples not be? I began to wonder. Theres [sic] their relationship to each other, & their

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colour, & their solidity. To Roger & Nessa, moreover, it was a far more intricate question than this. It was a question of pure paint or mixed; if pure which colour: emerald or veridian; & then the laying on of the paint; & the time he’d spent, & how he’d altered it, & why, & when he’d painted it— We carried it into the next room, & Lord! how it showed up the pictures there, as if you put a real stone among sham ones; the canvas of the others seemed scraped with a thin layer of rather cheap paint. The apples positively got redder & rounder & greener.7 Woolf emphasizes the painters’ overwhelming attention to the details of Cézanne’s craft, and at the same time that she gently mocks her sister and her friend, she also poses somewhat disingenuously as a naïf. This day in April 1918 was far from the first time that Woolf had viewed postimpressionist painting. She had attended both of Fry’s exhibitions and had even dressed as a Gauguin picture with Vanessa for the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition Ball.8 Woolf was quite familiar with postimpressionist and modernist painting, and a great deal of critical attention has been paid to the links between her work and that of painters such as Picasso and Cézanne. Indeed, those scholars who have noticed Woolf ’s diary entry on Cézanne’s Pommes have used it to demonstrate Woolf ’s awareness of her friends’ interest in postimpressionist color, composition, and paint application and, by extension, to link Woolf ’s presentation of painting in her novels, particularly To the Lighthouse, to postimpressionism. But almost none have noted the genre of the painting and considered the role that still life might play in Woolf ’s relationship to the visual arts.9 There exist only two extended discussions of still life and Woolf ’s work, the first from Robert Kiely, who uses the term in order to describe the oddly impersonal portraits and highly arranged compositions of Jacob’s Room and Roger Fry: A Biography. In Kiely’s usage, still life underscores the stiffness of fictional and biographical life writing.10 A related argument arises in Diane Gillespie’s discussion of still life in the work of Woolf and Vanessa Bell: what matters to both sisters is “the impersonality of objects,” their ability to provide “an escape from the confusions of the human realm” and “a source of relief from human activity.”11 For both Kiely and Gillespie, the most important part about still life is its stasis: for a writer like Woolf, still life ought to represent the novel at its least limber and active—at its most descriptive. But as Woolf ’s diary entry about Pommes hints, small paintings of objects may prove surprisingly lively. Surrounded by vigorous human discussion and other paintings, Cézanne’s apples get “redder & rounder & greener,” and the life that Woolf imagines for them—“What can 6 apples not be?”—suggests that the genre may play a vital role in the life of her own work.

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In this chapter, I take up the task of defining this role, particularly in relation to Woolf ’s most painting-obsessed novel, To the Lighthouse. But rather than center my argument, as so many critics have done, on the canvas completed by Lily Briscoe in the third part of the novel, I choose initially to turn away from this painting, not least because, as Jane Fisher notes, it “has frequently been interpreted as a self-referential figure for the novel’s construction.”12 Composed of masses on the left and the right connected by a line in the center, the painting does indeed mimic the structure of the novel, with its long outer sections, “The Window” and “The Lighthouse,” connected by the short central section called “Time Passes.” If Lily’s painting is the structural analogue for the novel, then it ought logically to follow that the form of To the Lighthouse is a spatial form—an example of “literature striving to rival the spatial apprehension of the plastic arts in a moment of time,” in Joseph Frank’s phrase.13 But as we have seen in chapter 1, the spatial-form account of the modernist novel relies upon far too limited a conception of plasticity. Any viewing of a fine-art object is a necessarily temporal experience, and in fact, the encounter with a three-dimensional sculpture is surprisingly and particularly unstable: as the viewer engages with such an artwork in the round, her many partial views of the object never condense into a single “spatial apprehension.” To acknowledge the plastic form of a sculpture is thus to admit that form does not always unify and, by extension, that novels that take their formal cues from the plastic arts are not necessarily exercises in totality. With this in mind, I aim in this chapter to reevaluate the form of To the Lighthouse. What might we learn about the novel’s relation to painting, I ask, if we leave behind the satisfying simplicity of the spatial-form thesis and instead attend to the important ways in which the novel evokes paintings and understands their formal conventions? For Lily’s painting is not the art object that best illuminates the novel’s structure. The painting, in fact, blocks the view we might have of other, unframed works of art, such as Rose’s still-life centerpiece of fruit and a seashell on the Ramsays’ dining table. This kind of quiet artwork reveals that the imbrication of the visual and verbal arts goes far beyond the thematization of Lily’s painting by the novel. The very forms of still life are woven into the fabric of To the Lighthouse, which embraces the genre’s familiar objects of depiction, and the aesthetic and iconographical preoccupations to which they conventionally give shape. In elaborating these objects and concerns, this chapter highlights two particular aspects or affordances of still-life painting that can help us to understand the dynamic form of To the Lighthouse. The first is description, my central concern in the first half of this chapter. Building upon a brief discussion

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of paintings by Cézanne, I suggest a revised understanding of still life that emphasizes not the genre’s stasis nor its descriptive inertness but rather its malleability and its compatibility with narrative. Similarly, I contend that the common critical understanding of visual-verbal intersections in literature as ekphrasis, or “the still movement of poetry,” neglects the narrative potential of the visual, particularly its implications for the novel.14 As I demonstrate, still-life-inflected, ekphrastic description can actually generate narrative form. The visual can animate both anecdotes like the one with which I began and also stories like To the Lighthouse, where still life crops up not in the hedge, but rather in the Ramsays’ house. There, it ceases to be an amusing incongruity and becomes instead a visual force and a constituent part of the progress of the narrative, from the dinner table to the children’s nursery to the abandoned drawing room. In this way, as still life helps to propel the plot of To the Lighthouse, its dynamism renders the spatial-form account of this modernist narrative incomplete and in need of revision. The second half of the chapter turns to the elegiac quality of still-life painting. Even as still life intermingles with the novel’s range of affects, including sympathy and melancholy, it also heightens and calls attention to even more extreme states, such as terror at the inevitability of death. Such feelings become questions of form in To the Lighthouse, and I consider the bodily attitudes that Woolf uses to register and communicate grief as threedimensional elegiac forms. We have seen how sculptural objects like Henry James’s golden bowl demand that the viewer engage in looking-as-if-touching; corporeal representations of elegy in To the Lighthouse likewise reveal the importance of gesture and touch to novelistic uses of the fine arts. The posture of the bereaved—like Lily Briscoe’s painting, to which I return at the end of this chapter—takes on absence as at once an affective and an aesthetic problem and shows us what it might mean for emptiness to have a form. Throughout the chapter, as I foreground the affective dimension of stilllife painting alongside the sorrow, anger, inadequacy, and grief that animate elegy, I mean to emphasize the variety and depth of this novel’s engagement with human feelings. In so doing, I aim to destabilize the grounds on which we might build an understanding of Woolf ’s fiction in relation to the theory of “significant form.” An aesthetic theory native to Bloomsbury, developed by Clive Bell and Roger Fry, significant form refers to the choices in composition, color, and line that together create the aesthetic content of visual artworks, separate from their subject matter. This kind of form is significant, say Bell and Fry, because it elicits aesthetic emotion on the part of the viewer.15 To look for significant form, it should be obvious, is to authorize yet another mode of modernist formalism that valorizes the separation

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of the artwork from the world and upholds the unified totality of the art object; in this regard, significant form and spatial form are kindred aesthetic theories. Thus by insisting upon Woolf ’s painting-accented attention to a spectrum of human emotions that extends beyond the aesthetic, I advocate for a more dynamic formalism that recognizes the significance of art’s vulnerability to sentiment, to change, and to history. The aesthetics of To the Lighthouse are indeed significant, but in what follows, I develop a formalist reading that grounds such significance in what I call mortal form. Referring to the memento mori and vanitas motifs of still-life painting, mortal form also describes the shape and end of the narrative determined by that iconography, as well as the contours of the elegiac project that attends such a narrative. Bringing together the visual and affective concerns of the novel, which converge together at its close, the mortal form of To the Lighthouse seems finally to present a kind of movement in and through stillness.

Still Life I: Fruit and Skull I want to continue, then, by revisiting the theorization of still-life painting in art historical circles as a nonnarrative genre. Perhaps the clearest formulation of this idea arises in Norman Bryson’s work, in which he describes still life in marked contrast to history painting: “While history painting is constructed around narrative, still life is the world minus its narratives or, better, the world minus its capacity for generating narrative interest. [. . .] It exactly breaks with narrative’s scale of human importance. [. . .] Still life pitches itself at a level of material existence where nothing exceptional occurs: there is wholescale [sic] eviction of the Event.”16 Insofar as still life refuses events, Bryson argues, it also offers an attack on human subjectivity, the principal subject of modernist literature: still life “attends to the world ignored by the human impulse to create greatness. Its assault on the prestige of the human subject is therefore conducted at a very deep level. The human figure, with all of its fascination, is expelled. Narrative—the drama of greatness—is banished.”17 Bryson’s discussion does underscore an important generic contrast: there are no noble, heroic humans to be found on postimpressionist canvases covered with fruits and crockery or in seventeenth-century Dutch paintings of flowers. Indeed, in her landmark study of seventeenth-century Dutch art—one of the heights of Western still-life painting—Svetlana Alpers contends that Dutch painting offers “an art of describing,” in which “attention to the surface of the world described is achieved at the expense of the representation of narrative action.”18 But for Alpers and Bryson, still life’s nonnarrative status is not simply the product of an insistence that narrative

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is the proper prerogative of history painting and a corresponding observation that still life renounces “the categories of achievement, grandeur, or the unique.”19 Rather, still life and narrative prove incompatible because still life attends to material details and eschews the human: still life operates on a scale that doesn’t allow for the growth of story or the “impulse” toward narrative. For these scholars, its narrative potential is quashed by the narrowness of its scope and the superficiality of its attention.20 This rejection of the possibility that still life might prove narrative emerges earlier in the twentieth century, too, in the work of Roger Fry. In Fry’s monograph on Cézanne—published by the Hogarth Press in 1927, the same year that To the Lighthouse appeared—he notes that “in any other subject humanity intervenes,” while “in still-life the ideas and emotions associated with the objects represented are, for the most part, so utterly commonplace and insignificant that neither artist nor spectator need consider them.”21 Like Alpers and Bryson, Fry sees still life as nonnarrative because of its unexceptional, incidental subject matter. He even argues that this purely aesthetic genre contains no ideas or emotions of import, and in this regard, Fry’s account coincides with later discussions of still-life painting: as Meyer Schapiro has noted, “the painting of still-life has in fact been regarded as altogether a negation of the interest in subject matter.”22 The objects that still life paintings depict “are nothing more, it is supposed, than ‘pretexts’ of form” for painterly experiments.23 And since all the tables of modernist still life are, for painters like Margaret Preston, “really laboratory tables on which aesthetic problems can be isolated,” these aesthetic problems should, in Fry’s view, prompt aesthetic responses from viewers who grasp each painting’s “purely plastic significance.”24 In keeping with the notion of significant form—vaguely defined by Clive Bell as “lines and colours combined in a particular way,” “the one quality common to all works of visual art”—Fry upholds the still life as a vehicle for arousing specifically aesthetic emotions, not for containing or prompting narratives: “it would be absurd,” he says, “to speak of the drama of [Cézanne’s] fruit dishes.”25 Still life’s nonnarrativity is, for Fry, not merely an incidental characteristic of the genre but rather a marker of the genre’s inherent formalism. In this way, the idea that still life cannot be narrative develops in association with a narrowly formalist conception of the genre, so that narrative and form begin to appear antithetical to each other. Yet narrative is a kind of form—a temporal form—and there are ways in which fruit dishes may be dramatic and still-life paintings can begin to tell stories. As Peter Schwenger argues, still life “can generate narrative, be bound up with narrative.”26 Even Fry seems to hint, almost against his will,

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that still life might prove weakly narrative, when he characterizes the genre as “drama deprived of all dramatic incident”: These scenes in his hands leave upon us the impression of grave events. If the words tragic, menacing, noble or lyrical seem out of place before Cézanne’s still-lifes, one feels none the less [sic] that the emotions they arouse are curiously analogous to these states of mind. It is not from lack of emotion that these pictures are not dramatic, lyric, etc., but rather by reason of a process of elimination and concentration. They are, so to speak, dramas deprived of all dramatic incident. One may wonder whether painting has ever aroused graver, more powerful, more massive emotions than those to which we are compelled by some of Cézanne’s masterpieces in this genre.27 Fry acknowledges that still-life painting can contain some ideas and emotions worth our consideration—like those we find in Bell’s letter to him and in Woolf ’s diary entry—provided, of course, that the genre remains in Cézanne’s hands.28 Unlike other artists, Cézanne paints still lifes that are various—“tragic, menacing, noble or lyrical”—and often “masterpieces.” Fry’s insistence on the superior character of Cézanne’s still lifes emerges quite plainly in the central section of his book, which he devotes to these paintings. (At sixteen pages, it is by far the longest of the sections.) As he states, “it is hard to exaggerate their importance in the expression of Cézanne’s genius or the necessity of studying them for its comprehension, because it is in them that he appears to have established his principles of design and his theory of form.”29 According to Fry, then, still life is not just a fundamentally formalist genre but also the site for some of the most important formal experiments by a protomodernist painter. For this reason, Fry also chose to model the cover for Cézanne: A Study of His Development (figure 2.2) on a still life by the artist, Still Life with Skull (figure 2.3). Both Cézanne’s painting and Fry’s cover display a human skull prominently, alongside a selection of fruit, including pears, apples, and a lemon. These skulls hint that, contrary to Fry’s protestations, the strong emotions of still life may not be entirely aesthetic and disinterested, and form may not be fully isolated from temporal human concerns. We can read Fry’s emphasis on the “grave events” and “graver, more powerful, more massive emotions” of Cézanne’s still lifes not only as a description of solemn artistic experimentation, or of the unexpected seriousness of paintings of fruit, but also in terms of their connection to human mortality. Cézanne’s painting here offers up a vanitas theme, which was common to his work in this period. From 1898 to 1906—the last eight years of his

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Figure 2.2 Cover for Cézanne: A Study of His Development by Roger Fry, published by Hogarth Press Ltd. Reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. ©1927

life—Cézanne painted six oil paintings and four watercolors with skulls, far more than he did in earlier years.30 As Charles Sterling has written, because Cézanne “also painted a picture of a young man brooding over a skull, there is no mistaking his intention: already he was haunted by thoughts of death and these are allegories contrasting life, as symbolized by fruit or sumptuous carpets, with the ineluctable doom towards which all life flows—these

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Figure 2.3 Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Skull (Nature morte au crâne), 1896–98. Oil on canvas, 213/8 × 25¾ in. (54.3 × 65.4 cm). The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, BF329

are Vanitas pictures.”31 Sterling’s iconographical reading has a logical foundation in biography, then, but it nevertheless interjects into Cézanne’s canvases what Fry would interpret as far too much “non-plastic emotion.”32 Fry even goes so far as to discount the participation of the skull in the vanitas theme by writing, near the end of his section on Cézanne’s still lifes, that “it is needless to say that for Cézanne at this period a skull was merely a complicated variation upon the sphere. By this time he had definitely abjured all suggestion of poetical or dramatic allusion,” so that the painter’s work offered only “form considered in its pure essence and without reference to associated ideas.”33 Cézanne, Fry seems to indicate, has managed to paint free of iconography, history, and implication: the skull is a form with no content.34 Despite Fry’s antisymbolist protestations, however, he cannot altogether prevent the skull from associating with ideas. Schwenger argues in his compelling response to Bryson’s work that, “even if an object is viewed as motionless, there is a paradoxical connection to event in that very viewing,” since an object may “provoke (mental) events in temporal sequence.”35 (These mental

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events include the formation of individual and partial views of the object, as in the practice of viewing in the round that I discussed in chapter 1.) By virtue of that provocation, still life can become embroiled in narrative, or give rise to it, and Sterling’s analysis of the vanitas motif in Cézanne’s late still-life paintings hints at this potential: his phrasing, with its emphasis on an unavoidable end, suggests that still life can point in the direction of an event. Fry’s book-cover version of Still Life with Skull seems to point even more aggressively, by giving the skull an even more prominent place. Because Fry has cropped the composition to such a great extent, and because the much lighter, brighter pigments that attract the eye to the tablecloth in the original painting are nowhere to be found on the two-tone cover, the skull is now the largest and most noticeable object in the image. Fry also allows the position of the skull to rhyme with the placement of Cézanne’s name: each initiates a series that descends from left to right, with the diagonal formed by the increasing indentation of the lettering roughly paralleled by the line formed by the decreasing height of the leaf motif and the pieces of fruit. If, in the original painting, we find the emblem of death nestled among the rich reminders of short-lived earthly pleasure, then on Fry’s cover, the skull conspicuously announces the book as a study of the deceased painter most important to the new guard.36 In this way, Fry’s skull suggests that, counter to his own arguments, “poetical” and “dramatic allusion” may creep into still life. The forms of still-life painting, in other words, cannot be altogether insulated from narrative, and despite both modernist and contemporary theories of the genre, still life often seems to leave itself open to narrative intervention or to contain incipient narratives. The genre seems to take special advantage of painting’s more general capacity to “employ a complex iconographical code, a language of signs and symbols to suggest things that will happen in the future.”37 In Still Life with Skull and the corresponding image on Fry’s book cover, the vanitas motif gestures toward a significance beyond the purely aesthetic (in Fry’s strict sense of that word). The skull and the fruit intimate events to come, showing us that formal innovations in color and composition can coexist with the temporal form of narrative.

Still Life II: Fruit and Shell Just as this still-life painting accommodates—and even encourages—more narrative readings, so too, in an instance of intermedia reciprocity, does still life invigorate the narrative of Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse. Challenging

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Bryson’s insistence that the material and the lowly have no stories to tell, the most important still life in the novel appears at a turning point in the plot, when Mrs. Ramsay notices her daughter’s arrangement of fruit and a seashell at the dinner party that serves as the climactic scene in “The Window.”38 What seems initially to be mere description becomes charged with narrative power: Now eight candles were stood down the table, and after the first stoop the flames stood upright and drew with them into visibility the long table entire, and in the middle a yellow and purple dish of fruit. What had she done with it, Mrs. Ramsay wondered, for Rose’s arrangement of the grapes and pears, of the horny pink-lined shell, of the bananas, made her think of a trophy fetched from the bottom of the sea, of Neptune’s banquet, of the bunch that hangs with vine leaves over the shoulder of Bacchus (in some picture), among the leopard skins and the torches lolloping red and gold. . . . Thus brought up suddenly into the light it seemed possessed of great size and depth, was like a world in which one could take one’s staff and climb hills, she thought, and go down into valleys, and to her pleasure (for it brought them into sympathy momentarily) she saw that Augustus too feasted his eyes on the same plate of fruit, plunged in, broke off a bloom there, a tassel here, and returned, after feasting, to his hive. That was his way of looking, different from hers. But looking together united them. Now all the candles were lit up, and the faces on both sides of the table were brought nearer by the candlelight, and composed, as they had not been in the twilight, into a party round a table, for the night was now shut off by panes of glass, which, far from giving any accurate view of the outside world, rippled it so strangely that here, inside the room, seemed to be order and dry land; there, outside, a reflection in which things waved and vanished, waterily. Some change at once went through them all, as if this had really happened, and they were all conscious of making a party together in a hollow, on an island.39 Rose’s arrangement reminds Mrs. Ramsay of the incidental still lifes that appear in paintings of feasts and classical bacchanals, and Mrs. Ramsay even looks at it in painterly terms, “putting a yellow against a purple, a curved shape against a round shape” (110).40 As she contemplates this still life of fruit and shell, she notices that her friend Augustus is also looking. She reflects

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that “looking together unite[s] them,” and all of a sudden, everyone else is united, too. In other words, Mrs. Ramsay’s looking at an aesthetic object created from disparate components parallels very strongly the way in which the distinct individuals around the table are “composed” into a party. The still life establishes the template—the formal configuration—for the diegetic event occurring around it. Moreover, the dish that cradles the fruit seems to correspond to the roundness of this scene in the hollow, where the group is sheltered from the sea by protective panes of glass. In its “disinclination to portray the world beyond the far edge of the table,” the scene evinces what Bryson has called still life’s “principal spatial value: nearness”: the dinner party circumscribes the sphere of vision, and “instead of plunging vistas, arcades, horizons and the sovereign prospect of the eye, it proposes a much closer space.”41 Brought close together and arranged, the Ramsays and their guests so strongly echo the still life that it hardly seems adequate to say that Rose’s still life simply appears at a key moment in the narrative. Instead, her composition seems to precipitate that very turning point: the dish of fruit and shell prompts the party to come together. In fact, the still life also seems to cause the end of the dinner party, when, after the boeuf en daube has been eaten and declared a “triumph” (102), Mrs. Ramsay finds herself thinking about the virtues of “boobies” like Paul Rayley, who, though stupid, is considerate enough to ask “whether she would like a pear”: “No, she said, she did not want a pear. Indeed she had been keeping guard over the dish of fruit (without realising it) jealously, hoping that nobody would touch it” (110). Mrs. Ramsay’s appreciation for Paul Rayley leads her back to the still life, and his considerate inquiries contrast markedly with the possessive gaze Mrs. Ramsay directs toward the dish of fruit.42 Her glances at the still life have calmed her gradually over the course of the dinner, and she feels suddenly disappointed when a disembodied hand removes a pear from the dish, ruining the composition entirely: “she felt more and more serene; until, oh, what a pity that they should do it—a hand reached out, took a pear, and spoilt the whole thing” (110). This disintegration of the still life prompts Mrs. Ramsay to look “in sympathy” at Rose, the arranger, and then at all her children, and just when she expresses her hope that her eldest daughter, Prue, shall be even happier than the newly engaged Minta Doyle, the dinner ends abruptly: “her own daughter must be happier than other people’s daughters. But dinner was over. It was time to go” (110–11). In this way, it seems that the conclusion of the dinner party is occasioned not by the actions of any person seated at the table, but

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rather by the removal of the pear from the dish, which “spoil[s] the whole thing.” The still life thus gives rise to the dinner and the coming together of the diners, and its disintegration prompts the dissolution of the party within a page. The still life’s crucial impact is not only visual or aesthetic, as Fry would have it, but also temporal, so that we can hardly retain a narrowly formalist conception of the genre. It seems particularly difficult to insist, as so many critics have done, that still life should be identified with nonnarrative description. As I have observed, this association emerges powerfully from an influential strain in art historical scholarship. In this line of thought, of which Alpers is the key advocate, still life is an art of description above all else: the genre, as she understands it, presents “a delight to the eyes,” locating meaning on the surface rather than beneath a layer of symbolism, to be unearthed with the tools of iconography and made subject to narrative reading.43 From this perspective, as a primarily descriptive genre, still life has no truck with narrative. Furthermore, the genre’s interest in surfaces—its attention to the (lowly) details of the everyday world—aligns its aims with those of realist literary description, which has always held an uncertain position in narrative theory. As Peter Brooks has noted, the description of things like fruit, furniture, and decorative objects—the stuff of still-life painting—is “sometimes maddeningly” typical of the novel, where it serves as a reality effect meant “to give a sense of the thereness of the physical world, as in a still-life painting.”44 As reality effects, descriptions are often understood by narrative theorists to constitute irrelevant digressions from the supposedly primary thrust of the fabula, “the real stuff of narrative literature.”45 Most foundational works of narratology have held that description and plot name forces working in opposite textual directions—that descriptions of all kinds constitute narrative stoppages. Gérard Genette, for instance, formulates descriptive pause as one extreme on the spectrum of narrative movement.46 Similarly, Seymour Chatman writes, “what happens in description is that the time line of the story is interrupted and frozen. Events are stopped, though our reading- or discourse-time continues, and we look at the characters and the setting elements as at a tableau vivant.”47 In short, from a classical narratological perspective, what happens in a description is nothing at all: happening and describing are incommensurate activities. (Their incompatibility is exemplified by the title of Georg Lukács’s landmark essay, “Narrate or Describe?”) Even today, after this position has been complicated to a certain extent, description remains a thorny subject for narrative theory and for literary criticism.48

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To the Lighthouse challenges this longstanding theorization, for within its pages, description does not interrupt narrative. In fact, Maggie Humm suggests that “much of the narrative weight of [Woolf ’s] novel is sustained by images which act as visual analogues to plot developments.”49 We might take Humm’s unelaborated idea one step further: description and image may not merely parallel the plot of To the Lighthouse, but instead propel it. Indeed, David James has recently sought to rehabilitate description’s reputation along these lines: contending that “description might not be so passive as we assume,” James has tracked how “description in recent fiction draws attention to its own aliveness.”50 This surprising vigor renders contemporary novelistic description rebellious: counterpointing the losses that it depicts, description “becomes—through the sumptuous pressure it exerts on what it describes—a type of narration in its own right.”51 Woolf ’s descriptive style is rarely at such great odds with the scenes and moments it pictures, yet in To the Lighthouse, too, description becomes a type of narration: the visual forms that Woolf describes provide the patterns for and thereby seem to provoke certain events. As we’ve seen, in the dinner party scene what seems at first glance to be a compositional echo between the group of objects in the dish and the group of people around the table becomes, when we look at it from a different angle, a pair of events. That is, a textual effect that looks merely like a formal rhyme, or perhaps like foreshadowing, may be something stronger: a kind of causality. Woolf insinuates this linkage by drawing simultaneously on the two fundamental understandings of form that Nicholas Gaskill has elaborated—form as shape and as essence. As Gaskill explains, “in the former case, two things have the same form if their spatial properties bear the same relation to one another. In the latter case, two things have the same form if the same purpose or telos—what will later get called ‘intention’—guides the formation of each.”52 The “spatial properties” of the still life and the dinner party do indeed resemble each other, and the same intention to bring distinct yet complementary elements into a pleasing group guides both formations. Considering forms not merely as shapes, then, but also as configurations with specific essences—embedded purposes—helps us to see how in To the Lighthouse, verbalized visual and plastic forms carry with them particular intentions and thereby exert great narrative force—what we might even think of as a kind of narrative determinism. This force is only visible—and only palpable, as well, since the forms I shall discuss are not all entirely visual—if we borrow an art historical mode of reading attentive to the traditions of still life painting. With this kind of reading, we can see that, as literature describes visual-art objects,

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it does not attempt immobility, becoming primarily spatial instead of temporal.53 Woolf ’s dish of fruit and shell is not a static picture but a form that shapes events, and its dynamism begins to show us how still life in To the Lighthouse is never really still.

Still Life III: Shell and Skull If the most important still-life event in “The Window” is the removal of the pear from the dish, Mrs. Ramsay’s thoughts in the moment just after this gesture also prove vital to understanding the narrative power of the still life and its capacity to end the dinner party: [A] hand reached out, took a pear, and spoilt the whole thing. In sympathy she looked at Rose. She looked at Rose sitting between Jasper and Prue. How odd that one’s child should do that! How odd to see them sitting there, in a row, her children, Jasper, Rose, Prue, Andrew, almost silent, but with some joke of their own going on, she guessed, from the twitching at their lips. [. . .] What was it, she wondered, sadly rather, for it seemed to her that they would laugh when she was not there. There was all that hoarded behind those rather set, still, mask-like faces. [. . .] Mrs. Ramsay looked from one to the other and said, speaking to Prue in her own mind, You will be as happy as she [Minta Doyle] is one of these days. You will be much happier, she added, because you are my daughter, she meant; her own daughter must be happier than other people’s daughters. But dinner was over. It was time to go. (110–11) Between the removal of the pear from the dish of fruit and the staccato realization that dinner is over, Mrs. Ramsay thinks about her children’s laughter and Prue’s future happiness. More importantly, she engages in a thought experiment about what her children’s lives might be like when she is, euphemistically, “not there.” Her thoughts seem to echo Andrew’s description of her husband’s work—“Think of a kitchen table [. . .] when you’re not there” (26)—but Mrs. Ramsay contemplates a harder eventuality, one made particularly difficult by its inevitability. She removes herself from the imagined scenes of her children’s lives, in an imaginative gesture that strongly parallels the removal of the maternally shaped pear from the dish of fruit.54 In this way it seems that the conclusion of the dinner party proceeds also from Mrs. Ramsay’s meditation on the future her children will have after her death. The dish of fruit, with its pear claimed by a disembodied hand, provides a topos for Mrs. Ramsay’s thoughts about her own mortality, and the entire

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still life might be said to constitute a mortal form. As I have implied in my reading of Cézanne’s work, still-life paintings have often allowed their viewers to contemplate mortality, since still life is, as Bonnie Costello has noted in her work on twentieth-century poetry, “a threshold genre, between nature and culture, morbidity and vitality.”55 The reason for this sometimes uncomfortable liminality is, Guy Davenport contends, that “a still life [is] a symbol of what we shall have taken from us though at the moment it is a sign of God’s goodness and the bounty of nature.”56 What Costello and Davenport imply here, in other words, is that still life can render absence as presence— indeed, as overwhelmingly abundant presence. This power of the genre suggests that even before the anonymous hand reaches out to take the pear from the dish, the fruit alone is capable of providing an arena for Mrs. Ramsay’s thoughts about her own mortality. But the centerpiece that Rose has arranged contains more than just fruit. The dish holds grapes, pears, bananas, and a “horny pink-lined shell”— a seashell that not only reminds us of the ever-present power of the sea in this novel, but also serves as a memento mori. Material reminders of death, shells are often used as “elements of the vanitas motif [because] their beautiful forms are empty of the life they briefly housed.”57 As kinds of skeletons themselves, in short, shells become easy formal analogues for the human skulls that appear in so many still-life paintings and descriptions, like the Cézanne still life on which Roger Fry chose to model the cover of his book. Thus even as Woolf ’s descriptive still life might seem to “exist as a luminous whole outside of time” or to “redeem experience by removing it to a vantage point outside the anarchy and futility of modern history,” the iconography of that very still life makes clear that there is no such viewpoint.58 Time, history, and death are present even in the centerpiece on the table. And of course, in To the Lighthouse, we find a skull just a few pages after we have seen the shell. After dinner, Mrs. Ramsay goes to the bedroom of her two youngest children, James and Cam, to see whether they are asleep, but she finds them awake and agitated because of the boar’s skull nailed to the wall of their bedroom: “there was Cam wide awake, and James wide awake quarrelling when they ought to have been asleep hours ago. What had possessed Edward to send them this horrid skull?” (116). An amusing gift by day, the skull has become a specter by night, with its horns enlarged into huge “branching” shadows: “She could see the horns, Cam said, all over the room. It was true. Wherever they put the light (and James could not sleep without a light) there was always a shadow somewhere” (116). The boar’s skull follows the shell in the still-life centerpiece as a memento mori.59 As a

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more obvious emblem of death, the skull frightens Cam, and it even seems to echo the specific form of the shell in its shape and texture: the shell has a horny ridge, and the skull has horns. Since this devilish shadow prevents the children from sleeping, Mrs. Ramsay searches for a solution that will restore peace to the nursery: “Well then,” said Mrs. Ramsay, “we will cover it up,” and [. . .] she quickly took her own shawl off and wound it round the skull, round and round and round, and then she came back to Cam and laid her head almost flat on the pillow beside Cam’s and said how lovely it looked now; how the fairies would love it; it was like a bird’s nest; it was like a beautiful mountain such as she had seen abroad, with valleys and flowers and bells ringing and birds singing and little goats and antelopes and . . . She could see the words echoing as she spoke them rhythmically in Cam’s mind, and [. . .] Mrs. Ramsay went on speaking still more monotonously, [. . .] raising her head very slowly and speaking more and more mechanically, until she sat upright and saw that Cam was asleep. (116–17; unbracketed ellipsis original) At this moment, even after Mrs. Ramsay has covered it, the skull continues to recall the dinner-party still life, which invited Mrs. Ramsay to explore its contours as she would a miniature landscape, “a world in which one could take one’s staff and climb hills, she thought, and go down into valleys” (99).60 Similarly, wrapped in Mrs. Ramsay’s shawl, the skull becomes another miniature world in which the sleepy Cam can traverse “a beautiful mountain such as she had seen abroad, with valleys and flowers and bells ringing and birds singing and little goats and antelopes.” In both these moments, Woolf presents a pastoral landscape, which, with its attendant poetic tradition, evokes a lifestyle of peaceful wandering and safe shepherding over terrain that proves quite different from the “broiling sea” (37) or the “icy solitudes of the Polar region” (38) upon which Mr. Ramsay imagines his heroic perseverance as he struggles to reach the letter “R.” Distinct from this kind of epic tragedy, the miniature pastoral here remains directionless and safe—the playground of the innocent.61 The affect attached to the miniature pastoral in To the Lighthouse also extends beyond safety to include a kind of family feeling. As I have argued, Mrs. Ramsay’s wandering through the landscape of fruit unites the hostess, her family, and her guests in the warmth of the dinner party. Moreover, as Douglas Mao has recognized, “the finding of the large scene in the small thing [. . .] serve[s] to link people in tenderness (Mrs. Ramsay unites with Augustus Carmichael and later soothes her daughter to sleep by imagining

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landscapes in domestic objects).”62 The security in which the miniature wanderer—whether it is Mrs. Ramsay or Cam—may traverse the landscape, in other words, arises from her connections to other people, who seem to hover unseen, just outside the sphere of the pastoral, as benevolent, full-scale forces of protection. But the Ramsays’ relations to miniature landscapes are not always charged with positive feeling in To the Lighthouse, and in fact, these landscapes prove so saturated with loss that they can illuminate the narrative drive and temporal implications of Woolf ’s still lifes. For example, when Nancy Ramsay crouches over a tidal pool during her walk with Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle, she does not place herself in the landscape by imagining a Lilliputian version of herself at sea. Instead, remaining her full size, she makes of herself a god: “she changed the pool into the sea, [. . .] and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures” (78). Nancy’s thought experiments with landscape and scale lead her, like her mother, to contemplate her own limits. She suffers a version of the crisis that attends Mrs. Ramsay’s still-life meditation on the life her children will have after her death: “the two senses of that vastness and this tininess (the pool had diminished again) flowering within it made her feel that she was bound hand and foot and unable to move by the intensity of feelings which reduced her own body, her own life, and the lives of all the people in the world, for ever, to nothingness” (78). Playing at omnipotence, Nancy finds herself reduced to something less significant than she was when she began. Her thoughts cannot quite be called a meditation on mortality per se, focused as they are on her “tininess” and the reduction of humanity to “nothingness,” but they do share with her mother’s thoughts a certain kind of existential anxiety. I want to suggest, then, that Nancy’s evening drama in the tidal pool reveals something vital about the other miniature landscapes in the novel— a subterranean rumbling that threatens the safety of the worlds in the dish of fruit and shell and the shawl-wrapped skull. The mortal forms of these memento mori and vanitas motifs incarnate an incipient narrative with only one possible ending. For this reason, the pastoral (or the marine) in To the Lighthouse always bears traces of the elegiac, and the novel seems to participate in the longstanding poetic tradition of pastoral elegy. Woolf ’s miniature topographies situate loss in a manner not altogether different from those landscapes in which we seek “a consolation for our mortality,” or those places of pastoral elegy “in which human loss is integrated into the rhythms of nature.”63 Indeed, Woolf ’s landscapes seem to prefigure loss—the shell

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and the skull offer vanitas motifs, and Nancy’s tidal pool causes her to imagine her own “nothingness”—without actually suffering from the removal of any object. (It is only after Mrs. Ramsay has climbed up hills and descended valleys in the dish of fruit that the anonymous hand removes the pear.) Like Rose’s still life, the miniature landscapes figure absence as presence, and thereby converge with a central paradox of pastoral poetry—the extent to which its peace always remains a “myth,” and its solace is characterized by “change and pain.”64 Like “idealiz[ing],” “artificial” pastoral elegies, the pastoral world in To the Lighthouse is anything but natural.65 Both the still-life centerpiece and the shawl-covered boar’s skull have been arranged, subjected to aesthetic modification. The comforting pastoral of the children’s nursery arises only from the bedtime stories of Mrs. Ramsay, and her words, like her shawl, serve to mask the “horrid,” branching reality of the skull. The pastoral, in short, works in To the Lighthouse not to naturalize death or to comfort the grieving, but instead to screen the forms of the memento mori. Even as Mrs. Ramsay tries to protect James and Cam from the harsh iconography of the vanitas motif by wrapping the skull with her shawl, we know that such protection cannot last forever.66 In time, the skull will surely escape her shawl as it has seemed to elude the children’s attempts to dominate it with the lamp: “Wherever they put the light [. . .] there was always a shadow somewhere.”

Still Life IV: Shrouded Jug and Sheeted Chair The redeployment of this form reveals the harshness it has always possessed: if the wrapped still-life object seemed to offer Cam a sense of security in “The Window,” it helps to construct the ghostly look of the Ramsays’ house in “Time Passes.” Here, in the middle of the novel’s three sections, the house is uninhabited, and all the furniture is covered: So loveliness reigned and stillness, and together made the shape of loveliness itself, a form from which life had parted; solitary like a pool at evening, far distant, seen from a train window, vanishing so quickly that the pool, pale in the evening, is scarcely robbed of its solitude, though once seen. Loveliness and stillness clasped hands in the bedroom, and among the shrouded jugs and the sheeted chairs even the prying of the wind, and the soft nose of the clammy sea airs, rubbing, snuffling, iterating, and reiterating their questions—“Will you fade? Will you perish?”—scarcely disturbed the peace, the indifference, the

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air of pure integrity, as if the question they asked scarcely needed that they should answer: we remain. Nothing it seemed could break that image, corrupt that innocence, or disturb the swaying mantle of silence which, week after week, in the empty room, wove into itself the falling cries of birds, ships hooting, the drone and hum of the fields, a dog’s bark, a man’s shout, and folded them round the house in silence. Once only a board sprang on the landing; once in the middle of the night with a roar, with a rupture, as after centuries of quiescence, a rock rends itself from the mountain and hurtles crashing into the valley, one fold of the shawl loosened and swung to and fro. (133–34) The draped furniture at the beginning of the passage presents us with another metamorphosis of the vanitas motif: just as the horny texture of the seashell recurs in the branching horns of the bare boar’s skull, here the shawl-covered skull is reworked in the forms of “the shrouded jugs and the sheeted chairs.” In the world of “Time Passes,” as Ann Banfield argues, “nothing persists but unconscious things, shrouded furniture.”67 But “persistence” is not quite the right temporal structure here. “Time Passes” shows us how time is “a mode of or for change,” in C. Namwali Serpell’s phrase: time “reforms and deforms form,” and “processes in time,” like types or units of time, can be temporal forms.68 By this moment in “Time Passes,” as Woolf has moved from fruit to shell to skull to shrouded jug and sheeted chair, her shape-shifting vanitas motifs have been re-formed and transformed, and their mortal meaning has become ever clearer.69 Indeed, Woolf ’s novel seems to refine Henri Focillon’s definition of iconography: her sequence offers us “a variation of forms on the same meaning,” but these forms might be apprehended as much in terms of their resemblance as their difference.70 In this way the ghostly furniture of “Time Passes” extends the narrative begun in the previous section by the still-life objects, those earlier “form[s] from which life had parted.” This passage even seems to begin as a meditation on the condition of still life: it is a loveliness that the viewer seems to catch unawares and to leave “scarcely robbed of its solitude,” although it has been “once seen.” If there is a subjectivity perceiving the objects of “Time Passes,” then, it is a glancing, inchoate one, and for this reason, the section became a “most difficult abstract piece of writing” for Woolf, who wrote in her diary that she struggled “to give an empty house, no people’s characters, the passage of time, all eyeless & featureless with nothing to cling to.”71 So while “Time Passes,” like still-life painting, “breaks with narrative’s scale of human importance” and

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“pitches itself at a level of material existence,” it does not do so (as Bryson would contend) in order to stage a “wholescale [sic] eviction of the Event.” Rather, the material existence of the empty house—its “eyeless,” “featureless,” characterless, inhuman world—actually seems to Woolf to provide the perfect gauge by which to register “the passage of time.” The vanitas motif as it appears here, then, is hardly an inert symbol: the purposeful forms of the still-life objects in the empty house inflect the temporal form of the narrative. The absence of consciousness in a space which was previously peopled by so many perceiving subjects results in a ghostly atmosphere, a house inhabited by shades.72 In “Time Passes,” even the loveliness and stillness that Woolf personifies offer cold comfort: “the shape of loveliness itself ” is, after all, “a form from which life had parted.” This description foreshadows Lily Briscoe’s description of the trouble with Mrs. Ramsay’s beauty in “The Lighthouse”: “she was astonishingly beautiful, as William said. But beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty—it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life—froze it” (180–81; emphasis mine). Just as loveliness is a lifeless form, here beauty is a force that seems to freeze life. Woolf nearly allows the term “still life” to enter her novel, as she also does when Lily recalls Mrs. Ramsay’s ability “to make of the moment something permanent”: “Life stand still here, Mrs. Ramsay said. ‘Mrs. Ramsay! Mrs. Ramsay!’ she repeated. She owed it all to her” (165; emphasis mine). As Lily describes her debt to Mrs. Ramsay’s mode of everyday art making, she evokes the mechanics of the dinner scene, in which life halts momentarily. But as I have argued, this apparent transcendence does not coincide with a narrative suspension or standstill, and Mrs. Ramsay’s beauty or domestic art cannot stop the passage of time. As Gillian Beer has written, in this novel “the ‘symbolical’ is valuable only if it is not freighted with permanence.”73 Even the characterization of “the shape of loveliness” as “a form from which life had parted” enlists that mortal form in a narrative, asking the reader to imagine the events that have produced its contours. The apparent permanence of Mrs. Ramsay’s moments goes handin-hand with her own impermanence, and Lily’s realization that Mrs. Ramsay could preserve the moment arrives accompanied by the very language that will characterize Lily’s body-wracking grief—the repetition of Mrs. Ramsay’s name, as if to summon her: “if they shouted loud enough Mrs. Ramsay would return. ‘Mrs. Ramsay!’ she said aloud, ‘Mrs. Ramsay!’ The tears ran down her face. [. . .] ‘Mrs. Ramsay!’ Lily cried, ‘Mrs. Ramsay!’ But nothing happened. The pain increased” (183–84). Mrs. Ramsay may seem to make life

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stand still, but Lily’s recognition of this fact depends upon—and is trumped by, perhaps—Mrs. Ramsay’s absence from the scene of her realization. Even as Woolf seems to permit the emergence of the term “still life,” she thus hints at the dangers to everyday existence that paintings of this genre often present clearly. As Bryson reminds us, even though still life evokes the space and gestures of the human body, the removal of this body is “the founding move” of the genre.74 The loveliness of “Time Passes,” just like the beauty of “stilled life,” in other words, is predicated on human mortality, and the entire section turns, to borrow Douglas Mao’s formulation, “upon the difficulty of separating the inanimacy of the innocent object world from human death.”75 This difficulty is underlined by the questions that the “sea airs” pose in “Time Passes.” Snuffling about the Ramsays’ house, they ask, “Will you fade? Will you perish?” In response, the natural forces—loveliness and stillness—and the objects in the house seem to say that they remain, capable of disregarding the human inevitability of mortality. But the still life in “The Window,” with its composition spoiled by the removal of a pear, suggests that loveliness and stillness are not actually permanent qualities—for the still life or for the Ramsays’ home. On the one hand, almost as soon as Woolf suggests that “nothing [. . .] could break that image, corrupt that innocence, or disturb the swaying mantle of silence,” Mrs. McNab arrives to clean the house, and the object world of “Time Passes” is jolted into a kind of animacy. On the other hand, the genre of still life, whether it presents a pear and a seashell or a “shrouded jug,” always asks the questions repeated by the sea airs—“Will you fade? Will you perish?”—and with its memento mori, it always answers these questions with a yes. Loveliness will fade, and stillness will perish; the fruit in the dish will rot, and the humans who once viewed these objects will die. The still-life objects of “Time Passes” thus epitomize mortal form in two senses: as visual motif and as narrative arc. They demand the completion of a particular kind of narrative: bound up with the human inevitability of mortality, these examples of memento mori drive the central section of the novel toward its only possible iconographical fate. After the sea airs introduce the possibility of perishing, the wrappings begin to come off the shrouded objects of the Ramsays’ house, as “the swaying mantle of silence” is undone “with a roar, with a rupture.” One fold of the shawl that Mrs. Ramsay has wrapped around the boar’s skull loosens, and its effects are calamitous: the shawl has begun to swing in the section after we learn that Mrs. Ramsay has died, and her death means that she cannot protect

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her children any longer.76 The loosening of the shawl from the “horrid” skull thus opens the floodgates of death in this section, so that two of her children, Prue and Andrew, die within three pages. Yet, as shocking as this sequence of events is, I want to suggest that the terror of “Time Passes” is simply the fulfillment of the promise made by the still life—the realization of the fate its mortal form has ensured all along. This fulfillment becomes clearer if we view still life as Bonnie Costello asks us to in Planets on Tables, that is, through a window. She argues that “still life is a threshold genre which focuses on what is on the table,” but which “is often, throughout its tradition, combined with landscape, through a window that looks out, or a shape that suggests a wider topography.”77 Still life manages “to bring the distant near and to relate to the world and public events within the private life.”78 Seeing still life combined with landscape, in other words, allows us to see what is on the table and what is outside the window at the same time—to see foreground and background at once, or to see the smaller scale alongside the larger. This kind of double vision emerges from the full story of Cézanne’s Pommes, with which I began: we can see the arrival of John Maynard Keynes from a Paris bombarded by Big Bertha at the same time that we see his small still life, which remains “extraordinarily solid and alive,” with all its tiny brushstrokes. In “Time Passes,” Woolf offers a related kind of innovation in scale. She enlarges the life of objects like “the shrouded jugs” to fill the space of the section and miniaturizes the drama of the Ramsay family to fit into the space between brackets. The Ramsays become something like the minnows in the tidal pool in relation to the span of the horizon. Just as Nancy feels simultaneously “the two senses of that vastness and this tininess” (78), so too do we comprehend the broader public upheaval of World War I alongside the private tragedies within the Ramsay family. To put it another way, if “The Window” allows us to see only the candlelit dinner because of its “disinclination to portray the world beyond the far edge of the table,”79 then “Time Passes” reveals both the human drama at the dinner table and what we might see outside the Ramsays’ dining room. While “The Window” refuses “any accurate view of the outside world,” “Time Passes” ensures that “the night” is no longer “shut off by panes of glass” (99). With this change in scale and the “downpouring of immense darkness” (129), we can see the full extent to which Woolf ’s still life proves its narrative capacity, in the events which consummate its memento mori.80 Mrs. Ramsay dies for an unknown reason, Prue dies in connection with childbirth, and Andrew Ramsay is killed in World War I. Rats carry “off this and that to gnaw behind the wainscots,” and the house is “deserted” (141).

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Nature overtakes the Ramsays’ house, and “Time Passes” makes the meaning of the vanitas motifs scattered throughout “The Window” quite clear: since the beginning, death has been a constituent element of this narrative, not a surprise.

Iconography, Physiognomy, Elegy If still-life iconography thus prompts a specific kind of mortal narrative in To the Lighthouse, then we might consider memento mori and vanitas motifs to be precursors to elegy: forms that run ahead, indicating the future necessity of the genre. Yet still-life painting can also, on its own, evoke the affects and moves of elegy. As Jeannene Przyblyski reminds us, still life is “simultaneously optical and tactile, objectively neutral and yet subjectively charged, purely formalist and yet almost evidentiary in its ability to ‘produce’ the inhabitant of its domestic setting”; the genre can achieve a “physiognomic” kind of “eloquence” that proceeds from “physical impressions and traces—a cumulative effect of the deep, domestic familiarity born of the habits of daily use worn into the surfaces of commonplace objects and imprinted from their surfaces to the surface of the painting.”81 Still life evokes, as Bryson puts it, “the space around the body that is known by touch and is created by familiar movements of the hands and arms [. . .] the gestures of eating, of laying the table.”82 Because still life so emphasizes the accumulation and legacy of touches and gestures, in other words, it can seem to preserve the impressions left by the dead, or to mourn their absence—the difficult tasks typically undertaken by the elegy. This more tactile, physical understanding of still life—and of painting more generally—proves necessary for reading the forms of both “The Lighthouse” (the final section of the novel) and To the Lighthouse as a whole. If still-life iconography installs a narrative determinism in the first two sections, the forms of this narrative undergo one further metamorphosis in “The Lighthouse.” There, as Lily Briscoe recreates and then completes the painting that she began ten years earlier, the gestures that enable still-life painting shift into three-dimensional forms, embodied poses, and attitudes that shape elegy and determine its course. A tactile consideration of painting helps us to see, for instance, that Lily begins painting again not by remembering an abstract puzzle of arranging masses—not by contemplating spatial form, in other words—but instead by reliving the physical situation in which she made her decisions about the painting’s composition during the dinner party. Woolf ’s aesthetics are bodily, and never disengaged from the progress of time, as Randi Koppen

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has argued: “memory and its reconstitution cannot be isolated from the body and its contingencies, its physical conditions.”83 Only because Lily sits at the table can she recall the solution to her compositional problem: “When she had sat there last ten years ago there had been a little sprig or leaf pattern on the table-cloth, which she had looked at in a moment of revelation. [. . .] Move the tree to the middle, she had said” (151). Lily reexperiences the realization that she had while sitting in the same place at the table a decade ago. Her specific orientation allows her to see the tablecloth as it was, with a botanical pattern that echoed the landscape elements of her painting. (Lily does not here occupy quite the same temporality as Maggie Verver circling the pagoda, which I discuss in chapter 1, even if the effects of these temporalities are superficially similar: she is less “the experiencing Lily” than she is “the remembering Lily,” as the verb tense used by Woolf ’s narrator confirms.) Lily meant to relocate the tree, as the relevant passage from “The Window” confirms: “Yes, I shall put the tree further in the middle. [. . .] She took up the salt cellar and put it down again on a flower in pattern on the table-cloth, so as to remind her to move the tree” (87). Lily constructs a mnemonic device out of the nearest tabletop object; this touch of the saltcellar and the tablecloth constitutes an especially concrete initial gesture in the painting process. (Her handling of the saltcellar also demonstrates the large extent to which domestic life mediates the fine arts in this novel.) Although the saltcellar does not rise to the surface of Lily’s memory in “The Lighthouse,” the gesture for which it was a marker does, shoring up Lily’s resolve to paint the picture that she never finished. I want to underscore the importance of physicality, gesture, and movement to the way that Lily paints for two primary reasons. First and foremost, the concrete physicality of her process strikes an important contrast with the painting that she produces—a work that proves abstract in more than one sense of that word. Lily’s painting is not strictly mimetic—her central “question” as she paints in “The Window” is “how to connect this mass on the right hand with that on the left” (56)—and critics have often argued for the painting’s avant-garde status or its position on the verge of modernist abstraction—a formal problematic that I take up in the next chapter.84 We might also call Lily’s painting abstract in a more conventional sense: despite some critics’ desire to treat it as a modernist masterwork, the painting is barely present within the pages of Woolf ’s novel—more an idea of a painting than a fully realized one, more a recounting of the painting process than a formalist totality. Our list of details about the painting proves quite short indeed, especially if we limit our analysis only to the completed canvas from “The Lighthouse.” We do know that she begins by creating a group of brown

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lines enclosing a space, “model[s] it with greens and blues” (163), and then begins “to lay on a red, a grey, [. . .] to model her way into the hollow there” (174). Despite this brief use of red and gray, Lily’s preferred pigments are blue and green—though we have no information about the particular shades she uses—and we might assume that she chooses these colors because she wants to represent the Hebridean landscape.85 What remains unclear, however, is exactly which features of the landscape she will include. Although Lily contemplates the sea, the hedge, and “an odd-shaped triangular shadow over the step,” among other sights, she gives prominent place to none of these subjects, and we know that, no matter what the contents of her painting, none of them anchors the composition, which seems to consist primarily of the unbalanced masses on the left and right sides of the painting (204). These masses trouble Lily until she finally seems to reach an equilibrium at the end of the novel by completing the canvas with a line in the center. In the end, despite Lily’s momentous statement, “I have had my vision,” all these characteristics of her painting—whether they pertain to its composition, subject matter, or coloring—fail to coalesce into a whole (211). Somewhat remarkably, very few critics have noticed how little we can see of Lily’s painting.86 Most seem to suffer from the same metonymic confusion that afflicted critics of Cézanne’s painting. In Cézanne’s work, as Richard Shiff explains, there is “a metonymic exchange operating between material surface and immaterial image: the ‘solidity’ previous critics saw actually belonged to neither the objects depicted nor even the illusion of their ‘real’ presence; instead, it belonged to the construction, by means of juxtaposed ‘touches,’” of the painting itself.87 That is, a painting by Cézanne—like one by Lily Briscoe—is built upon multiple touches: “the applied paint mark itself,” the gesture of the painter to deposit that mark, and “the tactile sensation the painter experiences” when making such a gesture.88 Condensed into the brush mark, these touches draw attention to their material support, emphasizing the canvas and its layers of pigment—all the various features of the painting’s physicality. This “solidity” has often been misattributed to the image depicted in a Cézanne, and the same metonymic transfer has occurred in discussions of Lily’s work: scholars have taken Woolf ’s description of Lily’s touches—marks, gestures, and sensations—as evidence of the substantial presence of her image.89 Yet as the description of Lily’s painting indicates, these touches are almost all we have of her work. In the end, her painting is minimally drawn—a barely visible sketch in comparison to the more fully colored descriptions of her movements as she paints. The form of the painting, as it appears in To the Lighthouse, is a temporally developed, three-dimensional enactment, rather than a finished, colored composition.

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The second reason that I want to underscore the touches of Lily’s painting has less to do with her finished work and more to do with her motivations. The painting, as many readers of To the Lighthouse have noted, is a means of grieving the death of Mrs. Ramsay.90 When she begins to paint, the first shape that emerges from the lines on her canvas is a mark of loss: “she scored her canvas with brown running nervous lines which had no sooner settled there than they enclosed (she felt it looming out at her) a space” (161–62). What Lily paints is not so much a shape or a figure as it is an absence; it might even be most accurate to say that Lily does not paint space nearly as much as she allows negative space to appear. Throughout “The Lighthouse,” her painting process is dominated by her attempt to grapple with this emptiness: “the problem of space remained, she thought, taking up her brush again. It glared at her. The whole mass of the picture was poised upon that weight” (174). The space “loom[s]” and “glare[s],” almost daring Lily to paint over it, and despite its vacancy, the space acquires a paradoxical “weight” that attests to the psychological impact of Mrs. Ramsay’s death. We see this connection even more clearly when Lily describes the absence of Mrs. Ramsay from the house and grounds in the same terms that she has used to describe her painting: “the empty drawing-room steps, the frill of the chair inside, the puppy tumbling on the terrace, the whole wave and whisper of the garden became like curves and arabesques flourishing round a center of complete emptiness” (182). Emptiness, in sum, constitutes a formal problem for Lily as she paints: “that glaring, hideously difficult white space” is a challenge to which her composition must respond (163). This emphasis on empty space might seem to affirm the novel’s primarily spatial orientation, but I want to suggest it operates within a temporality not unlike that activated by the iconography of still life. As we have seen in “Time Passes,” emptiness is a temporal form, an absence that registers the legacy of former presence. Emptiness cannot exist apart from the history it carries. Thus Lily’s canvas, marked by the movements of her paintbrush, registers her grief before her body does, and when Lily’s body does realize her loss, the effects are devastating. She wants somehow to communicate her grief to Mr. Carmichael, but the clumsiness of language holds her back: Little words that broke up the thought and dismembered it said nothing. “About life, about death; about Mrs. Ramsay”—no, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. Then one gave it up; then the idea sunk back again; then one became like most middle-aged people, cautious, furtive, with wrinkles

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between the eyes and a look of perpetual apprehension. For how could one express in words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there? (She was looking at the drawing-room steps; they looked extraordinarily empty.) It was one’s body’s feeling, not one’s mind. The physical sensations that went with the bare look of the steps had become suddenly extremely unpleasant. To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have—to want and want—how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again! Oh, Mrs. Ramsay! (181–82) Lily laments the inaccuracy of language to express the whole shape of her grief: trying to tell Mr. Carmichael how she feels would “dismember” the thought and strike “the object inches too low.” Moreover, in the time that it might take her to contemplate her store of available expressions and discard them all as inadequate, she will lose “the urgency of the moment.” But the problem with language that Lily feels most viscerally does not have to do with precision or temporality. Her primary frustration with communicating her grief to Mr. Carmichael arises instead from its physicality. Grief is, for Lily, one of the “emotions of the body,” and in order to tell Mr. Carmichael how she feels, she would have to translate this emotion into another medium. The poverty of language halts her attempt at this intermediation, and Lily is left isolated, with something like the “eloquence” of “physical impressions” that Przyblyski locates in still life painting. Mrs. Ramsay’s death thus manifests itself as an “emptiness” that is palpable even as it is also visual and temporal. The emptiness of the house and “the bare look of the steps” generate “unpleasant” “physical sensations” for Lily; her body becomes rigid under the force of “a hardness, a hollowness, a strain.” Such tension suggests that when Lily’s grief wrings her heart again and again, we should note the corporeal pain that underwrites the intensity of the expression. Indeed, as Gillian Beer has written, “there is an extraordinary sense of the substantiality of people” in To the Lighthouse, filled as it is with children who “are always pelting here and there” in phrases that “express the impact of the body.”91 Here grief impacts on the body, and this moment is, as Emily Dalgarno remarks, perhaps “the most painful in all of Woolf ’s work.”92 “To want and not to have” is, for Lily, not a state of “one’s mind” but a physical condition—a yearning in which Lily’s grief takes on the paradoxical capacity of still life to render an absence as presence. Mrs. Ramsay’s absence makes Lily’s body present in Woolf ’s text, and this “body’s feeling” can only become fully legible—fully tactile—through the physiognomic, touch-based reading of painting that I have outlined.

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Furthermore, the bodily feeling associated with Mrs. Ramsay’s death constitutes a form that proves just as vital to the progress of Woolf ’s narrative as the other forms I have examined. “To want and want” and “not to have” is to orient one’s body outward and ache from the absence of a reply. Such a feeling is not unique to Lily’s grief: it begins in the novel’s bracketed acknowledgment of Mrs. Ramsay’s death in “Time Passes,” in which we find Mr. Ramsay reaching for her: “[Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.]” (132). Here, in what has been called “one of the most disturbing moments in twentieth-century fiction,” Mr. Ramsay’s outstretched, ultimately empty arms establish the form for grief in To the Lighthouse.93 To reach out for another person in this novel ensures that one shall never grasp her; the only completed contact is disembodied or figurative, and always associated with mortality. An anonymous hand extends itself to take the pear from the dish on the dinner table in “The Window,” and when Lily experiences her “physical sensations” of loss in the long passage above, she also describes it as a touch from Mrs. Ramsay’s absent hand: “Ghost, air, nothingness, a thing you could play with easily and safely at any time of day or night, she had been that, and then suddenly she put her hand out and wrung the heart thus” (182). If these extended hands are markers of mortality, then Lily’s “body’s feeling” and Mr. Ramsay’s outstretched arms demonstrate the posture of the bereaved—what we might call the sculptural attitude of elegy. This attitude, like Lily’s “body’s feeling” and the memento mori which I have already examined, is a form in which a particular physical configuration is shaped by absence. The transformation of absence into representation is crucial to the operation of elegy in the novel, as Gabrielle McIntire has suggested: “To the Lighthouse explores what it means to wish for the presence—a re-presentation that involves both re-presenting and representing presence—of the irretrievable by rigorously and attentively mapping the longing friends and family feel for the dead. [. . .] In this way the novel functions as an ‘elegy’ for Mrs. Ramsay and her real-life correlative, Woolf ’s mother, Julia Stephen.”94 Woolf ’s elegy is even more expansive than McIntire suggests. Her memory of her father, in fact, lay at the heart of the book as it was first conceived, in the early summer of 1925, just as Mrs. Dalloway was being read by her friends: “This is going to be fairly short: to have father’s character done complete in it; & mothers; & St Ives; & childhood; & all the usual things I try to put in—life, death &c. But the centre is father’s character, sitting in a boat, reciting We perished, each alone, while he crushes a dying mackerel.”95 By late June, it had become clear that Woolf ’s engagement with the subject of

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death—whether it affected her characters, her parents, or a fish—had grown to dominate the book to such an extent that she believed she was writing in a different genre altogether: “I am making up ‘To the Lighthouse’—the sea is to be heard all through it. I have an idea that I will invent a new name for my books to supplant ‘novel’. A new—by Virginia Woolf. But what? Elegy?”96 Woolf ’s diary entry, despite its frequent invocation by scholars, mentions elegy with hesitation, and her uncertainty about the new genre surfaces not only in her use of question marks, but also, more provocatively, in the long dash. The dash, though it is a touch from her pen, a decidedly present mark, holds the place of an absent name, attesting quietly to the complexity of representing—or re-presenting—the dead that McIntire mentions. This touch—like other kinds of literal feeling, including Lily’s touches to her canvas, the impressions on the objects of still life, Mr. Ramsay’s hand reaching for his wife in the dark, the bodily sensation of wanting and not having— offers a gestural form for grief that grounds the challenge of elegiac representation in the body. Woolf offers us one more key three-dimensional form for grief in To the Lighthouse, which becomes visible just after Lily’s “body’s feeling” causes her to break into tears. Here, in the shortest chapter of the novel, Woolf sketches grief in surprisingly violent, even cruel, terms: “[Macalister’s boy took one of the fish and cut a square out of its side to bait his hook with. The mutilated body (it was alive still) was thrown back into the sea.]” (183). With this brief, bracketed sentence, Woolf offers a literalized figure for grief—a metaphor made material, in which the body of the fish serves as an analogue for Lily’s body, and the removal of its square of flesh corresponds to Mrs. Ramsay’s death.97 This metaphor depends for its force on the pathetic fallacy—the attribution of human feelings to nonhuman entities—but Woolf refuses to employ the figure at all; she never presents the slightest allusion to the possibility that the fish possesses feelings. We have only a description of the body in external terms: missing a square of flesh, “mutilated,” and yet somehow “alive still.” In this way, the metaphor constitutes an intriguing abandonment of the terms of “Time Passes,” in which Woolf extends and subverts the pathetic fallacy.98 (In fact, with its invocation of a figure of speech that isn’t actually used, the metaphor also presents another instance of the confusion of presence and absence in To the Lighthouse: here we have a metaphor in which the vehicle is present, but the link between tenor and vehicle remains stubbornly absent.) The link between the mutilated fish and Lily’s physical agony thus seems to rely upon a metonymic substitution of two of Shiff ’s aspects of touch: the mark upon the fish is taken for the sensation of Lily’s body. With this intensification of Lily’s “body’s feeling,” Woolf moves

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beyond her earlier suggestion that loss stirs “unpleasant” “physical sensations” in order to contend that death leaves the living survivors maimed. This is grief in extremis, and the still-living fish with a square cut out of its side presents a more shocking picture of grief than Mr. Ramsay’s sculptural attitude of outstretched arms. This gruesome form often surprises readers, but like the boar’s skull, it actually echoes an earlier, more subtle image. In fact, the mutilated fish proceeds from the very first mortal form introduced in To the Lighthouse, which has gone largely unremarked by critics. As the novel opens and Mrs. Ramsay tells James that he may go to the lighthouse “if it’s fine tomorrow,” he sits on the floor at her feet “cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores” (7). James’s clipped advertisements do not quite constitute the still life that his sister Rose’s arrangement of the fruit and shell will later that evening, but he shares with his sister an aesthetic sense of selection. Similarly, he shares with his mother the capacity to attach an emotional state to an aesthetic object. Just as Mrs. Ramsay finds sympathy with Augustus Carmichael in the dinner-table still life, James “endow[s] the picture of a refrigerator,” as soon as his mother tells him he may go to the lighthouse, “with heavenly bliss” so that the picture is “fringed with joy” (7). The emotional vibration of James’s pictures does not remain positive, however, and once his father has overturned his mother’s decision about the trip to the lighthouse, his ability to “guide his scissors neatly round the refrigerator” morphs into a patricidal impulse to seize “an axe handy, or a poker, any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father’s breast and killed him, there and then” (8). In this way, James’s careful handling of his scissors gives way to a desire for a sharper instrument. Although he cannot really “gash a hole in his father’s breast,” he establishes the form for boyhood cruelty later revisited by Macalister’s boy when he “cut[s] a square out” of the side of the fish. (These childish acts, especially Macalister’s boy’s violence toward the fish, also link up with the power over the sea that Nancy wields when she plays at divinity in the tidal pool.) James even comes close to getting his hands on a knife with which he could do the same kind of damage as Macalister’s boy: his mother tries to pacify him by finding an object in the catalog “like a rake, or a mowing-machine, which, with its prongs and its handles, would need the greatest skill and care in cutting out” (19), and eventually she comes upon the image that fulfills her requirements and James’s unspoken desires—“a pocket knife with six blades” (20). Both the implement and the emotional template for the actions of Macalister’s boy thus surface in the very first pages of the novel. And even though Woolf explores James’s affinity for sharp objects and his urge to wound his father in connection with

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two-dimensional images, she reuses this image—now literalized, in threedimensional form—with Macalister’s boy, as I have outlined.99 One boy’s patricidal impulse becomes another’s routine fishing activity, and because Woolf uses the form to figure the cruelty of Lily’s grief, the imagined mortal wound to the father is thereby transmuted into the agonizing gap left by the dead mother.

Rhopography: Painting for the Attic So cruel is grief, in fact, that an adequate exercise in elegy becomes almost impossible in the final section of the novel. Lily’s painting should constitute a reparative form that counters the violence and loss conveyed by the image of the fish—one that compensates for what has been cut out by restoring our sense of unity with a newly made whole.100 But as we have seen in chapter 1, the consolation of the unified artwork is not readily available to the viewer of modernist art or the reader of modernist novels. Those objects that might seem to exemplify or support notions of totalizing spatial form are perceived through many partial views, just as the novel itself comes into being through multiple circuits of revision. Here, we cannot ignore how the earlier forms that we have examined—especially the vanitas motifs of the still life—impinge upon Lily’s painting. As we’ve seen, the painting is not an abstract superstructure aloof from the novel’s formal determinism. Like the still life, it registers—and is subject to—the same temporal pressures. As she completes her painting, Lily feels these pressures acutely. At the height of her despair, she envisions a rebellion against death itself in which she is joined by Augustus Carmichael: “she felt that if they both got up, here, now on the lawn, and demanded an explanation, why was it so short, why was it so inexplicable, said it with violence, [. . .] if they shouted loud enough Mrs. Ramsay would return” (183). Lily’s thought experiment is—and must always have been—fruitless. She knows full well that Mrs. Ramsay cannot return, and the moment in which she imagines an alternative reality causes her great pain. This unnecessary, self-inflicted suffering quickly gives way to self-criticism once she has regained her calm: “She remained a skimpy old maid, holding a paint-brush” (184). Lily’s unflattering image of herself reveals the complexity of Woolf ’s elegy and its inability to offer easy solace to the living. Like other elegists, Lily emphasizes her shortcomings: her picture of herself as a “skimpy old maid” implies that the artwork produced by her paintbrush will be equally anemic, and she echoes her earlier lament for her inability to “express in words these emotions of the body” (181). Lily suffers, in short, from the degree to which elegy “throws into relief the

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inefficacy of language precisely when we need it most.”101 This stress on the inefficacy of the writer’s (or the painter’s) medium often adds another elegiac layer to compositions like Lily’s: in the twentieth century, Jahan Ramazani notes, “every elegy is an elegy for elegy—a poem that mourns the diminished efficacy and legitimacy of poetic mourning.”102 Inadequate as a form, then, elegy itself proves mortal, and for modernists, its time may have run out. Such a metapoetics implies that T. S. Eliot’s acknowledgment of the pervasiveness of elegy near the end of Four Quartets—“Every poem an epitaph”—must become doubly true.103 In Woolf ’s terms, if “a picture must be a tribute” not only to the dead but also to picture making, then Lily Briscoe’s painting remains a daunting task, with the touches on her canvas under a double imperative to offer up some kind of eloquence (56). Lily’s attempt to elegize Mrs. Ramsay with her painting—to make of this picture a “tribute”—is thus plagued by self-doubt, particularly Lily’s uncertainty about her own abilities as a painter. Just after she makes her first brush marks on the canvas in “The Lighthouse,” she feels “exposed without protection to all the blasts of doubt” and hears the echo of Charles Tansley’s repudiation of her painting: Why then did she do it? She looked at the canvas, lightly scored with running lines. It would be hung in the servants’ bedrooms. It would be rolled up and stuffed under a sofa. What was the good of doing it then, and she heard some voice saying she couldn’t paint, saying she couldn’t create, as if she were caught up in one of those habitual currents in which after a certain time experience forms in the mind, so that one repeats words without being aware any longer who originally spoke them. Can’t paint, can’t write, she murmured monotonously, anxiously considering what her plan of attack should be. [. . .] Charles Tansley used to say that, she remembered, women can’t paint, can’t write. Coming up behind her, he had stood close beside her, a thing she hated, as she painted here on this very spot. (162–63) Lily’s skepticism surfaces in the form of Tansley’s refrain, which still possesses some strength after ten years, despite Lily’s original dismissal of it in “The Window” as something that “was not true to him but for some reason helpful to him, and that was why he said it” (88). Lily still recognizes the selfserving quality of Tansley’s remark, and she never concedes his central point: her concern about her own painting is not whether she can paint at all, but why she paints, and to what end her picture will be put. She imagines several similarly unhappy fates that might befall the painting: it will be “hung in the

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servants’ bedrooms,” “rolled up and stuffed under a sofa,” or, as she thinks later, “hung in the attics” (182). (Woolf here echoes James’s emphasis on the impermanence of art, which surfaces not only in the destruction of the titular golden bowl but also, more subtly, in the “worn relief ” carved upon the vase that Adam Verver imagines.) Susceptible to a kind of material degradation that is almost as final as that which afflicts the more mortal forms of human beings, Lily’s picture seems destined for obsolescence. Many critics of To the Lighthouse have attempted to read against, or through, Lily’s protestations here, not least because giving any credence to Charles Tansley’s opinions seems commensurate with admitting one’s own misogyny. For example, in her study of fictional women painters, Roberta White insists that Lily is a “serious artist” and her painting is not at all amateurish, but “serious art” instead.104 Other critics have suggested that Lily’s painting will eventually be vindicated by the passage of time: “the house falls apart; Mrs. Ramsay dies; but Lily’s painting—or the idea of Lily’s painting— may endure. If one generation stores it under the sofa, the next may hang it in a museum.”105 In other words, the change from the staid Edwardian world of “The Window” to the more aesthetically risk-tasking modernism of “The Lighthouse” will allow Lily’s painting to be recognized—not only as valuable but also, perhaps, as avant-garde. (Such an imagined redemption bears no small resemblance to the elevation of Woolf to canonical status by critics writing after the first generation of modernism.) Lily has painted ahead of the curve all along, and Britain has needed to catch up with her. This view remains especially common among critics who argue that Lily participates in the groundbreaking aesthetic movements of modern painting, but it is perhaps most remarkably voiced by Vanessa Bell. Writing in response to her sister’s conviction that she would “laugh at the painting bits in the Lighthouse,” Bell speculated about the extent of Lily’s talent: “By the way, surely Lily Briscoe must have been rather a good painter—before her time perhaps, but with great gifts really? No, we didn’t laugh at the bits about painting—though I’m a little doubtful about covering paints with damp cloths, but it might be done.”106 Although she expresses skepticism about one small feature of her sister’s representation of the painting process, Bell’s tone proves largely affirmative. She not only finds Woolf ’s “bits about painting” compelling but also believes Lily to be a gifted avant-garde artist—someone who might have found common aesthetic cause with Bell herself.107 But in general, these attempts to redeem Lily’s artistic credentials and recuperate her painting go too far. She may advance the cause of painting in the Hebrides by eschewing the simpering style of Mr. Paunceforte, “with

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lemon-coloured sailing boats, and pink women on the beach,” but as I have argued, her painting is so minimally described that it proves very difficult to conclude that it is avant-garde art of any kind (17). Lily is neither a great nor a serious painter. She barely seems to think of painting as a career or even as a consuming hobby, and no matter how momentous her eventual completion of her painting is, she forgets it for ten years. I do not want to overemphasize my point, but I believe it remains possible—even vital—to acknowledge the importance of Lily’s painting and simultaneously refuse to aggrandize it. Diane Gillespie is one of the very few critics who do precisely this, noting that, among Woolf ’s “women artist characters—like Lily Briscoe, the painter in To the Lighthouse—most are amateurs, however committed.”108 To class Lily with misunderstood artists who toil in obscurity in order to advance the field is to make of her another Mr. Ramsay, when she possesses none of his ambition for heroic sacrifice in imagined expeditions “across the icy solitudes of the Polar region” (38).109 Lily’s painting is an ordinary occurrence, even resolutely minor, much like the dinner-table still life in “The Window” and the shrouded furniture in “Time Passes.”110 For this reason, it makes little sense to attribute the epic scope of history painting or the grand innovations of postimpressionists such as Cézanne to her canvas. The best description for her art is instead one borrowed from still life: rhopography. As Bryson has argued, if the domain of history painting is megalography, or “the depiction of those things in the world which are great,” then the proper sphere of still life is rhopography—a word from the Greek rhopos, meaning “trivial objects, small wares, trifles”— which refers to “the depiction of those things which lack importance, the unassuming material base of life that ‘importance’ constantly overlooks.”111 Still life has a natural relationship with rhopography, since its “whole subject is nothing else but the life of people among material things,” particularly those things which, like food, kitchen utensils and vessels, and boots, make daily life possible.112 Vanessa Bell’s own experience, in fact, underscores this relationship, since one of her greatest domestic problems “was to find a cleaning woman who would not tidy away unfinished still life compositions.”113 Still life is so attuned to “the ordinary business of daily living, the life of houses and tables,”114 in other words, that Mrs. McNab might well have cleaned up the objects that typify the genre. (Indeed, as Erich Auerbach notes in his classic essay on the novel, “The Brown Stocking,” To the Lighthouse itself “holds to minor, unimpressive, random events: measuring the stocking, a fragment of a conversation with the maid, a telephone call.”115 This is a divestment from stock in the event that is related to, but distinct from, what we saw in The Golden Bowl: there is nothing minor or ordinary

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about James’s withdrawal from narrating plot points.) So although Lily’s painting isn’t necessarily a still life, I want to link her interest in the life of the house, the garden, and the woman who animated them to the resolutely domestic, rhopographic qualities of still life. To put it differently: while Lily Briscoe certainly possesses the capacity for heroism, passion, and ambition, and even demonstrates some of these qualities, these are not the subjects of her painting. The everyday can certainly prompt great art, but Lily’s painting does not respond to this prompt in its aesthetic quality, its ambition, or its subject matter. Resolutely minor, her painting does not depict immortality or aim for timelessness but rather reckons with mortality: both the frail humanity of those it depicts and its own earthly fragility prove crucial to the form the painting takes in the novel. To read against Lily’s insistence that her painting will be hung in the attic is to deny one of its integral characteristics and even to ignore the very condition of its completion. At the end of the novel, when Lily finishes her painting, she does so in full knowledge of its minor status: “He has landed,” she said aloud. “It is finished.” Then, surging up, puffing slightly, old Mr. Carmichael stood beside her, looking like an old pagan god, shaggy, with weeds in his hair and the trident (it was only a French novel) in his hand. He stood by her on the edge of the lawn, swaying a little in his bulk and said, shading his eyes with his hand: “They will have landed,” and she felt that she had been right. They had not needed to speak. They had been thinking the same things and he had answered her without her asking him anything. He stood there as if he were spreading his hands over all the weakness and suffering of mankind; she thought he was surveying, tolerantly and compassionately, their final destiny. Now he has crowned the occasion, she thought, when his hand slowly fell, as if she had seen him let fall from his great height a wreath of violets and asphodels which, fluttering slowly, lay at length upon the earth. Quickly, as if she were recalled by something over there, she turned to her canvas. There it was—her picture. Yes, with all its greens and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something. It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that matter? she asked herself, taking up her brush again. She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision. (211)

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Lily can only complete her canvas once she has acknowledged both the possibility that it may be destroyed and the fact that this eventual ruin ought not prevent her act of creation. Lily’s acceptance of the chance that her painting may be hung in the attic is the mark of its status as both a vanitas piece— which reminds us of the superfluity of all earthly, material goods—and a work of rhopography, an engagement with the easily overlooked materials of everyday life that will itself remain minor. As an object that may be ignored or even discarded, Lily’s painting is like the still-life objects of the novel, and as Banfield suggests, Lily’s first, unfinished picture from “The Window” might well have been among the abandoned objects of “Time Passes.”116 In a very important way, then, the painting’s completion is dependent upon its own eventual absence. This condition arises in particular from the physicality of Lily’s painting process in the third section of the novel, which finds its conclusion here with Lily’s final brush mark—the “line there, in the centre”—and the final gesture, in which she “lay[s] down her brush in extreme fatigue.” Lily’s touches here necessarily draw attention, as Shiff reminds us, to the “material, constructed physicality of an artwork,” and this materiality signals that the painting can become subject to all the forces of decay, just like the fruit in the dish and the furniture in the Ramsays’ house.117 Lily’s final statement, “I have had my vision,” is therefore not a totalizing statement in which she fully overcomes Mrs. Ramsay’s death, replacing the dead woman’s outmoded vision with her own. The sentence instead causes an implicit gap to open up “between Lily’s vision and her final design,” as Cheryl Mares notes; with it, Woolf “avoids the kind of closure that suggests mastery, fixity, authority.”118 Nor does Lily’s statement ventriloquize Woolf ’s thoughts, rounding both novel and painting into bounded, complete structures—spatial forms—that deploy “the solidity of the plastic arts as a stay against the ravages of time.”119 Quite differently, Lily’s final statement is an exhausted glance, a final touch insistently bound up with the physiognomy and rhopography—the overwhelming pressures of time—that are central to still life painting. Thus Lily’s final statement, like her final brushstroke, marks her canvas as a work of mortal form. Moreover, Lily completes her painting here in the company of Mr. Carmichael, the aging author of “a volume of poems” (138). Shaggy, bulky, and puffing, Augustus Carmichael hardly seems capable of playing the role of Neptune, and indeed, Woolf is careful to deflate the divine simile by reminding us that he holds a novel and not a trident. The wartime elegist, who “lost all interest in life” after Andrew Ramsay’s death, then offers a funeral benediction, laying his wreath of flowers associated with mourning upon the

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earth (197). This final gesture of the aging poet provides the template for Lily’s “laying down her brush in extreme fatigue,” and this physiognomic form makes it impossible to read the end of the novel as a moment in which art transcends the condition of human mortality. Despite the desire of so many critics to see Lily’s painting as a triumph—an aesthetic achievement that corresponds to Mrs. Ramsay’s domestic art, and a masterpiece on par with the boeuf en daube—the formal progression of the novel forestalls such a reading. The painting’s kinship is not with the triumphant dish but instead with the still life, the composition of fruit and shell that is spoiled. These works are grounded in their own likely obsolescence, and it would be a mistake to insist that Lily’s work will last for all eternity. As Beer emphasizes, here “loss, completion, ending, absence, are acknowledged,” and “the elegiac triumph of the novel” is achieved only through artwork that “eschews permanence.”120 It is not “that actual picture” which will remain, as Lily herself recognizes, but only “what it attempted” (183). Like the still life, Lily’s painting remains vulnerable: a hand may reach out to take a pear, or to roll her canvas up and stuff it under a sofa. Susceptible as its material support is to the destructive forces of modern life, Lily’s elegy is all the more poignant: it too is a kind of mortal form. I began this chapter by telling the story of the purchase of Pommes from the estate of a dead impressionist, and I hinted at some of its lessons for a new group of modernists in Britain. But my point here has not really been about the movement from one outmoded kind of art to a fresh one that promises to make it new. Rather, I have hoped to emphasize the movement of still life over the canvases of Cézanne and through the pages of Woolf ’s novel, where it joins forces with the three-dimensional forms that animate Woolf ’s elegiac project. In both places, still life enacts a radical redefinition of Clive Bell’s notion of “significant form.” Refusing to call up specifically aesthetic emotions, still life instead guides us through a range of fully human emotions, including sympathy, grief, nostalgia, and shock—emotions for which Woolf also presents physical, embodied forms like the outstretched hand. Both visual forms and bodily attitudes prove malleable, and as they change, they move us toward a revisionary reading of Woolf ’s novel, a reinvigorated understanding of the genre of still life, and a new account of the capacity of description to drive narrative. Such descriptions make clear that the form of this novel isn’t spatial, meant to be apprehended in a moment of epiphanic insight and vision, but rather dynamic, unfolding and metamorphosing over time. In To the Lighthouse, the objects of still life remain vital, and all of them—apple and pear; shell, skull, and shrouded jug—shift affective shapes before our eyes. When they seem most to affirm

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human sympathy, they quietly yield to mortality, and when they appear nearly calcified into impersonal objecthood, their stillness perishes, permitting the human world to reenter the picture. These forms continually expand the scope of the novel’s vision and demonstrate the power of still life and other mortal forms, which flourish and re-form themselves, moving the narrative—and moving us—along the way.

Ch a p ter 3

Protean Form Erotic Abstraction and Ardent Futurity in the Poetry of Mina Loy

If To the Lighthouse provides a quiet rejoinder to the theory of “significant form” by situating art in time and insisting that art operates through and by virtue of time’s passage, then we might also say that Woolf ’s work returns abstraction to an earthly plane. Roger Fry may write that for Cézanne “the deepest emotions could only exude, like a perfume—it is his own image—from form considered in its pure essence and without reference to associated ideas,” but as we have seen, Woolf disdains the immaterial effusions of artistic perfumery for the profound emotions that can be elicited by mortal vanitas forms and rhopographic still life.1 Although Lily’s canvas is certainly abstract in the ways that I have discussed, and the modernist debate about abstraction in painting does swirl around Woolf ’s novel, Woolf makes the forms of modernism dynamic by turning away from their “pure essence” and returning them to their “associated ideas.” In this chapter, I want to examine more closely the question of abstraction—the question of “form considered in its pure essence”— because pure form, like spatial form, has often constituted an explanatory paradigm for modernism. Indeed, the modernist period in the fine arts is often historicized as a march toward abstraction, with pure form standing off in the distance as an attainable goal, a Platonic ideal that might one day be rendered visible and incarnate. This narrative is most frequently associated with the work of the art historian Clement Greenberg, who in his 93

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essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939) traces the avant-garde’s withdrawal from society in order to seek “an absolute in which all relativities and contradictions would be either resolved or beside the point.”2 The avant-garde finds its absolute in abstract art: rejecting the everyday “subject matter of common experience,” the avant-garde artist devotes his attention to “the medium of his own craft,” working on things like “pure poetry.”3 In this turn inward, Greenberg argues, we can find “the genesis of the ‘abstract,’” which grows and develops as artists self-reflexively explore the possibilities and limitations of their various media (such as the flatness of the painted canvas).4 As late as 1958, in an essay called “‘American-Type’ Painting,” Greenberg indicates that the process of abstraction begun under modernism is still ongoing: “Painting continues, then, to work out its modernism with unchecked momentum because it still has a relatively long way to go before being reduced to its viable essence.”5 Greenberg’s particular account has been challenged more often that needs mentioning, but his sense that abstraction constitutes a key identifying feature of early twentieth-century art has largely remained. A 2012 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, for instance, positioned abstraction as “modernism’s greatest innovation,” as “a form of ur-modernism.”6 Such ideas were, of course, not limited to the fine arts, as the work of the Bloomsbury group attests, and the debate about pure form erupted in a variety of literary and artistic contexts and energized many distinct oeuvres. The oeuvre that will focus my discussion of pure form in this chapter belongs to Mina Loy, who published primarily as a poet but was also trained as a visual artist. Born in Britain, Loy studied art in London and Munich, exhibited at the official academic salons in Paris, and interacted with a wide spectrum of modernist and avant-garde artists in France, Italy, and the United States. In the 1920s, Loy published a series of art poems that demonstrate a strong interest in purity and a cluster of related values, including essentialism, absolutism, formalism, and autotelism. Some are ekphrases of specific works—“‘The Starry Sky’ of Wyndham Lewis” and “Brancusi’s Golden Bird” fall into this category—while others, such as “Gertrude Stein,” “Poe,” and “Marble,” seem to offer more general analyses of the methods or qualities of particular artists.7 These shorter lyrics have been sparingly discussed by scholars, and they are perhaps neglected because their aesthetics seem incongruent with another area of Loy’s work: her long autobiographical poems, Songs to Joannes (1917) and Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose (1923–25), which have garnered the lion’s share of the critical attention to her work and form the evidentiary basis for most general conclusions about her oeuvre.8 The former poem, possibly Loy’s best-known, chronicles the encounters of

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two lovers modeled on herself and the futurist writer Giovanni Papini; the latter recounts the union of Loy’s Hungarian Jewish father and her English Protestant mother and her own development as an artist.9 In both poems Loy presents sexual encounters that have messily human emotional dimensions, and to give these accounts, she employs poetic forms that prove no less complicated than the narratives they convey. Bringing together seemingly opposed allegiances, Loy demonstrates the creative tension between them, or reveals their capacity to generate productive hybrids. Such boundarycrossing hybridity has led scholars to adopt Loy’s word mongrel as the label for her pioneering aesthetics.10 The abstract formalist aesthetics of Loy’s art poetry may seem incompatible with that of her autobiographical long poems. Yet it is possible not only to identify key continuities between apparently disjunct parts of her oeuvre, but also to discern an overall aesthetic program evident in both her art poetry and her autobiographical poetry. Loy’s life’s work, I contend, can be productively understood as a series of attempts to write within and about the aesthetics of pure form. In Loy’s shorter art poems, she reveals the unadorned art object as the essence of form, as when, in “Brancusi’s Golden Bird,” she describes an abstract sculpture as “The absolute act / of art.”11 And in the longer, more narrative poems, such as Songs to Joannes, Loy explores emotional intimacy and romantic love as formative processes that occur on a nearly atomic level, where abstract, fundamental selves may operate with the greatest honesty and vitality. Joining together the apparently antipathetic programs of her art poems and her autobiographical work, Loy’s aesthetics of pure form proves just as vital to an overall picture of her oeuvre as her mongrel mode. As we shall see, Loy’s aesthetics of pure form celebrates the particulate core: those essential elements that, like the naked body, remain behind when superficial coverings have been removed. Investigations of the fundamental and the abstract might well seem to move in opposite directions— conventionally, the fundament is the foundation, the base, and (even anatomically) the bottom, while the abstract floats above, “existing in thought or as an idea”—but I aim to show how Loy’s abstraction is not that of an airy superstructure opposed to the world of “physical and concrete existence.”12 Instead, she roots her treatment of the abstract in the granular. Working more from the scientific meanings of the word, Loy grapples with what remains after a process of “distillation” and extraction.13 In this regard, Loy’s work counters one contemporary critique of abstraction, which focuses on the violence that abstraction enacts as “the negation of a concrete item in its givenness.”14 For modernists, as Charles Altieri has written, “abstraction was

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not so much the negation of concreteness as the recuperation of concreteness otherwise lost to habits deriving from the codification of orientations toward nature.”15 Loy is one such modernist. Her work rejects codification and adopts a new orientation toward nature, and her notion of the abstract is paradoxically solid: it embraces the concentrated without also insisting upon the simplified. In this way, Loy’s aesthetic scientism may bridge the divide that Gaskill has described between a scientific, abstract understanding of form that generalizes and an aesthetic, concrete understanding of form that embeds formal knowledge in context.16 Like the “inviolate egos” that might be “disorb[ed]” by their clashes together in “seismic orgasm” in Songs to Joannes, Loy’s abstract is an “epitome,” “encapsulating in miniature, or representing the essence of, the characteristic qualities or features of something much larger.”17 Condensation, as I will demonstrate, never renders Loy’s elemental selves or essentialized art objects neutered or less powerful. Losing none of their complexity or unpredictability, her pure forms remain dynamic and erotic. More broadly, because Loy sits at an underexamined nexus in modernist art making, she can help shift our understanding of how various theories of pure form and practices of abstraction impacted each other. In what follows, I trace Loy’s engagement with the theories and objects of pure form produced by her contemporaries: Wyndham Lewis, Constantin Brancusi, Gertrude Stein, and the futurists. I begin with Loy’s ekphrastic poetry— “‘The Starry Sky’ of Wyndham Lewis” and “Brancusi’s Golden Bird”—to examine how she translates other abstract artists’ priorities into her own work via ekphrasis, a transformative process in its own right. The aesthetic program that Loy develops as she encounters other media—drawing and collage, sculpture and photography—also emerges in her reaction to modernist literature, as a related short poem called “Gertrude Stein” makes clear. I turn next to the incarnation of fundamental form in Loy’s autobiographical Songs to Joannes and conclude by reading its erotic formalism in relation to a prosepoem-essay hybrid titled “Brancusi and the Ocean.” Of uncertain date, and published for the first time in 2011, the piece demonstrates the consistency of Loy’s aesthetic program across at least twenty years of her oeuvre, as well as the compatibility of her aesthetics with her erotics and her politics.18 These readings dwell at different moments on two particular sites for the debate about pure form in the modernist period. The first is the work of sculptor Constantin Brancusi, a Romanian-born member of the Parisian artistic community who was lauded by reviewers and other artists for his services to the cause of abstraction. The language used to praise Brancusi nearly makes his oeuvre into a one-man Greenbergian teleology: the New

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York Sun, for instance, declared in 1926 that he had “carried abstraction further than any one.”19 Loy, too, remarked his commitment to pure form: writing in her essay “Phenomenon in American Art,” published long after the height of their friendship in the 1920s and 1930s, Loy asserted that the Golden Bird remained “the purest abstraction I have ever seen.”20 Of course, Brancusi does not stand at the apex of abstraction per se: his sculptures are generally representative, and other modernists delved much further into experimentation with nonobjective art. His is a decidedly peculiar position in the history of art. Although his work is crucial to the larger twentieth-century story about abstraction, Brancusi does not fit into the standard paradigm of understanding modernism (or the avant-garde) through its constituent, overlapping movements, as one can see in the famous diagram that Alfred Barr Jr. used to map out “Cubism and Abstract Art” for an exhibition by that name at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936.21 Here, Brancusi is the only twentieth-century artist to stand alone, functionally equivalent to futurism and Dadaism, and in keeping with his unique status, this chapter considers how Brancusi represented for other modernists such as Loy abstraction as it might be expressed in a purity of form—an expression made more obvious, perhaps, by sculpture’s three-dimensionality. The second important locus for the debate about pure form is the painted nude, a genre that Lynda Nead describes as “not simply one subject among others, one form among many”: the nude “is the subject, the form.”22 In the early twentieth century, in fact, the nude functions as the genre of choice for formally experimental modernist and avant-garde artists precisely because it has historically been defined, to a much higher degree than other genres (including the still life), as a special site for the artist’s creation of form, specifically “the conversion of matter into form.”23 The nude is less the quintessential figurative subject than the genre best suited to experiments in abstraction. Henri Matisse’s Blue Nude (Souvenir of Biskra) (1907) and Pablo Picasso’s Les demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), for instance, play a leading role in the birth of fauvism and cubism, respectively. Like Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (1912), these paintings reject received ideas about beauty in order to experiment with color and line, flatten and fragment planes, and compress the depth of depicted space. Just as these paintings flagrantly transgress the historical conventions of the genre, so too does futurism fight in its own way against all that is “tedious” in art: dismissing art museums as “cemeteries” and locating the worst kind of “monotony” in the genre of the nude, futurists demand “for ten years, the total suppression of the nude in painting.”24 For futurists, the pursuit of pure form leads away from the nude, and the theories that they develop in their attempt to

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renovate tedious academicism significantly impact Loy, who knew futurists such as F. T. Marinetti and Giovanni Papini quite well. (Indeed, she had romantic affairs with both men.) Throughout her oeuvre, as Loy engages with these overlapping discussions about form and abstraction, she borrows these artists’ theories of pure form and remakes them for her own purposes. In the process, Loy’s reimagination of what pure form might look like also transforms our understanding of what abstraction is for. Loy uses, for instance, recognizably mainstream futurist techniques—such as an evocation of dynamism, “the lyrical conception of forms”—in the pursuit of antifuturist ends, such as an emphasis on the body and emotional intimacy.25 Her work thus offers a counterweight to the colder modernism of Marinetti, Ezra Pound, and others, but not merely by opposing their abstraction with her mongrelism.26 Instead, she challenges these Men of 1914 on their own ground: Loy uses the principles and terms of their doctrines to reconceive modern abstraction and demonstrate that abstraction does not also necessitate sterility, or always tend toward minimalism. Borrowing from Brancusi and others, Loy’s abstraction instead attends to the radically denuded body, self, and art object, simultaneously reveling in their essentialized forms and relishing the erotic dimension of this very purity. Her poetics demonstrates the power of an erotic formalism, as she attends to pure forms in moments of protean potentiality and shows us abstractions on the verge of combining with other essential forms or escaping their own borders. Like the Brancusi sculpture that Loy pictures as “the nucleus of flight,” such forms gesture outward, orienting themselves within a temporality that I call ardent futurity (79). In this way, Loy’s poetry fantasizes about what might happen if Greenberg’s Platonic pure form were ever made manifest. If with his sculpture Brancusi “carried abstraction further than any one,” as the New York Sun puts it, then Loy’s poetry asks whether we can go further than pure form. Conceived as a vector into the future, the process of maximalist abstraction offers a feminist response to other models of artistic conception and generation within modernism.

“Into the Pure Dimension”: Loy’s Ekphrastic Poetry Writing in the Dial in 1926, the poet-critic Yvor Winters ranked Loy alongside Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore and pronounced her to be “the most astounding” of the four poets.27 “She moves like one walking through granite instead of air,” Winters rhapsodized, “and when she achieves a moment of beauty it strikes one cold.”28 He went on to spotlight such moments throughout Loy’s first book, Lunar Baedeker, which

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had appeared three years earlier, and to praise, in a much quoted line, her “images that have frozen into epigrams. It is this movement from deadly stasis to stasis, slow and heavy, that, when unified and organized, gives to her poetry its ominous grandeur, like that of a stone idol become animate and horribly aware.”29 Cold beauty, images frozen into epigrams, deadly stasis, ominous grandeur: what Winters offers us is a vision of Loy’s poetry through the modernist-formalist lens that this book seek to replace. In his view, hers is a poetic project contingent upon isolated images presented for the reader to contemplate, and then hardened into the rocklike solidity of the “unified and organized” work. Winters’s review emphasizes the strain of modernist writing that will lead to the New Criticism, and if his vision of Loy doesn’t quite make her poetry into a well-wrought urn, then it certainly starts to sound like a verbal icon. Although Winters does not mention “‘The Starry Sky’ of Wyndham Lewis” specifically—indeed, almost no critics have—he might well have celebrated the poem for its “cold beauty,” its seemingly sterile abstraction.30 As its title suggests, the poem is an ekphrasis of a 1912 collaged drawing by Lewis. Known today as Two Women, the drawing appeared under the title The Starry Sky in the November 1917 issue of the Little Review, as well as in the August 1921 issue of the Dial (figure 3.1), which seems to me the likeliest source for Loy’s poem.31 As we have seen with Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar,” ekphrasis has typically been understood as a highly formalist mode that permits the poet to study or simulate the totalizing effects of the visual art object. An ekphrasis of a cubism-influenced drawing—not only a visual art object but an exercise in abstraction, too—should redouble these effects and confront the reader with the “images that have frozen into epigrams” that Winters so admires. But in fact, just as Keats’s and Stevens’s ekphrases are not nearly as self-sufficiently autonomous as we might imagine, so too do Loy’s ekphrases challenge our ideas about the cold purity of abstract forms. Indeed, contra Winters, Loy’s poem “‘Starry Sky’” exemplifies a kind of abstraction that proves to be both malleable and driven by desire—two characteristics that shape Loy’s use of abstraction elsewhere in her work. Responding to Lewis, Loy meditates on a bare skyscape inhabited only by impersonalities and absences. The poem centers on the interaction between the two primary parts of the drawing, to which its competing titles refer: the mountainous figures—if we can call them figures—of the two women, and the starry sky that Loy imagines is behind them. (There is no such sky in the image, since the background is blank.) Loy’s speaker begins with an unpunctuated question—“who raised / these rocks of human mist”—that aims less

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Figure 3.1 Wyndham Lewis, Two Women, also called The Starry Sky, 1912. Pencil, pen, ink, gouache, and collage on paper, 187/8 × 245/8 in. (48.0 × 62.5 cm). Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London. Published in the Dial, August 1921. © Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust/Bridgeman Images

to inquire about the figures’ prior history and more to explore their present surroundings.32 The question registers the speaker’s strong sense of the disjunction between the figures and their environment—which is also the disjunction between the drawing’s two titles, and between the foreground and the background of the image. This disjunction is even more strongly articulated in the second and third strophes, which function in apposition to the first. In the second, Loy expands the disconnection between figures and ground across the line break—“pyramidical survivors / in the cyclorama of space”—and in the third, she asserts that the figures have entered “the / austere theatre of the Infinite” and transcended the human realm to such an extent that they seem never to have been human at all (91). Instead, as abstracted forms, these survivors inhabit a cold, vacant domain furnished only by “the ghosts of the stars” with “their celibate shadows” (91). The emptiness of Lewis’s background thus becomes a crucial feature of the poem’s aesthetics, thereby rendering the title “‘Starry Sky’” paradoxical. Loy contemplates what the cosmos might look like if the stars went out, and she packs the poem with images of things or qualities that are

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missing, or ineffectual. The fifth strophe especially enhances this accumulation of absences. Appositive descriptions of the stars proliferate—“the nerves of Heaven,” “the rays / that pierce / the nocturnal heart,” “the airy eyes of angels,” and “the sublime / experiment in pointillism”—but they amount to nothing, because the stars are all “faded away” (91). Loy summarizes the stars’ absence: “The celestial conservatories / blooming with light / are all blown out” (91). This combined metaphor figures the stars as both extinguished candles and hothouse flowers without their blooms. These are stars that cannot shine, and Loy’s ekphrasis installs them in a postapocalyptic landscape, or skyscape—but not one marked by trauma, or even by strident asceticism. Instead, there is a certain calm and benign vacancy to the poem’s desolation. By the final lines of the poem, the blankness of the sky extends to Lewis’s representation of the women, as Loy describes the white facets of the figures’ bodies: “The Nirvanic snows / drift — — — / to sky worn images” (92). Loy asks us to see the planes and sculptural concavities of Lewis’s drawing as snowy drifts that cover the spherical outcroppings of the rocky landscape.33 In their “Nirvanic” state, these “snows” have escaped the earthly confines of “bodily existence” and realized “non-existence”; etymologically, “Nirvanic snows” are extinct, blown out, just like the stars that the poem pictures.34 Similarly absent and impotent, the white, drifting facets become eroded images, worn down by the blankness of the sky into a condition of (near) nonexistence, rather than, as Winters would suggest, “frozen into epigrams.” This last line also indicates that the emptiness of the background is not really at odds with the massive presence of the mountainous figures; the blankness of the background has become the blankness of the foreground facets. Loy merges figure and ground—a typical move within the abstract painting of the period—to an even higher degree than Lewis’s drawing does, and finally disconnects both figures and ground, “pyramidical survivors” and the “cyclorama of space,” from everything else in the universe, so that they merely “drift” in “the / austere theatre of the Infinite.” “‘Starry Sky’” thus deploys apocalyptic cosmic imagery—which we shall also see elsewhere in Loy’s poetry—in order to seriously entertain an aesthetics of radical separation and sterility. The poem drives toward nirvana, and this condition is desirable, both for its simplicity as well as for its divinity. The poem’s speaker is explicitly jealous of the figures: they are “Enviable immigrants / into the pure dimension / immune serene” (92). Their purity, immunity, and serenity become affective states that are sought out, and the cosmic bareness of the blown-out starry sky becomes a condition to which one aspires. The yearning quality aroused specifically by the abstract art object also surfaces in the most famous of Loy’s art poems, “Brancusi’s Golden Bird,”

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an ekphrasis that takes its title from a 1919–20 sculpture by Brancusi (figure 3.2). I quote the poem in its entirety (including its concluding ellipsis): The toy become the aesthetic archetype As if some patient peasant God had rubbed and rubbed the Alpha and Omega of Form into a lump of metal A naked orientation unwinged unplumed —the ultimate rhythm has lopped the extremities of crest and claw from the nucleus of flight The absolute act of art conformed to continent sculpture —bare as the brow of Osiris— this breast of revelation an incandescent curve licked by chromatic flames in labyrinths of reflections This gong of polished hyperaesthesia shrills with brass as the aggressive light strikes its significance The immaculate conception of the inaudible bird occurs in gorgeous reticence . . .35

Figure 3.2 Constantin Brancusi, Golden Bird, 1919–20. Bronze, stone, and wood, 85¾ × 11¾ × 11¾ in. (217.8 × 29.9 × 29.9 cm). Art Institute of Chicago. © Succession Brancusi—All rights reserved (ARS) 2019. Photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, New York

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Loy engages with Brancusi by using many of the same strategies that shape her encounter with Wyndham Lewis. Here, too, an opening invocation marks the superlative strangeness of the abstract work, then a series of proliferating appositives seeks to describe it, and a final image of extreme purity prompts the ekphrastic exercise to drift quietly off into abstraction. With these poetic maneuvers already familiar to us, then, “Brancusi’s Golden Bird” can help us to see how Loy’s vision of abstract art is necessarily a question of form. Unlike “‘Starry Sky,’” “Golden Bird” is filled with phrases that present the sculpture as an utterly complete, peerless art object. The heart of the poem describes and redescribes its exceptional nature. The Bird is all at once “A naked orientation,” “The absolute act / of art,” “an incandescent curve,” and “This gong / of polished hyperaesthesia.”36 The streamlined sculpture concretizes both the essence of flight and the essence of art, and all these descriptions—as well as Loy’s frequent use of past participles—emphasize the sculpture’s status as a created object in its finished state. The sculpture seems almost denuded of its own history: it is an undecorated shape, “a naked orientation,” “bare as the brow of Osiris” (79). Loy even indicates that the sculpture has long been complete by beginning the poem with a noun followed by an unconventional past participial phrase: “The toy / become the aesthetic archetype” (79). The viewer can only imagine its origins, and this is precisely how the poem proceeds, by moving at the beginning of the second strophe to a meditation on “as if ” (79). “Golden Bird” plunges headlong into the thought experiment from which “‘Starry Sky’” turns away after its first line, as Loy goes on to depict the creation of the sculpture as a reduction to, or distillation of, its material essence. Perhaps a “patient peasant God” has “rubbed / the Alpha and Omega / of Form / into a lump of metal,” or an “ultimate rhythm / has lopped the extremities / of crest and claw / from / the nucleus of flight” (79). The Golden Bird thus incarnates a paradox: it is a pure form made material, to be sure, but it also transcends materiality altogether. The last strophe casts this transcendence in religious terms, as Loy adds one final superlative to describe the creation of this perfectly unadorned object: The immaculate conception of the inaudible bird occurs in gorgeous reticence . . . (80)

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With the intrusion of the present tense, it might seem possible that Loy offers the reader or viewer a new avenue to access the sculpture’s prior history, but the entire making of the Golden Bird—including the rubbing of the “peasant God,” the “lopp[ing]” off of all excess, and the polishing of the bronze to a final sheen—has been an “immaculate / conception.” Even as the poem meditates on the possible methods by which the object was created, then, the sculpture also seems never to have been touched by human hands. The moment of creation remains inaccessible, at a significant distance from the viewer, and Loy links this remoteness to the sculpture’s inability to speak: it remains “inaudible” in its “reticence.”37 The sculpture even seems to have been conceived in such a pure state that it is as much an idea as it is an object (although, as I shall explain shortly, the sculpture is not only an idea, nor more an idea than it is an object). Perfect and even sacred, Brancusi’s bird is the ultimate abstraction, the beginning and the end of form itself— nothing less than the apotheosis of aesthetics. Picturing the Golden Bird as simultaneously an essential form and the very essence of form, Loy affirms exactly the features of Brancusi’s work that were most appealing to her modernist contemporaries, who celebrated the sculptor for “doing what any nicely behaved modernist purist ought to do, which was to pare down the irregularities of observed form in the interests of creating a new purity and stability of shape.”38 This paring down is the central impulse that William Carlos Williams—who knew Loy well, among other reasons, for having joined her in performing a play by Alfred Kreymborg with the Provincetown Players in 1916—identifies in Brancusi’s work: “there was . . . with Brancusi the constant pull towards the centre, to simplify, to eliminate the inessential, to purify, a scientific impulse to get at the very gist of the matter.”39 Using the same term—“gist”—that he chooses in Paterson to mark the core of poetic achievement, Williams extols Brancusi’s scientific pursuit of discovery.40 Brancusi’s quest for purity is likewise exalted by Ezra Pound, who was “the sculptor’s first serious advocate in the press” and “the person initially most responsible for the canonical reading of Brancusi’s art.”41 Writing in the Little Review, Pound contends that Brancusi has “continued the process of purgation” in modern sculpture: “Above all he is a man in love with perfection. [. . .] Brancusi has set out on the maddeningly [. . .] difficult exploration toward getting all the forms into one form.”42 These are slightly contradictory terms: the formal perfection that Pound discerns is both the result of a “process of purgation”—the refined remainder left behind when all excess has been eliminated—and yet somehow, as the one form that encapsulates all other forms, possibly also the result of a process of accretion. Pound’s analysis, in other words, evinces the same paradox

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as Loy’s poem, where the production of the sculpture occurs by reduction but the poem itself operates by accumulating appositives, none of which can conclusively describe the Golden Bird.43 This paradox marks both sculpture and poem as works of maximalist abstraction: they cannot embrace formal simplification without creating or implying some kind of excess or mutability. Put differently, Brancusi’s form is for Loy and Pound an epitome, both the essential form that remains when everything superfluous has been stripped away and the concentrated “nucleus” of other forms. Pound approximates this kind of analysis in his discussion of Brancusi’s ovoid sculptures, such as Danaïde (1913) or The Beginning of the World (1920): “as an interim label, one might consider them as master-keys to the world of form—not ‘his’ world of form, but as much as he has found of ‘the’ world of form. [. . .] I take it Brancusi is meditating upon pure form free from all terrestrial gravitation; form as free in its own life as the form of the analytic geometers.”44 For Pound, Brancusi’s ovoids are “master-keys,” base forms that can help us to unlock the complexities of higher-order forms. Thus Pound, like Loy in her poem, asserts that Brancusi’s abstract sculptures are not just exercises in modeling particular forms; instead, they show us something about form itself. For Pound, these sculptures give the viewer a glimpse of “‘the’ world of form,” access to “pure form” so “free in its own life” that it seems nearly possessed of agency. Brancusi’s sculptures are sublime exercises in unadulterated aesthetics (or perhaps metaphysics), and in Pound’s account, Brancusi begins to sound like a “latter-day Platonist” with no concern for anything besides form.45 Yet while Pound envisions Brancusi’s work as fully abstracted from earthly concerns, Loy’s picture of pure form insists upon an additional, altogether different emphasis. At the same time that Loy goes to such rhetorical lengths to underscore the sculpture’s status as an abstracted aesthetic form— an “archetype,” an “orientation,” an “absolute act,” a “significance,” a symbol, in short—she also highlights its incontrovertible materiality, especially with the unrefined phrase that concludes the second strophe, “a lump of metal.”46 This particular phrase has nothing “hyperaesthetic” about it, and it seems more grounded than the rest of the poem, or more subject to “terrestrial gravitation,” to use Pound’s phrase. In this moment, Loy seems to call up the extent to which Brancusi’s sculpture attracts simplified interpretations or masquerades as an object without artistic aspirations—something crude or primitive. The abstract epitome of all form—the height of aesthetic refinement—therefore also operates on the most rudimentary level, as base material.

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Indeed, some contemporary reactions to Brancusi placed his sculptures entirely outside the realm of art. When Brancusi shipped a 1926 Bird in Space and twenty-five other sculptures from France to New York for an exhibition, US Customs officials took a more industrial or mechanical view of this “lump of metal.” Upon the sculptures’ arrival in the United States, officials “examined the objects for duty-free entry as works of art, took one look at the Bird in Space and saw the similarities it bore to a propeller blade or some other industrial object. They insisted on imposing a commercial import tax on the work, refusing to believe that it was sculpture.”47 The customs officials’ reading might seem to reduce abstraction to mere objecthood or impoverished simplicity, but I choose rather to take from it a useful grounding of Brancusi’s work, a reminder of its materiality, so that we do not risk reading the Bird sculptures—or Loy’s ekphrasis—as exercises in ethereal abstraction. Rather, the poem insists that the sculpture constitutes both a primary artistic form and a naked, elemental object, and both emphases remain in keeping with Loy’s particular aesthetics of abstraction.

“The Irreducible Surplus of the Abstract”: Materiality and Maximalist Abstraction Abstraction, for Loy, thus not only establishes a dialectic, internal to the art object, between rarified aestheticism and base material—a dialectic in which both positions exemplify pure form—but also creates a peculiar kind of surplus. We can see this dialectic at work, and also examine how abstraction generates surplus, in a later poem, simply titled “Gertrude Stein,” which appeared originally as the untitled epigraph to Loy’s two-part essay on Stein in the Transatlantic Review in 1924. The poem more or less rewrites the third strophe of “Brancusi’s Golden Bird”: Curie of the laboratory of vocabulary she crushed the tonnage of consciousness congealed to phrases to extract a radium of the word48 Loy’s lines in “Gertrude Stein” are characteristically short, but much simpler, grammatically, than we find elsewhere in her poetry, so that Loy manages to

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impart a sense of the step-by-step procedure that informs the scientific work of Marie Curie, the composition of Gertrude Stein, and the construction of her own poem. Here, as in “Brancusi’s Golden Bird,” process is a means of paring away excess in order to move from an entire lexicon (“vocabulary”) to the units of a sentence (“phrases”) and finally to the singular “word,” the basic formal unit. Loy recounts this process of paring down by employing a grammar that works in the opposite direction; she layers prepositional and verbal phrases here, just as she piles up appositives and strophes in the Brancusi poem. Such a grammar is clearly meant to ensure that seven of the lines in “Gertrude Stein” conclude with a noun, and the three longest nouns— “laboratory,” “vocabulary,” and “consciousness”—have a vital function in the poem’s creation of meaning through sound.49 These nouns arrive at the end of prepositional phrases beginning with “of,” and Loy delights in the nearly voluptuous way they roll off the tongue: their lines move quickly toward these nouns as conclusions and land hard at the end on their several syllables. (The combined “tonnage” of the words “laboratory” and “vocabulary” is increased by the near eye-rhyme between them, and their similar meter, with the accent on the second syllable.) They represent the “tonnage” one may achieve with a single word that arrives after the proper preparation. At the same time, this strategy ensures that an especially suggestive phrase concludes the poem. We are left with a distilled essence, the “radium of the word,” which here occupies the same position within the strophe as “the nucleus of flight” in the Brancusi poem. Arriving after many small delays, these prepositional objects—these root forms—feel somehow heavy, or perhaps dense. In the case of “Gertrude Stein,” the final “word” contains all the energy produced by the poem’s patterns of sound, its verbal phrases, and its lineation.50 Freighted in this way, “word” acquires a nearly biblical resonance.51 Like Brancusi’s “gong of polished hyperaesthesia,” Stein’s “word” reverberates. Like the element in Williams’s poem Paterson, there too brought forth by Marie Curie, Stein’s “word” is a “radiant gist.”52 And because “the radium of the word” is both base, elemental material and sanctified aesthetic symbol, the poem might be said to resolve the dialectic of pure form in a final phrase of religio-scientific synthesis. “Word” becomes a synecdochic substitute for the poem itself, which delivers a great deal of radiation in a very small package, as Loy announces the arrival of her own work as a singular, elemental aesthetic object. The essay that followed Loy’s poem in the Transatlantic Review demonstrates exactly how Stein’s “word” reverberates outward and proves generative. Loy begins the essay by casting Stein as a nearly religious figure: “Some

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years ago I left Gertrude Stein’s Villino in Fiesole with a manuscript she had given me. [. . .] The core of a ‘Being’ was revealed to me with uninterrupted insistence. The plastic static of the ultimate presence of an entity.”53 Loy’s visit to Stein in Italy occasions an epiphany, and the quasi-Eucharistic manuscript (Stein’s “Aux Galeries Lafayette”) brings Loy not only into the presence of the powerful writer and her prose but also into the presence of an eternal truth, or “austere verity,” as Loy puts it.54 In its avowal of such truths, Stein’s text is unrelenting, even incantatory: “Each one is one. Each one is being the one each one is being. Each one is one is being one. Each one is being the one that one is being. Each one is being one each one is one.”55 With her strictly limited diction, Stein has collapsed the person into “the word” and made both radiate outward. Her prose heightens the individuality and selfsufficiency of singular forms in order to describe “the core of a ‘Being’ [. . .] with uninterrupted insistence.” Lexically “static” though they are, Stein’s unities compound, so that Stein formulates an ontology by way of repetition. By philosophizing in this manner, Stein answers what Loy identifies in the essay as the animating question of modern art: “the ideal enigma that the modern would desire to solve is, ‘what would we know about anything, if we didn’t know anything about it?.’ . . to track intellection back to the embryo.”56 Stein’s manuscript seems to solve this enigma. Attesting to an intellect at work, it simultaneously denies its own knowledge. Often described as childlike, Stein’s language disdains “the tonnage / of consciousness / congealed to phrases” in favor of a radically limited diction, an embryonic “radium of the word.” Both essay and poem thus make clear that Loy values in Stein’s work the same quality, the same drive, that she locates in Brancusi’s sculptures: here, instead of a “patient peasant God,” we find a wish for a protoconsciousness, for a return to fundamental principles and original forms. What Loy admires in the work of her contemporaries is their evocation of a primitive creative process, and her writings about them evince her own desiring essentialism. Such a desire, such a “modern” primitivism, can only find its object in abstract art. As Loy puts it elsewhere in the essay, the task of the modernist writer is to attempt “the crystallization of the irreducible surplus of the abstract. The bankruptcy of mysticism declared itself in an inability to locate this divine irritation, and the burden of its debt to the evolution of consciousness has devolved upon the abstract art.”57 Loy nearly articulates the familiar claim that modernism establishes a religion of art to take the place of discarded Victorian pieties, yet her point is more that abstract art like Stein’s (or Brancusi’s) possesses a mystical charge: it seems to capture that which cannot be reduced. For instance, the people Stein writes about are, according

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to Loy, “packed by her poised paragraphs into the omniprevalent plasm of life from which she evolves all her subjects and from which she never allows them to become detached. In Gertrude Stein life is never detached from Life; it spreads tenuous and vibrational.”58 In Loy’s description, Stein’s characters become cellular forms fit for embryonic “intellection,” situated in a soup of “omniprevalent plasm” and on the verge of evolution. “Packed” and yet also spreading, Stein’s literary forms are nothing less than protean. Loy’s writing about Stein thus combines terms from biology with those from chemistry in order to reckon with Steinian abstraction, and Loy’s turn to the sciences in order to account for Stein’s difficult texts might seem to register—indeed to identify in Stein’s work—“a scientific impulse to get at the very gist of the matter,” as Williams puts it.59 But Stein’s radiating “word” and her protean, evolving character-subjects instead exemplify a kind of “crystallization” that hinges on “the irreducible surplus of the abstract.” Purity of form, as Stein writes it and Loy sees it, does not require minimalism. Consider the famous circular rose motif that appeared on Stein’s note-paper—“a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”—which resembles the text from “Aux Galeries Lafayette” that Loy quotes in her essay: “Each one is one.”60 Though seemingly a proposition about the unchanging nature of a rose’s identity, the motif risks, to use a line from Loy’s Songs to Joannes, an “approachment of — — — — / NOTHING”: an approach to nothingness, to the evacuation of meaning.61 By the final “rose” in Stein’s motif, the word’s content has been emptied out, its referential function halted and its semantics absent. (This is, as frustrated readers of Stein know, a kind of formlessness, and the oscillation between form and formlessness is a subject to which I shall return in the next two chapters of this book.) But we might also note how the motif undercuts its apparent sense of stability by piling tautology upon tautology: it runs on, creating multiple forms where there once stood a statement of absolute unity. Just as protean forms carry the additive possibility of future evolution, iteration and reiteration finally create their own kind of excess. This dynamic surplus created by iteration has an important relationship to Brancusi’s supposed “process of purgation,” too. Brancusi famously worked in iterated forms. Certain shapes and objects, like the ovoid Newborn and the Cock (or Coq), among others, were “produced again and again over the course of four decades, often with only subtle variations among them.”62 Indeed, the 1919–20 Golden Bird that centers Loy’s poem represents a distinct middle stage in between Brancusi’s earlier Maiastra sculptures, completed between 1910 and 1918, and the later Bird in Space series, which Brancusi began in 1923 and continued through the mid-1940s. By contrast with the Maiastra sculptures, in each iteration of the Golden Bird the legs and tail are

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“generalized into one sleek form,” and the chest is rendered as “a swelling in the now continuous shaft of the creature’s body.”63 The later, ultrasleek Birds in Space are even taller and thinner, with each bird’s tail or feet abstracted into a cone shape at the base of the body.64 The overall effect of this sequence of birds from 1910 through the 1940s might seem to be that of increasing abstraction, and in fact, contemporaries such as Pound took Brancusi’s process as evidence of his commitment to the cause of pure form. For example, Clive Bell—brother-in-law to Virginia Woolf and coiner of the confounding term “significant form,” which I discuss in chapter 2—wrote that Brancusi “creates a pure form,” made especially evident “by the fact that of some of his most beautiful works there are as many as three versions, the second pushed farther in the direction of simplification than the first, and the third farther than the second. [. . .] [I]n working towards his goal, Brancusi becomes aware of a further goal, of a simplification more complete, and more expressive, therefore, than his original conception.”65 Golden Bird is indeed more simplified than the Maiastra, and Bird in Space even simpler than Golden Bird. But Brancusi’s effort to simplify requires the ongoing, even perhaps neverending, production of art. His “pure form” manifests paradoxically in “as many as three versions,” and the viewer requires the context of the series in order to appreciate Brancusi’s “direction.” Moreover, the extreme similarity between many of the birds—and especially the identity of some—produces an “irreducible surplus.” At a minimum, the sculptor’s practice denies the singularity of the unique work of art, as we see in a 1924 photograph of Brancusi’s studio that pictures two versions of Bird in Space (figure 3.3). The birds certainly dominate the space and the surrounding sculptures, such as the marble Leda (1920) in the foreground and the bronze Princesse X (1916) in the back, but their twinning is altogether uncanny: it unfixes the viewer’s eye, creating a visual surplus that proves difficult to comprehend. Indeed, Brancusi knew that his repetition of earlier work might require some explanation for those who supported his practice and purchased his work. Writing to John Quinn, the lawyer and collector who owned one of the two versions of the Golden Bird that is Loy’s subject, Brancusi explained, “I did not repeat them merely to do them differently, but to go further.”66 Even as he reasserts the distinctions between the sculptures, Brancusi provides no justification outside his own process. The directionality of his method constitutes his rationale, and he specifies no destination. What might it mean “to go further,” especially to go further than the kind of form that Pound, for one, locates in Brancusi’s work—“pure form [. . .] as free in its own life as the form of the analytic geometers”? Can one, Brancusi seems to ask, maximize abstraction?

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Figure 3.3 Constantin Brancusi, View of the Studio: Bird in Space and Princesse X, 1924. Silver gelatin print, 15¾ × 11¾ in. (40.0 × 29.8 cm). Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. © Succession Brancusi—All rights reserved (ARS) 2019. Repro-photo: Jacques Faujour. © CNAC/MNAM/Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, New York

Photography’s “Incandescent Curves” and Erotic Formalism To maximize abstraction, I propose, the abstract form should suggest something “further” than the sculpture itself, something beyond its own

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boundaries. But such maximalist abstraction does not operate symbolically, by way of the purified form’s capacity for representation. Maximalist abstraction is, as we have seen, a matter of formal surplus, but it is also a question of the kinds of viewing and interaction that purified forms provoke. When pure forms “go further,” they go so far as to address the viewer. Brancusi’s Golden Bird, for instance, is for Mina Loy a “naked orientation,” an object that points, that is directed outward. Indeed, Brancusi’s sculptures, despite their “reticence,” can be seen as outwardly oriented. With this in mind, I want now to consider Loy’s relationship with Brancusi beyond the pages of her poetry to examine what forms such orientation might take, and what formalisms might be required to appreciate them. Loy’s career intersected with Brancusi’s long before she wrote her ekphrasis. The sculptor first exhibited in Paris at the 1906 Salon d’automne, where Loy exhibited a watercolor called Love among the Ladies, and they met in 1921 or 1922, around the time of the poem’s publication, beginning a friendship that would last into the next decade.67 Loy visited Brancusi’s studio, and she sketched a portrait of him in 1924. Brancusi was one of two witnesses invited to the marriage of Loy’s daughter Joella in 1927 (the other was James Joyce); Brancusi arrived at the ceremony with “his wedding present,” the ovoid bronze sculpture titled The Newborn.68 (The work, dated 1920, is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.) Later, in the 1930s, Loy and Brancusi often went to the movies together; there, sculptor and poet “discovered the ‘Thin Man’ series and Mina’s ‘namesake,’ the glamorous Myrna.”69 Loy’s friendship with Brancusi is thus an intermedial one—attested to by their shared engagement with the various art forms of drawing, sculpture, and cinema. Yet another medium, photography, can more directly highlight their connection and explore how abstraction produces what I will call an erotic formalism.70 At some point in the early years of their relationship, Loy was photographed during an evening in Brancusi’s studio alongside other prominent members of the Parisian avant-garde, including Tristan Tzara, Berenice Abbott, Jane Heap, and Margaret Anderson (figure 3.4). Brancusi took this picture himself, and imperfect by any technical measure, it evinces his characteristic photographic aesthetic: whereas other Brancusi photographs are dark or spotted, this one is slightly out of focus. The sculptor had begun photographing his work as early as 1905, and he continued to do so throughout his career. Adamant that no one else should photograph his studio, Brancusi deployed photography, as Anna Chave writes, “to articulate his vision of his works ‘in space’ [. . .] as he continually rearranged them. Photography provided a way of recording diverse, otherwise impermanent mountings and settings of sculptures, a way of transforming one work of art into multiple

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Figure 3.4 Constantin Brancusi, Brancusi, Tristan Tzara, Berenice Abbott, Mina Loy, Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson in the studio, ca. 1921. Gelatin silver print, 5 × 71/16 in. (12.7 × 18.0 cm). Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. © Succession Brancusi—All rights reserved (ARS) 2019. Photo: Philippe Migeat. © CNAC/MNAM/Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, New York

works of art.”71 (Brancusi’s intermedial use of photography to record, understand, and advertise his sculptures is a practice that we shall see applied to painting in chapter 5, which examines the photographs that document the shifting display of paintings in Gertrude Stein’s Parisian home and thereby similarly insist upon artistic multiplicity.) In this photograph, Loy and the other figures appear to have been arranged in space quite consciously, with Tzara, Loy, and Anderson creating an evenly spaced front row and Abbott and Heap in the back, heads staggered for maximum visibility. The author of the composition and the evening, Brancusi sits slightly apart from the group, gazing deeply into the foreground—more primitive or rough in appearance than his dressed-up, clean-shaven guests. Positioned thus, Brancusi is the only figure whose head is not represented by a full shadow on the back wall of the atelier, where the five abstract circles loom large, in a manner not unlike his contemporaneous sculpture Socrates (1922), with its oak circle balanced on a too-thin supporting column. These shadows are produced by strong lighting in the foreground of the photograph that attests to “the modernist fascination with the idea of dematerialising solidity and mass in pure form and space and volume.”72 Here, the dematerialized subject is Mina Loy herself.

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As her torso and especially her hands are overexposed, the lower half of her body nearly dissolves into immateriality and light, and Loy becomes, in any case, the luminous focal point of the photograph—so much so, perhaps, that she attracts the gaze of Margaret Anderson, founder and editor of the Little Review and the lover of Jane Heap, who seems to sulk with her downcast glance in the back row. Brancusi, then, not only uses photography to explore different arrangements of objects and people in space but also to reexamine—or to represent differently and thereby recast—their solid shapes. This challenge to solidity—this dalliance with light—registers the erotic aspect of his work. A similar flare effect constitutes a prominent feature of the photograph of the Golden Bird that appeared in both the Little Review and the Dial, which Brancusi took himself (figure 3.5). Here solidity dematerializes not because of overexposure but rather because of reflection: the photograph emphasizes the reflective surface of the bronze and courts “the dissipation of the edge of the work,” so that “the sculpture’s form is almost completely dissolved by the surface dazzle and play of shadow.”73 The boundaries of the supposedly unified shape appear to be in flux because light, as it strikes the reflective metallic surface, “tends to dissolve the vertical contours into an inexact, unstable gleam, fracturing one’s sense of its absolute shape.”74 In short, even though the sculpture possesses an elemental material form—the quality that Loy identifies when she calls it “a lump of metal”—its polished surface mounts what Pound calls “a revolt against one sort of solidity.”75 The surface makes the sculpture appear on the verge of deliquescing. Loy describes a related paradox in her later essay, “Phenomenon in American Art”: “I came face to face, or rather face to flight with Brancusi’s Bird. A metallic mould of static soaring whose reflection of boughs within Parisian skies beyond her windows gave to solidity an hallucinatory transparence. Is not the aerial content of a bird partly of the sky?”76 Here the ostensibly “static,” “solid” materiality of the Golden Bird is transmuted by its reflective surface into an illusory “transparence,” and the “lump of metal” gives rise to a vision in the sky. Brancusi acknowledges this kind of play with solidity when he claims that “‘a true form ought to suggest infinity. The surfaces ought to look as though they went on forever, as though they proceeded out from the mass into some perfect and complete existence.’”77 Emphasizing the immaterial extension of a sculpture’s surfaces, Brancusi suggests one way in which his pure forms are designed to “go further,” to reach beyond the visually apprehended boundaries of “mass,” shape, and contour. As works of maximalist abstraction, they do not concentrate or collapse inward, but rather aim for infinity.

Figure 3.5 Constantin Brancusi, Golden Bird, ca. 1920. Gelatin silver print, 815/16 × 513/16 in. (22.7 × 14.7 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. © Succession Brancusi—All rights reserved (ARS) 2019. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, New York

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This effect holds true even when a Brancusi sculpture is viewed not via photographic reproduction but rather in the round, in person. Under these viewing conditions, an artwork cannot be apprehended as a totality. Evading clear legibility, it engages in “something one might call the deflection of an ideal geometry. That is, when confronting many of his works, one seems to be seeing simple spheres or cylinders or ellipsoids that have been deformed in some way.”78 As the viewer circles a Brancusi work, its shape never quite settles into the simplified geometrical figure that it nevertheless evokes. Accordingly, Brancusi’s sculptures represent the apotheosis of art making under the conditions of viewing in the round that I described in relation to Henry James: our understanding of form is plastic, shifting over time as we move around the sculpture and compile many partial images of it. When we inspect the shape of the Golden Bird closely, it even acquires a surprising quality of movement—a quality that prompts Pound to say that Brancusi’s “research for the aerial has produced his bird which stands unsupported upon its diminished base.”79 Loy, too, understands the piece as “the nucleus of flight,” as a “naked orientation,” as an object that works like a vector to suggest and initiate movement. Both writers correctly sussed out Brancusi’s aim, which the sculptor described by saying, “It is not the bird that I wish to express but its gift, its flight, its élan.”80 The bird, in other words, refers to concepts beyond itself—we might even say that it represents its medium—but not simply by virtue of symbolism. Through the purity and plasticity of its form, viewed in the round, the sculpture evokes abstract ideas such as flight and the air. Loy’s description of the Golden Bird as a “naked orientation” is especially apt, since Brancusi aims for particularly erotic effects with his biomorphic sculpture. Expressing the “flight” of the bird, Brancusi orients his sculpture vertically on purpose, counter to a flying bird’s normal horizontal orientation. The sculptor himself recognized the provocative possibilities of this vertical phallic shape, saying, ‘“I could wish that one day my Birds and Cocks would pervade the whole universe and express total liberation.’”81 Brancusi’s formal abstraction thus coincides with a bold erotics. The “highly formalised art object” coexists with, and is inseparable from, the “object of fantasy”; the “uncompromisingly simple formal purism,” as Potts so rightly points out, “brings the impurity into focus.”82 Brancusi’s impurity doesn’t lie on the other side of abstraction but rather arises within and from it. This particular erotics of abstraction constitutes one of the primary areas of convergence between Loy’s art poetry and her autobiographical poetry, but before I turn to Loy’s autobiographical work, I want to underscore how Loy’s ekphrasis consistently attends to the erotic charge of pure form in two

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key ways. First, Loy highlights how the sculpture’s condensed, streamlined shape is actually doubly gendered. For Loy, the sculpture is not only masculine, “bare as the brow of Osiris,” but also feminine, the “breast of revelation.” We can view the Bird as resembling both male genitalia and, with its “gently curving crescent or almond shape,” female genitalia, too.83 This double gendering complicates and amplifies the sculpture’s erotic appeal. Second, Loy suggests that the sculpture’s abstraction prompts a particularly erotic mode of viewing: it is “an incandescent curve / licked by chromatic flames / in labyrinths of reflections” (79). These lines might refer to the sculpture as it appears in photographs, exploding into light, or as it appears to a viewer presented with its gleaming, reflective finish. In either case, Loy emphasizes the sculpture’s reflective instability—a quality that unnerves Pound, who objects to the possibility that the sculpture offers an arena for narcissistic selfcontemplation, or even a kind of autoeroticism.84 Loy, by contrast, underscores these dimensions of the sculpture’s erotic appeal with her emphasis on the sculpture’s reflective properties and its construction through rubbing.85 The publication history of “Brancusi’s Golden Bird” can help us to place the sculpture’s—and the poem’s—erotic contents in a context that indicates how obvious this feature was to Loy’s contemporaries. Brancusi’s Princesse X (1916) had been banned by the police from the 1920 Salon des indépendants on grounds of obscenity, at the behest of the salon’s president, who was “offended by the bust’s phallic shape.”86 As Brancusi received significant attention from artists and journalists throughout 1921 and 1922, his work was asked to challenge similarly restrictive, prudish viewpoints. The autumn 1921 issue of the Little Review, titled the “Brancusi Number,” constituted a collective rebuttal to the censorship that had been leveled against the magazine for its serialization of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The issue included the essay by Ezra Pound from which I have quoted, and “photographs of Brancusi’s sculptures were scattered through its pages, as if these ultra-modern shapes voiced an implicit defiance of prudishness.”87 Loy’s ekphrasis of Brancusi’s Golden Bird in the November 1922 issue of the Dial offers the perfect culmination to this avant-garde effort to épater le bourgeois.88 Loy’s poem, like Brancusi’s sculpture, insists upon a mode of maximalist abstraction that can only be appreciated through an “ultra-modern” erotic formalism.

“Form Hurtling against Itself” in Songs to Joannes Erotic formalism is also the best method for approaching Loy’s best-known poem, Songs to Joannes. Chronicling the encounters of two lovers modeled on herself and the futurist writer Giovanni Papini, Loy writes explicitly about

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sex. Her lovers shed “petty pruderies / From slit eyes” and “sidle up / To Nature / — — — that irate pornographist,” and she explores all the dimensions of their relationship, from trickling bodily fluids to egos colliding “in seismic orgasm.”89 Disapproval mounted quickly after the poem’s publication in Others, as it “created a violent sensation” and provoked “public derision.”90 Not only the public but also “critics almost unanimously expressed derision, confusion, or outrage.”91 The imagist poet Amy Lowell threatened to withdraw her support from the magazine because of Loy’s poetry, and Loy’s friend Carl Van Vechten, who was acting as Loy’s literary agent in New York and had placed the poems with Others, suggested that she try to write “something without a sex undercurrent.”92 But the undercurrent had already made its way to the surface, and Loy’s poetry managed to scandalize both the polite patrons of the art world and more avant-garde readers. As the editor of Others, Alfred Kreymborg, later recalled, Loy’s “clinical frankness” simply “horrified our gentry and drove our critics into furious despair”: “The nudity of emotion and thought roused the worst disturbance, and the utter nonchalance in revealing the secrets of sex was denounced as nothing less than lewd. [. . .] Had a man written these poems, the town might have viewed them with comparative comfort. But a woman wrote them, a woman who dressed like a lady.”93 Though Loy might dress something like the lady her Evangelical mother wanted her to become, her poetry disdains such propriety and offers exposure instead: “lewd” revelations of “the secrets of sex” accompanied by a “nudity of emotion and thought.” In Kreymborg’s analysis, Loy lays it all bare, and as she wrote in reply to Carl Van Vechten about the controversy, she meant to. Writing “something without a sex undercurrent” would be impossible, she declared, since she knew “nothing about anything but life—& that is generally reducible to sex!”: “I think the anglo saxon covered up-ness [sic] goes hand in hand with a reduction of the spontaneous creative quality [. . .] life can only evolve something more ample for us—if we help it by getting right into our emotions . . . We moderns have hardly a proscribed psychic area.”94 Rejecting “anglo saxon covered up-ness,” Loy suggests that all modern poets should try “getting right into” the entirety of their psyches, all for the sake of their art. Loy does indeed get right into it in Songs to Joannes, with a graphic description in the opening lines of the second section in which the speaker reflects upon her lover’s genitalia: The skin-sack In which a wanton duality Packed

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All the completion of my infructuous impulses Something the shape of a man To the casual vulgarity of the merely observant95 These lines dramatically reject “covered up-ness” in their presentation of the naked male body to the reader, and they are typical of the bodily imagery that abounds in Songs. This is a poem that consistently underscores, in Rachel Potter’s phrase, “the undeniable fleshiness of sexual relations.”96 By one critic’s count, in fact, fourteen of the poem’s thirty-four sections (which together compose 40 percent of the poem) are “centered on different occasions of/acts of sexual intercourse, or may be said prominently to mention sex,” and these lines include “imaginatively graphic descriptions of specifically sexual apparatuses.”97 Here Loy’s description offers our “first view” of the speaker’s lover and establishes “his genitalia as a metaphor for him.”98 Loy’s “skin-sack” is fleshy in a way that Brancusi’s bronzes are not, yet her synecdoche—“something the shape of a man”—is not an altogether dissimilar abstract form, and not just because she presents male genitalia in the abstract. A protean form like the “nucleus of flight,” the synecdoche is also a uniquely condensed, “packed” figure. We ought not, however, read Songs as a spatial arrangement of similarly abstracted figures and images—a flock of Golden Birds—since Songs to Joannes is a narrative poem that conveys, in however fragmented a manner, the story of the female speaker’s relationship with Joannes, the titular lover modeled on Giovanni Papini (and perhaps on F. T. Marinetti, with whom Loy also had an affair). Loy’s narrative mode in Songs and in AngloMongrels is a unique one, as Marjorie Perloff explains, and it remains one of the primary divergences between her work and that of other modernist poets: “unlike the Marinetti who invented parole in libertà, or the Dadaists of the Cabaret Voltaire, or the Eliot of The Waste Land and Pound of The Cantos, Loy was not a collagiste. She does not paste together disparate verbal fragments, letting their spatial juxtapositions create a complex network of meanings. Rather, hers is a temporal mode, a satiric narrative, however broken and self-interrupting, in which structures of voice and address take precedence over the ‘constatation of fact,’ as Pound called it, of the Image.”99 Perloff insists here that Loy makes use of some of the tools of imagism— and futurism, as I shall discuss shortly—without also relying solely upon their fundamentally spatial, disjunctive poetics. Her long poems prove distinctive because of the extent to which they subject striking images to the “structures of voice and address” that occur over a period of time. One reason for this subordination lies in the extent to which, as Rachel Blau DuPlessis has shown, the poem departs from the narrative conventions

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of sexually explicit works. Representations of sex in Songs do not occupy the “narrative peaks” of the poem and therefore “seem rather a series of repeated behaviors, conceptualized and reconceptualized, thought and rethought.”100 The “self-interrupting” narrative of Songs is, in sum, a narrative of thought and conceptualization: the instances of sex in the poem, and the often concomitant depictions of nudity, serve primarily as grist for the mill of abstraction. In this regard Loy’s narrative resembles that of Henry James: the main event, as it were, is mental—the after-the-fact reflection upon a plot point that is, in itself, less important than its cognitive formulation and reformulation. Put differently, the key moments in Songs coincide less often with abstracted erotic imagery—simultaneously pure and impure forms like Brancusi’s Golden Bird—and more often with Loy’s turn toward abstraction as an ongoing process. Representing the psychological and metaphysical dimensions of the lovers’ relationship, Loy elaborates a poetics of ardent form by focusing on what happens when essentialized forms encounter each other. One such turning point occurs in section XXIX: Evolution fall foul of Sexual equality Prettily miscalculate Similitude Unnatural selection Breed such sons and daughters As shall jibber at each other Uninterpretable cryptonyms Under the moon [. . .] Let meeting be the turning To the antipodean And Form a blurr Anything Than seduce them To the one As simple satisfaction For the other Let them clash together From their incognitoes In seismic orgasm

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For far further Differentiation Rather than watch Own-self distortion Wince in the alien ego (65–66) Loy’s speaker asks evolution for a set of norms that might change how present-day lovers interact with each other. She wants “anything” other than a scenario in which one partner is “seduce[d] . . . As simple satisfaction / For the other” and must therefore “watch / Own-self distortion” and “Wince in the alien ego.” (It is worth noting that, even as the speaker describes this troublesome scenario, in which the ego of one partner consumes the other, Loy refuses to assign the lovers distinguishing gender-based pronouns: the section conceptualizes them instead as two selves mirrored across the boundary between egos.) With an anaphoric series of hortatory entreaties, the speaker envisions an alternative reality in which the lovers encounter each other as equal and opposite forces of nature. She calls upon the powers of “unnatural selection,” asking that they “Let meeting be the turning / To the antipodean / And Form a blurr” and that they “Let them clash together / From their incognitoes / In seismic orgasm.” These encounters imagined by the poem are indeed climactic, yet despite Loy’s use of the word “orgasm” here, they remain less sexual than tectonic, or elemental. For Loy, all things scientific—whether the deflationary “mucousmembrane” of the poem’s first strophe (53) or the “evolution” and “seismic” collision imagined here—seem to offer ways of describing a state beyond, or beneath, the structures of love and sex dictated by conventional, patriarchal romance. Songs to Joannes seeks to picture instead the truth of the lovers’ encounter at a level that is simultaneously cosmic and atomic, and it is through this picturing, which constitutes the primary intervention of the poem, that Songs makes the greatest use of the poetics of ardent form. To understand exactly how the section above deploys such a poetics, we need to consider the representation of the embodied self that underwrites both this section and the entirety of the poem. Andrew Michael Roberts has offered a superb, highly nuanced description of the kind of self that recurs throughout Loy’s poetry: If Loy rarely represents the self as estranged from the body, this is perhaps because she represents the self as rhythmically dispersed and articulated across time, language and sequential experience. The modernist cliché of

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the “fragmented self ” does not seem appropriate here, resting as it does on an underlying idea of a self which ideally exists outside time, but has fallen into time, or a self which ideally moves through time as a coherent agent, but is threatened with disintegration by internal or external forces. [. . .] Her sense of self is rather a sense of process, the movement through time of a subject, existing as a node of experiences, both physical and psychic. The dynamic nature of this “self process” can present itself as dispersal and disintegration (entropy) or as articulation and formation (energy). But the disintegration is not that of a whole which did, or will exist; nor does the articulation create something permanent; both are different modes of movement through space and time.101 What Roberts explains here, without quite saying so, is something akin to a model of the self as matter—a self that is deeply physical and abstract at the same time, divorced neither from the body nor the invisible work of cognition. This kind of self is precisely what Loy alluded to when she wrote to Carl Van Vechten that she had of course eschewed “anglo saxon covered up-ness” in Songs to Joannes: “life can only evolve something more ample for us—if we help it by getting right into our emotions . . . We moderns have hardly a proscribed psychic area.”102 If Loy’s poetry attempts to reject “covered up-ness,” access the full range of human emotion, and explore all “psychic area[s],” then it does so not only by representing nude bodies and sexual intercourse, but also by putting forward a model of the embodied self at its most naked, in its purest form: the nearly particulate level at which selves may interact with the greatest honesty and vitality. Although it goes unremarked by Roberts, this notion of a “self process” is highly compatible with futurist thought. In fact, the futurist influence on Loy proves especially evident in Songs to Joannes, even though Loy’s work will always place more emphasis on human flesh, emotions, and psychology than any strict futurist would allow.103 For instance, the forces described by Loy’s poetry seem allied with Marinetti’s call to arms in the “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature.” He urges futurists to focus their art making in all media upon “the lyric obsession with matter” so that they might “divine its different governing impulses, its forces of compression, dilation, cohesion, and disaggregation, its crowds of massed molecules and whirling electrons.”104 Marinetti’s vision of matter seems congruent with the kind of embodied self that Roberts identifies in Loy’s poetry, which is not so much a coherent, static unit as an ongoing “self process,” which “can present itself as dispersal and disintegration (entropy) or as articulation and formation

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(energy).” There exists no whole—nothing permanent—simply movement through space and time, or as Umberto Boccioni and the other painters who signed their technical manifesto put it, “all things move, all things run, all things are rapidly changing.”105 They argue that this understanding of matter must fundamentally change the forms that the human body takes in painting: “To paint a human figure, you must not paint it; you must render the whole of its surrounding atmosphere. [. . .] Who can still believe in the opacity of bodies, since our sharpened and multiplied sensitiveness has already penetrated the obscure manifestations of the medium?”106 For these painters, of course, this rejection of “the opacity of bodies” coincides with their call for ten years’ suppression of the nude in painting, which held such academic sway that futurists found “the nude in painting, as nauseous and as tedious as adultery in literature [. . .], since artists obsessed with the desire to expose the bodies of their mistresses have transformed the Salons into arrays of unwholesome flesh.”107 Futurist painters hold that their engagement with matter will differ from this tedious academic nude—and even from the nude as reimagined by cubism—and Giacomo Balla, Boccioni, and others describe this distinction at greater length in their introduction to the first futurist painters’ exhibition: To paint from the posing model is an absurdity, an act of mental cowardice, even if the model be translated upon the picture in linear, spherical, or cubic forms. To lend an allegorical significance to the ordinary nude figure, deriving the meaning of the figure from the objects held by the model or from those which are arranged about him, is to our mind the evidence of a traditional and academic mentality. This method, very similar to that employed by the Greeks, by Raphael, by Titian, by Veronese, must necessarily displease us. [. . .] We see no difference between one of those nude figures commonly called artistic and an anatomical plate. There is, on the other hand, an enormous difference between one of these nude figures and our futurist conception of the human body. [. . .] In painting a person on a balcony, seen from inside the room, we do not limit the scene to what the square frame of the window renders visible; but we try to render the sum total of visual sensations which the person on the balcony has experienced; the sun-bathed throng in the street, the double row of houses which stretch to right and left, the beflowered balconies, etc. This implies the simultaneousness of the ambient, and, therefore, the dislocation and dismemberment of objects, the scattering and fusion of details, freed from accepted logic, and independent from one another.108

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The futurist painters reject the notion that other modernist movements in the visual arts have managed to significantly reinvent the nude. Despite the translations of Picasso and Matisse, they imply, these recent paintings rely upon the same grammar of representation, the same rhetoric, as that used by Titian.109 For the futurists, all these nude paintings and sculptures simply testify to “the transformation of the base matter of nature into the elevated forms of culture and the spirit,” but the transformation has ceased to occur: all they see now is the “base matter” of “unwholesome flesh.”110 What the futurists need is a new mode for “the conversion of matter into form,” for turning the body, which represents “pure nature,” into “pure culture.”111 So they seek to replace the stale academic method with an entirely new representational rhetoric—new “structural elements” and “compositional techniques” that will account for the ways in which the body interacts with its environment.112 Their new visual and plastic rhetoric of the body is quasiphenomenological, extending beyond the apparent visual limits of the body itself to include its sensations and its surroundings. The fundamental simultaneity and interpenetration of these ostensibly separate objects is crucial to their vision of pure form, which operates both on the scale of the scene and on the scale of the molecule. Later Boccioni would notably reformulate this idea—that one must paint a person by rendering both the human body and “the simultaneousness of the ambient”—as part of the concept of dynamism explored in his essay “Absolute Motion + Relative Motion = Dynamism.” (Titling an art theory manifesto with an equation—a mathematical synecdoche, a utilitarian twist on the aphorism—is a gesture of abstraction made particularly intriguing by the fact that it is much more reductive than Boccioni’s general philosophy.) For Boccioni, as this equation makes clear, dynamism is made up of two constituent elements, with absolute motion defined, as Christine Poggi explains, as “the result of the inherent volatility of matter with its whirring electrons and propensity to ‘disaggregate,’” and relative motion defined as “the displacement of one object in relation to another.”113 Understood properly, these two kinds of motion should alter how painters and sculptors conceive of artistic form. As Boccioni sums it up, “Dynamism is the lyrical conception of forms: forms as interpreted in their infinite self-appearance, in which their identity resides in the shifting relationship between absolute motion and relative motion, between object and environment, ultimately forming the apparition of a whole: environment object.”114 What Boccioni proposes here is a new kind of fundamental form: lyrically conceived, forms can give the viewer the totality of the “environment object,” or the human figure alongside and interpenetrated by “the whole of its surrounding atmosphere.”115

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In other words, for Boccioni, dynamism—“the lyrical conception of forms”—means that forms have no fixed boundaries. To understand fundamental form, on the level of matter, is to see the connections between all forms. Translated onto the canvas or into a sculpture, Boccioni’s notion of dynamic form should help us to realize the extent to which the body and the objects around it are composed of constantly moving matter—the extent to which, as Boccioni writes, “objects really never come to an end, but intersect each other with infinite combinations of attraction or repulsion.”116 In this way Boccioni’s formal theory collapses the dialectic of pure form so that, in the eyes of the futurist artist, rarefied aesthetics and base material become indistinguishable. In this fashion, what dynamic forms can communicate is nothing less than a kind of “plastic infinity.”117 Though Brancusi was no futurist, he also strives for “plastic infinity,” as I have noted, when he contends that sculptural surfaces “‘ought to look as though they went on forever, as though they proceeded out from the mass into some perfect and complete existence.’”118 Like Brancusi’s sculptures, the embodied selves in Songs to Joannes are represented as dynamic forms; as Boccioni’s manifesto does, Loy’s atomic vision discards “the timeworn concept of a clear distinction between bodies.”119 When her speaker envisions a new romantic norm—“Let meeting be the turning / To the antipodean / And Form a blurr”—she evokes Marinetti’s “whirling electrons” and the possibilities of disintegration and disaggregation. The image may call up the blurred forms in Balla’s painting Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912), and, even more important, it also echoes some even more obviously futurist-influenced lines from an earlier section of Songs, in which the speaker describes the lovers’ reaction to the arrival of dawn. Consider it a futurist aubade: “We twiddle to it / Round and round / Faster / And turn into machines” (63). Mechanical and sexualized all at once—much like Brancusi’s sculptures—the lovers’ bodies and egos seem to interact at the level of matter, or the level of the particle, and at each turning point in the thought of the poem, we find this emphasis on their dynamism reinforced, as Loy consistently makes use of a formal vocabulary that understands the body and the ego to extend beyond any conventionally apprehended boundaries. At one extreme, this dynamism of selves constitutes the speaker’s greatest fear, as she articulates in section XIII: Let us be very jealous Very suspicious Very conservative

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Very cruel Or we might make an end of the jostling of aspirations Disorb inviolate egos Where two or three are welded together They shall become god ——————— Oh that’s right Keep away from me Please give me a push Don’t let me understand you Don’t realise me Or we might tumble together Depersonalized Identical Into the terrific Nirvana Me you — you — me (58) Here we find the same concern about a possible loss of self that the speaker expresses in section XXIX, where she strives not to “watch / Own-self distortion / Wince in the alien ego” (65–66). In this section, though, that fear takes a more cosmic, or atomic form, as she wonders whether their relationship might “disorb inviolate egos”—knock them out of their spheres. By asking the very question, of course, she implies that these egos have never really been inviolate, and the absence of distinguishing gender pronouns here only underscores the extent to which these selves are already “tumbl[ing] together.” “Depersonalized” and “identical,” these essentialized forms risk “the terrific Nirvana,” the same shorthand for apocalypse that we found in “‘Starry Sky.’” But here the condition of nirvana is no longer desirable. Rather, desire plunges one headlong into a game of personal brinkmanship that might end in the nonexistence of the ego. In this way section XIII reworks one of Loy’s “Aphorisms on Futurism,” which gives us a further sense of the dynamism that she evokes: “And form hurtling against itself is thrown beyond the synopsis of vision.”120 Clashing with an equally powerful form, Loy’s essentialized self is catapulted into the void, beyond the retrieval of synoptic, binocular vision (in which the eyes, seeing together, synthesize two fields of view into a single perceived image).121 Form here is charged by the same uncontrollable speed and destructive glee that animate Marinetti’s famous car-crash opening to “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” and in fact, the entire opening of Loy’s manifesto—her first work in print—calls for liberation by way of imagining new pure forms. These forms have the power to reshape human

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consciousness, which does not “spontaneously accept or reject new forms,” but instead is itself transformed: “it is the new form [. . .] that moulds consciousness to the necessary amplitude for holding it.”122 (Loy makes the same point in the “Socratic dialogue” on form in “Mi & Lo,” an unfinished, fragmentary text from the 1930s in which she writes that “Man is not the conceiver of form. [. . .] Form is a signal reconnoitred by the intellect on its march upon the illimitable.”123) Thus even as forms court formlessness, there also emerges the possibility—indeed, the urgent demand—that new forms be generated out of this “terrific Nirvana.” As Loy puts it in her “Aphorisms on Modernism,” “Modernism is a prophet crying in the wilderness that Humanity is wasting its time.”124 Indeed, in section XIV of Songs, where we again find a description of bodily interaction that stresses dynamism, tumbling and hurtling movement is a more positive phenomenon. The speaker presents herself to her lover, declaring that there shall be No love or the other thing Only the impact of lighted bodies Knocking sparks off each other In chaos (59) These lines return to a strain of imagery that appears at the very beginning of the poem in a series of metaphors for orgasm, such as “Eternity in a skyrocket” (53). But the sparks that erupt as these bodies impact one another also belong alongside the instance of lovers “clash[ing] together [. . .] in seismic orgasm”: both seem elemental, electric. The metaphor carries a cosmic charge; “lighted bodies” moving “in chaos” sounds like nothing so much as a description of stars striking each other in space. We can sense yet another dimension of this metaphor when Loy rewrites these lines later in the poem, as she describes fireflies dancing among blades of grass in section XIX: Aerial quadrille Bouncing Off one another Again conjoining In recaptured pulses Of light (61) The speaker does not perceive the fireflies by viewing their bodies; rather, she registers their existence through the beats and loops of light that they create against the darkened backdrop of the grass and the sky. The fireflies interact

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with each other beyond their bodily boundaries by “conjoining / In recaptured pulses / Of light,” just as the lovers in section XIV together produce “sparks [. . .] in chaos.” In both these sections, just as in the strophes in which the speaker worries about the possibility that she and her lover might “disorb inviolate egos” and “tumble together / Depersonalized / Identical / Into the terrific Nirvana,” sexual bodies extend beyond the margins that we can see. To paraphrase Loy, they form a blur—or in her coinage, a “blurr.” These elemental interactions not only illuminate the speaker’s romantic concerns and the poem’s cosmic-confessional register. They also tell us something about form itself, as Loy signals with her capitalization of the word “Form.” If the lovers “Form a blurr,” if they merge “into the terrific Nirvana,” “depersonalized” and “identical,” then Nirvana represents a kind of formlessness, a state without the “orb”-like boundaries of the ego, the independent “lighted body.” Alternatively, we might view Loy’s “blurr”—the combined “Form” created by the abstracted bodies of the lovers—as a form in a state of flux, that arises from a moment of “conjoining” and can morph can into still other forms. In this sense the ardent form comprising the two lovers resembles the protean characters that Loy identifies in Stein’s work, or the plastic form of the Brancusi sculpture viewed in the round or photographically dissolved into light. In Loy’s autobiographical poetry, too, she constructs forms so abstract that they become malleable, capable of changing and creating new forms.

“Primary Embodiment” and Protean Form Loy makes what is perhaps her strongest formalist statement along these lines in a text that seems altogether unrelated to Songs: “Brancusi and the Ocean,” a hybrid work from the late 1920s or early 1930s that is both critical essay and prose poem. This piece, however, cannot be understood apart from the deployment of erotic formalism in Loy’s autobiographical poetry. I quote “Brancusi and the Ocean” in its entirety: The interpretation of Brancusi— the analysis of the elemental. An art engendered beyond the formidable naked subjectivity— Here is no abstraction coerced to the domain of form— Perhaps form arrested at its very inception— a certain élan of primary embodiment— has revealed to us the intriguing comparison of elemental form—

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evolved by the forces of nature— and an elemental form whose evolution is submitted to the process of the intellect— Of a man comparatively young in years—whose concentration—such sublime and imprecise the friction of his aesthetic has brought to a white heat of featureless beauty— the memory and anticipation of aesthetic fulfilment— and he has got irrefutably that something that every one of them lacks— the primary investigators of beauty. At any race he has set a terrible precedent—that will be impossible to eliminate with either fundamental or accessory— The form on which form is based. And so elemental — — — — that it actually connives with the atmosphere in any attainment of a prolongation of its direction A song to the eye— “who” used to take after belle matière— Brancusi is one of the few moderns—whose art has survived its own impetus—its cosmic reticence—he has got none of that everything else that all his other contemporary sculptors have—125 Initially, “Brancusi and the Ocean” seems extraordinarily similar to “Brancusi’s Golden Bird,” especially in its opening phrasing, rhythm, and line breaks—almost as if the poem had been paraphrased as an essay but its lineation and breath retained—so that even though Loy does not mention any sculpture by name, nor refer to any specifically birdlike features of the work in question, we cannot help but read this essay with Brancusi’s bird sculptures in mind. Significantly, Loy seems to echo Brancusi’s description of his own surfaces, which should, as I have noted, “look as though they went on forever, as though they proceeded out from the mass into some perfect and complete existence,” when she writes that his work is “so elemental — — — — / that it actually connives with the atmosphere in any attainment of a prolongation of its direction.” Sculptures like the Golden Bird thus give the viewer at once the elemental object and what the futurists called “the simultaneousness of the ambient” so that we witness “the

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apparition of a whole: environment object.”126 This coincidence of object and atmosphere is especially evident in the title Brancusi gave to his later sculptures, Bird in Space, and it also perhaps prompted the second term in Loy’s own curious title: “Brancusi and the Ocean.” In the latter piece, Brancusi’s work seems to possess an even more charged form than it did in the earlier “Brancusi’s Golden Bird,” as well as a more charged form than is typical of sculpture. Loy considers the unspecified object to have a relationship to the very idea of form: “form arrested at its very inception.” In her view, Brancusi hasn’t seized the notion of abstraction and encapsulated it in a physical form. Instead, he has captured form itself as it begins to exist, in its initial “elemental” state. (Loy makes an even stronger case for Brancusi’s formalism here than does Pound when he writes that Brancusi’s sculptures are “master-keys to the world of form.”127) This is a theory of form that again demands that we reframe the relation between materiality and abstraction. For Loy, as we have seen, the two are very close together: abstraction is grounded in materiality and cannot exist apart from it. For this reason, form can work differently from what we might expect. Functioning less as an end product and more as an initial, fundamental moment, form doesn’t concentrate, turning inward, but rather gestures outward: “Here is no abstraction coerced to the domain of form,” but instead “form arrested at its very inception,” “The form on which form is based.” Put differently, abstract form isn’t a distillate of worldly variety; Brancusi’s sculpture doesn’t contain by gathering up all the forms in the world. Rather, form contains—if it contains—by letting us see the moment right before the Pandora’s box of potential forms is opened. Put yet another way, form is protean, not Platonic. We can think of what Loy wants us to understand about Brancusi as a change in Raymond Williams’s emphasis: that we think less about “formed wholes,” less about “works of art” as “explicit and finished forms,” and more about art as “a formative process.”128 Loy’s emphasis on formative process becomes even more apparent if we scrutinize Loy’s diction here: “art engendered beyond [. . .] subjectivity,” “form arrested at its [. . .] inception, an “élan of primary embodiment.” This is the same diction that Loy uses to theorize human conception and childbirth throughout her autobiographical poetry. So we ought to consider the formal conception that Loy describes in her ekphrases of Brancusi—recall that in “Brancusi’s Golden Bird,” the sculpture is created by “immaculate / conception”—in conjunction with the human conception she discusses in Songs to Joannes, where Loy makes such extensive use of Boccioni’s idea of dynamism, “the lyrical conception of forms.”129

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Loy’s speaker in Songs often contemplates the possibility that she and her lover might conceive a child. When the speaker worries about losing her ego in a portion of section XIII that I have already quoted, she also fears that her self will merge with that of lover in their offspring: they “might tumble together / Depersonalized / Identical / Into the terrific Nirvana / Me you — you — me” (58). The speaker expresses her concern about the combination of personalities that results in the annihilation of both, as I have already indicated. Yet we can also read “Nirvana” here as a kind of placeholder for their desired child, since as the rest of the poem makes quite clear, no child is ever created. (Whether this absence occurs because of miscarriage, abortion, or simply failed conception is virtually impossible to tell.130) Loy returns to this image of the two lovers combining in the production of, or falling into, nothing, later in the poem, in section XXVII: The contents Of our ephemeral conjunction In aloofness from Much Flowed to approachment of — — — — NOTHING (64) Loy deploys her characteristic dashes both as a kind of vector, to signal the lovers’ approach to conception, and as an indicator of emptiness, the absence of substantive words or offspring.131 The lovers are left instead only with “Nucleus Nothing / Inconceivable concept” (63), the victims of “prenatal plagiarism” and “foetal buffoons” (66). They have missed, in sum, their chance to capture the “proto-form” (66). Not the “nucleus of flight” but rather a “nucleus” that is also “nothing,” their imagined child is the ultimate abstraction. By contrast, if Loy sees Brancusi’s sculpture as accomplishing a kind of conception, if the Golden Bird renders form as it becomes material and enters the physical world, then what his work offers the viewer is nothing other than embryonic form, “proto-form,” protean form: “the form on which form is based.” As an elemental form, such an abstraction exists within a strange erotic context, providing both “memory and anticipation of aesthetic fulfillment,” along a temporal horizon that extends from the past into the future. “Brancusi and the Ocean” anticipates the endurance of the art object, as a “precedent” that “has survived its own impetus” and will outlast the “contemporary.” Like an imagined child, the sculpture instantiates an

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ardent futurity. In this way, what Loy offers, both in her work on Brancusi and in Songs to Joannes, is a theorization of conception that makes use of a futurist-inflected understanding of how life at its most elemental behaves, whether this life is the protean form, the individual ego, the particular atom, or the soul naked in the cosmos. Simultaneously, Loy strongly counters the ideal of immaculate male conception that arose in various avant-garde movements in the early twentieth century, when artists such as Marinetti (in his novel Mafarka) and Guillaume Apollinaire (in his play Les mamelles de Tirésias) put forward a procreative ideal in which men give birth to their own offspring.132 (Indeed, elsewhere in her work, most notably in her “Feminist Manifesto,” Loy calls for radical changes in sexual politics precisely because she wants to remove women’s sexuality and childbearing from the discursive and ideological control of the patriarchy. She advocates “the unconditional surgical destruction of virginity through-out the female population at puberty” in order to dispense with “the fictitious value of a woman as identified with her physical purity.”133 With virginity eliminated as a controlling factor in the marriage market, every woman, married or not, might then exercise her “right to maternity”—a right that, for Loy, is inflected with eugenicist imperatives because “every woman of superior intelligence should realize her raceresponsibility, in producing children in adequate proportion to the unfit or degenerate members of her sex.”134 There is no shortage of ways that Loy’s feminism can make twenty-first-century readers feel ill at ease. Even so, Loy’s eugenicist and biologically determined vision of womanhood in the “Feminist Manifesto” helps to theorize a woman-centered procreative ideal that combines with the rest of her oeuvre to provide a rejoinder to her contemporaries’ “masculinist dream of omnipotence.”135) Whether she pictures sexual bodies interacting beyond their apparent visual boundaries, or as in “Brancusi’s Golden Bird” and “Gertrude Stein,” presents an origin story for an “absolute act / of art,” Loy’s lyrical conceptions present a new way of understanding the actions and interactions of elemental forms. Marinetti’s and Apollinaire’s autogenous protagonists, Picasso’s experimentation upon the faces of his Demoiselles d’Avignon, Duchamp’s cheekily titled Nude Descending a Staircase, and the futurists’ vehement desire to suppress the nude—all these bold gestures participate in a “modernist trajectory” that can be defined, as Nead argues, in terms of “an attempt to transcend the earthly domain of woman/nature/representation in order to discover the higher masculine plane of pure abstraction.”136 Loy’s poetry, by contrast, turns to “the irreducible surplus of the abstract” and reveals all

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the ways in which abstraction can turn away from the results of reduction to the bare minimum and toward the potential contained by the protean form. Loy’s maximalist abstraction brings together nature and form, erotics and aesthetics—no matter whether we consider her longer autobiographical poems, such as Songs to Joannes, or her shorter art poems, such as “Brancusi’s Golden Bird.” Loy’s elemental bodies, objects, sculptures, and selves manifest a kind of modernist abstraction that is far from sterile, leaving us with the sense that in her work, too, we may locate “the form on which form is based.”

Ch a p ter 4

Bad Formalism Evelyn Waugh’s Film Fictions and the Work of Art in the Age of Cinemechanics

Writing in his diary at the age of twenty, in July 1924, Evelyn Waugh guiltily observes the gap since his last entry: “More than a week has passed but I cannot quite remember how. I went out with Adrian one evening and overdrank myself with Terence another and I have been to many cinemas.”1 At the time, Waugh had just come down from Oxford, and the hazy fog of this entry, in which too much alcohol and too much cinema going blend together, is a characteristic affect of his student years and his early twenties. His diaries from this period are filled with similar notes of debauchery, as when, for instance, he and his friends pooled their efforts in the summer of 1924 in order to make a twenty-minute film called The Scarlet Woman. Their production metamorphoses into reckless consumption: The week before was hectic with cinema work and extremely expensive. Looking back on it I think the money was ill spent. The film cost us each £6, the hire of the dresses and taxi fares added heavily, and on Saturday night I gave a dinner to Elsa Lanchester which cost £4. [. . .] We were all a little drunk. Terence put on the cinema and I was quite disgusted with the badness of the film. Elsa and I discovered that we were born on the same day and fought all over the floor for a pound note which eventually became destroyed.2 135

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The film concerned an attempt to convert the head of Church of England to Catholicism, but there is no semblance of religious decorum among the players and the production team. The scene is decidedly symbolic: young aspiring artists celebrate their completed film with a party and end up drunk, aesthetically disappointed, and abjectly scrabbling for money that they destroy during the fight. Having not much to begin with, they end the evening with still less. This note of indulgence and disgust recurs in Waugh’s writing about the cinema throughout that autumn. On September 1, he is clipped but serious (and perhaps a bit melodramatic in his brevity): “Most of the day writing this diary. In the afternoon to a cinema. Resolved to go to no more cinemas promiscuously.”3 In the next entry, on September 3, he adopts a more confessional tone: “In spite of my earnest resolution never again to waste time at a cinema I have spent both yesterday and this afternoon in that unprofitable way. I am ashamed and more than ever strengthened in my resolution.”4 Waugh’s guilt is multivalent—at once sexual (“promiscuous”), economic (“unprofitable”), and temporal (a “waste” of “time”). Whereas he was “disgusted” with The Scarlet Woman’s lack of quality, he is here disgusted with himself, and his resolutions are no longer about fixing “the badness of the film” but rather about improving his own bad morals. In the throes of his early affair with the cinema, Waugh cannot his escape his sense that there remains something vulgar or immoral about the medium. Taken together, these youthful diary entries evince an undisciplined propensity for dissipation that seems spurred by, symbolically associated with, or best explained by the cinema. In this chapter I link such instances of cinematic dissolution to the question of formlessness and thereby depart in one key regard from the critical consensus about Waugh’s relationship to the cinema. Critics have generally agreed that the cinema is the site or source of form, not formlessness, for Waugh. As George McCartney, perhaps the most influential reader of Waugh, puts it, “Although Waugh had little respect for the film industry and its products, he frequently expressed himself in terms of cinematic strategy [. . .] which supplied him with the mechanics to build underlying patterns into his narratives, no matter how helter-skelter their surfaces might seem to the casual reader.”5 This is the same kind of reading that I have articulated and disputed in chapter 2, for instance, where the “underlying pattern” of To the Lighthouse is understood to derive from the painting’s composition, and borrowing from other media is believed to help writers such as Woolf and Waugh to produce newly stable literary forms. McCartney’s position does seem supported by Waugh’s own letters, in which he dispenses advice to other writers. “This is the inestimable value of the

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Cinema to novelists,” Waugh writes in 1921: “Make things happen. [. . .] Don’t bring characters on simply to draw their characters and make them talk. Fit them into a design.’”6 He echoes the sentiment more than thirty years later: Could you not conceive of Maria Pasqua’s life as a film? I don’t mean— Heaven forfend—that it should be filmed, or that you should attempt to give it any of the character of a Hollywood script. I mean in the mechanics of the imagination. Instead of seeing it as an historical document, imagine yourself watching a film—each incident as precise and authentic as in the present version, but with the continuity (in the technical cinematographic sense) and selective dramatic emphasis and scenery of a film. And then write as though describing the experience.7 Strategy, mechanics, pattern, design, technique—these are all elements of structure, or synonyms of form. The dissimilarity between Waugh’s diary entries, on the one hand, and his letters and critics’ opinions, on the other, establishes a curiously bifurcated way of understanding Waugh’s relation to the cinema as an encounter that somehow produces both bad feelings and good form. McCartney articulates precisely this dichotomy in the sentence that I have quoted, and other critics reiterate it. For example, Marius Hentea holds that “while the film within a novel in Vile Bodies is a ridiculously comic affair (a biopic of John Wesley), the novel takes cinema seriously in its formal construction.”8 Lisa Colletta makes a similar point in the opposite order: “Waugh appreciated the unique perspective of the camera’s eye, and the capacity of a filmic approach to fiction to capture the fragmented and unreal quality of modern life, and yet he is scathing in his mockery of the confusion and disorientation that results from the bogus reality perpetuated in motion pictures.”9 These critics repeatedly sideline Waugh’s distaste for the movie-making industry—and for cinema as a stimulus within a debased culture of consumption—by treating it as a matter of context or content, even as they are ready to acknowledge that Waugh imports filmic technique into literature. This chapter argues, by contrast, for considering Waugh’s feelings as matters of form. The lack of “respect” that Waugh shows for film, the “ridiculous” absurdity that filmic plots evince, the “confusion and disorientation” that film produces—all these features noted and bracketed by critics should be reexamined and linked to the dissipation of Waugh’s diary entries as questions of form. Specifically, I contend that Waugh’s film writing is better characterized as a formalism gone bad, even perhaps a bad formalism. Calling up Waugh’s guilt about and disgust with the cinema, this term restores

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some sense of the affective investment associated with Waugh’s use of film, rather than relegating Waugh’s negative feelings to the realm of content, cordoned off from the domain of form. More important, bad formalism names the overarching narrative aesthetic that Waugh develops out of his relationship with film, illuminating how Waugh’s film writing constantly oscillates between two poles of formal extremism, sometimes courting a dissolution into chaotic formlessness, as his diary entries have hinted, and at other times risking a mechanical, formulaic rigidity. Both parts of this dialectic can be described by bad formalism: formlessness arises because of an underdeveloped, incomplete, or insufficient formalism, while formulaic rigidity represents a too stringent formalism, one that squeezes any aesthetic life into a stultifying format. And if cinema produces this dialectic, as I will show, then we ought not classify Waugh’s film fictions as yet more examples of good modernist formalism, in which the influence of a nonliterary medium provides a steady, guiding structure. Of course, modernist formalism, as we have seen, has not operated in the way that the historicist turn away from it would suggest: it has never been as good at isolating and reifying the artwork as form-averse critics claim. The preceding chapters have tracked how the complex processes of intermediality in the modernist period do not turn literary artifacts into art objects such as bowls, paintings, or abstracted avian sculptures—durable exemplars of spatial form or pure form. Instead, intermedial influence ensures the continued dynamism of modernist literary form as it shapes novels through the practice of reading in the round (or via the narrative metamorphoses of still-life objects) and maximizes poetry’s abstractions. With this in mind, I aim to consider in this chapter what it might mean to take the idea of bad formalism seriously—not as a synonym for apolitical modes of reading form that the field would rather forget, but rather as a species of formalism that engages with the formal possibilities raised (or foreclosed) by modernist literature. Following the provocations of Mina Loy’s poetry, this chapter considers what kind of formalism is available after modernism has reached the apex—or as Loy would have it, the bedrock—of form with works like Brancusi’s Golden Bird. (Indeed, the dialectic of bad formalism inverts the dialectic of pure form that I described in the previous chapter. There, both positions—“hyperaesthesia” and “lump of metal,” as Loy’s Brancusi poem puts it—can be described as pure form. Here, their logical extremes— aesthetic form taken too far, to the point of suffocating rigidity, and materiality left alone, in a formless muddle—both exemplify bad formalism.) As Waugh—who arrived late to the modernist scene, in the second half of the

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1920s—reacts to his precursors, the very dynamism at the heart of modernist form becomes problematic, sending his work careening between the unsatisfactory options described by bad formalism.10 To elaborate this aesthetic, this chapter considers a much wider range of texts than most critics writing about Waugh and cinema have done—both early and late work, short and long, more and less overtly experimental. Ranging across the novels Vile Bodies (1930) and The Loved One (1948) and the stories “The Balance” (1926) and “Excursion in Reality” (1932), I track the relation between the two formal extremes explained by bad formalism. Everywhere we find bad formalism associated with the cinema, as I shall demonstrate, we also find a devaluing of the written word, especially the literary written word. Novels, memoirs, and poems that Waugh’s characters mean to write never get finished (or sometimes even started), and literature is sold off, replaced by the gossip column, or subjected to the indignities of plagiarism. The situation is not quite so dire as Waugh makes it sound in “Excursion in Reality,” where he writes that “the written word is dead,” and “now the film” replaces it.11 But his protagonists do seem to experience a fear that Ellen Rooney attributes to another late cultural moment: “the terror of formlessness, and it has erupted because reading has lost its place.”12 Such formlessness is articulated and elaborated through a range of cinematic attributes, including zany activity in “Excursion in Reality”; constant noise, chatter, and gossip in “The Balance” and Vile Bodies; and decadent artificiality in The Loved One. What the cinema finally represents, I argue, is the possibility that the formless might operate not just upon modernity but upon modernism itself. In this way I follow Georges Bataille’s “task”-based definition of the formless (informe) as “not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world.”13 This negative definition of informe usefully points to two particular aspects of the formless as it works in Waugh’s fiction. First, as a verbal action, the formless brings modernism down, as Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss write, through “certain operations that brush modernism against the grain, [. . .] split off from modernism, insulting the very opposition of form and content—which is itself formal, arising as it does from a binary logic.”14 The signal function of these de-forming operations is to declassify, “in the double sense of lowering and of taxonomic disorder,” and we shall see Waugh so act throughout his work, especially in relation to modernism, which he “brush[es]” and “split[s] off from”—neither an integral contributor to its operations nor entirely separated from them.15 Moreover, insofar as I aim in this chapter to restore Waugh’s bad feelings to the conversation about cinematic form, to return this

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affective content to the form of his work, I also aim to trouble the distinction between content and form that Bois and Krauss identify as central to modernism before its subjection to the informe. Second, cataloging such instances of formless action inevitably runs, as Bois and Krauss note, “the risk of transforming the formless into a figure, of stabilising it.”16 Bataille’s original description acknowledges this transformation. The formless is not only a “word,” a “term” to be defined by a “dictionary,” but also a concept that takes shape (even if only negatively or tenuously) as a figure of speech, as the simile by which Bataille points to what the term designates: that which “gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm.”17 The formless, as Benjamin Noys puts it, punning on Bataille’s French, is both informe and “always in-form.”18 Rooney makes much the same point: “formlessness is in some special sense a case of form.”19 Reading Waugh’s formless workings thus, this chapter tracks the ways in which the formless tips over—through the dialectic of bad formalism—into form, and specifically into the formulaic. Whereas formlessness appears in varying guises and as distinct specific forces across Waugh’s film fictions, the formulaic emerges primarily via his repeated plots and flat, superficial characters—what I call his “cinemechanics”—which I explain here because it offers such an effective introduction to the fictions that focus this chapter. First, Waugh relies on a stock character who begins each story or novel in the same initial position. Whereas the paradigmatic Jamesian situation places a naive American in Europe, where he or she will encounter slippery conversations and immoral sexual sophistication, fall from innocence, and eventually come to knowledge, Waugh’s favored protagonist is a young artist in an unfavorable economic position, slightly adrift in a world that does not understand (or to which he cannot convincingly market) his work. This artist surfaces in “The Balance” as Adam Doure, who demonstrates talent in his drawing classes at the Maltby School of Art; in Vile Bodies as the aspiring memoirist Adam Fenwick-Symes; in “Excursion in Reality” as Simon Lent, a moderately successful but nevertheless poor novelist; and in The Loved One as expatriate poet Dennis Barlow. Second, this protagonist is always placed within a plot that looks like a Künstlerroman, the genre that traces that repeated modernist narrative, the growth and development of the artist. By the end of the artist-protagonist’s progress—whether we think of Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Gertrude Stein in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas—we see that the artist is capable of producing the work we hold (or, in the case of Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse, a work analogous to the one we hold). But in Waugh’s hands the Künstlerroman takes a different path to

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a less heroic end, as Waugh twists the narrative and pushes it into a different shape. No Waugh artist-protagonist manages a feat of literary production, and his Künstlerroman cannot take the shape of the book in the reader’s hands, because Waugh remains skeptical about the force of original artwork in his particular cultural moment. Writing late in (or even after) modernism, Waugh offers no apotheosis of the artist. Instead, the bad formalism of his film fictions ultimately points to the precarious condition of the writer struggling to survive a changed media ecology dominated by the cinema.

Cinemechanics in “Excursion in Reality”: A Zany Plot and a Flat Character Waugh puts his typical character and paradigmatic plot into action most obviously in his 1932 short story “Excursion in Reality,” which stages the central paradox of his cinemechanics: the frequency with which repetitive formulas rapidly shift into the formlessness of chaotic activity. Waugh introduces us to his artist-hero, one Simon Lent, in economic terms: “Half-acrown into the white cotton glove, because Simon Lent was too tired to ask for change.”20 With this lament in free indirect style, Waugh hints, as we will soon learn, that his protagonist is in financial difficulties. Such a dramatically large tip has only intensified this position, and Simon has nothing to show for his profligacy: he has had “an unsatisfactory evening” during which his date, Sylvia, “would not drink anything because Simon had said he was broke,” and they simply “sat for five or six hours, sometimes silent, sometimes bickering” (78). This unnecessarily extended, contentless event will be replayed several times throughout the story, and it supplies the template for the narrative as a whole. “Excursion in Reality” shows us Waugh at his most formulaic, but because these repeated forms are empty, flat, or meaningless, the story slides from one extreme of bad formalism to the other. The focus on Simon’s finances continues as Simon returns alone to his attic room, for which he pays “six guineas a week,” and Waugh’s narrator proceeds to inventory the bills and inquiries that have arrived in the mail from the tailor, the hosier, his club, the restaurant, his bank, and “the incometax collector” (78–79). By “marked contrast,” the other part of Simon’s mail consists of completely useless tokens of admiration: “a box of preserved figs from an admirer in Fresno, California; two letters from young ladies who said they were composing papers about his work for their college literary societies [. . .]; press cuttings describing him as a ‘popular,’ ‘brilliant,’ ‘meteorically successful,’ and ‘enviable’ young novelist” (79). In this way the opening of “Excursion in Reality” foregrounds and accelerates the same plot

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elements that we find throughout Waugh’s work: the poor young artist will have to stoop below the level of his talent in order to earn some money. But instead of becoming a gossip columnist like Adam Fenwick-Symes in Vile Bodies, Simon Lent finds his source of income in his mail alongside his bills, in the form of a letter “headed with the name of a Film Studio in one of the suburbs of London” (79). Simon eagerly entertains the idea of “writing for the Films” (80) and throws over his budding, if unremunerated, career as a novelist. As he later tells Sylvia, novels are an outmoded art form anyway: You see, for the first time in my life I have come into contact with Real Life. I’m going to give up writing novels. It was a mug’s game anyway. The written word is dead—first the papyrus, then the printed book, now the film. The artist must no longer work alone. He is part of the age in which he lives; he must share (only of course, my dear Sylvia, in very different proportions) the weekly wage envelope of the proletarian. Vital art implies a corresponding set of social relationships. Co-operation . . . co-ordination . . . the hive endeavour of a community directed to a single end . . . (87–88; ellipses original) I will return to Simon’s superficial pomposities, but for now I want to underscore the extent to which his boasting explanation for abandoning novels and entering the studio world is dependent upon a socioeconomic justification. The artist must participate in the labor practices of his time: not different in kind from the proletarian worker, he shall be one of many striving toward a common goal. But even as Simon declares his unity of spirit and purpose with the proletariat, his hive vision of modern artistry suggests a key point of distinction: his “weekly wage envelope” shall deliver his share “in very different proportions.” The written word may be dead and replaced with the film, but for Simon the new salary—not the new medium—makes the transition worth it. Thus committed to the “single end” of the film, Simon Lent embarks upon an excursion in Real Life that makes plain exactly how unsuited his pseudoconstructivist rhetoric is to the world of the studio. Indeed, while “Excursion in Reality” is a story ostensibly about film production, no one produces a film at all. Instead Waugh presents a flurry of activity that never quite amounts to anything, and perhaps nothing so epitomizes this absurdity as the way in which Simon enters the film industry. Waugh devotes fully half the story to the process of getting Simon into a meeting with Sir James Macrae, the film executive who has sent him a letter requesting his “angle on a picture” (80).

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Simon eagerly responds to the letter by phoning Sir James’s night secretary, and despite the fact that it is nearly three o’clock in the morning, a car arrives and transports him to Hampstead, where he meets Sir James. Sir James has no memory of why he wants to meet Simon—and neither does the night secretary, who simply made Simon’s appointment under the instructions of the day secretary. Confused, everyone agrees to meet once the day secretary returns to work. So Simon returns to his sad attic room, where he is awakened less than four hours later by a phone call from the day secretary. In short order he finds himself back in Sir James’s car and heading toward the studio. But once he arrives at the lot, he discovers that no meeting is imminent. Simon waits all day for a rescheduled appointment with Sir James and has a near miss in the late afternoon: summoned over the loudspeaker to the conference room, he hurries across the lot, only to find the door closed and marked “Keep out” (84; italics original). Sir James, it turns out, has been called away and the meeting pushed back yet again, so Simon takes the subway to London to intercept Sir James at his office in Piccadilly. There, he finally discovers exactly what film Sir James is planning to make, and what his own apparently valuable “angle” is. Sir James wants nothing less than “to produce a film of Hamlet [. . .] in modern speech,” and he wants Simon to write the dialogue, with the help of a continuity editor named Miss Grits and a stenographer named Miss Dawkins (85). This zany sequence, with the content of the event repeatedly deferred, sets the pattern for Simon’s work on the film. No longer resigned to the dullness of his usual life, Simon adopts the frenetic pace of the studio: [H]e pursued a routine of incalculable variety, summoned by telephone at all hours to conferences which rarely assembled; sometimes to Hampstead, sometimes to the studios, once to Brighton. He spent long periods of work pacing up and down his sitting room, with Miss Grits pacing backwards and forwards along the other wall and Miss Dawkins obediently perched between them, as the two dictated, corrected and redrafted their scenario. There were meals at improbable times and vivid, unsentimental passages of love with Miss Grits. He ate irregular and improbable meals, bowling through the suburbs in Sir James’s car, pacing the carpet dictating to Miss Dawkins, perched in deserted lots upon scenery with seemed made to survive the collapse of civilization. (89) The high degree of repetition in Waugh’s diction here—“pacing,” “perched,” “improbable”—underscores the “routine” quality of all this irregularity, which echoes and extends the pattern established by the opening half of the

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story. Waugh’s characters hustle and bustle but are never engaged in creating a solid object: their scenario is always subject to correction and revision, and the conferences about the script and production never assemble.21 Substanceless activity is so routine in this story that the cinema seems to turn formlessness into a kind of form. “Excursion in Reality,” notably, does not offer the same kind of divestment from narrative events that we saw in To the Lighthouse, where the crucial plot point is deemphasized in order to elevate ordinary occurrences and minor processes. Neither does Waugh’s story resemble The Golden Bowl, which turns away from the event—“the occasion round which we have perhaps drawn our circle too wide”—by focusing on the reflections that it prompts afterward.22 Waugh still emphasizes the exceptional adventure and the rampup to the big event, but he offers no certainty that the event will ever actually occur: his circling characters may never home in on the occasion at all. His film fictions do not even offer up red herrings for spatial-form readings, as Woolf and James do (and as I have discussed in chapters 1 and 2). “Excursion in Reality” gives the reader no bowl of fruit and a seashell nor a golden bowl, but only aimless “bowling through the suburbs.” The bad formalism of routine, empty activity—at once formulaic and formless—shows us how dynamism makes modernist form into something other than the art object. “Excursion in Reality” tracks a bad formalism that inhabits the artistic process, and Waugh’s work usefully helps us to see how form is not simply a property of objects—not just a noun—but also a verb. And paradoxically, because Waugh so strongly underscores this capacity, his film fictions can be considered more consonant with the dynamic narratives by Woolf and James than we might expect. In a phrase that offers an unmarked echo of Bataille’s informe as a verbal operation, Sianne Ngai describes similarly formless forms as types of “informal form” that can, as she explains, “challenge some of our most deep-seated and conventional definitions of what ‘form’ is.”23 One exemplar of informal form for Ngai is zaniness—an aesthetic that parallels Waugh’s bad formalism because “zaniness asks us to regard form not as structure but as activity.”24 As we have seen in “Excursion in Reality,” activity abounds: Simon Lent, Miss Grits, Miss Dawkins, and even Sir James’s chauffeur work and move constantly. Pacing and dictating, eating and drafting, “bowling through the suburbs” and making “love with Miss Grits”—all these aspects of Simon’s employment blur together. He seems indifferent to any distinction between activities: they are all part of his “routine of incalculable variety.” In this way, working in the movies epitomizes how zaniness, Ngai writes, “involves a certain deformation of the forms of activity, a certain indifference to their

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qualitative differentiation.”25 This is the difficulty—or perhaps the threat— that the movie industry presents to the professional writer: “there is something precisely form-obliterating about the form that zany movement and action takes.”26 Simon’s work as a writer seems no more crucial than any other activity, and his “vivid, unsentimental passages” are composed, not of dialogue for the script, but of sex with Miss Grits. The cinematic, as Waugh presents it in “Excursion in Reality,” thus always threatens to deform the literary. In fact, the written work Simon and Miss Grits produce through this “form-obliterating,” zany process proves to be dramatically less substantial than the film scenery “made to survive the collapse of civilization.” Waugh never offers the reader a glimpse of the scenario at all, and little wonder, since it undergoes sweeping changes as “the experts [. . .] deliver their contributions” (90). The story moves from Denmark to Scotland, makes Ophelia the sister of Horatio rather than Laertes, and loses Gertrude and then gains her back in ghost form (at the expense of the king). Then, with the addition of the three witches—whose appeal “prove[s] too strong”—the scenario begins “incorporating with it the story of Macbeth,” as well as Julius Caesar and King Arthur (90–91). (This is the same cavalier treatment of British literary history that we shall see in Waugh’s later novel The Loved One.) Renamed The White Lady of Dunsinane and reworked over the course of a week, the new scenario is no sooner presented to Sir James “as ‘white script’ ready for shooting” than it is scrapped entirely—restored to the original whiteness of the blank page (91). Sir James, we discover, has decided that the overwrought scenario is unnecessary, since they already have a perfectly serviceable shooting script in the original play. “I don’t like the dialogue,” he tells Simon: “It misses all the poetry of the original. What the public wants is Shakespeare, the whole of Shakespeare and nothing but Shakespeare. Now this scenario you’ve written is all very well in its way—but it’s not Shakespeare. [. . .] We’ll use the play exactly as he wrote it and record from that” (91). Now, since Simon’s dialogue-writing “services” are no longer required, Sir James sends him home with parting words more appropriate to the close of a dinner party: “nice of you to have come” (91). Such an inconsequential goodbye, which reorients Simon toward his attic room, gestures at the way no plot point in the story ever quite builds into an event or develops the characters. The plot of “Excursion in Reality” is hardly static—as we have seen, it’s saturated with manic energy—but when Waugh concludes the story, all this activity amounts to little more than enervation, as Simon lies “in bed with all his energy slowly slipping away” (92). Just as the writing and production process never results in a film, so too the story itself

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produces nothing—only a restoration of the initial state of affairs. When the story begins, Sylvia calls Simon to demand “twenty minutes’ intimate explanation” for Simon’s “lousy” behavior on their date (80–81). At the end, having been let go by the studio, with “nothing to do,” Simon decides finally to call Sylvia back: Well, he supposed, now was the time to go away to the country and get on with his novel. Or should he go abroad? Some quiet caférestaurant in the sun where he could work on those intractable last chapters. That was what he would do . . . sometime . . . the end of the week perhaps. Meanwhile he leaned over on his elbow, lifted the telephone and, asking for Sylvia’s number, prepared himself for twenty-five minutes’ acrimonious reconciliation. (92) Quite plainly, nothing has changed, and Simon will now pick up his relationship with Sylvia right where it left off. Their reconciliation is delayed, however—held off beyond the story’s conclusion, as are “the end of the week” and “the time to go away to the country and get on with his novel.” Waugh ends the story in medias res, and Simon is left hanging on the telephone, waiting for Sylvia to answer. The story just stops, and the contents of the events that seem to mark its conclusion are once again deferred to a future time. Like the events, the plot, and the ending of “Excursion in Reality,” the story’s characters are also evacuated of meaningful content. Our introduction to Simon Lent by way of his mail would seem to suggest that he constitutes a writer of quality, if not of unique capabilities, and Sir James’s assessment of his utility to the studio confirms such an impression—“Many of the most high-class critics have commended Mr. Lent’s dialogue” (86)—but Simon Lent is hardly a singular character. He is, as I have already suggested, a collection of characteristics that Waugh often deploys in his other fictions: poverty, artistic ambition, troubled romance, and susceptibility to a madcap lifestyle entirely out of his control. (The effect is that of F. Scott Fitzgerald come too late, out of the right time and in the wrong place.) More accurately, then, Simon Lent is more of a character function than a character. He manifests—to the extent that so sketchily outlined a character can manifest anything at all—E. M. Forster’s description of the flat character: “Flat characters were called ‘humorous’ in the seventeenth century, and are sometimes called types, and sometimes caricatures. In their purest form, they are constructed round a single idea or quality.”27 The operative notion here is not, as Alex Woloch notes, that “a flat character might represent an idea,” but rather that “the character himself can become abstracted into an idea.”28 Simon Lent is

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less a struggling young writer than the idea of the struggling young writer—a highly formulaic character type, especially within Waugh’s oeuvre. To put it differently, we might say that Simon Lent is highly replaceable: there have been Simon Lents before this particular specimen takes his excursion in reality, and there shall be again. Waugh communicates this inessentiality through the reactions of Miss Grits, especially the studied nonchalance with which she introduces Simon to the filmmaking process and disposes of him once he is no longer useful. She greets the dressing-gowned Simon by informing him of his superfluity: “We arranged to start at ten [. . .]. But it doesn’t really matter. I shall not require you very much in the early stages” (87). And although Miss Grits supposedly serves Simon “in an advisory capacity, helping with the continuity and the technical side” (86), he ends up serving her, as her lover. She finds “it’s so much easier to work with a man if you’re having an affaire with him” (88). Their relationship is hardly evidence of Simon’s special status as a talented writer, then; it actually confirms his lack of distinction. Simon’s replaceability is driven home by Miss Grits’s goodbye to him, which marks his definitive break with the studio world. Declining a lunch invitation on the telephone, she insists that a date will be “quite impossible” because she has “to do the continuity” for another scenario, presumably with another screenwriter who will become her temporary lover: “Don’t suppose I shall see you again. Good-bye” (92). Miss Grits’s casual, detached tone here mirrors our own affect as we finish reading the story: we don’t suppose we shall see Simon Lent again, and we can hardly be bothered to care. The ending of the story thus highlights exactly how flat the protagonist of “Excursion in Reality” is. As David Galef notes, “flat characters, though lacking in depth, are finished creations, possessing what one might call contextual closure. A successful minor character may invite curiosity, but a well-drawn flat character provokes no further probing. When ‘what if ’ extrapolations are applied to flat depictions, the result is apt to be a failure.”29 Here, despite the fact that Waugh defers the contents of the story’s final events to a future time, we are not prompted to probe further or consider what might happen next to Simon Lent. The ending is tidy, and final, even though it leaves Simon hanging on the telephone. As a flat character, he constitutes a “clean, two-dimensional surface,” and our relation to him is unburdened by the sympathy that might be generated if Waugh gave us greater access to a more complex consciousness.30 Simon’s flatness therefore goes hand in hand with what critics have described as Waugh’s “external approach”: he particularly eschewed “what he considered the expressive fallacy of interior monologue and intense subjectivity.”31 Seldom does Waugh’s narrator describe Simon’s mental state,

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and when we do receive such information, it is a cursory report: “Next morning Simon woke bright and cheerful as usual and was about to leap from his bed when he suddenly remembered the events of last night. There was nothing for him to do” (91–92). Our narrator remains distant, uninterested in significant introspection, or incapable of finding it in such a character: “the truth, which no one who saw into Simon Lent’s heart could possibly have suspected, was that he was in his way and within his limits quite a famous young man” (79). Seeing into Simon Lent’s heart, our narrator finds no natural source for his fame. His very interiority is superficial, and this vacancy epitomizes the formlessness at the heart of the formulaic.

Cinematic Noise in “The Balance”: Chattering at the Movies and the Viewer’s Perspective This conversion of interiority into externality, of what should be depth into additional superficiality, seems to arise logically from Waugh’s satirical aims, which critics have typically associated with his adaptation of filmic techniques. They argue that Waugh joins the critical viewpoint of the camera eye with the perspective of the satirist, learning from his own early experiences with film and the experiments of earlier writers, especially the novelist Ronald Firbank, how to “create something like a camera’s-eye view” and “how to externalize his characters’ mental states” in order to achieve an “objective style” appropriate to satire.32 This critical commonplace, however, requires revision in light of the scholarship on modernism and cinema that has emerged in the last ten years. It is an analogical argument of the type that David Trotter identifies as having dominated the field for too long: “The literary text, this argument goes, is structured like a film, in whole or in part: it has its ‘close-ups’, its ‘tracks’ and ‘pans’, its ‘cuts’ from one ‘shot’ to another.”33 By extension, the author of the text is like the director or the editor of the film—standing outside its plot, looking through the lens of the camera. However, this conflation between the perspective of the camera eye and the critical viewpoint of the satirist is too easy.34 First, the camera eye is not necessarily critical: as Trotter reminds us, it can also be considered neutral. Cinema as a medium (that preceded the existence of the art form, as is true of photography) centers on “the instrumentality of a nonliving agent.”35 Second, the director is not the only creative force behind a film. As the cinemechanics of “Excursion in Reality” shows us, writers and production teams are important, too. And finally, the camera does not possess the only eye that matters in the cinema, as Waugh indicates in the writing advice that I have

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already quoted: “imagine yourself watching a film [. . .] and then write as though describing the experience.” I want to turn, therefore, to the perspective of the film viewer and consider how this position on the filmic experience shapes Waugh’s aesthetic of bad formalism in his first published short story, “The Balance” (1926). Much more experimental than his later work, the story began life as a novel, and Waugh enthusiastically reported its genesis in his diary: “I have quite suddenly received inspiration about my book. I am making the first chapter a cinema film and have been writing furiously ever since. I honestly think that it is going to be rather good.”36 Waugh’s understanding of his project might sound very much like the kind of analogy that Trotter disdains, with his new text set to be “structured like a film,” but Waugh drops the vital preposition: he isn’t making his first chapter like a cinema film; it is a cinema film.37 In his view, “The Balance” doesn’t formally resemble a film, but rather is the film itself. And while Waugh shortened his project during the writing process, finally publishing his book as a forty-page story, its deep engagement with film remains.38 In its final form, “The Balance” has four parts: in order, they are “Introduction,” “Circumstances,” “Conclusion,” and “Continuation.”39 What ties all four sections of the story together is a set of shared characters—chiefly Adam Doure, who is, like so many Waugh protagonists, an aspiring artist with little money, a vexing love life, and reckless aristocratic friends—and an investment in dialogue, a tool that Waugh will remain reliant on throughout his career. Here, as is typical, Waugh’s dialogue highlights the emptiness or purposelessness of young people’s conversation, creating a strong sense of dramatic irony and offering vocal noise as the imagined soundtrack of modernity. The mother of one young aristocrat in Adam Doure’s circle laments this effect: “they all talk so quickly that she can never hear what they are saying and they never finish their sentences either—but it doesn’t matter, because they always talk about people she doesn’t know. [. . .] Who are they talking about now?”40 The chatter of her son’s friends is too fast and too difficult to interpret from the outside. Like the talk of most young people in Waugh’s fictions, these conversations are incomplete and obscure. We can certainly connect the dialogue in “The Balance” to the “clicking exchange of dry-hearted lovers” in “Excursion in Reality” and “the cinematic clamor of competing voices in Vile Bodies,” but the dialogue of this early story is also uniquely situated by the film viewer’s perspective because the section called “Circumstances” interweaves the film scenario about Adam Doure with the reactions of the audience at a showing of the film.41 We meet Gladys and Ada, “the cook and house-parlourmaid from a small house

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in Earls Court” (5), as well as a “young man” “with a Cambridge accent” who sits in “the more expensive seats” (6, 11). The story presents their commentary in italics, and for the sake of clarity, we are told at the beginning of the section (figure 4.1) that “the conversations in the film are deduced by the experienced picture-goer from the gestures of the actors; only those parts which appear in capitals are actual ‘captions’” (5).42 The film is therefore a silent one, and the picturegoer that Waugh’s narrator imagines can’t hear or see the dialogue that appears in lowercase type, nor can she read the narration of action or scenic description in roman type (see, for instance, figure 4.2), although these aspects of the film would presumably be rendered visually onscreen. The world of the film and the world of these picturegoers aren’t exactly separate, however, since the narrator takes their viewing assumptions into account. The description of the London home of a wellto-do couple makes this effort explicit: “An interior is revealed in which the producers have at least made some attempt to satisfy the social expectations of Gladys and Ada. It is true that there is very little marble and no footmen in powder and breeches, but there is nevertheless an undoubted air of grandeur about the high rooms and Louis Seize furniture, and there is a footman” (12; italics original). With the onscreen images positioned thus in relation to Gladys and Ada, “Circumstances” seems to be both a plan for a film and a representation of a specific viewing: it exists, narratively, both before and after itself as a screenplay and a record of reactions to what eventually appears onscreen.43 The picturegoers’ “expectations” are indeed important, and Gladys, Ada, and the Cambridge voice occupy a position analogous to that of the mother on the outside of the young people’s conversation: their commentary provides an external perspective on the actions and affectations of the Bright Young Things. As these audience members watch the film, differences in social class and education affect their reactions and are represented in their speech. Gladys and Ada have a tendency to drop the initial aspirated “h” that begins words like “his,” and they worry about the love story between Adam and his girlfriend Imogen Quest—“’E’s thinking of ’er” (14)—and the possible titillation of scenes set in a class with nude models at Adam’s art school: “‘I say, Gladys, do you think we shall see ’is models?’ ‘Coo, Ada, you are a one’” (9). By contrast, the Cambridge voice offers dismissive assessments of the film’s aesthetics and realism: “Expressionismus” (6), “These films would be so much more convincing if they would only employ decent draughtsmen to do the hero’s drawings for him” (14), “It is curious the way that they can never make their heroes and heroines talk like ladies and gentlemen—particularly in moments of emotion” (18), “The ease with which persons in films contrive to provide themselves with the

Figure 4.1 Page 281 from the first edition of “The Balance,” in Georgian Stories 1926. © 1927 by Evelyn Waugh, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC

Figure 4.2 Page 290 from the first edition of “The Balance,” in Georgian Stories 1926. © 1927 by Evelyn Waugh, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC

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instruments of death” (19). But even if Gladys and Ada are clearly marked out as ridiculous by the narrator, with their repeated use of coo and their dropped consonants, then so too is the Cambridge voice: the narrator refers to him as a member of the “the cultured bourgeoisie” in a mocking tone because of his pseudointellectual pretension (14). (Since Waugh himself attended Oxford, his description of this voice as Cantabrigian offers the reader’s first sign that it will be subject to critique.) Gladys and Ada’s conversation dramatizes the cinematic tension between the formulaic and the formless as they attempt to classify the film, to understand it through a known rubric, only to find that it defies such rigidity. The discussion begins as they sit down and Ada offers an initial hypothesis: “I say, Gladys, what sort of picture is this—is it comic?” (5). When the picture shifts abruptly, with a saxophonist becoming a “vortex of movement” while “faces flash out and disappear” and “fragmentary captions will not wait until they are read,” they change their assessment: Gladys says, “I do call this soft” (6). And they modify their hypothesis further when Adam, Imogen, and their friends appear at a club: “‘No, it isn’t comic, Ada—it’s Society.’ ‘Society’s sometimes comic’” (6). This key question about genre and humor is then quickly rephrased by the narrator as Gladys and Ada contemplate Adam’s similarity to Buster Keaton: “Can it be funny?” (6). This constant consideration of multiple genres never actually clarifies anything for Gladys and Ada. Their conversation only seems to eliminate possibilities and leave both of them confused about how to approach the film. When Ada complains, “It can’t be Society, Gladys, they aren’t eating grape fruit,” Gladys has no good answer for her: “Well, if it isn’t funny and it isn’t murder and it isn’t Society, what is it? [. . .] I calls it soft, that’s what I calls it [. . .] I don’t understand this picture’” (8). Again, Gladys labels the film “soft”: it is inadequately strict in two senses, both uncategorizable and insufficiently realistic. Softness is a formal term that describes the film’s formlessness, and this lack of rigor is uncomfortable for the viewer. Gladys only feels “at last quite at home” when “the film has been classified” as a cross-class romance after Imogen’s forced separation from Adam: “Young love is being thwarted by purse-proud parents” (16). Of course, this apparently final classification is quickly undone—the film is too soft to stay within generic boundaries for long. Watching Adam stand at Euston Station “on the platform watching the train disappear” (18) and then contemplate only “solitude and the thought of Imogen” (19), Gladys and Ada jump to the next possible plot point even before Adam “takes a small blue bottle from one of the pigeon holes” in his desk: “Gladys is there already. ‘Suicide, Ada.’ ‘Yes, but she’ll come in time to stop ’im. See if she don’t.’ ‘Don’t you be too sure. This is a

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queer picture, this is’” (19). The film thus presents Adam’s suicide as a genuine possibility, which runs counter to the established moves of the genre. Like soft, queer serves here to mark the film’s absence of a defined shape, and these words give a form to the film’s formlessness. And as soon as Gladys comes to this conclusion, they must shift their assessment again, as they begin to recognize that they are supposed to receive some kind of “Instruction” from a film that they previously believed to be a romance (20). The lesson is telegraphed as Adam, pondering suicide, sees a series of three visions: first his family’s overwhelming emotion at the sight of his dead body, then a sick man dragging himself into the African jungle to die while his wives cry out, and finally a bestial, bloody Roman orgy. The three scenes are connected by Waugh’s implied verdict on their sentimentality and savagery: “unspeakable vulgarity” (20). The message could not be clearer for Gladys and Ada, but their conviction in its didactic aims eventually dissipates, too, for the end of the film attempts to reflect in its form the dissolution of Adam’s evening into drunken escapades with his friends: “the film becomes a series of fragmentary scenes interspersed among hundreds of feet of confusion” (29). Gladys is discomfited: “It’s going queer again, Ada. D’you think it’s meant to be like this?” (29). At this point, Gladys’s generic confusion is such that she has even begun to doubt the intentions of the filmmakers. Exiting the theater, she cannot help but reiterate this skepticism—“Well, I do call it a soft film”—while Ada indicates that it has been less than aesthetically coherent: “with the pictures you has to take the bad with the good” (33). The narrator chimes in, too: “Next week there may be something really funny” (33). The film is not funny, but it is both good and bad—all queer fragments and soft confusion that stymie Gladys and Ada’s attempt to reckon with the film in a single description of its genre or quality. It defies the format of the generic category. Importantly, Waugh casts Gladys’s and Ada’s reckoning with the film in dialogic form. This section of the story presents what Laura Marcus has described as a “narrative of ‘talking in the cinema’, in which a demotic feminine speech tends to operate as a model of distracted viewing.”44 This kind of talking in the cinema would have been distinguished from the speech of “the film lecturer or film explainer, who, in the early years of cinema, provided a spoken commentary to accompany films as they were projected.”45 Although film lecturing had largely disappeared from British cinemas by 1925,46 this portion of Waugh’s story nevertheless stages the contrast that Marcus identifies by positioning the vernacular conversation of Gladys and Ada—which McCartney describes as “a noisy but very sensible assessment of the ‘soft’ proceedings”—against the more sophisticated, learned interjections

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of the Cambridge voice.47 As I have already mentioned, though, both registers of commentary are subject to the narrator’s mockery, and neither kind of viewer is fully absorbed by the film in front of them. This film puts the entire public, as Walter Benjamin writes, “in the position of the critic”: “at the movies this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.”48 Presenting multiple viewers’ running commentary on the film alongside its dialogue, “The Balance” tracks precisely this kind of public examination. The chatter of the film viewers is even echoed in the film itself, with its images of modern sound-producing objects. For example, Adam gets a telephone call from Imogen during a life drawing class, which the secretary Miss Philbrick is forced to interrupt: “MISS QUEST WANTS TO SPEAK TO YOU ON THE TELEPHONE, MR. DOURE. I told her that it was against the rules for students to use the telephone except in the luncheon hour [. . .] but she says that it is most important” (13). (As I have noted, the capital letters, which are prominent in figure 4.2, distinguish the caption that would appear on a separate card from the part of the conversation that would be performed by the actors and implied by their gestures.) Adam follows Miss Philbrick to the office, where the close quarters ensure that “much of the forbidden conversation is audible to Miss Philbrick” (14). And at the Oxford party Adam attends between his extraction of the blue bottle and his actual suicide attempt later that night, “the gramophone starts playing ‘Everybody loves my baby’” right before the camera “fade[s] out” in order to underscore his heartbreak (31). Both Miss Philbrick’s eavesdropping and the spinning of the gramophone would presumably be captured by the camera, and the song on the gramophone would be incorporated into the music played to accompany the film.49 What makes these two moments important is their shared insistence on the way in which Adam’s private feelings become public through sound. Here sound—not the objectivity of the camera eye—constitutes the primary means by which Waugh “externalize[s] his characters’ mental states.”50 These sounds travel through the spaces in the film: Miss Philbrick overhears the telephone conversation in the office, and the song on the gramophone plays out across “the quad” (31). A low-level sound pollution is at work here, just as there is in the theater filled with the running commentary of Gladys, Ada, and the Cambridge voice. This representation and refraction of the picturegoer’s experience, then, suggests that in writing his “cinema film,” what Waugh is really writing about is the noise that surrounds the silent film. As several critics have argued, noise marks the infringement of the social world upon the territory marked out for art. Josh Epstein, for instance,

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writes persuasively that noise is “an interference that destabilizes listening and opens the text’s interiority to a range of external pressures,” which is precisely the dynamic that obtains for Adam’s feelings. Epstein goes further, too, arguing that noise in modernism is “the sound of the artwork coming to grips with the failure of its autonomy from social life.”51 This is the sound of form’s failure, of the collapse of the ideal of aesthetic wholes aloof from worldly and material concerns, and this lack of autonomy corresponds for writers and critics in the 1920s to a lack of beauty—perhaps even to a manifest ugliness or vulgarity—because “for the majority of commentators in the period, ‘beauty’ was identified with ‘silence’, drawing on a long-standing aesthetic credo in which silence is equated with universal and enduring values.”52 (Consider, as a paradigmatic example, the closing lines of Loy’s “Brancusi’s Golden Bird,” where “The immaculate / conception / of the inaudible bird / occurs / in gorgeous reticence.”53) Neither the theater space occupied by Gladys and Ada nor the Oxford presented by the film about Adam Doure provides a locus for beauty in “The Balance,” and in fact, Waugh’s story seems more interested in tracking the ways in which noise threatens the stability of defined forms. To put it one way: is the film about Adam Doure really unclassifiable, or does it only become so because Gladys and Ada’s conversational ruminations keep the question of genre alive? Epstein’s theorization of noise within modernism is especially useful here, since he reminds us that noise “by definition involves the transgression of a sonic, aesthetic, geographic, or cultural boundary.”54 Noise isn’t only auditory, in other words: it can also be visual, as the emphasis on the viewer’s perspective in “The Balance” makes clear. Early in the film, a saxophonist becomes a “vortex of movement” as “faces flash out and disappear” and “fragmentary captions will not wait until they are read” (6). This sequence would seem to be an exercise in quick jump-cuts, but we can also discuss it as a visual representation of noise.55 Waugh extends this visual noisiness to his presentation of captions more generally. A rapid series of caption cards bearing the characters’ dialogue provokes significant displeasure from Gladys, Ada, and the Cambridge voice. Registering her discontent synesthetically, Ada says, “Too much talk in this picture, eh, Gladys?” and the Cambridge voice offers an incompletely reported comment on the “elimination of the caption” (10). Since they are watching a silent film, they aren’t irritated by audible noise, but rather by the visual cacophony created by too many capital letters. As this page from the first edition of “The Balance” demonstrates (figure 4.3), Waugh ensures that the reader of his story suffers the same exasperation: the capitals are overwhelming. If the caption stayed true to its etymologically designated purpose, it

Figure 4.3 Page 287 from the first edition of “The Balance,” in Georgian Stories 1926. © 1927 by Evelyn Waugh, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC

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would take command: a caption should capture the viewer’s and the reader’s attention and make its meaning clear.56 But when it is overdeployed, the caption pushes viewers toward an opposing response: they speed-read, distractedly, or simply ignore the caption.57 Visually noisy, the captions in “The Balance” are a clear example of bad formalism. Rick Altman has argued that the “ventriloquism” of sound film—the strategy of “portraying moving lips on the screen” to convince the viewer that sound has been produced by a character within the diegesis, rather than by the technology of the loudspeaker—is meant to distract the viewer from the fact that film “begins as language—the screenwriter’s—and not as pure image.”58 Waugh’s insistence on visual representations of noise seems to anticipate and respond in advance to this strategy. Refusing to accept the “repression of the screenwriter,” Waugh reasserts the claims of language against the image.59 But by foregrounding language through noisy print, Waugh also points to the overall devaluation of the written word within a cinematic culture, where there are, as we shall see, no stable literary forms left.

Savaging the Written Word: The Cruel Media Ecology of “The Balance” The diminishment of the literary by the cinematic can be linked to a vital strain of imagery in “The Balance” to which I have only referred in passing so far: savagery. As McCartney notes, Waugh “linked film with primitivism” to such a degree that “wherever filmmaking enters his narrative we can expect some reference will be made to the jungle.”60 Savagery emerges in the visions that Adam sees as he contemplates suicide, which I have already mentioned, as well as in another moment that might initially seem entirely unrelated. During a lunch date with Adam, Imogen orders steak tartare: “Close up; a dish of pulverized and bleeding meat: hands pouring in immoderate condiments” (16). Compared to Adam’s abstemious omelet, Imogen’s steak tartare is the picture of excess—not sophisticated cuisine, but raw food for an unrestrained animal. The image indicates that savagery, and the qualities to which it is linked, are appetites that can tilt the scale if they are not sufficiently balanced by reason. But the savaged meat, presented in a verbal close-up shot, is not, as McCartney would have it, simply evidence of Waugh’s disgust with the cinema, but rather a dish that makes the close alliance between bad feelings and bad form clear. Despite its ostensible sophistication, the steak tartare represents an absence of decorum, of the forms of propriety.61 This “immoderate” savagery carries with it a sense of formlessness that Virginia Woolf identifies in film. She famously begins her essay “The

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Cinema” by writing about the viewer’s experience of the tension between defined shapes and inchoate fragments: People say that the savage no longer exists in us, that we are at the fag end of civilisation, that everything has been said already and that it is too late to be ambitious. But these philosophers have presumably forgotten the movies. They have never seen the savages of the twentieth century watching the pictures. [. . .] All is bubble bubble, swarm and chaos. We are peering over the edge of a cauldron in which fragments seem to simmer, and now and again some vast shape heaves and seems about to haul itself up out of chaos and the savage in us starts forward with delight.62 In her view, watching a film is a process of watching for the moments when shapes emerge from a sea of “fragments,” from the roiling, bubbling “swarm and chaos.” This opening leads Laura Marcus to conclude that “Woolf at times appeared to be suggesting that cinema is a lesser art than literature, and certainly more ‘primitive’”—exactly the value system that orients Waugh’s work.63 I want to highlight, too, the extent to which Woolf ’s rhetoric here positions the savagery of the filmgoer in relation to the history of the arts; despite—or because of—their appeal to the “primitive” within the viewer, the movies can say new things and be ambitious. Somehow, the savagery of the movie watcher suggests that we moderns are not quite yet “at the fag end of civilisation,” even if the new medium causes us to regress behaviorally. Waugh’s own view of cinematic savagery lacks any such positive valence. For him, savagery is not just a matter of misguided menu choices or primitive picture viewing. Savagery and vulgarity manifest themselves in precisely the place where we might expect to find the locus of European civilization— in the library. Waugh is careful to note that Adam has “rather a remarkable library for a man of his age and means. Most of the books have a certain rarity and many are elaborately bound; there are also old books of considerable value given him from time to time by his father” (21). Disrespecting these individual works of civilization, Adam “makes a heap on the floor of the best of them” and takes his books off to sell them (21).64 This characterization of Adam’s library suggests, quietly, that literature has never really been an autonomous site of aesthetic value for Waugh: like all other art forms, it is class bound and subject to economic pressures. Adam’s destination is Mr. Macassor’s bookshop, a den of dissipated reading, with books “everywhere, on walls, floor and furniture, as though laid down at some interruption and straightaway forgotten”: here the wisdom of reasoned intellect has been

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converted into the “treasures” of acquisitive appetite (21). Mr. Macassor, whose name evokes both the antiquated Victorian antimacassar and the savagery of a massacre, combines fustiness and ferocity in his attitude toward Adam’s books, lecturing Adam about the sadness of having to sell books before he “adjusts his spectacles and examines [the books], caressingly, but like some morbid lover fastening ghoulishly upon every imperfection” (22). His greed and his lust for decay are, in their own way, just as vulgar as Imogen’s steak tartare, and Mr. Macassor makes two crucial things clear. First, savagery is also, for Waugh, a kind of decadence—a vision of what follows from a philosophy that upholds art for art’s sake and strives for the conversion of life into art. For Waugh, any type of overindulgence is an aesthetic immoderation that signals the threat that all appetites—even cultural appetites—pose to the civilized world.65 In their ability to register this threat, moments of savagery in his work carry with them the temporality of decadence, which Vincent Sherry describes in terms of “anti-futurity,” “backward orientations,” and “the imaginative circumstance of aftermath.”66 Waugh expresses significant disdain for savagery and, in this story, for decadence, but again linking such negative affect to the form and function of Waugh’s oeuvre, I want to suggest that his work in general operates within this decadent temporality—specifically, as I shall contend in relation to Vile Bodies and especially The Loved One, within a decadent temporality of belatedness that obtains after modernism. Second, with Mr. Macassor’s bookshop serving as the sole repository of literature in the story—the logical final resting place, where all the books of young people will end up—“The Balance” establishes a media ecology very similar to the one we find in “Excursion in Reality,” where “the written word is dead” and “the printed book” has been replaced by the film (87). Writing and literature are dead in “The Balance,” too, left subject to the necrophilic lust of Mr. Macassor. In fact, “The Balance” reveals this ecosystem in its very first line, which reduces the written word to a cruel, gossipy party game of analogies: “Do you know, I don’t think I can read mine. It’s rather unkind” (3; italics original). If we consider the animal register associated with savagery in this story, we might say that media ecology is a less metaphorical term than it usually is. This media system seems right for a story that Waugh classifies as “a cinema film,” a story in which the aspirational form—the condition to which all art should aspire—is not music, or Adam’s drawing, or a novel, but the cinema, specifically a cinema that is steeped in dialogue within and without and characterized by noise. Since literature is no longer read, it must give way to conversation and chatter.

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Stamping Out Literature: Talkies and Gossip in Vile Bodies A very similar devaluing of the literary in favor of cinematic chatter occurs in Vile Bodies (1930), Waugh’s first best seller and the novel that made him a celebrity.67 Waugh clearly patterned Vile Bodies on “The Balance.”68 And here, too, the cinema is a medium primarily constituted by language.69 For instance, when the protagonist Adam Fenwick-Symes and his girlfriend Nina Blount have a date to the cinema and contemplate changing their plans, they engage in metafictional conversation, boring talk about how talkies are boring: “‘You’re much later than you said. It’s so boring to be late for a talkie.’ [. . .] ‘Talkies are boring anyhow’” (121). Their generalization is borne out by the only talkie with which Waugh specifically acquaints us: an absurd biographical feature about John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. The film is shot at Doubting Hall, the appropriately named estate of Colonel Blount, Nina’s father, and its production setup includes all the required equipment for a talkie: “A string band was playing not far off and round the singers clustered numerous men in shirt sleeves bearing megaphones, cinematograph cameras, microphones, sheaves of paper and arc lamps” (199). Here the visual (the camera and the lamp) is outnumbered by the auditory (the band, the singers, megaphones, and microphones), and the auditory is further bolstered by the “sheaves of paper” containing the film’s dialogue. The set at Doubting Hall makes the “technological origin” of sound obvious and attests to “the role [. . .] of the screenwriter”: rather than “suppress[ing] language,” Waugh’s imagined film world suggests instead that language lies “at its very heart.”70 Indeed, for Waugh the word “talkie” seems to call up not just the art form of sound film but also the same combination of noisy speech and print that we saw in “The Balance.” This linguistic definition of the cinema is best exemplified by the way that Mr. Isaacs, the film’s producer or director, explains the production to Adam: “Have a card. That’s the name of the company in the corner. Not the one that’s scratched out. The one written above. The Wonderfilm Company of Great Britain. Now this film,” he said, in what seemed a well-practised little speech, “of which you have just witnessed a mere fragment, marks a stepping stone in the development of the British Film Industry. It is the most important All-Talkie super-religious film to be produced solely in this country by British artists and management and by British capital. It has been directed throughout regardless of difficulty and expense, and supervised by a staff of expert historians and theologians. Nothing

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has been omitted that would contribute to the meticulous accuracy of every detail. The life of that great social and religious reformer John Wesley is for the first time portrayed to a British public in all its humanity and tragedy. . . . Look here, I’ve got all this written out. I’ll have them give you a copy before you go.” (202–3; ellipsis original) Mr. Isaacs’s pitch to Adam is a canned speech, full of clichéd claims for the value and historical distinction of the film. Going on far too long, it becomes noise, as the addition of every proposition undercuts the efficacy of the whole. “All-Talkie” and no substance, his attempt to sell the film’s importance can do nothing other than fall flat. But Mr. Isaacs remains unconscious of his shortcomings: his speech is so “well-practised” that he has “all this written out” in prepared copies that he can offer to the press. (A sharp contrast to the handwritten company name on his card.) Mr. Isaacs’s distributable speech turns moviemaking into a practice of bad reproduction, exactly aligned with his incompetent representation of Wesley’s life. Moreover, Mr. Isaacs’s bad copy helps us to understand cinema in Vile Bodies as a form of writing—an understanding of the medium that is underscored by Colonel Blount’s term of reference for the movies: “the cinematographs” (91). Etymologically, film is a way of writing movement.71 (This is, perhaps, the most succinct way to describe the operation of “Excursion in Reality,” which is for Waugh an exercise in writing about movement, and for Simon Lent, an exploration of the movements required to write.) But if film is writing in Vile Bodies, then we must admit that it is bad writing, as the Christmas Eve screening of the film at Doubting Hall makes evident. The Colonel is forced to present it as a silent film—“I’m afraid I haven’t got a talkie apparatus yet” (300)—and because the film still has captions and subtitles, it registers as text for the viewers who must grapple with its inconsistent pacing. One title is “displayed for practically no time at all” so that Adam and Nina “scarcely [have] time to read it before it [is] whisked away obliquely” (299). By contrast, another “legend, vibrating a good deal, [. . .] fill[s] the screen for some time” (299). This discrepancy is the result of incompetence: “‘Of course, I shall cut the caption’s [sic] a bit before it’s shown commercially,’ explained the Colonel” (299). The need to decrease the film’s impact as text for the broader market suggests that there exists some fundamental connection between the movies and the devaluing of the written word—a connection that is borne out by the contents of Colonel Blount’s library, which include “cheap weeklies devoted to the cinema” (94). From a different perspective, however, the cinema in Vile Bodies seems to prompt the revaluing or the precise valuing of the written word, since this

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is how Adam Fenwick-Symes will actually get paid in return for his writing. Adam begins the novel on a ship crossing from France to Britain after “two months in Paris writing a book”—his memoirs (7). When he arrives, the customs officer takes a highly suspicious view of both his “large pile of typescript” and the books he has brought along, and he checks their titles against a list from the Home Secretary, whose directions are clear: “If we can’t stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside” (23). The prohibition is nonsensical, of course, and executed by agents of ignorance, who look disapprovingly at Adam’s copy of Dante’s Purgatorio: “‘French, eh?’ he said. ‘I guessed as much, and pretty dirty, too, I shouldn’t wonder’” (22). The chief customs officer’s suspicion only thinly masks his interest, and as he assesses Adam’s memoirs, he is entertained by what he perceives to be their salaciousness: “engrossed,” he gives “vent at intervals to a sinister chuckling sound that was partly triumphant and partly derisive, but in the main genuinely appreciative” (24). The chief is something of a connoisseur of the forbidden—“I knows dirt when I sees it or I shouldn’t be where I am today”—and he knows Adam’s book: “that’s just downright dirt, and we burns that straight away, see” (25). This is not the customs problem that attended Brancusi’s Bird in Space, in which the materiality of his abstract sculpture, so pointedly highlighted by Loy’s ekphrases, causes the object to be categorized functionally, as a mechanical part. Here modernist form is not so avant-garde as to be misrecognized. Instead, literature is already divested of its form: nearly “stamp[ed] out” like Bataille’s squashed spider and brought “down in the world,”72 it can be identified as “downright dirt,” and to dust Adam’s memoir must return. The customs officer’s book burning elliptically foreshadows the fate of the literary in and presages the conclusion of The Loved One, and it attests to the pervasiveness in Vile Bodies of a debased literary environment. With his “whole livelihood” incinerated, Adam will have to acquire another income source, especially since he needs money to marry Nina. (Every time he loses his income, their engagement is called off.) The kind of writing to which he turns—the gossip column—resonates with Waugh’s particular understanding of film sound as chatter and noise. In fact, one of the two primary gossipmongers, Simon Balcairn, uses the byline “Mr. Chatterbox” and dictates his columns over the telephone to the staff at the logically named Daily Excess. When Simon falls out of social favor, however, and cannot gain access to the parties that represent his livelihood, he despairs and commits suicide. A tragicomic windfall, the pen name of “Mr. Chatterbox” thus devolves upon Adam, as does Simon’s salary, “ten pounds a week and expenses” (149). Eventually running out of subjects that will allow his readers to exercise their

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“inquisitiveness into the lives of others,” Adam begins “to invent people,” transforming the gossip column into a fiction-writing enterprise (155).73 In this regard, Adam follows in Simon’s footsteps, since Simon’s final desperate column consists of “lie after monstrous lie” (144). But fiction writing as a commercial enterprise is a dead end, as Vile Bodies makes clear in two key ways. First, when Adam allows Nina to make up his column one day, and she reports seeing “Count Cincinnati going into Espinosa’s in a green bowler” (213), she unwittingly hits on all the things that Adam has been prohibited from writing about; he has invented both the count and the trend in hats, their fictionality has been sniffed out at the Daily Excess, and Adam is summarily fired. Second, while Adam attempts to make a living by his pen, only film constitutes a real potential source of wealth. Isaacs uses the John Wesley film to extort money from those with an enthusiasm for the new medium. He runs something called the “National Academy of Cinematographic Art,” out of which he “produces a film straight away and pays the professionals out of the pupils’ fees,” and when the filmmaking goes “wrong,” inevitably, Isaacs forces the student who ruined the development of the film to “pay damages”—a provision written into “the contract they all have to sign” (208–9). Now, faced with an easy target like old Colonel Blount, Isaacs has offered him “half a share” of the company for “five thousand pounds” (209). To no one’s surprise, the Colonel invests, and he loses all his money. Thus while gossip-column writing represents a kind of falsehood not altogether unlike the sham biopic, only the film offers the opportunity for a Ponzi scheme. In the media ecology of Vile Bodies, film is the bigger predator.

Wasting Time at the Movies: Decadent Temporality in Vile Bodies Fiction writing is not the only dead end that Adam Fenwick-Symes and his friends encounter in Vile Bodies, which adopts the same decadent temporality of “anti-futurity” that we saw in “The Balance.”74 Vile Bodies can seem relentlessly modern, especially with its emphasis on new technology. Its pages include a party that is staged in a dirigible, an airplane ride, and an automobile race. But none of these modern modes of transportation actually allows any of Waugh’s characters to go anywhere meaningful or positive.75 As Brooke Allen has argued so persuasively, in Vile Bodies Waugh parodies “both the philosophy and the mannerisms of Futurist art and rhetoric, answering its enthusiastic affirmations with his own resounding ‘No.’”76 If Mina Loy worked through futurism in order to develop her own aesthetics

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of pure form, her own maximalist mode of abstraction, she did so because futurist doctrine had revealed for her the dynamic potential at the heart of all forms. But Waugh demonstrates no desire to expose this energy; such dynamic potential is, in Vile Bodies, deeply unsettling, and modern technology repeatedly proves destabilizing. In perhaps the most famous of the novel’s images for instability—Waugh’s cinematic description of Agatha Runcible’s rapidly dissolving sanity— modern exhortations to speed prove destructive: “There was rarely more than a quarter of a mile of the black road to be seen at one time. It unrolled like a length of cinema film. At the edges was confusion; a fog spinning past; ‘Faster, faster,’ they shouted above the roar of the engine” (284; italics original). The link Waugh insinuates between the cinema and the speeding car was, as Enda Duffy has noted, a common maneuver in the movies by the 1920s, where cars helped to optimize a “form of viewing enabled by [. . .] a rate of twenty-four frames per second.”77 As “the vision machine of the age of speed,” film is best suited to convey Agatha’s particular affliction.78 She suffers from acceleration and pays a price for her speed with what we might call a mental form of motion sickness, and her death finally prevents her from going ever faster. In this way, despite its thematic interest in speed and modern transportation, Vile Bodies consistently forecloses on the future. But it does not do so, as many commentators have suggested, by heightening the temporality of the present, “a world of ceaseless change in which there are no befores or afters, but only a blurred now.”79 The time of Vile Bodies is instead a decadent one. As Vincent Sherry has demonstrated, the present time of the modernist “now” is always already on the verge of decadence: “in the most intense experience of Now in the radical time of modernism,” he writes, “Now is already going over into Then—into the temporal imaginary of decadence.”80 Modernism thus always carries with it a “disappointment,” a “falling away from its ideal imaginary, the instantaneous whole in the present moment,” and therefore operates by virtue of a decadent “vision of historical loss” and “temporal dispossession.”81 This “historical loss” is best registered by the cinema, which always turns to the past and cuts off future possibilities. For example, Vile Bodies establishes a persistent, if humorous, link between the cinema and unfortunate death, which is cemented midway through the novel by the confusion between shooting the film and shooting people. First Adam learns that he can’t see Colonel Blount because “they’re just shooting him now” (197). Then he hears about the previous day’s botched shooting: “yesterday, they kept Miss La Touche waiting the whole afternoon, and then the light was so bad when they did

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shoot her that they made a complete mess of her—we had the machine out and ran over all the bits carefully last night after dinner—you never saw such rotten little scraps—quite unrecognizable, half of them. We didn’t dare show them to her husband—he’d be sick to death about it” (198). At this point, without the film production context, Adam thinks that these “bits” and “rotten little scraps” are parts of the deceased Miss La Touche’s body and that these strange people have desecrated her corpse and hidden the evidence from her husband. The “unrecognizable,” complete mess of Miss La Touche—her vile body—is something like the film-form equivalent for the steak tartare in “The Balance,” with the savagery of immoderate consumption transformed into the unintentional barbarism of ineptitude.82 At best, we might say that cinema possesses a benign “backward orientation,” as is true of the incompetent film biography of John Wesley, which begins with “the spectacle of four uniformed horsemen galloping backwards” (298).83 Such a backward, decadent temporality obtains especially at the end of the novel, where we find the characters, to use Sherry’s phrase, in the midst of “the imaginative circumstance of aftermath.”84 Since the midpoint of the novel, a war has been rumored in hushed conversations: as one character tells the Prime Minister (who is comically ignorant of “this war that’s coming”), “No one talks about it, and no one wants it. No one talks about it because no one wants it. They’re all afraid to breathe a word about it” (184–85; italics original). And at the end of the novel, we find Adam sitting “on a splintered tree stump in the biggest battlefield in the history of the world” and reading a letter from Nina, in which she tells him that Doubting Hall has been transformed into a hospital, where Colonel Blount shows the Wesley film to the wounded (314). Surrounding Adam is a landscape devastated by the conflict: “The scene all round him was one of unrelieved desolation; a great expanse of mud in which every visible object was burnt or broken” (316). Waugh offers up the war after the fact of battle, miring Adam in a wasteland that manifests the clear dangers of formlessness. The echoes of the Western Front and T. S. Eliot were obvious to contemporary readers: commenting on the novel for the Fortnightly Review, Rebecca West observed, “The book ends with the outbreak of another war, which the author plainly welcomes as the only way of sweeping the cards off the table and beginning a fresh game. [. . .] ‘Vile Bodies’ has, indeed, apart from its success in being really funny, a very considerable value as a further stage in the contemporary literature of disillusionment. That may be said to have started with T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land.’”85 While West characterizes Waugh’s ending as a continuation of T. S. Eliot’s project (albeit, I must add, one in which fragments are not shored against ruins but rather dispersed

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into them), another modernist reviewer had a very different sense of the book’s historical position. Writing in the Sunday Referee, Richard Aldington declared his sympathy for “the ‘younger generation’—i.e., those who were under eighteen when the gladsome maroons boomed out the information that Truth, Justice, Right, and Democracy had triumphed on the Western Front,” and he distinguished their ability to act from his own: “then it was all cancelled. We, at least, had seen something, been something, done something. But they couldn’t do anything or be anything.”86 Waugh’s imagined war, in this view, is not a chance to start a “fresh game,” nor a continuation of “contemporary disillusionment,” but a belated, frustrated, backward look. Yet in looking back toward World War I, Waugh also looks simultaneously and uncannily forward, toward World War II. Perhaps in this novel, looking forward is to look back. Another battle looms, even as Adam is joined by figures from his prewar life and, with wine, “deep cushions,” and closed blinds that “shut out that sad scene” (320), the group creates a semblance of cozy English domesticity in “a Daimler limousine sunk to the axles in mud” (317).87 Like the unrolling film reel that signals the approaching formlessness of mental instability and eventual death for Agatha Runcible, the final sentence of the novel offers an ominous image of spinning: “And presently, like a circling typhoon, the sounds of battle began to return” (321). The sentence highlights what Hentea has called “the cinematic quality” of noise in Vile Bodies, where “noise is decentered, emanating as if from offstage, making the characters hostages to it.”88 Adam and his companions have nowhere to go, and this final sentence does indeed look backward to sounds and actions that have previously occurred. Like the “circling typhoon” of Waugh’s simile, the novel’s structure is circular, as the final word “return” reminds us that we began Vile Bodies with Adam’s return to England. At the same time, as with the conclusion of “Excursion in Reality,” action is deferred beyond the ending of the novel: we look forward to a future moment when the battle will arrive. Vile Bodies thus ends poised in the uncomfortable temporality of the “present,” situated after modernism but with no sense of what else could come next.

“Death and Art” in The Loved One: Thanatogenic Formalism and the Writer after Modernism The destruction of war—and the challenges that it presents to the modernist writer—also hover over Waugh’s much later novel The Loved One (1948), where the protagonist Dennis Barlow publishes an “extravagantly praised” book of poetry while working as “a wingless officer in Transport

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Command.”89 Dennis has, of course, fought in the wrong war to be a proper soldier-poet along the model provided by Rupert Brooke—World War II rather than World War I—and Waugh explicitly sets the novel after modernism, so that the belated position that his fictions have always occupied is here made plain. Reading a magazine, Dennis’s friend Sir Francis Hinsley bemoans his inability to understand it: “‘It was Hopkins once,’ he said; ‘Joyce and Freud and Gertrude Stein. I couldn’t make any sense of them either. I never was much good at anything new’” (4). As Jonathan Greenberg notes, for writers like Waugh, “modernism was not yet the stuff of textbooks”— although by 1948 it was well on its way—but because it “had already happened,” “it was available by a kind of shorthand, and thus highly susceptible to ironic redescription.”90 The irony is high here: once new and incomprehensible, the moderns are now passé. Dennis’s literary ambitions are complicated, too, by his decision “on his discharge” to go “to Hollywood to help write the life of Shelley for the films” (23). Landing in a colony of British expatriates in Los Angeles, Dennis discovers that Hollywood is no place for the serious writer, especially one with a veteran’s sensitive temperament: “There in the Megalopolitan studios he found reproduced, and enhanced by the nervous agitation endemic to the place, all the gross futility of service life. He repined, despaired, and fled” (23). Dennis deserts the movies, but Hollywood nevertheless holds sway over the entirety of The Loved One, largely through the profession Dennis adopts—that of pet mortician—which is saturated with the absurdity and inauthenticity of the movies. The Loved One can be read, as Greenberg claims is true of Vile Bodies, as “a critique of modernity and its accompanying irreligious humanism,”91 but rather than mocking the emptiness of the Bright Young Things’ lives, Waugh here mocks the emptiness of Hollywood and all its constituent institutions, including a mortuary industry and a memorial park that refuse to admit the reality of aging or death. This memorial park, the central object of Waugh’s satire in The Loved One, is a place called Whispering Glades—clearly modeled, as so many commentators have noted, on the Forest Lawn cemetery in Glendale, with its exact replicas of European churches and artworks.92 Waugh encountered the cemetery in February 1947, during the course of an ultimately unsuccessful visit to Los Angeles to discuss an adaptation of Brideshead Revisited with MGM. He noted in his diary, “I found a deep mine of literary gold in the cemetery of Forest Lawn and the work of the morticians and intend to get to work immediately on a novelette staged there.”93 Celebrating the “gold” sure to come his way, Waugh echoes his protagonists’ economic imperative to write, and his writing “work” becomes bound up

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with the “work of the morticians.” Moreover, both the real cemetery and the fictionalized one are philosophically connected to the movies, with the same values, aims, and equipment.94 Dennis characterizes the cemetery as another version of a Hollywood set: “When as a newcomer to the Megalopolitan Studios he first toured the lots, it had taxed his imagination to realize that those solid-seeming streets and squares of every period and climate were in fact plaster façades whose backs revealed the structure of bill-boardings. Here the illusion was quite otherwise. Only with an effort could Dennis believe that the building before him was three-dimensional and permanent” (40). Whispering Glades is somehow less real than the Megalopolitan back lot— more fake than the false “plaster façades.” The connection between the film and funeral industries extends to the actors who labor among these illusory buildings. One such subject is Juanita del Pablo, a notoriously difficult actress. Her reputation should surprise no one, though, since she is forced by the barbaric standards of Hollywood beauty to undergo a series of transformations, from a Spanish flamenco singer to “an Irish colleen”: “They’ve bleached her hair and dyed it vermilion. [. . .] She’s working ten hours a day learning the brogue and to make it harder for the poor girl they’ve pulled all her teeth out. She never had to smile before [. . .]. Now she’ll have to laugh roguishly all the time. That means dentures” (8–9).95 These are cosmetic operations exactly like the ones performed upon the bodies of the dead who come to Whispering Glades, where the morticians must occasionally undertake similar acts of radical transformation, like fixing a drowned “stiff ” so that “he looked like it was his wedding day” (47). The “Mortuary Hostess” even boasts, “Why if he’d sat on an atom bomb, they’d make him presentable” (47). As an early reviewer noted, live but “vile bodies” become “indistinguishable from the corpses we so elaborately embalm. [. . .] [T]he live characters are virtually indistinguishable from the dead.”96 Mortuary work, in short, is made analogous to cinematic work, as both project an illusion. The illusion, importantly, is that of aesthetic form (rather than “reality,” as Beaty suggests).97 The work of the morticians and cosmeticians at Whispering Glades is repeatedly referred to as “art”: they transform the base matter of the corpse into a recognizable form. Under the tutelage of Mr. Joyboy the “Senior Mortician” (66), the aptly named cosmetician Aimée Thanatogenos works “like a nun, intently, serenely, methodically; first, the shampoo, then the shave, then the manicure. She parted the white hair, lathered the rubbery cheeks and plied the razor; she clipped the nails and probed the cuticle. Then she drew up the wheeled table on which stood her paints and brushes and creams and concentrated breathlessly on the crucial phase of

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her art” (69). Hers is a defined process, a series of formalized steps meant to combat the appearance of death. When the process has been completed, an embalmed, made up, fully costumed figure makes its appearance like an actor in a film, ready to take on the role of the “Loved One” (39). As Aimée recalls, the entrance can be dramatic: “there was Mrs. Komstock lying on the table in her wedding dress. I shall never forget the sight of her. She was transfigured. That’s the only word for it” (93). But this transfiguration is, like Aimée’s work, only temporary. As she remarks to Dennis, who will become her fiancé, “my work is burned sometimes within a few hours. At the best it’s put in the mausoleum and even there it deteriorates, you know. I’ve seen painting there not ten years old that’s completely lost tonality. Do you think anything can be a great art which is so impermanent?” (89). While the endurance of the art object is a vital question for modernism—as we have seen, this is the philosophical inquiry that subtends Lily Briscoe’s completion of her painting in To the Lighthouse—Waugh asks the question only in jest. For him, the art form in question is a debased one, and the object is already dead. The forms of the mortuary industry, it is already obvious, can hold sway against the formlessness of cremation only for so long. If these Hollywood arts are already illusory and impermanent, it might seem that The Loved One suggests literature as an alternative, more temporally stable art form. But as we have already seen, Hollywood is not a place where Dennis’s literary dreams can be realized. No character’s occupation as a writer is stable: twenty years ago Sir Francis Hinsley was “chief scriptwriter in Megalopolitan Pictures,” but by the time of the novel’s opening, he has “descended to the Publicity Department” (6–7). Moreover, the representation of literary lastingness that we receive is, like all other parts of Hollywood, a curiously inauthentic one. Like the real Glendale cemetery of Forest Lawn, Waugh’s Whispering Glades is “zoned,” and one area of the park in the novel is known as the “Lake Isle” (43). When Dennis finally visits the Lake Isle, he discovers that, of course, it exists in homage to William Butler Yeats’s poem: “the poeticest place in the whole darn park,” as a worker puts it (82). Its green paths converge “on a central space, where stood a wattle cabin, nine rows of haricots (which by a system of judicious transplantation were kept in perpetual scarlet flower) and some wicker hives. Here the sound of bees was like a dynamo” (83). If Whispering Glades fakes a European sophistication and presents a false pastoral façade—if California itself is for Waugh an artificial pastoral opposed to the authenticity of the British landscape—then the Lake Isle of Innisfree is a kind of live plagiarism. Plagiarism, in fact, runs rampant in the novel, as Dennis courts Aimée Thanatogenos with a series of poems passed off as his own writing. It begins

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innocently enough, when Dennis inquires after her profession as a mortuary cosmetician and then gently mocks her with a bit of John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” saying that she is “half in love with easeful death” (96). Thereafter, as Dennis purposefully sends Aimée poems that he has not written himself, Waugh makes the connection between plagiarized English literature and the funeral industry even more explicit. He juxtaposes Dennis’s reading of dead poets with another workplace activity, removing pets’ ashes from the ovens and preparing them for urns: “He stirred the little smoking grey heaps in the bottom of the buckets. Then he returned to the office and resumed his search of the Oxford Book of English Verse for a poem for Aimée. He possessed few books and was beginning to run short of material. At first he had tried writing poems for her himself, but she showed a preference for the earlier masters” (105). The poems in his anthology are “little smoking grey heaps,” the dead and destroyed works of “earlier masters,” and we might even go so far as to say that Waugh here reduces the history of English verse to ashes. And when Aimée finally discovers Dennis’s duplicity, her reaction figures plagiarism as a metaphorical cause of death: “All those poems you sent and pretended you’d written for me, that I thought so cultivated I even learned bits of them by heart—all by other people, some by people who passed on hundreds of years ago. I never felt so mortified as when I found out” (138; emphasis mine). Plagiarism, then, might seem to preserve intact the words and sentiments of bygone writers, but its alliance with death in The Loved One ends up distorting poems and debasing the literary. Aimée’s mortification is increased by the other major deformation of the literary in The Loved One: the advice column called “The Wisdom of the Guru Brahmin,” which is not written by a guru, a Brahmin, or even a single individual (100). This column—obviously a reworking of the gossip column from Vile Bodies—is instead the work of three people, the most important of whom is the aptly named Mr. Slump, who connotes and precipitates a formal collapse. When Aimée requests advice on her romantic dilemma, Slump drunkenly suggests that Aimée solve her problems by committing suicide: “I’ll tell you what to do. Just take the elevator to the top floor. Find a nice window and jump out. That’s what you can do” (147). Sensing that Aimée will follow through on his questionable wisdom, Slump attempts to sidestep any responsibility by appealing to Aimée’s surname: “Well, for Christ’s sake, with a name like that!” (148). Aimée Thanatogenos’s name marks her as the figure most symbolic of the novel’s death drive: she is both beloved and typified by death. She can do little other than fulfill the destiny that her name points toward. (Waugh’s propensity for semiallegorical character names is downright Dickensian,

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and it points to the overlap between his Künstlerromane and the genre of the parable, that most formulaic and antimodernist of morality tales.) Aimée attempts an overdose of barbiturates, that “staple of feminine repose” (148), before settling on a method of suicide that will allow her to preserve the forms for which she has labored: a tidily “self-administered” cyanide injection, before which she lays herself out in Mr. Joyboy’s “workshop, under a sheet” (152). Thus Aimée dies already prepared for the formalizing operations of the mortician—and even having completed one of them herself. Laying herself on the mortician’s table, Aimée takes the first step in adopting the role of the corpse. This fate has long seemed preordained: as Dennis thinks when he first sees Aimée (notably, before he has learned her name), “this girl was a decadent” (54). And if the immoderation of the cinematic world and the decline of literary value are tied to a kind of decadence as early as “The Balance,” as we have seen, then Waugh redoubles that connection here. When Dennis asks, “what do you think about when you come here alone in the evenings?” (95), Aimée responds, “Just Death and Art” (96). Her own death becomes an act of art making—the work of a decadent aesthete. Put differently, as Aimée propels herself toward death, we see Waugh enact a Thanatogenic formalism—formalism as a kind of death drive.98 This is indeed a formalism gone bad, and I want to suggest that Thanatogenic formalism can help to explain the prevalence of suicide in Waugh’s fiction—not just Aimée’s, or Simon Balcairn’s in Vile Bodies, or Adam Doure’s attempt in “The Balance,” but also the other notable suicide in The Loved One, that of Sir Francis Hinsley, which is what brings Dennis to Whispering Glades in the first place. Dennis (who has been living rent free with Sir Francis) discovers that his friend has hanged himself, and he cannot rid his mind of the horrid image: “the sack or body suspended and the face above it with eyes red and horribly starting from their sockets, the cheeks mottled in indigo like the marbled end-papers of a ledger and the tongue swollen and protruding like an end of black sausage” (45).99 Sir Francis’s body has been so altered by his suicide—note the sharp contrast with Aimée’s neat work—that what Dennis encounters is no longer recognizably human: it is a “sack” first and only secondarily a “body.” The body is transformed through similes of color (“black sausage,” the “mottled,” “indigo [. . .] end-papers of a ledger”) into a series of smaller objects.100 And two of the identifiable body parts are remarkable for the ways in which they escape their appropriate bounds: the eyes are “horribly starting from their sockets,” and the tongue is “swollen and protruding.” Sir Francis’s suicide has enacted a radical deformation—taking the live body of a person and transforming into an altogether different object.

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The other British expatriates surmise that the reason for his suicide is the termination of his contract with Megalopolitan Studios, and they speculate that “Frank,” as they call him, was fired because Dennis works as a pet mortician (33). Having “taken in” Dennis, Sir Francis is to some extent responsible for Dennis’s reputation, and his has been tarnished by proxy: “In a world of competition people are taken at their face value. [. . .] Frank lost face” (34–35). By virtue of Waugh’s mordant humor, this clubby idiom is almost literalized in Sir Francis’s suicide, as the face is deemphasized in favor of other nonhuman objects. (The currency of the face in Hollywood society is also evident, of course, in the work of cosmeticians like Aimée and the facial changes required of an actress like Juanita del Pablo.) To the British expatriates, this code is clear, and the studio’s action is justified: “You all know the form out here almost as well as I do” (35; emphasis mine). Sir Francis has violated the standards of propriety—as has Dennis, who has taken one of the “jobs that an Englishman just doesn’t take” (15)—and Sir Francis’s suicide is an event whereby the claims of proper forms reassert themselves. At the same time, however, as I have demonstrated, Sir Francis’s death manifests itself as a series of deformations. If suicide is thus a formalizing operation and a deforming (or re-forming) process, then we might say that suicide represents the essence of another idiom for Waugh: it is bad form, indicative of both an offense against social conventions and an attempt to right the social order. Suicide as bad form, then, represents the height of Thanatogenic formalism. Bad form can also help us to describe the significant problems that plague the writer in The Loved One, which extend beyond the moral bankruptcy of plagiarism or the cheap hucksterism of the advice column. When Dennis discovers the ridiculous Lake Isle at Whispering Glades, it is because he is looking for a good place to write a poem. Writing proves too difficult near the beehive and the bean rows—“It was a warm afternoon; no breeze stirred the evergreens; peace came dropping slow, too slow for Dennis”—and the situation improves once he relocates to a quieter spot: “Peace came dropping rather more quickly” (84). But Whispering Glades remains an inappropriate site for the kind of poetry that he wants to write and has previously published: It was not thus that he wrote the poems which brought him fame and his present peculiar fortune. They had taken their shapes in frigid war-time railway journeys—the racks piled high with equipment, the dimmed lights falling on a dozen laps, the faces above invisible, cigarette-smoke mixing with frosty breath; the unexplained stops, the

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stations dark as the empty footways. [. . .] This high hot afternoon was given for reminiscence rather than for composition. Rhythms from the anthologies moved softly through his mind. He wrote: They told me, Francis Hinsley, they told me you were hung With red protruding eye-balls and black protruding tongue I wept as I remembered how often you and I Had laughed about Los Angeles and now ’tis here you’ll lie; Here pickled in formaldehyde and painted like a whore, Shrimp-pink incorruptible, not lost nor gone before. (84–85; italics original) A crude mock-elegy, Dennis’s poem invokes both a jazz standard and a poem by W. H. Auden.101 Its composition makes clear that just as Dennis is no mythic, romantic poet in the mode of early Yeats, neither is he really a World War II–era Wilfred Owen. What Dennis is instead is a parodist, and a cruel one at that. There is no kindness here—just an empty critique of snobbish British expatriates who believe themselves above the superficialities of Hollywood but ultimately live and die mired in them—and Dennis’s poetic tears are more likely to stem from laughter than from grief. His couplets slander the dead, so that the poem can be considered an exercise in bad form even if Dennis never shares it or reads it aloud. The poem fulfills Waugh’s prefatory promise that The Loved One is “somewhat gruesome” and unsuitable for “squeamish” readers (n.p.). Dennis’s gross couplets highlight the contrast between the defined “shapes” of his earlier wartime poetry and the shape that the body of Sir Francis will take at Whispering Glades. “Pickled in formaldehyde and painted like a whore, / Shrimp-pink incorruptible,” the corpse of Sir Francis is not at all shapeless or formless. Rather, the embalmed body has too much form: “pickled” and “incorruptible,” it cannot decompose according to the laws of nature. (Its formal excess also results in changes that Waugh characterizes as aesthetic offenses: the corpse is an odd color and an unexpected gender.) As the poem imagines it, the corpse represents what happens when the mortician’s aesthetics—the illusory forms of Hollywood, where death cannot be admitted—run amok, and the abject dead body (a clear case of the informe) is forced into form. (That form is redoubled in the poem’s play with ballad meter, in which syllabic variation at the beginning of each line always resolves after a caesura—most clearly evident in the commas in the first and last lines—into inescapable, strict iambic trimeter.) Sir Francis is now, to use the inappropriate term that the mortuary hostess lets slip, a “stiff,” another

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example of bad form. In this way, we might say that even as death can carry, in the abstract, the terror of formlessness, the case is the reverse at Whispering Glades, where ossified rigor mortis represents the most rigid form in all Waugh’s work. But the object of Waugh’s critique isn’t only the dead Francis Hinsley—or delusional British expats, or the California funeral industry, or Hollywood itself. By layering satire over (or under) the Künstlerroman, Waugh transforms Dennis Barlow into a cruelly treated object, too. The Künstlerroman should chart the development of the artist-protagonist so that, by the end of the book, he is, like Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, en route to producing work like the one we have just finished reading. (In this regard, the modernist Künstlerroman should constitute a rounded aesthetic whole, a triumphant, autonomous work, yet as I have shown with Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse, arguably a more straightforward member of the genre, the final work is often neither triumphant nor autonomous, and Lily’s painting, at least, can be as productively analyzed in relation to holes—a “square” cut out of a fish, “a center of complete emptiness”—as aesthetic wholes.102) The Loved One, for its part, so consistently situates Dennis in relation to earlier modernists such as Owen and Yeats that we know he will likely fall short of this effort. Dennis has nothing original to say, and the only work he can produce is plagiarized or parodic. A modernist Künstlerroman should end in anticipation of great works to come, but for Waugh, the only Künstlerroman possible is a deformed version that doesn’t elevate the artist.103 The ending of The Loved One makes this abundantly clear. Dennis is no Stephen Dedalus, heading off to the continent to “learn in [his] own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels,” “to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race.”104 Instead, Dennis ends the novel on the eve of his return to England from Los Angeles, quoting Edgar Allan Poe’s “To Helen” and figuring himself a “weary wayworn wanderer” about to be borne back “to his own native shore”: “Dennis knew that he was singularly privileged. The strand was littered with bones and wreckage. He was adding his bit; something that had long irked him, his young heart. He was carrying back instead a great, shapeless chunk of experience, the artist’s load; bearing it home to his ancient and comfortless shore; to work on it hard and long, for God knew how long—it was the moment of vision for which a lifetime is often too short” (163–64). Dennis isn’t going to learn “what the heart is”; he’s leaving his heart in Los Angeles. And he’s not exiling himself in order to better understand his

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homeland and “forge [. . .] the uncreated conscience of his race”; he’s returning from exile in order to write about himself and his own “experience.” This ending casts toward Dennis’s future work as an artist, and in pointing toward a goal that may never be attained, the end of The Loved One also vaguely echoes another modernist novel about the hubris of youth and ego: The Great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work ends thus: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch our arms farther. . . . And on one fine morning—So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”105 Here there may be some quiet critique on Waugh’s part of Fitzgerald as the preeminent highbrow novelist to sell out to the studios and write for Hollywood. As I have noted, Waugh’s artist-protagonists forced into the film industry often seem like a series of less talented Fitzgeralds. Yet the echoes of Joyce and Fitzgerald are also important for other reasons. The tension here between future goals that have yet to be achieved and an involuntary nostalgia, or backward glance, is typical of the temporality that operates in Waugh’s writing about the cinema, where his artist-protagonists have arrived too late. Like these other mock Künstlerromane, The Loved One is not only a portrait of the artist attempting to survive in a changed media ecology dominated by the cinema, but also a portrait of the late modernist artist—or what we might call the artist after modernism. After modernism, Waugh’s film fictions seem to suggest, the artist’s aesthetic options are limited to the range defined by bad formalism. Simon Lent’s scenario is beset by zaniness in “Excursion in Reality,” Adam Doure suffers from noise and is surrounded by chatter in “The Balance,” and Adam Fenwick-Symes has only the crass commercialism of the gossip column and the backward film in Vile Bodies. None has a masterwork, and all must operate between the extremes of rigid filmic formatting and chaotic dissolution. For his part, Dennis Barlow returns to Britain with his “artist’s load,” his unique American experience. The Loved One suggests a number of ways that readers might assess Dennis’s return to Britain. We might, for one, read it along the lines suggested by Waugh’s subtitle for the novel, “An AngloAmerican tragedy,” which applies usefully to the fates of Aimée and Sir Francis and perhaps also to Dennis, for whom the tragedy is not personal or social but rather aesthetic. Waugh hints at this aestheticizing of tragedy with an offhand comment that Dennis makes to a coworker about Henry James: “All his stories are about the same thing—American innocence and European experience. [. . .] The stories are all tragedies one way or another” (121). Alternatively, we might read Dennis’s departure rather more hopefully: if, with the critical eye of “European experience,” Dennis can shape his “artist’s

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load,” it might take the form of a novel like The Loved One, which could then be authenticated as a bona fide Künstlerroman. However, Dennis’s experience does not have the well-wrought form of the work in our hands—indeed, it has no defined form. It is “a great shapeless chunk”—a compromising midpoint between formulaic rigidity and chaotic formlessness that notably does not constitute an artwork. While Dennis may have had some Woolfian “moment of vision,” he will have “to work [. . .] hard and long” before he can hew his “chunk of experience” into a shape fit for the closing lines of a Künstlerroman. The completion of this work seems especially unlikely when we examine the context that surrounds it. Dennis will have to work without his heart, which he has left on the “strand [. . .] littered with bones and wreckage.” Waugh opens The Loved One by describing Los Angeles as one of “the barbarous regions of the world,” a colonial site with a British outpost, and the final image of washed-up flotsam and jetsam reinforces this impression (4). Hollywood is, as we have seen, marked by savagery: it is where the decay of civilization signals a looming formlessness. Dennis’s writing prospects are even further undercut by the final sentence of the book, which follows the long passage I have quoted above: “He picked up the novel which Miss Poski had left on his desk and settled down to await his loved one’s final combustion” (164). Dennis ends the novel not by actually departing or writing—those actions are, like the writing at the conclusion of “Excursion in Reality,” deferred to a time beyond the ending. Instead, he returns to a novel discarded by a woman reader—never a kind of reading that Waugh endorses—as the feminine novel is substituted for the artwork that should be created by the protagonist of a properly masculine Künstlerroman. Dennis also returns finally to the business of the crematorium and waits for Aimée’s body to burn. Aimée herself has articulated what such an event means: “Do you think anything can be a great art which is so impermanent?” (89). The answer, we already know, is no, and Waugh indicates by association that even those art forms that are less routinely set aflame—the novel, the poem, the film—are bad or impermanent in their own way. The fashions of Hollywood change from flamenco dancers to Irish colleens, and the wartime sonnet gives way to the mock elegy in couplets. The drive to make art remains, but it is always, as in Aimée’s thoughts, coupled with death. Under the sway of cinematic, Thanatogenic, bad formalism in The Loved One, all forms tend toward their own “final combustion.”

Ch a p ter 5

Surface Forms Photography and Gertrude Stein’s Contact History of Modernism

While literary fame claimed Evelyn Waugh relatively early—when the twenty-seven-year-old novelist published Vile Bodies in 1930—it arrived late for Gertrude Stein, who was almost sixty when The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas made her a best-selling author in 1933. The book’s publication that August had been teased since May with excerpts in the Atlantic advertising the deployment of Toklas as a narrator. Ventriloquizing her partner throughout the memoir, Stein chronicles the life they have led together in Paris, at the nexus of the most vital creative currents in modernism. The story they tell proved popular even before it had been read in full: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas actually managed to sell “its entire first printing, more than 5,000 copies, nine days in advance of its official publication date.”1 As the popularity of The Autobiography rose with subsequent printings, so too was Stein’s fame in the United States amplified—so much so that she would embark upon a lecture tour throughout the country in 1934–35. These years have recently drawn significant attention from scholars, as the study of celebrity has offered a new lens through which to view Stein’s career.2 But my central subject in this chapter is less Stein’s success than what many have perceived to be her failure— specifically her historical and aesthetic failures in The Autobiography and the ways in which these supposed shortcomings and flaws redound upon her larger body of work. 178

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The most notable early complaints against The Autobiography were lodged by six of the people who appear in it: Eugene and Maria Jolas, André Salmon, Georges Braque, Tristan Tzara, and Henri Matisse. Offended by Stein’s flippant portrayals of them and by her less than scrupulous treatment of the details of certain events, the group sought retribution by publishing a fifteenpage rebuttal with the grandiose title “Testimony against Gertrude Stein” in a supplement to the journal transition. The anger of Eugene Jolas in his prefatory note is characteristic of the group’s outrage: These documents invalidate the claim of the Toklas-Stein memorial that Miss Stein was in any way concerned with the shaping of the epoch she attempts to describe. There is a unanimity of opinion that she had no understanding of what really was happening around her, that the mutation of ideas beneath the surface of the more obvious contacts and clashes of personalities during that period escaped her entirely. Her participation in the genesis and development of such movements as Fauvism, Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, Transition etc. was never ideologically intimate and, as M. Matisse states, she has presented the epoch “without taste and without relation to reality.” The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in its hollow, tinsel bohemianism and egocentric deformations, may very well become one day the symbol of the decadence that hovers over contemporary literature.3 Though we might be tempted to dismiss these charges as chauvinism or defensiveness on the part of artists faced with an unflattering reflection— looking at themselves as Stein sees them, they don’t like what they find—I want to take the terms of their critique seriously. These artists, first and foremost, accuse Stein of being a bad historian: she has missed “what really was happening around her” and neglected a “relation to reality.” Her book paints an inaccurate picture of Parisian bohemia, skimming over its invigorating, evolving ideas and mischaracterizing her own role in it. Yet Stein’s bad history is also, for this group, a problem of bad form: Stein did not “shape the epoch,” and so The Autobiography is an example of “egocentric deformation” and “decadence.” These two problematics come together in Jolas’s accusation that The Autobiography is superficial: the book demonstrates that Stein did not comprehend “the mutation of ideas beneath the surface of the more obvious contacts and clashes of personalities.” The Autobiography gives the reader only the most “obvious” aspects of modernist cultural ferment because it transmutes “ideas” into “personalities.” The result is a “hollow, tinsel bohemianism”—a cheap knockoff of the original. The Autobiography might

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be able to imitate the exterior form of modernist bohemia, in this view, but it stays on the surface, without any of the inner solidity that would make Stein’s history ring true. (This language is also taken up by Braque—“Miss Stein obviously saw everything from the outside”—and Salmon: “It is evident that she understood nothing, except in a superficial way.”4) The surface, in sum, simultaneously designates what is wrong with the form of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and with the history in it. The exceptionally harsh tone of this critique has seldom been adopted by later commentators, but its terms have stuck. Since 1933 scholars have consistently been unable to avoid underscoring The Autobiography’s superficiality, especially in relation to the rest of Stein’s work; in this context the memoir is seen as, at best, a collection of amusing vignettes with no real literary value. One critic, for instance, dismisses the book as “chitchat,” while another writes that the “innocently discursive” style of the book has ensured “that it is regarded as gossip, pleasant to read but undeserving of serious critical attention.”5 Even so great a defender of Stein as Catharine Stimpson tells us that The Autobiography “pull[s] back from Stein’s upsetting challenge to representational codes and generic conventions. Telling her comic stories, Stein writes of modern art. Despite some shrewd narrative tricks, she does not write modern art itself.”6 Stimpson’s distancing preposition places Stein outside the sphere of modern art making, much as Jolas and company do, and like all Stein’s critics, she implies that The Autobiography can easily be construed as simple storytelling meant to please—rather than challenge—Stein’s readers. Stein herself even appeared to hold this view, since she called The Autobiography an example of “audience writing,” a term that covers her work “written to satisfy demands of an imagined or real audience.”7 Too external and too easy, The Autobiography is thus disqualified from joining the ranks of Stein’s more serious works that merit scholarly reading. In fact, Marianne DeKoven explicitly excludes the book from her list of Stein’s experimental works and goes so far as to describe it as a “Hollywood Life of Gertrude Stein” filled with little else besides “Great Moments of Modern Culture” that seem “aglow with the sheen of idealised memory.”8 Long after the book’s publication, in other words, the surface is still a problem. Jolas suggests that the superficial form of The Autobiography conceals a lack and papers over a void, but DeKoven goes further: here the surface sheen is all there is. I rehearse these criticisms of The Autobiography not because I wish to quarrel with them, exactly, but rather because this brief history of reading The Autobiography raises many of the same specters that trouble the fiction of Evelyn Waugh. As we have seen in chapter 4, Hollywood functions as ready shorthand for artwork that is all too easy, that caters to the public taste rather

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than elevating it. Here too, we find significant skepticism about the commercial impulse that might animate literary production, as well as accusations of decadence and decline. Even the question of Stein’s failure, with which I began this chapter, is not altogether dissimilar to the recurrent note of letdown in Waugh’s youthful diary entries, especially when he recounts the aesthetic disaster of The Scarlet Woman. Because reactions to The Autobiography rely on such similar thematics, this chapter is consonant with the one that precedes it: both consider the aesthetics of bad formalism. But rather than elaborate this aesthetics broadly in relation to the cinema, as I do in chapter 4, here I treat a more circumscribed case of bad form—the surface—in order to answer a larger question about modernism’s relationship to form. The Autobiography, all these commentators suggest, demonstrates what good modernist form looks like after it goes bad, after the difficult avant-garde writer composes depthless work for wide distribution. Quite differently, I ask: What does modernism look like, if its promises have been exercises in bad form, as Waugh ultimately seems to believe? How does The Autobiography’s superficiality alter our understanding of the early modernist scene to which it returns? This chapter thus takes quite seriously the longstanding reception of the book in terms of its superficiality, and I argue that the explanatory power of the surface has hardly been exhausted; indeed, it has barely been tapped. It may seem perverse to consider the surface as capable of explanation, since the conventional critical language of explication relies upon metaphors of depth, excavation, and unveiling.9 The Autobiography, after all, famously executes its own act of unveiling in the final lines of the book, where Steinas-Toklas cheekily reports that “Gertrude Stein said, it does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiography. [. . .] I am going to write it for you. [. . .] And she has and this is it.”10 Thus the curious form of the double-voiced autobiography is revealed with a particularly theatrical gesture. Whatever deep reading The Autobiography can support usually occurs here, as those critics who have sought to recuperate The Autobiography’s reputation define its experimentalism in terms of its unconventional narrative voice. Feminist critics, in particular, have written extensively about Toklas’s narration, since “Stein’s displacement of the autobiographical ‘I’ onto the lesbian couple demonstrates that The Autobiography presents a distinctly feminist notion of identity that, with its resistance to the idea of a unified, coherent self, anticipates postmodern notions of subjectivity.”11 Queer theorists have adopted a similar argument, claiming that Stein’s resistance to the notion of a coherent self may be allied with her refusal to tell her queer life story straight.12

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In this way, deep reading seems to suggest that the real and proper form of The Autobiography is the dyad. These critics put a positive spin on Jolas’s phrase, elevating the dyad as an “egocentric deformation” that advances new possibilities for an identity politics without identity. But even as these readings focus our attention upon the lesbian couple in valuable ways, the dyadic form entails its own kind of distortion. Unavoidably, perhaps, it turns away from The Autobiography’s sprawling cast of characters and reduces the four hundred names mentioned to the two that really matter.13 To see how these other players—such as Jolas and Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Mina Loy—enter into The Autobiography, we need a more capacious (or wider) form than the dyad. To understand Stein and Toklas in context—which is, after all, the task that The Autobiography sets for itself—we cannot rely entirely upon depth hermeneutics. If distant reading can, as Natalia Cecire has recently shown, help us to meet Stein’s work at its most unreadable, perhaps some attention to the surface can help us to understand Stein at her most readable.14 To read the surfaces of The Autobiography, I aim to demonstrate, is not necessarily to “contentedly accept” its superficiality but rather to trace its contours and see what they can show us.15 Staying close to The Autobiography’s surfaces makes particular sense, I contend, not merely because Stein writes about those developments in painting, such as cubism, that attend to the flatness of the picture plane, considering the canvas as a surface, but especially because The Autobiography’s relationship to all visual artworks is largely superficial. The Autobiography makes clear from the beginning that it will not adopt a traditionally ekphrastic relation to the artworks within its pages: Stein does not describe visual art, recreate it in language, or really offer verbal representations of visual representations.16 The Autobiography approximates what Mark Goble calls “ekphrasis degree zero: description of the visual gives way instead to its citation, and the speaker’s experience of any individual works of art is lost to capture more effectively their numerousness.”17 Furthermore, Stein’s citations are barely citations at all, since The Autobiography does not consistently point to clearly defined preexisting artworks outside the text and prefers instead to lump paintings together by creator. Put otherwise: for a book about modernist artists, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas often cares curiously little about art itself. The book in fact stages a performative ignorance about art, as Toklas the narrator declares on the first page, “I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it” (7). This lack of ekphrastic attention has led some to insist that The Autobiography demonstrates a “rejection of the visual,” that “Stein shuns the pictorial” and “dismisses visuality.”18 But such readings—and, indeed, almost all scholarly

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writing about this memoir—neglect the visual evidence provided by The Autobiography itself, which does present sixteen artworks in full in the form of its photographic illustrations. These illustrations, interleaved with the pages of the first edition published by Harcourt Brace, do not appear in all editions of the book and are perhaps for this reason neglected. Scholars occasionally refer to the first and last illustrations, but the photographs have received no sustained consideration as a group since 1975 (and even then, in only one article)—which is to say that their last significant treatment predates Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1977), Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (1980), and all subsequent criticism and theory of photography.19 This chapter seeks to consider these illustrations by the light of photography studies, and even as I quote from The Autobiography, I focus my analysis on these neglected photographs as the primary text in this chapter in order to show how the surface forms of photography inform the superficiality of the text that surrounds them. Although Stein’s interaction with photography remains significantly underexamined, recent critical work on modernism and photography makes this examination possible, so that we might move beyond the bare facts of her encounter with the medium in the pages of Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work, the first outlet in the United States to publish her work. Alix Beeston, for one, has shown how composite photography informs the “serialized,” “reiterated” presentation of the “woman-in-series” in Stein’s Three Lives.20 For Judith Brown, Stein’s reiterations are part of her “project to drain the signifier of its signification,” “to consider the impact of the surface through an attention to form (rather than a singular focus on content)”; Stein’s flat, empty surfaces are analogous to “a version of the photograph, emptied of content” or representation.21 In a related way, Anne Anlin Cheng has been prompted by the figure of Josephine Baker, especially as she appears in glamorous photographs, to demonstrate how “the trope of skin/surface [. . .] occupies a central place in the making of modern aesthetic and philosophic theory,” so that we must ask what the surface can “be or do if it is not just a cover.”22 Building on this work, I show how, as Stein attempts to write and picture the history of modernism in a saturated media marketplace, photography (and its tropes and techniques) offer her useful ways of constructing memory and representing the embodied artist. The Autobiography is the text in which Stein begins “to feel the outside inside and the inside outside”—bringing others into the inner sanctum of her salon and externalizing her own subjectivity—and this transfer occurs across the surface of the photographic text.23 Although the critical history of The Autobiography would suggest that it has only a surface form—for its detractors, it has no depth—the surface, as I will demonstrate, actually enables more useful kinds of thinking than we

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assume. The photographic surface helps us to draw connections between The Autobiography and Stein’s other works, which consistently demonstrate a fascination with the inside-outside dialectic, with the body, and with touch (a sense often abandoned in Stein studies in favor of visuality or hearing). And thinking about the skin that Stein’s works share—to borrow from Barthes’s Camera Lucida—also allows us to consider “the skin of the social,” in Sara Ahmed’s choice phrase.24 A consideration of The Autobiography’s sociality thus introduces another, second-order form that I discuss in this chapter. For Stein’s photographic surfaces index a contingent history of modernist social networks, presenting modernism itself as a networked form that changes over time. Networks obviously “do not fit formal models of unified shape or wholeness,” as Caroline Levine has written—they “sprawl” and “spread,” sometimes seeming “altogether formless, perhaps even the antithesis of form”—but nevertheless “we can understand networks as distinct forms—as defined patterns of interconnection and exchange that organize social and aesthetic experience.”25 The network, in fact, is a highly social form, “a form that first and foremost affords connectedness,” allowing us “to understand how many other formal elements [. . .] link up in larger formations.”26 The Autobiography, precisely because of its superficiality, can track these lateral connections and establish patterns of exchange and linkage. I am interested in what difference it might make to consider these forms together, not as the same form, but rather as coexisting, compatible forms— “forms that run up against each other” in the pages and photographs of The Autobiography to tell us something important about modernism.27 As the figures of modernist Paris rub up against each other, modernism takes shape as a series of connections forged through the real “contact zone” of 27 rue de Fleurus and the visual-textual one of The Autobiography.28 In this way, while earlier chapters have considered the forms that animate modernism or the formal debates within it, here I turn to the form of modernism itself. As we will see, the surface, for Stein and for modernism, is not reducible to the flatness of the picture plane, and the superficial in The Autobiography is not necessarily also the insubstantial, or the trivial. The surface remains a site of dynamic encounter, and photography finally teaches us how to take Stein’s experimental superficiality and contingent history seriously.

Refreshing Memory with Photographic Histories The Autobiography’s photographs picture a variety of subjects: some are portraits (of Stein, Toklas, Picasso, and others), some reproduce paintings

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(by Picasso, Juan Gris, and Francis Rose), and the remainder show the interior of Stein and Toklas’s home at 27 rue de Fleurus, with the walls covered in modernist masterworks such as Picasso’s portrait of Stein and Matisse’s Le bonheur de vivre (both 1905–6). This last group of illustrations is explicitly invoked by Toklas-the-narrator, who admits within the first ten pages of the memoir to having “refreshed [her] memory by looking at some snap shots taken inside the atelier” (13). In this way The Autobiography links Toklas’s surface-level knowledge of modern art to the medium of photography and, simultaneously, insinuates a clear homology between the collection of illustrations and Stein’s own collection of paintings displayed on the atelier walls.29 Alice Toklas’s early reference to “snap shots” occurs as she attempts to halt her description of the furniture in the atelier and turn to the paintings on its walls but cannot quite make the leap: And on all the walls right up to the ceiling were pictures. At one end of the room was a big cast iron stove that Hélène came in and filled with a rattle, and in one corner of the room was a large table on which were horseshoe nails and pebbles and little pipe cigarette holders which one looked at curiously but did not touch, but which turned out later to be accumulations from the pockets of Picasso and Gertrude Stein. But to return to the pictures. The pictures were so strange that one quite instinctively looked at anything rather than at them just at first. I have refreshed my memory by looking at some snap shots taken inside the atelier at that time. The chairs in the room were also all italian renaissance [sic], not very comfortable for short-legged people, and one got into the habit of sitting on one’s legs. (13) Just like this passage, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is notoriously digressive, and Toklas offers a quiet explanation for both its anecdotal mode and its lack of ekphrastic interest in paintings.30 Although the book declares itself to be a story of “an art movement of which the outside world at that time knew nothing” (33), the pictures made by this art movement are so strange that one would rather look elsewhere first, at something easier on the eyes. One collection gives way to another, with the accumulated objects “from the pockets of Picasso and Gertrude Stein” occupying our visual interest instead of the paintings: like all other discussions of pictures in The Autobiography, this one turns to people instead. On the basis of this passage, we should not be surprised that The Autobiography consistently attends to Italian Renaissance chairs and to “contacts and clashes of personalities,” since the strangeness of the pictures themselves prompts everyone to avert their gaze.

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I offer this expanded quotation here because, like Toklas’s snapshots, it provides a useful reference point. The photographic consultation and its context register all the major aspects of photography that I will discuss in this chapter: history (the need to “refresh” one’s memory), collections (the accumulated objects and grouped paintings), contingency (the random pocket contents), mediation (the indirect look at paintings, via the snapshots), and embodied inhabitation (“the habit of sitting on one’s legs”). I discuss these attributes of photography in the same order as I list them here. Some will receive more attention than others, but I enumerate them now, all together, in order to demonstrate the extent to which they impinge upon each other, helping us to map out the complex formalism of photography as an art form. Toklas’s attempt to talk about the pictures in the atelier may not say much about paintings, but she does, by coincidence, tell us a lot about photography. I begin my discussion with the questions of history and memory, since these concerns are what drive Toklas to consult the photographs in the first place. The snapshots must bridge the gap between the early years of the twentieth century, which are the subject of almost two-thirds of The Autobiography, and the moment of the book’s composition in 1932. This section of The Autobiography, in fact, recounts Toklas’s first visit to the home of Gertrude and Leo Stein at 27 rue de Fleurus on a Saturday evening in September 1907—three years before Toklas was to move in. Invited for dinner, she had the privilege of sitting next to Picasso and sipping coffee with a group of artists discussing the upcoming vernissage of the Salon d’automne.31 After dinner Toklas observed the atmosphere in the atelier: “there were already quite a number of people in the room, scattered groups, single and couples all looking and looking. Gertrude Stein sat by the stove talking and listening and getting up to open the door and go up to various people talking and listening” (17). Although Toklas does not mention exactly what all these people are “looking and looking” at, we know that they are looking at the atelier walls, since the Steins’ Saturday evenings were informal exhibitions of modern art. In 1907 the remarkable collection needs only Gertrude Stein as its gatekeeper, because the paintings have not yet gained the “value” that will later justify the use of “the only yale key in the quarter” to lock the atelier’s door (13).32 When Toklas arrived in Paris, the avant-garde was in a transitional year, positioned on the cusp of the key movement in modern painting: cubism. The previous year had seen the definitive end of one artistic movement (postimpressionism) with the death of Cézanne, and it had marked the apex of another (fauvism) with the exhibition at the Salon des indépendants of

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Matisse’s Le bonheur de vivre, which the Steins bought.33 By contrast, 1907 was a year of new developments. Key relationships began—Marie Laurencin met Guillaume Apollinaire in February, and Pablo Picasso met Georges Braque later that spring—and one of the most important commercial sites for artists in Paris came into being, when Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler opened his gallery on the rue Vignon in July.34 The visits associated with an incipient cubism occurred: in the spring, Picasso went to the Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro to see African art, and in the summer and early fall, Braque began traveling to La Ciotat and L’Estaque, on the Mediterranean, in order to paint landscapes.35 By the time Toklas arrived at Stein’s door in September, several major paintings—not just for this year, but for the decade—had been completed: Matisse’s Blue Nude (Souvenir of Biskra), Braque’s Landscape at La Ciotat and Landscape at L’Estaque, and Picasso’s Les demoiselles d’Avignon. We might thus be tempted to read 1907 as a year of accomplishment, but it is crucial to note that none of these works prompted quite the burst of public recognition that we imagine. The primitivism of Matisse’s nude caused a scandal when it was shown in the spring, with the critic Louis Vauxcelles proclaiming his disdain for the “mannish nymph” with “the deformed body.”36 (Vauxcelles’s critique indicates how Matisse’s Blue Nude, as I mentioned in chapter 3, challenges the conventions of the genre: Matisse’s abstractions and his play with color register as formal violations.) The Braque paintings named after Mediterranean towns in which we recognize cubism would not be made until the following summer, in 1908.37 Perhaps most important, Picasso’s Demoiselles, which is often said to herald the arrival of cubism, was only seen privately, in Picasso’s studio in Montmartre, by a few friends in 1907; the painting was not photographed and reproduced in a publication until 1910, and it did not leave the studio for an exhibition until 1916.38 In sum, although these paintings already affected “the mutation of ideas” within Parisian artistic coteries (to use Jolas’s words), none of them had garnered the public approval with which we retrospectively endow them. We ought, therefore, to approach 1907 with a sense of Toklas and the rest of modernist Paris positioned on the threshold, just as Toklas is posed in the frontispiece photograph for The Autobiography (figure 5.1), which I analyze at length in the final section of this chapter. Toklas’s retrospective narration points up the difference between this early moment and the later one of the book’s writing. In the time that elapses between 1907 and 1932, not only does World War I occur, but the lives of modernist writers and artists change in other marked ways as well. Picasso, for example, joins Georges Braque in the development of cubism and moves through a key period of working in collage. He also signs an exclusive

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Figure 5.1 “Alice B. Toklas at the door, photograph by Man Ray,” from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933. © Man Ray 2015 Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/ ADAGP, Paris

contract with Kahnweiler in 1912, which allows him to move into increasingly comfortable apartments, and ultimately, after his marriage in 1918 to Olga Khokhlova (a dancer from the Ballets russes), into a stylish bourgeois residence at 23 rue la Boétie.39 In 1932, two experiences confirm Picasso’s admission to the realms of fame and material wealth: a full-scale, 236-work retrospective exhibition of his work opens in June at “that venerable symbol

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of artistic celebrity, the galerie Georges Petit,” and a photo-essay about him is published by the Hungarian photographer Brassaï, who cannot help but note his luxurious life, complete with dogs, nicely tailored suits, and a chauffeured car.40 (In this respect Picasso was just two years ahead of Stein, who would be the subject of “a virtual media blitz” during her US tour, complete with “newsreels, radio broadcasts, [. . .] newspaper articles, and magazine interviews.”41) As Picasso’s life and work indicate, the photographs that accompany The Autobiography create a stitch between two radically different moments in the lives of Stein and her fellow travelers, so that if the avantgarde stands in 1907 on the threshold of its major accomplishments, by 1932 it has entered the room, bought the house, and completely redefined the standards for interior decoration. Braque puts it best when he reflects upon the youth and poverty that lie in his past by sighing, “how life has changed we all now have cooks who can make a soufflé” (11). Toklas, too, contemplates “how life has changed” by looking back at photographs from the early years of the century. Her gesture appeals to photography’s unique, if complicated, capacity to historicize. As Goble notes, “the medium fetish for photography” reached an apex in the 1930s, when it manifested as “a new archival sensibility that is attracted to modern media precisely because they hold out the promise that new technologies will make for better history.”42 Insofar as The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas constitutes a “modernist experiment in historiography,” that experiment is indeed conducted through the medium of photography—but in a superficial way, formulated across its photographic surfaces.43 Its turn to photography is less a way for Toklas to consult history and more a way to write it, as we see in the language that Stein chooses to describe the use and operation of photography: “I have refreshed my memory.” Photography’s ability to picture the past creates memory anew and complicates—even compromises—its capacity to historicize. For this reason and others, many commentators on photography’s special relationship to history have suggested that the kind of history enabled or presented by photography is not necessarily better, or more accurate. Even Barthes—the writer perhaps most closely associated with a positive view of photography’s ability to historicize—admits that photographs stage the “tension of History”: history “is constituted only if we consider it, only if we look at it—and in order to look at it, we must be excluded from it.”44 Viewing history in a photograph, in short, necessarily separates the viewer from that very history. By extension, because the viewer is not in history, whatever knowledge she might gain is that of an outsider. This exclusion is dramatized by Toklas’s perusal of old photographs. Though she possesses

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an intimate, nonhierarchical relationship to modernism that is sometimes deemed desirable, her relationship to the Steins’ paintings is not one marked by knowledge.45 Her method of looking has been called naive, or somehow “suspect,” and even when we leave aside earlier critics’ condescension, we can see how her reference to the photographs dramatizes a particular epistemological problem of The Autobiography that is also part of how its history functions.46 Toklas has once (sort of ) known these paintings, forgotten them, and recalled them: she knows them, but she doesn’t know them well. The photographs must supplement—even as they can only ever be apprehended with—superficial knowledge. Any history furnished by the snapshots, then, manifests the pleasures and the problems of surface forms: they skim across subjects, touching on as many as possible. That this superficiality might be a fundamental characteristic of the medium is an idea for which Susan Sontag’s classic On Photography provides some support. Sontag contends that photographs contribute to history through their multiplicity, refusing to make propositions or totalizing claims about the past: “Paintings invariably sum up; photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.”47 Photographs seem thus capable of documenting the past—submitting evidence of the “real”—and also establishing openings for narratives about it (without fully delineating those narratives): in this regard photographs might be said to “furnish instant history.”48 But such instantaneousness—both in terms of the speed of production and the isolated moment represented by any one photograph—makes for a particularly commodified kind of history in Sontag’s view. “Any collection of photographs is an exercise,” she believes, in the “abbreviation of history,” “a short cut,” and we ought to remain wary of the ways in which the photograph can “turn the past into a consumable object.”49 The photographs of The Autobiography impart precisely such a history of modernism, with a different inflection: the point is to make Stein and Picasso easier to consume (see figures 5.2 and 5.3). Indeed, one of the primary ways that The Autobiography’s illustrations make Stein more palatable is by presenting images of her life before authorship, before she became “Gertrude Stein.” Two images, in particular, function as “pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history.” A photograph titled “Gertrude Stein in Vienna” (figure 5.4) presents the writer as a child at about the age of three or four, with a melancholy or perhaps quizzical look, her right hand placed carefully on the seat of a nearby chair—one of several old-fashioned, dark, and deeply serious pieces of furniture and decor that crowd the frame. Behind her sits a doily-topped table with an

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Figure 5.2 “Gertrude Stein in front of the atelier door,” from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933

ornate birdcage; though the door is open, a bird sits inside it. The openwork texture of the cage and the crocheted doily contrast sharply with the heavy velvet dress young Gertrude wears under a strange striped sash or cummerbund. No part of the image is the least childlike or playful, but as Sontag has written, she nevertheless looks “solemn and huggable.”50 The “invitation to

Figure 5.3 “Pablo and Fernande at Montmartre,” from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933

Figure 5.4 “Gertrude Stein in Vienna,” from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933

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sentimentality” extended by this photograph and the concomitant opportunity to “turn the past into an object of tender regard” soften the ground for the history of modernism that surrounds the image of Stein as a child.51 We feel differently about her—tender, sentimental, eager to hug—because the surfaces of the photograph, like the plush velvet of young Gertrude’s dress, invite our touch and thereby reformulate our relation to her. The subsequent illustration, “Gertrude Stein at Johns Hopkins Medical School” (figure 5.5), extends this solemn biography. In book-lined classroom of some kind, Stein squints into a microscope. Though she does not look at it, a human skull rests across the table from her, positioned at about eye level. The implication is clear: Stein was a sober medical student, as Toklas’s narration initially corroborates. In Baltimore, Stein “immediately betook herself to research work. She began a study of all the brain tracts, the beginning of a comparative study” (89). Her work for the first two years was so good, in fact, that she developed a good “reputation” and received all her credits in the

Figure 5.5 “Gertrude Stein at Johns Hopkins Medical School,” from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933

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later years when “she was bored, frankly openly bored” (90). The figure we see in this photograph would never do as the real Stein did, and leave medical school in Baltimore without her degree—a decision that prompted a friend to chastise her on feminist grounds: “Marion Walker pleaded with her, she said, but Gertrude Gertrude remember the cause of women, and Gertrude Stein said, you don’t know what it is to be bored” (91). While obviously a tool for anatomical study, the skull on the desk also marks this photograph with a memento mori, a mortal form that I have discussed at length in chapter 2. In a manner distinct from the paintings I treat there, these photographs might more generally be seen to function as reminders of death. “Photographs show people being so irrefutably there and at a specific age in their lives,” Sontag writes, that they can clearly also “state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction.”52 As Jay Prosser puts it, “photography is not an aide-mémoire but a memento mori.”53 Toklas may consult the snapshots to aid her memory and refresh it, but the photographs remind us, too, of the certainty of death and the vulnerability of even so egotistical a person as Stein. They link up with The Autobiography’s consideration of how modernism is fundamentally altered by World War I—“It was a changed Paris. Guillaume Apollinaire was dead” (207)—and by untimely early deaths: “Juan died and Gertrude Stein was heart broken [. . .]. The most moving thing Gertrude Stein has ever written is the Life and Death of Juan Gris” (229). More important, though, these two photographs of the younger Stein work to sanction her seriousness of temperament and purpose: taken together, this girl and this young woman authenticate Stein’s assertions of artistic centrality and innovation. They do so because photography’s special relation to the past is bound up with its relation to the real. As Barthes writes, “in Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there. There is a superimposition here: of reality and of the past.”54 (This contention is dependent upon assumptions about how photography refers to the world, which I will discuss later in this chapter.) Barthes is careful to note that, even though a photograph can show us “what has been,” even though the “very essence” of photography is “That-has-been,” it does not summon the past for us: “The Photograph does not call up the past (nothing Proustian in a photograph). The effect it produces on me is not to restore what has been abolished (by time, by distance) but to attest that what I see has indeed existed.”55 Stein’s youth, innocence, and studiousness are hardly revivified by these photographs; rather, the illustrations indicate that these earlier Gertrude Steins existed, despite whatever reservations we may have as (skeptical) readers of The Autobiography. Our task is to place these past Steins that indeed existed in

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relation to the Parisian Stein, as “pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history.”56 Arranged into such a linear relation, these photographs of the youthful sobriety that has been lead inevitably toward, and thereby authorize, the adult self-appreciation that is. We may feel reluctant to accept The Autobiography’s historical account. After all, Barthes surmises that we may “have an invincible resistance to believing in the past, in History, except in the form of myth,” but what the photograph does is to “put an end to this resistance: henceforth the past is as certain as the present, what we see on paper is as certain as what we touch.”57 Photography transmutes the uncertainty of vision into the security of touch. The medium thus reverses the Jamesian epistemology associated with sculpture, which combines the certainty of sight with the conjecture of feeling. The photographic illustrations of The Autobiography— interleaved with its pages and printed on the same paper as its text—take full advantage of the surface’s formal capacity to bring us into contact with the young Stein.

Making Paintings and Painters Look Small: Name-Dropping and Networking “Cézannes, Renoirs, Matisses, and Picassos” The turn toward photography is neither simple nor insignificant for The Autobiography’s claim to historicize, and the same is true for the book’s claims to refer to the world outside the text. To place the emphasis slightly differently, we can say that the photograph shows us “that-has-been,” pointing to a specific element of the past and leading Barthes to assert that “Reference [. . .] is the founding order of Photography.”58 One of the signal formal challenges in reading The Autobiography lies in understanding the operation of this reference. Most commonly, photography’s referentiality is described as being commensurate with its indexicality, the “direct physical link between a photograph and the thing it represents” created by photochemistry, and I shall have more to say about the physicality of this process in my next section.59 For now, I want to discuss referentiality more broadly: how does The Autobiography refer (and not refer), and what are its objects? Most obviously, The Autobiography refers to events (such as Stein’s serious study at Johns Hopkins) that can be represented in illustrations and thereby certify the reality of Toklas’s narration, which sometimes seeks directly to activate photography’s referentiality. For instance, we learn in the chapter about World War I that Stein and Toklas visited the town of Rivesaltes, the birthplace of General Joseph Joffre, who was responsible for the Allied victory at the Battle of the Marne in 1914: “It had a little hospital and we got

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Figure 5.6 “Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in front of Joffre’s birthplace,” from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933

it extra supplies in honour of Papa Joffre. We had also the little ford car showing the red cross and the A. F. F. W. sign and ourselves photographed in front of the house in the little street where Joffre was born and had this photograph printed and sent to Mrs. Lathrop [the head of the American Fund

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for the French Wounded]. The postalcards were sent to America and sold for the benefit of the fund” (194). The photograph that Toklas mentions here is, presumably, the interleaved photograph of Stein and Toklas in their car with the Red Cross on it (figure 5.6). Attempting to capitalize upon whatever referential capacity photography possesses, Stein signals that she and Toklas did indeed visit Joffre’s birthplace; that they took a photograph that was used to raise money for the A. F. F. W.; and that, by extension, their goodwill toward veterans is authentic. The historical record is intermediated by the photograph, and by telling their story in more than one medium, Stein hopes to make it seem more reliable. The truth claim of the photograph should reinforce the truth claim of The Autobiography as autobiography, a genre that conventionally depends on reference and faithful accounts. This kind of photographic referentiality is crucial, both because of Stein’s brash, potentially off-putting self-characterization as a genius and because of the improbability of her position within modernism, at the juncture of so many different figures and movements. It is simply hard to believe that Stein knew so many people and owned so many paintings. (The Steins’ collection still proves so extraordinary, in fact, that when the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art mounted an exhibition designed to reunite many of their paintings and contextualize them anew, the exhibition included life-size enlargements of snapshots taken inside the atelier so that exhibition viewers could better apprehend the size and arrangement of the collection.60) Photographs mitigate this readerly suspicion. When we read that Stein and her brother Leo buy Matisse’s La femme au chapeau, and that Stein’s portrait was painted in a drawn-out process, with Picasso delaying and hesitating, The Autobiography follows the textual reference quickly with a visual one, a photograph that shows them hanging together on the wall of the atelier (figure 5.7). The picture points us to their coexistence with its caption, “Room with Gas (Femme au chapeau and Picasso Portrait),” and provides specific information about their positions in relation to other paintings at the time that the photograph was taken. We see the portrait of Stein in the upper left corner of the photograph, with the Matisse directly below it, alongside at least nine other artworks on the same wall. Similar arrays of paintings appear in other illustrations, “Room with Oil Lamp” (figure 5.8), and “Room with Bonheur de Vivre and Cézanne” (figure 5.9), the last of which echoes Toklas’s sense that “on all the walls right up to the ceiling were pictures” because the top edge of Matisse’s Le bonheur de vivre is cut off by the framing of the photograph (13).61 By providing visual evidence that 27 rue de Fleurus contained the paintings that Stein vaguely mentions, these photographs can corroborate Stein’s stories and therefore shore up The Autobiography against those who—like Jolas,

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Matisse, and others—might question it. As Michael North writes, “whenever the issue of faithful mimesis is raised, the example of photography is apt to be influential.”62 These three photographs of paintings have been read in precisely this way by Paul Alkon, the only critic to have written about the photographs as a group. For him, these three illustrations work as “a corrective” to Stein’s otherwise silly narrative of “visitors and parties” by focusing “attention on what is most important: works of art.”63 The capacity of the photograph to refer seems to return The Autobiography to the realm of history, a genre whose putative objectivity makes it preferable to gossipy memoir. In his view, “the absence of people” in these photographs is just right.64

Figure 5.7 “Room with Gas (Femme au chapeau and Picasso Portrait),” from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933

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“Room with Oil Lamp,” from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,

Yet the photographs not only are not empty of people—so many of the paintings are portraits, after all—but they also refer to their creators in such a way that Stein’s visitors remain spectral presences in the photographs. In “Room with Gas” (figure 5.7), Matisse’s La femme au chapeau comes to stand not just for fauvism but for the painter himself, just as the portrait of Stein comes to stand for Picasso: the atelier wall puts Matisse and Picasso on the same plane.65 The same thing happens in “Room with Bonheur de Vivre and Cézanne” (figure 5.9), where the photograph places Matisse and Cézanne (via the portrait of his wife) in conversation. In these photographs of the atelier walls, we are asked to think about the surface of the wall more than the surface of the canvas, and these domestic galleries constitute miniature modernist networks, laying paintings and painters out in temporal and spatial relation to each other. (I say “temporal” because, as paintings are moved and hung elsewhere, the network undergoes renegotiation and rearrangement, much as would occur through the painters’ encounters and competition with each other in the atelier on Saturday nights.66 As Patrick Jagoda writes, “a network is never a static structure”; “capable of spatiotemporal transformations and scalar shifts,” the network describes “dynamic relations” and thereby reminds

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Figure 5.9 “Room with Bonheur de Vivre and Cézanne,” from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933

us, yet again, that form is not “merely synchronic.”67) The surface form, in short, enables lateral movement, which in turn permits the formation of the linkages that are crucial to the network: surface and network forms coexist along the photographed walls of 27 rue de Fleurus.

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Consider, as one example of this formal coexistence, “Room with Gas” (figure 5.7), the atelier photograph of latest date and last appearance in The Autobiography, which pictures the southwest corner of the atelier in 1908–9. Picasso’s Gertrude Stein (1905–6), given to her by the artist in autumn 1906, hangs in the upper left corner, above Matisse’s La femme au chapeau (1905), which Gertrude and Leo bought at the Salon d’automne in 1905. To the right of La femme au chapeau is another Matisse, Olive Trees at Collioure (1906), which was purchased in autumn 1907 from Matisse himself. The photograph, as I have already noted, puts Matisse and Picasso on a shared plane, here emphasized by the bare plaster of the wall to the left of the Picasso. “Room with Gas” reminds us of their superficial parity even as the arrangement also raises Picasso above Matisse. But Picasso is not the only painter with whom Matisse converses here: Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Girl in Gray-Blue (ca. 1889) hangs as a pendant with La femme au chapeau, mirroring Madame Matisse’s stance and millinery. Renoir’s colorism—evident even in the title of his painting— dialogues with the bold pigments of fauvism that Renoir, of course, influenced in the first place. And these two paintings enter into exchange with each other not just across two smaller paintings but also through an intermediary, an invisible character who appears in all the atelier photographs: Ambroise Vollard, the art dealer from whom the Steins made many purchases in the early years of the century. Gertrude and Leo acquired Renoir’s Girl in Gray-Blue from Vollard in January 1907 in a trade for Paul Gauguin’s Three Tahitian Women against a Yellow Background (1899), which appears in “Room with Oil Lamp” (figure 5.8) above the table and to the left of the pipe. Vollard also sold the Steins most of the major paintings in “Room with Bonheur de Vivre and Cézanne” (figure 5.9).68 Thus the photographs of the atelier, even as they emphasize the surface of the wall and the exchanges between painters who knew each other, also register the importance of network hubs such as Vollard, who links up Renoir and Stein, Cézanne and Matisse. That informally networked paintings should ultimately refer to their creators is a habit of reading and viewing encouraged by The Autobiography’s signal referential device within the text: the proper name.69 The name takes center stage very early in The Autobiography, when Toklas concludes the brief first chapter with perhaps the most frequently quoted lines of the book: “The three geniuses of whom I wish to speak are Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and Alfred Whitehead. I have met many important people [. . .] but I have only known three first class geniuses and in each case on sight within me something rang” (9). By evoking her own perceptive sight and sounding of these three figures, Toklas indicates the degree to which the reader will be asked to look at people in this text, and in the second chapter, names come

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to dominate the text. Take, for example, Toklas’s summary of the Steins’ collection on her first Saturday evening: In those days there were pictures of all kinds there, the time had not yet come when they were only Cézannes, Renoirs, Matisses and Picassos, nor as it was even later only Cézannes and Picassos. At that time there was a great deal of Matisse, Picasso, Renoir, Cézanne but there were also a great many other things. There were two Gaugins [sic], there were Manguins, there was a big nude by Valloton that felt like only it was not like the Odalisque of Manet, there was a Toulouse Lautrec. [. . .] There was a portrait of Gertrude Stein by Valloton that might have been a David but was not, there was a Maurice Denis, a little Daumier, many Cézanne water colours, there was in short everything, there was even a little Delacroix and a moderate sized Greco. (14) Toklas’s brief catalogue proves exciting for the reader in its variety, but the list actually gives us almost no information about the characteristics of these paintings, with the exceptions of the “big nude by Valloton,” the “portrait of Gertrude Stein by Valloton,” and the “Cézanne water colours.” The list is typical of The Autobiography’s refusal to engage in ekphrasis, and what Stein gives us instead is reference at its most general: text that seems replete with information actually reverts to (or relies upon) the form of the surface. In this list of paintings, qualities such as genre and subject matter prove far less significant than authorship, and the specificities of the paintings in the Steins’ collection are subsumed into the generalities of these painters’ styles. Referring to a painting by Cézanne as “a Cézanne” has, of course, long been a common conversational and even critical shorthand, but the effect of this shorthand, repeated throughout the list, is one of metonymic substitution of the artist for the artwork. This metonymic play makes the paintings in the atelier into characters in The Autobiography itself, so that the “enormous Picassos of the Harlequin period” slide easily into “the Picassos [who] have not come” to dinner on time (14–15).70 Such metonymic substitution situates the paintings within modernism’s broader networked form and enlists them in Stein’s name-dropping program more generally, as Stein and Toklas appear to come into contact with every single significant modernist writer, painter, sculptor, or dancer working in France or Britain in the first part of the twentieth century—either in person or in the guise of a painting. The catalogue of the collection offers the reader

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the same impression as this list of “wives of geniuses” that Toklas provides: “I began with Fernande and then there were Madame Matisse and Marcelle Braque and Josette Gris and Eve Picasso and Bridget Gibb and Marjory Gibb and Hadley and Pauline Hemingway and Mrs Sherwood Anderson and Mrs Bravig Imbs and the Mrs Ford Maddox Ford [sic] and endless others” (95). The paratactic list of wives is even more superficial than the catalog of paintings; what is remarkable is “the dimension it does not have,” the depth that is absent from the surface-level references.71 Surface aesthetics here are also network aesthetics: as Jagoda notes, “networks, after all, suggest a culture that grows shallower even as it becomes increasingly connected.”72 The list of wives, formulated with “and” after “and,” insinuates linkages between people with no regard for whether they possess a personal relation, so that the wives are as connected to each other as they are to Toklas. The list thus condenses an effect that Stein employs often throughout The Autobiography, in which it seems that a whirlwind suddenly deposits a new group of artists on Stein and Toklas’s doorstep: “Kate Buss brought lots of people to the house. She brought Djuna Barnes and Mina Loy and they had wanted to bring James Joyce but they didn’t. We were glad to see Mina whom we had known in Florence as Mina Haweis. Mina brought Glenway Westcott on his first trip to Europe” (216). In both these examples, Stein manages to enclose a large number of people within the figurative bounds of 27 rue de Fleurus even when, like James Joyce, they never actually visit Stein and Toklas. Her lists exploit the way in which lists exceed mere record keeping: as we see here, to list is “to display, to lay out, to arrange—to create reality,” to suggest “plenitude” and “rapid motion,” and especially to “spark endless connections and inclusions.”73 One name brings another, which brings another in turn, and the list thus provides a formal equivalent for “the usual formula” that allowed these guests to enter the atelier after knocking: upon being asked “who is your introducer,” “everybody was supposed to be able to mention the name of somebody who had told them about it. It was a mere form” (17; italics mine). The form of the list proves generative because the names are largely unencumbered by characterization or description. Stein never gives her readers any personal traits, physical attributes, or funny anecdotes to attach to most of the names—famous or not—that she scatters throughout her text. These people appear suddenly, as if from nowhere, and Stein provides her reader with no narrative that explains their origins or their reasons for being in Paris. Thus it is more accurate to say that even though Stein does often engage in local list making, the abundance of proper names does not actually function, on the larger scale of the book, as a list. Because Stein’s name

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is “mentioned more frequently than the others,” the generalized namedropping “has the repeated effect of making Gertrude Stein seem to be the focus of a coterie of luminaries.”74 That is, these names—like the paintings on the atelier walls—register, or perhaps create, networks with Stein at the center. Jonathan Goldman has argued that this social form depends upon the complex referential function of the proper name. Within the network, “even a celebrated name accrues value only by assuming a place within a system of signifiers composed of other names”: Stein’s intervention is to recontextualize the celebrity name, “making it signify an ordinary person within her text as much as it does an extraordinary person in the extratextual world.”75 For Mark Goble, too, Stein’s names enact a complex kind of referentiality that he discusses under the rubric of “cameo appearances,” which are characterized by “rapid, superficial referencing,” so that “a disorienting democracy of attention is all but forced upon us, a vortex of characters in constant motion, some of whom are perhaps crucial, many of whom are clearly trivial, yet all of whom occupy the stage for the identical fleeting moment.”76 What is ultimately important about these names, Goble contends, “is not their singularity as references to people but their accretion within space and time.”77 Stein’s constant naming is so obtrusive and aggressive that it becomes a mode of modernist difficulty and opacity “not because the text resists definitive interpretation but because it encourages endless annotation” in the form of “potentially endless historicizing, a historicizing rendered trivial, marginal, and haphazard by the very form of utterance that instigates it.”78 The difficult referentiality of Stein’s names arises, in sum, from their multiplicity, from the sheer scale of Stein’s name-dropping in The Autobiography and its coincident superficiality. Put differently, the outward spreading encouraged by the surface, like the “proliferating multiplicity” afforded by the network, introduces formal difficulty into The Autobiography that challenges the reader and makes this text, like Stein’s more obscure or repetitive works, exceed mastery in its own way.79 Considering scale also helps us to understand the ways in which photography intermediates the social in this book. Even as the total number of proper names can overwhelm the reader, each individual name displays “stardom in miniature,” depending upon a “reduction in scale” that manages to “effectively trivialize or ‘tame’” the author or the painter in question.80 The photographic illustrations in The Autobiography similarly miniaturize and domesticate Stein’s contemporaries. Photographs such as “Room with Oil Lamp,” “Room with Gas,” and “Room with Bonheur de Vivre and Cézanne” elevate the space of the home over the artwork: the point is the entire room, not the Cézanne. This recontextualization is made

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exceptionally clear in a photograph captioned “Homage à Gertrude, Ceiling painting by Picasso” (figure 5.10). A trumpeter in the company of winged, nude angels sounds the clarion call of Stein’s superiority over Picasso, which the inscription echoes. Although the homage might have been a joke between friends—it was meant to go above Stein’s bed—within the pages of The Autobiography the image is hardly ironic. This is the only Picasso painting reproduced in a standalone photograph, and even it cannot stand alone; the caption makes it dependent on the support of the ceiling. In this photograph, a larger painting is rendered small, and the other three photographs that reproduce paintings similarly diminish the works they picture: Juan Gris’s A Transatlantic (figure 5.11) and two works by Francis Rose, one of Bilignin (figure 5.12) and one of Alice Toklas (figure 5.13). These latter two paintings are, of course, already domestic because one pictures their summer home near the Swiss border, and the other shows us Stein’s partner. All the photographs, however, are domesticated to some degree by

Figure 5.10 “Homage à Gertrude, Ceiling painting by Picasso,” from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933. © 2019 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Figure 5.11 “A Transatlantic, painting by Juan Gris,” from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933

Figure 5.12 “Bilignin from across the valley, painting by Francis Rose,” from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933

Figure 5.13 “Alice B. Toklas, painting by Francis Rose,” from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933

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their inclusion with The Autobiography, where they are subordinate to the pages of Stein’s memoir. Taken together, all seven photographs of paintings raise the question of what it means to reproduce “art as photography”—a question that Walter Benjamin suggests is more important than “the aesthetics of photography as an art”: Everyone will have observed how much easier it is to get the measure of a picture [. . .] in a photograph than in reality. It is indeed tempting to put this down to a decline in appreciation for art, an abdication on the part of the present generation. But that is gainsaid by the fact that the development of reproductive techniques has been more or less paralleled by a change in the appreciation of great works of art. The latter can no longer be seen as the productions of individuals: they have become collective formations of such enormous dimensions that their assimilation is dependent precisely upon their diminution. The result of the mechanical methods of reproduction, ultimately, is to have provided a technique of diminution which helps men to a degree of control over works of art without whose aid they could no longer be used.81 Writing in 1931, at roughly the same moment as The Autobiography’s publication, Benjamin indicates how photographic reproduction can provide access to works of art, both for viewers who might not otherwise encounter them and for those who seek to comprehend them. One can “get the measure” of a painting when it has been subjected to “diminution” and appears in intermedial form, “in a photograph rather than in reality.” Photographic re-presentation is thus a “mechanical method of reproduction” that might actually allow the paintings in The Autobiography’s illustrations to acquire a kind of use value, so that they are restored, perhaps, to a condition not all that different from Stein’s Italian Renaissance chairs. From another perspective, photographs in books have the advantage, as Sontag has written, of becoming “collectable objects”: by extension, photographs of artworks gathered together in a book make the artworks themselves collectable, so that The Autobiography might be said to make Le bonheur de vivre available for the reader’s collection.82 Photographic reproduction is necessary, Benjamin claims, because historical changes in the appreciation of art—changes propelled by modernist networks like those created in The Autobiography—have altered our conceptions of authorship. We no longer understand a Picasso painting to have been produced by Picasso: it is not an individual but rather a “collective formation.”

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The photographs thus overwrite the dynamics of authorship enacted in Stein’s notorious early portraits of Picasso and Matisse, published in Camera Work in August 1912 with the apparent purpose, according to Stieglitz, of explaining “‘What Picasso & Co. have to do with photography.’”83 In these portraits, Stein tracks the interaction between each artist, figured as “one,” and the rest of the avant-garde, grouped together as “some,” and endorses a model of individual creativity and leadership within the artistic movement: “One whom some were certainly following and some were certainly following him, one whom some were certainly following was one certainly working.”84 This description of Picasso and his milieu underscores his vanguardism, elevating the “one” above the “some” to a degree that is perhaps clearer if we return to “Aux Galeries Lafayette,” the Stein text that Mina Loy quotes in her 1924 essay in the Transatlantic Review, which I analyze in chapter 3: “Each one is one. Each one is being the one each one is being. Each one is one is being one. Each one is being the one that one is being. Each one is being one each one is one.”85 Stein undoes her own apparent emphasis on individual self-sufficiency through the distributive logic of the adjective “each”; she multiplies unities and creates surplus forms. But the basic unit here is still the singular “one.” By contrast, the photographs of The Autobiography replace individual influence with the model of the collective; all individuals are situated within the “emergent” form of the network, and only come into view as that form shifts.86 With the illustrations of The Autobiography in mind, then, we can go further than Lisa Siraganian does when she contends that Stein’s “focus on the sociality of the art world and its celebrity culture was itself a way to work through her ideas of how art means in relation not only to individual creators but to the dynamics of movements and trends.”87 Art doesn’t just mean in relation to collective moments and social trends; it is created by those networks. Jeremy Braddock’s exploration of modernist collections helps us to see how: “the language of the modernist collection,” he has shown, is that of “textual sociability, referentiality, and collectivity,” and Stein clearly “conceived of the domestic space as a scene of creation as well as exhibition,” aiming “above all to produce a constructive mode of sociability.”88 Insofar as 27 rue de Fleurus—through salons and gallery arrangements on its walls—brings people into contact with each other, it produces relationality. Yet the creative networks of modernism defy easy representation. The best way to apprehend this constructive sociability and the dynamism of these movements and trends is to miniaturize them. Picasso’s portrait of Stein and Matisse’s Le bonheur de vivre are “collective formations of such enormous dimensions that their assimilation is dependent precisely upon their

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diminution.” To understand a Picasso, to comprehend cubism, to approximate a picture of modernism, you have to make it small. This necessary diminution precludes the collectivity of photographically reproduced art from being an egalitarian sociability. As Stein writes in her formally unconventional Photograph: A Play in Five Acts (1920), “Photographs are small. They reproduce well. / I enlarge better.”89 Nothing like a traditional five-act play, Photograph is better described as a six-part prose poem (five “acts” and a preface) that uses the occasion of a birthday party, perhaps for a set of twins, to mash up theater with photography. The first line of the play asserts, “For a photograph we need a wall” (as a background or a display site), and the wall becomes something like a theatrical backdrop while the rest of the piece contemplates the reproductive nature of photography: “A photograph of a number of people if each one of them is reproduced if two have a baby if both the babies are boys.”90 As in Benjamin’s account, photography’s reproductive capacity entails a reduction in size: the smallness of the baby mimics the diminutive form of the photograph itself. A single photograph can reproduce “a number of people,” just as a book of photographs—a collection of miniatures—can reproduce enormous collective authorship, but only by diminishing the size of the group, by scaling down the modernist network.91 Stein’s form, by contrast, grows to fill the empty space: undergoing her own process of development from the negative, she enlarges herself.

“To Feel the Outside Inside and the Inside Outside”: Touching the Surface of the Photograph That Stein enlarges better is no small matter. Stein was famously large, with an “open personality and sexuality that produced a social aura all its own,” attracting visitors with “her fatness, earthy persona, and unconstrained appetite.”92 Visual representations of Stein by her friends and contemporaries— including a bronze sculpture from the early 1920s by Jo Davidson and a painted portrait by Francis Picabia from 1933—attest to this attraction, as does the photographic illustration that pictures Stein and Toklas in the Piazza San Marco in Venice in 1908 (figure 5.14). The two women rest at the bronze, decorated base of a flagpole: Stein sits low and centered in the frame, almost oracular, with Toklas behind and one step above her. A cluster of approximately twenty-five pigeons gathers at Stein’s feet (presumably drawn to food she has scattered on the ground). Facing a passage in The Autobiography that recalls Saint Francis of Assisi, the photograph, as Alkon has noted, engages in “visual metamorphosis that transforms Saint

Figure 5.14 “Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in front of Saint Mark’s, Venice,” from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933

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Francis preaching to the birds into Gertrude Stein.”93 Alkon may not think that the photograph succeeds “morally,” but the main point of the nearby text is Stein’s fondness for animals, specifically pigs and dogs, and the photograph attests to the pigeons’ attraction to her.94 This attraction is rooted in Stein’s body, which appears bulkier here than in other photographs: draped in a heavy skirt, her knees are spread much wider than Toklas’s, and her posture creates a deep black trapezoid that grounds the entire composition. Indeed, the relation between Stein and the pigeons is replicated in the background of the photograph, where the deep black doorway on the right attracts a cluster of visitors and worshippers to enter Saint Mark’s Basilica. Put into parallel with this central portal, with its lunette mosaic depicting the Last Judgment, Stein here inspires veneration and awe—or at least attention and wonder—as the white-clad boy in the sailor suit stops and stares, and the man in rolled-up trousers turns to look at Stein from behind as she is photographed. As Natalia Cecire has recently reminded us, Stein’s reception history “has always understood Stein’s writing as an emanation of her body,” even when the writing under consideration isn’t one of Stein’s famous experiments in so-called automatic writing.95 Critics often handle Stein by excerpting passages that are “not there to be read but to exemplify”; their widespread practice implies that “like the body itself, Stein’s writing cannot be read, only sampled, tested, anatomized, and diagnosed—treated quite literally like a corpus.”96 This mode of not-reading is characteristic of The Autobiography’s critical history.97 The book is mined for its most memorable and witty bits— what one critic calls its “nuggets of opinion about genius”—such as the following opinion of Ezra Pound: “Gertrude Stein liked him but did not find him amusing. She said he was a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not” (217).98 The most frequently excerpted textual samples function in a similar way: to cut Ernest Hemingway down to size. Stein scoffs that the younger writer is successful because “he looks like a modern and he smells of the museums” (234), and she constantly corrects his work: “Once when Hemingway wrote in one of his stories that Gertrude Stein always knew what was good in a Cézanne, she looked at him and said, Hemingway, remarks are not literature” (85). These witticisms operate in the same way as the abundance of proper names and the photographs of paintings in The Autobiography; they diminish others within Stein’s network while enlarging her. Text and image work together, then, to make Stein’s body—and her body of work—obtrusive. The encounter with Stein’s body—and the forms that it takes in the photographs—begins with the frontispiece by Man Ray (figure 5.1). Cropped down from a larger version that pictures paintings on the walls of the

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atelier, this photograph shows us Stein and Toklas in the atelier. Toklas is framed in the doorway on the left, while Stein sits at her desk, writing, in the foreground on the right side. Stein looks down at her paper, and Toklas stares out of the photograph. The photograph rightly positions Stein in the place of the writer, revealing her authorship in visual terms long before the narration does and simultaneously insisting that the subject of this autobiography is the joint life of the two women.99 In this way the photograph seems to answer the longstanding critical debate about “whether the text participates in a masking of Stein’s and Toklas’s lesbian relationship [. . .] or whether it hides its protagonists’ sexuality in plain sight, making it visible to those who know how to look”: as Chris Coffman has argued (without mention of the photograph), “the book’s economy of vision strongly suggests the latter.”100 But part of what the frontispiece photograph indicates is that vision is not the only sense activated by photography in order to help us understand Stein and Toklas’s life. When women write, as we see Stein do here, “when they take up space as writers, their bodies in turn acquire new shapes,” and we cannot understand these shapes by sight alone, or by using the anatomizing approach that Cecire describes.101 (Indeed, although Cecire elaborates this approach in relation to the possibilities of distant reading, the emphasis on diagnosis that she finds pervasive in Stein scholarship also, paradoxically, recalls the protocols of symptomatic reading; one provocative corollary of Cecire’s argument is that suspicious hermeneutics, considered more broadly, is in some respects a mode of not reading literary texts.102) Forgoing both the aerial, distant view and the deep, diagnosing look, then, we might learn how touch is also crucial for apprehending these writerly shapes, since it helps us to stay closer to the surfaces of lived experience and of the body. Recall that Sontag deems the four-year-old Stein “huggable.”103 How does the frontispiece “put us in the presence” of Stein’s and Toklas’s bodies?104 In three interrelated ways—through indexicality, through contingency, and through mediation—all of which depend for their success upon a surface form that is provided by or analogous to the skin. First, indexicality. The photograph has long been considered—by Barthes, Benjamin, and others—to possess a special relation to the body of the photographed object: as Barthes puts it, “the Photograph always leads the corpus I need back to the body I see.”105 This special relation is often classified as indexicality: the photograph, as an index, “represents its object through contact: it points at its object, or it is itself a trace of, or mark made by, that object.”106 Stein describes photography in much this way in Everybody’s Autobiography (1937) by saying that “photography is different from painting”

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because “painting looks like something and photography does not.”107 Painting is iconic, operating through resemblance, while photography—an index that serves as a trace of the object—works differently. More specifically, when the photographed object is a person, the photograph functions as an index “in the same way that his smell, his fingerprints, or the footprints he leaves in the sand are indices of him”; thus photographic indexicality should be linked, not “to truth or testimony, but to the body.”108 Photographic indexicality, in short, is a property of the medium that can obtain as a corporeal phenomenon. Barthes writes rapturously about the physical particularity with which indexicality imbues the photographic experience: A scientific circumstance (the discovery that silver halogens were sensitive to light) made it possible to recover and print directly the luminous rays emitted by a variously lighted object. The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here. [. . .] A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed.109 Barthes waxes poetic, and his account of how light operates is not strictly accurate.110 But his investment in synesthesia here is notable, as the visual metamorphoses into the tactile: the impalpable touch of light reaches both the body of the photographed person and the eyes of the viewer. Understood as an index, what the photograph does is to connect, to bring into contact “the body that earlier marked the photographic plate or film with its presence and the body that holds the image in its hands and looks over it with its eyes.”111 These bodies are joined by light—a “carnal medium,” a shared skin that creates a smooth, contiguous surface. From the vantage point of an indexical account of photography, then, the photograph cannot help but put us into contact with Stein and Toklas, and any sensation we have of touching them more closely arises out of the properties of light as a superficial form. Light is also the salient aspect of photography for Stein, who favored Man Ray as a photographer: “One day she told him that she liked his photographs of her better than any that had ever been taken except one snap-shot I had taken of her recently” (214). This distinguishes Ray from the other prominent photographer to appear in The Autobiography, Alvin Langdon Coburn, who serves only to confirm Stein’s status as a “prominent” woman: “he was the first photographer to come and photograph her as a celebrity and she

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was nicely gratified” (153). What Stein appreciates about Man Ray, by contrast, is his technique: “she is always fascinated with his way of using lights” (214). Indeed, Man Ray was notable for one particular “way of using lights.” In addition to shooting portraits and more conventional photographs like the frontispiece for The Autobiography, he made many photograms— photographs produced without a camera. Calling these works “rayographs,” Ray placed objects such as scissors, or body parts such as hands, on photosensitive paper that he then exposed to light; the uncovered areas appear dark in the resulting images, while the areas of the paper that were beneath the scissors or the hand are lighter. Because the referent often literally touches the surface of the paper in the rayograph, we might say that light brings viewer and subject into a more direct form of contact in this type of photography. Barthes’s reading of light, like other critics’ insistence on the physical particularity of the photographic experience, uses the tools of phenomenology, which can also serve our apprehension of the second way that The Autobiography manifests Stein’s and Toklas’s bodies—through contingency.112 Both the photographic and the phenomenological understandings of that term are crucial for understanding the contingency of the frontispiece illustration in particular. Contingent upon what is in front of the lens when the shutter is closed, no matter how posed or planned, a photograph depicts that which “has occurred only once.”113 For Sontag, this contingency is “a loose cooperation (quasi-magical, quasi-accidental) between photographer and subject— mediated by an ever simpler and more automated machine.”114 And from a phenomenological perspective, Sara Ahmed reminds us, “it is useful to recall that the word ‘contingent’ has the same root in Latin as the word ‘contact’ (contingere; com-, with, tangere, to touch). Contingency is linked in this way to the sociality of being ‘with’ others, to getting close enough to touch.”115 This etymological connection helps Ahmed to elaborate a figure she calls the “contingent lesbian” that explains “the way in which lesbian desire is shaped by contact with others” and can therefore be “rethought as a space for action, a way of extending differently into space through tending toward ‘other women.’”116 Deriving first from the automaticity of the camera, photographic contingency thus also—at least in Sontag’s analysis—proceeds from the intersubjective situation of the photographic encounter, and we find this same potential for human interaction at the heart of phenomenological contingency. The contingency of Toklas’s position in the frontispiece photograph is noteworthy. We might be tempted to say that she is posed standing still in the doorway, but the extended position of her right arm and hand (the leftmost parts of her body in the picture) indicates that we may also have caught

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her mid-movement, with her hand on the doorknob as she opens it to cross the threshold. (The upraised pen in Stein’s hand similarly suggest captured action.) This particular entrance is doubly contingent—it only ever happened once, and it shows us Toklas’s tendency toward Stein. Lesbian desire shapes the space of the atelier, so that if the frontispiece photograph can be said to announce Stein and Toklas’s relationship at all, that announcement is less a “coming out”—a public revelation that names Stein’s and Toklas’s sexual orientation—than “a story of ‘coming to,’ of arriving near other bodies, as a contact that makes a story and opens up other ways of facing the world.”117 Facing the world in full recognition of this double contingency allows us to understand the surface form that modernism takes in The Autobiography. Take Toklas’s story about a Matisse painting of “a big figure of a woman lying in among some cactuses,” presumably his Blue Nude, which was the “most provocative” of the bather pictures in the studio when it was purchased in 1907 (22).118 At 27 rue de Fleurus the painting was the object of one especially memorable viewing: There one day this five year old little boy of the janitor who often used to visit Gertrude Stein who was fond of him, jumped into her arms as she was standing at the open door of the atelier and looking over her shoulder and seeing the picture cried out in rapture, oh là là what a beautiful body of a woman. Miss Stein used always to tell this story when the casual stranger in the aggressive way of the casual stranger said, looking at this picture, and what is that supposed to represent. (22) The anecdote juxtaposes the boy’s way of looking at the picture—its marvel at the nude body of the woman—with the stranger’s way of looking and its unpleasant insistence on symbolism. Considered alongside each other, these two ways of looking might indicate, according to Charles Caramello, “that a child with a fresh eye can ‘read’ modern art while an adult with a habituated eye cannot” and that the boy is “already acculturated to seeing women as bodies and to seeing those bodies as well as their representations [. . .] as things to own.”119 The scene thus acknowledges cultural influences on all modes of viewing art. Stein also manages, by refusing to say what the picture represents, to respond cheekily to some interrogations of her own written work, which resound in the stranger’s belligerent questioning. In more than one way, then, this story looks like feminist commentary on artistic reception, and perhaps it is, but the story and the painting also affirm Stein’s sexual orientation. Wrapped in Stein’s arms and looking over her shoulder into the atelier, the child understands the eroticism of the painting

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in this household (figure 5.15). The casual stranger does not; after all, he is unfamiliar with the space and its inhabitants, and he would not see that the Blue Nude, here in the upper left corner, is as “beautiful” as the nude sculpture, Standing Female Figure (1907) by Elie Nadelman, in the center of the photograph.120 What makes the difference is, first, the contingency of the boy’s visit upon that “one day,” which is nevertheless linked “to the sociality of being ‘with’” Stein, and second, the orientation that proceeds from that contingency, “extending the body in the world” and “bring[ing] certain objects near, including sexual objects as well as other kinds of objects.”121 Contact and extension—affordances of the surface as a form—enable the boy’s reaction. The story ultimately brings modernism to us not as an object of difficulty—Stein explicitly does not care how hard the painting is to understand—but as an object of ease and pleasure, something that can actually be genuinely appreciated for its surface value.

Figure 5.15 University

Interior, 27 rue de Fleurus, 1912. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale

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Surface appreciations are not without their risks, however. The illustration that intervenes between Francis Rose’s paintings of Bilignin and of Alice pictures Gertrude Stein in the garden at Bilignin with French historian Bernard Faÿ (figure 5.16). Read referentially, this photograph might be said

Figure 5.16 “Bernard Faÿ and Gertrude Stein at Bilignin,” from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933

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counter any goodwill generated by the image of Stein and Toklas at Joffre’s birthplace: it testifies to Stein’s friendship with Faÿ in the interwar years, before Faÿ, in his capacity as a Vichy official, would protect Stein and Toklas while promoting the mass death of Jews and Freemasons in the Holocaust.122 Reading in terms of creative history, we might say that the picture sentimentalizes and softens Faÿ’s bigoted deeds in advance. Standing relaxed in Stein’s sunny garden, with a book in hand, Faÿ is effectively domesticated by the photograph. Yet because Faÿ “is the only person besides Alice who is shown and identified in a picture with Gertrude,” this photograph also brings Faÿ to us in another way.123 As Jeff Solomon has argued, “the long-lasting friendship between Stein, Toklas, and Faÿ” can be explained, at least in part, by “their common homosexuality,” which may have also “worked perversely to protect the women” during the war.124 The photograph, then, brings us into contact with Faÿ as a gay man, “bond[ed]” to Stein and Toklas because of a shared sociality and orientation.125 The touch of Stein’s body mediates the boy’s experience of Blue Nude in a gay domestic space like that occupied by Stein and Faÿ at Bilignin, and as I turn finally to mediation, I want to think in two additional, slightly distinct ways about Toklas’s peculiar position in the frontispiece photograph. First, let us note that Toklas faces us while opening the atelier door, and insofar as our position mirrors hers, she seems to open the door to us, or for us. Here at the opening of the book, Toklas provides access to Stein, interceding for us as an intermediary. Her narration throughout The Autobiography performs this same task; “the wife is a medium,” as Cecire puts it, “but a necessary medium.”126 And because Toklas-as-medium narrates the making of modernism, she provides us with a kind of access to art that is very similar to what we gain from photographic illustrations like “Room with Bonheur de Vivre and Cézanne.” “Photographs,” Sontag reminds us, “make normative an experience of art that is mediated, second-hand.”127 The photograph interposes itself between the viewer and the painting; Toklas intermediates between the reader and artworks in the atelier. In The Autobiography Toklas describes her mediation as a kind of domestic intimacy: “I always say that you cannot tell what a picture really is or what an object really is until you dust it every day and you cannot tell what a book is until you type it or proofread it” (124). In this way, Toklas asks us to think about modernist artworks—visual and textual—as domestic objects encountered repeatedly over time, within the familiar space of the home. Familiarity, for Ahmed, “is shaped by the ‘feel’ of space or by how spaces ‘impress’ upon bodies.”128 Toklas’s mediation gives us some sense of how 27 rue de Fleurus, a familiar space of modernism, “impresses” her body through the

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repetitive acts of dusting and typing; in fact, Toklas contends that only with these daily impressions can one come to know modernism, to “tell what a picture really is.” Even the illustrations in The Autobiography seem like intimate, domestic objects. Hardly good quality, the photographs have a soft, matte look, and the flatness of the contrast quiets even the riotous colors of Matisse’s Bonheur de vivre: the photographs themselves feel like they’ve been softened by the pressure of living, by the touch of Alice’s hands as she dusts. (This physiognomic understanding of modernism rhymes with Lily Briscoe’s still-life-inflected painting, which I examined in chapter 2, and in The Autobiography, this domestic eventuality seems prefigured by the fact that on Toklas’s first visit to the atelier, she is as interested in furniture and the contents of Stein’s and Picasso’s pockets as in the paintings on the walls.) As Ahmed writes, “phenomenology reminds us that spaces are not exterior to bodies; instead, spaces are like a second skin that unfolds in the folds of the body,” because “the skin that seems to contain the body is also where the atmosphere creates an impression.”129 Familiarity with spaces and their contents is a matter of surfaces and the ways in which they impress themselves upon us. By impressing itself upon Toklas in myriad small ways, in other words, 27 rue de Fleurus ceases being exterior to Toklas. These domestic impressions on the surface of her skin make her intimate familiarity with modernism take a necessarily superficial form. Ahmed’s reminder “that spaces are not exterior to bodies” proves useful for thinking about the second way to describe Toklas’s action and position in the photograph. As I have already mentioned, she has been captured on, or in the act of crossing, the threshold of the atelier—she is neither entirely inside the room nor entirely outside it. The inside-outside dialectic was a constant preoccupation—a favorite formal problematic—in Stein’s writing: “She always was, she always is, tormented by the problem of the external and the internal. One of the things that always worries her about painting is the difficulty that the artist feels and which sends him to painting still-lifes, that after all the human being essentially is not paintable” (130). If “the human being” is not paintable, that is because so much of being human is an internal matter: the working of consciousness cannot be seen. Painters are better equipped, according to Stein, to represent essentially external objects, such as the fruits, bottles, and newspapers in still lifes. But Stein never claims that “the human being” isn’t writable, and she approaches people and the domestic objects of still life quite differently from painters. The poems of Tender Buttons—Stein’s love letter to domestic life— “were the beginning,” according to Toklas, “of mixing the outside with the inside. Hitherto she had been concerned with seriousness and the inside of

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things, in these studies she began to describe the inside as seen from the outside” (170). Poems with titles such as “A Chair” and “Rooms” present a phenomenological apprehension of objects and spaces rather than standard descriptions of them. Stein seeks to embody the human consciousness of an object such as a seltzer bottle in the bottle itself in order to evoke “the inside as seen from outside.” In this way Tender Buttons “represents the sphere of the home in terms of sensation—touching, seeing, tasting, hearing, and smelling—as affectively charged.”130 Sensation mixes the inside and the outside because, as Ahmed writes, “the location of sensation on the skin surface shows that the sensation is not ‘in’ the object or the body but instead takes shape as an effect of their encounter. [. . .] In being touched, the object does not ‘stand apart’; it is felt ‘by’ the skin and even ‘on’ the skin.”131 The peculiar affordances of skin as a surface form mean that it “connects as well as contains.”132 Stein uses very similar language—underscored by a new insistence on “feeling”—to describe her project in The Autobiography in her lecture “Portraits and Repetition”: “the important thing was that for the first time in writing, I felt something outside me while I was writing, hitherto I had always had nothing but what was inside me while I was writing. [. . .] [N]ow I suddenly began to feel the outside inside and the inside outside and [. . .] so I wrote the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.”133 While in Tender Buttons Stein sought to “describe the inside as seen from the outside,” The Autobiography attests to Stein’s feeling that there exists “something outside” her own consciousness. This problem of “the outside” is, in one way, simply a genre problem: the job of the autobiographer is to “create a text of what he knows from the inside in terms of what we recognize from the outside.”134 Thus Stein has little choice but to mix outside and inside in The Autobiography, and she demonstrates the extent to which the external can become internal and the internal can become external by relying upon Toklas’s voice. As Siraganian notes, “Stein’s use of Toklas-as-narrator produces an effect not unlike the modern novel’s free indirect discourse, giving the reader [. . .] both a personal viewpoint and [. . .] a community-directed or sociological perspective” so that The Autobiography “renders the art movement’s knowledge of itself as a private cognizance now provocatively divulged to the public.”135 Because Toklas speaks for and to the larger Parisian artistic community, then, feeling “the outside inside and the inside outside” is not just a question of individual autobiography or of domestic partnership. This kind of feeling is a broader problem—and a pleasure—prompted by the network as a form. It is also a problem and pleasure of the surface. Toklas’s narration is one way in which The Autobiography “dissociates interiority from privacy, from

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solitude, and most importantly, from meaningful perception,” and thereby “pursues a range of representational strategies that try not to devolve into a conventional metaphorics opposing surface to depth, ‘external’ to ‘internal.’”136 What Stein’s metaphorics do instead is to abandon depth entirely and, paradoxically, locate both the external and the internal on the surface: “to feel the outside inside and the inside outside” is to touch the surface. It is also to imagine the surface as both a site of transfer and a form of betweenness, both the location where the inside becomes the outside (and vice versa) and the shape of that transformation. This kind of inside out–outside in touching asserts itself with particular effect at the conclusion of The Autobiography, when Toklas declares that Stein has written her autobiography and “this is it” (272), and we see an illustration captioned “First page of manuscript of this book” (figure 5.17). The Autobiography’s final clause is theoretically a “deictic gesture,” directing us “back to the beginning of the book” via the photograph and thereby turning the spatial-form thesis—the aim “to ‘rival the spatial apprehension of the plastic arts in a moment of time’—into a kind of joke.”137 I have suggested in chapters 1 and 2 that the spatial-form thesis misunderstands the plastic arts, which are always already temporal, both on their own and as modernist writers such as Henry James and Virginia Woolf understand them. Moreover, we ought not to read this photograph quite so referentially. Texture matters as much as text here. Stein’s body leaves the trace of her handwriting, which is then indexed by the photograph: an index of an index affirms that Stein’s is the hand guiding The Autobiography. The photograph seems to allow direct contact with the fact of her authorship, but our contact is either inside out— she writes inside a first-person “I” that is not her own, thereby pointing us out toward Toklas—or outside in: we only know to take the handwriting as Stein’s because Toklas has narrated her authorship from the outside, in the distancing third-person “she.” Only at the surface, where outside becomes inside and inside becomes outside, can we see the form that Stein’s authorship takes in the writing of The Autobiography. Handwriting—indeed, writing itself—has a surprisingly close relationship to photography. The medium has been conceptualized as a kind of writing since its earliest days, when the inventor William Henry Fox Talbot recorded the phrase “Words of Light” in his diary; in fact, “the oldest of Talbot’s photographs to survive is a picture of his own handwriting, tracing out the alphabet.”138 With this useful coincidence in mind, North argues that “photography does not lead the visual arts toward a greater or more perfect realism but closer to the condition of writing, since the marks that make up a visual image are seen to be as schematic and as formalized as the marks that make

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Figure 5.17 “First page of manuscript of this book,” from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933

up a word.”139 Stein’s final illustration literalizes this lesson, bringing home the important extent to which photography comes to execute something other than its “mimetic function” in The Autobiography.140 As we have seen, photography does occasionally work to bolster The Autobiography’s claims to reality and truth—to a faithful account of

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modernism. But most of the time, its photographic illustrations function as an integral part of Stein’s nonmimetic project, her experiments in the aesthetics of surface forms. Photographs of the young Stein help to soften the reader’s impression of her and license the charming egocentrism of the text; they participate in a creative history. All seven photographs of paintings similarly aid Stein in her effort to “enlarge better,” and they produce modernist networks that serve this end: when modernism looks small, Stein looks bigger. Stein looms large within the network form, and her body—as well as Toklas’s—are also made to figure prominently in the various photographic surfacisms of The Autobiography, including light, touch, and the surface on which we “feel the outside inside and the inside outside.” In The Autobiography’s final illustration, that kind of feeling allows photography to become “a modern and almost magical blending of word and image that introduces the potential for new expressive form.”141 That new expressivity, that magical blending, is made possible not just by the book’s material support—paper makes the surface of The Autobiography’s text contiguous with that of its photographic illustrations—but by the conclusion’s confident intermediality. Stein tells Toklas early in The Autobiography, “Right here in front of you is the whole story” (23). This deictic gesture refers to the useful synecdoche provided by the paintings in front of Toklas: a Braque and a Derain that encapsulate the relationship between early cubism and fauvism and, by extension, the complex painted dialogue of modernism in 1907. The corollary deictic gesture at the end of The Autobiography compresses its own version of “the whole story” of modernism. Toklas announces that “this is it,” pointing us to a photograph of a literary work that renders history in intermedial form. The dynamic interplay between writing and photography gives us, here at the end of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, the whole story of modernism, right in front of us.

Epilogue The Consolations of Form

The end of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas might seem to bring us full circle, back to the beginning of the book, and to concentrate an entire intermedial history of modernism in its final line and illustration. But the “whole story” of modernism told by The Autobiography is not, as we have seen, a comfortably bounded totality.1 Stein’s preoccupation with modernism’s networked form ensures that she is always redrawing the contours of that story, stressing the porous borders of 27 rue de Fleurus and the contingent connections that are made there. Hers is the same trouble that Henry James articulates when he writes, “Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.”2 The geometry of the circle is an aesthetic intervention, an attempt to contain a sociability that cannot really be circumscribed. To borrow a phrase from Stein’s Tender Buttons, “the difference” between the encircled whole and the network or the surface “is spreading.”3 In this way the networked, superficial form of modernism itself points us toward the broader challenge posed by modernism’s constituent forms. As the proliferating, ever-extending relations of modernism attest, form is exceptionally dynamic in the first half of the twentieth century. I have tried to demonstrate in these chapters that form is motile and malleable, capable of movement and metamorphosis. Forms that we might believe to be stable, 226

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like the golden bowl or the photographed Golden Bird, shift shapes depending on our viewpoint, our viewing moment, and our viewing medium. Form carries the charge of narrative propulsion, as still-life iconography shows us. Rigid formats like the film scenario erupt into activity, and sculpted shape at its purest incarnates multiform possibilities yet to come. Form in modernism can be plastic, mortal, or protean, fusing literature with other media in order to express its dynamism in the round, across a narrative, or toward the future. The first three chapters of this book have thus argued that form is neither monolith nor manacle but a structure or scheme that enables action. Form does something for a text and to a reader. But such formal dynamism is not always liberatory or ecstatic, as the latter two chapters have indicated. The spreading network, like the bad options of cinematic formalism, makes plain that dynamism is also a formal difficulty. What looks from one perspective like tremendous formal energy becomes, from another vantage point, an immanent instability. Elaborating the dynamics of modernist forms in this way, I have not meant to make form into un-form (or informe), into breach, rupture, interstice, liminal space.4 Movement and metamorphosis are not the undoing of form but some of what form does. And by showing how form drives and shifts—how, in the preceding chapters, form rounds, mourns, radiates, misbehaves, and connects—how form forms—I have hoped to signal that there can be no easy conclusions about its actions. Aphorisms about moral impact or political ramification do not suit these forms. Bearing in mind the full formal diversity and complexity of intermedial modernism, we cannot say simply that forms “are good when they are open and bad when they are closed.”5 Indeed, these writers and artists have suggested that form can be good when it is closed—even when it is exhausted in its closure, like the end of To the Lighthouse—and bad when it is open, as in the fraught prospect of nirvana in Loy’s poetry, or the unspooling cinema reels of Waugh’s fictions. Form is good and bad, closed and open, and many more things besides. But modernism’s formal variety and dynamism do not, as I have argued, necessarily guarantee or amount to endurance. There has hovered over the preceding chapters a pervasive doubt about the permanence of art. Fanny Assingham dashes the golden bowl to the ground, and the sculptural metaphor that characterizes Maggie Verver casts her as “an image in worn relief,” with her profile softened by the pressure of the centuries.6 The hand of an unnamed person in To the Lighthouse removes a pear from the collection of still-life fruits, and Lily Briscoe frets that her picture will be “hung in the attics” or otherwise “destroyed.”7 Evelyn Waugh’s film fictions repeatedly relate the destruction of the artwork, as film scripts

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are scrapped and memoirs are burned like so many cosmetically enhanced corpses. He asks whether we “think anything can be a great art which is so impermanent,” and answers his own question with a resounding no.8 Stein’s self-serving superficiality and her network under constant revision refuse to grant a secure place in history to any work but her own. Perhaps the only writer here with any confidence about art’s durability is Mina Loy, who extols Brancusi’s art for having “survived its own impetus,” but she, too, is disappointed when the combined legacy of two pure forms turns out to be “NOTHING.”9 This doubt conveys a lingering question about form’s ability to console. Iris Murdoch warns us against these comforts, “against the consolations of form, the clean crystalline work,” because “our sense of form, which is an aspect of our desire for consolation, can be a danger to our sense of reality as a rich receding background.”10 Disdaining “the false whole,” with its “smallness, clearness, self-containedness,” Murdoch demands instead “a respect for the contingent” and declares that “we need a new vocabulary of attention.”11 Showing how modernism’s intermedial forms and impermanent artworks do in fact honor and even succumb to contingency, my readings have aspired to model something like the vocabulary of attention that Murdoch calls for. Thus if form is the site of consolation—and I have tried to argue that it is not, at least not always—then these forms indicate that, as David James writes, “solace rarely materializes without a foretaste of its indeterminable cessation.”12 To see this complex operation of form, which permits it to offer “more than a pleasing glaze,” we have needed a different kind of formalism, one less interested in identifying objects than in “closely examining [. . .] formal and affective work as ‘an event.’”13 Understanding form as a verbal category, as an activity, we can ask another question, one less concerned with whether crystalline spatial form, or clean pure form, or even formal rigidity can isolate text from context or artwork from background, as older conceptions (and skepticisms) of form might suggest. The works in these chapters ask instead about the power of art to last meaningfully—to continue the meaning-making work of form if forms are so bound up with art’s materiality and its susceptibility to the same neglect and damage as other material objects. Rather than discussing this precarity as always a matter of history, I have considered it as an aspect of form that is made manifest in so many artworks’ availability to the sense of touch. (In this respect, perhaps, I follow Henri Focillon’s idiosyncratic model in ending The Life of Forms with an ode to hands: “the hand,” he says, “means action,” for “it struggles with the very substance it metamorphoses and with the very form it transfigures.”14) If form has been understood as “the final, if

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deeply threatened, site of a notion of the aesthetic as untouched, untroubled, perhaps immune to wars,” then I hope that the repeated touches throughout this book have shown how modernism’s intermedial forms possess no such security.15 As intermediality makes modernism, then, it also makes modernism vulnerable. But it does not follow that all modernists’ formal efforts are attempts to shore fragments against ruins. Modernist form, as we have seen, is not nearly so brittle, and there lies some strength in its flexibility: “In its apparent fixity, form is all about change. In its fixity, form is all about the relationship of change to continuance, even when the continuance is itself precarious.”16 Modernism’s forms matter because they demonstrate the possibility of this precarious continuance, even when continuance ultimately fails. Their consolation is not to provide the shelter of a crystalline structure but rather to help us cope with change by giving shape to it. I have said that modernist form is dynamic—a word from the Greek for power, strength, force.17 We have both overestimated and underestimated the power of form in modernism, and the real force of form is not quite what we believed.

Notes

Introduction

1. Virginia Woolf, “Pictures,” in The Moment and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1974), 173. All subsequent citations of this essay (which was originally published in the Nation & Athenaeum, April 25, 1925, 101–2) will appear parenthetically within the text. 2. On modernism and the arts, see Marianna Torgovnick, The Visual Arts, Pictorialism, and the Novel: James, Lawrence, and Woolf (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux, Twentieth-Century Poetry and the Visual Arts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and the work of Daniel Albright on the comparative and collaborative arts in Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), and Putting Modernism Together: Literature, Music, and Painting, 1872–1927 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015). On modernism and media, see Julian Murphet, Multimedia Modernism: Literature and the Anglo-American Avant-Garde (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Mark Wollaeger, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900 to 1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); and especially Mark Goble, Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 3. On visual culture within modernism and visuality within modernity, see Christina Walter, Optical Impersonality: Science, Images, and Literary Modernism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); Rebecca Beasley, Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Karen Jacobs, The Eye’s Mind: Literary Modernism and Visual Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); and David Michael Levin, ed., Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 4. For studies that embrace the same range of arts and media as this book, see Lisa Siraganian, Modernism’s Other Work: The Art Object’s Political Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), and Judith Brown, Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009). On modernism and the arts, and modernism and media, see note 2 above. 5. Ezra Pound, “Canto LXXXI,” in The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, ed. Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair, 3rd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 1:381. 6. On abstraction in the visual arts, see Leah Dickerman, “Inventing Abstraction,” in Inventing Abstraction 1910–1925: How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art, ed. Leah Dickerman (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012), 12–37. 7. Goble, Beautiful Circuits, 10.

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8. Urmila Seshagiri, “Modernist Ashes, Postcolonial Phoenix: Jean Rhys and the Evolution of the English Novel in the Twentieth Century,” Modernism/Modernity 13, no. 3 (September 2006): 487–88. 9. Goble, Beautiful Circuits, 17. 10. Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, “Introduction: Modernisms Bad and New,” in Bad Modernisms, ed. Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 3. 11. Mao and Walkowitz, 3, 5–6. On the institutionalization of modernism, see also Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), especially x, 4, 42–43, 58–59, 66–67, 217, and David James, Modernist Futures: Innovation and Inheritance in the Contemporary Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 20–23. 12. Mao and Walkowitz, “Introduction,” 6. 13. Mao and Walkowitz, 6, and Michael Levenson, Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 18. Here and elsewhere in this book, ellipses surrounded by square brackets indicate that text in the quotation has been omitted for the sake of concision. 14. Mao and Walkowitz, “Introduction,” 1–2. 15. Christopher Bush, “Context,” in A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism, ed. Eric Hayot and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 76. 16. Bush, 79. 17. These expansions of new modernist studies are articulated by Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, in “The New Modernist Studies,” PMLA 123, no. 3 (May 2008): 737–38. 18. Goble, Beautiful Circuits, 16. 19. Mark Goble’s investment in formal issues and rejection of New Critical formalism I have already mentioned, and Lisa Siraganian makes a very similar turn in Modernism’s Other Work, where she explicitly states her intention not to “restore autonomy as an aesthetic truth,” and to instead “historicize the term conceptually within a twentieth-century cultural and theoretical debate, transforming our understanding of both modernism and postmodernism in the process.” Both Goble’s and Siraganian’s persuasively argued books thus take up old truisms about modernism that were commonplaces before their inversions themselves became commonplaces. These topics—medium specificity, aesthetic autonomy—are properties that the new modernist studies has disavowed in favor of a multimedia, hyperhistoricized vision of the artwork. That both arguments are so beautifully attentive to questions of form even as they explicitly disavow an outmoded formalism is evidence, to my mind, of their position within and at the edge of the new modernist studies. The same might also be said for Nico Israel’s Spirals, which refuses to “endorse [. . .] the ‘formalist turn’” as it takes up its title shape and treats the spiral explicitly as an image rather than a form. One of the very few scholars of modernism who acknowledges form in the course of an intermedial argument is Judith Brown, in her Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form. See Goble, Beautiful Circuits, 17; Siraganian, Modernism’s Other Work, 20; Nico Israel, Spirals: The Whirled Image in Twentieth-Century Literature and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 5; and Brown, Glamour, 8–9.

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20. Clive Bell, Art (New York: Capricorn Books, 1958), 17; T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Ramazani, Ellmann, and O’Clair, The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, 1:945; and Clement Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” Partisan Review 7, no. 4 ( July–August 1940): 301, 305. 21. Although the two fields are more or less coeval, the new modernist studies picked up steam more rapidly than the new formalist studies did and, insofar as it constitutes a methodology, enjoys more widespread acceptance. The two early, vital new formalist interventions are Susan J. Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), and Susan J. Wolfson and Marshall Brown, eds., Reading for Form (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006). A significant majority of the essays in this latter collection address themselves to pre-1900 literature. 22. W. J. T. Mitchell, “The Commitment to Form; or, Still Crazy after All These Years,” PMLA 118, no. 2 (March 2003): 321. 23. Susan J. Wolfson, introduction to Wolfson and Brown, Reading for Form, 14. 24. In 2007, Marjorie Levinson wrote that the new formalism at the time better resembled a “movement than a theory or method.” In the time elapsed since the publication of her review essay, the ground has shifted a bit, so that the new formalist studies is, like the new modernist studies, best described as a field—a combination of movement and method. Marjorie Levinson, “What Is New Formalism?,” PMLA 122, no. 2 (March 2007): 558. 25. Jesse Matz, Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 243. Matz takes particular care to distinguish between the painted impression and the literary impression. He contends that the hope for aesthetic totality or unity in the visual arts leads toward abstraction; by contrast, in literary works by Woolf, Walter Pater, and Joseph Conrad, such hope produces allegory, in which “what would ideally be synthesis becomes dissociation after all, along social lines, played out in the realm of narrative plot” (244). 26. Matz, 2, 42, 247. 27. Jesse Matz, Lasting Impressions: The Legacies of Impressionism in Contemporary Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 23, 25. Matz’s formalist commitment is especially evident in The Modern Novel: A Short Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), where he argues that “modern novelists felt they had to try for something new. Not just new plots and new stories, but new forms: not the what, but the how, is what sets the modern novel apart” (8; emphasis original). The insistence upon the plural here is noteworthy, and the book—which is intended for students— highlights from beginning to end how modernism matches “change and rupture” with “a creativity of forms” (181). 28. Matz, Lasting Impressions, 25. 29. James, Modernist Futures, 13. 30. James, 15. By showing how contemporary fiction continues to pursue the “promise” of modernism and draws upon its formal innovations, James might be said to extend the project of Rebecca Walkowitz, who similarly highlights “the salient features of modernist narrative” and describes a “critical cosmopolitanism” practiced by, for instance, Woolf in the early twentieth century and W. G. Sebald at (and after) the century’s end. Yet Walkowitz in Cosmopolitan Style treats “the concept of style” in such a broad way—“as attitude, stance, posture, and consciousness”—that

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the specific properties of literary form are often deemphasized within the “tactics” that she addresses: “naturalness,” “triviality,” “evasion,” “mix-up,” “treason,” and “vertigo.” As her key term “critical cosmopolitanism” suggests, Walkowitz is much more interested in a contextualizing, geographically expansive account than in aesthetics, and in that regard, Cosmopolitan Style is an exemplar of the new modernist studies. Insofar as James’s Modernist Futures is far more particularizing in its treatment of modernist literary form, it has a different, less comfortable relationship to the new modernist studies. James, Modernist Futures, 5, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 2, 26. 31. James, Modernist Futures, 4, 41. 32. James, 41. James has continued his attention to the “competition between content and form” in two more articles that show how stylistic aspects of contemporary fiction that have often been disdained (description and lyricism, notably) do not serve up retrograde comfort for the reader but instead “kick against plot” and “counterpoint” the “loss,” “despair,” apocalypse, and violence that contemporary novels depict. “Critical Solace,” New Literary History 47, no. 4 (Autumn 2016): 483, https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2016.0026, and “In Defense of Lyrical Realism,” diacritics 45, no. 4 (2017): 87. 33. Wolfson, Formal Charges, 29. 34. Wolfson, 134. 35. James E. B. Breslin, From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945–1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), xiv, quoted in Wolfson, introduction to Wolfson and Brown, Reading for Form, 12, and Wolfson, Formal Charges, 1; Wolfson, Formal Charges, 29. 36. Wolfson, Formal Charges, 18. 37. Wolfson, 17–18; Wolfson, introduction to Wolfson and Brown, Reading for Form, 7, 11–12; and Levinson, “New Formalism,” 559. 38. Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 35. To be clear, Levine does not consider herself a new formalist scholar, exactly, even though she proposes “a new formalist method” in her book (3). A significant part of her project is to demonstrate that many different critical schools and methods have all gotten some things wrong about form: “New Criticism missed the political power and the situatedness of constraining forms, intersectional analysis has overlooked the extraordinary plurality of forms at work in social situations, and the new formalists and genre theorists have too often neglected the capacity of forms to endure across time and space” (14). 39. Levine, 31, 35. 40. Levine, 2. 41. Levine, 2. 42. Levinson, “New Formalism,” 561 (italics original). 43. Levine, Forms, 2. 44. Angela Leighton, On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 1–2, and for a history of the word form and the concept from Kant through the early years of the new millennium and the new formalist studies, see 3–28. 45. Ali Smith, Artful (New York: Penguin, 2014), 68.

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46. Levine, Forms, 2. 47. Levine, 3 (emphasis original). 48. Levine, 6. 49. Levine, 25. 50. Levine, 4, 11. 51. Levine, 40. 52. Smith, Artful, 77, 69. 53. Brian Glavey, The Wallflower Avant-Garde: Modernism, Sexuality, and Queer Ekphrasis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 166. 54. Glavey, 8–9. It is worth noting that the very specific positioning of Glavey’s argument authorizes its revaluation of form. He puts formalism first and foremost into relation with queer theory—which has, he argues, a “constitutive” relationship to formalism—and only secondarily into relation with modernism (2). By virtue of the work of Eve Sedgwick and D. A. Miller, queer studies has long embraced idiosyncratic formalism alongside historicism and the hermeneutics of suspicion, and for this reason, Glavey is perhaps freer to point up modernism’s formalism than he would be in a project without this disciplinary cross-pollination. Much the same thing can be said of the arguments made by Matz in Lasting Impressions and especially by James in Modernist Futures: only by venturing outside the discipline of modernist studies can one arrive at a discussion of modernist form. Attending to the legacies of modernism within contemporary fiction—rather than to modernism within its original moment in the early twentieth century—Matz’s and James’s interventions can be seen as largely symptomatic of the extent to which formalist readings of modernist texts have been unnecessarily disavowed by the new modernist studies. In all three books, drawing on the resources of other theoretical disciplines and the texts of other literary periods seems to inoculate the critic against charges that he is reviving a hermetic, self-satisfied modernist aesthetics. 55. Glavey, Wallflower Avant-Garde, 7. Glavey’s emphasis on the impossibility of form might seem to recall Matz’s discussion of the failure of impressionism to achieve “perceptual unity,” but where Matz is primarily interested in describing the operation of the impression, Glavey seeks to redefine form more broadly. Matz, Literary Impressionism, 2. 56. Glavey, Wallflower Avant-Garde, 3. 57. Glavey, 167. Glavey and I make much the same move: by taking modernist “borrowing” from other arts and media “seriously,” we both allow “a different vision of modernism’s investment in form [to] come into focus” (7). His vision, by contrast with my own emphasis on dynamism, clarifies that apparently autonomous forms are “born from imitation,” and he suggests, by extension, that “modernist aesthetics might in fact be seen as a multiplication of mimetic practices rather than a repudiation of them” (7). 58. Wolfson, introduction to Wolfson and Brown, Reading for Form, 24. 59. As Marijeta Bozovic has remarked with respect to Levine’s work, “there is not much borrowed from media studies [. . .]. Nor is there much of modernism and the avant-garde.” The broader field of new formalist studies has the same blind spots, as does a 2008 special issue of Representations that took up the broad question of form. Even as the high formalist rhetoric of Roger Fry and Clive Bell makes an appearance in an art historical essay by Whitney Davis, literary modernism is

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nowhere represented in the issue. This absence is due, no doubt, to the particular preferences and fields of expertise of the editorial board, but it nevertheless seems noteworthy, not least because, as Samuel Otter observes, “many of the recent appeals to ‘form’ and ‘aesthetics’ manifest an attachment to twentieth-century formalisms,” which share an interest in “specialized literary uses of language.” Those early twentieth-century forms that heighten and innovate the specialized literariness of language ought to be, therefore, central to any renewed formalist inquiry. Marijeta Bozovic, “Whose Forms? Missing Russians in Caroline Levine’s Forms,” PMLA 132, no. 5 (October 2017): 1184; Whitney Davis, “Subjectivity and Objectivity in High and Historical Formalism,” Representations 104, no. 1 (Fall 2008): 8–22; and Samuel Otter, “An Aesthetics in All Things,” Representations 104, no. 1 (Fall 2008): 119; emphasis mine. 60. For all Joseph Frank’s writings on spatial form, including a reprint of the original 1945 essay, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” see The Idea of Spatial Form (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991). 61. W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 25. 62. Mitchell, 25. 63. Brian Glavey, “Dazzling Estrangement: Modernism, Queer Ekphrasis, and the Spatial Form of Nightwood,” PMLA 124, no. 3 (May 2009): 751. 64. Beasley, Ezra Pound, 4. 65. Wolfson, introduction to Wolfson and Brown, Reading for Form, 14. 66. I borrow the term “contact zone” from Sara Ahmed. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 105. 67. C. Namwali Serpell, “Weird Times,” PMLA 132, no. 5 (October 2017): 1238. 68. Davis, “Subjectivity and Objectivity,” 8. 69. Nicholas Gaskill, “The Close and the Concrete: Aesthetic Formalism in Context,” New Literary History 47, no. 4 (Autumn 2016): 507. For Gaskill, “in the former case, two things have the same form if their spatial properties bear the same relation to one another. In the latter case, two things have the same form if the same purpose or telos—what will later get called ‘intention’—guides the formation of each.” See also Leighton, On Form, 1–3. 70. Glavey, Wallflower Avant-Garde, 167. 71. James, Modernist Futures, 15. 72. Glavey, Wallflower Avant-Garde, 3, and Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, trans. Charles B. Hogan and George Kubler (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 33. While Focillon’s account in some respects resembles the high formalism of Clive Bell’s idea of “significant form”—Focillon writes that “the fundamental content of form is a formal content” (35)—he works, in general, to undo traditional binaries such as that between “matter and mind” or “form and content” (31), and he attends at length to the shaping power of the artist, the feelings of the viewer, and the evolution of forms over time. 73. Focillon, Life of Forms, 44. 74. Matz, Modern Novel, 181. My attention to the particular contours of form in a given text might be said to align with the understanding of form as a kind of explanation put forward by Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian, who argue that “form is an entity known by occasion, through encounters with its subsidiary

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phenomena.” “Form and Explanation,” Critical Inquiry 43, no. 3 (Spring 2017): 664. See also the continued discussion of this article in “Critical Responses to ‘Form and Explanation,’” Critical Inquiry 44, no. 1 (Autumn 2017): 129–74. 75. Langdon Hammer, “Fantastic Forms,” PMLA 132, no. 5 (October 2017): 1200. 76. The terms Matz and James use to designate form include “totality,” “unity,” “integrity,” and “whole.” Matz, Literary Impressionism, 2, and James, Modernist Futures, 12. 1. Plastic Form

1. Henry James to Hendrik Andersen, August 10, 1904, in Beloved Boy: Letters to Hendrik C. Andersen, 1899–1915, ed. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 54–55 (emphasis original). 2. Henry James to Charles Scribner’s sons, September 17, 1904, in Henry James: A Life in Letters, ed. Philip Horne (London: Allen Lane, 1999), 403–4. 3. Robert L. Gale, The Caught Image: Figurative Language in the Fiction of Henry James (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964), 250–54. 4. Henry James, The Golden Bowl, ed. Virginia Llewellyn Smith (New York: Oxford World’s Classics, 1999), 146. All subsequent citations of this novel will appear parenthetically within the text. 5. James scholars have seldom mentioned sculpture at all, and none has discussed sculpture in The Golden Bowl at any length or with any art historical detail. For largely descriptive catalogs, see Viola Hopkins Winner, Henry James and the Visual Arts (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1970), 36–38, and Adeline R. Tintner, The Museum World of Henry James (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1986), 35–45. For considerations of sculpture in works other than The Golden Bowl, see Jennifer Eimers, The Continuum of Consciousness: Aesthetic Experience and Visual Art in Henry James’s Novels (New York: Peter Lang, 2013), and David J. Alworth, “Henry James, Fredric Jameson, and the Social Art of Sculpture,” Henry James Review 36, no. 3 (Fall 2015), especially 213, 220–22. 6. James’s sculptor character is Gloriani, who first appeared in 1875 in Roderick Hudson (the title character is also a sculptor) and resurfaces in The Ambassadors (1903) and “The Velvet Glove” (1909). Adeline Tintner argues that Gloriani’s later incarnation derives from Auguste Rodin’s fame at the time, with which James was likely familiar. The sculptor subject of the biography James published in 1903 is William Wetmore Story, whose family offers a clear source for the family in The Golden Bowl. Story’s Italian son-in-law might have inspired Prince Amerigo, and his intimacy with his daughter may have inspired the relationship between Adam and Maggie Verver. Adeline R. Tinter, The Twentieth-Century World of Henry James: Changes in His Work after 1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), 117–20, 95–99, and Sheila Teahan, “Autobiographies and Biographies,” in Henry James in Context, ed. David McWhirter (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 59. James’s sculptor correspondent is Hendrik Andersen, to whose work James responds in the quotation that opens this chapter. For the entirety of the correspondence, see James, Beloved Boy, and on James’s relationship with Andersen, see Millicent Bell, “James and the Sculptor,” Yale Review 90, no. 4 (2002): 18–47; Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life

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(New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 489–90, 494; Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of a Genius (New York: William Morrow, 1992), 448; and Leland S. Person, Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 48. 7. On collection, connoisseurship, and commodity culture in The Golden Bowl, see Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 149; Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 228–45; and Mark McGurl, The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 30–56. The most persuasive account is offered by Bill Brown, who considers both the novel’s “objectification of people as possessions,” and those objects that are characterized by “underdetermined or indeterminate specification,” by the way in which they all, like the titular bowl, “signify so much” while also signifying “so little.” But some Jamesian “things,” especially the golden bowl, are actually highly specific in their reference to the world of visual and plastic art, and, as I argue, they can be better understood through sculptural reading than thing theory. See A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), especially 136, 156–60, 171, and Bill Brown, “Now Advertising: Late James,” Henry James Review 30, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 13. 8. Frank, Spatial Form, 97. 9. Frank, 115, 60–61. Writing in 1945, Frank means “contemporary literature” to designate the modernist novel. He bases his claims here on the insights offered by Russian formalism, specifically Boris Tomashevsky’s distinction between “bound” (that is, sequence-bound) motifs and free motifs. The latter mark art: Frank writes that “art may be provisionally defined as the extent to which free motifs diversify the constraints of the bound motifs” (118). 10. Glavey, “Dazzling Estrangement,” 751. In a later revision of this idea, Glavey more explicitly refers to, although he does not examine, the golden bowl as an example of modernist ekphrasis and as evidence for modernism’s “ceramic ambitions.” Wallflower Avant-Garde, 7. 11. Frank, Spatial Form, 21. 12. Herbert Read, The Art of Sculpture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 50. 13. As Caroline Levine has shown, notions of boundedness, unity, and wholeness are often “synonymous with form itself.” Forms, 24. 14. Frank, Spatial Form, 20–21. 15. Frank, 21. 16. Leighton, On Form, 44. 17. McGurl, Novel Art, 28, 34. 18. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “plastic art,” n., accessed May 9, 2018, http://dictionary.oed.com/. Although drawing and painting are also plastic arts to some degree, their traditional reliance upon the two-dimensional surface of the paper or canvas makes them less fully plastic than sculpture and perhaps more narrowly visual. 19. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “plastic,” adj., II.4.a. and b, accessed May 9, 2018, http://dictionary.oed.com/ (italics mine).

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20. Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 9. Theo Davis makes an indirect argument for the spatial form of The Golden Bowl when she writes that “one has the sense of knowing the whole of James’s work in any instant because it isn’t to be resolved by a final moral or lesson. [. . .] A novel which seems to exist in the moment, not from beginning to end, is precisely a novel that has defeated the one unavoidable phenomenal or object constraint of writing, which is that it must be experienced over time.” Davis draws this conclusion from the repetition of two-dimensional abstract forms in The Golden Bowl, especially the circles constituted by the vase, the pagoda, and the cage. But as I will show, thinking roundedness in three dimensions—as plastic form seen in the round—makes it very difficult to draw this conclusion: we never see or know the whole of the work, and the moment is not the operational temporality of The Golden Bowl. Theo Davis, “‘Out of the Medium in Which Books Breathe’: The Contours of Formalism and ‘The Golden Bowl,’” NOVEL 34, no. 3 (Summer 2001): 419–20, 429. 21. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. and ed. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994): 77–79. 22. Potts, Sculptural Imagination, ix. 23. Potts, 3. 24. Read, Art of Sculpture, 49 (emphasis original). The close connection between sculpture and touch is exemplified by James’s fifteen-year correspondence with Hendrik Andersen, where the conversation about sculpture is transfigured into James’s insistently physical language and his emphasis on gestures. He writes, for example, “I feel, my dear boy, my arms around you,” and “I meanwhile pat you affectionately on the back, across the Alps and Apennines, I draw you close, I hold you long.” This correspondence thus suggests that at the same time that James remained conscious of sculpture and sculptors while he was at work on The Golden Bowl, he also repeatedly evoked the intimacy of touch, in what we might consider a more broadly sculptural language. Jonathan Freedman has engaged in an extended examination of the importance of touch to The Golden Bowl, including its challenge to the primacy of vision, but without connecting touch to the question of sculpture. Edel, Henry James: A Life, 497, and Jonathan Freedman, “Hands, Objects and Love in James and Hitchcock: Reading the Touch in The Golden Bowl and Notorious,” in The Men Who Knew Too Much: Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock, ed. Susan M. Griffin and Alan Nadel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 127–28. 25. Peter Brooks, Realist Vision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 181. For excellent readings of the problems of knowledge and consciousness in the novel, see Hilary Schor, “Reading Knowledge: Curiosity in The Golden Bowl,” Henry James Review 26, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 237–45, and Sharon Cameron, Thinking in Henry James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 26. Leo Bersani similarly argues that sight in James’s work is connected to “the act of recognition,” to confirmation, and to the realization of betrayal. Future for Astyanax, 133. 27. J. Hillis Miller, Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 262. For more on these baroque metaphors, and on early and influential critical responses to their “arbitrariness,” see Ruth Bernard

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Yeazell, Language and Knowledge in the Late Novels of Henry James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 40–48. 28. This same kind of metamorphosis—of people into art objects and art objects into people—occurs elsewhere in James, most prominently in his early story “The Last of the Valerii” (1874), in which Count Valerio falls in love with a classical statue of Juno unearthed on the grounds of his villa in Rome. James’s anonymous firstperson narrator reports that the statue’s “marvellous beauty gave her an almost human look.” Devoting more attention to the statue, Count Valerio neglects his wife, and the narrator tells him that, “to rival the Juno, she’s turning to marble herself.” Henry James, Complete Stories 1864–1874, ed. Jean Strouse (New York: Library of America, 1999), 808, 821. For a complete reading of the story’s deployment of prosopopoeia, see J. Hillis Miller, Versions of Pygmalion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 212–36. 29. For a brief analysis of the different qualities James associated with Renaissance art and with classical art, see Winner, Henry James, 164–66. 30. Ovid, The Metamorphoses, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 243. 31. The story of Pygmalion and Galatea is especially useful for thinking about Adam and Maggie Verver because of its incestuous overtones. As J. Hillis Miller notes, “Pygmalion is Galatea’s fathering maker as well as her husband,” and the conflation of art making and lovemaking becomes particularly clear in the process of Galatea’s transformation: Pygmalion “kissed her, / And stroked her breast, and felt the ivory soften / Under his fingers, as wax grows soft in sunshine, / Made pliable by handling.” The tense then shifts into the present: “The lips he kisses / Are real indeed, the ivory girl can feel them, / And blushes and responds, and the eyes open / At once on lover and heaven.” For Miller, this is a moment of reflection—“the other is not really other”—and this implied incest finds its fruition in the next story in The Metamorphoses, in which Pygmalion and Galatea’s great-granddaughter, Myrrha, repeatedly tricks her father into incest. The Golden Bowl is far less explicit than The Metamorphoses, of course, but the slippage between the fatherly gaze, the eye of the collector, and the implied hand of Pygmalion render Adam’s view of his daughter no less uncomfortable. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 242–43, and Miller, Versions of Pygmalion, 4, 10–11. 32. John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in The Penguin Book of Romantic Poetry, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth and Jessica Wordsworth (New York: Penguin, 2006), 343–44. 33. Leighton, On Form, 40. 34. Keats, “Grecian Urn,” 344. 35. Keats, 344. For Leighton, the urn evinces both a problem of quality, because “‘overwrought’ hints at a workmanship perhaps not as finished or as formal as it might be,” and a problem of gender: “Behind such beauty there is force, specifically force against female objects. [. . .] The urn only just holds off a deflowering which seems forever imminent” (On Form, 41). For these reasons, she also concludes that this passage in James’s novel refers to Keats’s poem: both works reveal how “the idea of the aesthetic, then, not only has a catch, but the catch might have something to do with women” (43). Women are for aestheticism both the “sign of beauty” and the “sign of what beauty holds off: ravishment and force. [. . .] The crack which appears is like the sign of this strain” (45). Though my emphasis differs from Leighton’s—as

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will become clear, my focus is the round, bounded whole rather than the crack—the quiet violence that she identifies as common to both Keats and James proves compatible with my reading. 36. This passage is typical of Adam’s easy confusion of people and art objects, which many critics have noted. Kevin Ohi, Henry James and the Queerness of Style (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 53; Alan Rose, “The Spatial Form of ‘The Golden Bowl,’” Modern Fiction Studies 12, no. 1 (Spring 1966): 104; and Jonah Siegel, Haunted Museum: Longing, Travel, and the Art-Romance Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 164–65. 37. Miller, Versions of Pygmalion, 1. 38. Miller, 3–4. 39. F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (London: Penguin, 1972), 193, quoted in Yeazell, Language and Knowledge, 40. 40. Virginia Llewellyn Smith, introduction to James, Golden Bowl, viii. 41. For an account of the way that description has traditionally been understood to operate as a reality effect, see Brooks, Realist Vision, 16. 42. Potts, Sculptural Imagination, 5. 43. Potts, xi. 44. Miller, Literature as Conduct, 241 (italics mine). 45. Potts, Sculptural Imagination, 8, 19. 46. Potts, 1. As Jonathan Freedman has noted, the degree to which the bowl is handled and touched “reminds us that objects in this novel exist not just as static things to be read and reread, interpreted and reinterpreted, but as concrete objects that can be—and are—held, touched, moved about, lifted in the air (twice), broken, put back together.” “Hands,” 126, (emphasis original). 47. Wallace Stevens, “Anecdote of the Jar,” in Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1997), 60–61. 48. Levine, Forms, 24 (emphasis original). Levine demonstrates that the association between containers and form is longstanding and shared by both “formalist and antiformalist critics” (25): the former “celebrate unity” (28), while the latter bemoan its imposition of “boundaries” and its creation of “inclusions and exclusions” (25). 49. Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harvest Books, 1947), 166 (emphasis original), 162–63. 50. Brooks, 17 (italics mine). Levine notes that there is a certain “vagueness” to Cleanth Brooks’s conflation of the form of the poem and the form of the wellwrought urn, since Brooks also compares poetry to drama—an entirely different art form. Levine provocatively concludes that “Brooks is actually not formalist enough” because he fails to differentiate between forms. Forms, 29–31 (emphasis original). 51. Brooks, Well Wrought Urn, 163. Writing about what he calls Djuna Barnes’s “chamber pot modernism,” Glavey has also linked round ekphrastic objects to Frank’s spatial-form thesis and to modernist literature’s desire to “exist as a luminous whole outside of time.” His reading of Barnes is very persuasive, but I am arguing that roundedness in James operates differently to undercut or forestall a spatial-form account of The Golden Bowl. Glavey, Wallflower Avant-Garde, 73, 50–51. 52. Leighton, On Form, 41, 43. 53. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 166–68 (emphasis original).

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54. Siraganian, Modernism’s Other Work, 4. 55. Jahan Ramazani, “Form,” in Hayot and Walkowitz, New Vocabulary for Global Modernism, 115. 56. See, for instance, Winner, Henry James, 163. 57. James’s attention to the sculptural features of the church reminds us that, as Herbert Read has written, “the temple and the cathedral [. . .] evolved from the monument, which was originally a solid sculptured object,” “an integral form” that could not be described “as essentially architectural or essentially sculptural.” James’s shift from the large scale of architecture to the smaller scale of sculpture can also be explained by the source that Tintner identifies for the Palladian church metaphor: a “South German eighteenth-century table” with a “marquetry top” picturing a Palladian church. James encountered the table in the home of Ferdinand de Rothschild, which contained an art collection that bears some resemblance to Adam Verver’s collection at Fawns. Read, Art of Sculpture, 5–6, and Tintner, Museum World, 209–16. 58. See, for example, Rose, “Spatial Form,” 105, 112. 59. Amy Ling suggests that the source for the metaphor might be found in an 1887–88 article by C. F. Gordon Cummings in the English Illustrated Magazine—where James had been published—called “Pagodas, Aurioles, and Umbrellas,” which contains many details coincident with those in the passage. Tintner suggests several additional sources, including “the pagoda and mosque built [. . .] in the Royal Gardens and Kew for the Princess Augusta around 1760,” a pagoda at Alton Towers, an estate in Staffordshire that James might have visited, and two Chinese porcelain pagodas, which James might well have read about. Amy Ling, “The Pagoda Image in Henry James’s The Golden Bowl,” American Literature 46, no. 3 (1974): 386, and Tinter, Museum World, 171–72. 60. Most critics are, I think, too quick to say that the pagoda has a solid, identifiable referent. See, for instance, Ling, “Pagoda Image,” 387, and Laurence Bedwell Holland, The Expense of Vision: Essays on the Craft of Henry James (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964), 337. 61. Yeazell, Language and Knowledge, 2. For a highly compelling reading of The Golden Bowl in terms of a particularly Jamesian “communication that takes a certain satisfaction in refusing to communicate,” see Goble, Beautiful Circuits, 29–84, especially 30–44. 62. Brooks, Well Wrought Urn, 199, 201. Gaskill argues that Brooks’s aversion to paraphrase derives from the New Critical understanding of form as concrete, or anchored in the full context of the literary work, rather than as abstract, or capable of being separated from it. New Critical reading thus attends as closely as possible to the full context, communicating the work’s form more or less by replicating it. “The Close and the Concrete,” 511–12. 63. Ellen Rooney, “Form and Contentment,” in Wolfson and Brown, Reading for Form, 45–46. 64. Rooney, 45. 65. Rooney, 45. 66. For a reference to the pagoda as a sculptural element of interior decoration, which James might have seen in the drawing room of Mrs. Norman Grosvenor, see

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Tintner, Museum World, 172. For representative references to the pagoda as architecture, see Holland, Expense of Vision, 336, and Rose, “Spatial Form,” 105. 67. Freedman, “Hands,” 127. 68. Potts, Sculptural Imagination, ix. 69. See, for example, T. J. Lustig, Henry James and the Ghostly (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 220. 70. Miller, Literature as Conduct, 263. 71. Brown, Sense of Things, 165, and for more on the physicality of thought, see 160–71. 72. Ohi, Queerness of Style, 53. 73. Davis, “Out of the Medium,” 414. 74. James to Scribner’s sons, September 17, 1904, 404. 75. Yeazell, Language and Knowledge, 46, 48. 76. It is perhaps the ostensible spatiality of so many of the novel’s metaphors that leads Leo Bersani to provide a rather different account of the temporality attending “speculations” such as the pagoda metaphor. For him, Maggie “is standing outside of time,” in “the ‘eternity’ of great art,” while everyone else’s views “multiply, compete and usually disappear.” However, reading the pagoda metaphor sculpturally shows how Maggie is actually subject to time’s passage. Bersani, Future for Astyanax, 150. 77. Rosalind E. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York: Viking, 1977), 4–5. 78. Potts, Sculptural Imagination, 9. 79. Ohi, Queerness of Style, 37–38. For Bersani and Adam Phillips, this strategy constitutes almost a wholesale elimination of event: it is the method “by which James empties his stories of any actual, or actualized content.” Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, Intimacies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 20. 80. Glavey, Wallflower Avant-Garde, 54. 81. Dorrit Cohn, “‘First Shock of Complete Perception’: The Opening Episode of The Golden Bowl, Volume 2,” Henry James Review 22, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 5–7. 82. Henry James, “The Beast in the Jungle,” in The Portable Henry James, ed. John Auchard (New York: Penguin, 2004), 278. 83. James overstates the tightness of his two focalizing perspectives, since his narrator does allow glimpses through the perspectives of other characters, such as Adam Verver and Fanny Assingham. 84. My emphasis upon the obliquity of James’s view as he revises the New York Edition produces a very different account of the kind of reading he recommends from that found by Mark McGurl, who asserts that, especially in the prefaces to his earlier novels, James turns “apprentice texts into masterful ones, novels into art” and thereby presents himself as “a model of the strong reader.” Novel Art, 36. 85. Stephen Arata, “Decadent Form,” ELH 81, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 1013–14. Arata attends to analogies between Frank’s idea of spatial form and ideas about form that emerge in James’s critical writings and the story “The Figure in the Carpet,” but he also—in a manner congenial to my own argument—points out how James “puts useful pressure on the idea that narrative form is available to readers in the ways that Frank describes” (1015).

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86. Potts, Sculptural Imagination, 8. We cannot say, therefore, that the viewing of sculpture is “somehow more stably anchored” than the viewing of painting (8). 87. Frank, Spatial Form, 21, 97 (emphasis original). 88. Gérard Genette, Figures II (Paris: Seuil, 1969), 45–46, trans. Joseph Frank and quoted in Frank, Spatial Form, 129. 89. Potts, Sculptural Imagination, 5. 90. For more on the ways in which the prefaces to the New York Edition engage with James’s reflection upon his life and the conditions of composition, see Oliver Herford, Henry James’s Late Style of Retrospect: Late Personal Writings, 1890–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 187–200. 91. Here again my account of Jamesian reading differs markedly from McGurl’s. Powerful though she is, Maggie, like James, ought not be called a “strong reader” because her reading and viewing in the round foreclose the possibility of arriving at a single, masterful interpretation. Novel Art, 53. 92. Potts, Sculptural Imagination, 9. 93. James to Scribner’s sons, September 17, 1904, 404. 94. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “plastic,” adj., II.4.a. and b, accessed May 9, 2018, http://dictionary.oed.com/. 95. Brooks, Realist Vision, 181. 96. Miller, Literature as Conduct, 272. 97. Robert B. Pippin, Henry James and Modern Moral Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 16, and for more on morality in The Golden Bowl, see 66–82. 98. For an excellent summary of the incestuous connections in the novel, see Ohi, Queerness of Style, 33. 99. Henry James, Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, the Prefaces to the New York Edition, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1041 (emphasis original). 100. Miller, Literature as Conduct, 253. 101. Miller, 252–53. 102. Miller, 252–53. 103. Potts, Sculptural Imagination, 1. 104. Levine, Forms, 39. 105. Miller, Versions of Pygmalion, 219. 106. James, “Beast in the Jungle,” 282. 107. Potts, Sculptural Imagination, 1. 108. Jonathan Freedman has also read this final moment of The Golden Bowl in terms of touch, but his interpretation is much more positive than mine. Though I disagree that Amerigo and Maggie’s relationship is here “newly restored,” I would echo Freedman’s assertion that James’s emphasis on touch allows The Golden Bowl to move beyond its “own form of representation” at its conclusion. “Hands,” 140–41. 109. Potts, Sculptural Imagination, 13. 2. Mortal Form

1. Quentin Bell, “A Cézanne in the Hedge,” in A Cézanne in the Hedge and Other Memories of Charleston and Bloomsbury, ed. Hugh Lee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 136–38.

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2. Duncan Grant, “Charleston Trust Interview with Quentin Bell,” recorded 1969, disc 1, track 8 on The Spoken Word: The Bloomsbury Group, British Library NSACD 58–59, 2009. For another account of this episode, see Mary Ann Caws and Sarah Bird Wright, Bloomsbury and France: Art and Friends (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 16, 99, 317. 3. Vanessa Bell to Roger Fry, April 3, 1918, in Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, ed. Regina Marler (London: Bloomsbury, 1993), 212–13. 4. Bell, “Cézanne in the Hedge,” 136. 5. Bell, 138 (emphasis original), and Caws and Wright, Bloomsbury and France, 99. 6. Bell to Fry, April 3, 1918, 213. As Vanessa Bell’s letter hints, Pommes is quite small—only twenty-seven centimeters across and nineteen centimeters high, or approximately ten and three-quarters by seven and a half inches. Part of the Keynes Collection of King’s College, Cambridge, the painting is currently on loan to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England. 7. Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, vol. 1 (New York: Harcourt, 1977), 140–41. Although Woolf extols the possibilities of Cézanne’s “6 apples,” the painting actually pictures seven apples; the reason for her mistake is unknown. Woolf saw the painting a few days after Keynes returned from France, when, because of Fry’s desire to make a copy, the painting was moved to 46 Gordon Square in London. Caws and Wright, Bloomsbury and France, 99–100. Fry’s desire to make a copy was prompted, in no small part, by his interest in Cézanne’s “laying on of the paint,” as Woolf puts it. In Pommes Cézanne has built up and scraped away pigment—particularly the grayish-blue outline around each apple—so that the apples seem to protrude slightly and rise up from the ground. The materiality of the paint thus contributes to the illusion of the apples’ materiality. On the unique characteristics of Cézanne’s brushstrokes, see Roger Fry, Cézanne: A Study of His Development (London: Hogarth Press, 1927), 43, 45–46, 50–51; Roger Fry, A Roger Fry Reader, ed. Christopher Reed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 112; Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry: A Biography (New York: Harcourt, 1968), 153–56; John McCoubrey, “Cézanne’s Difference,” in Impressionist Still Life, ed. Eliza E. Rathbone and George T. M. Shackelford (New York: Phillips Collection in association with Harry N. Abrams, 2001), 37; Meyer Schapiro, Modern Art: 19th & 20th Centuries; Selected Papers (New York: Georges Braziller, 1978), 25; Meyer Schapiro, Paul Cézanne, 2nd ed. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1962), 18–19; Richard Shiff, “Constructing Physicality,” Art Journal 50, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 43–45; and Richard Shiff, “Apples and Abstraction,” in Rathbone and Shackelford, Impressionist Still Life, 44–45. For a broader consideration of the complex process by which the “impressionist touch or tache” can “simulate something real” while also “express[ing] the artist’s individual personality,” see Matz, Lasting Impressions, 35–71. 8. Christine Froula, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 15. On Woolf ’s relationship and artistic competition with her sister, see also Diane Gillespie, The Sisters’ Arts: The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1988); Diane Gillespie, “Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell and Painting,” in The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts, ed. Maggie Humm (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 121–39; Maggie Humm, Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography, and Cinema

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(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 75–87; Maggie Humm, Snapshots of Bloomsbury (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 5–8, 10–12; and Torgovnick, Visual Arts, 118–21. 9. For one example of a scholarly connection between Woolf ’s diary entry on Pommes, postimpressionism, and Lily Briscoe, see Victoria Rosner, Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 166. For the only work in which a critic pauses over the genre of the painting, see Rosemary Lloyd, Shimmering in a Transformed Light: Writing the Still Life (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). Lloyd quotes the diary entry just in passing (1–2), in much the same way that she quickly mentions the flowers arranged in Miss Pym’s shop in Mrs. Dalloway (15–16). The broad scope of her book allows for no sustained investigation of the place of still life in Woolf ’s oeuvre. 10. Robert Kiely, “Jacob’s Room and Roger Fry: Two Studies in Still Life,” in Modernism Reconsidered, ed. Robert Kiely (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 147–66. 11. Gillespie, Sisters’ Arts, 227, 236; for an expanded discussion, see 12–13, 224–66. 12. Jane Fisher, “‘Silent as the Grave’: Painting, Narrative, and the Reader in Night and Day and To the Lighthouse,” in The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf, ed. Diane Gillespie (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993), 102. 13. Frank, Spatial Form, 61. 14. Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 263, 266–68. Wendy Steiner notes that the atemporal, eternal stillness to which ekphrastic passages supposedly aspire is an impossible goal: ekphrastic description remains weakly narrative. See Wendy Steiner, “Pictorial Narrativity,” in Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, ed. Marie-Laure Ryan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 150; Wendy Steiner, Pictures of Romance: Form against Context in Painting and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 4, 126; and Mieke Bal, “Over-writing as Un-writing: Descriptions, World-Making, and Novelistic Time,” in A Mieke Bal Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 97, 124–25. 15. The term “significant form” is discussed at length by Clive Bell in his book Art and elaborated upon by Roger Fry in Vision and Design (London: Chatto & Windus, 1925), 294–95, 302. It is worth noting that Vanessa Bell remained resistant to the most extreme articulations of significant form, as Matthew Affron notes, by “saying that lived sensuous experience remained an important source of aesthetic emotion.” “Decoration and Abstraction in Bloomsbury,” in Dickerman, Inventing Abstraction, 182. In this regard, Vanessa’s views correspond with the embodied practice of abstract painting in which Lily Briscoe engages. For more on significant form as a “quasi-religious dogma” within Bloomsbury aesthetic theory, see Jane Goldman, The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-Impressionism and the Politics of the Visual (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 134–42. 16. Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 60–61. 17. Bryson, 61. Similarly, Margit Rowell asserts that still life possesses a “closed narrative structure.” Both Bryson and Rowell allude to the still life’s lowly position in the hierarchy of genres taught in European art schools: to an even greater extent than genre painting, which is sometimes considered to be narrative, still-life paintings

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do not show events and thus seem neither to contain narratives nor to be worthy of prompting them. Margit Rowell, Objects of Desire: The Modern Still Life (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1997), 16, and Steiner, “Pictorial Narrativity,” 146–48. 18. Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), xx–xxi. 19. Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, 61. 20. Importantly, neither Alpers nor Bryson considers the nonnarrative quality of still life to be a significant shortcoming. Indeed, their work is groundbreaking for insisting upon the value of the often derided or overlooked still-life painting. 21. Fry, Cézanne, 41. 22. Schapiro, Modern Art, 15. 23. Schapiro, 16. 24. Margaret Preston, aphorism 45, in Sidney Ure Smith, Margaret Preston: Recent Paintings (Sydney: Sidney Ure Smith, 1929), quoted in Lloyd, Shimmering, 6; Fry, Cézanne, 41. 25. Bell, Art, 17–18; Fry, Cézanne, 42. 26. Peter Schwenger, The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 115. 27. Fry, Cézanne, 42. 28. Fry means to spotlight aesthetic choices such as Cézanne’s use of red and green to model the apple in the bottom left corner of Pommes, where the painter gives the illusion of a spherical surface not with different shades of red but rather with contrasting colors, so that the shadows on the right side of the apple are actually green. This deployment of color was for Fry one of Cézanne’s “greatest contributions to art,” since color functions in this still life and in much of Cézanne’s oeuvre “not as an adjunct to form, as something imposed upon form, but as itself the direct exponent of form.” Cézanne, 13. That is, color proves partly—and unexpectedly— responsible for the viewer’s sense of three-dimensionality in Pommes, so that, if we follow Fry’s line of thought, we can identify a quiet drama or a low-level lyricism in this compact painting. Similarly, we might find something “analogous” (42) to nobility or tragedy in the aesthetic choices of Cézanne’s larger, more complex still-life paintings, such as those with draped tablecloths and heaped piles of fruit, in which more textures and colors operate in concert on a larger scale. It is possible, however, to read Fry slightly against the grain by locating drama and narrative potential in areas that he would consider insignificant. For example, in the bottom right corner of Pommes, an apple’s shadow—composed of red and green and possessed, at its top edge, of a thicker layer of paint than the ground—seems to take on its own mass and volume. As the fourth shape in the bottom row, the shadow substitutes for an apple, and although one cannot pinpoint whether the apple is simply absent, or was recently removed, the peculiar representation of this shadow can, to borrow Schwenger’s phrase, “generate narrative, be bound up with narrative.” For Fry, the only drama worth noting here would be the fact that the shadow is not black or gray but made up of other pigments, but I want to underscore how Cézanne’s visible brushwork and paint buildup intersect with the way that the impressionist tache is, as Jesse Matz has argued, “narratable without achieving closure” even as it also “undermines stories we would tell about it.” Schwenger, Tears of Things, 115, and Matz, Lasting Impressions, 44.

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29. Fry, Cézanne, 52. 30. George T. M. Shackelford, “Cézanne: The Three Skulls, 1898–1900 / Pyramid of Skulls, 1898–1900 / Skull, 1900–1904,” in Rathbone and Shackelford, Impressionist Still Life, 192. 31. Charles Sterling, Still Life Painting: From Antiquity to the Present Time, trans. James Emmons (New York: Universe Books, 1959), 102. 32. Fry, Cézanne, 41. 33. Fry, 53. 34. Even though I think that Fry radically overstates his case for Cézanne’s formal interest in the skull, I do not want to imply that skulls and apples do not also attract Cézanne’s interest as spherical shapes. In the original Still Life with Skull, we can see similar modeling and coloring in Cézanne’s treatment of the skull and the fruit, particularly the frontmost pear. As Shackelford notes, the skull interested Cézanne as a means of studying volume, and he also displayed a resurgent interest in painting skulls at the end of his life. “Cézanne,” 192. 35. Schwenger, Tears of Things, 100. 36. The case for Cézanne’s importance to modernist and avant-garde painting— “in every turn and twist of which the influence of Cézanne is traceable”—is laid out in the title essay of Clive Bell’s Since Cézanne (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1969), 2. 37. Stephen Cheeke, Writing for Art: The Aesthetics of Ekphrasis (New York: Manchester University Press, 2008), 62. 38. Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, 61. 39. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, ed. Mark Hussey (New York: Harcourt, 2005), 99 (unbracketed ellipsis original). All subsequent citations of this novel will appear parenthetically within the text. Rose’s arrangement here has been called a still life by other critics, but without any investigation of the impact such a term might have on our understanding of the novel as a whole. Emily Blair, Virginia Woolf and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 203; Gillespie, Sisters’ Arts, 240; Kathryn Stelmach, “From Text to Tableau: Ekphrastic Enchantment in ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ and ‘To the Lighthouse,’” Studies in the Novel 38, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 317; Torgovnick, Visual Arts, 22; and Roberta White, A Studio of One’s Own: Fictional Women Painters and the Art of Fiction (Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005), 92. 40. Rose’s budding artistic talent is given further development in the draft of the novel, in which she muses upon the possibility of a life “in Paris with painters.” The connection between viewing this still life and viewing painting is made clear by Woolf ’s rewriting of Augustus Carmichael’s bee-like visual feasting in her biography of Roger Fry: at the first exhibition of postimpressionist work, Fry faced the pictures, “plunging his eyes into them as if he were a humming-bird hawk-moth hanging over a flower, quivering yet still.” Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse: The Original Holograph Draft, transcribed and ed. Susan Dick (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 8, and Woolf, Roger Fry, 152. 41. Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, 71. 42. The draft of the novel makes Mrs. Ramsay’s possessive investment in the still life even clearer: “She did not want anybody to take any fruit.” Woolf, Original Holograph Draft, 179.

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43. Alpers, Art of Describing, xxii-xxiv. Lloyd makes the link between still life and nonnarrative description even more explicit by asserting that still life informs those points in novels “where the plot stops and the narrative viewpoint focuses on the elements we associated with the painted still life.” Shimmering, 7. 44. Brooks, Realist Vision, 16. For similar points, see Lloyd, Shimmering, 3, and Georg Lukács, “Narrate or Describe?” in Writer and Critic, ed. and trans. Arthur D. Kahn (London: Merlin Press, 1970), 130. 45. Bal, “Over-writing as Un-writing,” 102. A related, more abstract line of thought holds that, generally speaking, paintings cannot really be narrative, and the topic of narrative remains contentious for art historians. Ryan, Narrative across Media, 10–11, and Steiner, “Pictorial Narrativity,” 146. An important debate in this vein occurs between Bal and James Elkins in Critical Inquiry on the extent to which graphic marks can be analyzed with the same tools as linguistic signs. James Elkins, “Marks, Traces, ‘Traits,’ Contours, ‘Orli,’ and ‘Splendores’: Nonsemiotic Elements in Pictures,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 4 (Summer 1995): 822–60; Mieke Bal, “Semiotic Elements in Academic Practices,” Critical Inquiry 22, no. 3 (Spring 1996): 573–89; and James Elkins, “What Do We Want Pictures to Be? Reply to Mieke Bal,” Critical Inquiry 22, no. 3 (1996): 590–602. Elkins offers what is, in some crucial ways, a contemporary rearticulation of Fry’s understanding of painting when he demands that scholars “resist the temptation to slide away from the picture and toward symbolic or narrative meanings” and bristles at the thought that art historians are “anxious to turn pictures into narratives.” Elkins implies that pictures themselves contain no narrative meaning, that narrative is somehow outside the picture altogether, and that to discuss narrative in conjunction with painting is to counter the ontology of the picture, to turn painting into something other than what it is—in short, to overread. His resistance seems typical of what W. J. T. Mitchell characterizes as “ekphrastic fear.” Elkins, “What Do We Want,” 590–91, and Mitchell, “Ekphrasis and the Other,” in Picture Theory, 151–81. 46. Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 93–94. 47. Seymour Chatman, “What Novels Can Do That Films Can’t (and Vice Versa),” in On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 119. See also Ryan, Narrative across Media, 7, and James A. W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 5. 48. The cross-disciplinary ambivalence toward—and dependence upon—the practice of description is discussed at length in Sharon Marcus, Heather Love, and Stephen Best, “Building a Better Description,” the introductory essay in “Description across Disciplines,” ed. Sharon Marcus, Heather Love, and Stephen Best, special issue, Representations 135, no. 1 (Summer 2016): 1–21. Within narrative theory, Mieke Bal has made perhaps the most notable effort to complicate the position of description. Her third edition of Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009) acknowledges that “the premise that descriptions interrupt the line of the fabula”—a premise that appeared without qualifications in earlier editions—“is somewhat problematic” (41). In “Over-writing as Un-writing,” she also questions narrative theory’s casting of “description in the role of ‘boundary of narrative,’” but her elaboration of a “description-bound narratology of the novel”

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continues to emphasize description’s otherness—the “problem” that it has always constituted for narrative theory because its potential endlessness presents a threat to the coherence of the novel (96, 138). Gérard Genette’s understanding of description within narrative is similarly conditional: immediately after formulating description as an extreme pause, he suggests that a description can be considered part of the narrative when it recounts and analyzes the perceptual activity of the character contemplating the described object. Narrative Discourse, 100, 102, 105–7. Literary critics have recently begun to confront description’s vexed status by analyzing historical changes in modes of description and in the scholarly discourse on it. See, for example, Cynthia Sundberg Wall, The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 6–40; Franco Moretti, “Serious Century,” in The Novel, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 1:364–400; Caroline Levine and Mario Ortiz-Robles, Narrative Middles: Navigating the Nineteenth-Century British Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011); and Liesl Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). These scholars track how description first expands in size and scope and then grows in importance so that, as Olson puts it, “modernism makes the filler autonomous” (18). Woolf ’s “Time Passes” is, I would argue, perhaps the most frightening manifestation of the autonomy of description. 49. Humm, Modernist Women, 7. 50. James, “Critical Solace,” 483. 51. James, 483. 52. Gaskill, “The Close and the Concrete,” 507. 53. For readings of this kind, see Krieger, Ekphrasis, 263–87; Glavey, Wallflower Avant-Garde, 49–53; Steiner, Pictures of Romance, 4; and Stelmach, “From Text to Tableau,” 317–19. Stelmach’s discussion is especially relevant because she links the stilllife centerpiece in To the Lighthouse with the tradition of ekphrasis. Specifically, she argues that Woolf renovates ekphrasis by “relinquish[ing] all speech in favor of silent aesthetic contemplation, where visual imagery predominates so strongly that the scene could easily be reproduced as a painting.” While I obviously share Stelmach’s interest in the intermingling of verbal and visual representation in this scene, the dinner-party scene cannot be viewed a moment of suspension—as a tableau vivant— unless we ignore its narrative kernel. 54. Bonnie Kime Scott has specifically linked the pear in the dish to other modernist uses of that fruit in connection with women’s sexuality. In the Hollow of the Wave: Virginia Woolf and Modernist Uses of Nature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 30. 55. Bonnie Costello, Planets on Tables: Poetry, Still Life, and the Turning World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 10. 56. Guy Davenport, Objects on a Table: Harmonious Disarray in Art and Literature (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1998), 7. 57. Lloyd, Shimmering, 48. 58. Glavey, Wallflower Avant-Garde, 50–51. 59. While the skull has been called a memento mori in passing by Jane Fisher and Steve Ellis, Ann Banfield, quite curiously, has read the skull in connection with Roger Fry’s refusal to see Cézanne’s skulls as anything other than spherical forms.

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In both these cases, Banfield argues, the skull “is the presentation of a meaningless solid object, even its association with death emptied of meaning.” Fisher, “‘Silent as the Grave,’” 104; Steve Ellis, Virginia Woolf and the Victorians (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 106; and Ann Banfield, The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell, and the Epistemology of Modernism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 304. 60. For a discussion of the landscape features of the dinner-table still life, see Gillespie, Sisters’ Arts, 240. For more on landscape in To the Lighthouse, see Scott, In the Hollow, 112–13, 128–30. 61. Mrs. Ramsay’s attempt to conjure such a world seems to partake, like the shepherds that Wordsworth imagines to be in “harmony with the sublime landscape,” of the nostalgia for childhood that forms an integral part of Romantic and Victorian pastoral poetry. John Barrell and John Bull, eds., A Book of English Pastoral Verse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 427–28. 62. Douglas Mao, Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 73. 63. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 15; Bonnie Costello, “Fresh Woods: Elegy and Ecology among the Ruins,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy, ed. Karen Weisman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 324. Jane Goldman argues that the novel as a whole follows the pattern of pastoral elegy, and that “in keeping with elegiac convention,” the novel “ends in lyric consolation and transformative vision.” Although Goldman is careful to note that this vision “maintains a notion of art as contestive, not transcendent,” her reading fails to take into account Woolf ’s use of pastoral convention in the novel, which, as we shall see, reveals its comforts to be temporary at best. Randall Stevenson and Jane Goldman, “‘But What? Elegy?’ Modernist Reading and the Death of Mrs. Ramsay,” Yearbook of English Studies 26 (1996): 178, 181, 184. 64. Barrell and Bull, English Pastoral Verse, 4, and Iain Twiddy, Pastoral Elegy in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (New York: Continuum, 2012), 4. We might see this present absence in Costello’s observation that the “traditional pastoral contextualisation of elegy has less to do with the anthropomorphism of nature than with the naturalization of man.” That is, the pastoral context for elegy represents the process by which the human body returns to nature, vanishing as a distinct object in the landscape. Costello, “Fresh Woods,” 330. 65. Barrell and Bull, English Pastoral Verse, 224. 66. Goldman reads this moment quite differently, as a “Post-Impressionist colourist solution” that, by covering the sharply defined “light and dark” of the skull, which are evocative of “patriarchal chiaroscuro,” manages to sow “the seeds of social and artistic progressiveness.” Steve Ellis diverges sharply from Goldman’s reading, arguing that the shadow cast by the skull “will remain, even if its shape is now changed.” Ellis goes on to disagree at length with Goldman’s understanding of chiaroscuro in Woolf, which he characterizes as “light coexisting with shade,” and he seeks to balance a critical account that has favored color and light with an attention to “Woolf ’s obsession with shade, shadow, [. . .] ‘half light’, twilight and what they signify.” For Ellis, they signify—in a manner more or less in keeping with my own reading—that “Woolf is no utopian, and is unwilling to embrace naively a

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shadowless future.” Goldman, Feminist Aesthetics, 173–74, and Ellis, Virginia Woolf, 98, 101–2, 106 (emphasis original). 67. Banfield, Phantom Table, 223. In a similar if brief reading, David James has used this passage as an example of the longstanding presence of lyricism within the novel. Describing “Time Passes” as an “arresting sequence of gossamer resilience,” James argues that “lyrical moments” can be “narrative sites,” and while I diverge from his emphasis on paused, isolated action—this is not a tableau that “suspend[s] temporal progression” but rather a description that insistently, poignantly registers and responds to time’s passage—our arguments are largely compatible. James, “In Defense,” 71, 83. 68. Serpell, “Weird Times,” 1236. 69. Gillian Beer traces how distinct set of visual images—“table, house, tree, and stone”—participate in the novel’s “deepest questioning of what will survive.” Her analysis is congenial to my own, although I would submit that the series of still-life images I have foregrounded make the answer to that question more immediately clear. Gillian Beer, “Hume, Stephen, and Elegy in To the Lighthouse,” in Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 35, 38. 70. Focillon, Life of Forms, 36. 71. Woolf, Diary, 3:76. Although “Time Passes” is devoid of a centralized, organizing perception that has its basis in Woolf ’s characters, the extent to which the section is also devoid of a narrator’s consciousness remains a matter of some debate. Beer, “Hume, Stephen, and Elegy,” 39; Mao, Solid Objects, 59–60; and J. Hillis Miller, “Mr. Carmichael and Lily Briscoe: The Rhythm of Creativity in To the Lighthouse,” in Kiely, Modernism Reconsidered, 179–82. 72. On the ghostly quality of the Ramsays’ house as evidence of bourgeois nostalgia and the end of the Victorian age, see Julia Prewitt Brown, The Bourgeois Interior (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 11, and Victoria Rosner, “Virginia Woolf and Monk’s House,” in Humm, Edinburgh Companion, 192. 73. Beer, “Hume, Stephen, and Elegy,” 40. 74. Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, 60. 75. Mao, Solid Objects, 61. 76. Mrs. Ramsay’s shawl provides one example of the extent to which Woolf uses garments as “poignant markers of physical absence” and “archival traces of loss,” as Jane Garrity argues. “Virginia Woolf and Fashion,” in Humm, Edinburgh Companion, 209. For a related reading, see also R. S. Koppen, Virginia Woolf, Fashion, and Literary Modernity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 2, 35, 153–56. 77. Costello, Planets on Tables, 6. 78. Costello, 6. Costello argues quite strongly against the art historical commonplace that still life is “the opposite of history” (viii). 79. Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, 71. 80. For Froula, this “downpouring of immense darkness” clearly foreshadows death, and she also argues that the first “shock of loss” for the reader comes not with the deaths of Mrs. Ramsay, Prue, and Andrew but earlier, with the “narrator’s new detachment” in “Time Passes.” We might also relate the “downpouring of immense darkness” to the waters outside the window, that is, to the ocean that, as Beer writes, consistently “remind[s] us of the expanse of the world beyond the human, in the

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face of which all attempts of signifying and stabilizing are both valiant and absurd.” Froula, Bloomsbury Avant-Garde, 152–54, and Beer, “Hume, Stephen, and Elegy,” 43. 81. Jeannene M. Przyblyski, “The Makings of Modern Still Life in the 1860s,” in Rathbone and Shackelford, Impressionist Still Life, 29. For additional readings of the ordinary and the everyday in modernist literature and in Woolf ’s work, see Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary; Bryony Randall, Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Siobhan Phillips, The Poetics of the Everyday: Creative Repetition in Modern American Verse (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 82. Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, 70–71. This point, taken in conjunction with Bryson’s contention that the removal of the human body from the depicted scene is the foundational movement of still life, accounts for the uncanny quality that he ascribes to the genre. For more on still life’s evocation of the body, see Schapiro, Modern Art, 23, and Schapiro, Paul Cézanne, 18–19. 83. Randi Koppen, “Embodied Form: Art and Life in Virginia Woolf ’s ‘To the Lighthouse,’” New Literary History 32, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 384. 84. For representative readings, see Banfield, Phantom Table, 288–89; Froula, Bloomsbury Avant-Garde, 132; Gillespie, Sisters’ Arts, 221–22; Christopher Reed, “Through Formalism: Feminism and Virginia Woolf ’s Relation to Bloomsbury Aesthetics,” in Gillespie, Multiple Muses, 25; and Torgovnick, Visual Arts, 139. 85. There remains some critical debate over the genre in which Lily’s painting should appropriately be placed. Mao, among others, believes that it is obviously a landscape, while another group of scholars holds that, even after Mrs. Ramsay’s death, the painting remains a portrait. For references to the painting as a landscape, see Mao, Solid Objects, 62, and Goldman, Feminist Aesthetics, 170–71. For references to it as a portrait, see Banfield, Phantom Table, 289; Emily Dalgarno, Virginia Woolf and the Visible World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 88, 95; Fisher, “‘Silent as the Grave,’” 92; Froula, Bloomsbury Avant-Garde, 129, 167; and Humm, Modernist Women, 84–85. 86. Two critics note this lack of information. Gillespie, Sisters’ Arts, 220–21, and Cheryl Mares, “Reading Proust: Woolf and the Painter’s Perspective,” in Gillespie, Multiple Muses, 76–77. 87. Shiff, “Constructing Physicality,” 43. For references to the solidity of Cézanne’s images, see Bell to Fry, April 3, 1918, 213; Fry, Cézanne, 51; Schapiro, Paul Cézanne, 10; and Sterling, Still Life Painting, 104. 88. Shiff, “Constructing Physicality,” 43. 89. See, for example, White, Studio of One’s Own, 106. 90. On the painting and grief, see Fisher, “‘Silent as the Grave,’” 105; Froula, Bloomsbury Avant-Garde, 161; Goldman, Feminist Aesthetics, 168–70; Humm, Modernist Women, 17, 77, 84; Mao, Solid Objects, 62; and Stevenson and Goldman, “Modernist Reading,” 174, 178. 91. Beer, “Hume, Stephen, and Elegy,” 37 (emphasis original). 92. Dalgarno, Visible World, 94. See also Koppen, “Embodied Form,” 387. 93. Stevenson and Goldman, “Modernist Reading,” 174. Neither Stevenson nor Goldman connect Mr. Ramsay’s gesture here to the others like it in To the Lighthouse, or to the “trope of the empty arms” in other works by Woolf, which Emily Dalgarno has discussed. Visible World, 7.

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94. Gabrielle McIntire, Modernism, Memory, and Desire: T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 173 (emphasis original). On the biographical basis of the novel, see also Gillespie, Sisters’ Arts, 195–203, 220–21, and Humm, Modernist Women, 17, 77. 95. Woolf, Diary, 3:18 (all punctuation original). 96. Woolf, 3:34. 97. Roberta White offers a reading somewhat similar to my own, but many other potential meanings for the fish have been put forward by critics. White, Studio of One’s Own, 104; Goldman, Feminist Aesthetics, 180; Elizabeth Abel, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 59; Jane Marcus, Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 153–54; and Christina Alt, Virginia Woolf and the Study of Nature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 206. 98. Mao, Solid Objects, 59–60. See also Miller, “Mr. Carmichael and Lily Briscoe,” 181. 99. The connection between James and Macalister’s boy attests to the extent to which there is no real opposition between the ordinary and the traumatic, or between the ordinary and the moment of shock or epiphany, as Olson suggests there is. Reading To the Lighthouse as I have, in terms of the forms that begin with the still life on the dinner table, reveals that these two states coexist. Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary, 7–9. 100. Steve Ellis reads the painting in just this way, as “a creating of wholeness out of division.” Virginia Woolf, 79, 86–87. 101. Karen Weisman, introduction to Weisman, Oxford Handbook of the Elegy, 1. 102. Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 8. 103. T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1969), 197, quoted in Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning, 1. 104. White, Studio of One’s Own, 86, 89. Christine Froula goes even further than White, arguing that Lily’s work might be a “masterpiece.” Bloomsbury AvantGarde, 173. For additional readings of Lily’s painting as a triumph and a success, see Mark Hussey, The Singing of the Real World: The Philosophy of Virginia Woolf ’s Fiction (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1986), 80, and Torgovnick, Visual Arts, 118–21. 105. Rosner, Modernism, 170. Similar arguments describe this generational change in terms of the rise of “feminist prismatics” and colorism; the increasing visibility of women’s art; the education of the public about modernist art; and the abandonment of the “outmoded visual conventions” of linear perspective and Victorian beauty. Goldman, Feminist Aesthetics, 168, 185; Reed, “Through Formalism,” 25; Benjamin Harvey, “Virginia Woolf, Art Galleries and Museums,” in Humm, Edinburgh Companion, 155; and Dalgarno, Visible World, 88–90. 106. Virginia Woolf to Vanessa Bell, May 8, 1927, in The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, vol. 3 (New York: Harcourt, 1977), 372, and Bell to Woolf, May 11, 1927, in Selected Letters, 318 (emphasis original). 107. It should be no surprise that Bell finds a kindred spirit in Lily Briscoe, since Lily’s character was based, in part, on her own. Torgovnick, Visual Arts, 118, and Gillespie, Sisters’ Arts, 108–9, 196–203.

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108. Gillespie, “Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell and Painting,” 128. 109. My reading diverges sharply from that of Christine Froula, who charts the similarities between Mr. Ramsay’s journey and Lily’s painting as voyages, and contends that the novel remakes the quest romance and uses the voyage as its guiding metaphor. Bloomsbury Avant-Garde, 130, 133–36, 149, 161. 110. Beer echoes my sense that Lily’s painting is ordinary when she reads “the last part of the book” as “placing parental figures ‘on a level with ordinary existence’, with the substance of chair, table, house.” “Hume, Stephen, and Elegy,” 47. 111. Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, 61. See also Sterling, Still Life Painting, 11. 112. Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, 131. 113. Margaret Drabble, “Vanessa Bell,” in Lee, Cézanne in the Hedge, 20. 114. Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, 135. 115. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 546. 116. Banfield, Phantom Table, 135. 117. Shiff, “Constructing Physicality,” 43. Even as I underscore the importance of corporeality to Lily’s completion of her painting, by emphasizing the fragile physicality of both her canvas and her exhausted body, I want to indicate my divergence from readings like Steve Ellis’s, which emphasize a “unity,” a “coming together of body and mind.” To read her final gesture as an act of union is, I think, ultimately too triumphalist. Ellis, Virginia Woolf, 86–87. 118. Mares, “Reading Proust,” 77. We might thus use a still-life-inflected reading of Lily’s painting to extend one of the points that Jesse Matz makes about Woolf ’s impressionism—that it consistently aspires to “a total perceptivity.” For Matz, this aspiration is evident in the “epiphany” that Lily seems to have as she finishes her painting, but as I have argued, any epiphany is contingent upon Lily’s recognition of her painting’s material vulnerability. Neither she nor the painting can achieve a kind of perceptivity that is total or lasting in any real way. To borrow a different phrase from Matz, then, we might say that Woolf in To the Lighthouse tries “to put failure in positive terms.” Literary Impressionism, 193, 201. 119. Glavey, “Dazzling Estrangement,” 751. See also Frank, Spatial Form, 61. 120. Beer, “Hume, Stephen, and Elegy,” 46–47. I mean to emphasize that Lily does not, as Diane Gillespie contends, use her painting to make “life stand still”; or produce a painted representation that can “resist death,” as Maggie Humm suggests; or make “stay against time and death,” as Froula argues. Gillespie, Sisters’ Arts, 74–75, 311; Humm, Modernist Women, 87; and Froula, Bloomsbury Avant-Garde, 164. 3. Protean Form

1. Fry, Cézanne, 53. 2. Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 5. 3. Greenberg, 5–6. 4. Greenberg, 6. 5. Greenberg, 209. 6. Glenn D. Lowry, foreword to Dickerman, Inventing Abstraction, 7, and Dickerman, “Inventing Abstraction,” 34. The exhibition concurs with Greenberg in this

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regard but otherwise mounts a significant challenge to Greenberg’s account, which privileges medium specificity, by effectively demonstrating how abstraction developed out of network thinking and cross-media exchange. 7. Most critics have followed Loy’s biographer, Carolyn Burke, in calling these latter poems “tributes” or “homages.” Regardless of their specific type, both kinds of poetry constitute examples of the intermediality that characterizes Loy’s oeuvre more generally, and for that reason I refer to them as art poems. Carolyn Burke, Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), 324–25. 8. In Maeera Shreiber and Keith Tuma’s Mina Loy: Woman and Poet (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1998), which was for a decade the only collection of essays on Loy, over half the articles address either Songs to Joannes or Anglo-Mongrels, and the subjects of essays published elsewhere remain in keeping with this trend. More recent treatments of Loy’s nonfiction, fiction, and memoir appear in Rachel Potter and Suzanne Hobson’s Salt Companion to Mina Loy (London: Salt, 2010) and Sandeep Parmar’s Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies: Myth of the Modern Woman (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). Linda A. Kinnahan’s Mina Loy, Twentieth-Century Photography, and Contemporary Women Poets (New York: Routledge, 2017) pays particular attention to Loy’s late poetry, as does Tara Prescott’s Poetic Salvage: Reading Mina Loy (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2017). Prescott also offers extended close readings of many poems that are less frequently discussed and that feature in this chapter, but as will be made clear in following notes, I diverge significantly from her readings. 9. Dated 1923–25, Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose appeared in three unchronological parts in the Little Review and Robert McAlmon’s Contact Collection, and it was not published as a unit in sequence until after Loy’s death. Burke, Becoming Modern, 350, and Roger L. Conover, textual notes to The Last Lunar Baedeker, by Mina Loy, ed. Roger L. Conover (Highlands, NC: Jargon Society, 1982), 326. 10. On Loy’s mongrel aesthetics, see Elisabeth A. Frost, “Mina Loy’s ‘Mongrel’ Poetics,” in Shreiber and Tuma, Mina Loy, 151–52, and Marjorie Perloff, “English as a ‘Second’ Language: Mina Loy’s Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose,” in Shreiber and Tuma, Mina Loy, 134. For similar discussions of creative tension or boundary-crossing hybridity, see Parmar, Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies, 18–19, 109–34; Paul Peppis, “Rewriting Sex: Mina Loy, Marie Stopes, and Sexology,” Modernism/Modernity 9, no. 4 (November 2002): 574–75; and Aimee L. Pozorski, “Eugenicist Mistress & Ethnic Mother: Mina Loy and Futurism, 1913–1917,” MELUS 30, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 41–69. 11. Mina Loy, “Brancusi’s Golden Bird,” in The Lost Lunar Baedeker, ed. Roger L. Conover (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997), 79. 12. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “fundament,” 1.a. and 3, and “abstract,” adj., 1.b., accessed September 10, 2013, http://dictionary.oed.com/. 13. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “abstract,” etym. and verb, 1.c., accessed September 10, 2013, http://dictionary.oed.com/. 14. Jay Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Paintings (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 150. Bernstein writes at the intersection of abstract expressionism and Hegelian philosophy, but his critique has prompted significant concerns about abstraction more broadly. See, for instance,

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Judith Butler, “Restaging the Universal,” in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek (New York: Verso, 2000), 19. 15. Charles Altieri, “Why Modernist Claims for Autonomy Matter,” Journal of Modern Literature 32, no. 3 (Spring 2009): 4. My account of abstraction within this chapter complements the one that Altieri provides in his Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), which does not mention Loy and which focuses, as its title indicates, on the ways that the medium of painting contributed to US poets’ challenge to received representational forms. 16. Loy’s pure forms are generalizable “patterns and organizations,” but they also insist on a specificity of aesthetic experience: “these words in this order.” Gaskill, “The Close and the Concrete,” 505–6, 520. 17. Mina Loy, Songs to Joannes, in Lost Lunar Baedeker, 58, 66, and Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “abstract,” noun, 3.a., accessed September 10, 2013, http:// dictionary.oed.com/. 18. Sara Crangle notes that “the rough, handwritten document of ‘Brancusi and the Ocean’ includes a draft of a poem entitled ‘La descent des Ganges,’” and because “a more complete version of this poem is published in The Last Lunar Baedeker as ‘Descent of the Ganges,” and dated by the editor of The Last Lunar Baedeker, Roger Conover, “as most likely written in the late 1930s or early 1940s,” we can assume that this aphoristic essay on Brancusi also dates from around this time. Sara Crangle, notes to Stories and Essays of Mina Loy, by Mina Loy, ed. Sara Crangle (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2011), 370. 19. Other US reviewers of Brancusi’s work struck much the same note: the Art News lauded his “genius for simplification,” and the Brooklyn Eagle expressed admiration for his creation of “the essential forms of life.” New York Sun, February 27, 1926; Art News, February 27, 1926; and Brooklyn Eagle, February 28, 1926; all quoted in Anna C. Chave, Constantin Brancusi: Shifting the Bases of Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 10. 20. Loy, Last Lunar Baedeker, 300. 21. For more on this diagram, see Glenn D. Lowry, “Abstraction in 1936: Barr’s Diagrams,” in Dickerman, Inventing Abstraction, 361–63. 22. Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (New York: Routledge, 1992), 18 (emphasis original). I should note that, for art historians, the nude both is and isn’t a fully codified genre, even though many refer to it in that way: the nude image has been central to “academic theory” and “studio practice” since the Renaissance, but it has no special place in “the organisation of knowledge [. . .] in the systems of museum classification.” Marcia Pointon, Naked Authority: The Body in Western Painting 1830–1908 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 12. 23. Nead, Female Nude, 18. Nead rehearses this theorization primarily in order to critique it. 24. F. T. Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” in Marinetti: Selected Writings, ed. R. W. Flint, trans. R. W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972), 42, and Umberto Boccioni et al., “Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto,” in Art in Theory 1900–2000, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 152 (emphasis original).

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25. Umberto Boccioni, “Absolute Motion + Relative Motion = Dynamism,” in Futurism: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Whitman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 190. In this regard, Loy might be said to borrow theories of geometric abstraction from futurism and merge them with the interest in biomorphic abstraction that she develops out of her encounter with Brancusi. 26. Jessica Burstein has recently reworked the term “cold modernism” to explain how modernist literature, art, and fashion conceive an ahuman world without the individual and the subject. She applies this term to Loy’s invention of the body in her early domestic poetry and her design work. Whereas Burstein suggests that “cold modernism is exemplary in its demonstration that there is no outside to culture,” my account of Loy’s poetry is interested in precisely the intersection between her work and the early twentieth-century attempt to escape culture through pure form. Jessica Burstein, Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 11. 27. Yvor Winters, “Mina Loy,” Dial 80 ( June 1926): 498. 28. Winters, 496. 29. Winters, 498. 30. One of the only critics to comment on the poem, Tara Prescott, reads the poem as demonstrating the superiority of cubism to Romanticism (and to religion) as a mode of representation. In my view, the poem stages no such conflict, and its abstraction is thoroughgoing. Prescott, Poetic Salvage, 96–103. 31. The exact circumstances under which Loy saw Lewis’s drawing remain unknown, as does the composition date of her poem: no manuscript exists, and the poem first appeared in Lunar Baedeker in 1923. Loy might have seen the original drawing in London at some point after Lewis made it in 1912, or the reproduction in the Little Review in 1917, or the reproduction in the Dial in 1921. According to Wyndham Lewis, Loy reintroduced herself after a 1914 exhibition at the Grafton Galleries in London and asked about the price of his drawings, saying “I must . . . have one” (Conover, editorial notes to Loy, Lost Lunar Baedeker, 201–2). The implication is that The Starry Sky might have been among these drawings, but as far as I can tell, Lewis showed nothing in that gallery in 1914, and according to Burke’s biography, Loy attended no exhibitions in London in 1914, since she spent the entire year in Italy. For this reason, Lewis’s recollection seems faulty, though we do know that Loy had known Lewis in Paris, saw his Timon of Athens drawings at the second exhibition of postimpressionist work at the Grafton Gallery in 1912, and thought him “a marvellous draughtsman.” Burke, Becoming Modern, 139–40. Loy’s literary executor, Roger Conover, believes it likely that Loy wrote in response to the November 1917 issue of the Little Review, where the drawing appeared under the title The Starry Sky, because Loy noted in Lunar Baedeker that Lewis’s drawing belonged to John Quinn, along with Brancusi’s Golden Bird and the manuscript of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses; all these were poetic subjects for Loy, and all appeared in the Little Review. Conover, editorial notes to Loy, Lost Lunar Baedeker, 201–2. The Little Review image might well have inspired Loy’s poem, but Conover overlooks an important additional source: the reproduction of the drawing in the August 1921 issue of the Dial—again under the title The Starry Sky and with Quinn’s ownership noted—in a group of Lewis’s

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wash drawings. This same issue of the Dial contained Loy’s own poem “Perlun,” so it seems to me to be the more likely of the two little-magazine sources. The possible sources for Loy’s poem merit commentary because, in each of these sources, the drawing takes on a distinct appearance. In the original, it proves much easier to see that, as Walter Michel notes in Wyndham Lewis: Paintings and Drawings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), “the two figures, drawn on white paper, have been cut out and pasted on to a dark-grey paper background” (354). That the drawing is a collage proves particularly apparent at its top edge, where one can see that the tops of the figures’ heads do not abut the supporting paper’s edge. Furthermore, the background’s flat, matte character is especially apparent, and the ground looks like unmarked paper. We find the same flatness in the Dial reproduction, but here the figures’ heads do abut the top edge of the image, thus making it very difficult for the magazine reader to know for certain that the drawing is a collage. The transformation of the image for a black-and-white publication has also altered the appearance of the ground, which now seems to be a dark charcoal gray. The greatest difference from the original occurs in the Little Review, where the particular ink and paper used have the effect of making Lewis’s flat paper background appear to have depth and to have been shaded by the same pencil that has drawn the two figures. Thus each image presents a different visual for “the ghosts of the stars,” for “the celestial conservatories” that “are all blown out” in Loy’s poem. Lost Lunar Baedeker, 91. My claim is that the absence of the stars, or the vacancy of the drawing’s background, constitutes the central preoccupation of the poem, and the background is empty in a distinct way in each image. In all three versions, the supposed starry sky proves absent, so all three offer emptiness in that sense. But in the original and in the Dial, the background is also empty in the sense that it appears to be blank paper empty of Lewis’s markings; it is not at all empty in this sense in the Little Review. For these reasons, the blankness that I identify as a key interest of the poem obviously takes on more resonance if the image associated with Loy’s poem is the original drawing or the reproduction from the Dial, even if my argument is not entirely dependent upon that precise image or date. Both because Loy seems much more likely to have seen Lewis’s drawing reproduced in the Dial rather than in the original, and because Loy’s ekphrasis articulates aspects of the drawing that appear in the Dial and not in the Little Review, I include the image from the Dial as an illustration in this book. 32. Loy, Lost Lunar Baedeker, 91. All subsequent citations of this poem will appear parenthetically within the text. 33. The Lewis scholar Paul Edwards notes that the drawing features similar “striations” in the figures and the ground. Loy’s lines reflect this continuity—this “drift,” if you will. Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 67. For more on Lewis’s own engagement with abstraction, see Matthew Gale, “Vorticism: Planetary Abstraction,” in Dickerman, Inventing Abstraction, 154–56. 34. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “nirvana,” 1.b., 1.a., etym., accessed March 14, 2013, http://dictionary.oed.com/. 35. Loy, Lost Lunar Baedeker, 79–80 (punctuation and spacing original). Throughout this chapter, I will attempt to reproduce Loy’s unique typographic effects,

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including line indentations and spaces between words, when I quote longer sections of her work. All subsequent citations of this poem will appear parenthetically within the text. 36. Since “an incandescent curve” isn’t capitalized, it is also possible to read this phrase in relation to the line that precedes it—“this breast of revelation”—as an appositive, or as the predicate of a sentence missing the verb, is, that would link the two strophes together. 37. If we choose to follow Loy’s biographer, Carolyn Burke, in reading the poem as an ars poetica, Loy’s emulation of a silent object might prove problematic, since the sculpture’s “aesthetic inevitably leads one to the abandonment of writing.” But Loy’s ellipsis makes more sense, within the context of Loy’s other work on Brancusi, as a vector—an indication of movement—than as a retreat into poetic silence. Carolyn Burke, “‘Accidental Aloofness’: Barnes, Loy, and Modernism,” in Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes, ed. Mary Lynn Broe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 76. 38. Potts, Sculptural Imagination, 141. 39. William Carlos Williams, “Brancusi,” in A Recognizable Image: William Carlos Williams on Art and Artists, ed. Bram Dijkstra (New York: New Directions, 1978), 250, quoted in Potts, Sculptural Imagination, 143. 40. William Carlos Williams, Paterson, ed. Christopher MacGowan, rev. ed. (New York: New Directions, 1995), 109, 184–85. 41. Chave, Constantin Brancusi, 1. 42. Ezra Pound, “Brancusi,” in Little Review 8, no. 1 (Autumn 1921): 4–5 (emphasis mine). 43. By emphasizing the elements of Brancusi’s sculpture and Loy’s poem that operate not by reduction but rather by accumulation and surplus, I mean to provide a very different, much more art historically nuanced account of abstraction than the simplified relation outlined in Prescott, Poetic Salvage, 85–96. 44. Pound, “Brancusi,” 5–6. As he did with his Bird sculptures, Brancusi executed multiple versions of each of these shapes. For the versions of Danaïde (as well as the related versions of the ovoids Mademoiselle Pogany, Sleeping Muse, and The Newborn), see Pontus Hulten, Natalia Dumitresco, and Alexandre Istrati, Brancusi (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1987), 284, 287 (cat. nos. 63, 75), and for the versions of The Beginning of the World, see 295, 301 (cat. nos. 115, 143). 45. Chave, Constantin Brancusi, 41. 46. Loy’s work thus perfectly exemplifies the duality of form that I mentioned in the introduction to this book: the term designates both “the material aspects of a thing”—its shape—and “the immaterial nature that makes a thing what it is”—its essence. Gaskill, “The Close and the Concrete,” 507, and Leighton, On Form, 1–3. 47. Krauss, Passages, 99, and for a full account of the customs controversy and lawsuit, see Chave, Constantin Brancusi, 198–202. 48. Loy, Lost Lunar Baedeker, 94. On the poem’s publication history, see Conover, editorial notes to Loy, Lost Lunar Baedeker, 203. 49. Alex Goody, by contrast, stresses the poem’s verbal phrases instead of its nouns. Modernist Articulations: A Cultural Study of Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy, and Gertrude Stein (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 138.

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50. Burke argues convincingly that Loy is always “also expressing her own ideas about modernism” when she writes about Stein, and she sees this poem as a statement that “voiced [Loy’s] sense that the aim of modernism was to release this untapped energy.” Reading “Gertrude Stein” in the context of Loy’s other work, however, makes clear that this release does not quite happen within the poem itself. Burke, Becoming Modern, 318, 329. 51. “Gertrude Stein” thus indirectly highlights a characteristic shared by Loy’s and Brancusi’s work—what the art historian Anna Chave describes as a “gnomic and aphoristic” quality. Like the new “word” that Stein discovers or like the reverberating poem that Loy writes, Brancusi’s sculpted forms—“immaculate / conception[s]” all— sometimes take on the power of “displaced relics” that can strike viewers dumb with their “sacred and revelatory” quality. Chave, Constantin Brancusi, 2–3, 145, 162. 52. Williams, Paterson, 184–85. 53. Loy, Last Lunar Baedeker, 289. 54. Loy, 289. 55. Loy, 289. 56. Loy, 297 (punctuation original). 57. Loy, 297. Ellen Keck Stauder reads this passage in Loy’s essay on Stein as a rejection of the idea that the absolute could “be contained by anyone or anything,” and while I agree with Stauder that the absolute “always gives rise to further creation,” Loy’s longstanding engagement with ideas of pure form and abstraction indicates the extent to which she imagines some containment to be possible. Ellen Keck Stauder, “The Irreducible Surplus of Abstraction: Mina Loy on Brancusi and the Futurists,” in Shreiber and Tuma, Mina Loy, 364–65, and Ellen Keck Stauder, “Beyond the Synopsis of Vision: The Conception of Art in Ezra Pound and Mina Loy,” Paideuma 24, nos. 2–3 (1995): 211–12. 58. Loy, Last Lunar Baedeker, 290. 59. Williams, “Brancusi,” in A Recognizable Image: William Carlos Williams on Art and Artists, quoted in Potts, Sculptural Imagination, 143. In Paterson, which has certain areas of overlap with Williams’s essay on Brancusi, Williams even describes the elemental form of poetry in language that seems to draw directly on Loy’s essay: “The radiant gist that / resists the final crystallization.” Yet the difference between the two poets’ conceptions of elemental form is subtle but crucial. For Williams, the elemental epitome never fully crystallizes; for Stein, it does, and such crystallization is not a reduction but rather a grounding for possible formal evolution. Williams, Paterson, 109. 60. The rose motto appears in “Sacred Emily,” in Geography and Plays, and Alice Toklas recounts the transfer to Stein’s stationery in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Gertrude Stein, “Sacred Emily,” in Gertrude Stein: Writings 1903–1932, ed. Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman (New York: Library of America, 1998), 395, and Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (London: Penguin, 2001), 150. 61. Loy, Lost Lunar Baedeker, 64. 62. Chave, Constantin Brancusi, 13. 63. Chave, 112, 115. 64. Chave, 115, and Hulten, Dumitresco, and Istrati, Brancusi, 294, 300–315. 65. Clive Bell, “The Art of Brancusi,” Vogue, June 1, 1926: 83 (emphasis mine).

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66. Constantin Brancusi to John Quinn, December 27, 1917, John Quinn Papers, New York Public Library, quoted in Chave, Constantin Brancusi, 207. I should note that it is unclear which of the two 1919 Golden Birds prompted Loy’s poem. One sculpture was owned by John Quinn and reproduced in the pages of the Little Review in 1921, and Loy might have developed her poem in response to the magazine, or she may have seen Quinn’s sculpture at his home or at the exhibition titled Contemporary French Art, which took place at the Sculptors’ Gallery in New York City in 1922. But Loy also recalled seeing a Golden Bird in 1921 at the home of her friend Mariette Mills: “At wonderful Mariette Mills’ I came face to face, or rather face to flight with Brancusi’s Bird.” For this reason, Roger Conover argues that the second sculpture, rather than Quinn’s sculpture, was the inspiration behind the poem. Quinn’s sculpture is now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the second 1919 Golden Bird belongs to the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Conover, editorial notes to Loy, Lost Lunar Baedeker, 198–99, and Loy, Last Lunar Baedeker, 300. 67. Chave, 23. Their friendship may have begun after the publication of “Brancusi’s Golden Bird” in the November 1922 issue of the Dial, as Conover contends, or slightly earlier. Conover, editorial notes to Loy, Lost Lunar Baedeker, 198–99. 68. Burke, Becoming Modern, 346. 69. Burke, 380. 70. For a thorough examination of Loy’s various connections to modernism’s “photographic cultures,” see Kinnahan, Mina Loy. Kinnahan discusses none of the particular photographs that I treat in this chapter. 71. Chave, Constantin Brancusi, 3, 212, 214–15. 72. Potts, Sculptural Imagination, 124. Potts discusses the modernist predilection for dematerializing solidity in relation to a nearly contradictory idea, “the autonomy of the art work” (124). Both ideas are presented initially without reference to Brancusi, but later, he implies that Brancusi’s work can specifically be seen to instantiate either vision of modernist sculpture by noting that Brancusi’s work has been “celebrated for its reconfiguring of the sculptural object by writers of widely different aesthetic persuasions” (132). On the one hand, for William Tucker, Brancusi is “the exemplary creator of a perfectly self-contained modernist object,” while on the other hand, for Rosalind Krauss, Brancusi turns away from “the inner formal logic of the object to a concern with its surface qualities and its staging” (132). 73. Krauss, Passages, 99, and Potts, Sculptural Imagination, 134. For more on Brancusi’s deployment of photography, see Chave, Constantin Brancusi, 3, 212–15, 279. 74. Krauss, Passages, 99. Krauss is here writing about a Bird in Space, but her analysis holds true for the Golden Bird as well. 75. Pound, “Brancusi,” 6. 76. Loy, Last Lunar Baedeker, 300. 77. Brancusi is quoted in “Master of Form,” Time, 66, no. 20, (November 14, 1955): 90. 78. Krauss, Passages, 86. For similar points, see Potts, Sculptural Imagination, 141–42, and Chave, Constantin Brancusi, 41. 79. Pound, “Brancusi,” 6. Pound was incorrect about Brancusi’s bases, which often grounded the hidden vertical supports that kept the sculptures upright. The bases thus counter the aesthetic and symbolic qualities of the upper bronze or marble pieces. Since Loy’s poem ignores Brancusi’s base, I have not paused to analyze it,

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but I would be remiss if I did not mention that Brancusi’s bases constitute one of the most significant ways in which he challenged sculptural convention. For more on his bases, see Chave, Constantin Brancusi, 14, 16, 41, 186–93, 222–49. 80. Brancusi is quoted in Claire Gilles Guilbert, “Propos de Brancusi,” in Prisme des arts 12 (1927): 7, trans. by Chave, quoted in Chave, Constantin Brancusi, 119. Chave argues that Brancusi almost manages “to render not merely birds but flight and space” in part by streamlining his sculptures of animals in ways “that evince their soaring or gliding motions and, by extension, the seemingly weightless environments that permit such movement,” so that the sculptor nearly succeeds at “fixing the fluid and materializing the immaterial” (141). 81. Brancusi is quoted in Radu Varia, Brancusi (New York: Rizzoli, 1986), 304n1. 82. Potts, Sculptural Imagination, 142, 144. 83. Chave, Constantin Brancusi, 121. While Loy would never fully embrace the nonsexual or “dual sexual identity” that Chave recognizes as possible in Brancusi’s work, the sculptor’s interest in “doubling, confounding, and fusing the markers of sexual identity” is echoed by Loy’s exploration of the ways in which lovers’ egos and bodies are doubled, confounded, and fused in Songs to Joannes, which I discuss in the next section of this chapter (123). For a complex reading of the double gendering of Brancusi’s Bird (via Loy’s poem), see Stauder, “Beyond the Synopsis,” 210–21, where she argues that Loy’s attention to this feature echoes other reactions to the sculptor’s work, particularly that of William Carlos Williams, who, in an essay spurred by a major Brancusi retrospective in 1955, noted the femininity of Princesse X and its metamorphosis into a phallic shape. The Bird sculptures, in Stauder’s view, can undergo a similar metamorphosis, but in the opposite direction. For a full account of Williams’s engagement with Brancusi’s work, see Potts, Sculptural Imagination, 142–44. 84. Pound, “Brancusi,” 6. See also Chave, Constantin Brancusi, 20, 66, 78–79, 211. 85. On Loy’s recreation of the reflective surface of Brancusi’s bronze sculpture with sound effects, see Stauder, “Irreducible Surplus,” 366–67, and Virginia M. Kouidis, Mina Loy: American Modernist Poet (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 99–100, 122–23. 86. Chave, Constantin Brancusi, 4, and for a full account of the scandal, see 93–97. 87. Burke, Becoming Modern, 309. 88. Between the autumn 1921 issue of the Little Review and the November 1922 issue of the Dial, Brancusi also featured in the May 1922 issue of Vanity Fair, which included photographs of his work and his studio and an article about “Brancusi the man” by Jeanne Foster. The three publications, which created a moment of extraordinary, condensed attention to Brancusi’s work, were interlinked in several ways. Because the Little Review interleaved the first group of photographs of Brancusi’s work with Loy’s essay “Psycho-Democracy,” it seems quite possible that she developed the idea for her poem in response to this issue. Richard N. Masteller, “Using Brancusi: Three Writers, Three Magazines, Three Versions of Modernism,” American Art 11, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 48, 52, 59; Carolyn Burke, Becoming Modern, 309; and Marissa Januzzi, “Bibliography,” in Shreiber and Tuma, Mina Loy, 520. 89. Loy, Lost Lunar Baedeker, 63, 66. All subsequent citations of this poem will appear parenthetically within the text 90. Alfred Kreymborg, Our Singing Strength: An Outline of American Poetry (1620–1930) (New York: Coward-McCann, 1929), 488.

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91. Roger L. Conover, introduction to Loy, Last Lunar Baedeker, xxxvi. For additional details surrounding the publication of Songs, see Conover, editorial notes to Loy, Lost Lunar Baedeker, 188–90, 224. 92. Quoted in Burke, Becoming Modern, 191. 93. Kreymborg, Our Singing Strength, 488–89. 94. Quoted in Burke, Becoming Modern, 191. 95. Loy, Lost Lunar Baedeker, 53. All subsequent citations of this poem will appear parenthetically within the text. I refer to the individual parts of Songs to Joannes, which are marked with roman numerals, as sections and to the entirety of Songs as a poem, although other critics frequently refer to its parts as poems and to the entirety as a sequence. 96. Rachel Potter, “Obscene Modernism and the Wondering Jew: Mina Loy’s ‘Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose,’” in Potter and Hobson, Salt Companion to Mina Loy, 49. 97. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “‘Seismic Orgasm’: Sexual Intercourse and Narrative Meaning in Mina Loy,” in Shreiber and Tuma, Mina Loy, 57. 98. DuPlessis, 54. 99. Perloff, “English,” 144. Perloff is not the only scholar to have defended the narrativity of Loy’s long poems: Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Cristanne Miller, and Suzanne Churchill have made similar points specifically about Songs to Joannes. DuPlessis, “‘Seismic Orgasm,’” 50; Suzanne Churchill, The Little Magazine “Others” and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 196; and Cristanne Miller, Cultures of Modernism: Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, & Else LaskerSchüler; Gender and Literary Community in New York and Berlin (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 115. 100. DuPlessis, “‘Seismic Orgasm,’” 49, 66, 71. Rachel Potter makes much the same point in her analysis of obscenity and Songs: “The most powerful moments in these poems come when she shifts the focus of what is obscene, or unmentionable, from flesh to mind.” “Obscene Modernism,” 49. 101. Andrew Michael Roberts, “Rhythm, Self, and Jazz in Mina Loy’s Poetry,” in Potter and Hobson, Salt Companion to Mina Loy, 123. 102. Quoted in Burke, Becoming Modern, 191. 103. The elucidation of Loy’s relation to futurism has proven especially thorny for critics, with some arguing that she adopts the aesthetics and philosophy of futurism wholesale, and others claiming that she rejects futurism entirely, or does nothing but subject its tenets to satire. None of these positions is, as my argument will bear out, really accurate, and perhaps the best articulation of the relationship between Loy and futurism lies in Rowan Harris’s contention that Loy must move outside futurist discourse to realize the aesthetic vision and to pursue the conceptual possibilities that futurist theorization underwrites. “Futurism, Fashion, and the Feminine: Forms of Repudiation and Affiliation in the Early Writing of Mina Loy,” in Potter and Hobson, Salt Companion to Mina Loy, 24–25. 104. F. T. Marinetti, “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature,” in Marinetti: Selected Writings, ed. R. W. Flint, trans. R. W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972), 87. 105. Boccioni et al., “Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto,” 150. For more on the futurist emphasis on movement and change, see Stephen Eric Bronner, Modernism

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at the Barricades: Aesthetics, Politics, Utopia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 67–78. 106. Boccioni et al., “Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto,” 150. 107. Boccioni et al., 152. 108. Giacomo Balla et al., “The Exhibitors to the Public,” in Rainey, Poggi, and Whitman, Futurism: An Anthology, 106. 109. The futurists carried this disdain for early twentieth-century nudes over to their evaluation of modern sculpture, too. But the similarity between the futurists’ evaluation of modern painting and their evaluation of modern sculpture is not, according to Potts, simply the result of an exceptionally sweeping adherence to avant-garde doctrine. Rather, like many other modernists, Boccioni put forth a conception of plastic form that was “basically painterly,” and Boccioni’s disdainful tone in the sculpture manifesto simply attests to the fact that “sculpture became an ideal site for imagining a Futurist revolution, not because of its specific resources as an art form, but because sculpture was such a retardaire, classicising art, completely out of tune with the demands of the modern age and thus in need of a total blowing apart.” Umberto Boccioni, “Futurist Sculpture,” in Rainey, Poggi, and Whitman, Futurism: An Anthology, 119, and Potts, Sculptural Imagination, 106. 110. Nead, Female Nude, 2. 111. Nead, 18. 112. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “rhetoric,” 4.b., accessed March 28, 2013, http://dictionary.oed.com/. 113. Christine Poggi, “Introduction to Part Two,” in Rainey, Poggi, and Whitman, Futurism: An Anthology, 317. 114. Boccioni, “Absolute Motion,” 190 (emphasis original). 115. Boccioni et al., “Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto,” 150. The futurist notion that the body and the environment fully interpenetrate each other is, perhaps, one of the ideas that Wyndham Lewis, whose vorticism was significantly influenced by futurism, takes from the Italian avant-garde and manifests in his own way in Two Women or The Starry Sky, where the figures merge with the ground on which they stand. 116. Boccioni, “Futurist Sculpture,” 119. For more on the body’s lack of boundaries, see Christine Poggi, Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 151, 165. 117. Boccioni, 119. 118. Quoted in “Master of Form,” 90. 119. Boccioni, “Absolute Motion,” 190. 120. Loy, Lost Lunar Baedeker, 149. 121. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “synopsis,” etym., and s.v. “syn-,” prefix, etym., accessed May 10, 2018, http://dictionary.oed.com/. 122. Loy, Lost Lunar Baedeker, 151. 123. Crangle, notes to Loy, Stories and Essays, 399–400, and Loy, Stories and Essays, 267. 124. Loy, Last Lunar Baedeker, 311. I should clearly say that Loy’s “Aphorisms on Futurism” and her “Aphorisms on Modernism” are two distinct texts. The former appeared in Camera Work in 1914; the latter was “improvised” from unpublished materials in Loy’s folders and titled by her editor and literary executor, Roger

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Conover. However, they share a genre and a format—short lines with fully capitalized first words, which I have not retained in my quotations—and a similar call for formal and psychic revolution, so I group them together here. In fact, Conover notes that in one print copy of Camera Work in Loy’s archives, probably annotated after Loy rejected futurism, she has transformed her “Aphorisms on Futurism” into another version of “Aphorisms on Modernism” by penciling in “modern” for “future” and “Modernism” for “Futurism.” Conover, editorial notes to Loy, Lost Lunar Baedeker, 215, and Conover, textual notes to Loy, Last Lunar Baedeker, 329. 125. Loy, Stories and Essays, 221–22. 126. Balla et al., “The Exhibitors to the Public,” 106, and Boccioni, “Absolute Motion,” 190. 127. Pound, “Brancusi,” 5. My paraphrase and interpretation of Loy might here begin to suggest that the sculpture behind “Brancusi and the Ocean” is actually one of his ovoids, such as The Beginning of the World, which present an egglike shape to the viewer and might therefore seem a more logical inspiration for Loy’s description of “form arrested at its very inception.” This may be true, since Loy certainly saw Brancusi’s ovoids on a visit to his studio, and since there may well be more than one sculpture that prompts her lines in this essay. But I want nevertheless to suggest that Brancusi’s Bird sculptures remain Loy’s primary inspiration because of the strong similarities between this piece and “Brancusi’s Golden Bird.” 128. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 129. 129. Boccioni’s original Italian is “Dinamismo è la concezione lirica delle forme,” and as is true in English, concezione is used in Italian both for the notion of conception as it relates to thought (as in “the lyrical conception of forms”) and as it relates to reproduction (as in the “immaculate / conception”). 130. Scholars have found evidence to support all these possibilities. For a variety of readings, see DuPlessis, “‘Seismic Orgasm,’” 61–64; Goody, Modernist Articulations, 98–99; Peppis, “Rewriting Sex,” 570, 573, 575; Pozorski, “Eugenicist Mistress,” 62; and Maeera Shreiber, “‘Love Is a Lyric/Of Bodies’: The Negative Aesthetics of Mina Loy’s Love Songs to Joannes,” in Shreiber and Tuma, Mina Loy, 91. 131. Goody also reads Loy’s dashes in Songs as indicators of “potential” and as markers of possible “becoming.” Modernist Articulations, 77. 132. For Chave, Brancusi’s Bird sculptures may also uphold the ideal of immaculate male conception, since their sexually dimorphic forms participate in “the circumvention of the female body.” Chave’s compelling reading, however, does not fully align with Loy’s vision of Brancusi’s work in “Brancusi’s Golden Bird” and “Brancusi and the Ocean.” For Loy, the erotics of Brancusi’s work will always bring it closer to her own, feminist-inflected deployment of dynamic form than that of misogynists such as Marinetti. For more on the significance of Brancusi’s sexually dimorphic figures and on the immortality of the mythical bigendered phoenix that Bird in Space evokes, see Chave, Constantin Brancusi, 19, 99, 104, 112, 115–17, 142, 163. 133. Loy, Lost Lunar Baedeker, 154–55 (underlining and hyphen original). 134. Loy, 155. 135. Chave, Constantin Brancusi, 104. 136. Nead, Female Nude, 45. Here Nead is summarizing and glossing Carol Duncan’s criticism of the modern art galleries in the Museum of Modern Art in New

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York in the late 1980s. Carol Duncan, “The MoMA’s Hot Mamas,” in “Images of Rule: Issues of Interpretation,” special issue, Art Journal 48, no. 2 (Summer 1989): 171–78, and Carol Duncan, “Virility and Domination in Early Twentieth-Century Vanguard Painting,” in Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 292–313. 4. Bad Formalism

1. Evelyn Waugh, The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Michael Davie (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), 169. Waugh refers to Adrian Stokes and Terence Greenidge. 2. Waugh, 170. The entry was written on September 1, 1924, and refers to events from that summer. The film, made in July, starred Waugh and Lanchester, who would go on to become a successful film actress in the United States. No diary for the two years that Waugh spent at Oxford, from 1922 to 1924, survives: Waugh wrote one but destroyed it, presumably because it recounted affairs with men that he later deemed inappropriate or “dangerous.” Martin Stannard, Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years 1903–1939 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 68, and Michael Davie, preface to Waugh, Diaries, n.p. 3. Waugh, Diaries, 176 (emphasis original). 4. Waugh, 176. 5. George McCartney, Evelyn Waugh and the Modernist Tradition, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2004), 99–100. 6. Evelyn Waugh to Dudley Carew, January 1921, in The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Mark Amory (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1980), 2. See also McCartney, Evelyn Waugh, 99. 7. Evelyn Waugh to Father Aelred Watkin, February 12, 1956, in Waugh, Letters, 464–65 (emphasis original). See also McCartney, Evelyn Waugh, 99. 8. Marius Hentea, “The End of the Party: The Bright Young People in Vile Bodies, Afternoon Men, and Party Going,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 56, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 104. 9. Lisa Colletta, Dark Humor and Social Satire in the Modern British Novel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 99. Like McCartney and Hentea, Colletta focuses upon Waugh’s use of an external perspective, the director’s eye, montage, and the dominance of dialogue. McCartney, Evelyn Waugh, 40, 102–3, 121, 125, and Frederick L. Beaty, The Ironic World of Evelyn Waugh: A Study of Eight Novels (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1994), 12–14, 54. 10. Waugh would seem to be neatly described by the contours of late modernism that Tyrus Miller delineates in Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts between the World Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). A generation younger than many earlier modernist writers, Waugh begins publishing well after World War I, and his fictions frequently prompt laughter, engage in satire, and feature “grotesque bodies” (64). Yet Miller’s account of late modernism—specifically its relation to the formalism of earlier modernism—is challenged both by my description of a dynamic formalism within modernism and by the operation of form within Waugh’s work. For Miller, form is always containing and cohesive, and late modernism operates upon modernist form by laughing at it, or by reopening its “enclosure[s]” to “the work’s social and political environs” and to historical context (20). That modernist

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form does not always contain and cohere is, I hope, clear from the preceding three chapters. Moreover, late modernism is not simply the undoing of good modernist form, or the “deflation” of form as a category (18), or the disintegration of formal orthodoxies into the “significantly weaker formal principle” (57) provided by a “deforming” (19) laughter. As Waugh’s work shows us, after the apotheosis of form, the late modernist writer is confronted with the two options of bad formalism: formlessness, which is akin to the “unbinding of the work” that Miller describes (31), and the rigid, ossified format, which does not feature in Miller’s description of late modernist aesthetics. 11. Evelyn Waugh, The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2000), 87. 12. Rooney, “Form and Contentment,” 32. Rooney writes at the end of the twentieth century, a moment when theory seems to preclude reading, in an essay originally printed in a 2000 issue of Modern Language Quarterly. 13. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl, with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 31. 14. Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 16. 15. Bois and Krauss, 18. 16. Bois and Krauss, 40. 17. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 31. 18. Benjamin Noys, Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction (Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2000), 34. 19. Rooney, “Form and Contentment,” 42. Rooney acknowledges, as do I, that such a reading in some ways runs against the grain of Bataille’s brief essay. 20. Waugh, Complete Stories, 78. All subsequent citations of this story will appear parenthetically within the text. 21. Beci Carver has shown how Waugh, like other Oxonian novelists of his generation, participates in what she calls “granular modernism”—a kind of “sequel” to naturalism in which writers engage in “exhaustive description of experiences that do not seem to merit exhaustive description.” Their works are “semi-aware exercise[s] in futility,” and I would argue that Simon Lent’s experience with the studio exemplifies the extent to which this futility manifests as a waste of time. Beci Carver, Granular Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 2, 64. 22. James, Golden Bowl, 111. 23. Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 30. 24. Ngai, 30. 25. Ngai, 197. 26. Ngai, 231. 27. E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New York: Harcourt, 1955), 67. 28. Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 340n3 (emphasis original). 29. David Galef, The Supporting Cast: A Study of Flat and Minor Characters (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 3.

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30. Galef, 4. 31. Colletta, Dark Humor, 92. On Waugh’s celebrated externality, see McCartney, Evelyn Waugh, 75–78, and Naomi Milthorpe, Evelyn Waugh’s Satire: Texts and Contexts (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2016), 35–53. 32. Beaty, Ironic World, 12–13. On Waugh and Firbank, see McCartney, Evelyn Waugh, 102–3, and Alex Murray, “Decadence Revisited: Evelyn Waugh and the Afterlife of the 1890s,” Modernism/Modernity 22, no. 3 (2015): 597–600. 33. David Trotter, Cinema and Modernism (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 1 (emphasis original). 34. For one example of this type of conflating argument, see, especially, McCartney’s book chapter on the subject: “Film: The Glaring Lens of Satire,” in Evelyn Waugh, 99–109. 35. Trotter, Cinema and Modernism, 3. 36. Waugh, Diaries, 212. 37. Trotter, Cinema and Modernism, 1 (italics original). 38. Waugh had difficulty publishing “The Balance,” which was rejected by Leonard Woolf, Cecil Palmer, and an editor named Whitworth. Eventually, the story appeared in a volume called Georgian Stories 1926, a repeating periodical meant to capitalize upon the success of the Georgian Poetry series. Most of the selections in the 1926 volume—including work by Aldous Huxley and Gertrude Stein—were reprints, and Waugh’s story only appeared courtesy of his brother Alec, who served as the editor that year. See the entries for September 18, September 29, and November 19, 1925, in Waugh, Diaries, 222, 225, 234; Stannard, Early Years, 127–28; and Georgian Stories 1926 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1927). 39. The two inner sections, “Circumstances” and the misleadingly titled “Conclusion,” follow the single plot of Adam Doure, presenting a silent film about his life in slightly different fashions: “Circumstances” uses a screenplay format, while “Conclusion” abandons the scenario form in favor of an implied third-person narrator. Adam does not appear in the two outer sections, “Introduction” and “Continuation,” which present his social circle instead. They focus in particular on his girlfriend Imogen Quest, whose parents attempt to extricate her from the relationship by shipping her off to Thatch, the country estate of a family friend. Both “Introduction” and “Continuation” take place at Thatch after Imogen has arrived—and therefore belong approximately at the midpoint of the plot of “Circumstances.” 40. Waugh, Complete Stories, 40. All subsequent citations of this story will appear parenthetically within the text. 41. Anthony Lane, “Waugh in Pieces,” foreword to Waugh, Complete Stories, xiii. 42. For more on the importance of gesture to the language of early cinema, see Laura Marcus, The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 244, 248. 43. This odd temporality might also affect the other sections, since it proves difficult to tell whether “Introduction” is a part of the film that flashes forward to later events. Gladys and Ada have entered the theater “late” after the picture has already “begun” (5), so perhaps they have missed it. It is also worth mentioning the scant possibility that the viewing here is imagined, and that Gladys and Ada and the Cambridge voice are fictions created by a scenario writer (who is also the narrator) for greater ease of drafting. In this case, “Circumstances” would constitute

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an extended exercise in ekphrasis. However, the initial disclaimer about the use of capital letters to designate captions suggests that this is in fact a screenplay. Similarly, the narrator’s capacity to track the actions of Ada, Gladys, and the Cambridge student after they leave the theater—“the young man from Cambridge goes his way to drink a glass of Pilsen at Odenino’s,” and “Ada and Gladys fight manfully and secure places on the top of the bus” to Earls Court (33)—indicates that the story represents a specific showing, rather than types of viewers imagined by the writer. Both Beaty and McCartney share this view. Beaty, Ironic World, 12, and McCartney, Evelyn Waugh, 21, 101. 44. Marcus, Tenth Muse, 181 (emphasis original). 45. Marcus, 181. 46. Marcus, 179–81, and Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 143–44. 47. McCartney, Evelyn Waugh, 21. 48. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 240–41. 49. Waugh does specify that there is an orchestra that “plays very softly the first bars of ‘Everybody loves my baby,” presumably within the theater itself (7). On the use of popular music, especially for sentimental films, see Altman, Silent Film Sound, 222–26, 266–67, and on the use of phonographs, see 89–92. 50. Beaty, Ironic World, 13. 51. Josh Epstein, Sublime Noise: Musical Culture and the Modernist Writer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), xxv, xv–xvi. 52. Marcus, Tenth Muse, 186. 53. Loy, Lost Lunar Baedeker, 80. 54. Epstein, Sublime Noise, xix. 55. I mean my reading to diverge from that provided by George McCartney in his chapter “The Wisdom of the Eye,” which argues that “Waugh generally associated barbarism with noise and civilization with vision.” As I argue, noise can also be visual. McCartney, Evelyn Waugh, 155–68. For more on seeing sound, see Sam Halliday, Sonic Modernity: Representing Sound in Literature, Culture and the Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). 56. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “caption,” etym., 1.a. and 4, accessed May 28, 2017, http://dictionary.oed.com/. 57. The visual impact of Waugh’s captions in “The Balance” can be likened to the gaps of negative space that appear in Vile Bodies, which possesses a “purposeful visual quality.” Milthorpe, Evelyn Waugh’s Satire, 36. 58. Rick Altman, “Moving Lips: Cinema as Ventriloquism,” in “Cinema/Sound,” special issue, Yale French Studies 60 (1980): 69. 59. Altman, 70. 60. McCartney, Evelyn Waugh, 137. 61. Adam’s childhood games with his cat are as savage as the steak tartare. Chasing the cat around the nursery until it “crouche[s] jungle-like with ears flattened back and porpentine hair” (35), Adam first effectively undomesticates his pet and then, in the next phase of the game, seeks to win back the cat’s affection because

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he knows, even at the age of seven, that he is a “horrible little boy” (35). To underscore the symbolic register of the game even further, Waugh gives the cat an absurd name—Ozymandias, Shelley’s emblem of extreme hubris, whose immense, carved likeness has crumbled into “a colossal wreck.” Waugh’s feline Ozymandias is wiser: he already knows that arrogance will lose to “decay” and the “lone and level sands” of the desert: as the cat paces the nursery, he uses “just the extreme tip of his tail” to express “his unfathomable contempt for European civilization” (35). Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias,” in Wordsworth and Wordsworth, The Penguin Book of Romantic Poetry, 441. 62. Virginia Woolf, “The Cinema,” in Selected Essays, ed. David Bradshaw (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 172. The specific film in question is Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), which Trotter argues that Woolf saw at a meeting of the Film Society in London on March 14, 1926. Cinema and Modernism, 166–68. 63. Marcus, Tenth Muse, 107. 64. Like much of “The Balance,” this event draws on Waugh’s own life at Oxford, where in his last year, “his rapidly mounting debts forced him to auction off the choicest parts of [his] library.” Richard W. Oram, “Evelyn Waugh, Bookman,” in “A Handful of Mischief ”: New Essays on Evelyn Waugh, ed. Donat Gallagher, Ann Pasternak Slater, and John Howard Wilson (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011), 23–24. For more on the ways in which Waugh drew on his life in Oxford, see John Howard Wilson, “A Walking Tour of Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford,” in Gallagher, Slater, and Wilson, “Handful of Mischief,” 34–61. 65. In an argument compatible with my own, Stephen Arata has written that decadence at the fin de siècle constitutes a “crisis” of form, with its texts exhibiting both “too little form” and “too much.” “Decadent Form,” 1007, 1009. For more on Waugh’s long-term, changing relationship to decadence, see Murray, “Decadence Revisited,” 593–607. 66. Vincent Sherry, Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 26–29. 67. Stannard, Early Years, 196. 68. The protagonists of these fictions share a first name, Adam, and “The Balance” presents a group of Bright Young Things—the original title for Vile Bodies—similar to the group that we find in the later novel. In both texts this social circle includes young people from a more aristocratic background alongside those of more limited means, all of whom demonstrate a reckless disregard for social conventions. Many of these young bohemians possess absurd or allegorical names (Swithin Lang, Mr. Bickerton-Gibbs, and Mr. Egerton-Verschoyle in “The Balance,” and Miles Malpractice, Artie Schwert, and Edward Throbbing in Vile Bodies). Adam Doure’s girlfriend in “The Balance,” Imogen Quest, also appears in Vile Bodies, but as a fictional character created by Adam Fenwick-Symes to signify “social inaccessibility.” All the young people are simultaneously titillated and plagued by the published gossip that chronicles their exploits (the Tatler photograph of Sybil Anderson in “The Balance,” the daily newspaper columns written by Lord Balcairn and Lord Vanbrugh in Vile Bodies). The two fictions even share certain plot points—not just the turbulent love story that occupies the center of all Waugh’s cinema fictions,

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but also a drunken car accident (Ernest Vaughan in “The Balance,” Agatha Runcible in Vile Bodies). 69. The only suggestion that the medium is visual comes in the form of the Christmas gift that Nina gives her father, a “large illustrated book about modern cinema production,” which is still, of course, a textual object as well as a visual one. Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1999), 305. All subsequent citations of this novel will appear parenthetically within the text. 70. Altman, “Moving Lips,” 79, 70. 71. Although George McCartney has previously noted the repeated appearance of the cinematograph in Waugh’s work, he has connected it to a filmic epistemology that Waugh supposedly borrows from Henri Bergson, in which the external perspective of the camera eye allows the intellect to order the flow of becoming into a more easily understandable “sequence of static representations or frames.” Evelyn Waugh, 106. But as I argue, Waugh does not always adopt the perspective of the camera eye, and cinematography—figured as writing in Vile Bodies—is not so orderly, but rather a further representation of disorder. 72. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 31. 73. Adam’s financial difficulties—and his need to produce fiction in order to solve them—are Waugh’s own. Waugh was anxious to finish writing Vile Bodies because he was only very precariously a professional writer. His first novel, Decline and Fall (1928), had been well received and sold reasonably well, but it was not at all a best seller. (The publisher made each printing relatively small in order to be able to advertise the book as being in, say, the fifth impression.) Waugh’s professional career, his economic security, and his personal reputation depended upon the successful publication and sale of another book, and in the middle of the summer of 1929, with Vile Bodies slated for a fall release, his success was far from certain. If the novel failed, he was likely to “slip back into the role of dilettante unemployed schoolmaster.” For more on his economic anxieties in this period, see Stannard, Early Years, 158–59, 182, 197, and Evelyn Waugh to Henry Yorke, June 1929, in Letters, 35–36. For more on the gossip columnist as “a stand-in for the novelist,” and this figure’s connection to rampant falsehoods in the novel, see Jonathan Greenberg, Modernism, Satire, and the Novel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 56–59. 74. Sherry, Reinvention of Decadence, 29. 75. The dirigible is “captive,” “moored” to the ground in a “degraded suburb,” and the party inside it is a bust, leaving one character “a mass of bruises” from the tight angles and metal “protrusions” (168). The airplane causes Nina Blount to vomit. And when the drunk Agatha Runcible decides to drive in the motor race, she finds herself “out of control” (248), disappears from the course, and is found the following day, “staring fixedly at a model engine” in Euston Station and saying that she arrived “in a motor car [. . .] which would not stop” (258). 76. Brooke Allen, “Vile Bodies: A Futurist Fantasy,” Twentieth-Century Literature 40, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 320. See also Greenberg, Modernism, Satire, and the Novel, 66–68, and McCartney, Evelyn Waugh, 48–50. 77. Enda Duffy, The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 7, 55. 78. Duffy, 55. That Agatha has this nightmarish vision while she is in the hospital and not moving at all follows logically from the novel’s epigraph, from Lewis Carroll,

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in which the queen tells Alice, “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place” (n.p.; italics original). 79. McCartney, Evelyn Waugh, 46. See also Colletta, Dark Humor, 94, 100. 80. Sherry, Reinvention of Decadence, 33. 81. Sherry, 34–35. 82. This is not to say that such consumption is entirely absent from Vile Bodies: Waugh links acting, excessive drinking, and savagery together by designating one of the parties held by the Bright Young Things as “a Savage party,” to which “they were to come dressed as savages” (65). 83. Sherry, Reinvention of Decadence, 27. Carver links the film to the novel’s tendency to shut down “emerging plotlines” in what she describes as “a kind of antimomentum.” Granular Modernism, 92. 84. Sherry, Reinvention of Decadence, 26. 85. Rebecca West, in the Fortnightly Review, February 1930, in Evelyn Waugh: The Critical Heritage, ed. Martin Stannard (New York: Routledge, 1997), 107. 86. Richard Aldington in the Sunday Referee, February 9, 1930, in Stannard, Critical Heritage, 103. 87. The two figures who reappear here at the end are a general (formerly the drunk major who features earlier in the novel) and a prostitute named Chastity, who crossed on the same boat to Britain as Adam. For Lisa Colletta, the only order in this scene is that created by dark comedy, which “has more in common with the dynamics of gallows humor than it does with the didactic paradigm associated with traditional satire.” But Vile Bodies is not nearly as nihilistic as Colletta and Beaty claim: Waugh is careful to place the deaths offstage and to mention them only after the fact, so that the gallows humor is tempered to a degree. Colletta, Dark Humor, 15, 84, and Beaty, Ironic World, 66. 88. Hentea, “End of the Party,” 104. 89. Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1999), 22–23. All subsequent citations of this novel will appear parenthetically within the text. 90. Greenberg, Modernism, Satire, and the Novel, 43–44. 91. Greenberg, 48. 92. For more on Whispering Glades and Waugh’s visit to Hollywood, see Charles L. Crow, “Home and Transcendence in Los Angeles Fiction,” in Los Angeles in Fiction: A Collection of Original Essays, ed. David Fine (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 189–205; K. Edington, “The Hollywood Novel: American Dream and Apocalyptic Vision,” Literature/Film Quarterly 23, no. 1 (1995): 63–67; Milthorpe, Evelyn Waugh’s Satire, 130–31; Ian Scott Todd, “Editing Corpses in Evelyn Waugh’s Hollywood,” Twentieth-Century Literature 59, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 414–40; and Walter Wells, “Between Two Worlds: Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh in Hollywood,” in Fine, Los Angeles in Fiction, 169–88. 93. Waugh, Diaries, 675. As Walter Wells notes, when Waugh visited the cemetery, he already knew that Aldous Huxley had written about it, but he nevertheless thought it might prove fruitful. “Between Two Worlds,” 181. 94. For a similar analysis of the link between Whispering Glades and Hollywood, see Beaty, Ironic World, 173. 95. The Loved One has a curious obsession with dentures as a marker of Hollywood inauthenticity: Mr. Joyboy the mortician wears them, as does Sir Francis

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Hinsley, and Aimée Thanatogenos can even go so far as to generalize that suicides usually preserve this vestige of dignity: “Loved Ones who pass over by their own hand usually wear their dentures” (58; italics original). 96. Unsigned review of The Loved One in the Times Literary Supplement, November 20, 1948, in Stannard, Critical Heritage, 306. 97. Beaty, Ironic World, 173. 98. I am indebted to Seth Brodsky for the term Thanatogenic formalism. 99. There is an additional possible suicide in Vile Bodies, which I have left unmentioned until now: a Bright Young Thing named Flossie “swing[s] on the chandelier” during a party, but Waugh’s language leaves ambiguous whether her death is intentional or accidental: “It doesn’t do anyone any good having people killing theirselves in a house like Flossie did” (77–78; italics original). 100. For a related reading, see Milthorpe, Evelyn Waugh’s Satire, 134–35. As she writes, the death makes clear that “Sir Francis is no longer Sir Francis.” 101. Valentine Cunningham, “Twentieth-Century Fictional Satire,” in A Companion to Satire, ed. Ruben Quintero (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 418–19. 102. Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 182–83. 103. By arguing that Dennis falls short of the achievements of Waugh’s modernist precursors, I mean to challenge Milthorpe’s reading of Dennis as “one of Eliot’s mature poets, flagrantly stealing in order to accomplish some very real poetic and emotional effects.” Evelyn Waugh’s Satire, 13. 104. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Seamus Deane (New York: Penguin, 2003), 275–76. There is an additional Joycean echo in Dennis’s writing of the parodic elegy for Sir Francis Hinsley: with its emphasis on “rhythmic movement” and hackneyed verse, the scene calls up Stephen Dedalus’s composition of the villanelle in Portrait—a poem that Joyce hardly regards as a masterpiece. 105. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribner, 1995), 189 (ellipsis original). 5. Surface Forms

1. Timothy W. Galow, Writing Celebrity: Stein, Fitzgerald, and the Modern(ist) Art of Self-Fashioning (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 1. As Alyson Tischler, Karen Leick, and especially Jeff Solomon have demonstrated, Stein’s fame in the United States was not created by the publication of The Autobiography but rather heightened by it: mass cultural forms such as advertisements and newspaper column parodies acknowledged Stein as early as 1914. Alyson Tischler, “A Rose Is a Pose: Steinian Modernism and Mass Culture,” Journal of Modern Literature 26, no. 3/4 (Summer 2003): 12–27; Karen Leick, Gertrude Stein and the Making of an American Celebrity (New York: Routledge, 2009); and Jeff Solomon, So Famous and So Gay: The Fabulous Potency of Truman Capote and Gertrude Stein (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). 2. Most Stein-as-celebrity studies focus more on the impact of The Autobiography than on the book itself. Examples include Galow, Writing Celebrity, 43–109; Leick, Gertrude Stein, 131–90; Bryce Conrad, “Gertrude Stein in the American Marketplace,” Journal of Modern Literature 19, no. 2 (Autumn 1995): 215–33; Loren Glass, Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880–1980 (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 25–26, 115–37; and Deborah M. Mix, “Gertrude Stein’s

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Currency,” in Modernist Star Maps: Celebrity, Modernity, Culture, ed. Aaron Jaffe and Jonathan Goldman (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 93–95. 3. Henri Matisse et al., “Testimony against Gertrude Stein,” supplement to transition 23 (1935): 2. See also Andre Vuillet, “Americans on the Continent,” Washington Post, March 10, 1935, S7. For more on the charges against Stein, see Darcy L. Brandel, “The Case of Gertrude Stein and the Genius of Collaboration,” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 37, no. 4 ( June 2008): 371–92, and S. C. Neuman, Gertrude Stein: Autobiography and the Problem of Narration (Victoria, BC: English Literary Studies, 1979), 10, 22–23. 4. Matisse et al., “Testimony against Gertrude Stein,” 14. 5. The first critic is B. L. Reid, Art by Subtraction: A Dissenting Opinion of Gertrude Stein (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958), 186, quoted in Richard Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 218. The second is Bridgman himself. Gertrude Stein in Pieces, 218. This line of commentary follows on that established, in a more positive tone, by some of the early reviews of the book in the New York Times and the Nation. Michael Hoffman, ed., Critical Essays on Gertrude Stein (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986), 62–64. 6. Catharine R. Stimpson, “Gertrude Stein and the Lesbian Lie,” in American Women’s Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory, ed. Margo Culley (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 161 (emphasis original). 7. Ulla E. Dydo, “Stanzas in Meditation: The Other Autobiography,” Chicago Review 32, no. 2 (1985): 4. 8. Marianne DeKoven, A Different Language: Gertrude Stein’s Experimental Writing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), xiii, 11, and Marianne DeKoven, “Gertrude Stein and the Modernist Canon,” in Gertrude Stein and the Making of Literature, ed. Shirley Neuman and Ira B. Nadel (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 8–9. 9. For an overview of the metaphors associated with depth hermeneutics, see Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 12, 37. 10. Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 272. All subsequent citations of this work will appear parenthetically within the text. 11. Phoebe Stein Davis, “Subjectivity and the Aesthetics of National Identity in Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,” Twentieth-Century Literature 45, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 19. 12. Most feminist and queer readings build on the work of Marianne DeKoven, even though, as I have mentioned, she excludes The Autobiography from her list of Stein’s experimental works. DeKoven, Different Language, xiii–xiv. For examples of similar arguments, which have come to constitute a consensus position on The Autobiography, see Chris Coffman, “Visual Economies of Queer Desire in Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,” Arizona Quarterly 70, no. 4 (Winter 2014): 49–83; Karin Cope, Passionate Collaborations: Learning to Live with Gertrude Stein (Victoria, BC: ELS Editions, 2005), 166–69; Sidonie Smith, Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 67, 71; and Stimpson, “Gertrude Stein and the Lesbian Lie,” 157–58. Critics focusing on genre have also mounted a case for the experimental quality of The Autobiography: using an examination of Toklas’s narration to differentiate

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Stein’s book from other autobiographies, these critics call her work a “mock memoir” or “an elaborate tall tale” and draw attention to its place within a tradition of humorous first-person writing in US literature. For this kind of reading, see Timothy Dow Adams, Telling Lies in Modern American Autobiography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 30, 37, and Neil Schmitz, Of Huck and Alice: Humorous Writing in American Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 203. 13. Here I rely upon a count by Mark Goble. Beautiful Circuits, 90. 14. Cecire suggests that surface reading is a subcategory or offshoot of distant reading. These practices were more closely related at the time of her essay’s publication than they are now, and insofar as I exchange distant not-reading for close reading of Stein’s superficiality, my account is the inverse of Cecire’s. Even so, as the last section of this chapter demonstrates, there are certain consonances between Cecire’s thinking and my own, especially about Stein’s body. Natalia Cecire, “Ways of Not Reading Gertrude Stein,” ELH 82, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 283, 285, 305–6n13. 15. Toril Moi, Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 177. 16. Heffernan, Museum of Words, 3–4. 17. Goble, Beautiful Circuits, 262. 18. Jonathan Goldman, Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 106–8. 19. While the Library of America edition of Stein’s collected writings follows the first Harcourt Brace edition and reproduces the illustrations, the standard US Vintage and British Penguin editions do not. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in Stimpson and Chessman, Gertrude Stein: Writings 1903–1932, 653–913. To my knowledge, the only scholar to have considered the illustrations as a group and at length is Paul Alkon, in “Visual Rhetoric in ‘The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,’” Critical Inquiry 1, no. 4 ( June 1975): 849–81. 20. Alix Beeston, “Images in Crisis: Three Lives’s Vanishing Women,” Modernism/Modernity Print Plus 2, no. 2 (May 1, 2017), https://modernismmodernity.org/ articles//vanishing-women. 21. Brown, Glamour, 151–52. Brown’s analysis concentrates on Stein’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts, which had cellophane sets. 22. Anne Anlin Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 10–11. 23. Gertrude Stein, “Portraits and Repetition,” in Gertrude Stein: Writings 1932–1946, ed. Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman (New York: Library of America, 1998), 312. 24. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 81, and Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 9. 25. Levine, Forms, 112–13. 26. Levine, 113. 27. Levine, 120. Insofar as she explicitly classifies gossip as a kind of network (133), Levine offers some support for thinking about the superficiality of networked forms. 28. I borrow the term “contact zone” from Sara Ahmed. Queer Phenomenology, 105. For the purposes of my argument, the word contact not only calls up the

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linkages that construct networks and implies their tactility, but also, as in the term contact sheet, reminds us that the photograph, as an index, is considered to have touched its subject. 29. On modernist collections, especially as provisional institutions within the United States (though without any significant discussion of Stein), see Jeremy Braddock, Collecting as Modernist Practice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). 30. Toklas’s invocation of the photographs significantly complicates the movement of the narrative, opening up several possible looping trajectories of departure from and return to the text that have no fixed length and allow for readers to peruse the photographs whenever and for as long as they may wish. We might consult the illustrations at this relatively early point in the text, thereby “return[ing] to the pictures” immediately, without waiting for Toklas’s narration to catch up. Or, given that the table of contents is followed by the list of illustrations, we may have already returned to the pictures by the time we read Toklas’s comment, making our memory fresher than her own. In either case, I think that The Autobiography’s illustrations prompt a less rigid practice of reading and looking than has been suggested by Paul Alkon, who builds his entire argument upon the premise that the table of illustrations at the beginning of the book necessarily sends readers off to look at the pictures before they begin to read. “Visual Rhetoric,” 849. That this method may not be the one a reader chooses is, I think, obvious. 31. The spring Salon des indépendants and the Salon d’automne were the only scenes of viewing in Stein’s Paris that we might properly call formal exhibitions, but these were not the stiff, academic showings that were typical of the state-supported Salons. For more on these scenes of viewing, see Bernard Smith, Modernism’s History: A Study in Twentieth-Century Art and Ideas (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1998), 151–52, and Christopher Green, Art in France 1900–1940 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 12–15, 40–43. 32. For more on the ways that The Autobiography indexes the art market, see Lisa Siraganian, “Speculating on an Art Movement: Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,” Modern Fiction Studies 59, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 591–609. 33. Hal Foster et al., Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 70–76. 34. John Richardson, A Life of Picasso, Volume II: 1907–1917 (New York: Random House, 1996), 34, 59, 63, 68. See also Green, Art in France, 53–54. 35. Richardson, Life of Picasso, 24–25, 67–68, and Christopher Butler, Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe 1900–1916 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 57. 36. Vauxcelles is quoted in Green, Art in France, 91, and for more on the scandal and its impact, see Richardson, Life of Picasso, 38, 43–45. 37. Butler, Early Modernism, 57. 38. Foster et al., Art Since 1900, 78. Since the nascent cubist movement was not the subject of widespread, monumental recognition in 1907, cubist work was most often exhibited in relatively private, informal settings such as artists’ studios or in the commercial spaces of the galleries and dealers’ shops owned by Kahnweiler and Ambroise Vollard. These small galleries were arguably the most important scenes of viewing for the artists themselves, since the dealers could give the artists solo

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shows and contracts that guaranteed them some income. For more on the spaces of viewing in Stein’s Paris, see Green, Art in France, 39, 53–54, 63, 71; Richardson, Life of Picasso, 3–7; and John Malcolm Brinnin, The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and Her World (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1960), 84–86. 39. Green, Art in France, 73–75. 40. Green, 49, 68–69. 41. Conrad, “American Marketplace,” 228–29. 42. Goble, Beautiful Circuits, 22. 43. Goble, 22. 44. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 65. Many art historians and other theorists have found fault with Camera Lucida since its publication, usually because Barthes here abandons the semiotic interest that characterized his earlier work for a phenomenological, highly personal approach to photography. Nevertheless the book remains foundational and indispensable, and since Barthes’s central subject is viewing nonart photographs like the snapshots that Toklas describes and like the illustrations in The Autobiography, I shall turn to Barthes among other writers in this chapter. For a variety of sustained responses to and revisions of Barthes, see Geoffrey Batchen, ed., Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s “Camera Lucida,” (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). 45. Georgia Johnston, “Narratologies of Pleasure: Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,” Modern Fiction Studies 42, no. 3 (Fall 1996): 597–600. 46. Johnston, “Narratologies of Pleasure,” 594. See also Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces, 221. 47. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador, 1977), 166. 48. Sontag, 75. To be clear, I am not claiming that photography as a medium always gives the viewer better or more direct access to the real or to history. I am interested instead in linking the fact that these claims have been made on behalf of photography with the fact that Stein attempts to exploit them in The Autobiography. That her exploitation of photography’s reality effects—as well as its indexicality and its capacity to historicize—may not be successful is, I think, obvious, and signaled by the critique published in transition that I have already quoted. Sontag, too, is critical in this quotation of photography’s capacity to historicize: furnishing “instant history” is, in her view, a bad thing. 49. Sontag, 68. 50. Sontag, 71. Sontag is not writing about The Autobiography or its illustrations but rather about a book published in the 1970s that “arranges in alphabetical order the photographs of an incongruous group of celebrities as babies.” In this book, Stein’s page follows and faces that of Joseph Stalin. While I cannot be certain that Sontag refers to the same photograph that appears in The Autobiography, it is the most widely known and disseminated picture of Stein as a child, and the figure’s orientation aligns with Sontag’s description. 51. Sontag, 71. 52. Sontag, 70 (emphasis original). 53. Jay Prosser, “Buddha Barthes: What Barthes Saw in Photography (That He Didn’t in Literature),” in Batchen, Photography Degree Zero, 100. For more on the mortifications and hauntings of photography, see Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 7–13.

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54. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 76 (emphasis original). Barthes begins elaborating this theory earlier than Camera Lucida, in “The Photographic Message” (1961) and “Rhetoric of the Image” (1964). Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), especially 17–18, 44–45. 55. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 93, 76–77, 82. 56. Sontag, On Photography, 166. 57. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 87–88. 58. Barthes, 77 (italics mine). 59. Geoffrey Batchen, “Palinode: An Introduction to Photography Degree Zero,” in Batchen, Photography Degree Zero, 12. See also Tom Gunning, “What’s the Point of an Index? or, Faking Photographs,” in Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography, ed. Karen Beckman and Jean Ma (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 24. 60. In general, the exhibition and its catalog function as a corrective to The Autobiography by reminding us of the importance of Steins other than Gertrude. Janet Bishop, Cécile Debray, and Rebecca Rabinow, eds., The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde (New Haven, CT: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with Yale University Press, 2011). 61. It is possible to see a family resemblance between these photographs of the atelier walls and photographs that Picasso made of groups of paintings and sketches taped up onto the walls, which Stein saw and mentions in “Picasso” (1938) and which are considered instrumental in his development of collage. For the photographs, see Anne Baldassari, Picasso and Photography: The Dark Mirror, trans. Deke Dusinberre (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1997). For a discussion of them, see Michael North, Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 18. 62. North, Camera Works, 3. North is less interested in the mimetic capacity of photography than its ability to represent details typically invisible to the human eye, which made the photograph “as much a cabinet of wonders as a faithful representation of the real” (25). This “hyperreality” (25) allowed modern writers to see photography as “an ally in their attempt to see the world anew and to represent it in different terms” (26). In Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and the Biographical Act (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), Charles Caramello makes much the same point in reference to the snapshots to which Toklas refers (although he does not connect these to the photographs in The Autobiography), which are “recorded observations of constructed representations of previously mediated observations” (144–45). 63. Alkon, “Visual Rhetoric,” 857. 64. Alkon, 857. 65. Alkon argues that the positioning of the Matisse in the lower left corner and its representation in black and white necessarily “domesticates it,” rendering it and the work of Stein with which it is compared completely unthreatening. In a related vein, Caramello argues that the photograph executes a comparison between the two portraits “as similar masculine appropriations of the female model,” and if we bear in mind the constant association of Toklas with hats, then it also encodes a “representation of Toklas, herself, and their lesbianism.” Alkon, “Visual Rhetoric,” 859–60, and Caramello, Biographical Act, 163–64. 66. For photographs of the interior of 27 rue de Fleurus that demonstrate the great extent of this rearrangement, see Bishop, Debray, and Rabinow, The Steins Collect, 360–76.

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67. Patrick Jagoda, Network Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 8, 29. 68. Vollard sold the Steins Madame Cézanne with a Fan (1878–88) in December 1904. All the paintings around it were purchased in October 1904. In clockwise order, starting from the top left, these are Renoir’s Two Nudes (1897), Renoir’s Head of a Young Woman (1890), Cézanne’s Group of Bathers (1892–94), and Cézanne’s Bathers (1898–1900). For all the information on the paintings in “Room with Gas” collected by this paragraph, see Bishop, Debray, and Rabinow, The Steins Collect, especially Rebecca Rabinow, “Discovering Modern Art: The Steins’ Early Years in Paris, 1903–1907,” 39; “The Stein Residences in Photographs,” 361, 368–69; and Robert McD. Parker, “Catalogue of the Stein Collections,” 396, 415, 430, 449, 452. 69. This use of the proper name has been exhibited as the crucial piece of evidence in the critical cases both for and against The Autobiography, with detractors such as Richard Bridgman calling the memoir “a virtual address book of names” and supporters such as Sidonie Smith arguing that the repetition of the name “Gertrude Stein” can “signal the pleasure of Stein as the author of the text.” Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces, 223, and Smith, Subjectivity, 81. These two understandings of the proper name correspond exactly to the two existing explanations for The Autobiography’s composition. Those who find the proliferating names to be a stylistic shortcoming, as Bridgman does, typically also view The Autobiography as a lengthy exercise in selfpromoting gossip meant to create Stein’s celebrity in the United States and shore up her bank account. For this type of reading, see Conrad, “American Marketplace,” 224; Helga Lénárt-Cheng, “Autobiography as Advertisement: Why Do Gertrude Stein’s Sentences Get under Our Skin?” New Literary History 34, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 118–22; Janet Malcolm, Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 8–9; and Stimpson, “Gertrude Stein and the Lesbian Lie,” 156. By contrast, those who note the pleasurable repetition of Stein’s name typically agree with Ulla Dydo that Stein wrote The Autobiography as a gift to placate Toklas, who discovered in the summer of 1932 that Stein had had an affair with May Bookstaver from 1901 to 1903. Toklas’s jealousy was such that she made Stein destroy Bookstaver’s letters and delete all occurrences of the word “may” from the manuscript of the long, abstract Stanzas in Meditation. Dydo, “Stanzas in Meditation,” 12–13, 16. 70. Such metonymy is one of the reasons that some critics, following the critique laid out in “Testimony against Gertrude Stein,” have argued that Stein’s presentation of the history of modern art in terms of personality constitutes a major shortcoming of The Autobiography, but as Loren Glass has demonstrated, this presentation of the lives of artists rather than their work corresponds with the public’s interests. Authors Inc., 116. For considerations of The Autobiography’s shortcomings, see Conrad, “American Marketplace,” 223–33; Michael Hoffman, Gertrude Stein (Boston: Twayne, 1976), 115; and Lénárt-Cheng, “Autobiography as Advertisement,” 126. 71. Goble, Beautiful Circuits, 146. 72. Jagoda, Network Aesthetics, 26. 73. Robert E. Belknap, The List: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloging (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 2–3, 19. 74. Lynn Z. Bloom, “Gertrude Is Alice Is Everybody: Innovation and Point of View in Gertrude Stein’s Autobiographies,” Twentieth-Century Literature 24, no. 1 (Spring 1978): 84.

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75. Goldman, Literature of Celebrity, 14, 92, and see also 86–88. Goldman’s argument directly counters Deborah Mix’s assertion that, for Stein, masterpieces, literary values, and fame exist “outside systems of exchange” or systems of “relation.” “Gertrude Stein’s Currency,” 97. 76. Goble, Beautiful Circuits, 100, 103. In a related vein, Lisa Siraganian has argued that Stein’s poetry demonstrates “that her interest is in the work of art not in relation to its referent but in relation to the beholder.” Modernism’s Other Work, 24–50. 77. Goble, Beautiful Circuits, 102. 78. Goble, 104. Goble’s and Goldman’s analyses bridge the gap between the two previous ways of understanding The Autobiography’s indexicality. The proliferation of names could, on the one hand, encourage a reader who does not recognize a name to research it—to use “the autobiography as a source text” and begin to read intertextually. Johnston, “Narratologies of Pleasure,” 596–97. On the other hand, to the degree that the names reject the project of signification in favor of becoming pure sound, we might say that The Autobiography epitomizes Stein’s larger project, which Marjorie Perloff describes as seeking “to demonstrate that language is not transparent, that it does not point innocently to a world of objects or ideas somewhere outside itself.” “(Im)Personating Gertrude Stein,” in Neuman and Nadel, Gertrude Stein and the Making of Literature, 63. 79. Jagoda, Network Aesthetics, 3. 80. Goble, Beautiful Circuits, 91–92. 81. Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” trans. Stanley Mitchell, Screen 13, no. 1 (Spring 1972): 22–23 (emphasis original). 82. Sontag, On Photography, 5. I should note, however, that Sontag is generally against viewing paintings via photographic reproduction, since she says it “weakens” the experience of painting (146). For other accounts of the tension between photography and painting, see Barthes, Camera Lucida, 30–31, and North, Camera Works, 4–8. 83. Alfred Stieglitz, Alfred Stieglitz: Photographs and Writings, ed. Sarah Greenough and Juan Hamilton (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1983), 194, quoted in North, Camera Works, 35–36. 84. Stein, “Picasso,” in Writings 1903–1932, 282. 85. Loy, Last Lunar Baedeker, 289. 86. For more on the emergent aesthetics of networks, see Jagoda, Network Aesthetics, 8, 34–35, 75, 84–88. 87. Siraganian, “Speculating,” 593–94. 88. Braddock, Collecting as Modernist Practice, 24, 81 (emphasis original). 89. Gertrude Stein, Photograph: A Play in Five Acts, in A Stein Reader, ed. Ulla E. Dydo (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 344. 90. Stein, Photograph, 344, 346. 91. That The Autobiography miniaturizes its subjects has also been discussed by Goble under the rubric of the cameo appearance, which he describes as reproducing “stardom in miniature.” Beautiful Circuits, 91–92. 92. Emily Braun, “Saturday Evenings at the Steins’,” in Bishop, Debray, and Rabinow, The Steins Collect, 63. 93. Alkon, “Visual Rhetoric,” 872. 94. Alkon, 872.

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95. Cecire, “Ways of Not Reading,” 289. 96. Cecire, 292–93. For an extended meditation on the relation between Stein’s body and her writing, see Cope, Passionate Collaborations, which offers a phenomenologically inflected account of actually reading Stein and thereby suggests that the corporeality of Stein’s writing is compatible with methodologies other than the anatomizing not-reading that Cecire suggests is typical of the critical approach to Stein. 97. In “Ways of Not Reading,” Cecire persuasively argues that the circular “rose is a rose is a rose” motif embossed on the book’s cover “rehabilitates the readable Autobiography [. . .] under the sign of Stein’s unreadable style” (286), and that there are “many moments where the Autobiography is marked by Stein’s distinctively repeating, permuting ‘“a rose is a rose is a rose” style’” (288). 98. Margot Norris, “The ‘Wife’ and the ‘Genius’: Domesticating Modern Art in Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,” in Modernism, Gender, and Culture: A Cultural Studies Approach, ed. Lisa Rado (New York: Garland, 1997), 86. 99. For more readings of the photograph in this vein, see Caramello, Biographical Act, 165; Neuman, Problem of Narration, 15–16; Schmitz, Of Huck and Alice, 205–6; Smith, Subjectivity, 66; and James E. Breslin, “Gertrude Stein and the Problems of Autobiography,” in Hoffman, Critical Essays on Gertrude Stein, 151–52. 100. Coffman, “Visual Economies,” 56. 101. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 61. 102. Toril Moi notes that “predictable readings” result when suspicious readers don’t respond “to the text’s concerns” but instead view the text “as a symptom of something else,” usually “a theoretical or political insight possessed by the critic in advance of the reading.” This practice comes close to not-reading in its “stultifying” sameness. Cecire, “Ways of Not Reading,” 281, 293, and Moi, Revolution of the Ordinary, 175. 103. Sontag, On Photography, 71. 104. Gunning, “What’s the Point,” 35. 105. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 4. Benjamin elaborates his idea of “the optical unconscious”—the capacity of photographs to show us something that the photographer and the subject do not yet know, so that in “the long-past moment, the future so persuasively inserts itself that, looking back, we may discover it”—specifically in relation to the photographed female body. “Short History of Photography,” 7. 106. Margaret Olin, “Touching Photographs: Roland Barthes’s ‘Mistaken’ Identification,” in Batchen, Photography Degree Zero, 76. 107. Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 1993), 60. 108. Eduardo Cadava and Paola Cortés-Rocca, “Notes on Love and Photography,” in Batchen, Photography Degree Zero, 119. Cadava and Cortés-Rocca are careful to imply that indexicality is not equivalent to truth. For more on indexicality as a foundation for truth claims but not truth per se, see Gunning, “What’s the Point,” 26–32. 109. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 80–81. 110. Objects such as the human body do not emit rays of light so much as they reflect them, and indexicality belongs more to the photochemistry of photography than to its images. For discussions and critiques of indexicality as a property

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of photography and as a scholarly tool for explicating it, particularly vis-à-vis Camera Lucida, see Gunning, “What’s the Point,” especially 25–26, 35–36; James Elkins, ed., Photography Theory (New York: Routledge, 2007), especially 125–203; and James Elkins, What Photography Is (New York: Routledge, 2011). 111. Cadava and Cortés-Rocca, “Notes on Love,” 120. 112. Gunning calls for more phenomenological descriptions of the photographic experience in “What’s the Point,” 34–39. 113. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 34, 4. 114. Sontag, On Photography, 53. 115. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 103. 116. Ahmed, 93, 102. 117. Ahmed, 105. 118. Rabinow, “Discovering Modern Art,” 40. 119. Caramello, Biographical Act, 156. 120. I should be explicit that figure 5.15 is not one of The Autobiography’s illustrations: I use it here to give the reader a sense of Blue Nude in context, since that context is crucial for the boy’s viewing. The Nadelman sculpture—associated with Gertrude Stein’s own body since the 1970s but not actually a portrait of her—is identified and discussed in Bishop, Debray, and Rabinow, The Steins Collect, 110, 366. 121. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 103. 122. For more on Stein and Toklas’s experience of the war, especially vis-à-vis their relationship with Bernard Faÿ, see Malcolm, Two Lives, and Barbara Will, Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 123. Alkon, “Visual Rhetoric,” 850. 124. Solomon, So Famous, 204. 125. Solomon, 204 126. Cecire, “Way of Not Reading,” 288. 127. Sontag, On Photography, 147. 128. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 7. Writing from a pedagogical angle rather than a phenomenological one, and about Stein’s portraits rather than The Autobiography, Glavey shows how “familiarity is the goal of aesthetic experience” for Stein: this “form of knowing” is, crucially, “arrived at through feeling, rather than thought.” In this regard, Glavey’s argument is compatible with my own. Wallflower Avant-Garde, 41–42. 129. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 9. 130. Lorraine Sim, Ordinary Matters: Modernist Women’s Literature and Photography (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 76. I should note that, despite the title of her book, Sim makes no explicit comment on Stein’s work in relation to photography. 131. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 54. 132. Ahmed, 54. 133. Stein, “Portraits and Repetition,” in Stimpson and Chessman, Gertrude Stein: Writings 1932–1946, 312. In an interview, Stein expresses a similar idea in different terms: writing The Autobiography, she discovered that “other people’s words are quite different from one’s own” and that “narrative in itself is not what is in your mind but what is in somebody else’s.” She concludes this discussion of externalities

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with triumph: “and so I did a tour de force with the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.” Gertrude Stein, “A Transatlantic Interview,” in A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1971), 19. 134. Shirley Neuman, “The Observer Observed: Distancing the Self in Autobiography,” Prose Studies 4, no. 3 (1981): 328, quoted in Adams, Telling Lies, 11 (emphasis original). For similar readings, see Breslin, “Problems of Autobiography,” 153; Caramello, Biographical Act, 144; and Neuman, Problem of Narration, 15. From a Barthesian perspective, mixing the inside and the outside is a photographic move, since “the Photograph is the advent of myself as other”: choosing Toklas to narrate her life, Stein has “transformed subject into object.” Barthes, Camera Lucida, 12–13. 135. Siraganian, “Speculating,” 594, 602. For more on the sociological and formal aspects of mediation in relation to the modernist collection, see Braddock, Collecting as Modernist Practice, 4–6. 136. Goble, Beautiful Circuits, 100. For a related argument about Stein’s efforts to educate her readers out of “either/or logics,” see Glavey, Wallflower Avant-Garde, 24–25, 41. 137. Goble, Beautiful Circuits, 106–7. 138. North, Camera Works, 4. 139. North, 53. 140. Brown, Glamour, 11. 141. Brown, 11. Epilogue

1. Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 23. 2. James, Literary Criticism, 1041 (emphasis original). 3. Stein, Gertrude Stein: Writings 1903–1932, 313. 4. These are the favored explanatory frameworks of New Historicist scholars, identified and described in order to mark the critic’s interest in historical or political matters instead of formalist concerns. They are, of course, forms themselves, even if they have not been the central forms of this study. For more on this topic, see Levine, Forms, 9, 26. 5. This line comes from Sandra Macpherson who, it’s worth noting, is not making this argument herself but rather suggesting (perhaps too reductively) that Caroline Levine’s Forms does. Sandra Macpherson, “The Political Fallacy,” PMLA 132, no. 5 (October 2017): 1216. 6. James, Golden Bowl, 139. 7. Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 211. 8. Waugh, Loved One, 89. 9. Loy, Stories and Essays, 222, and Loy, Lost Lunar Baedeker, 64. 10. Iris Murdoch, “Against Dryness: A Polemical Sketch,” Encounter 16, no. 1 ( January 1961): 20. 11. Murdoch, 19–20. 12. James, “Critical Solace,” 497. 13. James, “In Defense of Lyrical Realism,” 86. This kind of formalism is useful not only for engaging those contemporary fictions that are James’s subject, in which

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descriptive passages depict losses that cannot be compensated, but also for reassessing the modernist fictions (and memoirs and poems) that, I would argue, furnish contemporary writers with the forms by which consolation admits “its own intimacy with loss.” James, “Critical Solace,” 484. 14. Focillon, Life of Forms, 158, 184. 15. Leighton, On Form, 25 (italics mine). 16. Smith, Artful, 77. 17. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “dynamic,” etym., and “dynamism,” etym., accessed May 24, 2017, http://dictionary.oed.com/.

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Index

Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations. Titles of works generally will be located under the name of the author/artist. Abbott, Berenice, 113, 114 abstraction erotic formalism and, 96, 113 maximalist abstraction, Loy’s poetry, and Brancusi’s sculpture, 14, 98, 107–13, 112, 115, 118, 134 modernist tendency toward, 3, 93–94 pure form and abstraction in Loy’s poetry, 13–14, 15, 17, 93–98, 110, 133–34, 257n16, 261n57 of Stein, 110 Waugh’s film fictions and, 146–47 in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, 73, 77, 78, 85 Affron, Matthew, 246n15 Ahmed, Sara, 184, 216, 220, 221, 222 Aldington, Richard, 167 Alkon, Paul, 199, 211–13, 277n30, 279n65 Allen, Brooke, 164 Alpers, Svetlana, 58, 66, 247n20 Altieri, Charles, 95–96, 257n15 Altman, Rick, 158 Andersen, Hendrik, 237n6, 239n24 Anderson, Margaret, 113, 114, 115 Anderson, Mrs. Sherwood, 204 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 187, 195 Les mamelles de Tirésias, 133 Arata, Stephen, 243n85, 271n65 Auden, W. H., 174 Auerbach, Erich, “The Brown Stocking,” 88 bad formalism Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas as, 179–80, 181 Waugh’s aesthetics as, 14, 17, 25, 137–41, 144, 158, 172–73, 268n10 Baker, Josephine, 183 Bal, Mieke, 249n45, 249n48

Balla, Giacomo, 124 Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, 126 Banfield, Ann, 73, 90, 250–51n59 Barnes, Djuna, 204, 241n50 Barr, Alfred, Jr., “Cubism and Abstract Art,” 97 Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida, 183, 184, 189, 195, 196, 215, 216, 278n44, 279n54, 284n134 Bataille, Georges, 139–40, 144, 163 Beasley, Rebecca, 12 Beaty, Frederick L., 273n87 Beer, Gillian, 74, 81, 91, 252–53n80, 252n69, 255n110 Beeston, Alix, 183 Bell, Clive, 57, 88, 91, 111, 235n59, 236n72, 246n15, 248n36 Bell, Quentin, 54 Bell, Vanessa, 53, 54, 55, 60, 87, 245nn6–7, 246n15, 254n107 Benjamin, Walter, 209, 211, 282n105 Bergson, Henri, 272n71 Bernstein, Jay, 256–57n14 Bersani, Leo, 239n26, 243n76, 243n79 Best, Stephen, 249n48 Boccioni, Umberto, 124–26, 132, 265n109, 266n129 Bois, Yve-Alain, 139–40 Bookstaver, May, 280n69 Bozovic Marijeta, 235–36n59 Braddock, Jeremy, 210 Brancusi, Constantin bases used by, 262–63n79 customs officials’ response to works of, 107 dual sexual identity of works of, 263n83, 266n132 Loy’s “Brancusi and the Ocean,” 96, 129–31, 257n18, 266n127, 266n132

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Brancusi, Constantin (continued) Loy’s relationship with, 13, 96, 112–14, 114, 262n67 Loy’s Songs to Joannes and sculpture of, 120, 126, 263n83 maximalist abstraction and, 14, 98, 107–13, 112, 115, 118, 134 photography of, 111, 112, 113–17, 114, 116, 262n70 Ezra Pound on, 105–6, 111, 117, 118, 131, 262–63n79 pure form and sculpture of, 96–97, 105–7, 111, 115, 117 viewing sculptures in the round, 117 William Carlos Williams on, 105, 261n59, 263n83 Brancusi, Constantin, specific works The Beginning of the World, 106, 266n127 Bird in Space series, 107, 110–11, 112, 131, 163, 260n44 Cock (Coq), 110, 117 Danaïde, 106, 260n44 Golden Bird, 102, 103, 110–11, 113, 115–17, 116, 120, 130, 132, 138, 258n31, 262n66, 263n83 Leda, 111, 112 Loy’s “Brancusi’s Golden Bird,” 13, 94–97, 101–8, 103, 108, 110, 113, 115–18, 116, 130–34, 156, 262n66, 266n127, 266n132 Mademoiselle Pogany, 260n44 Maiastra sculptures, 110, 111 The Newborn, 110, 113, 260n44 Princesse X, 111, 112, 118, 263n83 Sleeping Muse, 260n44 Socrates, 114 Braque, Georges, 179, 187, 189, 225 Landscape at La Ciotat, 187 Landscape at L’Estaque, 187 Braque, Marcelle, 204 Brassaï, 189 Bridgman, Richard, 280n69 Bronzino, 23 Brooke, Rupert, 168 Brooks, Cleanth, 8–9, 34, 38–39, 241n50, 242n62 The Well Wrought Urn, 12, 34 Brooks, Peter, 23 Brown, Bill, 238n7 Brown, Judith, 183, 232n19 Bryson, Norman, 58, 62, 64, 77, 88, 246n17, 247n20, 253n82 Burke, Carolyn, 256n7, 260n37, 261n50 Burstein, Jessica, 258n26

Bush, Christopher, 5 Buss, Kate, 204 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 8 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 271n62 Cadava, Eduardo, 282n108 Camera Work, 183, 210 Caramello, Charles, 217 Carroll, Lewis, 272–73n78 Carver, Beci, 268n21 Cecire, Natalia, 213, 214, 220, 276n14, 282nn96–97 Cézanne, Paul, 1–2, 59–63, 88, 186, 199, 200, 201, 203, 205, 213, 248n36 Bathers, 280n68 Roger Fry’s Cézanne: A Study of His Development, 59–63, 61, 62, 69, 93, 247n28, 248n34, 250n59 Group of Bathers, 280n68 Madame Cézanne with a Fan, 280n68 Still Life with Apples (Pommes), 53–55, 54, 76, 91, 245n6, 247n28 Still Life with Skull (Nature morte au crâne), 60–63, 62, 69, 248n34 Chave, Anna, 113, 263n80, 263n83, 266n132 Cheng, Anne Anlin, 183 chiaroscuro, 251–52n66 Churchill, Suzanne, 264n99 cinema. See film Coburn, Alvin Langdon, 215–16 Coffman, Chris, 214 Cohn, Dorrit, 44 cold modernism, 258n26 Colletta, Lisa, 137, 267n9, 273n87 Conover, Roger, 258n31, 262nn66–67, 266n124 Cope, Karin, 282n96 Cortés-Rocca, Paola, 282n108 Costello, Bonnie, 69, 251n64, 252n78 Planets on Tables, 76 Crangle, Sara, 257n18 cubism, 97, 182, 187, 225, 277–78n38 Cummings, C. F. Gordon, 242n59 Curie, Marie, 107–8 Dadaism, 97, 120 Dalgarno, Emily, 81, 253n93 Daumier, Honoré-Victorin, 203 Davenport, Guy, 69 Davidson, Jo, 211 Davis, Theo, 239n20 Davis, Whitney, 235n59

INDEX Degas, Edgar, 53 DeKoven, Marianne, 180 Delacroix, Eugène, 203 Denis, Maurice, 203 Derain, André, 1, 225 description narrative force of, 56–57, 58–68, 61, 62, 77, 249–50n48, 249n45 See also ekphrasis The Dial, 98, 99, 118, 258–59n31, 263n88 distant reading/not-reading, 182, 213, 214, 276n14, 282n96, 282n102 Donne, John, “The Canonization,” 34 Duchamp, Marcel, Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2, 97, 133 Duncan, Carol, 266–67n136 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 120–21, 264n99 Dydo, Ulla, 280n69 dynamic form/formalism, 12, 14–16, 22, 56, 58, 125–26, 138–39, 226–27, 266n132, 267n10 Edwards, Paul, 259n33 ekphrasis fear, ekphrastic, 249n45 form/formalism and, 10–11 James’s Golden Bowl and, 238n10, 241n51 Loy’s poetry and, 13, 94, 96, 98–107, 100, 103 modernist intermediality extending beyond, 3 Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas eschewing, 182, 203 Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar” and, 34 stillness and narrative in, 57, 246n14 Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and still life, 246n14, 249n45, 250n53 El Greco, 203 Eliot, T. S., 5, 16, 274n103 Four Quartets, 86 The Waste Land, 120, 166 Elkins, James, 249n45 Ellis, Steve, 250n59, 251–52n66, 254n100, 255n117 Epstein, Josh, 155–56 erotic formalism, 96, 113, 115, 117–18 fauvism, 97, 186–87, 200, 202, 225 Faÿ, Bernard, 219, 219–20 feminism/feminist theory, 7, 98, 133, 181, 195, 217, 254n105, 266n132, 275n12 film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 271n62

307

Thin Man series, Brancusi and Mina Loy enjoying, 113 Woolf’s “The Cinema,” 158–59, 271n62 See also Waugh, Evelyn, film fictions of Firbank, Ronald, 148 Fisher, Jane, 56, 250n59 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 146 The Great Gatsby, 176 Focillon, Henri, The Life of Forms in Art, 16, 73, 228, 236n72 Ford, Mrs. Ford Madox, 204 form/formalism, 226–29 defining form, 9–11, 15–16, 234n44 disrepute of formalism, 3–9 dynamism of, 12, 14–16, 22, 56, 58, 125–26, 138–39, 226–27, 266n132, 267n10 erotic formalism, 96, 113, 115, 117–18 the formulaic, in Waugh’s film fiction, 140–41 mortal form and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, 13, 14, 16, 58, 69, 71, 75, 76, 84, 87, 90–92, 195 new formalist studies, 3–9, 11, 233n21, 233n24, 234n38, 235–36n59 plastic/sculptural form (see also James, Henry, The Golden Bowl) protean form, 14, 17, 98, 110, 120, 129–34 queer theory and, 235n54 reading in the round and, 46 rounded containers and, 34 significant form, concept of, 57–58, 59, 91, 93, 111, 246n15 See also bad formalism; intermediality, modernism, and form; pure form; spatial form formlessness (informe), 14, 136, 138–40, 144, 148, 158, 174, 177, 227 Forster, E. M., 146 The Fortnightly Review, 166 Foster, Jeanne, 263n88 Frank, Joseph, 12, 19–20, 21, 22, 34, 39, 46, 238n9, 241n51, 243n85 See also spatial form Freedman, Jonathan, 40, 239n24, 241n46, 244n108 Freud, Sigmund, 168 Froula, Christine, 252n80, 254n104, 255n109 Fry, Roger, 53, 54, 55, 57, 235n59, 246n15, 249n45 Cézanne: A Study of His Development, 59–63, 61, 62, 69, 93, 247n28, 248n34, 250n59 Woolf’s Roger Fry: A Biography, 55, 248n40

308

INDEX

futurists/futurism, 13, 96, 97–98, 120, 123–28, 133, 164–65, 258n25, 264n103, 265n109, 265n115 Galatea and Pygmalion, 24–28, 240n31 Gale, Robert, 18 Galef, David, 147 Garrity, Jane, 252n76 Gaskill, Nicholas, 15, 67, 96, 236n69, 242n62 Gauguin, Paul, 203 Three Tahitian Women against a Yellow Background, 200, 202 Genette, Gérard, 47, 66, 250n48 Gibb, Bridget, 204 Gibb, Marjorie, 204 Gillespie, Diane, 55, 88, 255n120 Glass, Loren, 280n70 Glavey, Brian, 10–11, 16, 20, 235n57, 235nn54–55, 238n10, 241n50, 283n128 Goble, Mark, 4, 182, 189, 205, 232n19, 242n61, 281n78 Goldman, Jane, 251n63, 251n66, 253n93 Goldman, Jonathan, 205, 281n75, 281n78 Greenberg, Clement, 6, 96, 98, 255–56n6 “‘American-Type’ Painting,” 94 “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” 93–94 Greenberg, Jonathan, 168 Gris, Juan, 185, 195 A Transatlantic, 206, 207 Grosvenor, Mrs. Norman, 242n66 Gunning, Tom, 283n112 Hammer, Langdon, 16 handwriting and photography, relationship between, 223–24, 224 Harris, Rowan, 264n103 Heap, Jane, 113, 114, 115 Hemingway, Ernest, 213 Hemingway, Hadley and Pauline, 204 Hentea, Marius, 137 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 168 Humm, Maggie, 67, 255n120 Huxley, Aldous, 269n38, 273n93 imagism, 120 Imbs, Mrs. Bravig, 204 impressionism, 7, 235n55, 245n7, 247n28, 255n118 See also postimpressionism; and specific impressionists informe. See formlessness

intermediality, modernism, and form, 1–17, 138–39, 226–29 decadent temporality of modernism and, 165 disrepute of formalism, 3–9 dynamism of, 14–16, 138–39, 226–27 formlessness, 14 fragments and whole, relationship between, 16–17 new formalist studies and, 3–9, 11, 233n21, 233n24, 234n38, 235–36n59 new modernist studies and, 5–7, 11, 232n19, 233n21, 233n24, 234n30, 235n54 pure form, 13–14, 15, 17 spatial form, 11–13, 16, 19–20 Woolf’s “Pictures” and, 1–3 See also form/formalism; James, Henry, The Golden Bowl; Loy, Mina, poetry of; Stein, Gertrude; Waugh, Evelyn, film fictions of; Woolf, Virginia, To the Lighthouse, and still life Israel, Nico, 232n19 Jagoda, Patrick, 200, 204 James, David, 7–8, 16, 67, 228, 233–34n30, 234n32, 235n54, 237n76, 252n67 James, Henry The Ambassadors, 23, 237n6 “The Beast in the Jungle,” 44–45 on geometry of the circle, 226, 284–85n13 “The Last of the Valerii,” 51–52, 240n28 New York Edition of novels of, 22, 45, 46–48, 50, 243n84, 244n90 Roderick Hudson, 50, 237n6 “The Velvet Glove,” 237n6 Waugh on stories of, 176 The Wings of the Dove, 23 James, Henry, The Golden Bowl, 2–3, 16, 18–52, 227 aesthetic principle of Adam Verver in, 19, 34 encounters between titular bowl and its beholders in, 29–35 epistemology and management of knowledge in, 23–24 ethics in the round and, 48–52 incest in, 19, 38, 49, 50, 51, 240n31, 244n98 Loy’s Songs to Joannes compared, 121 narrative temporality, structure, and reading in the round, 21–23, 41–48

INDEX Pygmalion/Galatea metamorphosis and, 24–28, 240n31 spatial form and, 12, 13, 16, 19–20, 34, 39, 42, 46–47, 241n51, 243n85 touch in, 23, 25, 27, 36, 40, 52, 239n24, 241n46, 244n108 value of plastic/sculptural reading of, 18–24 “vicious circle” in, 50–51 viewing in the round in, 21–23, 35–41, 63, 117 Waugh’s film fictions and, 144 Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and, 13, 21, 22, 78, 87 Joffre, Joseph, 196–98, 197, 220 Jolas, Eugene, 179, 180, 182, 187, 198–99 Jolas, Maria, 179 Joyce, James, 3, 12, 16, 21, 113, 168, 176, 204 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 140, 175–76, 274n104 Ulysses, 118, 258n31 Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry, 187, 188, 277n30 Kant, Immanuel, 234n44 Keats, John “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 20, 26–27, 33–35, 99, 240–41n35 “Ode to a Nightingale,” 171 Keynes, John Maynard, 53, 76 Khokhlova, Olga, 189 Kiely, Robert, 55 Kinnahan, Linda A., 262n70 Koppen, Randi, 77–78 Kramnick, Jonathan, 236–37n74 Krauss, Rosalind, 43–44, 139–40, 262n72, 262n74 Kreymborg, Alfred, 105, 119 Künstlerroman, 14, 140–41, 172, 175–77 Lambinet, Émile, 23 Lanchester, Elsa, 135, 267n2 Laurencin, Marie, 187 Leavis, F. R., 28 Leick, Karen, 274n1 Leighton, Angela, On Form, 9, 10, 15, 21, 26, 34, 240–41n35 Lessing, Gotthold, Laocoön, 22 Levine, Caroline, Forms, 8–9, 234n38, 235–36n59, 238n13, 241n48, 241n50, 276n27, 284n5 Levinson, Marjorie, 233n24

309

Lewis, Wyndham Loy’s relationship with, 13, 96, 258n31 Loy’s “‘The Starry Sky’ of Wyndham Lewis,” 94, 96, 99–101, 100, 104, 258–59n31 Timon of Athens drawings, 258n31 Two Women, also called The Starry Sky, 99, 100, 258–59n31, 265n115 vorticism of, 265n115 Ling, Amy, 242n59 The Little Review, 99, 105, 115, 118, 258–59n31, 262n66, 263n88 Lloyd, Rosemary, 246n9, 249n43 Love, Heather, 249n48 Lowell, Amy, 119 Loy, Mina, poetry of, 2–3, 17, 93–134, 227 art poems, 94, 95, 134, 256n7 Brancusi, relationship with, 13, 96, 112–14, 114 ekphrasis in, 13, 94, 96, 98–107, 100, 103 erotic formalism and, 96, 113, 115, 117–18 futurists/futurism and, 13, 96, 97–98, 120, 123–28, 133, 164–65, 258n25, 264n103, 265n109, 265n115 maximalist abstraction and, 14, 98, 107–13, 112, 115, 118, 134 mongrel aesthetics of, 95, 256n10 photography of Brancusi and, 111, 112, 113–17, 114, 116, 262n70 protean form and, 14, 17, 98, 110, 120, 129–34 pure form and abstraction in, 13–14, 15, 17, 93–98, 110, 133–34, 228, 257n16, 261n57 Stein and, 107–10, 182, 204 Loy, Mina, specific works Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose, 94, 120, 256n9 “Aphorisms on Futurism,” 127, 265–66n124 “Aphorisms on Modernism,” 128, 265–66n124 “Brancusi and the Ocean,” 96, 129–31, 257n18, 266n127, 266n132 “Brancusi’s Golden Bird,” 13, 94–97, 101–8, 103, 108, 110, 113, 115–18, 116, 130–34, 156, 262n66, 266n127, 266n132 “La descent des Ganges,” 257n18 “Feminist Manifesto,” 133 “Gertrude Stein” poem and essay, 94, 96, 107–10, 129, 133, 210, 261n57, 261nn50–51

310

INDEX

Loy, Mina, specific works (continued) Lost Lunar Baedeker, 98–99, 258–59n31 Love among the Ladies, 113 “Marble,” 94 “Mi & Lo,” 128 “Perlun,” 259n31 “Phenomenon in American Art,” 97, 115 “Poe,” 94 “Psycho-Democracy,” 263n8894 Songs to Joannes, 13, 94–95, 96, 110, 119–29, 131–32, 134, 263n83 “‘The Starry Sky’ of Wyndham Lewis,” 94, 96, 99–101, 100, 104, 258–59n31 Loy, Myrna, 113 Lukács, Georg, “Narrate or Describe?,” 66 Macpherson, Sandra, 284n5 Man Ray, 188, 213–14, 215–16 Manet, Édouard, Odalisque, 203 Manguin, Henri, 203 Mao, Douglas, 75 Bad Modernisms, 4–5 Marcus, Laura, 154 Marcus, Sharon, 249n48 Marinetti, F. T., 14, 98, 120, 123, 126 “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” 127 Mafarka, 133 “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature,” 123 Matisse, Henri, 125, 179, 182, 199, 203, 210, 279n65 Blue Nude (Souvenir of Biskra), 97, 187, 217–18, 220 Le bonheur de vivre, 185, 187, 198, 200, 201, 210, 222 La femme au chapeau, 198, 199, 200, 202 Olive Trees at Collioure, 199, 202 Matisse, Madame, 204 Matz, Jesse, 7, 8, 16, 233n25, 233n27, 235nn54–55, 237n76, 247n28, 255n118 McCartney, George, 136–37, 154, 158, 270n55, 272n71 McGurl, Mark, 21, 243n84, 244n91 McIntire, Gabrielle, 82, 83 memento mori and vanitas, 13, 58, 60–63, 69, 71–72, 77, 85, 93, 195, 250–51n59 Michel, Walter, 259n31 Miller, Cristanne, 264n99 Miller, D. A., 235n554 Miller, J. Hillis, 27, 32, 49, 50, 52, 240n31 Miller, Tyrus, 267–68n10 Mills, Mariette, 262n66 Milthorpe, Naomi, 274n103

miniaturization, 76, 205, 210–11, 281n91 Mitchell, W. J. T., 7, 34, 249n45 Mix, Deborah, 280n75 modernism. See intermediality, modernism, and form Moi, Toril, 282n102 Moore, Marianne, 98 mortal form, in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, 13, 14, 16, 58, 69, 71, 75, 76, 84, 87, 90–92, 195 movies. See film Murdoch, Iris, 228 Nadelman, Elie, Standing Female Figure, 218, 283n120 narrative force of description/still life, 56–57, 58–68, 61, 62, 77, 249–50n48, 249n45 Nead, Lynda, 97, 133, 266–67n136 Nersessian, Anahid, 236–37n74 New Criticism, 5, 8, 12, 22, 34–35, 38, 99, 232n19, 234n38, 242n62 new formalist studies, 3–9, 11, 233n21, 233n24, 234n38, 235–36n59 New Historicism, 5, 8, 284n4 new modernist studies, 5–7, 11, 232n19, 233n21, 233n24, 234n30, 235n54 New York Sun, 96–97, 98 Ngai, Sianne, 144 North, Michael, 199, 223–24, 279n62 not-reading/distant reading, 182, 213, 214, 276n14, 282n96, 282n102 Noys, Benjamin, 140 nude, as genre, 97–98, 257n22, 265n109 Olivier, Fernande, 192, 204 Olson, Liesl, 250n48, 254n99 Others, 119 Otter, Samuel, 236n59 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 25, 26, 27, 240n31 Owen, Wilfred, 174, 175 Palmer, Cecil, 269n38 Papini, Giovanni, 95, 98, 118, 120 paraphrase, in literary criticism, 38–39, 242n62 Perloff, Marjorie, 120, 264n99, 281n78 Phillips, Adam, 243n79 photography of Brancusi, 111, 112, 113–17, 114, 116, 262n70 handwriting and photography, relationship between, 223–24, 224

INDEX modernism and, 183 See also specific entries under Stein, Gertrude Picabia, Francis, 211 Picasso, Eve, 204 Picasso, Pablo, 1, 2, 55, 125, 182, 184–89, 192, 202, 203, 209–11, 279n61 Les demoiselles d’Avignon, 1, 2, 55, 133, 187 Homage à Gertrude ceiling painting, 206 portrait of Gertrude Stein, 185, 198, 199, 200, 202, 211 Pippin, Robert, 49 plastic form. See James, Henry, The Golden Bowl plastic infinity, 126 Poe, Edgar Allan Loy’s “Poe,” 94 “To Helen,” 175 Poggi, Christine, 125 Poovey, Mary, 8–9 postimpressionism death of Cézanne and end of, 186 narrative and, 58 paintings of Lily Briscoe in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and, 88 Woolf’s familiarity with, 54–55, 248n40 See also specific postimpressionists Potter, Rachel, 120, 264n100, 265n109 Potts, Alex, 30, 43, 48, 117, 262n72 Pound, Ezra, 3, 14, 98, 105–6, 111, 117, 118, 131, 213, 262–63n79 Cantos, 120 Prescott, Tara, 256n8, 258n30, 260n43 Preston, Margaret, 59 Prosser, Jay, 195 protean form, 14, 17, 98, 110, 120, 129–34 Proust, Marcel, 1 Przyblyski, Jeannene, 77, 81 pure form Brancusi’s sculpture and, 96–97, 105–7, 111, 115, 117 dialectic of bad formalism inverting, 138–39 Loy’s poetry, pure form and abstraction in, 13–14, 15, 17, 93–98, 110, 133–34, 257n16, 261n57 nude, as genre, 97–98, 257n22, 265n109 Pygmalion and Galatea, 24–28, 240n31 queer studies/queer theory, 10, 181, 235n54, 275n12 Quinn, John, 111, 258n31, 262n66

311

Ramazani, Jahan, 86 Read, Herbert, 20, 242n57 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 203 Girl in Gray-Blue, 199, 202 Head of a Young Woman, 280n68 Two Nudes, 280n68 rhopography, still life as, 88–91, 93 Roberts, Andrew Michael, 122–23 Rodin, Auguste, 237n6 Rooney, Ellen, 39, 139, 140 Rose, Francis, 185 Alice B. Toklas, 206, 208, 218 Bilignin from across the valley, 206, 207, 218 Rothschild, Ferdinand de, 242n57 Rowell, Margit, 246–46n17 Schapiro, Meyer, 59 Schwenger, Peter, 59, 62 Scott, Bonnie Kime, 250n50 sculpture. See Brancusi, Constantin; James, Henry, The Golden Bowl Sedgwick, Eve, 235n554 Serpell, C. Namwali, 15, 73 Serra, Richard, The Matter of Time, 43 Seshagiri, Urmila, 4 Shackelford, George T. M., 248n34 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, “Ozymandias,” 271n61 Sherry, Vincent, 160, 164 significant form, 57–58, 59, 91, 93, 111, 246n15 Sim, Lorraine, 283n130 Siraganian, Lisa, 34, 210, 222, 232n19, 280n76 Smith, Ali, 9–10, 11, 229 Smith, Sidonie, 280n69 Solomon, Jeff, 220, 274n1 Sontag, Susan, On Photography, 183, 190, 191, 195, 209, 214, 216, 220, 278n50, 281n82 spatial form, 11–13, 16 James’s Golden Bowl and, 12, 13, 16, 19–20, 34, 39, 42, 46–47, 241n51, 243n85 Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and, 223 Waugh’s film fictions and, 144 Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and, 12, 13, 16, 56–58, 65, 67–68, 77, 80, 85, 90, 91 See also Frank, Joseph Stalin, Joseph, 278n50 Stauder, Ellen Keck, 261n57, 263n83 Stein, Gertrude “Aux Galeries Lafayette,” 109, 110, 210

312

INDEX

Stein, Gertrude (continued) Everybody’s Autobiography, 214–15 formlessness and, 14 in Georgian Stories 1926, 269n38 Künstlerroman, use of, 14, 140 Loy’s “Gertrude Stein” poem and essay, 94, 96, 107–10, 129, 133, 210, 261n57, 261nn50–51 Photograph: A Play in Five Acts, 211 photographic work of, 183, 210 photos of, 188, 191, 193, 194, 212, 219 Picasso’s portrait of, 185, 198, 199, 200, 202, 211 “Portraits and Repetition,” 222 rose motto of, 110, 261n60, 282n97 “Sacred Emily,” 261n60 Tender Buttons, 221–22, 226 Three Lives, 183 in Waugh’s Loved One, 168 Stein, Gertrude, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 2–3, 13, 14, 178–225 as bad formalism, 179–80, 181 celebrity culture and, 178, 189, 205, 210, 215–16, 275–76n2, 280n69, 281n75 contemporary complaints about, 179–80 contingency and photography in, 186, 216–20, 218, 219 dyadic interpretation of, 181–82 embodied inhabitation (sitting on one’s legs), 185, 186 frontispiece photograph of Toklas at the door, 187, 188, 213–14, 216–17, 220–21 genre studies of, 275–76n12 “Gertrude Stein at Johns Hopkins Medical School,” 194, 194–95 “Gertrude Stein in Vienna,” as young child, 190–94, 193, 195, 214, 278n50 handwriting and photography, relationship between, 223–24, 224 indexicality and photography in, 214–16, 223, 281n78, 282n108, 282n–83n110 inside-outside dialectic of, 183, 184, 221–23, 283–84n133 mediation in, 186, 220–21 modernism and, 178, 180, 181, 183, 184, 189, 190, 195, 198, 203, 205, 211, 217, 218, 220–21, 225, 226 photographic documentation of art collection, 114, 183, 186, 198–211, 199–201, 206–8, 279n61 photographic referentiality in, 196–98, 197 photographic surface in, 183–84, 201

photography, history, and memory, 184–96, 188, 191–93, 195, 277n30, 277n48 rose motto in, 261n60, 282n97 sexual orientation of Stein/Toklas and, 181–82, 211, 216–18, 220–22, 279n65, 280n69 social networks and name-dropping in, 184, 198–210, 199–201, 280n69 Stein’s body, in text and photographs, 191, 211–14, 212 superficiality of, 179–80, 181, 190, 203–5, 228, 276n14 surface, explanatory power of, 181–84, 218, 218–20, 219, 222–23 Waugh’s film fiction and, 140, 178, 180–81 “wives of geniuses” list, 204 Stein, Leo, 186, 198, 202 Steiner, Wendy, 246n14 Stelmach, Kathryn, 250n53 Stephen, Julia, 82 Sterling, Charles, 61–62 Stevens, Wallace, 98 “Anecdote of the Jar,” 20, 33–35, 99 Stevenson, Randall, 253n93 Stieglitz, Alfred, 183 still life. See Woolf, Virginia, To the Lighthouse, and still life Stimpson, Catharine, 180 Story, William Wetmore, 237n6 The Sunday Referee, 167 surface form/superficiality. See Stein, Gertrude, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Talbot, William Henry Fox, 223 Tintner, Adeline, 237n6, 242n57, 242n59 Tischler, Alyson, 274n1 Toklas, Alice B., 178, 181, 182, 184, 186–87, 188, 212, 220 See also Stein, Gertrude, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Tomashevsky, Boris, 238n9 The Transatlantic Review, 107, 108, 210 transition, 179, 275n3, 278n48 Trotter, David, 148, 149, 271n62 Tucker, William, 262n72 Tzara, Tristan, 113, 114, 179 Valloton, Félix, 203 Van Vechten, Carl, 119, 123

INDEX vanitas and memento mori, 13, 58, 60–63, 69, 71–72, 77, 85, 93, 195, 250–51n59 Vanity Fair, 263n88 Vauxcelles, Louis, 187 Vollard, Ambroise, 202, 277n30, 280n68 Walker, Marion, 195 Walkowitz, Rebecca, 233–34n30 Bad Modernisms, 4–5 Waugh, Alec, 269n38 Waugh, Evelyn, film fictions of, 2–3, 14, 135–77, 227–28 bad formalism, Waugh’s aesthetics as, 14, 17, 25, 137–41, 144, 158, 172–73, 268n10 decadent temporality and anti-futurity, 160, 164–67 film audience’s perspective, in “Balance,” 148–58, 151, 152, 157, 269–70n43 flatness of Simon Lent’s character in “Excursion,” 141–48 formlessness and, 14, 136, 138–40, 144, 148, 158, 174, 177 the formulaic in, 140–41 James’s Golden Bowl and, 144 Künstlerroman, Waugh’s use of, 14, 140–41, 172, 175–77 low esteem of Waugh for film medium, 135–37, 158 modernism and, 168, 170, 176, 267–68n10, 268n21 savagery and, 158–60, 176, 270–71n61, 273n82 Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and, 140, 178, 180–81 suicides in Loved One, 171–75, 274n95, 274n99 Wesley, John, film biography of, in Vile Bodies, 137, 161, 164, 166 Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and, 136, 140, 144, 170, 175, 177 writing and literature, decline of, 160–64, 170–71 Waugh, Evelyn, specific works “The Balance,” 139, 140, 148–61, 151, 152, 157, 164, 269nn38–39, 270n57, 271–72n68, 271n64 Brideshead Revisited, 168 Decline and Fall, 272n73 “Excursion in Reality,” 139, 140, 141–48, 149, 160, 162, 167, 176 The Loved One, 14, 139, 140, 145, 160, 163, 167–77, 273–74n95

313

The Scarlet Woman, 135–36, 181, 267n2 Vile Bodies, 14, 137, 139, 140, 142, 149, 160, 161–67, 270n57, 271–72n68, 271n64, 272n73, 273n87 Wells, Walter, 273n93 Wesley, John, film biography of, in Waugh’s Vile Bodies, 137, 161, 164, 166 West, Rebecca, 166 Westcott, Glenway, 204 White, Roberta, 87, 254n97 Whitehead, Alfred, 202 Wiene, Robert, 271n62 Williams, Raymond, 131 Williams, William Carlos, 98, 105 Paterson, 105, 108, 261n59 Wimsatt, W. K., The Verbal Icon, 12 Winters, Yvor, 98–99 Wolfson, Susan J., 8 Woloch, Alex, 146 Woolf, Leonard, 269n38 Woolf, Virginia Cézanne’s Pommes, Woolf’s diary discussion of, 54, 54–55, 60, 76, 245n7 “The Cinema,” 158–59, 271n62 Jacob’s Room, 55 Mrs. Dalloway, 82, 246n9 “Pictures,” 1–3 Roger Fry: A Biography, 55, 248n40 Woolf, Virginia, To the Lighthouse, and still life, 16, 53–92, 227 beauty as still life, 74 clipped advertisements of James, 84–85 dinner party, fruit and seashell arrangement at, 63–68, 84, 88, 248n39, 250n53 elegiac and affective qualities of still life, 57–58, 77–86, 251nn63–64 James’s Golden Bowl and, 13, 21, 22, 78, 87 miniature pastoral landscapes, use of, 70–72, 251n61 mortal form and, 13, 14, 16, 58, 69, 71, 75, 76, 84, 87, 90–92, 195 narrative force of description/still life, 56–57, 58–68, 61, 62, 77, 249–50n48, 249n45 paintings of Lily Briscoe and, 13, 21, 56, 57, 77–81, 85–91, 93, 170, 175, 221, 246n15, 253n85, 255n117, 255n118, 255n120, 255nn109–10

314

INDEX

Woolf, Virginia, To the Lighthouse, and still life (continued) postimpressionism, Woolf’s familiarity with, 55 removal of pear from dish and Mrs. Ramsey’s thoughts of mortality, 68–69, 71, 75, 82, 250n54 rhopography, still life as, 88–91, 93 “shrouded jugs and sheeted chairs” of uninhabited house, 72–77, 81, 88, 252n72 significant form, concept of, 57–58, 59, 91 skull in children’s bedroom, 69–70, 72, 73, 75–76, 250–51n59

spatial form and, 12, 13, 16, 56–58, 65, 67–68, 77, 80, 85, 90, 91 vanitas and memento mori in, 13, 58, 60–63, 69, 71–72, 77, 85, 93 Waugh’s film fictions and, 136, 140, 144, 170, 175, 177 Wordsworth, William, 251n61 World War I, 76, 166–67, 168, 187, 195, 196–98, 197, 267n10 World War II, 167, 168, 174, 220 Yeats, William Butler, 174, 175 “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” 170 Yeazell, Ruth Bernard, 42