Architecture and Modern Literature

Front matter

LL . MICHIGAN PUBLISHING unglueit M | UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS

ONLINE SURVEY

In collaboration with Unglue.it, we have set up a survey (only ten questions!) to learn more about how open access ebooks are discovered and used.

Contents

Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction: Meaning in Architecture and Literature 1

CHAPTER

Preface

This is a book about the interpretation of architectural forms in modern literature. One of its claims is that literature’s encounter with the built environment is essential to its definition of what is sometimes called modernity, meaning the set of material and symbolic forms that constitute the modern world and our experience of that world. In order to address this subject, I have found it necessary to pose certain larger questions of the relation between literature and architecture. The introduction puts forward the general question of how meaning is produced by architecture and literature, respectively, and how these meanings have intersected. This question is initially addressed in historical terms, ranging from what I choose to call the foundational myths of Babel and the house of Odysseus to the "house ideologies" of the early modern period. The attention then shifts to the crisis of meaning common to both arts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This crisis manifests itself in a number of ways: in the aesthetics of ruin and fragmentation, in the retreat toward interiority as a space of subjective and private meaning, in the new kinds of attention given to the human body, in the development of new forms and materials, and in the conception of the past in terms of stock or reserve.

The first chapter takes up some of the points raised in the introductory essay in order to recast them within the problematic of architecture as a space of human dwelling, understood in a practical as well as an existential sense. The subject of dwelling is of central importance to this book, as it brings together a range of literary, architectural, and theoretical discourses x + Preface in which the conditions of modernity are those of crisis: a crisis in human habitation, in the adaptation of human beings to the objective conditions of a world in which the question of what it means to be human is given unprecedented urgency. The question is posed equally, if indirectly, by works as diverse as Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) and Adolf Looss Michaelerplatz building in Vienna (1911). The specifically modern concept of dwelling seeks reconciliation with the ontological condition that Martin Heidegger names homelessness ( Heimatlosigkeit). Homelessness in this sense is the other of the traditional concept of dwelling, along with the conditions of ruin, fragmentation, and exile. It means not just lacking shelter but not being at home in the world, including the world of language. Modern literature and architecture are the consequences of this condition, in both their formal freedoms and their respective engagements with the question of the way we live now.

The chapters that follow explore from different angles the question of dwelling and its other, beginning at the turn of the nineteenth century and ranging through the twentieth century and beyond. The second chapter concerns the space of the “demonic” in Sade, Dickens, and Kafka. The demonic is understood here as embodying both the uncanny forces within human being which the modern world has failed to bring under the control of rational mastery, and as the destructive element within the construction of modernity itself.

The chapter on demonic spaces is concerned, in part, with modernity’s relation to a premodern and even prehistoric past. The third chapter, on “allegories of the Gothic,” turns to the modern relation to the Middle Ages by examining the curious variety of nineteenth-century literary responses to the abiding presence of medieval Gothic cathedrals, notably in France. These responses, which range in register from Goethe’s sense of the sublime to Henry James’s self-deprecating irony, prove to be symptomatic of the perplexity and sense of loss with which the modern sensibility contemplates the architectural evidence of a faith that once united the European world in its collective strength and fervor. Behind this perplexity is not just the enigma of modernity’s relation to the past but also the problem of the nature of aesthetic experience in a world where art is removed from its traditional foundations in ritual and worship.

The following chapter, on Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc, pursues the general subject of the Gothic by comparing the two most important writers on architecture in the nineteenth century in their conflicting ideas concerning the restoration of medieval architecture. Once again it is a question of modernitys relation to the past. Ruskin revives the eighteenth-century aes-

Preface + xi thetic of the ruin in wishing to preserve the effects of time on medieval architecture, whereas Viollet-le-Duc attempts to modernize the Gothic in order to restore it to an ideal form that it may never have actually had. The opposition between these architectural values is compared to that which exists in modern literature between the figures of allegory and symbol as contrasting modes of representing the relation of the past to the present.

The chapter on Proust in Venice carries the question of the past into the twentieth century. Whereas in a writer like Balzac, the progress of his heros life is defined according to his ability to negotiate the labyrinthine ways of the social space of Paris, in Proust the narrator experiences urban space as a kind of map of his own memory—as a metaphorical projection of the personal metaphysics of time in which he struggles to unite his present with his past. The historical memory embodied in the architecture of Venice thus serves as a model in the narrator’s search for a way to relive the privileged moments of his own memory. The problem of history is equally important for Joyce: in Ulysses the modern city emerges as a great palimpsest in which architectural objects built in different historical epochs are juxtaposed with one another so as to transform their respective meanings in a manner similar to the way this happens between the archaic and modern elements of Joyce’s language.

The chapter on architecture in Frost and Stevens returns to the metaphysics of dwelling in order to show how, in an era when the traditional myth of dwelling can no longer be revived, modern poetry assumes the task of defining a new relation to dwelling, as a mode of being, in the form of poetic language itself. The difference between the two poets lies in the respective meanings they assign to this dwelling in relation to the more universal conditions of being. The final chapter examines the literary response to the modular, temporary, and cumulative architectural forms produced by the adaptation of building technology to the imperatives of mass consumption and globalization—what the architect Rem Koolhaas has called “junkspace.” The works of J. G. Ballard and Michel Houllebecq serve as testimonies to radical transformations in subjectivity and the social fabric—transformations seen as intimately related to specifically contemporary architectural forms, such as the high-rise apartment building, the corporate office park, the suburban shopping mall, and the highway interchange. Our reading of these works brings us back to the question of dwelling, both in historical time and in the space of the present, and of the need to find a way to live in a world in the absence of any necessary relation between the human subject and the built environment—where dwelling always has to be learned or invented anew.

Acknowledgments

Parts of this book have appeared elsewhere. Chapter 1 was published as “An End to Dwelling: Reflections on Modern Literature and Architecture," in Modernism, ed. Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007). An early version of chapter 2, “Demonic Spaces: Sade, Dickens, Kafka,” appeared in Colloquium Helveticum: Cahiers Suisses de Littérature Comparée 36 (2005). Chapter 4, "Figures of Ruin and Restoration: Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc,” appeared in Chora: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture 5 (2007). Finally, chapter 7, “Architecture in Frost and Stevens,” was published in the Journal of Modern Literature 28, no. 3 (2005). Permission to reprint these essays is gratefully acknowledged.

In preparing this work I have had the good fortune to benefit from the knowledge, generosity, and goodwill of some extraordinary colleagues. I wish especially to thank Guillemette Bolens, Lukas Erne, Dario Gamboni, Pascal Griener, Martin Leer, Alberto Pérez-Gomez, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Markus Winkler, and the students in my seminars at the University of Geneva.

Introduction: Meaning in Architecture and Literature

I

In the monumental collection of fragments known as Das Passagen- Werk, Walter Benjamin remarks that architecture bears the most important testimony to the hidden “mythology” of a society (1002). As in so many of the remarks tossed out by the German critic in his seemingly offhand manner, there is matter for a book in this idea. If we understand mythology, in this modern sense, to be the set of symbols and narratives through which society gives meaning to itself, then the idea of architecture as testimony to a latent mythology offers one way of seeing architecture in relation to literature. What Benjamin claims is not simply that architecture is passive evidence of mythic content, but also that it “bears witness" (zeug?);! in other words, it speaks a language that bears testimony to a hidden mythology by making it available to interpretation in concrete form. His examples are the commercial arcades of nineteenth-century Paris, in which the fantasy world of burgeoning consumer capitalism, with its dreams of exotic luxury and domestic bliss, can be read in the luminous passages newly fashioned of iron and glass. In architecture this mythology remains latent to the extent that its form speaks only indirectly of its content. The novels of Balzac, by way of contrast, make this mythology manifest when they expose the ruthless ambition of parvenus, the greed of would-be inheritors, and the secret crimes of the ruling class. Each of these cultural forms nonetheless bears testimony in its own way to the underlying conditions of meaning belonging to its historical moment.

There exists a philosophical tradition that puts architecture and literature into relation with one another according to the particular question of what art is and how it functions. This tradition is distinctly modern and dates from a moment—roughly located in the eighteenth century—when the aesthetic dimensions of both cultural forms began to take precedence in the discourse surrounding them, that is, when architecture could be conceived as a fine art rather than essentially the science of building and literature began to refer to those particular forms of writing that make a claim to consideration on aesthetic grounds. For Hegel, architecture and literature are diametrically opposed in their respective manners of giving expression to the individual and collective human spirit. In his Berlin lectures on aesthetics in the 1820s, he says that of all the arts, architecture was the first to come into the world because the first task of art consists in giving shape to the objective, physical world of nature. However, since the material of architecture is solid, inanimate matter, it remains a purely external reflection of what Hegel calls spirit. On the other hand it is poetry, and by extension literature in general, that stands opposite to architecture as the "absolute and true art of the spirit": more than any other art, poetry has the capacity to bring before the imagination everything of which the mind is capable of conceiving. Architecture is the first art, but literature is the total art in its pure expression of inner spirit (Aesthetics, 2:627).

In the twentieth century, Hans-Georg Gadamer defines the difference between the arts in somewhat different terms. For him, the essence of art lies neither in the expression of spirit nor in an aesthetic autonomy abstracted from the world but rather in the meaning that it produces in the world. Because the architectural work is always the solution to some problem, its meaning is a function of its place in the world, in the relation between its form and the surrounding context. To this spatial conception of architectural meaning can be added a temporal one, for a building, as it is "borne along by the stream of history," acquires a historical meaning by virtue of its mediation between the present and the past from which it emerged ( Truth and Method, 157). As for literature, Gadamer takes a similarly pragmatic view. Literature occupies a borderline position between sheer aesthetic contemplation and the material mediation in space and time represented in architecture (159). Nonetheless, literature comes into being as meaningful only by being read; our understanding of literature “is not specifically concerned with its formal achievement as a work of art, but with what it says to us” (163). In this sense the mode of being of literature, like that of architecture, is historical: it brings the past down to us in the space of the present; the reading of literature accomplishes, almost magically, “the sheer presence of the past” (164).

For the purposes of this study, we need to retain two essential points from these philosophical discussions. The first concerns the importance of both arts in defining the world in which we live. Architecture, as the art of building, gives concrete form to the external world according to the structures of imagination; whereas literature, as the art of written language, gives symbolic form to the same world. In their respective manners architecture and literature are potentially the most unlimited of all art forms in their comprehension of human existence itself, and this fact alone justifies the task of putting them into relation with one another. The second point concerns the nature of art in general as a culturally significant phenomenon—as an ordered presentation of social and cultural meanings, whether as the pure expression of mythology, as the contestation of it, or as a symptom of the contradictions inherent in the conditions under which meaning is to be produced. In all of these cases, the artwork bears the marks of its own production as something indissociable from the larger culture, here understood in the anthropological sense of a set of values and practices particular to a given place and time. In other words, we want to know what the artwork means as a cultural artifact and how that meaning is produced.

The present work explores a series of instances in which architecture and modern literature come together in ways that appear to break down the barriers between the two art forms, or at least to construct bridges between them. The particular mode of this exploration is to ask the question of how meaning is produced by architecture and literature, respectively, and by their interaction, particularly in the context of modernity. Modernity is used here in historically limited terms to refer primarily to the social, cultural, and economic conditions of urban industrial society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although such conditions have their origins in the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, and earlier forms of capitalism and imperialism, I hold the view that beginning in the early nineteenth century the scale of such conditions was increased to proportions that could not have been imagined a century earlier, and that one of the consequences of these changes was to throw into disarray whatever harmony may have existed among the arts.

In order to seize the points of intersection between architecture and literature in the modern context, much of the material studied here consists of the literary representation of architectural forms, such as Proust's fictional impressions of the baptistery of Saint Mark's Basilica in Venice. In a case like this, the layers of meaning are multiple and interconnected. There is first of all what we might call the architectural meaning of the baptistery, itself a fourteenth-century interpretation of the various Gospel narratives of Christ's baptism and of their subsequent institutionalization as a sacrament of the Church. This space within the basilica, however, was interpreted in the nineteenth century context by Ruskin, whose work of architectural criticism informs the impressions of Proust's narrator, and by Proust himself, who visited Venice eight years before writing this passage. The literary meaning produced in Proust’s work is thus itself a re-presentation of other meanings produced by architectural form, criticism, and authorial reminiscence. When we consider that the architectural form that inspires Proust's narrative is itself inspired by biblical narrative, the interdependency of literary and architectural meanings becomes most evident. In cases like this the production of literary meaning may be theoretically distinct, but in practice it remains inseparable from the production of architectural meaning.

Architectural theory, like literary theory, has many ways of approaching its subject, but one of these is to understand an architectural work in terms of three factors: site, type, and architectonics. As we have seen in Gadamer, every architectural work intervenes in a given site in such a way as to give a new shape to that space while also establishing a new relation between the newly formed space and that which remains outside it. The notion of architectural type, introduced in the eighteenth century, classifies architecture according to figures that develop independently in themselves.? Originally conceived in terms of basic archetypes such as the cave, the hut, or the tent, architectural typology by extension includes such universal categorical forms as the temple, the fortress, the bridge, or, in another register, the arch, the door, the wall. Architectonics has come to mean that aspect of architecture specifically concerned with construction, such as the interaction of the forces of load and support. Siegfried Giedion uses the word to describe Le Corbusier definition of the relations between architecture and construction as consisting of load-bearing pillars, of the mutual independence of wall and frame, of the free-standing facade, and so on (Espace, 304). More recently, Kenneth Frampton has argued in favor of the term tectonics (from the Greek teknè) to designate the "expressive potential" of constructional technique, the “poetics of construction” (Studies 2), thereby seeking a synthesis of the artistic and the purely analytical understanding of the architectural work.

The point of this brief excursion into architectural language is to demonstrate the potential for literary analogies. The architectural site can thus be compared to the historical and cultural context, or what Pierre Bourdieu calls the field of cultural production in which a literary work intervenes. Architectural type corresponds to literary genre, while the essential question at stake in the contemporary understanding of architectonics is analogous to the attempt in literary theory to reconcile structure with style or to disengage the specifically literary quality of a given text. In both arts, the production of meaning is a function of the relations between the respective sets of vectors outlined here: in architecture among topos, typos, and tectonic; in literature among context, genre, and text.

However, the study of the relations between architecture and literature needs to go beyond mere analogy in at least two respects. One is to examine the rivalry, or even the outright opposition, between the two arts in their respective responses to certain historical conditions. The closest example at hand is that of modernity itself. Many of the most striking elements of modernist architecture—its extreme rationality, its pure functionalism, its brutal break with the past—have been seen to embody precisely the objective conditions of modernity that modernist literature calls into question. Certainly the functionalist and rationalist elements of twentieth-century architecture appear diametrically opposed in spirit to the value that so much of twentieth-century literature places on subjective, nonrational experience. Suggested by this difference is the fragmentation of meaning within the realm of modernity itself, or what Theodor Adorno calls the negative dialectic between art as imaginative production and the experience of objective reality. The other way of reading literature with architecture is, as I have already proposed, to study the representation of one art by the other. If the architectural representation of literature is rare, the representation of architecture is everywhere in literature, precisely because of what Hegel identifies as literature’s capacity to bring before the imagination every object of the mind’s conception or the senses’ perception.

Many of the cases studied in the present work identify an ambiguous relation between architecture and literature in the modern era. The story of this relation, which can be offered in only the most tentative form, can nonetheless be told along the following general lines. In the formal classicism of the eighteenth century, poetry and architecture have in common an aesthetic designed to reproduce the classical values of proportion, reason, and the justice of natural order. To the extent that this common aesthetic represents a relative harmony between the arts (at least in their neoclassical manifestations), the nineteenth century literary interest in Gothic architecture signals, in important writers, both a break with classical values and an estrangement from what these writers perceive as the objective and subjective conditions of modernity. Against these conditions stands the purity of spirit that is thought to lie at the origin of the great medieval cathedrals, marooned like great albatrosses in the midst of European industrial cities. In the twentieth century, this experience of rupture is transformed into architectural rationalism, on one hand, and literary fragmentation on the other. These two modes of artistic production constitute very different responses to the modern condition, even if they share certain aims, such as the breakdown of barriers between inside and outside. In contrast to these positions, the art more contemporary to our own time approaches a “postmedium” condition in which architectural and literary elements are combined in the same work. As Fredric Jameson has written, in a world saturated with aesthetic codes, the specificity of any artistic mode or genre is systematically put into question. The focus of the present work, then, as well as its general thesis, concerns the manner in which the relations between architecture and literature are symptomatic of modernity as a crisis of meaning. Before treating this question further, however, I first wish to look backward at certain representative instances of the relation between architectural and literary meaning in a range of cases from antiquity to the threshold of modernity.

II Foundational Myths

In the penultimate book of the Odyssey Odysseus has returned to his house in Ithaca after an absence of twenty years. The familiar story is beautiful enough to be worth retelling. Odysseus has killed the suitors who importuned his wife, dishonored his family, despoiled his household provisions, and mistreated his servants. However, at the long-awaited moment of his reunion with Penelope, she fears an impostor and is therefore unable or unwilling to recognize him. In her caution, she requires proof that this strange man, twenty years older than the husband she knew, is indeed Odysseus. She orders her servant to prepare a firm bed for the stranger, the very bed that Odysseus himself built, and to place it outside the nuptial chamber. Overhearing these orders, Odysseus is overcome with emotion. He demands to know what man could have removed his bed from its original place, where it was literally rooted in the earth. When he built the bed, there was an olive tree in the courtyard of the house, “with long leaves growing strongly . . . and it was thick, like a column (kżon)” (340). He constructed the nuptial chamber around this tree and made a bedpost of its living trunk. The bedpost being thus immovable, Penelope’s orders to the servant must be impossible to carry out, Odysseus says, unless someone has severed the trunk of the olive from its roots.

So he spoke, and the knees and heart within her went slack

as she recognized the clear proofs that Odysseus had given; but then she burst into tears and ran straight to him, throwing her arms round the neck of Odysseus. (340)

This scene is the culmination of Homer’s epic; after years of voyage and suffering, Odysseus is finally reunited with home and family, and as if to consecrate the event, he has penetrated to the most intimate interior of the house to find the nuptial bed rooted in the earth, exactly where he left it twenty years earlier.

The constellation of symbols is powerful: the nuptial bed is the place of conception of Odysseus’s progeny; thus it is the source of the continuity of patriarchal order as well as being the center of intimacy within the domestic space of the house. Its placement is therefore temporal in the successive order of generations but also spatial in two senses: in the horizontal order of the distribution of the house as arranged around the central point of courtyard and chamber, and in the vertical order that connects the house to the earth and to heaven by means of the column of the tree. To be thus literally connected to the earth is important symbolically, because in the patriarchal and agricultural world of Ithaca, the earth guarantees the prosperity of the house of Odysseus as well as its continuity in the generational sense. In another sense, the immovability of the marriage bed and of the house itself marks the end of Odysseus’s wandering. It thus signifies the supremacy of a sedentary over a nomadic way of life and the security of an agricultural and domestic economy in contrast to the economy of war. Homer gives us the first figure of the house as a figure of stability and permanence, symbolic values it will retain even in the modern era, when the nature of human dwelling will be called into question by architects, poets, and philosophers alike. For Gaston Bachelard the house even in the twentieth century is a world unto itself from cellar to attic, a symbol of the interior life of the psyche, and the very place of reverie: "La maison est une des plus grandes puissances d'intégration pour les pensées, les souvenirs et les réves de l'homme" (26) (the house is one of the great forces for combining the thought, memory, and dreams of man).

When Bachelard's insight is directed toward classical antiquity, what it suggests in the case of Homer is that the ozkos, or domestic economy, of the house is the condition for the epic itself. Odysseus, in telling the story of how he built the marriage bed, compares the trunk of the olive to a column, or kion. This word has been used before, in Book VIII, to designate the place of the singer Demodokos at the feast held for Odysseus in the house of Alkinoës. Let us recall that in that episode Odysseus, shipwrecked on the island of the Phaiakians, is received by the "hallowed prince" of that island, whose palace is the symbol of divine favor, of the prosperity of his kingdom, and of the justice with which he rules over its inhabitants.

For as from the sun the light goes or from the moon, such was the glory on the high-roofed house (467a) of great-hearted Alkinoós. (113)

Homer lingers on the architectural detail of the interior: brass walls of rooms encircled by a cobalt frieze, golden doors with silver doorposts. The richness of the material appointments reflects the harmony and prosperity of life on the island: the leaders of the Phaiakians hold their sessions in the light of torches held by golden statues standing on their "strong-compounded bases" (113). The island is known for its bountiful orchards and olive groves and for the skill of its women at weaving. These combined elements of architectural splendor, flourishing industry, and social harmony make the house of Alkinoós an ideal symbol of domestic economy; they define the high standard to which Odysseus’s house at Ithaca must one day be restored. Seeing all this, Odysseus prays that he may live to see once more "my property, my serving people, and my great high-roofed house (dóma)" (117).

It is at the center of the scene at Phaiakia that Homer places the figure of epic poetry. During the great feast held for Odysseus at the palace, Demodokos, the blind singer (aoidos) is led into the middle of the room and is seated on a silver-studded chair leaning against a tall column (ion). Demodokoss lyre is hung on a peg in the column above his head, where he can reach it when he has done eating and drinking. At the end of the meal Demodokos sings movingly of the Trojan War, including the quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles. Hearing the song, Odysseus himself, his identity still unknown to his hosts, quietly weeps at the story of his own sufferings and those of his companions. The scene is as richly symbolic as that of the marriage bed of Odysseus and Penelope, with the difference that in this episode Homer connects the art of poetry quite literally to the supporting structure of his architectural and social ideal. Demodokos, loved by the Muse, is also revered by the Phaiakians and given a place of honor in the middle of their assembly. In a figure joining poetic art to architectural strength, the poet’s lyre is hung on the column that holds up the roof, and his chair is propped against the same support. The song of Demodokos, which takes the narrative and poetic form of the epic, provides the occasion and the house itself with a sense of history, human community, and a relation to the gods. In Hegelian terms, it gives voice to the spirit without which the splendors of Alkinoós's palace would remain little more than a show of riches. The performance of Demodokos is Homer’s manner of paying homage to his own art and its capacity to endow life with meaning. When we come to the scene of the marriage bed late in the narrative, the kion of the bedpost sends us back to the kion of Demodokos in order to remind us that the restoration of order and meaning to Odysseuss universe is the work of the poet himself. Literary meaning here works in harmony with architectural meaning as the foundation of cultural memory and value, and of their transmission from one generation to the next.

The houses of the Odyssey need to be balanced against that other primordial architectural text, the story of the Tower of Babel in the eleventh chapter of the book of Genesis, which implicitly proposes a different kind of relation between architecture and writing. Although the story has been reinterpreted over the centuries in innumerable theological and philosophical works, perhaps I may be permitted to retell it once more in light of the particular perspective afforded by my subject. Readers of Jacques Derrida will understand that my interpretation would not have been possible without his reading of the same biblical passage in "Les tours de Babel," although his main preoccupations and his conclusions are different from mine. The dream of a universal and common language at the story’s foundation—“And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech" (Gen. 11:1)—is heretical to the spirit of the Law in that such a language establishes the strength of the human race independent of its relation to God. For the redactor of the tale, the common language is a condition for the construction of the tower, which in turn symbolizes precisely