Andrew Thacker
Modernism is a cultural and aesthetic category with deep links to geography, but for many years criticism tended to overlook its affiliations with spatiality in favour of exclusively temporal and/or historical theorizations. It is true, of course, that in such formulations critics were influenced by the semantics of the term itself, as ‘modernism’ clearly implies a temporality, of being ‘modern’ rather than ‘ancient’, ‘new’ rather than ‘old’, and of having an awareness of being uneasily located within an unfolding history.1 Discussion of modernism’s relationship to the avant-garde and, more recently, the arrière-garde continues to foreground temporality as the key to understanding the theoretical landscape.2
However, if we consider one of the canonical texts of modernist criticism from the 1970s, Malcolm Bradbury and Alan McFarlane’s Modernisms: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930 (1976), we discover that one of the strongest sections of the book is entitled ‘A Geography of Modernism’. It contains seven chapters locating modernist art and literature across Germany, France, Russia, England and the United States (despite the ‘European’ subtitle of the volume). Many of these chapters are stimulating and of continuing relevance today, with a profound stress upon the urban character of modernism. In the 1970s, metropolitan modernism was mainly understood as an aspect of the movement’s internationalism, in which cultural formations and ‘isms’ such as surrealism or futurism arose and then were shared across major cities in Europe and America. Today’s geographical conception of modernism would be more likely to revise the notion of internationalism by also discussing globalization and transnationalism, terms rarely in critical usage forty years ago. Equally, the urban quality of modernism would also be supplemented by other geographical features: by analysis, for instance, of the role of pastoral spaces in modernism or of modernism at the seaside.3 To take account of such developments, we would need to revise Bradbury and McFarlane’s ‘A Geography of Modernism’ to stress a more plural notion of ‘Geographies of Modernism’ (Brooker and Thacker, 2005), just as Peter Nicholls’s Modernisms (1995) signalled that the many movements of modernism contained perhaps as many differences as similarities.
Recent critical work has thus sought to expand our understanding of the complex ways in which modernism was located in particular places, how such locations inflected the nature of the modernism encountered there and how forms of modernism migrated to different locations. Did, for example, American writers such as Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway and Djuna Barnes, who were located in Europe for much of their lives, produce a different form of modernism from those American writers who stayed at home? Was the American artistic avant-garde of New York Dada itself formed from European visitors such as Marcel Duchamp? How did modernist writers imagine different locations within the cities they inhabited and wrote about? Did they produce metaphorical versions of the material spaces of cities such as London, Berlin or Paris? How was Irish modernism, in writers such as Yeats and Joyce, distinctive because of the colonial situation of Ireland in relation to Britain? What happened when modernist styles and attitudes travelled away from the metropolitan capitals (London, Paris, New York) discussed by Bradbury and McFarlane, and were reworked and reimagined in India, China, Japan or the diverse countries of Africa? In what sense can we talk of an African modernism (Woods, 2010) or an Indian modernism (Chadhuri, 2010; Mitter, 2007)? An overview of geographies of modernism would thus distinguish between two broad, and often overlapping, approaches to the topic. The first builds upon the work of cultural geographers and spatial theorists of modernism and modernity, such as Henri Lefebvre, Walter Benjamin, David Harvey, Michel de Certeau and Michel Foucault. This work attempts to explore the multiple ways in which modernist writing represents and engages with social space in, for instance, the depiction of cities, landscapes or architecture. A second tendency, often influenced by postcolonial studies or world literary studies, has been to consider the global and transnational spread of modernism as a cultural phenomenon, questioning the stylistic and historical parameters of what is defined as modernism. Key figures and ideas here include Susan Stanford Friedman and her concept of ‘planetary modernism’ (Friedman, 2010), Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel’s notion of ‘geomodernism’ (2005) and Jahan Ramazani’s analysis of ‘transnational poetics’ (2006). This chapter thus outlines some of the main features of these different trajectories, discusses what they have in common and where they diverge, and explores the implications of the two approaches for future work in modernist studies. The remainder of the chapter briefly examines work by three modernist writers in the light of this understanding of geographies of modernism.
Spatial Theory and Modernism
The early twentieth century was not only the period in which modernist writers started to explore questions of geography and spatiality, but also the time when several key thinkers in the discipline of geography reinvented the subject along more ‘modern’ lines, shifting the focus from deterministic evolutionary and racialist categories to new notions of the complex interactions between human beings and their multiple landscapes. As Jessica Berman has noted, there is considerable similarity between the questions addressed by geographers, such as Halford Mackinder, Ellen Churchill Semple and Paul Vidal de la Blache, and the geographical frameworks utilized by many modernist writers at the start of the twentieth century: ‘In the high modernist fiction of the years between 1910 and World War II, we encounter everywhere the same concerns about location, mapping, center and periphery, and race and its relationship to identity that also dominated the cultural geography of Semple, Mackinder, and Vidal de la Blache’ (Berman, 2005, 285).
Recent critics have also interpreted modernist writing by drawing analogies with contemporary geographers, such as Jon Hegglund’s reading of modernist fiction in the light of Mackinder’s notions of ‘spatial self-consciousness and imaginative projection’ (2012, 14) or Chris GoGwilt’s work on modernism and geopolitics (1993, 2000, 2010). However, other critics have also begun to develop theoretical approaches to literary texts, in modernism and other fields, which explicitly foreground issues of geography and spatiality and which draw upon more contemporary geographical thinkers. Robert J. Tally’s work, for instance, has pioneered an approach he calls ‘geocriticism’, which focuses upon the dynamic relationships between space, place and literature (2013, 2014); the term itself is derived from a volume by the French critic, Bertrand Westphal, Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces (2011). For Westphal this approach explores the relationships between actual and imagined geographies, shifting attention from ‘the writer to the place’, making the ‘spatial referent’ found in the texts the focus for critical analysis rather than, for instance, biographical information about the author (2011, 112–13). From a different perspective, Franco Moretti’s work on the novel, as found in his Atlas of the European Novel (1998) and his short text Graphs, Maps, Trees (2005), pioneers an approach he calls ‘distant reading’, in which he systematically maps the rise and diffusion of the novel in a form of literary cartography. Moretti’s approach is guided by the idea that geography is ‘not an inert container […] but an active force, that pervades the literary field and shapes it in depth’ (1998, 3). While Westphal’s approach is textually focused, analysing literary texts in a relatively traditional way, Moretti’s controversially eschews ‘close reading’ of the actual text in favour of plotting where novels were read, published or borrowed from libraries in a series of maps and diagrams.
Moretti’s claim that space is not an ‘inert container’ but an ‘active force’ is indebted to one of the key figures in spatial theory in the twentieth century, Henri Lefebvre, who, in his magisterial work, The Production of Space (1991), outlined how geographical space is never simply a blank background on which social activity takes place, but is rather both produced by human activity and is an active force in shaping human societies. Lefebvre’s work has not only influenced later geographical theorists such as Derek Gregory, David Harvey, Doreen Massey, Edward Soja and Neil Smith, but also proved influential for many literary critics whose work has centred on the geographies of modernism, such as Eric Bulson (2007), Hegglund (2012), Thacker (2003), and many of the contributors to the edited volumes, Geographies of Modernism (Brooker and Thacker, 2005) and Regional Modernism (Alexander and Moran, 2013). This critical work explicitly borrows various concepts and theories from cultural geographers and spatial theorists, adapting their usage in various ways to interpret literary texts. The volume, Regional Modernism, for instance, explores the geographical notion of scale, analysing how modernist writers engaged with more localized geographies than merely that of the nation-state, while Eric Bulson’s Novels, Maps, Modernity (2007) analyses the role of maps, (dis)orientation, and placement in a range of modern writers, demonstrating how the cartographic imagination was of crucial significance to many novelists in this period.
Another significant example is the conceptual opposition between space and place which is often employed to understand how modernist writers engage with urban landscapes, broadly distinguishing between an alienating sense of the city as an abstract space and a more attached belonging to particular places within cities, such as rooms, cafes or restaurants. De Certeau’s distinction between the tour and the map is a refinement of this space/place binary, and a key part of his notion of ‘spatial stories’, which links together Lefebvre’s notion of social space and literary style; for de Certeau ‘every story is a travel story – a spatial practice’ and all stories ‘traverse and organise places; they select and link them together; they make sentences and itineraries out of them’ (1984, 115). Spatial stories always oscillate between discourses of the map and those of the tour, between a mapping of place that stresses stability and fixity, and a tour discourse that foregrounds how spaces are associated with movement and lived experience. Much modernist fiction contains examples of both of these discourses: writers explore the attempt to map and control urban space as well as employing tour discourses that subvert this, often in narratives about the flâneur, a key figure of modernity who wanders aimlessly through the city streets, first identified by Charles Baudelaire. Robert Hampson, for example, illustrates how James Joyce and Joseph Conrad produce fiction (in Ulysses and in The Secret Agent) in which the ‘homogeneous, abstract space of the map’ is displaced by the ‘heterogeneous lived spaces of the journey’ (2005, 63).
Much of this work on the geographies of modernism is historicist and materialist in orientation, exploring how specific spaces and geographies (such as nations, regions, cities, streets and buildings) were represented by modernist writers. These physical locations are then often linked to more metaphorical or imagined geographies, which examine how modernist writing did not simply aim for cartographic verisimilitude, but instead probed and revised how space and place were experienced in social and cultural modernity. Central to this approach is the question of spatiality: modernist writers live, leave or travel through specific places that mark their perception of the world, and many texts represent distinct places, spaces, cities, nations and islands directly; in addition, every text is written, published and read in a specific place. Thinking through the impact of these environments upon texts, in ways that can enhance existing social and historical modes of interpretation, is clearly one way of advancing the development of a specific ‘geocriticism’ or ‘critical literary geography’ of modernism.
Transnational and Global Modernisms
The second framework for a geography of modernism is, to an extent, influenced less by debates in cultural geography and spatial theory than by work in postcolonial studies and, more recently, world literary studies. For several decades, work in postcolonial studies has drawn attention to modernist practices in locations beyond Anglo-American and European traditions, such as in the Caribbean and Africa (see Emery, 2007; Gikandi, 1992; Ker, 1997; Ramazani, 2001). One of the key influences for this focus upon how the material spaces of imperial and colonial geography infuse cultural texts has been that of Edward Said. In Culture and Imperialism (1993), Said noted that his project in this book was ‘a kind of geographical inquiry into historical experience’ and that just ‘as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography’ that is at the basis of imperialism and colonialism: this struggle, suggests Said, ‘is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings’ (Said, 1993, 6). Given that the rise of European modernism coincided with the apex of European imperialism, it is hardly surprising that Said’s reminder about geographical ‘struggle’ has been so influential on geographies of modernism.
More recent discussions, however, have developed Said’s points by foregrounding globalization and transnationalism, as in many of the essays in The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (2012). In this volume, the editors argue for an approach that moves beyond the postcolonial work pioneered by Said and others, since ‘a global conception of modernism requires more than the geographical addition of previously ignored or marginalized traditions’ (Wollaeger and Eatough, 2012, 4). A globalized understanding of modernism therefore attempts to move beyond existing national traditions (a French modernism, a Chinese modernism) by focusing upon the transnational, which ‘presupposes the crossing of national borders’ and which switches between a micro- and macro-level geographical focus, or what the editors call ‘local complexity and large-scale visions’ (5). One impetus for the shift to a transnational approach is thus to try to capture more geographical precision when discussing modernism, as many earlier critics had tended to discuss modernism as an international movement, arguably eliding ‘local complexity’. Thus, Hugh Kenner’s 1984 article on ‘The Making of the Modernist Canon’ suggested that works by a very limited number of writers such as Joyce, Eliot and Pound were ‘best located in a supranational movement called International Modernism’ (53). In Kenner’s conception, this is a modernism that is ‘located’ in a vacuum in terms of material geographical space. Recent proponents of a transnational approach have, therefore, critiqued the ‘international paradigm’ developed by Kenner and other earlier critics because, in Ramazani’s words, its ‘internationalism was not always particularized, its Eurocentricism made scant room for the developing world, and its supposed universalism tended to de-ethnicize writers’ (Ramazani, 2006, 350).4
The ramifications of a geographical framework that stresses the global and the transnational are profound for, as Susan Stanford Friedman argues in an important article on this topic, ‘the new geography of modernism needs to locate many centers of modernity across the globe, to focus on the cultural traffic linking them, and to interpret the circuits of reciprocal influence and transformation that take place within highly unequal state relations’ (Friedman, 2006, 429). Two important consequences of Friedman’s argument are that she wishes to abandon ‘the ahistorical designation of modernism as a collection of identifiable aesthetic styles’ as well as ‘the notion of modernism as an aesthetic period’ with a single start and end point (432). If we now look for ‘multiple modernisms’ that can be located across the globe, then we are looking not at a singular modernist epoch, but different regimes of modernism, all engaged in encountering forms of social, economic and political modernity, some of which interconnect with others and some of which operate under a different time schema entirely.5 Thus, we might argue that an ‘Indian modernism’ is composed of a number of different elements: indigenous aesthetic and cultural practices that continued throughout the conventional period of Anglo-American modernism; the importation of European modernist styles, often by writers who travelled abroad and then returned (the great Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagore, met and was admired by many Anglo-American modernists, such as Yeats and Pound, while Mulk Raj Anand associated with members of the Bloomsbury Group); and the adoption of complex notions of being ‘modern’ by writers and artists operating after Anglo-American modernism is said to have finished – the contemporary novelist Amitav Ghosh might thus be said to typify Indian modernism (see Freedman, 2005). Friedman’s argument, along with other such work, offers a profound challenge to many researching and teaching modernism, since it expands greatly the range of material that could come under the umbrella term of ‘modernism’; indeed, this might be seen as one of the problems of this kind of spatializing of modernism, that it runs the risk of losing focus entirely and turning all twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature into some form of modernism.
Another question here involves the difficulties in moving beyond Western definitions of modernism to capture the specificities of multiple global modernisms. Friedman writes that a ‘planetary modernist poetics must be plural, opening up the concept of formal ruptures to a wide array of representational engagements with modernity’ (2010, 489). However, ruptures in form and representation have long been terms used to describe the aesthetic strategies of Western modernism. The difficulties of identifying non-Western modernisms without using Western modernist categories is something that Friedman is acutely aware of (480) but, as Andreas Huyssens comments, ‘it may well turn out that, despite the best of intentions, [the] de-Westernization of Modernism/modernity will remain limited because of the Western genealogy of the concepts themselves’ (Huyssens, 2005, 13).
Arguably, the differences between a geography of modernism as understood by proponents of spatial theory and one by critics of transnational and global modernism are partly that of method and partly of emphasis. Hegglund’s work, for instance, draws on ideas from globalization and transnational studies but he frames his approach in the following way: ‘Rather than looking at modernism’s spaces within a particular geography of imperialism and globalization, I examine modernism and political globalization as related events in a history of spatiality’ (2012, 18). Hegglund thus understands ‘modernism and globalization through the lens of spatiality’ (19), while transnational criticism could be said to view the spaces of modernism through the lens of globalization.
Geography and Some Modernists
The current interest in geographies of modernism, wherever located, arguably has its origins in the intrinsic interest in space and geography to be found in many of the canonical texts of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Anglo-American modernism. To give a flavour of some of these geographies of modernism, I will discuss briefly Joseph Conrad, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
Conrad’s travels as a seaman not only fed into novels such as Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904) and Heart of Darkness (1899), but also sharpened his interest in space and geography as categories for shaping narrative. Maps, for example, often figure in his texts at key moments, such as Marlowe’s invocation of the map of Africa at the start of Heart of Darkness, which he laments now lacks the ‘blank spaces’ of his youth due to imperial expansion by European powers: ‘It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery […]. It had become a place of darkness’ (Conrad, 1988, 11). In one sense, Heart of Darkness sets out to explore the implications of the story this map tells, while also attempting to reinscribe ‘blankness’ and mystery – but not of the ‘delightful’ kind – onto the map in the form of the incomprehensible behaviour of Kurtz in the jungle. A further meditation upon the nature of maps can be found in a much-cited essay written by Conrad in 1924, outlining the history of geography, ‘Geography and Some Explorers’, and first published in the mainstream magazine, National Geographic Magazine. In this essay Conrad outlined three phases of Western geography, praised exploratory geographical travels or what he terms ‘geography militant’ (Conrad, 1924, 243), and focused upon the limitations of cartography. As in Heart of Darkness, Conrad lamented the fact that the modern world now lacked unmapped spaces and recalled how, as a schoolboy, he put his finger ‘on a spot in the very middle of the then white heart of Africa’ and ‘declared that some day I would go there’ (271). When, some eighteen years later, Conrad found himself in the African Congo and thought he was standing on the spot he imagined as a child, his feeling was of disappointment and disenchantment with ‘geography militant’: ‘A great melancholy descended upon me. Yes; this was the very spot’; the overwhelming sensation was of ‘the distasteful knowledge of the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration’ (272). Drawing upon de Certeau’s theories of the tour and the map, Robert Hampson notes that Conrad was ‘probably more involved with maps and mapping than any other major nineteenth- or twentieth-century British novelists’ and because of this involvement he ‘resists the map’s colonization of space’ and uses his fiction to uncover the historical practices, including the ‘vilest scramble for loot’ of imperialism, that gave rise to such cartographic projects (Hampson, 2005, 56).
While Conrad’s texts of overseas travel offer the most obvious encounter with the many geographies of modernism, we can also analyse a novel such as The Secret Agent (1907) from the perspective of geographical and spatial theory. The Secret Agent explores London as a world city populated with immigrants, an experience drawing on Conrad’s own background as one of the most deracinated of modern writers: born in Russian-controlled Poland he travelled the world as a merchant seaman for fifteen years before finally settling in Britain in 1896. With a plot concerning foreign anarchists pitted against the bourgeois British state, The Secret Agent offers a fascinating perspective on the cosmopolitan geography of particular areas of central London. At one point Verloc, the secret agent of the title, is said to be ‘cosmopolitan enough not to be deceived by London’s topographical mysteries’ (Conrad, 1986, 53), a description that points to Conrad’s awareness of how the modernist city requires a certain urban consciousness or cognitive map in order for the characters to find their way in the urban landscape. Conrad, in a later Preface to the novel, noted that its genesis lay in a revelation of London as a world city: ‘the vision of an enormous town presented itself, of a monstrous town more populous than some continents and in its man-made might as if indifferent to heaven’s frowns and smiles […] Irresistibly the town became the background for the ensuing period of deep and tentative meditations’ (41). The central story of Winnie Verloc and her family, wrote Conrad, ‘had to be disengaged from its obscurity in that immense town’ and he had ‘to fight to keep at arm’s length the memories of my solitary and nocturnal walks all over London in my early days, lest they should rush in and overwhelm each page of the story’ (Conrad, 1986, 41). In a sense Conrad, as an exile turned cosmopolitan author, struggles to keep the monster that is London as a ‘background’ rather than to have its ‘topographical mysteries’ obscure the story of the tragic death of Winnie Verloc’s brother Stevie, and of her revenge upon her husband for perpetrating that death.
In this respect, Conrad’s fears that the city will ‘overwhelm’ his narrative parallels the way that many characters in the story struggle once they leave the internal space of rooms for the streets of this monstrous town. London streets are represented in an acutely physical and palpable fashion – fog, mud, smells and sounds frequently force their presence upon the characters in the novel making the inorganic city into a kind of living entity. One street is like ‘a wet, muddy trench’ (141), shops are ‘steamy’ and ‘greasy’ and ‘smell of fried fish’ (162), and when Winnie flees her house after the murder of her husband, ‘a slimy dampness enveloped her, entered her nostrils, clung to her hair’ (239). The city always exerts a tactile hold upon its citizens as when Verloc, at home, leans against the window and feels that only the glass separates him from ‘the enormity of cold, black, wet, muddy, inhospitable accumulation of bricks, slates, and stones’ and considers ‘the latent unfriendliness of all out of doors with a force approaching to positive bodily anguish’ (84).
Yet the cosmopolitan citizen must struggle to find a place in this hostile world of matter, and one of the most interesting incidents occurs when the Assistant Commissioner visits a Soho restaurant. Leaving his office for the city streets is memorably compared to ‘the descent into a slimy aquarium from which the water has been run off’ and now a ‘murky, gloomy dampness enveloped him’ (150). As he enters the Strand by Charing Cross Station ‘the genius of the locality assimilated him’ and he is compared to one of the ‘queer foreign fish’ that frequent this location in the evening (151). The imagery of the street as an aquarium is a brilliant continuation of the idea of the city as an alien physical environment: humans here are literally like fish out of water. The location itself, suggests Conrad, acts upon an individual’s identity, transforming the Assistant Commissioner from a ‘native’ to a ‘queer foreign fish’. ‘Assimilation’ here is a process which reverses the normal understanding of the term: here the native inhabitant is assimilated to the uncanny and ‘foreign’ quality of the genius loci itself.
Conrad’s meditation upon place, belonging and national identity here is continued when the Assistant Commissioner takes a hansom cab to ‘a little Italian restaurant’ in Soho, near to the Brett Street location of Verloc’s shop. James McLaughlin provides a brilliant analysis of this episode in his account of how Conrad’s novel ‘constructs the modernist metropolis as a site of social anarchy’ (2000, 23). For McLaughlin, the restaurant is a location in which ‘identity is lost by being rendered blank and meaningless’ (24): in it, one eats food that is other to one’s sense of identity, rather than a cuisine that affirms one’s national heritage. Soho, by the early twentieth century, had become a cosmopolitan quarter of European and non-European migrants, and a newspaper report of 1900 described it as ‘more continental than it is English’ (cited McLaughlin, 2000, 136). It was also, as McLaughlin and Judith Walkowitz argue, perceived as an area rife with political anarchists and sexual depravity, a reputation that gave this West End area the feel that the demonized East End of London possessed in the late nineteenth century (McLaughlin and Walkowitz, 2012). Much is made in the novel of the Soho location in terms of the spatiality of social class in London. Winnie, for example, is acutely aware that she has moved from a Belgravia address, where her mother kept apartments for rent, to a shop in Soho: towards the novel’s end she is described as ‘the respectable girl of the Belgravian mansion’ (McLaughlin and Walkowitz, 2012, 253), an ironic epithet given she has just murdered her husband in the far from respectable location of Soho.
Walkowitz has traced in detail the cultural history of Soho from the later nineteenth century, showing the different stages in its development as a zone of cosmopolitan cultural activity, described in 1887 as ‘the foreign quarter of the metropolis’ (Walkowitz, 2012, 22). One key marker of this ‘foreignness’ was the establishment of French, then Italian restaurants in the area, such as the one visited by the Assistant Commissioner. Walkowitz traces how the rather negative associations of cosmopolitan Soho in the late nineteenth century changed in the first decade of the twentieth century: now Soho became a crucial part of a topography that was styled as Bohemia in London, as Arthur Ransome’s popular book of 1907 described it. This bohemia self-consciously aped its Parisian antecedents in the development of a cafe society, with restaurants whose Frenchified names signalled their cosmopolitan tendencies. Sites such as the Café Royal, the Tour Eiffel and the Mont Blanc all attracted writers and artists, and became important locations of emerging modernist formations (see Brooker, 2004).
As McLoughlin notes, then, Conrad’s negative depiction of the Italian restaurant as a place of ‘fraudulent cooking mocking an abject mankind’ (2000, 151) is linked to the ironic distancing of his narrative voice, a style that Conrad had made his own in his earlier text, Heart of Darkness. Conrad was quite clearly one of the ‘queer foreign fish’ that inhabit London and its cosmopolitan restaurants, but he was equally determined to developed an identity as a ‘native’ English author. The complexities of this dialectic between home and abroad for the migrant writer become crystallized in the scene in the restaurant for, as McLaughlin writes, ‘Conrad is attempting to flee a Soho that powerfully calls him (home)’ (McLaughlin, 2000, 148). In the restaurant the Assistant Commissioner ‘seemed to lose some more of his identity’ and, catching himself in the mirror, is ‘struck by his foreign appearance’ (Conrad, 1986, 151). As he leaves he reflects upon how patrons of the restaurant lose their national characteristics, just as the dishes of food are also ‘denationalized’ due to being fraudulent. The Italian restaurant, writes Conrad, with delicious irony, ‘is such a peculiarly British institution’ (152). The social space of this Soho is not, therefore, seen as a site of cosmopolitan freedom, but a location for becoming, in Conrad’s revealing term, ‘unplaced’ (152). Conrad’s novel can thus be interrogated for its engagement with specific geographies of London, showing how social space, as understood by Lefebvre, affects class, national identity and belonging in the city. The Secret Agent does not offer us a cartographic representation of London so much as a demonstration of the ways in which certain geographies ‘unplace’ individuals in the modernist city.
Conrad’s interest in travel, mapping and the ways in which social space structures our identities is also found in a writer such as James Joyce, another modernist who displays a profoundly cartographic imagination. Joyce, for instance, regularly showed an interest in mapping and its effects in his fiction: the first piece of writing we read by Stephen Dedalus, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), is written in his geography primer and contains a child’s mapping of his location in the world:
Stephen Dedalus
Class of Elements
Conglowes Wood College
Sallins
County Kildare
Ireland
Europe
The World
The Universe
(Joyce, 2000, 12)
The young Stephen is thus trying to locate himself in his world and the run of familiar geographical categories of scale (school, town, county, nation, etc.) is an attempt to turn abstract social space into a place of belonging. This dialectic between space and place can also be found throughout Ulysses (1922), which demonstrates how Joyce critically engaged with maps and mapping in his fiction. In Ulysses, we encounter a text which exemplifies and has at its core the modernist exploration of the relations between space, place and modernity. The novel seems to typify David Harvey’s assessment of how modernism ‘explored the dialectic of place versus space, of present versus past, in a variety of ways’ and that while ‘celebrating universality and the collapse of spatial barriers, it also explored new meanings for space and place in ways that tacitly reinforced local identity’ (Harvey, 1989, 273). Joyce himself appeared well aware of this particular dialectic: ‘For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal’ (cited in Ellmann, 1976, 505). However, Ulysses does not reinforce the ‘local identity’ of place but instead interrogates the spatial politics of particular sites in Dublin, much as Conrad examined Soho in London. Joyce’s overall conception of place, however, appears closer to Doreen Massey’s definition of place as ‘numerous social relationships stretched over space’ (Massey, 1995, 69). In other words, Ulysses does interrogate the dialectic of place versus space, but the effect is to show how space and what Bloom calls ‘joggerfry’ (geography) (Joyce, 1993, 56) are always informed by social and political relationships, in particular those between Britain and Ireland.
Among the many guides to Dublin that Joyce used when composing Ulysses was a miniature map of the city, taken from the Ordnance Survey map of Ireland, and included in the Thom’s Directory for 1904/5. Frank Budgen reports that ‘Joyce wrote the “Wandering Rocks” [an episode in Ulysses] with a map of Dublin before him on which were traced in red ink the paths of the Earl of Dudley and Father Conmee. He calculated to a minute the time necessary for his characters to cover a given distance of the city’ (1960, 122–3). However, much like Conrad, Joyce was also sceptical of the claims of cartography to capture the spatial and geographical nature of everyday experience in the city of Dublin, and several critics have noted how Joyce contests the spatial power embodied in Ireland’s geographical status as part of the British Empire (see Gibbons, 2011; Howes, 2000). For example, ‘Wandering Rocks’ contains multiple journeys by Dublin citizens criss-crossing the streets of Dublin, following the ‘technic’, in Joyce’s (Gilbert) schema for the novel, of the labyrinth. However, this picture of the bustling streets of the Dublin metropolis closes with a viceregal procession by the Governor General, the representative of the British crown in Ireland. The viceregal parade in one sense illustrates how the social space of Dublin is, ultimately, ruled by British imperial powers. While some citizens pause to acknowledge the procession, others offer forms of resistance to this imperial spatial power: thus, the viceroy is ‘unsaluted by Mr Dudley White’ (Joyce, 1993, 242) and ignored by John Wyse Nolan and the brother of the disgraced Irish nationalist leader, Charles Stewart Parnell. Joyce even encodes resistance in the actual material spaces of the city, as when the River Poddle, a tributary of the main river Liffey, displays ‘in fealty a tongue of liquid sewage’ (242) to the parade. Joyce also refers to the conflicted spatial history of Dublin in several references to sites along the route of the parade, which passes the place where one Irish nationalist leader, Robert Emmett, was hanged (230–1) and another where a planned statue for Wolfe Tone was never erected (220). This is in marked contrast to the many statues of military heroes loyal to the British Crown, such as Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington, which Joyce depicts in other places in the novel. As Eric Bulson notes, we can thus ‘rewrite Budgen’s vignette to say that Joyce “traced in red ink the paths” of his characters over an Ordnance Survey map of Dublin’, and thus ‘the map Joyce left in Ulysses […] was an act of reappropriation, a way to imagine Ireland as an independent nation in the not so distant future with a colonial past’ (Bulson, 2007, 81). To draw upon de Certeau, then, we can argue that Joyce’s spatial story of Dublin offers us a ‘tour discourse’ that resists the imperialist map of the city.
The novels of Virginia Woolf also display a considerable interest in space and geography, and while Woolf’s texts are less obviously engaged with colonial space than those of Joyce, the politics of spatiality is also central to her concerns. As Anna Snaith and Michael Whitworth argue, in Woolf’s fictional and non-fictional texts ‘the interrelationships she creates between real and imagined spaces’ demonstrate her interest in ‘the politics of spaces: national spaces, civic spaces, private spaces or the textual spaces of the writer/printer’ (Snaith and Whitworth, 2007, 1). The relationship between ‘real and imagined spaces’ is noted in one of Woolf’s earliest published pieces of writing, a review for the Times Literary Supplement of 1905, entitled ‘Literary Geography’. The review considers two books in a series of illustrated guides to the places represented in the work of specific writers. Woolf discusses how certain writers, such as Scott or the Brontës, vividly evoke a country and its inhabitants but then goes on to note how we should distinguish between ‘houses in the brain’ and external geographies:
A writer’s country is a territory within his own brain; and we run the risk of disillusionment if we try to turn such phantom cities into tangible brick and mortar […]. No city indeed is so real as this that we make for ourselves and people to our liking; and to insist that it has any counterpoint in the cities of the earth is to rob it of half its charm. (Woolf, 1986, 35)
Much of Woolf’s fiction is, arguably, dominated by this division between inner and outer space, between ‘houses in the brain’ and cities of bricks and mortar. Woolf thus refines this early statement upon literary geography, constructing a fiction that shows how material spaces rely upon imaginative conceptualization and how the territory of the mind is informed by an interaction with external spaces and places. In Jacob’s Room (1992a), Woolf summarized these two spaces: ‘The streets of London have their map; but our passions are uncharted’ (Woolf, 1992a, 82). And contemplating how to construct The Waves in 1928, Woolf mused, ‘what is my own position towards the inner & the outer? I think a kind of ease & dash are good; – yes: I think even externality is good; some combination of them ought to be possible’ (Woolf, 1982, 209). Woolf does not reject externally mapped spaces, as ‘Literary Geography’ might seem to suggest, rather she charts psychic life via her use of stream of consciousness, criss-crossing the liminal regions of inner and outer with ‘ease and dash’ to reveal how this division itself is somewhat false. In her work, it is the interaction between inner and outer spaces that dominates, showing how Woolf’s texts continue to interrogate the external geographies of modernity.
In particular her writings often explore the geography of London, in novels such as Jacob’s Room and Mrs Dalloway (1925), and in essays such as ‘The Docks of London’ in The London Scene (1931–2), which examines the relationship between the capital and imperial space. Mrs Dalloway, for example, is often taken as a key instance of Woolf’s interest in the ‘dark places of psychology’, as the narrative relies heavily on representations of the thoughts of its central characters. But the novel is equally interested in the geography of London and how external spaces interact with the interior lives of its characters; as Gillian Beer notes, in Mrs Dalloway, Woolf ‘sets out the topography of London as precisely as does Defoe’ and the ‘accounts of walks and of districts register the characters’ social space as well as their separations’ (Beer, 1996, 52–3). An example of this depiction of social space is found if we consider the locations depicted in Mrs Dalloway. These are very circumscribed, as the novel is mainly set in Westminster and Mayfair, areas of power, wealth and influence, as would befit Clarissa Dalloway, wife of a Conservative MP. Thus, the novel explores the areas of London most associated with traditional forms of aristocratic prestige, rather than with cultural power (such as Bloomsbury, associated with Woolf’s own life and only briefly mentioned in the novel) or financial power (the City, towards which Elizabeth Dalloway peers, but does not go). Woolf is thus very astute in her use of representations of space to indicate power and status. Inner city suburbs are mentioned, such as the ‘poor mothers of Pimlico’ (Woolf, 1992b, 21) waiting to see the Queen outside Buckingham Palace, but Pimlico is itself close to the Houses of Parliament where Richard Dalloway works, although it is not explored in detail in the novel. In a number of essays in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Woolf described the pleasure she took in exploring London, including areas such as the East End docks in The London Scene. In a diary entry of November 1923, Woolf daydreamed of wandering the city streets, ‘walking say to Wapping’ (Woolf, 1982, 272), a location in the much poorer East End of the city. So the lack of a more socially panoramic picture of the city in Mrs Dalloway is, then, a clear indication of Clarissa Dalloway’s own circumscribed social space.
This brief discussion of Conrad, Joyce and Woolf has aimed to demonstrate some of the rich potential for understanding modernism through its multiple geographies. Future work in this area might include more of a rapprochement between the two strands of criticism outlined in this chapter, bringing a richer and more nuanced spatial and geographical vocabulary into dialogue with the more over-arching concepts influencing transnational and global modernist studies. Such work would continue to exemplify the idea that geography, in Moretti’s words, is not ‘an inert container’ in which modernism occurs, but is rather ‘an active force’ that continues to shape how we understand modernist culture and its diverse locations.
Notes
1 For a classic analysis of the relationship between the modern and the historical, see De Man, 1970, 386.
2 On the arrière-garde, see Marx, 2009.
3 For such approaches, see Harris, 2010, and Feigel and Harris, 2011.
4 See also Jessica Berman’s Imagining World Literatures: Modernism and Comparative Literature (2009). Berman argues that ‘comparative modernist studies must at last kill that old bogey, “international modernism”, along with its homogenizing impulses and its insistence on a singular universal sphere of readership’ (Berman, 2009, 68–9).
5 Friedman’s project, with its claim that a ‘planetary modernist poetics must be plural’, thus sets itself firmly against those interpretations of modernity and modernism that align themselves with Frederic Jameson’s notion of a ‘singular modernity’. For Jameson this ‘singular modernity’ is to be identified with worldwide capitalism, with ‘central’ and ‘peripheral’ forms of modernist practice that are homologous with the uneven spread of capitalist development across the globe (see Jameson, 2002).
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