Literature and Film, Dispositioned: Thought, Location, World

191 Pages·2014·1.373 MB·Language, Discourse, Society

by  Alice Gavin (auth.)

Language, Discourse, Society
Series Editors: Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe and Denise Riley
Selected published titles:
Alice Gavin
LITERATURE AND FILM, DISPOSITIONED
Thought, Location, World
Patrizia Lombardo
MEMORY AND IMAGINATION IN FILM
Scorsese, Lynch, Jarmusch, Van Sant
James Wilkes
A FRACTURED LANDSCAPE OF MODERNITY
Culture and Conflict in the Isle of Purbeck
Richard Purcell
RACE, RALPH ELLISON AND AMERICAN COLD WAR INTELLECTUAL LITERATURE
Andreas Vrahimis
ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN ANALYTIC AND CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY
John Twyning
FORMS OF ENGLISH HISTORY IN LITERATURE, LANDSCAPE, AND ARCHITECTURE
Regenia Gagnier
INDIVIDUALISM, DECADENCE AND GLOBALIZATION
On the Relationship of Part to Whole, 1859–1920
Jennifer Keating-Miller
LANGUAGE, IDENTITY AND LIBERATION IN CONTEMPORARY IRISH LITERATURE
Matthew Taunton
FICTIONS OF THE CITY
Class, Culture and Mass Housing in London and Paris
Laura Mulvey
VISUAL AND OTHER PLEASURES 2ND EDITION
Peter de Bolla and Stefan H. Uhlig (editors)
AESTHETICS AND THE WORK OF ART
Adorno, Kafka, Richter
Misha Kavka
REALITY TELEVISION, AFFECT AND INTIMACY
Reality Matters
Rob White
FREUD’S MEMORY
Psychoanalysis, Mourning and the Foreign Body
Teresa de Lauretis
FREUD’S DRIVE: PSYCHOANALYSIS, LITERATURE AND FILM
Mark Nash
SCREEN THEORY CULTURE
Richard Robinson
NARRATIVES OF THE EUROPEAN BORDER
A History of Nowhere
Lyndsey Stonebridge
THE WRITING OF ANXIETY
Imaging Wartime in Mid-Century British Culture
Ashley Tauchert
ROMANCING JANE AUSTEN
Narrative, Realism and the Possibility of a Happy Ending
Reena Dube
SATYAJIT RAY’S THE CHESS PLAYERS AND POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
Culture, Labour and the Value of Alterity
John Anthony Tercier
THE CONTEMPORARY DEATHBED
The Ultimate Rush
Erica Sheen and Lorna Hutson
LITERATURE, POLITICS AND LAW IN RENAISSANCE ENGLAND
Jean-Jacques Lecercle and Denise Riley
THE FORCE OF LANGUAGE
Geoff Gilbert
BEFORE MODERNISM WAS
Modern History and the Constituency of Writing
Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe and Denise Riley (editors)
THE LANGUAGE, DISCOURSE, SOCIETY READER
Michael O’Pray
FILM, FORM AND PHANTASY
Adrian Stokes and Film Aesthetics
James A. Snead, edited by Kara Keeling, Colin MacCabe and Cornel West
RACIST TRACES AND OTHER WRITINGS
European Pedigrees/African Contagions
Patrizia Lombardo
CITIES, WORDS AND IMAGES
Colin MacCabe
JAMES JOYCE AND THE REVOLUTION OF THE WORD
Second edition
Moustapha Safouan
SPEECH OR DEATH?
Language as Social Order: A Psychoanalytic Study
Language, Discourse, Society
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Literature and Film,
Dispositioned
Thought, Location, World
Alice G avin
ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Germany
© Alice Gavin 2014
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-29544-6
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First published 2014 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-45185-2 ISBN 978-1-137-29545-3 (eBook)
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Preface: Stimmung v iii
1 Literature 1
Where language works 1
With style 5
Excess philosophy 1 1
Freedom or else 18
The work of literature 2 7
2 Intermedium 34
It/A virtual screen 34
Can thought be streamed? 4 1
Unbearability 5 3
Bursting infrastructure 6 2
Dispositioned 65
3 Intramedium 6 9
Where was she? 69
Nonoccupied 76
Receptivity 83
Dying voices 89
Literature in L ove 95
4 Film 9 8
A black line wriggling 98
Filmed style 101
With the without 105
The poetry of cinema 1 08
Unworkability 110
Living in a dead world 117
5 Film 120
Excommunication 120
The Film ic age 1 25
v
vi Contents
A little elsewhere 1 30
Buster and Beckett’s Cameras 1 40
A little exuberance 148
Notes 154
Works Cited 168
Index 179
Acknowledgements
This book was begun in London at the London Consortium which
was then directed by Steven Connor. It was completed in Berlin, while
I was a fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. Both
cities and both institutions were vital to the book’s development, and
I wish to thank each guiding voice and source of encouragement I
encountered within them. My time spent at the ICI was invaluable to
the project’s advancement; I am hugely grateful for the resources and
opportunities my fellowship there afforded. The middle sections of
Chapter 2 revisit and reformulate elements of a previously published
article, ‘Thinking Room and Thought Streams in Henry and William
James’ Textual Practice 26:5 (2012): 871–889, and I thank the journal
for permission to reuse that material here. I also want to thank by
name and niche the following: Christien for love and longing; Adam
for piano songs; Richard for five years and then some; Sophie for
tremendous friendship at tremendous distances; Greg for guitars and
whiskey; Laura for brill Brum cos stuff; the Cowley pack for Cowley
magic; Alex for Pusha T; Daniel for glam literality; Nahal for calm
and chocolate; Hadi for blue Farsi; Robert for notes that don’t exist;
Bobby for death on the dance floor; Netta for life on the dance floor;
and David for ping pong. But if my admiration and adoration is for
these dear friends and many unmentioned others, then this book is
for my brothers Ben Harlow and Kieran Gavin, and my sister Lucy
Sutton. Here’s ‘a little something’, the least I could do.
vii
Preface: S timmung
This book is about the encounter between twentieth-century litera-
ture and silent film, and how this encounter thwarts the ‘optimistic
assumption’ that what we call modernism can be defined by a subjec-
tivist, ‘inward turn.’ ‘Optimistic assumption’, and ‘inward turn’ are
phrases I borrow from Fredric Jameson’s T he Antinomies of Realism.
Similar to the present book, The Antinomies of Realism thinks about
literature partly by giving attention to a form of unspeakable sentence
whose emergence, in association with the phenomenon of free indi-
rect style, Jameson considers ‘a fundamental event in the history of
language.’ Unspeakable sentences are for Jameson connected with
the nameless reality, and realism, of affect, the literary representa-
tion of which he places in tension with so-called objective sentences
of novelistic narration. In Jameson’s view, the ‘namelessness’ of this
‘new’ affective ‘reality’ is what eventually forces the dissolution of
literary realism. 1 His focus, for the most part, is the nineteenth-
century novel. By contrast, my interest is in tracing the density of
unspeakable sentences in the prose of Henry James, James Joyce,
Virginia Woolf, and, in a peculiar way, Samuel Beckett too. If Henry
James is often considered an intermediary between realism and
modernism – a consideration with which this book in many ways
concurs – then Beckett’s T he Unnamable (1953) may after all be a
name for where namelessness goes when realism is dissolute.
Because it is my suggestion that thinking about film’s muted
refusal of interiority allows us to think with more sensitivity about
the unspeakability of unspeakable sentences in literature, this book
also attends to the free indirect as it is theorized with respect to film.
It concludes with a discussion of the not-quite-silent movie Beckett
made in the early 1960s with a weary and wizened Buster Keaton,
whose slapstick films of the 1920s Beckett loved. Across the book’s
course, ‘love’ inadvertently becomes a key word. Indeed, Love is a
silent movie. Directed by Edmund Goulding and released in Britain
and America in 1927, Love was the third filmic adaptation of A nna
Karenina (1877), and the first of these adaptations not to name itself
Anna Karenina. Given its 1927 release, Love cannot be the movie
viii
Preface: S timmung ix
Virginia Woolf is thinking of in her essay ‘The Cinema’ (1926), an
essay that contains some grumbling about the ‘unnatural’ coupling
of film and literature. 2 In ‘The Cinema’, Woolf discusses how, in the
cinema, Anna falls in love with Vronksy. The failure of film to see
‘inside’ Anna’s mind is what by and by leads Woolf to think about
‘thought in its wildness’ – a wild kind of thought no longer attached
to named characters and which as such raises questions of location
and attribution similar to those of free indirect style (T C , 270, 271).
More so than the adaption or adaptability of Tolstoy’s novel, this
wild form of thought becomes the interest of ‘The Cinema’, and liter-
ature’s love for film becomes a way of thinking intensely about litera-
ture. If one of the questions that trembles throughout the chapters
of this book is ‘where is subjectivity in the literature of James, Joyce,
Woolf, and Beckett?’ – or better, ‘where did subjectivity go?’ – then
another is ‘what does literature want from film’s mute response to
such a question, a muteness that soon enough erupts in a voiceless
laugh?’
In order to set the scene, the first chapter gives a detailed intro-
duction to unspeakable sentences as they appear in the writing of
the likes of James Joyce, explores the implications of the various
terms associated with such sentences (from represented thought, to
narrated monologue, to free indirect style), and discusses the timing
of these terms’ emergence. But it also begins to draw from exam-
ples of free indirect style – the term I stick to – a form of thinking
about literature that is philosophically informed; a form of thinking
with which this book is more generally infused. In The Antinomies of
Realism , Jameson connects affect with the German word for mood.
Stimmung , he says, ‘has the additional advantage of introducing
an auditory dimension, not so much in its relationship to Stimme
or voice, as rather to what the term suggests of musical tuning, of
the according of a musical instrument (as well as the jangling of
the unharmonized)’ (A R , 38). In their Theory of Bloom , the collec-
tive of authors called Tiqqun meanwhile take the figure of Leopold
Bloom for the name of our contemporary predicament, which is for
them our contemporary Stimmung . For Tiqqun, ‘Bloom’ is less a char-
acter in Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) than ‘a spectral, distracted, supremely
vacant humanity that no longer accesses any other content than the
Stimmung in which it exists, the twilight being for whom there is
no longer any real or any self but only S timmungs .’3 Interested in