EccentriCities: Writing in the margins of Modernism: St. Petersburg to Rio de Janeiro

EccentriCities:

Writing in the margins of Modernism

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EccentriCities:

Writing in the margins of Modernism

St. Petersburg to Rio de Janeiro

Sharon Lubkemann Allen

Manchester University Press

Manchester and New York

distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

Copyright © Sharon Lubkemann Allen 2013

The right of Sharon Lubkemann Allen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster

To David, Sophia, Katarina, Isaac

There is a curvature in literary style as there is curvature in space …

If parallel lines do not meet it is not because they cannot, but because they have other things to do. Gogol’s art as disclosed in The Overcoat suggests that parallel lines not only may meet, but that they can wriggle and get most extravagantly entangled, just as two pillars reflected in water indulge in the most wobbly contortions if the necessary ripple is there …

So to sum up, the story goes this way: mumble, mumble, lyrical wave, mumble, lyrical wave, mumble, lyrical wave, mumble, fantastic climax, mumble, mumble, and back into the chaos from which they had all derived. At this superhigh level of art, literature is of course not concerned with pitying the underdog or cursing the upperdog. It appeals to that secret depth of the human soul where the shadows of other worlds pass like the shadows of nameless and soundless ships.

Nabokov

Contents

List of figures

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction

Part I  Eccentricity and modernity

1   Urban contexts, urbane consciousness and the eccentric slant of modernisms

1.1   Retracing urban/e dimensions of the modernist novel

1.2   Reconfiguring modernist reflection: fractured mirrors, refractory narrators

1.3   Re-mapping modernism: eccentric vs concentric design and dynamics

1.4   Reframing the modernist sentence: concentric memory, eccentric madness and dialogism

2   Eccentric cities and citytexts: transpositions, translations and transformations of authority and authorship

2.1   Eccentric domains: St. Petersburg and Rio de Janeiro

i    Form: schizophrenic designs

ii   Foundations: displaced capitals

2.2   Eccentric dynamics in Russian and Brazilian literature: displacement, digression, dialogue, dissembling and dissent

Part II  Eccentric narrative consciousness

3   Gogol’s open prospects: digressive copy clerks

3.1   Gogol’s eccentric ‘parallel lines that do meet when the necessary ripple is there’: texts, cultural contexts, criticism

i    Logos: travestying Peter

ii   Cosmos: transcribing and transforming the Petersburg text

3.2   Reading between the lines: authority in ‘The Overcoat’ (dialogues between author, narrator and hero)

3.3   Intertextual lines: crossings on ‘Nevsky Prospekt’ (intertextual dialogues)

3.4   Realignments: critique and creativity within ‘The Notes of a Madman’ (contradiction and dialogue)

4   Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s unending undergrounds: dead men writing

4.1   Towards a theory of underground laughter: carnival, degeneracy, degeneration, and generation

4.2   Generation/s of eccentrics: formation of an underground aesthetics in marginocentric capitals (subtexts, contexts, pretexts, early texts and resonances of underground consciousness)

4.3   Generation in the underground text

i    Romancing the reader

ii   Refractory and refractive rambling in the city

iii Gambling on drunken digressive discourse and winning an afterlife

Part III  An encompassing eccentric line

5   Hallucinated cities

5.1   Evolving eccentricities: revolutionary Russian modernisms and Brazilian ‘modernismo’

5.2   Eccentricity in the ex-centric city and in exile: Russian, Luso-Brazilian and transnational post-modernism

Postscript: theory of the novel and the eccentric novel’s early play with theory

Bibliography

Index

Figures

1   Olivier Truschet & German Hoyau. Plan dit de Bâle. 1552. Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, Collection Gérard Leyris.

2   Matthaüs Merian. Le Plan de la Ville, Cité, Université et Faubourgs de Paris avec la description de son antiquité et singularités. 1615. Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, Collection Jean-Loup Charmet.

3   Victor Hugo. Annotated Statistique des égouts de la ville de Paris, from the notebooks for Notre Dame de Paris. Bibliothèque Nationale de France-Richelieu.

4   Le Corbusier (Charles Edouard Jeanneret). Pages 38–9 from Destin de Paris, avec des illustrations de l’auteur. Paris: F. Sorlot, 1941. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris/F.L.C.

5   J. Meijer. Plan for the Site of St. Petersburg or Plan of Nyen’s location and the Neva Channel. 1698. Military Archives of Sweden – Riksarkivet.

6   Carl Fredrik Coyet. St. Petersborg. 1821/22. Military Archives of Sweden – Riksarkivet.

7   Johann Baptista Homann. Topographische Vortfellung der Neuen Russisches Haupt Resident und See Stadt S. Petersburg … / Map of St. Petersburg. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum / photo by Vladimir Terebenin, Leonard Kheifets, Yuri Molodkovets.

8   Matthaus Seutter. Nova et accuratissima urbis St. Petersburg … 1734/37. Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

9   Plan der Kayserl. Residentz Stadt St. Peterburg … 1737. Engraving by G. I. Unverzacht. St. Petersburg: Petersburg Academy of Sciences, 1741. National Library of Russia, St. Petersburg.

10   Luís dos Santos Vilhena. Planta da cidade de S. Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro. 1775. Ink and wash sketch. Biblioteca Nacional do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro.

11   Jean Massé. Planta da Cidade de São Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro. 1713. IICT – Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Lisbon. 113

12   Nova Planta da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro. E. & H. Laemmert, 1867. Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

13   Christopher Marselius. The Shore Opposite the Fortress. 1720s. Indian ink with pen and brush. Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg.

14   Aleksei Fedorovich Zubov. Sankt Pieter Burkh / Panorama of St. Petersburg. 1916. Etching with line engraving. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum / photo by Vladimir Terebenin, Leonard Kheifets, Yuri Molodkovets.

15   D. Miguel Ângelo Blasco. Prospectiva da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro. 1760. Watercolor on paper. Arquivo Histórico do Exercito, Rio de Janeiro.

16   Marc Ferrez. Cidade do Rio de Janeiro. Panoramic photograph. 1889.

17   Vue des bords de la Neva en remontant la riviere entre l’Amirauté et les batimens de l’Academie des Sciences. Engraving by I. Sokolov, after drawings by M. I. Makhaev. Plate 11 of 12 accompanying I. F. Truscott’s Plan of the Capital City of St. Petersburg with the Depiction of its Most Distinctive Views. St. Petersburg: Imperial Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1753. The Russian National Library, St. Petersburg.

18   Grigorii Grigorevich Chernetsov. Panorama of the Palace Square from the Scaffolding of the Alexander Column. Lithograph in 3 parts. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum / photo by Vladimir Terebenin, Leonard Kheifets, Yuri Molodkovets.

19   Rua Direita. Photographic print by unknown photographer. Late nineteenth century. Arguivo Geral da Cidade, Rio de Janeiro.

20   Ivan Nostits. View of Nevsky Prospekt by the Gostiny Dvor Shopping Arcade. Photograph, albumen print. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum / photo by Vladimir Terebenin, Leonard Kheifets, Yuri Molodkovets.

21   План столичнаго города Санкт-Петербурга/Plan de la ville capitale de St. Petersbourg. St. Petersburg: A. Savinkov, 1825. Coloured engraving. The National Library of Russia. 130–1

22   Rio Iavero. Engraving c.1598 by Baptista Van Deutecum. Published by Olivier Van Noort. Description du Penible Voyage Faict entour de l’Univers ou Globe Terrestre. Cornelis Claes, 1602.

23   Plan de la Baye, Ville, forteresses, et attaques de Rio Janeiro Levé par Le chevler de la Grange … au mois de 9bre. 1711. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.

24   Pieter Picart (Pickaert). Saint Petersburg. 1704. Engraving. The National Library of Russia.

25   Pieter Picart (Pickaert). Sts. Peter and Paul Fortress and the Holy Trinity Square. 1714. Etching with line engraving. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum / photo by Vladimir Terebenin, Leonard Kheifets, Yuri Molodkovets.

26   Fedor Iakovlevich Alekseev. View of the Stock Exchange and Admiralty from the Peter and Paul Fortress. 1810. Oil on canvas. The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

27   Quinhentos mil reis. Brazilian banknote depicting the harbour in Rio de Janeiro. Casa da Moeda, Rio de Janeiro.

28   Vasilii Surikov. View of the Monument to Peter I in Senate Square. 1870. Oil on Canvas. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

29   Pedro I in Tiradentes Square. Unknown photographer. Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

30   Valentin Aleksandrovich Serov. Peter I. 1907. Oil on canvas. The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

31   Alexandre Benois. Carnival on the Fontanka. 1900. Gouache and graphite on paper.

32   Karl Petrovich Beggrov. Shrovetide Fete with Tobogganing on the Tsaritsyn Meadow in St. Petersburg. First half of the nineteenth century. Lithograph with tinted watercolour. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum / photo by Vladimir Terebenin, Leonard Kheifets, Yuri Molodkovets.

33   Flooded St. Petersburg, 7 November 1824. Unknown artist. Drawing published in a yearbook on notable objects and events, Erinnerungen an merkwürdige Gegenstánde und Begebenheiten. Vienna: V. Jahresband, 1825. 64.

34   Augusto Malta. Avenida Central. Photograph. c.1906. Arquivo Geral da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro.

35   Chernetsov. Detail from Reviewing of the Guards on Tsaritsyn lug in St. Petersburg in 1831. 1831–37. Oil on canvas. All-Union Pushkin Museum, St. Petersburg.

36   Carlos Julião. Detail from Configuração que mostra a entrada do Rio de Janeiro. c.1799. Gabinete de Estudos Arqueológicos da Engenharia Militar, Lisbon.

37   Alexandre Benois. Frontispiece for Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman.

38   Ilya Yefimovich Repin. Saint Petersburg. Nevsky Prospekt. 1887. Graphite pencil and ivory black on paper. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

39   The Nevsky Prospekt, St. Petersburg, Russia. Stereograph published by The United States Stereograph, 1908. The Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

40   Gala Day in Busy Streets of Rio de Janeiro. Stereograph published by the Keystone View Company, n.d.

Acknowledgements

Like any cartographer drawing new boundaries, I set out with many maps in hand. Over the past decade of exploration, I collected countless others. Any new cultural territory or trajectory, literary domain, dimension, or dynamic delineated in EccentriCities is deeply indebted to scholars whose work in diverse disciplines illumined Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s eccentrics and eccentric cities. I could not have navigated so many crossings without expert guides and extraordinary encounters. Robert Louis Jackson framed my first forays into this terrain and encouraged me at critical junctures along the way. Katerina Clark, Joseph Frank, Anna Lisa Crone, Julie Buckler, and especially Michael Wachtel contributed immensely to my work on Petersburg and urbane Russian literature. For finding my way in Rio and across the vast landscape of Brazilian modernism, I am most grateful to K. David Jackson and Nelson Vieira, both of whom also offered incisive commentary on the entire manuscript as it neared its final form. The work would not have reached that form without copious early critical readings and continued conversations with Maria DiBattista, Michael Wood, Robert Bird, Sarah Clovis Bishop and Anne Caswell Klein. But more than any other scholar, my work is indebted to and inspired by the extraordinary imagination, critical attentiveness and generous spirit of Caryl Emerson.

Spanning continents and centuries, discrete disciplines and cultural domains, this study would not have been possible without the support of research grants from Princeton University, a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship within the lively University of Pennsylvania Humanities Forum, a Fulbright Scholars Fellowship in Lisbon, as well as a Drescher Fellowship, Scholarly Incentive Grants, and a Provost’s Fellowship from the State University of New York, College at Brockport. I am especially grateful for the interdisciplinary vision, insightful commentary and protracted commitment of my series, commissioning, production and copy editors at Manchester University Press, from Michael Thompson to Tony Mason, Sarah Hunt, Lianne Slavin and George Pitcher. Many other institutions have collaborated in bringing this work into being. In Russia, I received invaluable assistance from scholars at the Hermitage, Tretyakov Gallery, Russian National Library and especially the Institute of Russian Literature/Pushkinskii Dom and the F. M. Dostoevsky Literary Memorial Museum. I am particularly indebted to Natalia Ashimbaeva, Vera Biron, Natalia Chernova and Boris Tikhomirov. In Paris, I benefited greatly from access to archives at the Bibliothèque Nationale and Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, as well as comments from and conversations with Jean-Yves Tadié and Guy Rosa. In Portugal, my work was enriched by exchanges with many scholars at the University of Lisbon, especially Miguel Tamen, João Figueiredo, António Feijó, Helena Buescu, and Ângela Correia. In CLEPUL and CompaRes, I finally found an eclectic international group of comparatists concerned with crossings between Slavic and Luso-Brazilian cultures, committed to cultivating interdisciplinary dialogues and collaborative cross-cultural investigations. Archives ranging from the Biblioteca Nacional in Rio de Janeiro to the Military Archives of Sweden and Portugal provided maps and other images essential to the interdisciplinary scope of this study. Closer to home, the insights and inquiries from my colleagues and students at SUNY continually refined my vision and voice.

Long before I first ventured into Dostoevsky’s Petersburg in Blannie Curtis’s wondrously curious Lisbon classroom, followed Machado de Assis’s Brás Cubas through Rio, and revisited Lisbon in the company of Pessoa, I lived under the strange spell of eccentricity and ex-centricity: feeling the draw of displacement. Insider and interloper in a decentred cultural capital, I played street soccer to strains of ‘Grandola, Vila Morena’ in the aftermath of 1974. As a child constantly moving between cultures, copying was always a way of coping, and erring a way of creating and staking out my own claims. For my fascination with eccentricity and creativity, I am grateful to my parents – my restless, Rio-born but unrooted father, carving exquisite creatures out of deadwood wherever he finds it; my continually uprooted mother, cultivating roots on the road, collecting and grafting. My brothers Stephen and David have shared and long encouraged my restless spirit. With their spirited imagination, Sophia, Katarina and Isaac have made my road most extraordinary. From early forays in Petersburg to our recent year in Lisbon, they and David have explored this terrain, real and imaginary, with me. David has turned every detour, digression and delay into discovery. He has not only tolerated, but immeasurably enriched my eccentricity and EccentriCities.

Abbreviations

Introduction

Every work of genius slants the rational plane, or so claim twentieth-century writers as disparate in style and distant in setting as Mário de Andrade and Vladimir Nabokov, re-casting creative consciousness in their respectively ‘hallucinated’ cities of São Paulo and St. Petersburg.¹ While these writers eccentrically reconfigure and relocate creative consciousness in citytexts marked by peculiarly modern tempos and marginocentric topographies, they also recuperate an ancient association between art, alienation and urbanity, central to the Western canon. In work that blurs boundaries between theoretical, critical and creative literature, they align insight and innovation with a deep and diverse literary tradition defined by dissent, deviance, digression, displacement and dispossession. Yet modern exploration of that domain takes treacherous turns. Modernist poetry and prose slides steeply into the recesses of the mind, bent in time and space along Einsteinian lines, marked by the explosive energy of dizzying metaphor and metonymy, disrupted memory and disorienting madness. Seismic chronotopic shifts in literary texts can be partly accounted for by socio-political ruptures and scientific revolutions, by rapid change predicated on rationality but revealing the irrational. Chronotopic complexity and contradiction explored by writers such as Nabokov and Andrade stems from cross-cultural as well as historical flux. The chronotopic expansion of modernist literature derives, paradoxically, from concomitant compression. Turning inward, modernist works characteristically chronicle centrifugal social and cultural movement by angling through seemingly narrow streams of consciousness, often obsessive and obstructed. Retrospective, recursive, reflexive, refractive and refractory, modernist poetry and prose register from anxious and alienated perspectives the changing surface of the cityscape, its shifting patterns of circulation, disorienting discursive crossroads, and continual socio-political reconfiguration. Through a doubly reflexive turn, they reveal the unconscious, both cultural and individual, through highly self-conscious writing. In dialogue with modern science, modernist literature explores not only complicated dimensions, but also dynamics of consciousness. Like modern psychiatry and physics, it surveys systems along borders and breaking points. It traces frayed edges and irregularities, ruptures and sutures in a tensely stretched social fabric, ill-suiting its eccentric characters. But more akin to other contemporaneous arts, modernist and postmodernist literature, in which the pathological and paradoxical filters into self-conscious form, investigates the chaos on which modernity verges – its decentring, its forgetting, its contradictions – from within. That is, it looks at and into the man beneath his patched overcoat, retracing unruly city and sentence by turning through unruly subject. It surveys social and literary landscapes refracted through alienated consciousnesses.²

Circling predominantly within the confines of the city and subjective consciousness, the modernist sentence is acutely aware of its limits, of the period (historical and grammatical) that finalizes authority or suggests what postmodernists will call the death of the author. It explores what Nordau, in 1892, already calls the dead end of decadence, ‘stemming from the rise of the overwrought city, the source of nervous fatigue and mental exhaustion’.³ But this ‘pathologically defective’ literature⁴ also finds creative impetus in the concentration and corresponding ‘intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli’ noted by Simmel in his 1903 essay ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’.⁵ Whereas Nordau finds the fragmentation of urban life either a dead end or context for competitive Darwinian development,⁶ Simmel’s theory takes as its premise the necessity of urban disruption and digression for creativity, contending that ‘man is a creature whose existence is dependent on differences, i.e. his mind is stimulated by the difference between present impressions and those which have preceded.’⁷ Development is not necessarily progressive but differential. Framing this difference in temporal terms – urban ‘tempo’ and urbane memory (‘the rapid telescoping of images past and present’) – Simmel suggests what this study delineates as the more conventional concentric framework for the (re)constructions of reality within modernist consciousness,⁸ critically incisive and creative revisions contingent on social dismembering and remembering. The concentric citytext’s casting of difference in terms of alienated and aberrant consciousness, dissenting and digressing on both social and aesthetic planes, may register as eccentricity. But concentric modernist figures face fragmentation and creatively refract reality primarily through disrupted individual and cultural memory, social descent and ascent, dissent defined through memoried realignment. If such characters actually skirt the city centre, alienated consciousness is marked by a sense of exclusion from a clearly demarked core or of ex-centricity, involving departure from or deconstruction of a centre that remains a retrospective point of reference. Yet Simmel also suggests the simultaneous, spatialized difference (‘multiplicity’ perceived upon ‘crossing the street’⁹) defining divided, doubled consciousness in the eccentric or marginocentric cultural contexts central to this investigation – eccentricity much further elucidated by Bakhtin’s and Mário de Andrade’s explorations of urbane polyphony, by Lotman’s and Bakhtin’s discrete delineations of dialogue and dialogism, interpolated semiospheres and speech genres. Eccentric creative consciousness is marked by the many contradictions inherent in being cast on the margins of paradoxically marginocentric geo-cultural sites. Rather than primarily defined by diachronic development and disruption, eccentric consciousness is configured by the subject’s and city’s displacement and delay, digression and deviance. Time and memory are still disrupted, but also delayed, doubled and creatively distorted through transposition and translation. Divided consciousness is marked as madness, expressed as contrariness and contradiction, more than discontinuity and decay. These differences are foregrounded in the most reflexive strain of modernist fiction, where, anticipating the heightened self-consciousness of postmodernist fiction, the subject sentenced to the pressures of urban life, ‘struggling to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence’,¹⁰ also struggles to maintain autonomy, authority and originality under historical, ethical, aesthetic and (in eccentric contexts) cross-cultural pressures, as self-authored fictional construction. Such fictional writers arbitrate against dead-ended trajectories in the city and citytext with discrete arguments for the concentric and eccentric chronotopic expansion of the urbane sentence.

This study seeks to bring greater clarity to discrete urbane architectonics of modernist literature within a distended Western (including Slavic and Latin American) tradition. It traces different slants of the rational plane in modernist fictions, which similarly assert creative freedom, critical originality and cultural authenticity and authority by rupturing, deconstructing and reconstructing consciousness along differently temporalized and spatialized axes respectively aligned with concentric and eccentric cultural construction. It does so by focusing on fictionally realized (both represented and recognized) correspondences between urban development and urbane consciousness. Distinguishing between pathologically memoried and mad (particularly manic and paranoid schizophrenic) modes of cultural consciousness, concentrated in reflexive citytexts respectively located at the centre of European modernism (early twentieth-century Paris and London) and on its historical and geographical edges (mid-nineteenth-century St. Petersburg and Rio to twentieth-century Moscow, São Paulo and Lisbon), this investigation seeks to redefine some of the dimensions, dynamics, creative capacities and critical contributions of discrete literary modernisms – concentric, but especially, eccentric.

Eccentric cities, self-consciously cast on geographical margins and constructed through a kind of bricolage that collapses cultural and historical difference onto a single dialogic plane, give rise to seemingly anachronistic modernist texts. The strange correspondences between self-realizing nineteenth-century Russian and Brazilian citytexts, undetermined by significant direct cross-cultural contact, elucidate the formative relation between particular urban contexts and urbane modes of modernist consciousness. Remarkably similar eccentricities shape fictions rooted in and refracting St. Petersburg and Rio de Janeiro, as a function of peculiarly parallel development on geo-political and mythical planes, on the material landscape and within cultural memory. Offering an alternative mapping to the many surveys of modernism grounded in concentric contexts (Paris and London, in particular) and to consequently concentric constructions of modernist consciousness, as well as an alternative to examinations of eccentric modernism only in terms of derivation and delay, this study traces eccentric anticipations of European modernisms and postmodernisms. It re-examines the development of literal and literary landscapes underpinning paranoid schizophrenic constructions of eccentric consciousness in Nikolai Gogol’s and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Petersburg tales and Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’s Rio narratives. Re-grounding these works through a diachronic and interdisciplinary structural survey of eccentric cities and citytexts, the study reconsiders these works as critical and creative responses to urban/e European genres as well as earlier strains of Russian and Brazilian literary and artistic representation. Their reflexive narrators are also read as seminal reconfigurations, generating a continually displaced line of ‘scribblers’ in the self-conscious fiction of the eccentric and then ex-centric city. While the work foregrounds incipient modernisms by focusing on eccentric urban formation and formative urbane texts, the concluding section of this study looks forward to extensions of the eccentric line through a concomitant logic of discontinuity and dialogue, parody and stylization, carnivalesque laughter and paranoid creativity in recognized Russian and Brazilian modernisms and postmodernisms, focusing on eccentric consciousnesses framing the hallucinated cities drawn by writers including Andrei Bely and Mário de Andrade, Mikhail Bulgakov and Osman Lins, Clarice Lispector and Liudmila Petrushevskaya – relocating and re-casting marginocentric cultural debate and cultural memory. In its initial reframing and conclusion, the study also briefly reconsiders the impact of nineteenth-century eccentric narratives on such modernist writers as Woolf and Proust – re-mapping London and Paris – as well as Pessoa, whose polyphony resounds in Saramago’s postmodern ex-centric re-mapping of Lisbon. Anticipating and, in the Russian case, directly informing the anxieties of European modernist and postmodernist consciousness through their peculiarly reflexive, refractive and refractory construction, the Russian and Brazilian narrative traditions examined here offer different models for the split, multiple subject. They frame an eccentric ethical aesthetics contingent on a cross-cultural dialogue relevant to contemporary transnational post-colonial and cosmopolitan literature and theory.

While demonstrating the greater gravity of madness or memory within eccentric and concentric citytexts, in which the self is polarized respectively in space or time, this study seeks to attend to the complex chronotopic dimensions of particular narrative consciousnesses. It traces the interplay of memory and madness in discrete texts. We find past as well as culturally transposed presences transfigured in Pushkin’s and Gogol’s madmen’s paranoid projections. Dostoevsky’s underground man’s interlocutors are engaged through both recollection and paranoid anticipation. Similarly, the underground man and Brás Cubas anticipate Proust’s Swann and Marcel as they confront their own manias as a creative condition for recollecting narrative. Bulgakov dramatizes in his displaced poet the creative capacity of memoried madness in the moonlit rewriting of the ending of his masterful novel. Spaces evoked by pathological memory, mania and schizophrenia are all the more crossed in Pelevin’s and Lin’s urbane fictions, indicative of the ways in which recent eccentric citytexts contend with now piled-up histories, while concentric citytexts contend with decentring post-colonial discourses. The postmodern eccentric citytext accrues local time and memory, and the concentric registers present difference encompassing disruptive displacement and distant memory. EccentriCities argues that cultural distance remains the most definitive dimension for eccentric revision, even as it spatially remaps cultural memory in the ex-centric domain.

If creative consciousness in nineteenth-century Petersburg and Rio texts is (and in later larger Russian and Brazilian contexts remains) more liminal, marked by manic schizophrenia and other forms of madness, while consciousness in once concentrically coherent Paris or Moscow texts still reflects historical haunting, all these cities and their fictions share places (public squares and private rooms, tenement stairways, taverns, salons, prisons, madhouses) that function as spaces of linguistic, social, ideological, mythical and literary convergence. These are threshold sites for aesthetic refractions and self-realization. Yet the maps, lithographs, and photographs considered here alongside literary citytexts, evince how these commonplaces are differently charted in eccentric and concentric texts. They discretely frame these sites for dialogue within the city, by visually as well as verbally emphasizing different dimensions. Their chronotopic dynamics are contingent on peculiar political-ideological and material principles of (re)construction in the city. While evident on the surface, these different dimensions and dynamics of eccentric and concentric construction are more exposed in verbal and visual texts that turn towards edges (both literal and literary margin or visual frame) and into the underground (literal urban foundation and urbane consciousness). EccentriCities retraces St. Petersburg and Rio as sites whose underground narrators’ mad and memoried, contradictory, cross-cultural modes of creativity underpin not only later competing modernisms, but also current dialogues in literature and theory.

¹ Mário de Andrade, Hallucinated City/Paulicéia Desvairada (1922). Bi-lingual edn. Trans. Jack E. Tomlins (Nashville, TN: Vanderbuilt University Press, 1968), 9; Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol (Norfolk: New Directions, 1944), 140–1.

² Cf. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1880–1930 (Sussex: Harvester, 1978), 47; Douwe Fokkema and Elrud Ibsch, Modernist Conjectures: A Mainstream in European Literature, 1910–1940 (London: C. Hurst & Company, 1987), 43.

³ Max Nordau, Degeneration (1892) (New York: H. Fertig, 1968 [1895, 1892]), 536; cited in Richard Lehan, The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 126.

⁴ Lehan, The City in Literature, 126.

⁵ Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (1903), in Donald L. Levine (ed.), On Individuality and Social Forms; selected writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 324–39, 325.

⁶ Lehan, The City in Literature, 126.

⁷ Simmel, ‘The Metropolis …’, 325.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Ibid.

Part I

Eccentricity and modernity

[Nineteenth-century writers] built their myths by returning to [the city] obsessively, in a variety of ways, from a variety of angles, their obsessive concern being with the character of this new urban life, with what happened to the traditional staples of human nature when placed in an unnatural setting and subjected to pressures, many of them new in kind and all of them new in degree. The results – strangeness, alienation, crime, as matters of fact – explain much of the common technical inventory: a carefully fostered sense of mystery (atmosphere), of grotesquerie, a penchant for stark contrasts, for the improbable, the sensational, the dramatic. Technique and theme, in short, go hand in hand, and both are directly connected with urban social history. We need a study of that connection, but it would make a book in itself.¹

¹ Donald Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism, A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens and Gogol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965),

Chapter 1

Urban contexts, urbane consciousness and the eccentric slant of modernisms

Retracing urban/e dimensions of the modernist novel

While modernism ranges far beyond the bounds of the city, it emerges from crises concentrated in urban centres and urbane consciousness. Modernist writers converge in St. Petersburg and Rio de Janeiro, Moscow and São Paulo, as in Paris, London, Lisbon, Prague, New York and other cities whose contours filter into their fictions. These cities concentrate publication venues, a reading public and the political and critical establishments that redefine modern literary production. Within a broad Western tradition, works such as Bely’s Петербург (Petersburg), Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Time Past), Pessoa’s O Livro do desassossego (The Book of Disquietude), Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Kafka’s Der Prozes (The Trial), Joyce’s Dubliners and Ulysses, and Mário de Andrade’s Pauliceia Desvairada (Hallucinated City) chronicle the pressures of the modern city in cultural crisis. Their doubly inward turn, into the mind and the margins of the text, appears motivated by the increasing alienation and self-consciousness of modern urban life. Thus, historical, geographical, sociological and psychological dimensions of modernism are often mapped in relation to the city.¹

Insofar as they take the city as setting and its denizens as characters for the novel, modernist fictions extend a literary line including the Parisian physiologie and roman feuilleton, developed through such variants as the Petersburg ocherk. The rambling of modernist narrators is related to that of the flâneur made famous by Balzac’s fictions. While exploring the layered social and psychological domains delineated by writers such as Balzac, Baudelaire, Flaubert and Zola, modernist narrative often turns into more degenerate spaces in the literal and social urban landscape than realist or naturalist fiction, and into darker recesses of individual and cultural consciousness than romantic realism. It blurs boundaries, turns on uncertainty and into the uncanny.² It grants greater access to the city and self, albeit through an apparently depersonalizing dialogue within a split self and relatively impersonal intertextual dialogue, paradoxically expanding its reach by pushing inwards through an abstracted experience of the concrete and through linguistic and literary openings in the city text.³ But in its digressive exploration of the creative potential inherent in prosaic and pathological aspects of urban space, speech and subject, the rambling of ‘high modernist’ narratives such as Proust’s or Joyce’s resembles, more closely than the flâneur’s reporting of urban event and character in fairly good faith, the admittedly evasive accounts of earlier eccentrics voicing culturally and critically marginal works. It evokes Gogol’s ambivalently urbane skaz narrator pursuing digressive clerks and artists through Petersburg, Gogol’s madman chronicling his own disintegration in the city, Hugo’s self-exonerating condamné executing his own recursively and retrospectively open sentence against a death sentence, and Baudelaire’s refractory poète-chiffonier recuperating and recycling urban detritus – apparently anachronistic figures, more subjective in relating urban life, more strained in their relation to the city, and more depersonalized than Balzac’s flâneurs. We revisit territory traced in Gogol’s chronicles of displacement, Hugo’s cautionary narrative against forgetting and dismembering, and Baudelaire’s poetry of recycling in the modernist recovery of cityscape, culture and consciousness in a condition of uncertainty, confronting apparently insoluble crisis.⁴ Recognized by recent critics, these echoes have required some rethinking of literary lines. Yet modernist novelists including Proust, Gide and Woolf directly associated their reconfiguration and relocation of modern fiction with earlier embodiments of alienated consciousness in French and Russian literature, prosaically fleshing out Baudelaire’s poetic sentence and adapting the cross-cultural crisis of consciousness and conscience in Dostoevsky’s fictions to their own cultural contexts – fraught first by historical disruption and only later by a sense of cultural displacement and decentring. But rather than merely reaffirming the influence of a Russian psychological realism reduced in translation and refracted through literary debates staged largely in London and Paris though resounding as far as Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, this study seeks to more radically re-map modernism as urban/e phenomena.

Unruly realist as much as high modernist works are often already constructed by the bricolage that Lyotard recognizes as the principle of postmodernist architectural construction, neither forgetful nor totalizing (an impulse he attributes to modernist, particularly Futurist, architecture). They are engaged in what Lyotard recognizes in avant-garde art as ‘postmodernist’ recovery and scrutiny of the past, suggesting continuities rather than discontinuity between modernism and postmodernism.⁵ The literary sentence in these citytexts, with its capacity for urbane re-membering (destructive, deconstructive and creative), arbitrates against a real death sentence in the city, positing ambivalent self-authoring against absurd authority. The ‘crisis of presentation’ afflicting cultural and individual consciousness in the city results ‘among other things, in a penchant for forms which, by turning in upon themselves show the process of the novel’s making, and dramatize the means by which the narration is itself achieved’.⁶ The reflexive strain of the modernist novel under focus in this investigation explores both urban landscape and literary form as these are refracted within alienated urbane consciousness, paradoxically self-aware and articulate pathological figures. While the city is the context in which romantic and realist as well as modernist fiction represent doubting and doubling of the self, in modernist works charting their own becoming in the context of urban crisis, the multiplicity of the self is concomitantly represented in urban space, urbane consciousness and narrative structure. Sentenced consciousness frames our perception of the city. The cityscape literally unfolds within the turns of a grammatically recursive sentence and reflexive generic structure, yet modes of urban construction frame urbane consciousness and begin to redefine grammar and genre.

Reflexive variants of the novel especially elucidate the formative presence of the city in the modern novel. Urbane narrative consciousness registers, recognizes and resists the urban framework. Such works not only make explicit the fact pointed out by Tadié in his essay ‘Ville, architecture du roman’: cities may order and disorder novels, urban topography orienting narrative trajectory, while the ‘eruption of the megapolis’ ‘multiplies’ and ‘pulverizes’ narrative discourse.⁷ Reflexive first-person narratives also expose the particular dynamics of that correlation and critically reflect on violently urban/e modes of creation – retrospective, refractive, revisionary. Like the postmodern architecture Lyotard describes, reflexive fictions arbitrate against abstraction, even as they contend directly with their own abstraction and arbitrariness. They are conscious of urban context and urbane consciousness as spaces that must be inhabited, conducive not just to the circulation of bodies and texts, but to humane intercourse, ensuring significance, survival. By fleshing out urbane authorial consciousness circulating in the city, confronting and recalling others and self as other, these fictions manifest the ways in which particular architectonics of cities – the (re)imagining of the city (re)drawing of streets, sectioning into quarters or neighbourhoods; the dynamics of underground and surface circulation; the (re)definition of horizons, of socio-economic, political and symbolic systems; even shifting modes of monumental construction and placement of public art, architectural redesign and shifting styles of interior decoration – impose different constructive dimensions and dynamics on literary language and form.⁸

For first-person narrators in fictions such as Dostoevsky’s Записки из подполья (Notes from Underground) and Machado de Assis’s Memórias Postumas de Brás Cubas (Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas), the retreat into a corner of the city instigates the writing of the narrative. As Irving Howe observes of Notes from Underground, ‘the city bears … what might be called a dialectical intimacy with the narrator: each of his intellectual disasters is publicly reenacted as a burlesque in the streets,’ so that ‘the city provides’ the author (and this peculiarly self-conscious self-authoring narrator) ‘with the contours and substance of his metaphysical theme’.⁹ However, that metaphysical theme, a matter of freedom related as directly to aesthetic or authorial discourse as to questions of cultural and political authority in reflexive modernist works, is not merely retrospectively explored through an urban dialectic. Just as there is no synthesis in the developing urban landscape, there is no final metaphysical realization in these self-realizing novels. The subject’s relation to the city is dialogic, involving the continual re-presentation of the city’s contradictory discourses in narrative that consciously re-maps city and re-designs citytext, reorienting the reader in relation to both. The eclectic city, refracted within consciousness, becomes pretext, subtext and context for the realization of the polyphonic novel, reorienting narrative form towards humanizing ambiguity. Metaphysical and moral concerns are connected to the material and, at the same time, to the literary and meta-literary planes of these novels, where the narrator reaches towards a reader, made responsible to this multiplicity.

This critically urbane, concomitantly confined and digressive narrative consciousness, whose central ethical concern is embedded in aesthetics, is entrenched as a feature of modernism by the time Proust’s Marcel recovers multiple places, persons and pasts from his present corner in Paris; yet its relation to discrete modes of urban development and circulation is relatively unexamined in literary criticism and theory. Urban contexts are recognized as essential to modernism, typically dated in Europe from the 1880s or the close of the nineteenth century, in Russia from the early twentieth century, in Brazil with the manifestos of ‘modernismo’ issued in the 1920s.¹⁰ However, the significance of this urbanity shaping the modernist novel is asserted mainly in terms of its general character – undifferentiated and derivative. This reduction of the city in the text is both a function of and perpetuates misreadings of the citytext. Recent scholarship examines more closely the interrelation between specific socio-historical, cultural and literary geographies, narrative and cognitive structures.¹¹ More interdisciplinary in scope, recent mappings of modernism also stretch beyond conventional historical and geographical bounds. Yet the concentric city remains at the core of most of these revisionary studies, not only as site but, more problematically, as structure in terms of which eccentric citytexts are understood as colonized, co-opted, and corresponding derivatives or as contrastive, but incoherent, chaotic, disorderly deviations. In this study, the eccentric is repositioned in dialogue with the concentric, still provoked and provocateur, but speaking from and in terms of its own complex cultural context.¹² Eccentric literature recalculates modernist time and place (history) and structure (chronotope and consciousness), through the narrators who playfully and perversely cast themselves as deviants and their works as paradoxically authentic, authoritative and even ethical deviations. Cross-examining dynamics of urbane discourse and consciousness in discrete Russian and Brazilian contexts elucidates both eccentric derivations of European modernism and distinctly eccentric modes of modernist construction.

Gogol’s and Dostoevsky’s, Machado de Assis’s and Lima Barreto’s alienated narrators recover ground in the city and gain footing in cultural consciousness through partial representation, problematized recollection, paranoid projection and schizophrenic response, corresponding to their respective city’s eccentric modes of cultural conception. Their fictional recollections of urban spaces and reflections on urbane narrative recall domains and dynamics already registered in a reflexive line of visual (cartographic, lithographic and other artistic) as well as literary representations. But looking through more layered critical lenses at copied and contradictory construction, these writers interrogate further what is represented and its mode of representation. Their fictions explore, in disrupted, digressive internalized dialogues and direct confrontation with death, both the end of consciousness and the ethical ends of aesthetic consciousness.¹³ The closed circle of these eccentric narratives ultimately encompasses an infinitely open space, stretching like early maps and panoramas of Petersburg and Rio towards unmeasured horizons, drawn out in these fictions within what would seem infernal, dead-ended underground discourse. These eccentric undergrounds can be compared to the depths mined as openings in the concentric citytext through the unearthing of individual and cultural memory, chronicling of socio-ideological and material upheaval, and exploration of socially and historically layered language. In both concentric and eccentric contexts, underground discourse explores new dimensions within the confines of the city and the non-transcendent subject. As Georges Poulet notes in Les Métamorphoses du cercle, this involves a circling towards a centre reconfigured in modernity as interiority, which supplants external authority and objectivity. At its limits, the subject deploys exteriority, and there is a constant movement between centre and periphery, constant expansion and concentration.¹⁴ We recognize redesigned space and movement in these eccentrically circling narratives as alternative to and anticipation of the works of such concentric writers as Baudelaire, Flaubert, James and Eliot, examined by Poulet. Both eccentric and concentric reflexive modernist narrating consciousness represents the concomitant insideness and outsideness that Bakhtin ascribes to the author of the polyphonic novel. But Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s eccentric narrators register more peripherally engaged and polyphonic cosmologies than Baudelaire and Flaubert, and anticipate the more dynamic dimensions of Proust’s and Woolf’s memoried fictions, in an underground charted on the surface and in the simultaneity and schizophrenia of the eccentric city.

It is the alienation of fictive narrators in the city that generates not only self-consciousness but the authorial capacity ‘for hearing and understanding all voices immediately and simultaneously’ – an urbane capacity that, according to Bakhtin, is characteristic of the novelistic genre of modernity. The compression of the city gives rise to that polyphonic and dialogic structure of the novel recognized by Bakhtin as a ‘new artistic model of the world’.¹⁵ Bakhtin’s understanding of the dialogism inherent in Romantic, Realist or Modernist novels is wholly urbane. Gachev maps Bakhtin: ‘Bakhtin is the City (and not the Countryside), People, heteroglossia (and not silence), dialogue (and not a unified or single Logos), polyphony (multivoicedness), pluralism, and not singleness … And so is the novel as a genre. It is also the city! And its genres are the formation of cultural consciousness …’¹⁶ That is, the capacity of authorial consciousness to flesh out in fictive dialogue multiple ‘speech genres’, with their sociological and ideological particularity, depends on attentiveness to the circulation of language in the city and its satellites, to the plural discourses of urban characters and to displaced urbane consciousness. In that model of character development that Bakhtin derived from his reading of Dostoevsky’s novels, fictive consciousness develops at crossroads and on thresholds concentrated in the town or city. The other’s perspective is necessary for the realization of the self,¹⁷ and the city is the quintessential space in which the subject is forced to face himself in the gaze and understand himself through the utterance of others. The resulting sense of irreducible difference is critical for authentic realization, always responsive, whether ethically responsible or irresponsible.

This dependence on contact for the development of fictive consciousness can be found not only in the urban Dostoevskian novel that Bakhtin privileges, but generally in the Bildüngsroman or roman d’éducation, which in the nineteenth-century revolves increasingly around the hero’s coming to, circulating within and departing from the city. Whether the city functions as a point of arrival, as Paris for Balzac’s Rastignac and Petersburg for Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, or of departure, as for Flaubert’s Frédéric or Machado de Assis’s Rubião (in discrete anti-Bildüngsromans), the realization of the hero is wholly urbane, conscious of the interplay of meaning in interlocking urban discourses. In Notes from Underground and Posthumous Memoirs, as in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Proust’s Recherche, not only points of departure and arrival, but also the distance travelled lies (or is recuperated) within the city. More essentially, in such reflexive novels, urban discourse and literary dialogism are realized both though the ‘face to face’ encounters recognized by Bakhtin,¹⁸ but also through a facing of self as other through continual repositioning, replacement, and remembering. Polyphony resounds in modernist narrative in the intercourse between fictive characters who converge in the novel as they might in the city, in impossible conversations created by the recursive turns of an urbane narrative consciousness, in intertextual dialogues instigated by a cosmopolitan author (double-voiced discourse in which fictive narrator and other characters may or not be conscious participants), and in the interpenetration of different forms of urban discourse.

A hybrid genre, the novel, particularly in its modernist and postmodern variants, incorporates the language, form and content of newspapers, of political, juridical, aesthetic, scientific and philosophical debate and of multiple strains of popular speech concentrated in the city. If this is particularly clear in recognized modernist citytexts such as Bely’s Petersburg, Mário de Andrade’s Hallucinated City, and Joyce’s Ulysses, we find that Gogol’s and Dostoevsky’s, Machado de Assis’s and Barreto’s narratives anticipate their hybrid forms and self-consciously derivative, divided, textually mediated motley characters, while also anticipating a postmodern casting of authorial consciousness along these lines. Theirs are ‘modern characters’ such as Strindberg describes in a preface to Miss Julie (1888), ‘living in an age of transition more urgently hysterical at any rate than the age that preceded it’, whose situation requires that he ‘have drawn them as split and vacillating’. Strindberg speaks to a corresponding generic vacillation: ‘My characters are conglomerations of past and present stages of civilization, bits from books and newspapers, scraps of humanity, rags and tatters of fine clothing, patched together as is the human soul.’¹⁹ This characterization of the composite subject of modernist fiction is prefigured also by Hugo’s gamin and word-mongering urban narrators as by Baudelaire’s aged chiffonier, collecting and recycling fragments of speech and material as they cut across layers and spheres of the concentric cityscape. But socio-historical speech forms, customs, costumes, literary models, etc. in early Petersburg and Rio de Janeiro citytexts are drawn from far more widely dispersed, displaced, contradictory and temporally collapsed cultural references, which, as Schwarz points out in his seminal study of Machado de Assis, are poorly suited to these contexts, hence peculiarly revealing.²⁰ We might recall the ‘baggy’ form of Russian fiction recognized by James and Woolf’s evocation of Russian writers in her call for unbuttoned prose adequate to the unravelled subject of modern fiction – except that these writers’ associations draw on a Russian literary canon delimited not only by the dissemination of problematic translations, but also by critical interpretations such as de Vogüé’s, designating the ‘soul’ as the special domain of the Russian novel and excluding from its canon precisely the more eccentric strains focused on here: Gogol’s Petersburg tales and Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground resist the rallying of an alternate Russian realism in critique of French naturalism.²¹ These complex and much contested Russian narratives, along with ambiguous Brazilian novels like Machado’s Posthumous Memoirs, challenge the ethics and aesthetics of European romanticism and realism as well as anticipate and offer alternatives to European modernism, while critically redefining their respective literary traditions by concentrating and directly confronting the contradictions of marginocentricity.

The shifting reception of these works by Gogol, Dostoevsky and Machado de Assis, both at home and abroad, demonstrates how literature not only