In writing and design, Wharton strove for clean lines and economy, to remove excess. Lily’s excessive, a disturbance within the social structure. It’s rotten, but she’s a character formed inside its rooms. Lily wanted to be an original, and Wharton, conflicted and ambivalent about the new, gave her enough rope to hang herself—trapping her between the novel of situation (or circumstance and circumstantial evidence) and the novel of character. Through her imperfect heroine, Wharton proclaimed the vivacious allure of freedom, the voracious seductiveness and promise of modernity and change, with all its destructive potential, and the helplessness of individuals before the claims and blind dictates of society in which women and men lived. But she didn’t allow them a talking cure, and her characters have very little room in which to negotiate happy endings.
***
Another unsettling element of modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before; for though one of the instincts of youth is imitation, another, equally imperious, is that of fiercely guarding against it. (Writing, 17)
Original vision is never much afraid of using accepted forms [my emphasis]; and only the cultivated intelligence escapes the danger of regarding as intrinsically new what may be a mere superficial change, or the reversion to a discarded trick of technique. (Writing, 109)
There is one more thing to be said in defence of conformity to style; and that is, the difficulty of getting rid of style. Strive as we may for originality, we are hampered at every turn by an artistic tradition of over two thousand years. Does any but the most inexperienced architect really think he can ever rid himself of such an inheritance? He may mutilate or misapply the component parts of his design, but he cannot originate a whole new architectural alphabet. The chances are that he will not find it easy to invent one wholly new moulding. (Decoration, 15)
When I read the last quote to Laura Kurgan, an architect, she said, “You could get rid of the molding entirely.” It’s what the modernists did.
I have discovered the following truth and present it to the world: cultural evolution is equivalent to the removal of ornament from articles in daily use . . . Don’t you see the greatness of our age lies in its inability to produce a new form of decoration? We have conquered ornament, we have won through the lack of ornamentation. . . . for ornament is not only produced by criminals; it itself commits a crime, by damaging men’s health, the national economy and cultural development.7
Adolf Loos wrote his famous essay, or manifesto, “Ornament and Crime,” in 1908. Wharton’s work on houses and decoration preceded it by a decade. She was in line with Loos, and the modernists, to a point.
It is the superfluous gimcrack—the “ornament”—which is most objectionable, and the more expensive these items are the more likely they are to harm. (Decoration, 177)
The supreme excellence is simplicity. Moderation, fitness, relevance . . . There is a sense in which works of art may be said to endure by virtue of that which is left out of them, and it is this “tact of omission” that characterizes the modern hand. (Decoration, 192)
Wharton appreciated simplicity and omission. But she could see the reason, rhythm, and logic of certain kinds of decoration.
While plain paneling, if well-designed, is never out of keeping, the walls of a music-room are especially suited to a somewhat fanciful style of decoration. . . . Fewer changes are possible in the “upright” [piano]; but a marked improvement could be produced by straightening its legs and substituting right angles for the weak curves of the lid. The case itself might be made of plainly paneled mahogany, with a few good ormolu ornaments; or of inlaid wood, with a design of musical instruments . . . (Decoration, 146-7)
Slavoj Zizek, lecturing at New York University, once urged the audience I was in to throw out the baby but keep the bathwater. Wharton wanted to keep the bathwater. Her disinclination to throw out everything—except what she called the “horrors”—makes her a vital candidate for rereading and rethinking. Wharton relentlessly forced her characters to live, and die, struggling against or submitting to conventions, acknowledging their contradictions, while trying to create paths through or around rigid social customs. They were usually blocked. She did not imagine a utopia. She didn’t see a way of divorcing the past from the present. She didn’t see the necessity of abandoning all traditions or styles. Even molding, in proportion to the room, could be beautiful.
It is a curious perversion of artistic laws that has led certain critics to denounce painted architecture or woven mouldings. As in imaginative literature the author may present to his reader as possible anything that he has the talent to make the reader accept, so in decorative art the artist is justified in presenting to the eye whatever his skill can service to satisfy its requirements nor is there any insincerity in this proceeding. (Decoration, 40)
Her ideas were modern—she wanted to clear house of nineteenth-century vestiges, stuffed chairs and stuffed shirts, to question conventions and numbing, absurd traditions, but she was far from being a card-carrying modernist. Wharton was skeptical about the new, not positive that progress was progress, not sanguine about the future of the joys of speed and flight, as the futurists were; she took off and looked back over her shoulder at the past. She doesn’t fit comfortably into the modernist canon and has suffered for it.
Architecture articulates space, the movement within walls and without them, delineates the relationships of the built to the unbuilt and surroundings. Wharton’s prose makes its own particular space, its complex borders pierced by new and old. It’s one of those uncanny pieces of fate—less colloquially, historical overdetermination—that her reputation, her literary place, is inflected not just by her idiosyncratic relationship to Modernism but also by three biographical facts: She was female, upper-class and Henry James’s younger friend. Not mentioning James in relation to her is like not mentioning the elephant in the room, a room which she did not, of course, design. Her critical reputation stands mostly in his large shadow. (Her primary biographer R.W.B. Lewis’s first sentence in his introduction to the House of Mirth begins “Henry James . . .”)8 Few U.S writers who are women make it, as the song goes, to standing in the shadows of love, critical love. (And her books were about love, its promise and seductiveness, its inevitable impossibility within a harsh, prohibitive world.)
The ironist Wharton might have appreciated, in her perverse way, the secondary or minor position she has attained. (Perhaps in the way Deleuze and Guattari appreciate minor literature) Ironically, undidacitally, Wharton teaches that separate isn’t equal; difference shouldn’t be but usually is hierarchical, and change in any establishment or tradition is like her sentences, slow.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author would like to thank Gregg Bordowitz and Kenneth Frampton for their invaluable help in the writing of this essay.
A brief, preliminary version of this essay appeared in Conjunctions: 29, Tributes, Fall 1997 (pp. 122-125); it was entitled “Edith Wharton: A Mole in the House of the Modern.”
NOTES
2. Edith Wharton, The Writing of Fiction (New York: Touchstone, 1997); first published in 1924.
3. Sigmund Freud, “Contributions to the Psychology of Love,” in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier Books, 1963), 63.
4. Edith Wharton, The Letters of Edith Wharton, ed. R.W.B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis (New York: Scribner’s, 1988), 450-1.
5. Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” in A General Selection from the Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. John Rickman, M. D. (New York: Doubleday, 1957), 116.
6. Charles Baudelaire, Intimate Journals, trans. Christopher Isherwood (London: Picador, 1990), 14.
7. Adolf Loos, “Ornament and Crime,” in Adolf Loos: Pioneer of Modern Architecture, ed. Ludwig Munz and Gustav Kunstler (New York: Prager, 1996), 226-8.
8. R.W.B. Lewis, “Introduction” to Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (New York: Bantam, 1984), viii.
X is for X-rated
History of Shit
A cesspool is not just a metaphor. In the suburbs, it’s under the driveway or front lawn, and, sometimes, during long, hot summers, it seeps. What escapes is an olfactory embarrassment that reminds the neighborhood of stuff no one wants to talk about. Dominique Laporte’s History of Shit reveals and revels in dirty, unmentionable stuff, digging beneath the beautiful to find the unspeakable it hides. Laporte sniffs bad smells, waxes rhapsodic about the odoriferous body and explores the division between private and public.
The story of shit is older than human beings, of course, but Laporte begins his account in 1539, with the proclamation, in France, of two edicts. One, the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterets, stated that “henceforth justice would be administered and civil documents and notarized acts registered in the French language.” The other edict, Laporte writes in characteristically florid style, “we need exhume . . . for its substance, and in so doing, may as well abandon ourselves, albeit briefly, to the strange beauty of its language.” It forbade “all emptying or tossing out into the streets and squares of [Paris] and its surroundings of refuse, offals, or putrefactions, as well as all waters whatever their nature . . .” Of the coterminous moves toward purging “maternal French” of Latin and Parisian streets of shit, Laporte comments: “We have known since Barthes that ‘when written, shit does not smell.’ . . . No doubt beautiful language has more than a little to do with shit, and style itself grows more precious the more exquisitely motivated by waste.”
This playful treatise, wryly translated by Nadia Benabid and Rodolphe el-Khoury, links asshole to mouth, excrement to language. Laporte claims that efforts to contain, deodorize and sanitize the body’s products have shaped language and consciousness. “To touch, even lightly, on the relationship of a subject to his shit,” Laporte writes, “is to modify not only that subject’s relationship to the totality of his body, but his very relationship to the world and those representations that he constructs of his situation in society.” Representations, such as language, must be censored, elegant phrases and stylistic flourishes invented to cover and disguise, like literary kitty litter, the human capacity to foul and be foul. “But the incapacity of this system to manage its own filth is lucidly betrayed by its intrepid fantasy of an elimination so complete it leaves no trace of waste.”
To this futile end—the fantasy of wastelessness in which “the hygienist is a hero”—excrement was taxed, by emperors Vespasian and Constantine; urine was drunk; and feces were turned into medicine and cosmetics. What streamed out of us could make money or make us healthy and beautiful. (The truism “Waste not want not” finds its supreme explicator in Laporte.) In a wackily convincing way, History of Shit traces society’s efforts to legislate and handle human waste, to reduce the shame produced by what leaks from our orifices, even to transform shit into gold. “The place where one ‘does one’s business’ is also the place where waste accumulates. . . . To each his shit! proclaims a new ethic of the ego decreed by a State that entitles each subject to sit on his own ass on his own heap of gold.”
Laporte, a French psychoanalyst, died in 1984 at the age of thirty-five. Along with Barthes, not surprisingly, his guiding lights were Freud and Lacan. The former “defined order, cleanliness, and beauty . . . as the cornerstones of civilization,” while the latter stated: “Civilization is the spoils: the cloaca maxima.” For these two theorists, the terror of our own mucky, dark holes, the abject fear of never climbing out of the primeval sewer, propelled the march to civilization—the costuming of human animality.
As a character from the anarchic ’60s should, Laporte maintains an ironic posture toward the civilizing drive. “The privatization of waste,” he proclaims in his inimitable fashion, “a process whose universality is not a historical given, made it possible for the smell of shit to be bearable within the family setting, home to the closest social ties.” In other words, the family, the basis of society, established an enduring bond only after first being able to stand each other’s shit—something R.D. Laing failed to mention in his critique of that neurotic social unit.
Reading History of Shit is both pleasurable and disgusting—and it is also about that ambivalent duo, pleasure and disgust. Laporte, who studied the hidden mission of style, also had style in abundance—a definite way with words—and his tongue is often in his cheek. My recourse to that flaccid metaphor drolly underscores his idea that language and the body are bound together—often gagged—in secret, inviolable secretions or nuggets. See, it’s nearly impossible to discuss History of Shit without sliding into bathroom humor, which is by definition immature. A baby’s interest in its shit precedes its ability to speak. So if eschatology is the study of last things, scatology should be the study of first things, since shit precedes language and death. In any case, History of Shit could transform all language scholars into Howard Stern. It certainly confirms this reader’s sense that it would be less embarrassing to admit to having murdered someone than to having farted in a “good” restaurant.
Twee Kamers
It’s very difficult to find apartments in Amsterdam, an old and small city. Sidonie and her friend were trying to find a place to live and they placed an ad in the newspaper, giving my place of work to call. They asked if I would mind taking calls for them. I said I wouldn’t.
My Dutch was hardly adequate; it enabled me to buy food and panic when times called for it. They had advertised for two rooms. I knew two rooms to be twee kamers.
I was alone in the office when the telephone rang. A Dutch male voice asked, “Advertitie voor twee kamers?” Ya, I replied, not me (or may, as it would be pronounced in Dutch), my friends, twee persons voor twee kamers. I felt quite proud of myself, two people for two rooms. Aah, he said, twee persons. Ya, I said, do you have them? Twee kamers, he said. Ya, ya, I said. Slowly, and partially in English, he said, “I am holding my pemel.” Oh, ya, I said, thinking he might mean he was holding a pencil, not knowing the world for pencil in Dutch, though curious as to why he would tell me that at all. “Momentje,” he called out. I imagined he was writing something down and waited. “Ik kom,” he cried. I hung up.
Y is for Yearning
For Sensitive People
It’s Independence Day, the Fourth of July, and America is 236 years old. I’ve been pondering the tortuous coupling, “art and politics.” Each partner resists easy definition, especially “art” (“Is it art?” and “What is art?” are jokes); I can’t imagine Ludwig Wittgenstein countenancing their murky conjunction. It’s hard to avoid the couple’s traps.
Art is not usually measured by its utility (the school of “relational aesthetics” attempts to call that hand), while politics is. What usefulness is believed to be is also a matter of contestation. In 1972, in Amsterdam, with artist Jos Schoffelen, I ran a cinema with an eclectic program, the first in the Netherlands to feature double-headers and to screen an Andy Warhol movie, Bike Boy (1967). A rogue film collector approached us with a 16mm print of Tarzan Escapes (1936). He screened it for us: Its white supremacy and brutal racism were shockingly casual. Black African men fell off steep cliffs, while their white British masters exclaimed about the loss of precious equipment.
Jos and I wanted to pair it with a documentary about the Black Panthers. Amsterdam’s Communist Film Club distributed it, but wouldn’t rent it unless we organized a protest march. “Why do we have to organize a march?” “Because it’s a political film,” they said. I said, “If people want to march afterward, they can.” Juxtaposing the two was art and politics; “Art could be a dialogue,” we said, “which is political activity.” “No way,” they said.
The cinema wasn’t considered “serious” because of its emphasis on art; soon their club vetoed the cinema getting funding from Amsterdam City Council. Maybe this is too strident or absurd an example of conflict between, and in, art and politics. Generally, I proffer the idea that all art is political, though I’m not satisfied by it. It seems subtle, yet too broad, and because of this not conv
incing. But I may be trapped in it, not having a better argument.
Writing novels and stories, I’ve become convinced that narratives concern themselves with justice or adjudication. Writing fiction, I might be able to avoid mental traps, habits of mind. I try to be vigilant about how I write—style, form—to trample complacency of all types; in concert with a writer’s lacks, it generates truisms and stereotypical characters.
I often recall other artists’ choices. Ad Reinhardt drew political cartoons and made non-referential paintings. The American poet George Oppen stopped writing poetry for 30 years, after he became a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s, because he wouldn’t write Party poems. When he started again, he produced an exceptional poetics.
In a performance I once saw, the artist Bob Flanagan hammered a nail into his penis. I put my head in my hands, covering my eyes (one man fainted); but I wouldn’t think of stopping him. It was his penis. Was this a political act? Flanagan was born with cystic fibrosis and was told he’d die at 20. He’d been a cystic fibrosis poster boy at 13. His art fought his genetic identity, and what the disease didn’t cruelly claim, he tormented. For his exhibition “Visiting Hours” at the New Museum, New York, in 1994, Flanagan built a hospital room and lay on a hospital bed, attached to an oxygen tank.
What Would Lynne Tillman Do? Page 24