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Modernism's poetics of dislocation
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Modernism's poetics of dislocation
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Content
MODERNISM’S POETICS OF DISLOCATION
by
Adrienne Walser
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)
August 2012
Copyright 2012 Adrienne Walser
ii
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the University of Southern California English department,
Visual Studies program, and Graduate College for the support that enabled me to write
this dissertation. The summer funding from USC Visual Studies aided my Mina Loy research
at the Yale Beinecke library, and the USC Graduate School Dissertation Fellowship helped
me complete this project. The English department at USC has been a constant source of
encouragement; my scholarship has been supported through fellowships, teaching,
conference travel funding, and inspiring relationships with my professors and classmates.
I would also like to thank the English department at the University of Arizona in Tucson,
where I received my master’s degree in English literature and began this journey.
This dissertation is the result of my relationships with many communities of people.
At the University of Arizona, I benefitted from Susan Aiken’s professional encouragement
and the inspiring teaching of Laura Berry, Miranda Joseph, Eric Hayot and Charlie Bertsch.
I would like to thank Eric and Charlie, who, as my mentors, helped shape my writing and
introduced me to the exciting field of modernism. It was also at the University of Arizona
that Tenney Nathanson, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, and Jason Zuzga taught me how to read
and love poetry. At the University of Southern California, Marjorie Perloff was an invaluable
source of inspiration and guidance; in her classes on the avant-garde and modernist poetics
I began my ruminations on modernist poetics of travel. Marjorie, thank you for introducing
me to the poet Blaise Cendrars. I am grateful to Akira Mizuta Lippit, whose classes and
teaching inspired me profoundly, influencing the way I think and write about media, culture,
and the world. Viet Thanh Nguyen has been very helpful to me as a mentor, teacher, and
iii
friend. My studies with Viet on cosmopolitanism and travel served as the groundwork for
this dissertation. I am very grateful for the support, the provocative questions and thoughtful
guidance of Susan McCabe, who has overseen this project from beginning to end. I have
thoroughly enjoyed working with Joseph Boone on this dissertation; his careful reading,
astute feedback, critical insights, and enthusiastic direction made writing this dissertation
an exciting and rewarding experience. Thank you, Joe.
My friends have been an endless source of love, fun, encouragement, and
illuminating conversations over the course of this journey. Their creativity and passion for
their own work inspires me. Without them, this dissertation would not exist. Thank you to
Amaranth Borsuk, Gabriella Jauregui, Sam Solomon, Stacy Dacheux, Jimena Sarno, Colin
Dickey, Marie Smart, Raphaelle Steinzig, Miranda Thompson, Steve Kidder, Robin Wisser,
and Taylor Baldwin. Thank you to Linda Wei, who never doubted that I would complete this
project, and whose love and care helped me to do so. I am very grateful for my lifetime best
friends—my sister, Christie Walser Mullins, and my father, Jack Walser—who support me
in so many ways. I appreciate how this dissertation has been a collaborative project, one
informed by my interactions with many people who encouraged me to travel down new and
compelling paths of inquiry.
iv
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ii
List of Figures iv
Abstract v
Introduction 1
Chapter One: Blaise Cendrars’s Signs of Travel 37
Chapter Two: Mina Loy and the Traveling Self 90
Chapter Three: Getting On: Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark 140
Epilogue 201
Bibliography 207
v
List of Figures
Fig. 1. Blaise Cendrars, La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France 46
Fig. 2. Blaise Cendrars, Cover, Le Panama ou Les adventures de mes sept oncles 69
Fig. 3. Blaise Cendrars, Le Panama ou Les adventures de mes sept oncles 71
Fig. 4. Umberto Boccioni, Le strada entra nella casa 103
vi
Abstract
This dissertation, “Modernism’s Poetics of Dislocation,” contributes to the field
of transnational modernism in its examination of writers whose birthplaces include England,
Switzerland, and the West Indies, and whose writing is defined by modernity’s multi-
directional movements. I examine the work of Blaise Cendrars, Mina Loy, and Jean Rhys
as modernist modes of early twentieth-century travel writing. Neither they nor their writing
fit into categories delineated by national or cultural lines. Thus, I argue that their texts,
which have yet to be fully investigated as travel writing, complicate not only this genre,
but modernism’s literary genealogies. Their models of modernist travel serve as a contrast
to its narratives of exile and expatriation that rely on fixed categories of self and place.
These dynamic intercultural texts of movement anticipate contemporary forms of mobility
and identities that negotiate the local and the global. By focusing on these writers, whose
lives and work cross myriad borders, this project remaps modernism’s terrain and challenges
its mono-national literary frameworks through an interrogation of the lines that have
previously delineated its literatures.
Because this group of writers inhabited many communities, forming relationships
across national and cultural spaces, their texts and literary methods are cross-pollinated
products of synergistic collaborations and exchanges across various locations and intellectual
coteries. Unlike the expatriates gathered in Paris, who more often than not remained attached
to their home countries, the writers examined here demonstrate in their geographical and
literary promiscuity little nostalgia for home or allegiance to a country. Enacting shifting
landscapes and multiple perspectives, their texts serve as a foil to the teleological journeys
vii
depicted in conventional travel writing and modernist novels of travel, which typically
differentiate between home and away, and feature a central subject anxiously safeguarding
borders. If modernist writing tends to exhibit anxiety about displacement—about the self
becoming unmoored from its origins—these forms of travel writing understand the self as
unstable and subject to continual reconfiguration. In contrast to conventional travel writing,
in which difference is a threat to a traveler’s logic of a coherent identity, the texts of the
writers that I examine in this project challenge rigid constructions of the self and other.
Their poetics of dislocation reflect the contacts, exchanges, and the dissonance of modernity.
1
Introduction
This dissertation examines the work of writers Blaise Cendrars, Mina Loy,
and Jean Rhys as modernist modes of early twentieth-century travel writing. I argue that
their texts—which have yet to be fully investigated as travel writing—complicate and subvert
not only the conventions of this genre but also modernism’s national and literary genealogies.
These nomadic writers translated their personal and geographical dislocations into dynamic
literary forms indicative of modernity’s multi-directional movements. Not only does their
work resist categorization along national, cultural, and aesthetic lines, their avant-garde
poetics and hybrid forms enact a plethora of heterogeneous identities and shifting terrains
that stand in contrast to both the ordered trajectory of the travel story and the modernist
narrative of expatriation that rely on the stability of self and place. Highlighting liminal
spaces as opposed to distinct origins and final destinations, these texts serve as foils to
modern Europe’s narratives of teleological progress and its more visible forms of modern
travel.
Cendrars, Loy, and Rhys participated in the transnational travel and creative cross-
currents that were part of the modernist zeitgeist of the early twentieth-century, yet their
itinerancies produced unique textual forms of dislocation. While these three writers share a
history of living and writing unanchored to any one particular nation, culture or location,
their heterodox and mixed textual forms mirror their heterogeneous affiliations and ways of
traveling. Living and working both inside and outside their period’s literary communities,
2
all three wrote across genres—and even within those genres, their writing troubles textual
singularity. Each were influenced by the isms of early twentieth century and circulated in
modernism’s art and literary communities, yet each rejected long-term affiliations with any
one group. Unlike the expatriates gathered in Paris, who more often than not remained
attached to their home countries, the writers of interest to this project demonstrate in their
geographical and literary promiscuity little nostalgia for home or allegiance to a particular
country. Though rooted in the particularities of places familiar to them, their texts of travel
reflect a migrant sensibility.
None of these three writers considered themselves “travel writers,” nor has their
work been fully explored as travel writing; doing so, I argue, adds further texture to an
already rich picture of modernism and its travel by making visible hitherto neglected,
imposed and negotiable borders and transcultural networks of relations in the early decades
of the twentieth century. I contend that the texts of travel of Cendrars, Loy, and Rhys serve as
a foil to the journeys depicted in conventional travel writing and modernist novels of travel,
which typically differentiate between home and away, and feature a central subject anxiously
safeguarding borders. Their innovative aesthetics enact complex unmoorings of self and
place that move beyond the modernist conceptions of movement and anxiety about the
uprooting and fracturing of the self.
The unsettling movements and sense of disorientation that characterize modernity
were instigated and facilitated by the period’s new technologies of transportation and
communication, transnational exchanges, empire-building and world wars. The texts of these
3
particular writers reflect not only varied responses to these forces but suggest transformative
identities and forms that anticipate contemporary concerns about what it means to be mobile
and to negotiate multiple and varied identifications. What has been said of Loy’s relevance to
current understandings of modernity and modernism can also be said of Cendrars and
Rhys—namely, that they are “attractive both because [they] seem so much a part of the
issues that animated (and tortured) the era—and also because [their work] can seem to point
to a way beyond them.”
1
Their dynamic texts of movement anticipate contemporary forms of
mobility and identities that negotiate and move between local and global relationships.
Given the transcultural exchanges that facilitated the artistic and literary movements of
the early twentieth-century, any study of modernism’s texts requires paths of inquiry that can
negotiate its complex cultural terrains. Accordingly, this dissertation’s engagement with the
genre of travel writing and with modernist texts situates this project at a crossroad of
multiple scholarly fields; therefore, my methodological approach to theorizing travel is
interdisciplinary. I ground these writers and their work within historical and cultural contexts,
utilize anthropology, post-colonial studies and narrative theory to examine forms of travel
and travel writing, and draw on contemporary gender theory and theories of phenomenology
in my consideration of identities that are fluid and formed through self-world interactions.
Given that the writing of Cendrars, Loy, and Rhys understands the self as part of a material
world in flux, I approach the notion of the self as embodied, mobile, and shifting in its
1
Maeera Shreiber and Keith Tuma, “Introduction,” Mina Loy: Woman and Poet (Orono, Maine:
1
Maeera Shreiber and Keith Tuma, “Introduction,” Mina Loy: Woman and Poet (Orono, Maine:
The National Poetry Foundation, 1998) p. 14.
4
identifications with, and attachments to, multiple places and groups. The work of Henri
Bergson, for example, which influenced both Cendrars and Loy, posits the body’s
intertwinement with the mind as the source of intuitive knowledge that is perceived or sensed
through its continuous activity in the world. The activity of travel provides opportunities
for moving outside the borders of the self and forming new connections and identities.
A receptive attitude to moving towards otherness, Bruce Robbins suggests, stimulates a
“mobile reciprocal interconnectedness.”
2
In the dissertation I seek to explore travel as an
activity of interconnectedness, and I approach the concept of travel from many angles;
I consider travel as movement that negotiates borders—those of nation, geography, genre,
the body and the self—and I consider travel as movement that facilitates diverse
identifications and affiliations.
This dissertation does not seek to present an overview of modernist travel writing,
nor does it offer a comprehensive survey of modernist travel writers who documented
the facts of their excursions away from home or on trips abroad. Nor does it seek to showcase
writers of travel that exist completely outside the borders of Euro-American modernism.
Instead, I offer, in the spirit of cultural parataxis, a transnational assemblage of writers and
texts of travel that are unique in their differing responses to modernity’s dislocations—
unique from one another and from those in their modernist communities. In taking into
consideration the literary, cultural, and geographical landscapes that produce these mobile
2
See Amanda Anderson’s article, “Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies of Modernity,”
Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1998) p. 274.
5
figures and texts, this project underscores the transnational character of modernism and
draws attention to its forms and discourses of dislocation. My focus on this group of writers,
who have often been peripheral in modernist studies, and whose lives and work cross myriad
borders, further unsettles modernism’s literary terrains and challenges its mono-national
frameworks. In this introduction I will discuss the fields of study, literary genres, historical
period, and aesthetic theories with which I am in conversation and which inform my
scholarship and methodologies.
The New Modernist Studies and its Transnational Turn
This project is situated within a framework of a “new modernist studies” that seeks to
expand the temporal and spatial borders of the field and draw attention to affiliations within
and across national spaces.
Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz in their 2006 PMLA
article, “The New Modernist Studies,” posit that modernist studies’ remapping of
modernism’s time and space boundaries goes hand in hand with rethinking the relations
between the terms “modernism,” “modernization,” and “modernity,” which in turn disrupts
the narrative of modernism as an elite Western art and as a literary movement pitting high
against low culture.
3
This reconceptualization of modernism as a global practice comprised
of transnational and transcultural exchanges has produced the “transnational turn” in
modernist studies. Hence, Paul Jay opens his book, Global Matters: The Transnational Turn
in Literary Studies, with this declaration: “Since the rise of critical theory in the 1970s,
3
“The New Modernist Studies,” PMLA 123. 3 (2008) pp. 737-748.
6
nothing has reshaped literary and cultural studies more than its embrace of transnationalism.
It has productively complicated the national paradigm long dominant in these fields,
transformed the nature of the locations we study, and focused our attention on forms of
cultural production that take place in the liminal spaces between real and imagined
borders” (1). The scholarship affiliated with this “turn” widens the modernist archive to
include alternative traditions, emphasizes the centrality of transnational circulation and
translation in the production of modernist art, and examines how modernists responded
to anticolonial projects and created models of transnational communities (Mao and
Walkowitz 739).
It is within these debates that modernist studies considers the political and cultural
implications of shifting from “modernism” to the plural “modernisms”
4
and poses the
question, “where was modernism?” as the means to “review the social and physical
architecture of modernity” and direct our attention to geographical cultures where modernism
“found a new range of forms, idioms and media” (Brooker 3).
5
This shifting of modernism’s
borders away from a nominal view of modernity to a relational one, Susan Stanford
Friedman observes, “opens up the possibility for polycentric modernities and modernisms at
4
See Peter Nicholls, Modernisms (1995), and the September 2006 special issue of Modernism/modernity
entitled Modernism and Transnationalisms.
5
See Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker’s collection of essays, Geographies of Modernism: Literature,
Cultures and Spaces.
7
different points of time and in different locations.”
6
In her work, Friedman deploys “cultural
parataxis” as the means to examine modernist texts “each in its own right, reflecting the
modernity of its time and place, as well as the textual and political unconscious of its
distinctive geomodernism.”
7
The body of work of modernist studies that informs this
transnational turn critiques the notion of a center and periphery, and recognizes that, in the
words of Friedman, “modernisms develop as a form of cultural translation or transplantation
produced through intercultural encounters” (“Periodizing Modernism” 430). Building on
Said’s traveling theory
8
and studies of geomodernisms,
9
Friedman characterizes encounters
within modernity as “sites of intercultural contact and multidirectional intermixing that are
not passive assimilations but transformative ones based in a blending of adaption and
resistance” (430).
Cendrars, Loy, and Rhys, each inspired by modernity’s frictions of travel, translated
their different responses to the dislocations of the early twentieth century into forms of
modernist writing that are, I argue, sites of intercultural encounters and multidirectional
intermixing. The particular texts of each writer that I have chosen to examine in this project
are not exceptional texts of travel simply because they deviate from conventional travel
6
See Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (1998) and “Periodizing Modernism:
Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/Time Borders of Modernist Studies.” Modernism/Modernity 13 (2006):
425-44.
7
See Friedman’s essay, “Paranoia, Pollution, and Sexuality; Affiliations between E.M. Forster’s A Passage to
India and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things” in Doyle and Winkiel’s Geomodernisms Geographies of
Modernism: Literature, Cultures and Spaces.
8
This term is taken from Said’s “Traveling Theory,” The World, the Text and the Critic (1983) and
his essay, “Traveling Theory Reconsidered” (1994) from Reflections on Exile and Other Essays.
9
See Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel’s collection, Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity.
8
writing in their aesthetic forms, but because, more significantly, they illuminate complex
models of movement and address the travel discourses housed within the “social and physical
architecture” of modernity. As such, they complicate and expand our understanding of what
is and has been considered the field of modernism.
The life-long nomadic existence of the French-Swiss writer Blaise Cendrars kept him
in touch with early twentieth-century culture; its forms, media, and technologies inspired his
disorienting poetics of travel. His is a poetics not interested in moving a subject from point A
to point B but in conveying the restless energy of the age through an aesthetics of collage that
mixes together without discrimination the materials of modern life from across cultures and
continents—photographs, art, postcards, newspapers, and adventure fiction—to create a
disorienting form of writing that literally and figuratively travels. His “travel writing”
blurs distinctions between avant-garde poetry, travel writing, the personal travelogue and
adventure fiction. Thus, Cendrars’s poems, written between 1913 and 1924, which I examine
in this project, are dynamic and disorienting travel maps of his experience in the modern
world, as is the poetry of the English-born Mina Loy, whose work is inspired by her
relationships to the various intercultural communities in which she lived—in London,
Munich, Paris, Florence, and New York City. Influenced by myriad early twentieth century’s
art and literary movements—Italian Futurism, for example, inspiring her early poetry—Loy’s
painting, poetry, journalism, fashion designs, and manifestos respond to, critique, and
reassemble that which she encountered in the places she circulated and lived. In contrast to
the pleasure in the possibilities of crossing borders that characterizes Cendrars’s and Loy’s
9
poetry, the displacements depicted in the texts of Jean Rhys are entangled with experiences
of alienation. Having grown up on the West Indies island of Dominica, the Anglo/Welsh-
Creole Rhys traveled uneasily as a migrant in Europe’s metropolitan centers. Her writing,
concerned with questions of identity, place, and difference, depicts transitory women
negotiating restrictive metropolitan landscapes and responding to their encounters with
various forms of estrangement, adaption, and resistance. The wandering narrative of her
novel, Voyage in Dark (1934), makes its anti-journey of a displaced young woman in London
into a form of critique of the English travel novel and of Europe’s colonializing texts and
discourses alike. In focusing on these three writers, this dissertation seeks to investigate
modernist practices of travel and, in the words of Jay, those forms of “cultural production
that take place in the liminal spaces between real and imagined borders” (1).
The Genre of Travel Writing
Given that travel writing has existed since people began leaving home and putting pen
to paper, the genre includes a wide variety of forms—from epics, travelogues and diaries to
novels, Baedeker Guides, picaresque adventures and epistolary exchanges. Travel writing
provides an enormous source of information about who has traveled, how, and why—
shedding light on who has had freedom of movement and what have been and are the costs of
travel. Travel writing has a troubled history of serving colonial projects of European nations
at least since the sixteenth-century. As Mary Louise Pratt documents in Imperial Eyes,
10
10
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. (New York: Routledge, 1992).
10
“[t]he Empire in its heyday was conceived and maintained in an array of writings” which
included legal documents, letters, novels, and poetry (Leon 21). Since the 1970s, there has
been a renewed interest in travel writing in the academic fields of humanities and social
sciences, and in post-colonial studies, in particular. Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), which
illuminates the mechanisms by which colonial discourse shaped the West’s perceptions of the
Eastern Other, served to generate interest in such scholarship. The fact that travel discourse
“produced the rest of the world for Europeans” (Pratt 5), continuing to do so well into the
twentieth-century, made travel writing particularly complicit in the violence of empire-
building, and therefore, a ethically problematic literary genre.
“Before tourism there was travel, and before travel there was exploration” (39),
explains Paul Fussell in his book Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars
(1980). Fussell expresses much dismay about the passports, identity cards, and legal
restrictions instituted in response to World War I, which meant that British travelers could no
longer roam free—hence the disappearance of “real” exploration and travel, which, he
argues, had a detrimental affect on travel writing. He makes a persuasive point that the way
one travels translates into the way one writes travel; in this particular example, he argues that
the British having free reign to travel translated into “richer travel books,” because the looser
the travel, the looser the genre—“enabling the writer to toss everything in” (78). Caren
Kaplan, in her critique of Fussell’s romantic treatment of British male travel writers and his
celebration of European expansionism that gave free rise “to the flowering of travel writing,”
quips, “the sun never set on the imagination and resources of the empire’s writers in this
11
halcyon view” (52). Kaplan argues that Fussell’s book, positively received in the mainstream
press for making travel writing respectable, “reproduces and participates in the primary
tropes of Euro-American modernisms” (51). For example, his book celebrates the travel trope
of the “gentleman traveler”—the white man of means who is cultured, literate, and
introspective—and in this celebration, Fussell relays an anxiety about the literary-ness of
travel writing suffering as a result of impediments to the movements of the cultured traveler.
In regards to the common “tourist” taking up travel writing in the wake of the “gentleman
traveler,” Fussell laments, “Is there not perhaps something in the genre that attracts second-
rate talents?” (212). Fussell’s favorite travel writer is the English gentleman, Robert Byron.
“The Road to Oxiana is his masterpiece,” Fussell writes, “[it] is the Ulysses or “The Waste
Land” of modern travel books” (108). In his argument that “real travel” results in literary
travel writing,
Fussell bemoans the growth of leisure travel and the tourist industry, which,
he argues, results in poor quality travel writing and the genre’s status as a middlebrow,
commercial genre.
Illustrating that similar anxieties exist within academic scholarship on travel writing,
Kimberely Healey, commenting on the French writers of travel she examines in her book
The Modernist Traveler: French Detours, 1900-1930, offers this caveat: “the writers I study
preferred to align themselves with great authors or philosophers rather than with vulgar
explorers or nineteenth-century tourists” (8). Acknowledging the problems with “the whole
travel metaphor”(33)—anthropologist James Clifford in his book, Routes: Travel and
Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, admits, “I struggle, never quite successfully,
12
to free the related term ‘travel’ from a history of European, literary, male, bourgeois,
scientific, heroic, recreational meanings and practices” (33). I too feel compelled to offer
caveats and qualifiers in my study of travel, but I do not seek to completely extricate the term
travel from this history. I acknowledge this history and these anxieties in this introduction
because they are exemplary of larger concerns that inform the work on travel writing,
concerns that underscore how issues of nation, class, race and gender continue to inform
and trouble the genre. While I cannot provide a comprehensive survey of the history of
travel and the genre of travel writing, the approaches, issues, and models that I touch on
are those that contribute to my examination of Cendrars, Loy and Rhys in the following
chapters.
The Shape of Travel
Travel writing informs our sense of time and space, and shapes our sense of our selves
in relation to others. Healey proposes that “[a]lthough travel writing may exist on the
margins of the literary canon, texts about travel have been instrumental in shaping the way
the world and self are understood and written in the twentieth century” (2). Indeed, travel
itself is an instrument that reshapes the traveler; the traveler leaves home, faces the unknown
in his or her explorations, and returns home changed as a result of perilous conflicts.
Fussell reminds us of the rigor of physical travel, of its effect on the body: “travel is work.
Etymologically, a traveler is one who suffers travail, a word deriving in its turn from Latin
tripalium, a torture instrument consisting of three stakes designed to rack the body” (39).
13
Travel writing is expected to report on the facts of the physical experience and inspire the
imagination with scintillating details of the foreign landscape and figures. No matter what
form the travel writing takes, it is in the difficult position of feeling the need to report on,
re-create, and re-invent the “real life” experiences of a particular traveler in a particular time
and place. In other words, the travel text always straddles the line between fact and fiction.
However, as Sara Mills suggests, “it is not necessary to read travel writing as expressing the
truth of the author’s life, but rather, it is the result of a configuration of discursive structures
with which the author negotiates” (11). It is the discursive structures with which the writer
constructs his or her travel narrative that are most revealing of the picture of himself or
herself and of the world that the writer seeks to create. Ideology exists in the form itself.
Despite the fact that travel writing has always been a hybrid and heterogeneous form,
one that has changed over time in response to cultural and technological conditions, modern
travel writing has relied on and shared particular formal literary conventions. For example,
of the role that writing has played in expanding and maintaining the Empire—and how this
has translated into a literary genre, Carol Leon explains: “Unfamilar spaces were translated
and made textually understandable using narratives, symbols and metaphors that were
commonplace to the colonial community” (21). Mills points out, “most travel writers portray
members of the other nation through a conceptual and textual grid constituted by travel
books. This close intertextual relation with other accounts can be seen in the fact that writing
has always appropriated other writing, sometimes explicitly but often by plagiarizing” (63).
Appropriation and plagiarism have tended to make for a uniform approach to the depiction of
14
the relationships between self, place, and others within the genre. This, however, is not the
case with the writing of Cendrars, whose appropriations and plagiarisms work against the
conceptual and textual grids of travel books by confusing lines between the foreign and the
familiar. Rhys in her novel, Voyage in Dark, calls attention to the language of colonial
discourse that works to make the other, or the unfamiliar, “textually understandable.”
As a general rule, travel writing tends to chart routes in which a traveler with a
predetermined destination undertakes a trip across geographical and textual landscapes.
11
Given its history, travel writing more often than not is encoded with the motifs of
exploration, conflict, mastery—the discourses of expansionism and colonialism—and
its narratives typically rely on the stability of the self in the face of unsettling encounters.
Carl Thompson, in his recent book, Travel Writing (The Critical Idiom), notes, “To begin
any journey, or indeed, simply to set foot beyond one’s front door, is quickly to encounter
difference and otherness. All journeys are in this way a confrontation with, more
optimistically a negotiation of, what is sometimes termed alterity” (10). As the traveler
negotiates alterity, he or she relies on an identity that is grounded in a stable origin (family,
culture, nation, gender, ethnicity), one that serves to inform his or her response to challenges
put forth by that which is foreign, and therefore a potential threat to the logic of the traveler’s
identity. The traveler must then translate his or her negotiation of the unfamiliar into a textual
terrain that is readable and understandable to his or her audience back home; as Steve Clark
observes, “the subject of a travel narrative must integrate new experiences and radical
11
Carol E. Leon. Movement and Belonging: Lines, Places, and Spaces of Travel. Travel Writing Across the
Disciplines: Theory and Pedagogy 11. (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009) p. 69.
15
geographical and cultural differences within a stable cultural frame” (64). Thus, travel entails
negotiating and translating into writing the encounter or contact of the self with the other.
Thompson proposes: “If all travel involves an encounter between self and other that is
brought about by movement through space, all travel writing is at some level is a record or
product of this encounter, and of the negotiation between similarity and difference that it
entailed” (10). The form that this record of the encounter takes—the documentation of this
negotiation—must re-create the encounter and produce for the reader the effect of the
contact. These sites of contact, or contact zones, are central motifs of travel writing. Writing
this encounter with the other—with difference—is a critical moment in a travel text given
that it is a site embedded with historical and ethical dimensions.
Pratt’s study of “contact zones” in Imperial Eyes has had a significant impact on
travel scholarship. In her study of travel books by Europeans about non-European parts of the
world, she borrows the term “contact zones” from linguistics, “where the term contact
language refers to improvised languages the develop among speakers of different languages
that develop among speakers of different native languages who need to communicate with
each other consistently” (6). In her work, she uses the term to refer to the space of colonial
encounters “in an attempt to invoke the space and temporal copresence of subjects previously
separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, and whose trajectories now intersect”
(7). “A contact perspective,” Pratt notes, “emphasizes how subjects are constituted in and by
their relations to each other” (7). This approach to examining contacts within travel
experiences informs my own work as it does work across academic disciplines—postcolonial
16
studies, cosmopolitan studies, border studies, and diaspora studies. As Clifford observes,
“[a]n unruly crowd of descriptive/interpretive terms now jostle and converse in an effort to
characterize the contact zones of nations, cultures, and regions: terms such as ‘border,’
‘travel,’ ‘creolization,’ ‘transculturation,’ ‘hybridity,’ and ‘diaspora’” (245). In his
anthropological work, Clifford approaches travel in the twentieth century as a “complex and
pervasive spectrum of human experiences” (3). He argues that “[e]veryone’s on the move,
and has been for centuries”—in a form of “dwelling-in-travel” (2). Thus, building on the
Pratt’s work as well as others, he approaches travel in the twentieth-century as a “complex
and pervasive spectrum of human experiences,” informed by local and global forces, in
which “practices of displacement might emerge as constitutive of cultural meanings rather
than as their simple transfer or extension” (3). In contrast to the notion of dwelling as “the
local ground of collective life, travel a supplement,” and that “roots always precede routes”
(3), Clifford examines travel as borderlands: “I portray a borderland, a zone of contacts—
blocked and permitted, policed and transgressive” (8). These zones of contact, or “differently
centered worlds” (27), Clifford argues, are sites of “worldly travel, difficult encounters and
occasion for dialogue” (12).
Clifford’s borderland, suggests Carol Leon, is a site that encompasses both stasis and
displacement; it is a “tension-ridden locus that is promising in its possibilities for translations
and encounters” (74). In Moment and Belonging: Lines, Places, and Spaces of Travel, Leon
draws on Clifford’s work and builds on Syed Manzurul Islam’s differentiations between
17
nomadic and sedentary travel
12
in her argument that the most basic feature in travel is the
movement of the traveller—“the transference of the self from one site to another” (26)—and
that “while the destination seems to be the goal of the journey, it is the action of moving,
of becoming, that constitutes the act of travel” (26). It is this transience, the fluid passage or
the movement between points of definition, in which the traveler encounters difference and
otherness where, Leon proposes, “true travel” happens. “Indeed,” she notes, “identity is
created in the act of traveling” (27). As an approach to the study of travel and travel
literature, she suggests that “by relocating the emphasis of the dialectic between self and
other from the destination of the travel to the mobility of the travel line, and by shifting
encounter and representation along the lines of travel, we complicate the relationship
between self and other, dweller and dwelling” (26). In “true travel,” which Leon designates
as nomadic travel, “spaces and bodies are configured and reconfigured in the ebb and flow of
their encounters.” Such nomadic relationships create “fissures in boundaries of representation
firmly entrenched in difference,” thus moving away from “dichotomies that immobilize”
(25). Thus, representations of true travel “must always be incomplete” (25) given that self
and place are in continual flux, and that subject and object roles keep shifting. Travel, then,
is a continuous renegotiation of personal and social time and space. Such conceptions about
travel and writing travel challenge the classical paradigms of the genre in that it allows for
and affirms instability, ambiguity and alterity. I see the paradigms of travel offered by Leon
12
See Islam’s The Ethics of Travel: From Marco Polo to Kafka. (New York: Manchester University Press,
1996).
18
and Clifford as useful in examining Cendrars, Loy and Rhys and their texts of travel that
push at and transgress the boundaries of travel writing and modernist conventions.
Mobility, Modernity, and Modernism
Modernism, as an artistic and literary event, is about movement. As many scholars
have noted, its forms of mobility are rooted in the technological advances of modernity.
Before I examine the relationship between modernism and movement as the means to
illuminate the unique perspectives of Cendrars, Loy and Rhys, I want to turn to one
particularly evocative literary trope of modern movement and its radical realignment of time
and space—the train. The traveller in Cendrars’s “The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and Little
Jeanne of France” (1914) responds to the modern world with both exhilaration and horror as
an out-of-control train carries him through an endless succession of landscapes, crossing
myriad spatial and temporal borders. The poem exemplifies Stephen Kern’s vision of the
modern age as one with a “crisis of abundance” (9). A reoccurring symbol of modernity in
the period’s art and literature, the train evokes many of the age’s central interests in, anxieties
about, and desires for travel. Thus, Cendrars’s train traveler is simultaneously disoriented,
anxious, and enthralled by what he experiences in his jarring adventure —urban detritus,
rural poverty, magical visions, beautiful cityscapes, death, revolution. His vacillating feelings
about his journey reflect modernity’s ambivalent response to the train, travel, and
uncontrollable encounters.
19
This modernist poem of travel marks a departure from conventional travel narratives
in its lack of a journey structure and its embrace of the dislocations of travel—those of time,
space, and the self. With its chaotic cutting from one image to the next, without a beginning
and end, its movement is in stark contrast to the well-orchestrated train and steam-ship
round-trip travel of the unflappable English gentlemen Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne’s Around
the World in Eighty Days (1873). Nor does the poem depict train travel as an opportunity for
a short holiday in the country where flowers and romantic love blossom—as is a frequent
motif in modern and even modernist travel novels. For example, in E.M. Forster’s Howard’s
End (1910), Margaret sees the railway station as the starting point for a temporary escape
from the staid homogeneity of her city life: “Like many other who have lived long in a great
capital, she had strong feelings about the various railway termini. They are our gates to the
glorious and unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas!
we return.” In travel fictions such as these, the train returns you home—to your self and to
your familiar life—somewhat disheveled and, if all goes as planned, more worldly and
sophisticated. Turn-of-the-century and early twentieth-century travel narratives tend to
provide a showcase for scientific and technological advances—celebrating modern order,
timetables, and schedules—and convey the romance of a temporary excursion into idealized
rural landscapes/pasts. Another typical response to the train as representative of modernity is
Émile Zola’s The Human Beast (1890), in which the railroad takes on a threatening sinister
persona as it sprawled into cities, taking over with a “huge body, a gigantic being lying
across the earth, his head in Paris.” Train travel and the railroad changed the physical,
20
cultural and economic landscapes of countries, established new routes for transnational and
transcultural exchanges, and altered people’s perceptions of time and space. As Lynn Kirby
observes, “the train was a force of integration, of linking, of coherence, it tried to make the
world readable. At the same time, the force of such integration was profoundly dislocating”
(6).
I begin this section with the image of the train because what can be said of it can be
said in general of modernity’s myriad forms of transportation, which is that they put people
into new, often unexpected, types of contact that, in turn, became part of the subject matter of
the period’s texts of travel. Kirby posits that train travel not only facilitated modern vision by
teaching people to cope visually with a “sequential unfolding chain of essentially still
images” (6)—before and along with cinema—it helped them adjust intellectually and
ideologically to seeing themselves differently in relation to others by “redefining boundaries
and accentuating differences” (6). Train travel as was just one of many new modern ways of
moving that had a profound impact on people’s sense of themselves and the world. If the
modern person is shocked by the jolts of the train and has his or her perceptions of the world
altered by foreign images rushing by in the window and by the foreign person sitting across
the way, he or she is likewise excited by the speed of the car, physically and psychologically
traumatized by forced resettlements in foreign locations, and stimulated and unsettled by the
sights, sounds, and contacts encountered when walking within the modern metropolis.
Movement defines modernism’s art and literature. In 1910 the Futurist Manifesto
insists that art must now render “not a fixed moment but the dynamic sensation of movement
21
itself.” Russian painter Kasimir Malevich observes, “the new beauty of our modern life”
lives in the machine, in “the conquest of air [and in the] speed of travel,” and Italian Futurist
leader F.T. Marinetti declares that “[u]p to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility,
ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s
stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.”
13
These modern avant-gardists celebrated
modern machines and forms as the progenitors of a new aesthetics of movement and speed,
affirming vitality, yet they also tended to denigrate the body and the feminine as part of the
sentimental past to be left behind. If, according to Futurism, modern art and literature must
convey movement as a masculine, aggressive body fused with the machine in order to be
hard, intact, and contained in its travel through space, then, in contrast, the narrative of the
modernist novel rendered the fluid landscape of the mind in a stream-of-consciousness flow
of sensation in which the past and present constantly run together. Modernist poetry sought
to break up the poetic line into fragments as the means to enact the rhythms of modernity and
depict the fracturing of the self. Reaching into the past, Pound insisted that artists “make it
new,” and T.S. Eliot called for the modern poet to “force, to dislocate if necessary, language
into his meaning” (289).
Metropolitan centers of Europe and America housed transnational communities
of artists and writers in the years leading up to World War I and between the wars.
Contributors to Ford Madox Ford’s 1924 transatlantic review—Hemingway, Pound, Jean
Rhys, Mina Loy, H.D., Djuna Barnes, Stein, Eliot, and Joyce, for example—had acquired
13
These quotes are taken from Umbro Apollonio’s Futurist Manifestos (Boston: First ArtWorks Edition, 2001).
22
what Ford dubbed “the habit of flux” (Carr 70). Cendrars, Loy, and Rhys were connected to
one another through their relationships with these avant-garde communities of the early
twentieth-century. All three had formative experiences in Paris—and likely met in passing in
a café, on a street corner, or at Stein’s 27 Rue de Fleurs. And it was in Paris that a young
Cendrars had misadventures with the Dadaist Arthur Craven, who would become Loy’s
husband after they met in New York City. Their work circulated among many of the same
groups and was published in many of the same little magazines. While Loy and Cendrars
had different personal and creative entanglements with the Futurists, they shared with the
movement an interest in the concepts of dynamism and simultaneity. Loy and Rhys shared
conflicted relationships with England, which figures into their work, and when they were
both living in Paris in 1924, each had writing published in Ford Madox Ford’s transatlantic
review. In other words, these writers crossed paths in one way or another via their
affiliations with the modernist movements of the early twentieth-century. However, as I
suggest throughout this dissertation, these three wandering writers produced singular work
inspired by their unique ways of inhabiting multiple environments and by their experiences
of dislocation; their work conveys their habits of shifting locations, identities, and
attachments. This, I want to argue, translates into forms of writing that deviate from those of
their peers in terms of their representations of movement and travel.
Cendrars, Loys and Rhys offer variations on the modern flâneur, a social
phenomenon and a popular figure in modernist art and literature who is associated with the
increasingly heterogeneous street life in metropolitan centers. A mobile artist of modern life,
23
he loses himself in the crowd but manages assert control of himself by assuming the position
of detached observer (Parson 6). While Baudelaire’s late nineteenth-century flâneur strolled
through Paris eager to engage with signs and symptoms of modernity, Benjamin’s was more
aloof, attuned to the aesthetic, economic and cultural aspects of the cityscape. Both, however,
experienced an ease in their ambling, their observations of urban physical and social
landscape stimulating them on sensual, intellectual, and artistic levels. The perspective of the
city that is translated by the flâneur into his art or writing, Raymond Williams notes, is that
of “a man walking, as if alone” (Parsons 4).
Unlike the cerebral man walking alone, jotting down his observations, Cendrars
wholeheartedly embraced the places he inhabited; he never merely strolled through a city,
he was an enthusiastic participant in its environments, rhythms, and activities. Jay Bocnher
explains, “he was the poet of the train, of the Eiffel Tower, of publicity, cars, photographs,
newspapers, even dime-novels; he is the poet of these objects not because they were new and
novel, but because they were really there, with him and part of his condition” (106). If
Cendrars could wander freely and endlessly in whatever cities, streets, woods and hills that
intrigued him, Loy and Rhys could not, and they depict in their writing the constraints on
women’s mobility, even as they themselves pushed against such impediments. Critics in
modernism point out that women had different relationships with the modern city than did
men.
14
For example, Deborah Parson argues that “whereas Benjamin’s flâneur increasingly
14
See Deborah Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000; Janet Wolff, “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity’, Theory,
Culture, and Society 2/3 (1985), 37-46; Griselda Pollock, ‘Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity’ in Vision
24
becomes a metaphor for observation, retreating from the city streets once the arcades are
destroyed to a place of scopic authority yet static detachment, women were entering the city
with fresh eyes, observing it from within” (6). The writing of Loy and Rhys, informed by
their own experiences of seeing cities from within, complicates modernism’s picture of the
flâneur by bringing to the forefront the complex gender dynamics that inform the mobility
and the gaze of the modern subject within the metropolis.
The female city traveler, or the flâueuse, in the writing of Loy and Rhys travels in a
variety of city spaces—walking in the streets in London, Paris, and Florence, and circulating
in shops, cafes, bars, and hotels. In Loy’s “Italian Pictures” and “Three Moments in Paris,”
as we will see in chapter two, women do experience some freedom of mobility, yet
repeatedly find themselves returned to private “female” spaces; they have restricted access
to public space and are often placed within positions that render them passive objects of
regard instead of active subjects who observe. Rhys, feeling herself to be an outsider in the
European cities in which she resided—and in London in particular—draws attention to
the ways in which not only gender but race and class inform a subject’s movement within
Europe’s metropolitan centers. Upon arrival to the city of London from Dominica, Anna
Morgan, in Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark, responds to what appears to be a bleak confining
urban labyrinth with the declaration, “oh I’m not going to like this place I’m not going to like
this place I’m not going to like this place” (17). The antipathy that Rhys felt towards this
capital city, Parson suggests, is “perhaps imbued with a sense of being particularly inferior
and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988), 50-90, p. 71; and
Gillian Rose, Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geography (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993).
25
and ‘other,’ as a colonial and a woman, to the imperial and patriarchal might of England’s
capital city” (132). Along with Voyage in Dark, Rhys’s other early novels, Quartet (1929),
After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931) and Good Morning, Midnight (1939), depict various
versions of the wandering flâueuse who haunts the margins of the urban landscape and finds
it spaces alienating and its inhabitants hostile. Rhys’s female city traveler is neither the artist
flâneur nor the well-heeled cosmopolitan, but a dislocated outsider struggling to keep
moving in, and keep up with the pace of, the modern metropolis.
The Modern Novel of Travel in the Age of Global Negotiations
Caren Kaplan argues that in the conventional modern travel narrative, the traveler
keeps track of his or her movements in relation to others and demarcates locations as discrete
and distinct; this structuring of selves and locations, she notes, has the effect of reinforcing
borders and binaries such as past and present, old and new, feminine and masculine, home
and away.
15
Yet, because this period is increasingly aware of global networks of relation,
I suggest, its literature displays a shift from earlier literary constructions of distinct national
and cultural categories and identities. As Helen Carr points out, “[m]odernist texts register a
new consciousness of cultural heterogeneity, the condition and mark of the modern world;
in both imaginative and travel writing, modernity, the meeting of other cultures, and change
are inseparable” (73-4). Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, which draws on his travels
in the Congo and on travel writing of explorers, is often analyzed as the paradigmatic
15
Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1996) p. 12.
26
colonial travel novel that illustrates simultaneous desire for and horror in encountering and
“discovering” the exotic other. But, as many critics of Conrad observe,
16
his Ukraine and
Russian background, multilingualism, and ambivalent relationship with English culture and
travel—having served as a seaman for the French and British—informs the novel’s uneasy
handling of issues of imperialism and complex racial and national identities. On the other
side of the same coin, the novels of American expatriate novelist Henry James depict the
transnational forces newly at work at the turn-of-the century. Jonathan Freedman observes
that “[a]t the moment when identities start to circulate across and through national borders
and boundaries, when financial and cultural capital are being exported wholesale from an
attenuating British empire or a vitiated Europe to a new kind of world power, what it is to be
‘English’ or ‘Italian’ or ‘French’ is as much up for grabs as what it is to be ‘American’” (8).
Informed by his experience of living as an expatriate abroad, James’s novels illustrate the
increasingly complex relationship between national and individual identity exacerbated by
the increasing circulation of capital, culture, and travelers. Although his early novels are
indebted to nineteenth-century novel plot structures and character models, James’ narratives
and protagonists become more elusive, less plot-driven, and more demonstrative of the
notion of interactive identity-formations as he enters his mature phase at the turn of the
century.
17
16
See Christopher GoGwilt, The Passage of Literature: Genealogies of Modernism in Conrad, Rhys and
Pramoedya (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race,
Language and Twentieth-Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
17
Of this, Freedman writes, “In his globe-trotting Americans or his bemused Europeans or even his own critical
comprehension of the American scene, James depicts a world where national and cultural identity exists (as
27
In some respects, Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out (1915) can be seen as a further
development of James’s experiments, in that this novel of travel does not completely
conform to a teleological narrative, not does its female protagonist participate fully
in the genre’s conventions. Nonetheless, the novel retains many aspects of the genre in its
characterizations of European travelers as they pursue foreignness on their “voyage out.”
Novels of Euro-American writers based on the authors’ own travels tend to showcase
protagonists who participate in travel to foreign locations—as exemplified in novels by
Conrad, Hemingway, Lawrence, Forster, Fitzgerald, Bowen—in order to reveal the
dialectical tensions of the period: the desire for difference and alterity balancing the desire
to retain one’s self, place, and past.
E.M. Forster observed in 1915 that England felt “tighter and tinier and shinier than
ever—a very precious little party, I don’t doubt, but most insistently an island, and there are
times when one longs to sprawl over continents, as formerly” (Fussell 10). The ways in
which the war thwarted England’s need to “sprawl over other continents” informed its travel
texts, which fed into Euro-American romantic notions of leaving home and tapped into their
“wanderlusts” and escapist fantasies to expand one’s “frontiers.” Fussell marks D.H.
Lawrence’s flight from England as “the vanguard of the British Literary Diaspora, the great
flight of writers from England in the 20’s and 30’s” (11). This characterization of literary
modernism is a popular and revealing one, as illustrated by Fussell’s statement that this
does identity generated in the context of the family) as something to be made, not something given, in a world
where new possibilities of identity-formation are being conjured forth by an internationalizing economy
organized by leisure, travel and mass culture.” p.11.
28
diaspora is one of “the signals of literary modernism, as we can infer from virtually no
modern writer’s remaining where he’s ‘supposed to be—except Proust” (11).
This picture of literary modernism, a scene of temporary “flights” of mostly white
Western male writers from where they “supposed to be”—their home in the West—is the
very picture of modernism that transnational modernist studies seeks to revise, a picture that
does not account for the divergent forms of travel and of writing that this period produced.
As Kaplan observes, “all displacements are not the same” (2). Modernist writers traveled
with different agendas and had varied personal, political, and aesthetic responses to their
displacements. I will be examining just such a variety of dislocations and their global reach.
It is widely agreed,” notes Carr, that “modernism was predominantly an urban and
metropolitan movement but, significantly, many writers and artists of the period worked in
someone else’s metropolis[;] the modern metropolis was as much a contact zone, in Pratt’s
phrase, as were the colonies” (74). Thus, the contacts and exchanges that occurred within
these zones resulted in mixed languages, styles, and forms that were not sent directly back
to a home nation, but instead traveled along other various routes and underwent further
transformations. Having spent her adult life in metropolitan “contact zones,” Loy,
for example, claimed for herself a mongrel identity—noting once in a letter that she “thinks
in a muddle of foreign languages.” Her interlingual poetics refuse to abide by, or stay true to,
any one particular form or style. Of the modernist writing that came out of these metropolitan
contact zones, Jahan Ramazani observes, “writing in the metropole at a time of imperial and
ethnographic adventure, massive immigration, world war, interlingual mixture, speedier
29
communication and travel, the modernists—many of them exiles and émigrés themselves—
were the first English-language poets to create a formal vocabulary for the intercultural
collisions and juxtapositions, the epistemic instabilities and decenterings of globalization”
(100).
Towards a Poetics of Dislocation
Drawing attention to texts of dislocation in her examination of a “critical cosmopolitan
style” within modernism, Rebecca Walkowitz notes that “whereas critics from Terry
Eagleton to James Clifford have argued that early twentieth-century have used metaphors of
exile to represent various experiences of displacement, I argue instead that modernist writers
troubled the distinction between local and global that most conceptions of exile have
presupposed” (6). In contrast to the conventional portraits of Euro-American figures of
modernism as apolitical expatriates producing texts of modernist exile that uphold national
and cultural lines and programs, Conrad, Joyce and Woolf, Walkowitz argues, employ a
“critical cosmopolitan style” that acknowledges the politics of everyday life, understands
cosmopolitanism as a model of community that challenges or exceeds national collectivity,
and utilizes aesthetic tactics of mix-up and evasion to transform and to disable social
categories. T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” she suggests, “is a prime example of a modernist
text that is certainly cosmopolitan in its posture of worldliness, in its collage of national
traditions, and in its resistance to the moral niceties of modern culture, but it is not especially
interested in representing patterns of fictions or affiliation, in rejecting conceptions of the
30
local, or in comparing the uses and histories of global thinking” (7). In contrast, the writing
of Conrad, Woolf, and Joyce, Walkowitz continues, employs purposeful literary styles that
reflect what she nominates an “idiosyncratic modernism,” writing that entangles, or knots
together, cultures and experiences that seem to be disparate.
Jahan Ramazani in Transnational Poetics, a project related to Walkowitz’s, considers
the poetics of what he terms “traveling poetry”—that is, poetry that enacts the geographical
displacements of modernism’s traveling writers. In the spirit of Said’s “traveling theory”
and Clifford’s “traveling cultures,” Ramazani asserts that “traveling poetry” is an
“intercultural poetic form of modernism” that has the ability to “leap across national and
cultural boundaries.”
18
He approaches the concept of travel literally and conceptually,
utilizing Clifford’s expansive understanding of travel that includes “practices of crossings
and interaction” and “the ways people leave home and return, enacting differently centered
worlds, interconnected cosmopolitanisms” (51). These dynamic relationships and this travel,
argues Ramazani, “occur at the micro-level” in traveling poetry, in its “swift territorial shifts
by line, trope, sound or stanza that result in flickering movements and juxtapositions” (53).
These approaches inform my understanding of three aspects of modernism’s “poetics
of dislocation”—specifically, my understanding of how poetic and narrative forms enact
travel, how writers experience bodily and psychological displacements, and how texts depict
the transcultural crossings and exchanges within modernity’s landscapes. As Ramazani
suggests, “[t]he hybridities in recent postcolonial and cross-ethnic literatures can help in
18
See Ramazani’s A Transnational Poetics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009) p. 51.
31
recovering the earlier hybridities in Euromodernism” (47). For example, he points out,
“[h]elping to put in relief stylistic and cultural commonalities and differences, a cross-
national paradigm enables us to recognize that Loy”—and I would add Cendrars and Rhys—
were “bricoleur migrant[s] entangled in, and tensely divided amid, the various cultural
affiliations mediated in their poetry” (33). This dissertation seeks to identify and examine the
entanglements both cultural and aesthetics that are at play in the writing of Cendrars, Loy
and Rhys.
This dissertation is divided into three chapters, which represent the start of what will
become a broader and more nuanced consideration of the relationship between travel and
writing in twentieth-century modernism. I begin with Blaise Cendrars because he
is the quintessential traveler of modernity; “dwelling in travel,” he transformed his endless
peregrinations into an eclectic body of work that serves as an anti-Baedeker Guide to the age.
In this chapter I examine his early poetry, which is replete with tropes and motifs of travel
that he encountered in his reading and traveling—both of which he did widely. His avant-
garde train-travel poem, “The Prose of the Trans-Siberian” (1913) introduces his departure
in both form and content from his avant-garde peers and from conventional writers of travel.
This poetic representation of modern travel embraces dislocation and multiplicity, which I
argue, is a groundbreaking model of travel writing for 1913. I then turn to “Panama, or the
Adventures of My Seven Uncles” (1918), an intertexutal poem that assembles images,
figures, texts and locations from across the world and depicts travel as endless activities of
mediation, appropriation, and transformation. I end the chapter with a discussion of Kodak
32
(1924), poetry snapshots of “found material” that Cendrars excerpted from a friend’s science-
fiction adventure novel, and with Nineteen Elastic Poems (1919), his short cubist-like poems
that highlight “text-lifting” from adventure novels, popular fiction, and everyday material.
His forms of travel writing, I argue, call attention to the discursive nature of the genre.
In the second chapter, I examine a series of poems that Mina Loy wrote and published
when she was living in Florence, Italy: “Italian Pictures” (1914), “Three Moments in Paris”
(1915), and “Parturition” (1914). As sites of “intercultural encounters” and “multi-directional
mixing,” these poems are influenced by her myriad cultural and creative affiliations and
rooted in her relationships with communities in England, Paris, and Florence, where she lived
for almost a decade. I examine these poems in the context of her personal and cultural
dislocations, and in particular, in regards to her experiences in Italy. Loy’s writing from this
period engages with the cultural politics of Italian Futurism and with her Italian community,
as well challenges Futurism’s vision of modern movement. These particular poems, I argue,
serve as a cross-cultural poetic critique of English and Italian values that oppress the body
and restrict intellectual and physical mobility. Influenced by the work of her avant-garde
peers, the Italian Futurists, and Gertrude Stein in particular, her poetics utilize modernist
techniques such as juxtaposition and collage as the means to convey the unstable self and its
movement across borders. The body figures prominently in her poetry as the vehicle for
travel—it forms the basis of dynamism and means of experiencing the world. Her poetics
enact multidirectional movement (of the body, of the poetic line) in a dynamic of
33
simultaneity inspired by Henri Bergson’s theory of continuous time, the dureé. For Loy,
travel is an interactive state of being.
The third chapter focuses on Jean Rhys and her novel Voyage in the Dark (1934).
I argue that this novel, which records the journey of a young displaced Creole woman, Anna
Morgan, revises the narrative of the cosmopolitan male for whom Europe is home, and the
Empire the center of civilization. In contrast to the city travel of Loy’s “Italian Pictures,”
which becomes the occasion for liberating interactions between the traveler and the urban
landscape, Anna experiences alienating and dehumanizing encounters in her negotiation of
the modern metropolitan center of London. I focus on Anna’s various forms of resistance to
textual and cultural discourses that seek to manage her movements and erase difference by
incorporating her into restrictive terrains. I contend that Voyage in the Dark’s modernism is
one that illuminates the unstable conditions and mixed discourses of modernity that inform
Anna’s dislocations, and that this modernist text enacts her forms of resistance to dominant
structures by accommodating the presence of geographical and cultural landscapes that, as
Anna’s observes, “do not fit together.”
Carl Thompson wonders, “Are all forms of writing that emerge from the travel
experience to be classified as travel writing?” (10). Why classify, one might ask, the writing
of Cendrars, Loy, Rhys as such, given that their work has been read primarily within the
oeuvre of modernist literature and does not abide by the literary conventions of the genre?
Considering their texts as travel writing, I suggest, provides the genre of travel writing
dynamic models of travel that trouble its categories and discourses, as well as expands the
34
genre to include alternative models of writing travel that do not reproduce its hegemonic
history. Conversely, using the lens of travel writing to examine modernist texts shifts the
focus away from overly familiar modernist travel tropes, such as exile and expatriation,
to include forms of modernist travel that challenge or disable static social categories of
self and place. Such is the case in the writing of Cendars, Loy and Rhys, in which travel
is a disorienting experience of border-crossing. Their literary techniques of collage,
fragmentation, intertextuality, and juxtaposition enact indirection, dislocation, and mobility,
producing travel writing that also “travels,” undercutting the hierarchy of relations and
exoticism of the other that is inherent in the genre. Cendrars, Loy and Rhys ask us to
consider travel as an activity in which, in the words of Carol Leon, “spaces and bodies are
configured and reconfigured in the ebb and flow of their encounters” (25). In contrast to
travel writing that constructs ordered narratives and identities, immobilizes the self, and
disregards the presence and the significance of in-between spaces and identities, their writing
is a heterogeneous mix of textual terrains that convey the multifarious nature of being and
moving in a modern age.
35
Introduction Bibliography
Apollonio, Umbro, ed. Futurist Manifestos. Boston: First ArtWorks Edition, 2001.
Brooker, Peter and Andrew Thacker. Geographies of Modernism: Literature, Cultures
and Spaces. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Carr, Helen. “Modernism and Travel (1880-1940).” The Cambridge Companion to
Travel Writing. Eds. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002.
Clark, Stephen. Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit. New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late 20th Century. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1997.
Eliot, T.S. “The Metaphysical Poets.” Selected Essays. 3
rd
Ed. London, 1931.
Freedman, Jonathan. “Introduction: The Moment of Henry James,” The Cambridge
Companion to Henry James. ed. Jonathan Freedman. Cambridge University Press,
1998.
Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the
Space/Time of Modernist Studies.” Modernism/modernity 13.3 (2006), pp. 425-
443.
Fussell, Paul. Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1980.
36
Healey, Kimberley. The Modernist Traveler: French Detours, 1900-1930. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska, 2003.
Jay, Paul. Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2010.
Kaplan, Caren. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. Durham
and London: Duke University Press, 1996.
Kirby, Lynne. Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema. Durham: Duke
University Press, 1997.
Leon, Carol. Movement and Belonging: Lines, Places, and Spaces of Travel. Travel
Writing Across the Disciplines: Theory and Pedagogy 11. Bern: Peter Lang, 2009.
Mills, Sara. Discourses of Differences: An Analysis of Women’s Traveling Writing and
Colonialism. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Pratt, Mary Louise. Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Ramazani, Jahan. A Transnational Poetics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
2009.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Random House, 1979.
Thompson, Carl. Travel Writing (The New Critical Idiom). New York: Routledge, 2011.
Vigeras, L.A., “Blaise Cendrars.” The French Review. Vol. 14, No. 4 (Feb. 1941)
pp. 311-318.
Walkowitz, Rebecca. Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2006.
37
I don’t follow the roads anymore
Lines
Cables
Canals
Nor suspension bridges!
--“Panama, or the Adventures of My Seven Uncles,” 1918
Chapter One
Blaise Cendrars’s Signs of Travel
Blaise Cendrars was born Frédéric Louis Sauser in 1887 in La Chaux-de-Fonds,
Switzerland to a Scotch mother and Swiss father, a clock merchant whose transitory business
schemes resulted in the family moving from city to city—Naples, Alexandria, London,
Nauchâtel, and Paris. Perhaps it was this nomadic childhood that fostered in Freddy—as
Cendrars was called—a sense of normalcy in habitual relocation. Around 1904, the
seventeen-year-old Freddy left his family and jumped aboard a train to travel with a
watchmaker to St. Petersburg, where he would witness the initial rumblings of Russian
Revolution—or so his story goes. Another, less romantic version, is that Freddy was sent to
apprentice with the man because he refused to stay put in the boarding schools in which his
father placed him. The experience of this journey aboard the Transsiberian train, which
carried him across Europe to Moscow through Siberia to the East, and back to France, made
its way into one of his first published poems, Le Prose du Transsibérien et de la Jeanne de
France (1913). As was Freddy, the poem’s train-traveler is at home in movement: “Je suis
en route / J’ai toujours été en route” (239) (I’m on the road / I’ve always been on the
38
road”).
19
After studying at universities and working odd jobs across Europe—he was a piano
player and bee-keeper, he became involved in the burgeoning avant-garde movements
in numerous cities, including Berne, Brussels, Rome and Paris. When he set sail in 1911
from a Polish port for New York City, he began what would become life-long transatlantic
travel between Europe, the United States, and South America.
It was in Paris in 1913 that Freddy Sauser, inspired by a line from Nietzsche,
20
christened himself Blaise Cendrars—a name evoking embers and ashes. This proved to be an
appropriate epithet for a writer whose life was one of continuous energy and whose writing
reflected his proclivity for constant motion and re-invention. Cendrars declares, “to write is
to burn alive.”
21
Henry Miller aptly characterized him as a man exploding in all directions at
once. Not tied to a particular nation or culture, Cendrars apocryphally named a hotel in Paris
as his birthplace—in other stories, he said he born on a moving train. In Paris he began his
life as a writer as he formed his friendships with avant-garde writers and artists—Guillaume
Apollinaire, Francis Picabia, Modigliani, Chagall and Léger. It was there that he formed
19
Blaise Cendrars: Complete Poems. Trans. Ron Padgett. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
Henceforth, all lines of Cendrars’s work quoted in this chapter will be Padgett’s English translations of the
original poems and prose, which Cendrars wrote in French—both of which are in Padgett’s edition. I use
Padgett’s English translations so that Cendrars’s work can be understood by readers of English— given that I
include his work in this project with texts written in the English language. However, not only do I understand
the limitations that this imposes on my close-reading of his writing, I am aware of the theoretical problems
inherent in my choice to use the English translations, given my project’s transnational landscape and its interest
in incongruity. However, reading English translations of Cendrars’s writing seems, to some extent, appropriate,
given the fact he wrote with the intent of depicting disorienting collisions and because his writing, in many
ways, translates and reconfigures that which he encountered in his travels.
20
“And everything of mine turns to mere cinders/ What I love and what I do.” Jay Bochner provides this
Nietzche quote in the Introduction to Blaise Cendrars: Complete Poems, xv.
21
Taken from Monique Chefdor’s introduction to a collection of Blaise Cendrars’s later travel texts, Complete
Postcards from the America: Poems of Road and Sea. p.7
39
collaborative relationships with Simultaneist painters Robert and Sonia Delauney and, later,
with the director Abel Gance, with whom he worked on films. These relationships were
formative to his modernist poetics. However, after serving in the French Foreign Legion in
World War I and losing his writing arm, he detached himself from Paris poetry circles.
22
He quickly returned to working—writing with his other hand and with a typewriter—and to
traveling. Translating his mobile nature into his creative endeavors, he wrote across genres,
essentially all of them; he tried his hand at poetry, prose, film, novels, autobiography, art
criticism, advertisement, a ballet inspired by African folk tales,
23
lectures, radio, newspaper
journalism—continually and consistently blurring the lines between these genres. For, as
Steve Kogan observes, “[w]hether he [was] reporting from a point along his travels, writing
from his wealth of memories, translating, discussing books, or inventing stories and making
collages from the works of others, Cendrars always gave the impression of being on a
journey” (258).
Cendrars formed attachments to places and individuals, yet, “in spite of numerous
affinities with his contemporaries,” Monique Chefdor explains, “he remained fiercely
independent from all coteries and literary schools, taking on immediately the proud stance of
a loner” (37). As we will see is also the case with Mina Loy, whose critics struggle to place
22
Cendrars suggests as much in his report of his conversation with the poet André Gallaird: “André told me he
had spent most of his time among the Surrealists in Paris, but guessing that, since I loved pure poetry,
I did not love those young people who I considered to be dreadful sons-of-their fathers in true bourgeois
tradition, and therefore opportunists even in their craziest manifestations” (The Astonished Man 94).
23
Jeff Bursy writes in his essay, “Blaise Cendrars,” that in 1921, reflecting Europe’s growing interest in African
art and culture, Cendrars had published a collection of African folk tales, African Saga, as recounted by
missionaries. He later collaborated with Fernand Leger and Darius Milhaud to adapt the collection into a ballet,
La Création du Monde.
40
her and her work in a single literary tradition, Cendrars’s writing evades easy categorization.
Jeff Bursey notes that “few critics have written on Cendrars in English,”
24
and when
Cendrars’s work is discussed in French literature surveys of the twentieth-century,
“he is considered unclassifiable or else a Dadaist, a surrealist, a verbal cubist, a futurist,
a Bohemian, or an antiromantic. …. Placing Cenrdrars proves too difficult for most critics,
except in footnotes or amid a welter of other names” (8). While he did reject long-term
affiliations with such groups and movements, Cendrars constantly cultivated new friendships,
as well as identities, as part of his peripatetic lifestyle, and continuously taking up new
interests and jobs. Thus, in a 1950 interview he boasted, “I’ve already had thirty-six
professions, and I’m ready to start something entirely different tomorrow morning.”
Cendrars’s writing, constructed from the myriad materials of his nomadic life, enacts his
dynamic interactions with his worlds; in essence, it forms an assemblage art, a unique form
of early twentieth-century avant-garde travel writing.
In any conventional understanding of travel writing, Cendrars’s collage-inspired,
disorienting avant-garde poetry is definitely atypical. “Generally, the history of travel
and travel writings has followed a teleological route,” writes Carol Leon. “Journeys to
predetermined destinations imaged as linear excursions across physical and textual
landscapes have been a characteristic of both travel and travel writing from the time of
Herodotus—often called the first travel writer” (69). Given the fact that Cendrars did not
write from a stable singular position and was a nomadic traveler, it is not surprising that his
24
The exception to this is the extensive scholarship generated by Monique Chefdor and Jay Bochner.
See my bibliography for their biographical and critical work on Cendrars.
41
writing does not provide clear origins, destinations, or returns, and that travel for him is
anything but the mere act of crossing geography to reach a destination.
Cendrars’s life-long intellectual and bodily wanderings generated an expansive and
eclectic body of work inspired by the forms, motifs, and experiences of travel. This chapter
seeks to investigate his initial foray into travel writing—his unsettling train-travel poem,
“The Prose of the Trans-Siberian” (1913) and “Panama, or the Adventures of My Seven
Uncles” (1918), an intertextual and meta-textual poem about travel that combines an
assortment of references to uncles, images, stories and locations from across the world.
These two poems, typically characterized as his journey or adventure poems, laid the
groundwork for what was, at the time, an unconventional and radical approach to the writing
of travel; these poems reflect Cendrars’s sense of what it looks and feels like to travel in the
modern world, which he conveys through a variety of modernist poetic techniques. In this
chapter I argue that while the forms and content of conventional travel writing inspired
Cendrars, his poetry subverts the formal conventions and the hegemonic politics of the genre
of travel writing. For these poems convey traveling as a multi-faceted experience and
embrace disorientation and instability, an attitude that stands in stark contrast to the ordered
narratives and identities constructed in conventional travel writing. Cendrars’s avant-garde
poetic techniques, such as collage, integrate the materials of every-day modern life to create
travel writing that is inter-textual and inter-subjective. His writing takes pleasure in refusing
to demarcate lines of difference, which has the effect of undermining authorial authority and
42
destabilizing not only the borders of the self, but spatial and temporal distinctions on which
travel writing traditionally depends.
As is true for both Loy and Rhys, travel for Cendrars is movement that does not
maintain or privilege borders. In his poetry, locations and subjects become unfixed and are
continually reconstructed through ongoing and unending interactivity; hence, shifting borders
and identities in flux make representation of difference difficult. These traits exist in contrast
to the impulse of travel texts of previous centuries, particularly those that participated in
colonizing projects and thus relied on travel writing to make the “exotic” recognizable and
therefore easier to manage and absorb. Leon observes that the homogenization of foreign
places and foreign others was integral to the project of colonial expansion: “Imperialists
persistently described people and places that were distinct and remote from each other in
interchangeable terms which cast diversity ‘in the same perpetual mould’” (21). In stark
contrast, Cendrars’s travel poems refuse to flatten place and identity—quite the reverse;
they convey travel as a disorienting experience in which a heterogeneous mix of places and
figures jostle together in dynamic geographical and textual terrains. Some early readers of his
poetry were uncomfortable with his avant-garde poetics, as Bochner notes precisely because
they “take exception…to the ‘disorder’ in his writing” (114).
Kimberely Healey claims that the early twentieth-century writer left home in order to
organize his or her perceptions and verify the structure of relations of locations in the interest
of aesthetic gain (58). Because this form of travel writing is invested in cultural or national
identities, it tends to reinforce binary categorization. Such organization and verification of
43
relations, however, are neither features of Cendrars’s traveling nor of his writing, in that both
are replete with instances and images of dislocation. His poems convey the experience of a
mobile interactive self, which he explains, which, Healey explains, exemplifies how “by
moving the body, and through consciousness itself, the writer will make language take on a
new form that characterizes what the traveler experiences” (52). In L’homme foudroyé
(1945), Cendrars describes his method of writing as not intellectual but intuitive and
experiential: “As for me, I have to see everything with my own eyes, to touch things with my
own hands in order to love and understand them, and to become lost in them in my thoughts
and to reinvent them in order to make them live and be born again.”
25
Cendrars’s poetry
enacts his own experiences with his myriad environments and materials, his way of being in
his world; his poetics conveys an appreciation of bodily and sensory disorientation—a sense
of pleasure in the feeling of being lost. Thus, the undermining of structure, a feature of his
poetry, seems less a poetic affect and more a reflection of Cendrars’s own experiences of
dissonance and non-dichotomous relations.
His employment of modernist aesthetics to create such forms reflects his ties to early
twentieth-century avant-garde art and literary circles. Hence, scholarship on his work tends to
examine his work in literary and cultural contexts, but little attention has been given to his
work within the oeuvre of travel writing. I would argue, however, that his modernist literary
techniques are directly related to his experiences of travel and mobility, whose dislocations
produce what might be called translocational poetry. Caroline Patey and Giovanni Cianci
25
This quote taken from Steve Kogan’s “The Pilgrimage of Blaise Cendrars.” p. 258
44
have coined this mobility as modernist nomadism,
26
and Ramazani observes that “traveling
poetry” has the ability to “leap across national and cultural boundaries” (52). Cendrars’s
poetry performs such locational displacements through the congregation and juxtaposition of
disparate material. While his poetry incorporates conventional travel motifs—such as journey
by rail and ship, movement across a variety of landscapes, fleeting images and impressions of
“foreign” locations and people—it simultaneously undercuts the hierarchy of relations and
exoticism of the other that is inherent in travel writing’s representation or othering; and it
does so through a poetics of juxtaposition in which travel is not written as a linear journey
but as collage. “Collage,” Clifford notes of this aesthetic practice, “is a way of making space
for heterogeneity, for historical and political, and not simply aesthetic, juxtapositions” (3).
In this regard, Cendrars’s writing resembles contemporary or postmodern forms of writing
that recognizes global networks of relations and multi-sited formations of identities. In doing
so, Cendrars constitutes travel as movement that does not maintain borders but transgresses
the lines and dichotomies present in the traditional paradigms of travel writing. Crossing
genres and forms, Cendrars’s collage poetics deliberately incorporates aspects of adventure
novels and travel writing, such as that written by Jules Verne and Gustave Lerouge,
combining these with the material of every-day modern life—photographs, books, movies,
post-cards, maps, newspapers, and conversations. His poetic combinations of such material
26
This is from their introduction to Transits: The Nomadic Geographies of Anglo-American Modernism. Ed.
Giovanni Cianci, Carolyn Patey and Sara Sullam. Cultural Interactions: Studies in the Relationships between
the Arts 18. (Bern: International Academic Publishers, 2010).
45
produced an inter-textual form of travel writing that depicts the identity of the self and of
place as a confluence of interactive texts.
While collage and intertextuality are ubiquitous in modern twentieth-century art and
writing, Cendrars’s poetry is unique in its radical embrace of dislocation and its lack of the
anxiety about the effects of modernity found in the high modernist literature of many of his
English and American avant-garde peers. Ramanzi points to Pound’s Cantos and Eliot’s
“The Waste Land” as examples of modernist bricolage and intercultural contact. I would
argue that the transcultural collage poetry of these poets is often at odds with the
conservative themes and politics of their work, which exhibit anxiety about the loss of
national culture, tradition and stability, as well as fear of excess, the feminine, and disorder.
In contrast, Cendrars’s work, his poetry in particular, depicts borders as negotiable and
modern identity as dynamic and formed through a disorderly confluence of contacts. For
Cendrars, who wrote his travel poetry both prior to and during World War I, culture is
not precious, and there is no center that must hold. His travel poems exhibit modern
displacements without a sense of loss and nostalgia for a home or for past structures and
forms. And while he shared with the Russian and Italian Futurists an interest in modern
technology’s impact on culture, Cendrars does not see the machine as a model for the modern
self, nor is he interested in speeding into the Future.
In 1918, exhilarated by the present
world, Cendrars writes, “Poetry begins today.”
46
Displacing the Self
In the first decade of the twentieth-century, the Transsiberian train carried a young
Freddy Sauser across Europe through Siberia to the East and back to Montmartre in Paris.
Cendrars’s “Prose of the Trans-Siberian and Little Jeanne of France” (1914) depicts such a
journey. In its first publication, this travel poem was a collaborative work between Cendrars
and the painter Sonia Delaunay. In the two-meter-high unfolding book, Cendrars’s poem
Fig. 1. Sonia Delaunay. Written by Blaise Cendrars. La Prose du Transsibérien
et de la petite Jehanne de France, 1913.
and Delaunay’s colorful splashes of paint travel down the page together, her brushstrokes
of “visual and simultaneous contrasts” and “sensation of movement” (Leamon 160) in
conversation with his dynamic poetics of movement.
The train, a machine of locomotion, seems to inspire the poetics that convey frenetic
travel. As a symbol of modern travel, the train embodied many of the anxieties and desires
47
of the early twentieth-century. Marita Sturken points out that “the railroad has been
characterized as the most quintessential technological artifact of modernity” (76).
Cendrars’s poem conveys the modern era’s ambivalent relationship with modern technology;
the newness of train travel had the effect of creating feelings of disorientation and instability
in its passengers, given its rapid movement across geography that appeared to shrink
distances and connect between previously imagined separate locations. Wolfgang
Schivelbusch in The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19
th
Century attributes modernity’s shifting sense of spatiality and temporality to the railway
system, specifically, in the effect of the impact of mechanized, high-speed train travel.
For Schivelbusch, modernity’s reconfigurations of time and space correspond directly to
issues of transport, commerce and industrialization. He thus opens his chapter, “Railroad
Space and Railroad Time,” with the declaration, “‘[a]nnihilation of space and time’ was the
early-nineteenth century characterization of the effect of railroad travel. The concept was
based on the speed that the new means of transport was able to achieve. … [T]o put it
another way, the same amount of time permitted one to cover the old spatial distance many
times over” (33). In Cendrars’s “Prose of the Trans-Siberian,” the traveling poet and the
poem try to keep up with the border-crossing train, “a machine of vision” that is a dynamic
and dislocating mechanical force that rearranges time and unsettles and influences the body,
the self, and one’s perceptions.
48
Cendrars wrote and published “Prose” in close proximity to “Zone,” which was
written by his good friend at the time, Guillame Apollinaire. Both poems reverberate with
motifs of urban travel reminiscent of the poetry of their French predecessors, Baudelaire
and Rimbaud, whose flâneurs traveled modernity’s metropolitan streets. Yet, unlike the
wandering perambulations of the walking (and floating) travelers of the nineteenth- century,
Cendrars’s train-traveler is carried away into a modern machine nightmare:
Wild locomotives fly through rips in the sky
And in the holes
The dizzying wheels the mouths the voices
And the dogs of misery that barks at our heels
The demons are unleashed
Scrap iron
Everything clanks
Slightly off
The clickety-clack of wheels
Lurches
Jerks
We are a storm in the skull of a deaf man
In the words of Chefdor, who compares Cendrars’s jolting train to Rimbaud’s floating boat,
“[a]s the train rushes across the Russian plain the poem becomes a real ‘drunken train after
the Drunken Boat,’ as Jean Cocteau put it. Images, association of ideas, words without
correlatives are tossed out faster and faster in jolting disarray as the mental rhythm
accelerates with each turn of the wheels, until the convulsive movement of the Transsiberian
Express becomes the poetic vehicle for the frantic whirling of the universe” (44).
Nonetheless, while Cendrars’s poetics embraced the modernist aesthetic of fragmentation
and juxtaposition as the means to depict the pace and sensations of modern movement,
his writing does not share in its vision of technology.
49
As I discussed in my introduction, early twentieth-century avant-garde movements,
such as English Vorticism and Italian Futurism, called for hard and fast breaks from the past,
home, bourgeois society, and its conventions. Such calls, from the male leaders of these
avant-garde movements, degraded the familiar, the sensate body, the feminine, the
sentimental
27
—all that which they considered indefinite and imprecise—celebrating instead
modern machines and forms as the progenitors of a new clean modern aesthetics. Futurists
called for art to depict modern motion, dynamism and speed. In 1909 F.T. Marinetti declared,
“[n]o work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece” (21),
28
and in 1915
Malevich writes that “the new beauty of our modern life” lives in the machine—in “the
conquest of air, [and in the] speed of travel” (Perloff, The Futurist Moment 118). Futurists
hurled their manifestos out of racing cars in order to disseminate progress with speed and
force; they saw the automobile, the train, and the airplane as the means to propel bodies
forward into the expanding world. Malevich advised those lagging behind to “[h]urry up and
shed the hardened skin of centuries so that you can catch up with us more easily...Hurry!
For tomorrow you will not recognize us” (Perloff 120). The Futurists wanted to slough off
the weighty past in order to move faster into the new modern century; aero-dynamic, plastic
and gleaming, the Futurist man, they declared, would need to be like the modern machine in
27
The intersection of gender with political and aesthetic issues was a particularly common occurrence in
Futurist and early avant-garde work. Cinzia Blum observes that Marinetti’s manifesto “relies crucially on a
rhetorical strategy in which femininity works as a mark of impotence, disease and fragmentation attached to
those mental attitudes that contradict Futurist hubris.”
28
Taken from Marinetti’s “Manifesto of Futurism” reprinted in “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism
1909,” Futurist Manifestos. p. 21.
50
order to speed through the present landscape into the future.
29
Cendrars’s writing, however,
illustrates a different relationship with modern technology, particularly with the train.
30
At one point in his “Prose of the Trans-Siberian and Little Jeanne of France,”
the speaker decides to imagines that he is aboard the train “with a traveling jewel merchant
on his way to Harbin.” He amuses himself and his traveling companion by characterizing the
trip as an adventure from one of his Jules Verne novels: “[i]t was like Cops and Robbers /
We had stolen the treasure of Golconda / And we were taking it on the Trans-Siberian to hide
it on the other side of the world / I had to guard it from the thieves in the Urals who had
attacked the circus caravan in Jules Verne.” This colors the poem’s travel—momentarily—as
an exciting modern day adventure,
31
which invokes literary travel writing conventions,
as well as illustrates personal Cendrars’s reading habits and story-telling techniques that mix
fact and fiction. As already alluded to, Cendrars told many different stories about where he
29
The intersection of gender with political and aesthetic issues was a common trope in Futurist and avant-garde
art and writing. In her essay, “Dreams of Metallized Flesh: Futurism and the Masculine Body,” Christine Poggi
points out the potential the Futurists saw in a male-machine hybrid: “Once fused with the machine, with wings
sprouting from his very flesh, the new Futurist man will be able to externalize his will without resistance,
achieving each of his desires while reigning over space and time.” To paraphrase Poggi--the Futurist ideal of
masculinity affirmed virility, yet it resisted bodily desire. While permeable and open to fusion with the
machine, the body must be a rigid and contained self. pp 1-2.
30
Bochner writes that “Cendrars was not much interested in the development of science and technology
for their application to ‘progress,’ but rather for the renewal of lyricism […]”(84).
31
Timothy Unwin discusses Verne’s train as a example the ultimate in present-day human achievement: “There
is, as I have suggested, an obsession throughout Verne’s work with his own century as both culminating and an
originating moment. Many of his stories lead up to, and end in, a narrative present, which is usually also the
moment of their real-life composition. The present is the pinnacle of human achievement. Yet if the present is
so alluring, it is partly also because it has the ability to appeal to the future as the guarantor of its own
spectacular quality. The American train is that which Phileas Fogg travels in Le Tour du monde [and it]
epitomizes the magic of modern engineering—magic indeed, for the train actually leaps across an open gulf at
Medicine Creek where a bridge has collapsed, defying all the laws of physics and mechanics in the process.”
Jules Verne: Journeys in Writing. p. 46.
51
was born—one has him born on a train on the Italian railway during his mother’s journey
back from Europe.
32
For Cendrars, the train, a recurring trope in his work, operates not as the
Futurists’ aggressive masculine train that carries him away from the past, but as a symbol of
familiarity and natality—his train associations evoke the womb more than they do than the
hard phallus. In his biography, he mentions that during his visit to the village of La Redonne
he recognizes the mail train, the Malle des Indes, which prompts him to outfit himself in the
clothes and shoes “that enable the local huntsmen to climb among the rocks” and stay there:
“I had adopted the place. That Jules Verne-style train had won me over, and when you come
to an isolated place to work on a book, it is good to settle down in the proximity of a railway
line and watch the trains passing your window” (The Astonished Man 66).
33
The train, for
Cendrars, signifies travel, reminding him of his beloved Verne’s adventure novels, and
simultaneously it makes him feel at home. It is evident in his poetry, writes L.A. Viegras,
that “[Cendrars] can tell, his eyes closed, each country by its smell, each train by the rhythm
of its wheels (314).
The kinetic presence of the fast-moving train in the “Prose of the Trans-Siberian”—as
it travels far and wide across the expansive newly laid Transsiberian tracks—conveys a mood
of excitement and trepidation as the train-traveler is carried through a landscape of voices,
places and bodies. Yet, the traveler is not on a journey to conquer time and space, nor does
32
Yannis Lavidas, “Blaise Cendrars [the greatest poetic spirit of the 20
th
century]”
http://blaisecendrars.blogspot.com/
33
He does everything but write his book in La Redonne; instead he spends much of his time drinking and
playing betting games with the fishermen, wandering the woods and forming relationships with the people of
the town.
52
the poem seek to leave something behind. In contrast, for the Futurists, the train represented
an embrace of a modern travel narrative in which technology facilitates the way out the past,
and as the means to break away from oppressive feminine tendrils of tradition and shoot
easily into a modern landscape. A counter travel narrative of modernity represents the train
as a means of escape from the industrial modern world, a vessel that could carry one away to
an exotic natural destination. Sidone Smith writes that in flight from pedestrian and
repressive culture, “the traveler pursued ‘adventure’ in exotic locales uncontaminated by the
dehumanizaing excesses of modernity” (9). Cendrars’s train travel poem, however, does not
follow either of these models. In “Prose,” the speaker’s varying identifications and
entanglements with present people and with memories of the past occur in simultaneous
time; “home” and “away” exist in corresponding physical and psychical spaces, and the
masculine and the feminine, the self and the other are intimately intertwined. The traveler-
poet does not rush towards a final destination; in his configuration of time as circular and
identity as multiple, he neither expects nor achieves autonomy from a particular time, place,
or culture, recognizing that that the past and the modern world is always with him.
The speaker is already on the road when the poem opens: “I was barely sixteen but
my childhood memories were gone / I was 48,000 miles from where I was born /
I was in Moscow, city of a thousand and three bell towers and seven train stations.”
And he laments: “I was already a bad poet/I didn’t know how to take it all the way.”
His initial reason for embracing the train—of modern technology—to facilitate his exile and
carry him away from his home and the familiar is forgotten as he finds himself repeatedly
53
returned to the past, despite the distances he travels. He finds that“[t]he world stretches out
elongates and snaps back like an accordion in the hands of a raging sadist.” No matter how
much ground he covers, distance in the modern world feels overwhelming and
unmanageable. He eventually, rather cynically, observes, “[w]e are the amputees of space/
We move on our four wounds/ Our wings have been clipped/ The wings of our seven sins/
And the trains are all the devil’s toys/ Chicken coop/ The modern world/ Speed is of no use /
The modern world / The distances are too far.” Crippled and incapable of flight, he finds
himself in a passive position and at the whim of jarring capricious technology and overcome
by memories and associations that return him to places he has previously inhabited:
And the train moving forward endlessly
Every morning you set your watch ahead
The train moves forward and the sun loses time
It’s no use! I hear the bells
The big bell of Notre Dame
The sharp bell at the Louvre that rang on Saint Bartholomew’s Day
The rusty carillons of Bruges-the-Dead
The electric bells of the New York Public Library
The campaniles of Venice
And the bells of Moscow ringing, the clock at Red Gate that kept time
for me when I was working in an office
Even as the train seems to move forward, and even as he sets his watch to the time zone of a
new place, it is “no use”—the train and his watch do not overpass the past that remains with
him in the sound of bells ringing in multiple locations across the world. The railway system
is “a new geometry” that might connect faraway locations and shrinks distances, but this
journey lacks a clear sense of direction, and the poet loses confidence since “[t]here are trains
that never meet” and “[o]thers just get lost.” Embedded in the poet’s initial admission, “I was
54
already a bad poet / That I didn’t know how to take it all the way,” are his insecurities about
achieving success as a modern man, world traveler, and poet, given these undependable lost
trains and his inability to arrive at a new place. How does the modern artist—the poet seems
to wonder—write a good poem of modern travel?
Reneé Hubert and Judd Hubert argue that the poem’s refrain—“I was already a bad
poet / That I didn’t know how to take it all the way”—can read as the poet’s artistic
disclaimer and “could refer to a lack of closure in the poem, a quality normally considered
indispensable to good poetry” (64), while Chefdor sees this repetition as an expression of the
poet’s fear of limitations—a fear that he will not be able to accomplish a spiritual or
imaginative voyage and therefore will not be able find “a language attuned to this new era of
multiplicity” (45-46). I argue that the poem demonstrates all these readings simultaneously.
This refrain, which certainly reveals an anxiety about creative potency and literary fecundity,
also contains a subtext about a young man’s concern about masculine inadequacy, about the
ability to perform sexually—about his ability to keep it up, to take it all the way, and achieve
his goal of writing a travel poem that satisfies his readers. This refrain, however, drops out
of the poem as he lets himself experience the sense of being lost and dislocated along with
the train.
Even as the poet travels exhibits anxieties about losing his direction, he ultimately
finds satisfaction in confused, waylaying entanglements and in postponed climax. The train,
in fact, seems to assist the poet in abandoning the plan to “go all the way.” Indeed,
55
the poem conveys the difficulty of taking anything all the way and demonstrates—though its
non-linear, fragmented, multi-voiced narrative—an openness to seeing where things end up.
The traveler-poet learns not to rush towards a final destination, and in his reconfiguration of
time as circular and identity as multiple, he certainly does not achieve what Leamon
understands as this poet’s “personal quest for identity and sexual autonomy” (158). The
poet’s statement that he cannot or will not go all the way can, thus, be read as a relinquishing
of control—as admitting upfront his limitations, his lack of experience, and his profound
disinterest in a quest with a final epiphany or singular destination that he arrives at through
personal gain. The speaker’s varying identifications and intimate entanglements with
multiple places, times, and bodies differentiate him from the more singular-minded
privileged cosmopolitan male traveler on a teleological journey and casts him increasingly in
the role of a nomadic or widely-wandering figure. In his poetic travel narrative, the speaker
acknowledges the material realities of the places in which he finds himself, and he seems to
be most at home in simultaneous overlaps of time and in fluid spaces that collapse distance;
in other words, the poem consistently positions “home” and “away” in corresponding
physical and psychical spaces, as well as productively intertwines the masculine and the
feminine, the self and the other, instead of suggesting that the other be subsumed, relocated,
or erased in the interest of artistic production.
The poem’s traveler, constantly awash in bodily and sensory sensation, is in no
position to impose himself on others. Not sure of his destination, he “is carried along,
submits, resists, sympathizes and flees, [and is] hardly the master of his own adventure”
56
(“Introduction,” Bochner xvi). Marjorie Perloff observes that the poem “is presented as an
elaborate montage of sensations, images, and narrative fragments by means of which the poet
tries to keep his ego intact” (23). I argue that his ego does not remain intact—nor does
anything else in the poem. Clear binary structures do not stay in place, and without them to
offer stability and traction, the poem serves not as a personal travelogue for a poet-traveler,
but, as in Bochner’s words, “the poetic vehicle for the frantic whirling of the universe” (44).
The poem’s speaker explains, “So many associations images I can’t get into my poem/
Because I’m still such a really bad poet/ Because the universe rushes over me/ And I didn’t
bother to insure myself against a train wreck” (26). The poem cannot contain and order the
traveler’s experiences and associations. The uncontrolled movement of the poem and journey
portend a “wreck” as conversation, bodies, animated objects and machines become entangled
and subject and object relations blur.
The poem’s traveler is in constant contact with a boundless world; his world
is one in which the body—in the words of Merleau-Ponty—“is a fabric in which all
objects—and other bodies—are woven.” As the traveler interacts with the material world—
with places, objects, and other bodies, he or she perceives, senses, and experiences the
present and past simultaneously; significantly, the past always lacks a location, as it is not
simply as a space to recall or one to which he can return. The manner in which this traveler
moves through the world makes the control and mastery of time, space, one’s self and the
other, not just unattainable, but undesirable.
Instead of working harder to impose order and keep himself and his poem intact,
57
the poet lets the world rush over him. As does this train with its erratic and spontaneous
movements and seeming lack of itinerary, the poet allows for ambiguity and a change
in his course of action.
34
When he finds that he cannot keep everything straight, he writes,
“I give up/ Bounce back into my leaping memory.” The return of the past in the form of
memories prevents a clean break from the past and forces him to “give up” or abandon his
initial inclination to “take it all the way.”
The poem’s rapid movement from past to present, from one location to the next,
constantly carries the poet—and reader—into new geographical locations. He notes of his
journey, “I’m on the road. /I’ve always been on the road.” The poem spins into a swirl of
locations—Russia, France, China, Manchuria, Siberia, Japan, Mexico: “all of Europe seen
through the wind-cutter of an express at top speed.”
35
Witness to incongruous events and
devastating violence across the world, he depicts in short detail the material reality with
which he comes into contact, particularly, the effects of war and social upheaval on the body:
“I went to the hospitals in Krasnoyarsk […] I saw in quarantine gaping sores and wounds
with blood gushing out.”
36
In such moments, overcome by the intensity of irreparable
destruction, the traveling poet loses the sense of control of his own body in time and space.
34
Hubert and Hubert note that “Cendrars refuses to maintain a stationary position and a definable identity.
His displacements exceed those of the train, which, while supposedly moving along with monotonous
regularity, suddenly rushes ahead, stops, jerks, encounters obstacles, and gives undue freedom to its performing
wheels. It hardly keeps to its set itinerary”(69).
35
This continuous blur of locations as seen from the train window resonates with what Schivelbusch
described as the panoramic effect that produces “the tendency to see the discrete indiscriminately.”
36
On his travels Cendrars would have been witness to various manifestations of the budding [Russian]
Revolution; the devastated Russian troops returning home on the Transsiberian from defeat at the hands
of the Japanese at Port Arthur; Bloody Sunday in January 1905, and the general strike of that year.
58
Instead of distancing himself from the chaos, he becomes swept up in and lost in the world’s
morass and its wrecks: “We disappear right into a tunnel of war/ Hunger the whore, clutches
the clouds scattered across the sky and craps on the battlefield piles of stinking corpses.”
Faced with the abject and overwhelmed by stimulus, his world is one of temporal and spatial
confusion.
37
On the train, he looks out his window, hears the disorienting circus music and
imagines the body of an acrobat who defies gravity and weightlessly flies through the air.
“And here is my cradle” he writes of the train at this moment. The rocking train is
comforting, both carrying him into and protecting him from the world. Its movement
transports him back home through this bodily sensation, until he is an infant in his cradle
again: “My cradle/ It was always near the piano when my mother / Like Madame Bovary,
played Beethoven sonatas.” If the train is a safe home, his cradle from his infancy, the next
minute the maddened train feels suffocating and alienating: “The demons are unleashed/
Scrap iron/ Everything clanks/ Slightly off/ The clickety-clank of the wheels/Lurches/ Jerks/
We are in a storm in the skull of a deaf man.” Trapped in the disorienting, chaotic modern
world, the poet is temporarily re-oriented by a query from his French traveling companion,
Jeanne: “Say, Blaise, are we really a long way from Monmartre?” Not only does her
37
Schivelbusch writes about the physical and psychological impact of “mechanical power that created
its own new spatiality,” that altered the traveler’s relationship to “natural” space and time, including discussion
of “railway spine” (145), “nervous shock” (145) and sections on “the Pathology of the Railway Journey,”
“the History of Shock,” “Stimulus Shield, or the Industrialized Consciousness.” Thus, Schivelbusch links the
concept of “shock” to cultural and social stimulus that is “shocking” and technically caused “shocks,” such as
those caused by velocity or mechanically produced stimulus. Whether the shock was from a railway accident,
a military clash, from being bombarded by a deluge of sights, or from witnessing a violation of social custom,
the modern industrial age was in the process of shocking, switching up and re-charging not only the mind and
body, but culture as a whole.
59
question remind the poet of his present state and his distance from home, but “the terrific
presence of Jeanne” anchors him to the material world; and yet, she—and her words—
suggest distance and illustrate a return home as a false romance. Jeanne’s “poor naked
body,” with pelvis sticking out, belly sour with the clap, cannot serve as a safe or lovely
harbor to which the traveler might return.
The figure of Jeanne can—and has been read—as the poet’s feminine self, a symbol
of the past or home, the poet’s object of desire and muse, and the location of nostalgia and
melancholic attachment that the poet must relinquish or eliminate in the interest of his future.
Leamon sees the train and Jeanne forming oppositional roles that pull the speaker in different
directions: “[t]he devastating, sexually intense image of the train, a phallic symbol of the
speed, power, and progress of the new world of modernity and technology, is vividly
juxtaposed with the passive, ‘feminine’ fragility of Jeanne, who represents the old world of
the poet’s past.” However, this “juxtaposition” does not hold—for both prove to be fluid,
unstable tropes. One moment, the train is an uncontrollable, destructive technological force
of man’s doing and the next it is a rocking cradle that provides music and a sense of comfort.
Similarly, the figure of Jeanne morphs from a bony, diseased prostitute, to “the poet’s
flower,” to mistress, to child. Certainly, she serves in many typical feminine roles, yet as a
“terrific presence” in the poem, she cannot be relegated to a static symbol or even “the
externalized mirror-image” of the poet; the dizzying array of characterizations of Jeanne
illustrates the poet’s valorization of the fluidity of identity, as well as his own desire to retain
60
the presence of the feminine within the travel narrative as well as in himself. While Leamon
argues that Cendrars needs to keep an other in sight in order to “maintain his autonomy as
the (male) author of his written text” (164), the poet’s willingness to dissolve into his
surroundings seems to resist such self autonomy; Jeanne—and/or the feminine—is not
simply relegated solely or simply to the role of the “other” to his “self.”
The poet’s absence from the poem’s title, which includes the train of the
Transsiberian railway and little Jeanne of France, illustrates for some readers the poet’s
identification with Jeanne. The title triangulates man, woman, and machine, and conveys
the poet’s restless movement back and forth between the “feminine” and “masculine.” The
poem’s multiple and complex poetic personae allows the poet freedom to displace time and
place, and in doing so, facilitates a merging and shifting of identity by conveying experience
from feminine and masculine perspectives simultaneously. As suggested by Leamon, “[t]he
poem deconstructs itself even as it is taking shape: the male subject “je” is fragmented,
sometimes absent, sometimes taking the form of his alter ego Jeanne; he is once narrator,
narrated and narratee of his poem, displaced and disoriented, and disembodied, sliding from
present to past to future as he seeks a voice…” (163). Jeanne’s question then—“Blaise, are
we really a long way from Montmarte?”—is both her question as well as his, and when he
answers, “A long way, Jeanne, you’ve been rolling along for seven days/You’re a long way
from Montmarte,” he refers to the movement of both of their bodies together “rolling along
for seven days”—with no mention of actual distance, where they are at the present moment,
or where they are headed. Jeanne’s consistently unsettling and indeterminate presence
61
throughout the poem, comprised of varying forms and figures, configures her as an enigmatic
and un-locatable figure who, in crossing physical and metaphysical borders and in troubling
gender identification, contributes to the poet’s never arriving at a singular destination or
identity.
The gendering of exile and travel as a masculine phenomenon in modernist literary
histories often participates in imperialist nostalgia, and just as often the melancholic quest
for substance calls for the erasure or violation of the object of concern. Jeanne does
disappear temporarily in the poem, after the poet midway through his journey blurts out
rather anxiously—as if pushed to do so—“[a]nd at the end of the trip it’s horrible to be a man
with a woman.” Yet, if the poet gives voice to masculine performance anxiety along the
way—about how to take it all the way—when he comes to the end of his train travels, he
appears no longer invested in keeping it up, and no longer at odds with the presence of the
feminine; he embraces multiply-sited subjectivities. The journey and the poem end
simultaneously in Russia and in Paris; the present and in the past co-mingle. He writes of his
final stop, “Tsitshihar and Harbin/ That’s as far as I go/ The last station/ I stepped off the
train at Harbin a minute after they had set fire to the Red Cross office.” At two places at
once, he finds himself, on this final stop—in the final stanza—back in France: “O Paris/
Great warmth with the intersecting embers of your streets.” Here he sees and names women
he has known from the locations he has inhabited: “Bella, Agnes, Catherine” and “the mother
of my son in Italy/And she who is the mother of my love in America,” “And I can’t help
thinking about Little Jeanne of France. /It’s through a sad night that I’ve written this poem in
62
her honor/ Jeanne/ The little prostitute.” In the poem’s final stanzas, the poet is surrounded
by the bodies, the streets, and the debris that have become attached to him, and to which he
has become attached, through promiscuous geographical intimacy—that which stays with
him and in him as his world, as opposed to being or staying as an other.
In the early moments of the journey, the poet-traveler “The Prose of the Trans-
Siberian” gives voice to the period’s anxiety over instability, over the sense of losing one’s
place and self, which I discussed earlier as a feature of both modernist texts and travel
narratives; yet, both poet and poem ultimately embrace what might be characterized as a
feminine form of nomadic movement through and in the modern world. The poem’s traveling
subject, highly receptive to cross-pollination, finds himself in states of between-ness, while
still being consistently attentive to, and interacting with, local and material particularities.
Such in-between states and identifications inform both the content and form of this travel
poem. Bochner declares, “‘The Prose of the Trans-Siberian’ stands out among all twentieth-
century poetic experiments as the work that best captures the prismatic reality of the modern
world in its multiplicity” (Modernities xi). While the world of the poem is modern, its poetics
of travel enact a post-structuralist model of identity formed in and through dislocation, as
theorized in the work of James Clifford and Paul Gilroy, whose models, as Kaplan puts it,
allow for “the process of mapping [a] transnational and trans-ethnic terrain, [and] dislodge
essentialist identities in favor of more hybrid ones” in which identities are “relationships
rather than pre-given forms […], a network of partially-connected histories, and persistently
and re-invented time/space crossings’” (Kaplan 134). The travel of “Prose of the Trans-
63
Siberian” is a mapping of just such a terrain in its undermining of discrete, singular origins
and destinations.
Storytelling
Cendrars’s travel writing is characterized by most scholars as a form of creative non-
fiction, or, in Chefdor’s words, a “mythopoeia, a deliberate reconstruction of reality through
poetic vision” (16). In interviews, Cendrars frequently asserted the truth of the biographical
details in his work, in spite of the fact that in his writing he also discloses his poetic practice
of textual appropriation and reveals the creative liberties that he took with the facts of his
life. While the scholarship acknowledges these aspects of his writing, it also tends to express
anxiety about the “discrepancies between the fictive life of this fabulous storyteller and his
real biography” (Bochner 23). Of these much discussed discrepancies, Bochner explains,
“Cendrars is famous as an adventurer, and much of his work reflects his experiences, real
and imaginary. So fantastic is this life as it has come down to us in his work and the
reminiscences of others that the author has often been called a great liar” (4). Concern for
what distinguishes “real” biographical information and his own personal travel in his writing
highlights the understanding that travel is a bodily journey across physical geography and
that travel writing is generally taken to be the factual written account of this journey.
Cendrars’s travel poems, however, do not serve as vehicles for following a poet or traveler
on his journey. Instead, they reveal the ways in which travel, for Cendrars, constitutes
continual movement between the geographical and the textual.
64
The characterizations of Cendrars as a rebel, a vagabond, and an adventurous world-
traveler fail to acknowledge his extensive reading habits and the degree to which a wide
variety of media inform his travel poetry. As he moved from place to place as a youth, he
spent much of his time scrambling to earn a living and to read as many books as possible.
Because his own biographical accounts suggest that it was his youthful experiences as an
international vagabond that inform the travel details in “Prose of the Trans-Siberian,”
“it is more unexpected,” writes Chefdor, “to discover that the nineteen-year-old explorer of
Russia was a self-torturing sentimental dreamer and a studious methodical young scholar.
…[I]nstead of travel notes on Russia, [his]1906-1907 diaries are a methodical recording of
hours spent in the Saint Petersburg Library” (25). His first few years in New York City—
during which time he wrote “Easter in New York” (1914)—had him roaming it streets,
working odd jobs, yet spending hours reading in the New York City Library. Perloff writes:
“Cendrars's youthful adventures in New York (1911-12) were legendary: the tales, at least
partly generated by Cendrars himself, tell of his near starvation, of his stint as tailor in the
Lower East Side ghetto and then as pianist in a Bowery cinema, and of his passion for the
New York Public Library where he read almost daily” ("Alterable Noons” 162). Cendrars,
in his prose essay, “In Praise of the Dangerous Life” (1917), explains, “If you want to know
who I am, consult a dictionary and all the encyclopedias. Don’t forget bookmarks and cross-
references. Leaf through. Moisten your finger. Don’t skip a single page. You’ll end up
reading all the books in all the great libraries of nations and you’ll end up making your hole
in them like a worm through pulp” (Modernities 19). Cendrars traveled through textual space
65
with the same veracity and deliberation as he did geographical space, and given that his
reading activities and his geographical wanderings were simultaneous habits, it is no surprise
that his writing is an inextricable mix of textual and lived experiences, the difference
between the two not often distinguishable in his work or differentiated by Cendrars himself.
As Bochner observes, “the legendary world roamer mused as much through his books in all
the libraries of the world as along the highways” (22). Speaking of his relationship with
books, Cendrars said in a 1950 Paris Review interview, “[I] read enormously. It's my
passion. Everywhere, in all circumstances, and all sorts of books. Everything that falls under
my hand I devour.”
38
When asked about “unusual reading he had done,” Cendrars talks about
Captain Lacroix’s volumes of writing he is currently reading—“an old sailor and his books
are a feast […] certainly not the work of a littérateur. […] His pen is a marlinespike, and
each page brings you something, and there are ten big volumes! […] One touches the globe
with a finger.” For Cendrars, reading was a way of being in the world—his encounters with
textual material were a constant pleasure. He enthusiastically discussed a multi-volume
dictionary that he takes with him every place he goes: “The latest book I've discovered is the
great dictionary of the Customs Administration,” which, he explains, will someday assist him
in writing “the mystical life of Mary Magdalene.”
38
Interview by Michel Manoll, “Blaise Cendrars, The Art of Fiction No. 38,” The Paris Review, Spring 1966
No. 37. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4388/the-art-of-fiction-no-38-blaise-cendrars
66
Writing Travel
Concerning his poem, “Panama, or the Adventures of My Seven Uncles” (1918),
Cendrars “confessed” that it had been inspired by an issue of the Le Tour du Monde,
39
a
French adventure magazine popular during the years 1860 to 1914 that showcased travel
diaries of contemporary famous explorers and illustrated geographical expeditions with
maps, drawings, and wood engraving prints. The word “confession” carries with it the
suggestion that he committed a literary transgression, which is curious, given his predilection
for autobiographical inventiveness and openness about his practice of incorporating found
material into his writing. Cendrars in his autobiography The Astonished Man tells various
stories of how other people’s writing becomes embedded in his own. Once such story is of a
time his friend Andre Gaillard visits him in La Redonne and on Cendrars’s typewriter he
adds lines to Cendrars’s book-in-progress. Cendrars tells the reader, “I never crossed out
those lines of André Gaillard’s, and they were published, embedded in my text, when the
novel finally appeared in book form in 1929” (93). Cendrars’s acceptance that writing is
always a collaborative, multi-author process poses problems for readers who are eager to
track the author in his writing. For example, while “Panama” includes a central “I” narrator,
and certain sections appear to be personal travel accounts, a variety of texts and authors
circulate throughout the poem. Chefdor points out, “[i]f Prose of the Transsiberian had
established Cendrars’s reputation as a poet traveler, ‘Panama’ […] marked a crucial
transition which outlined the mythopoetic direction of future storytelling” (46). Cendrars’s
39
See Monique Chefdor, Blaise Cendrars. p. 48.
67
“confession” that the inspiration for the poem is a travel magazine undercuts readerly
expectations for authenticity in travel writing. Cendrars’s writing is provocative in that it asks
whether the authorial “I” is disingenuous and the content not “real” if it is inspired by or
lifted from others’ travel stories—not from the author’s own life and travels. I contend that
Cendrars’s “Panama” makes explicit that all the various forms of movement embedded in the
poem serve as travel, even those that are not accounts of the author’s physical traversing of
geographical space. Cendrars’s textual appropriations make his work inauthentic travel
writing only if travel is understood as a person’s singular bodily movement across
geographical space, an assumption that “Panama” works to dismantle.
Cendrars’s reported “confession” that Le Tour du Monde inspired “Panama” draws
attention to the interplay between the real and the imaginary in travel writing, and it
highlights the intertextual character of composition in general. In many ways, this poem
serves as a precursor to Cendrars’s later writing—his novels, essays and “memoirs” that
similarly traverse multiple genres and make transparent the intertextual literary character of
travel writing, in which writing itself figuratively “travels” across modes, forms, and genres.
While Cendrars’s cut-up method and practices of textual appropriation are attributable to the
influence of avant-garde artistic and literary techniques, they also follow textual practices
inherent in the genre of travel writing, such as its borrowing and recycling of motifs and
tropes. For, as Sara Mills points out, “[a] close intertextual relation with other travel
accounts can be seen in the fact that travel writing has always appropriated other writing,
sometimes explicitly but often by plagiarizing” (63). “Panama,” as an intertextual poetic
68
travel collage of found material, complicates the identification of what is “actual”
autobiography and what is pure creation, even as it highlights the discursive nature of travel
writing. As Mills also notes, “it is not necessary to read travel writing as expressing the truth
of the author’s life, but rather, it is the result of a configuration of discursive structures with
which the author negotiates” (9). Intertextuality, as explicitly illustrated in Cendrars’s
“Panama,” has the effect of disregarding lines that distinguish; no one particular voice, text,
form or perspective is valued over another.
Cendrars’s travel writing frequently makes reference to and borrows from the novels
of Jules Verne, the prolific nineteenth-century writer of the Voyages extraorinaries, whose
work was published from 1863 through 1914. Of the intertextual nature of Jule’s Verne’s
writing, Brian Aldiss writes, “Verne seems to make a very modernistic statement about the
collapsing relationship between writing and rewriting. There is no such thing as an ‘original’
text, for the modern writer is dealing at all times with the already written, which he must re-
use and recycle” (17). Yet, if Verne’s adventure novels illustrate the genre’s proclivity for
constructing coherent narratives out of pre-existing sources, texts, and discourses in order to
propagate new tales of frontier exploration” (17), Cendrars’s techniques of appropriation
deconstruct such structures, anticipating contemporary forms of travel writing that
acknowledge the presence of multiple and heterogeneous identities—of form, place, and self.
Cendrars deviates from Verne’s models in which Verne “synthesizes his sources into a
single, cohesive account heavily inflected by the voice of a heterodiegetic narrator” (Unwin
183). In his travel poetry, Cendrars does not create a unified artifact that tightly weaves the
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appropriated material into a seamless narrative in an attempt to make invisible the
multiplicity of texts and discourses that feed into it. Rather, his tendency is to make such
multiplicity and metatextuality deliberately overt, obvious, and disruptive.
The first edition of “Panama, or the Adventures of My Seven Uncles” (1918) was
published to look like a pocket-size fold-up travel brochure. The cover of the brochure is a
red, blue, and white booklet with the words LE PANAMA emblazoned on the top of
the page above an image of a ship’s life preserver with a banner reading BLAISE
CENDRARS and OUS LES ADVENTURES.
Fig. 2. Blaise Cendrars, Cover, Le Panama ou Les adventures de mes sept oncles, 1918.
The last part of the poem’s title, DES MES SEPT UNCLES, fills a bottom banner.
The images resemble travel stickers or stamps. According to Bochner, “[t]he format, train-
routes and cover of Panama are those of an old Union Pacific Railroad schedule” (110).
The train routes that are embedded in the body of the poem are reproductions of American
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railroad schedules for routes that run north, south, east and west. One page contains a
facsimile of a travel brochure from the Denver Chamber of Commerce that advertises
desirable attributes of the city that might attract tourists.
The images and advertisement are familiar signs of travel, ones that signify various
aspects of travel—commerce, transportation, geography, and foreign experiences. Such signs
function to help the traveler make choices that will facilitate productive and easy travel.
Hence, the combination of these images and the poem’s text produces an incongruous mix.
While the images operate as recognizable signs of travel, the poetics do not operate as a
conventional travel narrative in that they confuse direction and location. Unlike the train
route, banner, or ad, the poem’s text is not instructive or directional, nor does it follow a
straightforward path. This poem’s appropriation and use of these signs of travel creates a
disorienting interplay between travel signs and the poem’s poetics of travel.
Bochner sees the train route images, which lack their original borders and are
interspersed throughout poem, as integral paths of the poem: “the train-routes seem
to indicate a pause, a new paragraph” (110). He suggests that the maps and the Denver
advertisement take on a lyric quality. I would argue that instead their placement has a two-
fold affect that is quite different. The maps, schedules and advertisement are cultural signs of
instruction and direction. However, their placement in the poem results in visual and
thematic misdirection rather than contributes to structural or thematic coherence.
The discord that results from the presence of different signs and concepts of travel produces a
dynamic conversation about what is travel and what is the travel of the poem. For example,
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the sentence from the Denver Chamber of Commerce advertisement that situates the city in a
global context resonates with the poem’s translocational movements. The sentence reads:
“Denver, Colorado, Berlin, Germany and Manchester, England, are cited by Economists as
examples of inland cities which have become great because they are located at a sort of
natural crossroads.” Embedding an advertisement promoting tourism for a Midwest town
within an avant-garde modernist poem produces dissonance between high and low culture,
even as it highlights the relationship between a town in the center of America and worldly
cosmopolitan travel. The combination illustrates and reinforces the poem’s central aesthetic
and thematic premise; namely, that the experience of being and traveling in the modern
world is one that is associative and disorienting, entailing connections that seem incongruous.
Fig. 3. Blaise Cendrars, Le Panama ou Les adventures de mes sept oncles, 1918.
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The poem’s title, “Panama, or the Adventures of My Seven Uncles,” seems to suggest
that the poem is either about a country, Panama, or about the adventures of his uncles.
The ambiguity is provocative: is this an account of a place, Panama, or is it a collection of
adventure stories about traveling uncles? It is both. The poem’s Panama is both a real and an
imagined place that is constructed through letters, books, and imagination, as are the
fantastical adventures of the uncles, which are experienced by the nephew as both real and
imagined travel. The title thus highlights the poem’s presentation of travel writing as a poetic
intertextual latticework that weaves together multiple narratives to create identities of self
and place, illustrating how the writing of travel involves facts and fictions, as well as
multiple narratives and authors. Like “Prose of the Transsiberian,” “Panama” is
homodiegetic; however, the voice of central speaker, the nephew, mingles with the uncles in
the spaces of the poem. The seemingly random juxtaposition of travel accounts highlight the
hybrid character of travel writing, as it calls attention to the particularities of materials and
voices in the poem that create its disorienting narrative. In Bochner’s words, “It is a poetry of
presentation, with emotions held in reserve behind the rapid-fire juxtaposition of the wide
world’s quotidian” (“Introduction” xxv). Thus, “Panama” operates as an “imaginative
enactment of geographic displacement,” a form of traveling poetry whose poetics, as
Ramanzi notes, “proceeds more quickly and abruptly, through translocal juxtapositions
which by their rapidity and lyric compression [and] foreground the negotiations and
fabrication of imaginative travel” (51). Travel in this poem occurs through a poetic
negotiation of imagination, geography, memories, texts, and images as the poem congregates
73
the experiences of the nephew in myriad locations and the experiences of the seven uncles
that emerge in their letters.
The poem’s initial speaker is the nephew who has been uprooted from his home and
“sent to all the boarding schools of Europe.” What is familiar to him are books, movies,
newspapers, and letters from his uncles. His changes of location and his interactions with his
environments are interwoven with the travel stories he culls from his uncles’ letters. The
rapid and compressed juxtapositions of all of these elements eliminate the distance between
the speaker’s imaginative and bodily travels, the poem’s images, the textual citations, and the
uncles’ stories. The poem’s collage style juxtaposes and intermingles these various forms of
travel so that none is privileged over the other; they figure as equivalent forms of travel, and
no one speaker serves as the central traveler. The poem’s “I” is mobile, moving from speaker
to speaker and from place to place; it shifts from a child’s physical home to textual spaces
and to myriad geological locations of the world. The rapid movement from one poetic line to
the next, along with the mobility of the narratives of the travelers, also causes the distinction
between the nephew and uncles to blur, particularly when the nephew becomes a world
traveler. Moved emotionally by the descriptions of travel he reads in books and his uncles’
letters, he comes to occupy the locations of the uncles via his own travel.
The poem’s first two lines acknowledge books as the speaker’s source of inspiration
and knowledge of both the world and his own family situation: “Books / There are books that
talk about the Panama Canal.” The poem and its evocation of travel begin in and with books,
as the speaker connects the words and images in books to his family history: “The Panama
74
Canal is intimately linked to my childhood.” Panama is the location of the “Panama crash”
that he knows “turned his childhood upside down”; it is a place that is constructed through
multiple sources and signifies both family and dislocation. Through the child’s associated
recollections, the poem’s first three stanzas make these leaps, connecting this far-off place,
Panama, with the letters that his traveling uncles’ letters send to his mother: “And when she
got the letters / Dazzlement!” The letters and their “beautiful exotic stamps inscribed with
lines from / Rimbaud,” are signs of travel, and taken together the uncles’ words, and the
stamp pictures, and Rimbaud’s poetry connote the romance of otherness and worldliness.
Likewise, the boy learns of the world through his picture books:
I had a nice picture book
And for the first time I saw
The whale
The big cloud
The walrus
The sun
His first experiences of travel thus occur in the act of reading images and in the words
of his uncles: “Oh that first letter I deciphered alone, letter more teeming than all of
creation.” Reading the letter is the genesis of his initial traveling in the world, providing
a form of desired displacement from home. The first “trips” he experiences include in
addition to letters and books, the cinema. All of these media put him in conversation and
circulation with the worlds around him:
How am I supposed to study for my tests
When a letter slides under the door
I saw
This beautiful pedagogy!
In the movies, I saw the trip it took
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It took sixty-eight days to get to me
Words and images reveal the world to him. He first knows places through textual and
imagined travel, which is not subordinate to bodily travel.
The poem’s collage poetics mix travel that is seen and that is read with bodily travel;
they coincide in the same stanzas, sharing textual and geographic space. That the uncles
travel in the world, and, like the central speaker, read about travel and write about it, further
contributes to the poem’s refusal to make absolute distinctions:
O uncle, my mother told me everything
You stole some horses to run away with your brothers
You became a cabin boy on a tramp steamer
You broke your leg jumping from a moving train
[…]
And you used to write poetry inspired by Musset
San Fransisco
That’s where you read the story of General Sutter who conquered
California
One form of dislocation in the poem is this constant movement between the speaker’s travel
accounts and those of his uncles, the distinction between them becoming even slighter when
the speaker recounts his own physical traveling in the world. The poem’s lines and stanzas
begin to switch back and forth between travelers, speakers, locations, and texts, resulting in
an “I” without a clear referent. Such an “I” appears mid-way through a stanza that begins
with the inclusive statement, “There’s no hope / And we have to work,” followed by a
lamenting for “shut-in lives,” followed by a jump to a new place that juxtaposes an “I” that is
experiencing a place, time, and book alongside an “I” that is an uncle doing the same:
I was in Naples
1896
76
When I received the Little Illustrated Journal
Captain Dreyfus being stripped in front of the army
My fifth uncle:
I’m head cook at the Club Hotel in Chicago
I have 400 kitchen boys under me
But I don’t like Yankee cooking
Please note my new address
Absent in this stanza is the “you” that the nephew uses to address his uncles. The “I” that was
in Naples and received the journal shares the same stanza as the “I” of the fifth uncle. Despite
the “I” being in Naples, and the “I” being head cook in Chicago, they are linked by a shared
date and by the ambiguous “my” of the fifth and the last line, which could belong to either
speaker. The juxtaposed speakers, texts, places and activities suggest simultaneity and
collapse the actual physical distance that separates them. As is true of physical distances,
the line between experiences and subject positions of the nephew and the uncles becomes
increasingly blurred. Contributing to this confusion is the fact that the uncles, like the
nephew, are readers and writers of texts and poetry:
O uncle, you’re the only one who never felt homesick
Nice London Budapest Bermuda Saint Petersburg Tokyo Memphis
[…]
It seems you own a History of Cuisine down the Ages and throughout
the World
[…]
Your menus
Are the new poetry
In this stanza, the names of cities, a world cuisine book, and the uncle’s menus are all signs
of travel as well as indications of this uncle’s worldliness. The cosmopolitan travels of this
uncle produce a cosmopolitan dinner menu: travel involves reading and writing. This meta-
textual acknowledgement of travel writing as an intertextual form of art suggests that art is
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the everyday experience of congregating diverse but often quotidian materials, such as the
menu poetry. Modern travel, the poem suggests, is not a pure and authentic physical
experience in which one traverses a single romantic landscape or geography. Instead, it is
simply being in the modern world, immersed within landscapes that are replete with
mundane media. The texts experienced and read by the travelers in the poem shape and
inform their conceptions of location, and, in turn, the texts facilitate intellectual and bodily
experiences of travel.
The poem’s travelers’ appropriation of others’ journeys as their own mirrors the
poem’s appropriations of signs of travel and motifs in the travel writing. In turn, the poem
serves as an experience of travel for the reader, much like the letters of the uncles have
served for the speaker as a boy. Hence, the poem makes explicit that travel is the re-
occupation of places and positions; in other words, travel can be the act of repositioning
oneself via appropriation as the means of traveling—an attitude more explicit and transparent
in this poem than in most travel writing texts. The nephew refers to an uncle who explained
his location and job:
My uncle said:
I’m working as a butcher in Galveston
The slaughterhouses are 15 miles from town
I’m the one who takes the bleeding animals back along the sea, in the
evening
In response, the traveling nephew addresses this uncle and discloses that he too has visited
this town and place that the uncle once occupied and has seen the town rebuilt:
Uncle, you disappeared in the cyclone of 1895
Since then I’ve seen the rebuilt town and strolled along the seashore
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where you took the bleeding animals
In a reversal, a switching of positions, the nephew points out that a different uncle has
followed in his footsteps: “For a long time you hunted in the Sacramento valley where
I worked / clearing land.” The speaker and his uncles cross paths and share the same spaces;
even though they do not do so in the world’s geography, they do so in the poem.
In one instance, the nephew tracks an uncle, fantasizing committing a crime just as
his uncle had done. The nephew considers appropriating the uncle’s story, making it his as
well, so that he can meet him in prison:
It was at Whitechapel that I picked up your trail again
You’re a convict
Your life circumscribed
So much so that
I feel like killing someone with a sap or a waffle iron just to get the
chance to see you
You must have a long scar across your head
The result of these displacements and replacements is that the poem’s “I” and its travel
stories are no longer are clearly attached to a specific person or narrative. The lines between
the uncles and nephew blur further as he appropriates one uncle’s body: “My seventh uncle /
No one ever knew what happened to him / They say I look like you.” The nephew has
appropriated the activities, travel and locations of his uncles, and he now sees a resemblance
between himself and his seventh uncle. In essence, he attempts to take the place of this absent
uncle; this position is available given that his uncle is missing, yet it is not a complete or final
fit/destination as he only looks like his uncle. This uncle, and all the uncles and their stories,
are floating signifiers of travel for the nephew’s writing, whose writing is the new travel
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poetry/menu. That the uncles are (a)kin to the nephew and are not fixed entities creates
constant slippage in what they signify and complicates the nephew’s acts of appropriation.
His appropriations occur in shared acts of reading and writing and through the sharing of
spaces, as opposed to the nephew taking and owning that which is not his/him. In contrast to
the traditional travel narrative in which a traveler colonizes, conquers and expels the other at
the culmination of a journey, the nephew’s recycling and re-circulating of family stories and
figures does not absorb them only to erase them. Rather, his encounter with them is
constantly deferred, creating an endless chain of unfixed signs of travel, images, uncles,
texts, and places that all shift and refer elsewhere in a continuous circulating movement that
does not come to a halt.
The poem’s final stanzas of fragments and one-word lines spin into a whirlwind of
sensations and images. The poem’s unfixed “I” travels even more widely to include “Suns /
Moons / Stars / Apocalyptic worlds.” This mobile, multiple “I” is simultaneously universal,
particular and derivative: “I’d like to be a fifth wheel / Storm / Noon at two P.M. / Nothing
and everywhere.” The traveling “I” is only momentarily attached to particular sites and times
as “a fifth wheel.” Choosing not to be a separate entity is being “nothing”, but it is also being
multiple (“everywhere”), existing in simultaneous times and spaces. “‘Panama, or the
Adventures of My Seven Uncles,’” writes Bochner, “is a discovery, the discovery of one’s
place among the events and places of the world and among the manifestations of oneself in
others who went before” (109). I would argue that these are multiple and continuous
discoveries in which the traveler is always moving and never arriving at a final or single
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event, place, or manifestation. Thus, this poem conveys travel as movement among a
network of interrelated parts, and it proposes that travel writing is a mutable form of
appropriations of multiple endless predecessors and sources.
The journey of “Panama” resembles that of “Prose of the Trans-Siberian” in that
neither are concerned with definite origins nor final destinations. Their collage poetics
instead facilitates a journey of continuous interactivity that puts into contact, in the words of
Bochner, “the wide world’s quotidian.” “In Panama,” he observes, “we meet, we leave, then
we blend, in our minds, the places we visit so quickly that the idea of a voyage recedes
leaving in its place the sense of all places coexisting simultaneously” (Introduction” xxv).
This poem’s intersections convey modern travel as continuous and inclusive movement in
which the identity of the self and the identity of the poem form mobile terrains that travel and
are traveled through storytelling.
Snapshots
Everything that Cendrars encountered he incorporated into the seemingly endless
textual terrain that is his oeuvre of writing. As illustrated by the following excerpt from his
biography, The Astonished Man, he would frequently take up residence in a place he liked
and become familiar with its geography, local people, and material culture:
Whenever I arrive in a strange country or a new town, I visit the photographs,
where I linger for hours and even days in front of the windows, comparing the
photographs on display, the little babies stark naked on furry rugs, the
engaged couples, the bride and groom in wedding attire, the soldiers, the
enlargements of ancestors, passport photographs that look the same in every
country in the world […], the celebrities of the town, the local beauties, and
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mentally classifying all these faces framed under glass and mounted on Ingres
paper or Bristol-board in the electric mirages of the show-cases, I form for
myself an idea of the local people, a type, which I complete by idling about in
the bookshops and corner stationers’ to see what the people of the country
read, not the great writers, but the adventure stories, romantic serials, keys to
dreams, sales catalogues and other printed matter of the same stamp as the
innumerable works signed by Gustave Lerouge (230).
Adventure stories, romantic serials, photographs and sales catalogues are equally compelling
to Cendrars; and because they are a part of his traveling experience, of his interactions with a
place and its people, these texts find a way into his writing. Such was the case with the
writing of his good friend, Gustave Lerouge. A huge fan of Lerouge’s popular works, which
included everything from science fiction, magazine serials, and romance novels to social
tracts and cookbooks,
40
Cendrars writes, “I always had one or another of his publications in
my pocket and the latest installment of one of his serial stories” (131). Because he greatly
admired Lerouge, describing him as a man who “turned away from the company of literary
men” and rejected recognition for his writing, he wrote his collection of snapshot travel
poems Kodak (1924) by cutting and pasting together excerpts from Lerouge’s adventure
novel, Le Mysterieux Docteur Cornélius, in an effort to prove to Lerouge the literary merit of
his work. Cendrars takes him the published poem “clipped out of one of his prose works”
(133) in order to convince him that he too writes poetry. Of the travel poems in Kodak,
Bochner observes, “The only trip Cendrars took for these snapshots is through a book by
someone else” (Introduction xxix).
40
Arthur B. Evans writes, “poet Blaise Cendrars, who collected Le Rouge's books and admired him greatly, has
portrayed Le Rouge as a writer of uncommon genius and productivity—an unsung hero of French letters who
published over three hundred works during his lifetime, dozens of which were identifiably science fiction or
hybrid-science fiction. For more on Gustave La Rouge, see Evans’ article, “Gustave La Rouge, Pioneer of Early
Science Fiction.”
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Kodak is arranged in general categories with titles related to geographical travel
excursions, such as “West,” “Far West,” “Aleutian Islands,” “Elephant Hunt,” and “Menus.”
The short poems are snapshots that seemingly capture the details of what was seen (or eaten)
in far-reaching locations. The poems are labeled according to their subject matter, such as
“Roof Garden,” “Girl,” “The Bahr el Zeraf,” “Fishy Cove.” While readers appreciated that
the poet of Kodak appeared to be certified travel writer, having been to so many foreign
places and seen so many exotic things, Chefdor reports that they were “disconcerted”
(Blaise Cendrars 54) by the absence of the traveler himself in his travel texts. Chefdor
writes, “[w]hen Kodak came out in February 1924, it was received as a new chapter of
Cendrars’s travel diary. […] The novelty of this apparent travelogue is an absence of the
narrator’s personal commentary and the traditional narrative tone” (53-54). In a sense, Kodak
is indeed a new chapter of Cendrars’s lifelong travel diary; his presentation of written travel
pictures, created from appropriating his friend’s fictional novel and rearranging the material
into his own poetics of travel, is an extension of the notion in “Panama” that travel writing is
always storytelling.
The last collections of poetry that Cendrars wrote, Nineteen Elastic Poems (1919),
Kodak (1924), and Travel Notes (1924), are indeed all poems assembled from the random
collection of things Cendrars pulled out his pockets—objects he gathered as he traveled
through various cities, countries, cafes—and books. Each of these collections reflects
the enormous and varied swath of materials in which Cendrars had been or was immediately
engaged, and each demonstrates Cendrars trying out another approach to the writing of
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travel. Common to all these latter works is the abandonment of the narrative frames that
Cendrars used in “Prose” and “Panama” (a poet experiencing train journey and a boy
following the adventures of his uncles). Instead, the poet opts to throw the reader into the
middle of situations and places that are not immediately recognizable or even
comprehensible. Having abandoned the poetic journey narrative form, he turns to film,
telegrams, photography, and the postcard as sources of inspiration for form and language.
This travel writing is the accumulation and juxtaposition of the quotidian, which entails
appropriation and amiable plagiarism. His poetry provides glimpses of exotic locations to
which the poet seemingly traveled, the cafés in which he sat, the conversations he overheard,
the texts he read, the art that he saw, the strange languages and images he encountered. In
Nineteen Elastic Poems, the poems’ images, figures, and words bounce off of each other,
creating a sense of frenetic time shifts and suggesting the connectivity of disparate people
and locations. Menus are poems, as are daily newspapers, and catch phrases—the everyday is
intermixed with that which is “exotic.” This mixing calls into question what is local and
immediate and what is foreign and far way by making unclear what exactly is familiar and
what is exotic. “Mee Too Buggi,” is a tongue-in-cheek “travel poem” that intentionally
confuses and alienates the reader in its scramble of unidentifiable words, locations, cultures
and points of view—what Bochner calls “an extraordinary act on Cendrars’s part of
decolonizing perception” (Introduction xxvii). Cendrars performs this act in all of his writing,
even when his writing corresponds to his actual physical travels. Such is the case with Travel
Notes, personal “post-cards” and “ocean letters” from his trip to South America, all of which
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continue Cendrars’s quest to blur the distinctions between the mobility inherent in traveling,
living, and poetry-making.
Characterizing Cendrars’s writing as a form of religious homage to the material and
people he encountered in his travels, Steve Kogan notes that “Cendrars is not an author in
the ordinary sense of the word but a writer who casts off his work along a spontaneous
pilgrimage through life,” treating his subject matter “not as literary objects but as a form of
communion with the world” (22). Cendrars did, indeed, commune with the world and feel
passionately about his subject matter, but he himself had little romantic reverence for the
person or the nation who views world travel as the occasion for plundering and exploitation.
Yet, Kogan’s metaphor of accumulating material and then casting it off is not the most
appropriate description of Cendrars’s method. In fact, Cendrars calls into question this form
of appropriation in one of his early prose pieces, “I Have Killed” (1916), where he depicts
unromantic global “communions” or “collaborations” that he experienced firsthand as a
soldier in World War I:
All over the world people are working for me alone. Ores come from Chile,
canned food from Australia, leather from Africa. America sends us machine
tools. China sends us machine tools. […] I’m smoking Arabian tobacco. I
have Batavian chocolate in my rucksack. Men’s hands and women’s hands
have made everything I wear. All races, all climates, all beliefs have
collaborated. […] The entrails of the globe and the standards of good behavior
have been racially disrupted; virgin lands have been exploited, inoffensive
beings have been schooled in an inexorable trade. Entire countries have been
transformed in a single day. (13)
41
41
This essay is in Modernities and Other Writings.
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Cendrars satirically describes global trade, the material “collaborations” of the early
twentieth-century that benefit him, the European man, and exploit lands and people, leaving
them disrupted and transformed. Cendrars’s storytelling serves not only as a critique of the
travel writing genre, but more broadly, it illuminates and subverts the power dynamics
between the self and the other that tend to be inherent in acts of traveling. Thus, his poetic
collaborations give us a sense of what it is to be in and of the modern world.
86
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Bochner, Jay. Blaise Cendrars: Discovery and Re-creation. Toronto: University of
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---------. “Introduction.” Blaise Cendrars: Complete Poems. Trans. Ron Padgett.
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Blum, Cinzia. “Rhetorical Strategies and Gender in Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto,”
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--------. Modernities and Other Writings. Ed. Monique Chefdor. Trans. Esther Allen.
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87
---------. La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France, 1913.
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of Rupture. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003.
89
Poggi, Christine. “Dreams of Metallized Flesh: Futurism and the Masculine Body,”
Modernisn/modernity 4.3 (1997), pp.19-43.
Ramazani, Jahan. A Transnational Poetics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
2009.
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space
in the 19
th
Century. Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1986.
Smith, Sidonie. Moving Lives: 20th-Century Women’s Travel Writing. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
Sturken, Marita. “Mobilities of Time and Space: Technologies of the Modern and
Postmodern.” Technological Visions: The Hopes and Fears that Shape New
Technologies. eds. Marita Sturken, Douglas Thomas, and Sandra J. Ball-
Rokeach. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004.
Unwin, Timothy. Jules Verne: Journeys in Writing. Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press, 2005.
Vigeras, L.A., “Blaise Cendrars.” The French Review. Vol. 14, No. 4 (Feb. 1941)
pp. 311-318.
90
We take a walk
They are going somewhere
And they may look everywhere
Men’s eyes look into things
Our eyes look out
--“Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots,” 1914
I am knowing
All about
Unfolding
--“Parturition,” 1914
Chapter Two
Mina Loy and the Traveling Self
In modernism’s heralded year of 1914, Mina Loy, an English-born painter and poet
living in Florence, Italy, had her first writing published in America and her paintings
exhibited in Rome’s First Free Exhibition of International Futurist Art. The American
literary magazine Camera Work introduced her controversial “Aphorisms on Futurism,”
and Trend published her poems “Parturition” and “Three Italian Pictures.” As did Loy
herself, her writing traveled across borders, its origins a transnational constellation of her
literary and art communities.
Two years later Loy stepped off a transatlantic steamship and onto American ground
for the first time. In 1918 when Ezra Pound published her poem, “The Effectual Marriage or
The Insipid Narrative Of Gina and Miovanni,” in The Little Review along with the work of
Marianne Moore, he wrote in his introduction: “These girls [Loy and Moore] have written a
distinctly national product. They have written something which would not have come out of
91
any other country.”
42
With this declaration, Pound proposes that a national culture—in this
case, American culture—produced Mina Loy’s poetics; yet, ironically, the contribution to
which Pound refers is a poem steeped in Loy’s Italian community and her English
background, its intercultural terrain a challenge to such categorization. Because Loy herself
never felt at home in England nor considered herself a British poet, actions that place Loy
and her writing within the parameters of a national identity threaten to evacuate the
geographical and cultural heterogeneity that informs her poetics of mobility.
In this chapter I examine Mina Loy’s shifting position within modernism’s
transnational terrain through a reading of two examples of her early poetry, “Three Italian
Pictures” (1914) and “Three Moments in Paris” (1915),
43
which I argue form dynamic,
intercultural forms of travel writing. Written in Italy, these poems reveal Loy’s attentiveness
to her locations and relationships there, as well as situate her within broader transnational
networks of relations. Rooted in the particularities of myriad cultural and personal
interactions, Loy’s poetics bring into close contact the seemingly disparate and incongruous.
Her disregard for convention of form, employment of irregular syntax, and use of
fragmentation challenge linearity and unity in the interest of depicting intersections and
convergences. Illuminating the instability of borders, “travel” in these poems occurs within
and across foreign and familiar spaces—bedrooms, homes, cafes, neighborhood streets—and
these various forms of movement challenge both material and cultural structures. Because the
42
This quote is taken from Roger L. Conover’s “(Re)Introducing Mina Loy,” Mina Loy: Woman and Poet,
(Orono, Maine: The National Poetry Foundation 1998) p. 248.
43
“Three Moments in Paris” was first published in the American little magazine, Rogue.
92
poems’ speakers are fluid and unsettled, vulnerable to dissolving and reconfiguring, the
physical and psychological borders of the self do not remain intact. Loy’s avant-garde poetics
enact Bergsonian simultaneous time and depict travel as phenomenological interactions
between the self and world. Loy’s poetry is a Baedeker that dislocates more than it guides.
The poetics of itinerancy that characterize Loy’s Italian poems serve as a counter
to the restrictive narratives of self and other inherent in conventional travel writing.
For example, by rejecting unifying vocal subjectivities and playing on subject/pronoun
instability, Loy’s writing troubles distinctions between subjects and between subjects and
locations. In fact, the effect her poetics creates of crossing myriad borders—physical,
temporal, spatial—produces a sense of dizzying disorientation that make it difficult for a
reader to retain a sense of a stable place or subject. Loy’s biographer Carolyn Burke notes,
“Loy’s idiosyncratic crossings of Paris and Italy, metaphysics and feminism, have made
numerous readers uneasy” (“Mina Loy” 236). While Loy’s is a traveling poetry in its
geographical and cultural itinerancy, what is unique is the way in which its dislocating
poetics makes the sensate body into the vehicle for crossing material and metaphysical
borders and its travel the means for critiquing those structures that impede mobility.
A disorienting poetics that mixes together places and figures in Florence with those in
Paris,
44
Loy’s “Three Italian Pictures” and “Three Moments of Paris” serve as a non-linear
translocational poetic map of Loy’s concern with female mobility in particular.
44
For example, the figures in the Paris café scene of “One O’Clock at Night” resemble Loy and the men with
whom she had relationships while in Italy—the Futurist leaders F.T. Marinetti and Giovanni Papini.
93
In dialogue with Loy’s restrictive English upbringing and with Italian culture, these poems
serve as a cross-cultural critique of both English and Italian values and all social institutions
that oppress the body and restrict psychic and physical mobility.
Mongrel Poetics
Modern travel writing, as I discussed in the introduction, tends to be encoded with
colonizing discourses of expansionism and is thus concerned with the stability of the self.
The reason the self must stay intact, Steve Clark observes, is because “[t]he subject of a
travel narrative must integrate new experiences and radical geographical and cultural
differences within a stable cultural frame…” (64). In contrast to the traveler, the migrant or
nomad, he suggests, is an “unstable subject [….] that belongs to no dialectic, that eludes the
logic of identity. It is the subject for whom the origin (or home) is from the beginning a
displacement and cannot thus be fixed. The figure of the migrant, nomadic in essence, begins
in travel, or with a lost beginning, and essentially irreversible trajectory, and has nowhere to
return” (65).
Given that Loy never returned to England and did not situate her writing within a
singular national or cultural framework, it is not surprising that her texts of travel do not
dwell upon origins and destinations. Undercutting the hierarchy of relations and exoticism of
the other that is endemic to much travel writing, Loy writes travel as a poetics that enacts her
own personal and geographic dislocations. The avant-garde aesthetic and literary techniques
that Loy employs in her poetry have the effect of collapsing and confusing distances,
94
resulting in a transgressive form of travel writing in which travel is an interactive state of
being—similar to the poetry of Cendrars. For both poets, the negotiation of geographical,
cultural, and personal terrain is the negotiation of one’s subjectivity. Loy, in particular, was
“infinitely aware of the myriad means by which we come into relationship with one another”
(Schreiber 14), and how those relationships shape identity formation. As Geraldine Pratt and
Susan Hansen observe, “[l]ocation does not simply reflect identity; identities are formed
through the mediating activities of places, locations and positions” (185).
45
While Loy lived
in New York City, Paris, Berlin, and Mexico, it was in Italy that she began her foray into
creating a poetics that illuminates just such mediating activities and shifting identities.
Loy herself was known for her shifting identities. From her international set of friends
that Loy made while studying art in Munich, the young Mina earned the nickname Dusie,
“a name composed of two pronouns (Due and Sie) between which she always hesitated”
(Burke, Becoming Modern 62). This non-singular name is suggestive of Loy’s perpetual state
of being in-between, her vacillation between states of being; it speaks to what was Loy’s life-
long personal and poetic identity. Loy’s dis-identification with her English background and
self-identification as “a mongrel”
46
situated her outside a national literary tradition, suggests
Cristanne Miller, so that “when Loy began writing poetry, her fluency in German, French
and Italian provided extensive possibilities for conceptual distancing from her home culture”
(164). Loy adopted the term “mongrel” to define her mixed heritage—her father was Jewish-
45
For Caren Kaplan’s discussion of Pratt and Hansen’s article, “Geography and the Construction of
Difference,” see her book Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 1996) pp. 184-187.
46
Mina Loy used this term in “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose,” published in The Little Review 9:3, Spring 1923.
95
Hungarian and her mother Protestant-English. From an early age Loy had a strained
relationship with her mother, from whose house she left as soon as she found an opportunity.
Loy would later write of her non-identification with her home country and language, “I left
England at seventeen & think in a subconscious muddle of foreign languages—Perhaps I
have no notion of what pure English is” (163). Loy herself was a self-constructed work of
continual improvisation. As Conover notes of Loy, “[r]ather than allowing herself to be fixed
by an identity, she interloped, using her various identities to transform the cultures and social
milieus she inhabited. […] She was the binarian’s nightmare. She was a Futurist, Dadaist,
Surrealist, feminist, conceptualist, modernist, post-modernist, and none of the above.” He
adds, “her anti-career was marked by so many seeming contradictions, counter-allegiances,
and inconsistencies that she was often considered unbalanced” (xiii). Loy’s life-long practice
of crossing boundaries translated into an eclectic body of work—art, poetry, journalism,
manifestos, inventions, found-art assemblages, fashion and lampshade designs—that re-
assembles and critiques that which she encountered in her travels.
Cross-cultural intersections informed the sensibilities of many writers in the
twentieth-century’s avant-garde movements; however, Loy’s sense of her “mongrel” identity
as intrinsically impure and impartial to any one particular language or culture, is a form of
cosmopolitanism born of personal and cultural dislocations. Because Loy relocated herself in
response to personal and professional needs, she has been described as lacking personal ties
and binding attachment to places. Loy seems to make this point herself when she writes to
Mabel Dodge in 1920, “New York is the only city I have ever been grateful to [but] whoever
96
cares for any city for long is merely attending his own funeral” (21). Linking Loy’s physical
rootlessness to personal detachment, Miller proposes that “the very distance suggested in the
tones and attitudes of her poems reflects her lack of connection to a place, family, group, or
community of fellow writers, artists, and friends. The extraordinary quality of Loy’s work
stems from the brutal directness this lack of connection perhaps liberates her to express”
(201). On a similar note, Roger Conover characterizes Loy as foot-loose, unaware of the
borders of her environments:
[w]hile most of the expatriates were just beginning their exile training,
shifting their allegiance from one short-lived masthead to the next and
changing headquarters as fast as Jimmie Barman switched jobs in
Montparnesse, Mina Loy moved freely in World Bohemia—a land without
seacoast or policy whose mythic contours were barely sensed.
(“Introduction” xviii)
Indeed, over the course of her life, Loy displayed little long-term commitment to one
particular place or group—with her writing indicative of how and why she was disinclined to
situate herself domestically for extended periods of time. Yet, I want to argue that Loy’s
form of nomadism follows the definition of Rebecca Solnit, who explains that nomads
“contrary to current imagination have fixed circuits and stable relationships to places”
(120).
47
Citizens of early twentieth-century “World Bohemia,” for example, like the fabled
American expatriates in Europe, traveled its countries and cafes in pursuit of the next new
47
See Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost (New York: Penguin, 2006).
97
thing and city. As her writing evidences, Loy felt acutely the contours of her shifting
physical, cultural and personal landscapes, resulting in a cosmopolitan poetics that reveals
the self as formed and reformed through self-world interactions, and undergoing a form of
traveling that could not be captured in a straightforward narrative.
Given Loy’s resistance to her English upbringing and her formative experiences in art
schools in Munich and Paris, Loy arrived in Italy with little attachment to her home nation
and culture and a predilection for operating within multiple linguistic, national and cultural
frames. Loy lived in Italy for almost a decade—primarily in the area around Florence, where
she formed relationships with American expatriates and Italian Futurists and began writing
poetry. She would later write in a letter to her friend and publisher, Carl Van Vechten,
“When I was twenty-three I was elected a member of Salon d’Automne and then I stole away
from civilization—to live on the Costa San Giorgio.”
48
She arrived in Florence in 1907 as an
artist and in an unhappy marriage with fellow artist Stephen Haweis. She had studied art in
London, Munich, and Paris, and despite her acceptance into the prestigious Salon d’Automne,
she felt compelled to leave Paris to set up house in Italy with Stephen. The relocation was
meant to accommodate her “condition”—she was pregnant with her lover’s child. Staying
married to Stephen would temporarily secure her income from her father, an income
predicated on her staying in her marriage. More restricted by personal and financial
constraints than many of the expatriates in Florence, Loy did not feel immediately
48
Mina Loy, Personal letter to Carl Van Vechten, Box: Loy-Lung in Carl Van Vechten correspondence,
Beinecke Library, Yale, New Haven.
98
comfortable in the eccentric circle of writers, artists, and political activists surrounding the
exuberant American Mabel Dodge.
49
For her first three years in Italy, she and Stephen lived
an isolated life outside of Florence, during which time she was occupied with motherhood
and with painting. Eventually, she became friends with Dodge, who introduced Loy to
coterie of assorted expatriate writers and artists that included Gertrude Stein, whose writing
would influence Loy’s.
But before she was integrated in Dodge’s circle, Loy largely remained an outsider to
the expatriate and Italian communities of Florence. Burke argues that Loy’s isolation during
this period contributed to a loneliness that provided her with a neutral vantage point that
benefited her work: “[f]rom her isolated position as a foreigner, Mina observed the
differences that placed her outside both cultures and began drafting ‘July in Vallombrosa,’
the poem that would become the first in a series, ‘Three Italian Pictures’” (Becoming Modern
172). Loy’s isolation, however, did not prevent her from participating in the local milieu in
which she found herself. In her prose poem, “Summer Night in a Florentine Slum,” Loy
writes, “I leaned out of my window—looking at the summer-strewn street; late heat—lit with
lamps, and mixed my breath with the tired dust.” In this piece of writing, she describes in
detail her conversations with her neighbors: “These were friends of mine; they lived in a
49
Loy wrote of her friendship with Dodge, “Mabel of course was a great salvation in my life—[I] consider her
the most ample woman-personality alive.” Janet Lyon describes their relationship in more detail: “As an
English expatriate who had studied art in Munich, Paris, and London and who now lived in Futurist Florence
near Mabel Dodge and her sexually adventurous American entourage, Loy was exposed to some of the vital
cross-currents of avant-gardism.” “Mina Loy’s Pregnant Pauses: The Space of Possibility in the Florence
Writings,” Mina Loy: Woman and Poet. p. 383.
99
room—with a cobweb and a bed—sofa—under which they stored the family valuables.”
50
Her engagement with her Italian community runs throughout her personal writing and
published work from this period. “Three Italian Pictures” in both form and content decries
the very act of observing from one’s home.
Overall, the effect of “Three Italian Pictures” is a decentralized representation of
place; it cannot be read as one person’s account or view of Italy, and it suggests that Italy, or
any place, is not to be seen or known from any one position, particularly a fixed or static one.
Virginia Koudis writes that in this poetry, “[s]elf-conscious and isolated English characters
and narrators are foils to the Italians,” and that [Loy drew] upon the Italian commoners she
observed from her home in the Costa San Giorgio [in order to] “capture the vitality that was
for her the most important element of Futurism” (48). Koudis suggests that Loy’s writing
falls into the convention of travel writing in which the writer-traveler finds the native people
to be strange objects of curiosity in their difference and emphasizes this difference in relation
to his or her “normal” culture to serve an aesthetic purpose.
51
I contend that “Three Italian
Pictures” does not draw such lines between Loy, the English, and the Italians, and that no one
figure, culture, or nationality serves as the embodiment of the dynamism that she values. In
fact, her poetics trouble distinctions not only between the Italians and the English, but
50
Mina Loy, “Summer Night in a Florentine Slum,” unpublished poem. Mina Loy, Box 5, Folder 123, Beinecke
Library, Yale, New Haven.
51
This is a reference to Sara Mill’s discussion of Paul Fussel’s Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the
Wars in which he characterizes travel writing almost solely in terms of 19
th
century British conventions. Loy’s
writing operates quite differently than his models—even though she was a British expatriate in a foreign
community; her dis-identification with England, I would argue, has much to do with this. Sara Mills, Discourses
of Differences: An Analysis of Women’s Traveling Writing and Colonialism (New York and London:
Routledge, 1991) p. 86.
100
between all seemingly separate spheres. As Suzanne Churchill observes of “Three Italian
Pictures,” “[i]n these free verse collages, Loy assembles fragments of the sights, sounds, and
sayings of the world around her, allowing them to jostle together and using spatial gaps to
highlight incongruities, cast doubt on the sanctity of middle class family life, and disrupt the
divisions between private and public, and masculine and feminine spheres” (16).
Italian Pictures
The relationships that Loy eventually formed in Italy—with Mabel Dodge, Gertrude
Stein, Carl Van Vechten, and the Italian Futurist F.T. Marinetti, which whom she had a brief
love affair—facilitated the formation of her poetics.
52
Mina Loy and Italian Futurism crossed
paths in 1913. Stephen had recently left Loy to sail to the Fiji Islands, and the young
American painter, Frances Stevens, arrived in Florence with a plan to meet the Futurists and
took over the studio in Loy’s house. Together Loy and Stevens were swept up for a time with
the Futurist movement, its aesthetics having a significant impact on Loy and her work—
although it was only one of many crosscurrents that fed into Loy’s poetics that combined
avant-garde aesthetics, feminist politics, and metaphysical and phenomenological concerns.
53
52
Carolyn Burke writes about the impact of Stein’s writing on Loy’s as it predates Loy’s involvement with
Futurism: “By 1912, although resident in Florence, Loy was sufficiently familiar with Cubism and had read
enough of Stein’s manuscripts to grasp the implications of these ‘new forms,’ for both poetry and prose. When
the Futurists arrived there in 1913, she had already been thinking about a kind of writing in which point of view,
like perspective in painting, could be displaced, the structure of the line or sentence loosened, and punctuation
discarded so that words might lie side by side.” “Getting Spliced: Modernism and Sexual Difference,”
American Quarterly 39.1 (Spring 1987) p. 107.
53
In 1913 from Florence, Loy wrote to Mabel Dodge, “I am in the throes of conversion to Futurism, but I shall
never convince myself. There is no hope in any system that combat le mal avec mal.” Burke, Becoming Modern
157. In letters to Carl Van Vechten, Loy often asserted that she was not Futurist—that Marinetti influenced her
101
Carolyn Burke’s brief note about Loy’s response to a specific Futurist painting serves
as an appropriate introduction to the poetry that she wrote while living in Italy—the first of
her poetry that was published. Of Loy’s response to Le strada entra nella case [The Noise of
the Street Penetrates the House] (1911) by Futurist/Dynamist artist Umberto Boccioni, Burke
writes, “A painting that opened the window onto a noisy city was particularly challenging to
Mina since its title hinted at erotic freedom” (Becoming Modern 153). Burke’s rather cryptic
comment points to the fact that sexual freedom was a provocative topic for Loy at this time
in her life—although it does not make immediately clear the relationship for Loy between a
noisy street and “erotic freedom.” Loy, who was emerging from her own domestic situation,
negotiating new sexual relationships in Florence, and observing the gender dynamics of her
Italian community, would have been interested in the painting’s depiction of the intersection
of a public masculine space and a private feminine space. Her poetry from this period
demonstrates her interest in movement between such spaces.
In the following paragraphs, I juxtapose Boccioni’s painting and Loy’s poem “The
Costa San Giorgio,” the third poem of “Three Italian Pictures” in order to illustrate Loy’s
engagement with the cultural politics of Italian Futurism and with her Italian community as
well her challenge to Futurism’s construction of modern movement. Loy’s poem and
Boccioni’s painting share an interest in Italian street life and an aesthetic typical of the
burgeoning avant-garde movements of the period. Boccioni’s panoramic painting celebrates
by “merely by waking her up.” Mina Loy, Personal letter to Carl Van Vechten, Box Loy-Lung in Carl Van
Vechten Correspondence, Beinecke Library, Yale, New Haven.
102
the modern city through his use of the Futurist preference “straight line” and
“interpenetration of planes,”
54
whereas Loy’s poem conveys smaller-scale interactions,
lively commotion, and disorderly intermingling of people. By using Futurist aesthetic
techniques of fragmentation and collage to depict the messy “life-traffic” of the Italian
neighborhood, Loy undercuts the impersonality and hegemonic constructions of space and
gender implicit in the Italian Futurist vision of movement.
Boccioni’s title, Le strada entra nella case [The Noise of the Street Penetrates the
House], makes explicit the unsettling but liberating aspect of the collision between private
and public spheres, the title’s language characterizing the contact between a city and a house
as an aggressive assault. The painting itself with vibrant bright colors and intersecting planes
confuses the demarcations between the house’s balcony and the city through multiple askew
lines and overlapping surfaces. The frenetic city, filled with various activity and men
constructing buildings, rushes up to the solitary woman on a house balcony. With her back to
the viewer, she appears to lean forward as the city’s penetrating activity moves through her
body in the shape of small charging men and galloping horses: the cacophony of the city, the
public/masculine world, literally penetrates her space. Boccioni’s painting suggests that by
opening up her window to the dynamic city, the woman opens herself up its destabilizing,
energizing and erotic forces.
54
Umberto Boccioni, “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture (1912),” Manifesto: A Century of Isms. p. 172.
103
Fig. 4. Umberto Boccioni, Le strada entra nella casa, 1911.
A scene of chaotic intermingling of an Italian city and its inhabitants also finds its
way into Loy’s “The Costa San Giorgio,” the first of the “Italian Pictures”:
Fluidic blots of sky
Shift among roofs
Between bandy legs
Jerk patches of street
Interrupted by clacking
Of all the green shutters
From which
Bits of bodies
Variously
Leaning
Mingle eyes with the commotion
104
This collage of interacting sky, street, houses and bodies operates quite differently than do
the similar elements in Boccioni’s painting. “The Noise of the Street Penetrates the House”
depicts the liberating forces of the modern world through the frenzied erection of new
structures and galloping horses as it collapses distances and overwhelms the female figure,
who seems to represent static domesticity.
55
Such an assault on the domestic is in accord
within the Italian Futurist’s vision of modernity; Koudis notes of the Futurists: “they scorned
women as the embodiment of the amore to which the Italian male sentimentality devoted
himself at the expense of the technical world the Futurists prized as Italy’s hope for cultural
and political rejuvenation” (Mina Loy 30). The woman and home are decried by Futurism as
embodiments of the sentimental past and the placid bourgeois. In contrast, while Loy’s
“The Costa San Giorgio” similarly revels in the dynamic city, her lyric neither privileges the
masculine nor subordinate the feminine; neither does it showcase modern materials and
machine technology as the antidote to domesticity and stasis.
In a kaleidoscope of images typical of Loy’s early poetry, blots of sky move between
rooftops and peek out from the spaces of legs. Underscored by the absence of punctuation or
spatial distinctions, the organic and non-organic and the hard and soft intermingle in these
lines. The “jerk patches of street” circulate with the soft “fluidic blots of sky.” The hard
sounds of “j” “k” and “tch” and “t” and the “clacking of shutters” mingle with the soft
55
For many early 20
th
century avant-garde artists and writers, the Italian Futurists in particular, modern
technology and materials served as progenitor of the new generation; the fleshy, past-tainted sensual body was
the stuff of romantic nostalgia. F.T. Marinetti recommended in his infamous first Futurist Manifesto that scorn
for woman go hand-in-hand with the acceptance of war as “the world’s only hygiene.” See “The Founding and
Manifesto of Futurism (1909)” in Manifesto: A Century of Isms. ed. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2001) p. 185-189.
105
soothing vowels of “fluidic blots of sky,” “bodies,” and “eyes.” Unlike Boccioni’s fixed
female figure on a balcony, here “bits of bodies” and “eyes,” the women in the windows
participate in the activity of the street with their “clacking / Of all the green shutters” and
their bodies “variously leaning/ Mingle eyes with commotion”—the eyes and green shutters
adding to the mixed palette of street and sky.
Loy’s poetics of the body and female subjectivity veer sharply away from the
directives of her avant-garde peers, the Futurists, as well as the Imagists, who called for
impersonal art.
56
Thus, Burke writes, “Mina Loy was an early explorer of that uncharted
territory, the ‘new psychic geography of woman’s poetry. […] Her poems are born of the
desire to enter into a terrain where physicality embodies the spirit, where the body is
animated by the mind” (“Becoming Mina Loy” 137).
57
When Loy first encountered Futurism
in Florence in 1913, the movement appealed to her because its art conveyed the rhythms and
sensations of the modern world. This appreciation, however, attests not only to the influence
of Futurism on her work, but of the influence of Henri Bergson,
58
whose work she read a few
years earlier with Mabel Dodge and alongside Gertrude Stein’s writing—in particular,
56
“Futurism’s iconoclastic poetics, absorbed from Marinetti and his crew, were compatible with Loy’s own
talents for cauterizing diction and syntax,” notes by Lyon; however, “[w]hen practiced upon such taboo topics
as orgasm and childbirth and fornication, those talents produced poems that outraged philistines, and avant-
gardists alike.” “Mina Loy’s Pregnant Pauses: The Space of Possibility in the Florence Writings,” Mina Loy:
Woman and Poet. p. 383.
57
“Becoming Mina Loy,” Women’s Studies, 1980. Vol. 7, p. 137.
58
In Matter and Memory, Bergson theorized time as a continuous flow of simultaneous sensations that is
experienced and perceived by an individual. With modern technology and Bergson’s theory of continuous time,
or “dureé,” as its inspiration, Futurism and Dynamism depicted “the particular rhythm of each object, its
inclination, its movement, […] its interior force.”
106
Stein’s The Making of Americans and her portraits.
59
In her essay, “Gertrude Stein,”
published in 1924, Loy wrote of these influences and of her early years in Italy: “[t]his is
when Bergson was in the air and his beads of Time strung on the continuous flux of Being
seemed to have found a literary conclusion in the austere verity of Gertrude Stein’s theme—
‘Being as the absolute occupation.” Loy observes that Stein’s prose repetitions and rhythms
convey the temperament of a person or culture: “in order to obtain movement she [Stein]
has shaped her words to the pattern of a mobile emotion […].”
60
If Stein’s language depicts
the movements of consciousness, Loy’s poetics convey the movements of places—the
interactions of its subjects and objects forming the Being of the place. Even as her poetic
sensibilities initially found commerce with the unconventional syntax and forms of her avant-
garde peers, her poetry enacts its own unique sense of Bergsonian simultaneous time, one
attuned to bodily rhythms and to the dynamics of spaces familiar to Loy.
61
In her poetry of
this period, bodies that are in transit and continually crossing borders constitute for Loy the
ultimate form of vitality—or dynamism—and inform the movement of her writing. Of this,
Tim Armstrong notes, “the body knocks against other bodies; its presence insinuates itself
into the rhythms of the poetry” (120).
59
As noted by Carolyn Burke, “[i]n a sense, Stein’s writing had prepared the way for Loy’s response to
Futurism, while Marinetti’s volativity and contradictory assertions about woman’s role in the transformed future
stimulated her to write. […] Loy published her poetic homage to Stein as ‘Cure/of the laboratory/or vocabulary”
in the transatlantic review. This appropriately unpunctuated tribute suggests that the modernist project to
unearth in writing some liberating linguistic energy could, in fact, be combined with a ‘feminist’ project of
changing consciousness.” “Getting Spliced: Modernism and Sexual Difference” p. 107.
60
Loy’s “Gertrude Stein” was originally published in The Transatlantic Review, 1924.
61
Loy, “Gertrude Stein,” The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology. ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (Indiana
University Press, 1990) p. 238-244.
107
The places that Loy depicts in the poems of “Three Italian Pictures”—“July in
Vallombrosa,” “The Costa San Giorgio,” and “Costa Magic”—she knew well. She and
Mabel stayed in Vallombrosa, a retreat-town in the Appennines forest with a sanitarium
(formerly a church) run by nuns, and Loy’s studio was located in the town of Costa San
Giorgio. Hybrid of avant-garde poetics and travel writing, these poems utilize, to varying
degrees, a cubist aesthetic as the means to convey the complex web of inner and outer worlds
of these locations; juxtaposition of images and scenes depict interactivity, while varied
perspectives and indeterminate references convey multiple experiences that occur
simultaneously within a place. Thus, the juxtaposed poems create a multifaceted Italian
Picture. However, the cubist aesthetic of “Three Italian Pictures” is not pure in any Dadaist
or Futurist sense, given the intermittent appearances of first-person speakers, satiric voice,
and narrative elements.
62
In each of the poems, an “I” or “we” appears, introducing a subjective presence to the
poem, an observing I/eye. However, the poems provide little information as to the speakers’
identities, other than a relational one, in respect to the subjects and objects rendered in the
poems’ changing landscapes; positions are therefore unfixed. Even as the speaking subjects
have physical presence in the poem, they do not take on a central role, nor do they dictate the
62
As Loy moved farther away from Florence and Futurism, her poetry would become less cubist and more
freely employ a satiric authorial voice. For example, of Loy’s “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose”(1925), Marjorie
Perloff writes, “She does not paste together disparate verbal fragments, letting their spatial juxtapositions create
a complex network of meanings. Hers is a temporal mode, a satiric narrative, however broken and self-
interrupting, in which structures of voice and address take precedence over the “constatation of fact,” as Pound
called it, of the Image.” “English as a ‘Second’ Language: Mina Loy’s ‘Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose.’” Jacket
#5, p. 144. http://jacketmagazine.com/05/mina-anglo.html
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action within the place or poem. This de-centering of the subject indicates a relationship
between subjectivity and place in which both are formed and reformed through interaction.
Loy’s poetry depicts a world in flux in which the subject, or the “I,” is a part of the world’s
thing-ness.
63
Indeed, present in all three poems is a critique of those forces that would restrict
this dynamic. Like much of Loy’s other poetry, “Italian Pictures” thus argues that the
restriction of body’s interaction with the world is the stifling of life, a belief that aligns
dynamism with psychic and physical liberty.
64
The first two lines of “July in Vallombrosa” paint a picture of a seemingly peaceful
place in which a figure and landscape mirror one another: “Old lady sitting still / Pine trees
standing quite still.” If in this scene the old lady and pine trees are positioned in still-life
repose, the next two lines unsettle this lovely portrait of Vallombrosa—a forested village
with a beautiful historic cathedral—with the suggestion that this stillness is the result of
imposed order: “[s]isters of mercy whispering / Oust the Dryad.” This stanza introduces
the poem’s central tension between passivity and activity, as well as between Christian and
pagan. Belying the poem’s opening peaceful images, these lines intimate that this once
natural place is now devoid of life; the sisters of mercy have expunged the pagan dryads from
the grounds: “O consecration of forest / To the uneventful.” In light of Loy’s appreciation of
dynamic movement, as conveyed by her erratic poetic lines and fragments, these lines
63
Koudis, “Rediscovering Our Sources: The Poetry of Mina Loy,” Boundary 2 8.2 (Spring 1980) p. 186.
64
This concept owes in part to the Christian Science theory of a mind-body connection, a religion that Loy
studied with Mabel Dodge and Gertrude Stein. For Loy, writes Miller, “liberation of the spirit was inseparable
from the body.” p. 70.
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contain a simultaneous critique of formal artistic composition—this image being devoid of a
living spirit—and of this seemingly placid place.
In the third stanza, a first-person speaker appears in order to remark on the patient-
tourist occupation of what turns out to be a sanitarium setting: “I cannot imagine anything /
Less disputably respectable / Than prolonged invalidism in Italy / At the beck / Of a British
practioner.” The guest for whom Italy is a countryside hospice with a resident British doctor
can afford a leisured recovery. The poem’s “I”—the only “I” in the poem—recognizes this
form of respectability, which belies the speaker’s familiarity with these British tourist-
invalids; however, in making this somewhat snide remark, she distances herself from them.
She, the speaker, does not approve of this prolonged invalidism, despite it being the ultimate
in (bourgeois British) respectability, since inertia of any kind, as the poem’s imagery affects,
is linked to passivity and lifelessness. This ambiguous speaker, although present in this place,
remains unaligned with any one particular group, observing at a distance the place’s
inhabitants and activities.
The poem provides glimpses into the rooms in which occupants are involved in
varying activities. The British invalid is wasting away, attended to by the Nun performing her
“permissible pastimes.” Primary among these pastimes, the speaker acridly accuses, is “the
one with which you most efficiently insult / Life / […] your hobby of collecting death-beds /
Blue Nun.” The body ceases to live in the hands of the Nun for whom the death-bed is the
place for the Catholic Church’s final imposition of physical and religious order—the two
going hand in hand: “So wrap the body in flannel and wool / Of superior quality from the
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Anglo-American / Until that ineffable moment / When Rigor Mortis / Divests it of its innate
impurity.” The word “superior” to describe the quality of the bedding material is bitingly
ironic as it implicates both the coarse foreign materials and the Nun—each masquerading as
comfort—in the business of the death; both stifle the body in this place of rest.
This Italian picture thus offers an unappealing depiction of an actual popular Italian-
countryside tourist destination, one that Loy visited with Mabel Dodge on a holiday. In travel
writing and novels from this period, the hotel, and even the sanitarium, is frequently a
bustling site of cosmopolitan and romantic encounters. Yet, the combined presence of the
leisure class, imported material comforts, and restrictive Italian Catholic Nuns in this
sanitarium create an oppressive force hostile to its occupants’ freedom of movement. In their
obligation to attend to the invalids, even the young people are depleted of their vitality. The
poem’s ambiguous speaker, privy to the hotel’s intimate activities, explains that the old lady
“has a daughter / Who has been spent / In chasing moments from one room to another/ […]
And lost her last little lust / Lost itself in a saucer of gruel.” Trapped and frenetic in this place
and in her position, the daughter has no outlet for her energy; her physical desires waste
away, and are inconsequential, displaced, and reduced to the loss of bodily appetite.
While this hotel contains the weary and lifeless, it also houses a vital undercurrent of
bodies that sweep through its space, operating as a counter to stultifying forces of
containment and organization. While the Catholic nun and occupants are preoccupied with
death “round the hotel / the wanton Italian matrons / Discuss the better business of bed-
linen.” The Italian women who work at the sanitarium move behind the scenes in its rooms.
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There is a finality to the activity of the nun and the body in the lines, “When Rigor Mortis /
Divests it of its innate impurity,”—the inevitable “when” a contrast to the opening “while” of
the next two lines, “While round the hotel / Wanton Italian matrons.” “Wanton” and
continuously in motion, the Italian women are physically unrestrained in their speech and
actions as they circle around the hotel rooms, occupied with life’s daily business —as are the
young, who pursue romance amidst the expiring visitors. The speaker, as an observer of the
place’s activities, appreciates that its commerce facilitates romantic relationships: “[b]ut all
this moribund stuff / Is not wasted / For there is always Nature / So its expensive upkeep /
Goes to support / The loves / of head-waiters.” Such is the speaker’s final word on this place.
Not directly participating in these dynamics described, but invested in them, this speaker
gives glimpses of the networks of relationships, but not the aesthetic attractions of this place,
or what makes it a hospitable destination. The speaker approves of the sensual, erotic life of
the sanitarium; yet, this approval is less a romanticizing of Italians and more of an
appreciation of bodily vitality and unrestricted movement.
As discussed in the introduction, Loy’s “The Costa San Giorgio” opens with a
speaker who admits association with the inert English, and in doing so, initially drawing a
distinction between the English and Italians: “We English make a tepid blot / On the
messiness / Of the passionate Italian life-traffic / Throbbing the street up steep.”
The collective speaker, “We English,” is a weak presence in the Italian streets, barely making
a mark on the compelling messiness of the Italian landscape. This initial tone establishes a
clear contrast between the “tepid,” watery English and the “throbbing” Italian bodies.
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What constitutes the “Italian life-traffic” in the Costa San Giorgio in the following lines is a
lively jumble of body-automobiles traversing the city’s geography, its paths, streets, and
stairs: “Up up to the porta / Culminating / In the stained fresco of the dragon-slayer.”
Unlike Futurism’s clean aesthetics and machine rhythms, Loy’s interest here is on the
interaction of various bodies that are the traffic in city spaces. The repetition of “up” and
spaces between words convey bodily movement—climbing pausing, looking. The next
stanza cuts to other activity: “The hips of women sway / Among the crawling children they
produce / […] The greyness of marching men / Falls through the greyness of stone.” The soft
sounds and the physical motion of the sway of women’s hips and the grey of marching men
that falls into the grey of the stone depict the city’s dynamics as bodily rhythms whose
motions not only counter the mechanically marching men, but prevent distinctions from
staying in place.
As the poem proceeds, its poetic line become further fragmented, and the city’s
inhabitants, objects, and spaces mingle even more indiscreetly, creating a collage of varying
interwoven perspectives. An assortment of sensations follows in rapid succession, conveying
the experience of traveling the streets of the Costa San Giorgio:
Oranges half-rotten are sold at a reduction
Hoarsely advertised as broken heads
BROKEN HEADS and the barber
Has an imitation mirror
The half-price split oranges are heads that float among the shout of HEADS, and among
other human heads that appear in the barbershop window. Categories of the organic and non-
organic blur; all is a continuous movement and sensory experience of what is seen, felt and
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heard: “Shaving / ICE CREAM / Licking is larger than mouths / Boots than feet / Slip Slap
and the string dragging / And the angle of the sun / Cuts the whole lot in half / And warms
the folded hands / Of a consumptive.” The present progressive verbs convey various bodies
and objects in motion; the repetition of “and” connects body parts, language, and sensations
into one continuous moment of flux.
The “we” of the poem, the tepid English, having initially declared themselves
removed from this activity merge into its life-traffic; a different “we” now emerges.
On the street, the consumptive is “[l]eft outside her chair is broken / And she wonders
how we feel / For we walk very quickly.” A contrast to the immobile consumptive, this “we”
mirrors the earlier observed bodies, “throbbing up the street,” and in its dynamic movement,
becomes an object of curiosity to the observing consumptive who watches and wonders how
this “we” feels; this is a reversal that puts the “we” in the position of the other, instead of the
passively observing tourist. This complication mitigates this poem as an account of a foreign
visitor or outsider’s appreciative view of a foreign place. “The Costa San Giorgio,” rather,
is interested in how this walking “we” has become part of this environment: “For we walk
very quickly / The noonday cannon / Having scattered the neighbor’s pigeons.” The walking,
cannon booming, and pigeon scattering happen separately, and yet these three actions occur
together; the “we” is a mobile body no longer specified in terms of culture or ethnicity, but
is, like the pigeons, connected to this place and its other inhabitants in a shared experience.
The speaker’s identification of the pigeons as belonging to the “neighbor” suggests
familiarity between the “we” and this community.
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At this point, the shifting “we” disappears into its environment, and the poem’s point
of view, taking its cue from the scattering of the pigeons, breaks into pieces. “The Costa San
Giorgio” becomes a collage of interrelated moving parts that are neither put into hierarchical
relations to each other nor designated as subjects versus objects—as seen in a passage I
examined in the opening of the chapter:
Fluidic blots of sky
Shift among roofs
Between bandy legs
Jerk patches of street
Interrupted by clacking
Of all the green shutters
From which
Bits of bodies
Variously leaning
Mingle eyes with the commotion
The absence of punctuation and abundance of prepositions, along with words operating
simultaneously as nouns, adjectives, and verbs—blots, bandy, jerk, mingle eyes—put
everything in motion, including the physical features of the landscape. Blots of sky shift,
patches of street jerk, green shutters interrupt and clack. The human elements—bandy legs,
bits of bodies, eyes—are pieces of this landscape. This is a typical Loy poetic moment of
subject-object blurring.
The final three stanzas of “The Costa San Giorgio” depart dramatically from Futurist
dynamism in their attention to the body and domestic life, for the perspective shifts from the
city street life-traffic to its housed life, the “bits of bodies” leaning out of the green-shuttered
windows of the houses. “They mingle eyes with the commotion” of the city below them—
“for there is little to do,” explains the next line, in seeming reference to a lack of activity for
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the bodies behind the shutters. The tone of the poem changes abruptly with the line “[f]or
there is little to do,” as it stands alone and pauses the activity of both city and poem. Unlike
the other interacting parts of the city, these figures are contained within their houses. While
bits of their bodies and their eyes mingle with the outside world, they do not travel the city
streets. Instead, they stay inside anxiously managing domestic objects: “The false pillow-
spreads / Hugely initialed / Already adjusted / On matrimonial beds / And the glint on the
china virgin / Consummately dusted.” The houses seemingly contain the same objects and
actions, the same domestic concerns. With everything adjusted and dusted, there is little to do
except wait for these objects to be put to use.
As is the case through much of the poem, unclear clear subject-verb relations suggest
objects in confused motion. Additionally, the absence of a single or singular subject and the
presence of verbal phrases suggest a lack of agency, given the obfuscation of who or what
was adjusted and dusted, and who or what performed these actions. The attention given to
these objects of domesticity in the final section of the poem; the poem suggests the difficulty
of keeping these objects orderly, discrete, and clean, the difficulty of keeping things inside
and keeping what is inside pure—in anticipation of a future husband and marriage. However,
the virgin objects and the virgin herself, though inside, are subject to contamination from the
“dust” of the street that enters the green-shuttered open windows. Mingling, it seems, is
unavoidable. However, unlike the mingling on the street that incorporates bodies into the
city’s weave of sensations and relations, in the domestic space mingling is restricted and
stymied—not unlike the stifled and still bodies under the Nun’s care in Vallombrosa.
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The poem’s final stanza returns to the street outside, its attention focused on an
ambiguous thing that has been discarded from a house, “[h]aving been thrown / Anything or
something /That might have contaminated intimacy / OUT / Onto the middle of street.” In
contrast to the indirect forms of movement of the city street (fall, sway, shift, mingle), this
object, resistant to adjusting and dusting, has been ejected in a direct and forceful trajectory,
thrown out from the house OUT into the street in a seemingly an anxious and violent
response to the outside world infiltrating interior spaces. Both the subject that did the
throwing and the object thrown are ambiguous. What is cast out into the “passionate life-
traffic” of the street is an unidentified thing that seems to represent that which adulterates
hallowed marriage relations within the house—the impure or unmanageable woman possibly
being this thing. The first line of the triptych’s final poem, “Costa Magic,” picks up on this
narrative thread, as it introduces characters involved in such a story: “[h]er father /
indisposed to her marriage / And a rabid man at that.” This “Italian Picture” is an oblique
tale of a daughter who dies as a result of her disapproving father’s curse.
“Costa Magic” is the final turn of the kaleidoscope that is “Italian Pictures,”
the vantage point now located within a particular house with a speaker privy to secrets
contained within all the homes of the Costa San Giorgio. Unlike the indefinite and shifting
speakers of the previous poems, this first-person speaker, the triptych’s first “I,” is a mother
who narrates the tale of her daughter’s demise. Providing yet another angle from which to
picture Italy, this “I” is a member of the local community; her reference to neighbors echoes
the speaker of “The Costa San Giorgio,” who knows the neighbor’s pigeons. This carry-over
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of the word “neighbor” into “Costa Magic” provides a bridge between the poems’ speakers,
suggesting that the writer/artist who presents this final “Italian Picture” is part of the web of
relations formed across the three poems and is a member of the local community—and thus
privy to the story that unfolds in this poem.
However, “Costa Magic” is not a straightforward narrative. First, the poem’s “I” that
emerges indirectly and in fragments reports the sound of violence perpetrated on the daughter
by the father, “While listening up I hear my husband / Mumbling Mumbling /
Mumbling at the window / Malediction /Incantation.” This “I” is witness to the bodily
suffering of the daughter under a spell cast her father: “Under an hour / Her hand to her side
pressing / Suffering / Being bewitched.” The interactions in this poem occur between
the women and neighborhood as the tale of the “I” unfolds in a blur of disconnected
explanations: “the doctor Phthisis/ The wise woman says to take her / So we
following her instruction.” Images flicker in a cab’s window, “fields and houses,” creating
the effect of movement, as do the women’s communal actions to save the girl, all of which
come to a halt with the image of her still body: “I and the neighbor and her aunt / Bunched
together / And Cesira / Droops across the cab.” Cesira’s drooping near dead body recalls the
stifled and dying bodies in “July in Vallombrosa” and the bodies sequestered in houses in
“The Costa San Giorgio”—a contrast to the various forms of bodily mobility in all three
poems. This Italian picture, more so than the others, directly implicates an oppressive
father/patriarchal culture in the young woman’s loss of life. If “The Costa San Giorgio”
conveys the dynamism of its life-traffic, then “Costa Magic” provides an intimate snapshot of
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what happens to a neighborhood girl within her own house. But it contains only pieces of a
story, the blanks in the lines suggesting missing words and parts.
In dialogue with Loy’s restrictive English upbringing and her view of patriarchal
Italian culture, “Three Italian Pictures” challenges values and institutions that oppress the
body and restrict the movement of the self irrespective of nationality or country of origin.
In this aspect, Loy’s poetic critique correspondences with Marinetti’s call for the dismantling
of antiquated traditions and forms; however, Loy departs here—as well as elsewhere in her
work and life—with Italian Futurism. If Italian Futurism’s scorn for woman and the domestic
as the antithesis of the modern results in the castigation of and indifference to the feminine in
its art, Loy’s “Three Italian Pictures” depicts woman and the body as inextricable from a
culture’s landscapes and conveys the harm that ensues when the self, especially the embodied
female self, is cordoned-off from the world at large.
Dismantling
Houses and rooms in Loy’s early writing are often metaphors for internal stasis.
To the extent that they are represented as prisons, it follows then, that Churchill characterizes
Loy’s poetics as “a poetics of dislodging”: “by dismantling conventional linguistic structures,
Loy attempts to dislodge herself and her readers from habitual confinements” (181). Loy’s
“Aphorisms on Futurism” (1914), printed in Alfred Steiglitz’s American magazine, Camera
Work, indeed promulgate such poetics, directing women to “[f]orget that you live in houses
so that you may live in yourself.” This Futurist dictum also illuminates Loy’s Italy poem,
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“Virgin Plus Curtains Minus Dots,”
65
in which the house operates as a literal and figurative
site of restriction for the unmarried Italian young women without a dowry: “Houses hold
virgins / The doors on the chain.” The house does the holding, keeping the young women
prisoners behind the door, subjected to its confining chain: living in confinement, the
dynamic of the restrained self is antithetical to the state of “living in yourself,” which Loy
advises women to do in her Futurist aphorism. For a woman, living in yourself is living in
your body, which is not a self-contained closed space, but is, unlike the literal house owned
by the father, a space that has the potential for movement. Of Loy’s metaphor of the house as
both the space of restriction and of the restricted female body, Koudis observes, “the house, a
symbol of the human body and the feminine principle, is locked and curtained, signifying
virginity” (32). It is the body’s virginity, specifically, that the patriarchy attempts to protect;
hence the young woman’s body must be kept out of the streets and safe from contamination
and penetration. That Loy advocates during this same period (quite problematically) for the
“surgical destruction of virginity” in her Futurist Feminist Manifesto (1914) is further
indicative of her view that it is the societal valuation of women’s sexual purity, or her fitness
to be a wife and mother, according to traditional patriarchal culture, that impedes their
physical and intellectual mobility.
66
Loy herself enters into the landscape of this poem as a
65
Published in Rogue 2, 1915.
66
This is the complete stanza from the Futurist Manifesto: “The fictious value of woman is identified with her
physical purity is too easy a standby. It renders her lethargic in the acquisition of intrinsic merits of character by
which she could obtain a concrete value. Therefore, the first self-enforced law for the female sex, as protection
against the manmade bogey of virtue (which is the principal instrument of her subjugation) is the unconditional
surgical destruction of virginity through the female population at puberty.” The Last Lunar Baedeker. p. 270.
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member of a “we” traveling an Italian street. She belongs to a group of women who possess
the physical freedom to move in the world, women who have dislodged themselves from
their houses; yet even so, they do not experience the same self-mobility as men, who have a
sense of purpose and vision: “We take a walk / They are going somewhere / And
they look everywhere.” Going somewhere, moving with agency, and looking everywhere is
the privilege of men; their easy access to the world provides them possibilities for
experience, for self-expansiveness and endless self-creation, as the self is an accumulation of
experiences.
67
This is Loy’s Bergsonian vision of the self shaped through a mind-body-world
relationship.
Loy’s cross-cultural critique of habitual confinements includes her own English
culture and up-bringing, which she acridly satirizes in an early piece of personal writing
entitled, “Ladies in the Aviary,” in which late nineteenth-century young women are depicted
as lovely birds who live in gilded cages, waiting for sugar from male visitors, or “an even
sweeter offering to the captives is ‘the sanctity of marriage.’” Of this situation, Loy wonders,
“Why are these ladies kept in captivity with the bodies almost severed in the middle—they
appear to be tame? It is the fashion. Their plumage is not their own.” She concludes,
“The female pets could never escape, but the men enjoyed a certain amount of liberty.”
68
Trapped in the cage that is the house, and restricted by corsets that almost sever their bodies,
67
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution. p. 8.
68
Mina Loy, “The Child and the Parent,” Chpt. 7, “Ladies in the Aviary,” unpublished writing. Beinecke
Library, Yale, New Haven.
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these Ladies are birds whose freedom of movement is restricted by fashion and a habitation
that is not of their own making.
69
As a girl Loy had been locked in her house, strictly supervised and castigated for
inappropriate behavior by her mother whose social values were rooted in Victorian England.
Art school in London allowed Loy a respite from her oppressive home life, and as an art
student in Munich, she experienced her first taste of physical and social independence.
With her international group of friends, Loy circulated in avant-garde art circles, enjoyed
café life, and cultivated a new eccentric persona for herself. “She felt more at home with
these easygoing foreigners than she had ever felt in London,” writes Burke. Of her reluctant
return, Loy writes, “I went home to England and stayed there for a few minutes” (Becoming
Modern 68). After studying art in London, she moved to Paris in 1900, where she married
fellow student Stephen Haweis in 1903. During this period of her life, Loy became
acquainted with Paris—spending time in its boulevards, cafes, concert and dance-halls.
In a letter Loy declares, “Walking along the street is for many the only assumption of
freedom […] releasing us from our circumstantial identity when we ‘go out’ on the
Boulevards” (68). Being out in the city of Paris was for Loy a temporary escape from “the
Voice”—Burke suggests, her mother’s reproving voice of Victorian values.
70
Loy equates
69
Loy’s critique of women’s fashion here is interesting given the fact that she was known to be a very
fashionable person, designing and making her own clothes throughout her life.
70
Disapproving of their bohemian artist daughter, Mina’s parents were relieved to hear she had married; the
subsequent income from Loy’s father would serve to prolong what was immediately an unhappy marriage.
Pregnant at the time she married Haweis, Loy later expressed that she felt ambivalence towards him at the time
and confusion about exactly what led her to marry him; she characterized their first sexual encounter as a
seduction.
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walking in the city with a temporary liberation from an identity rooted in one’s social and
physical circumstances; walking, being out in the world, provides opportunities for feeling
differently.
Loy’s declaration, “we ‘go out’ on the Boulevards,” has the tone of the male flâneur
who strolls through city boulevards taking in its sights and sounds for pleasure. However,
the woman who goes out and walks along the street might have a more fraught experience,
becoming an object of scrutiny and perhaps judgment. Loy’s use of “us” and “we” aligns her
with other women, painting a picture of them out together in the city, and walking the streets
of Paris with no anxiety. During her time as a student, Loy enjoyed going to Paris’s cafes,
cabarets, and the Bal Bullier, a popular dance hall—“places popular with students, artists,
and workers” (80), but not typically popular with middle and upper-class women. Loy later
recalled in a letter to Carl Van Vechten, “[…] I shall always feel grateful to the day I first
‘saw’ the early Renoirs—But the most beautiful things in Paris were the Fêtes and the Bal
Bullier” (Koudis 3). Loy herself, suggests Carolyn Burke, did not remain merely an observer
at these festive gatherings: “The atmosphere was so contagious that Mina forgot herself and
joined in the dance” (Becoming Modern 80).
In his essay on Loy’s relationship to these public places of entertainment, Andrew
Michael Robert juxtaposes Loy’s “Three Moments in Paris” (1915),
71
which depicts street
and café life, with travel-guides designed for the English male-tourist or gentleman in Paris
71
“Three Moments in Paris” was first published in the American little magazine, Rogue.
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of this period. The guidebooks suggest that the French woman, like the city itself, is a
pleasurable spectacle for consumption. The touring gentleman is to enjoy the sights of the
city, yet must remain cautious, keeping a certain distance from its pleasing but sordid
spectacles in order to retain his respectable position. Loy, while still new to bohemian life,
enjoyed this public side of Paris, and her poetry conveys moments in which women navigate
these same places. Robert characterizes Loy’s “Three Moments in Paris” as “feminist poetic
discourse.” In contrast to the male-oriented discourse of the travel-guides, this set of poems
“[…] evokes and subverts various male discourses of domination and specularism” and
“involves a revaluing of the body and an identification with other women.”
72
The
identification between women that Loy’s poems depict is embedded in a connection,
a recognition of their shared bodily and social restrictions.
While writing “Three Italian Pictures” in Italy, Loy was also composing the poems in
“Three Moments in Paris.” In these poems, she revisits Paris, transposing experiences and
figures from Italy into Parisian locations. For example, the figures in the café scene of “One
O’Clock at Night” resemble Loy and the two men with whom she was romantically involved
in Italy (the Futurist leaders F.T. Marinetti and Giovanni Papini). This blurring of temporality
and spatiality facilitates the interaction between these two places and periods of Loy’s life.
The result is that “Three Italian Pictures” and “Three Moments in Paris” enact a non-linear
personal translocational map of Loy’s cross-cultural concern with female subjectivity and
72
Andrew Michael Robert, “ ‘How to be Happy in Paris’: Mina Loy and the Transvaluation of the Body”
Cambridge Quarterly (1998) XXVII (2): 129-147.
http://camqtly.oxfordjournals.org/content/XXVII/2/129.extract
124
mobility. Of these two groups of poems, Burke writes, “[Loy] reflected upon her situation as
a spectator, a woman of privileged status in a culture that afforded little autonomy to women;
at the same time, she examined her position “inside” and “outside” the frame of her
creations. Entering into the scene presented in a poem, she sought to re-imagine her own
experience” (“Becoming Mina Loy” 137). In contrast to “Three Italian Pictures,” which
juxtaposes scenes of restrictive domestic spaces against scenes of worldly dynamic
movement and depicts these dynamics through a fairly wide-angle, objective lens/voice,
the scenes in “Three Moments in Paris” are set in the public cafes or streets of Paris where
various women negotiate female identity. The word “moments” in the title calls attention to
the scenes in the poems that house interactions between interior states and external situations.
Loy herself seems to travel through these poems, through their locations and scenes, present
as a speaker in moments and “thinking through the body.”
73
In “One O’Clock at Night,” a woman announces her connection to her lover whose
café chair she shares, his arm across her back—“I have belonged to you since the beginning
of time.” Half asleep, she drifts in and out of awareness of his conversation with another
man, “arguing ‘Dynamic Decomposition.’” Despite her physical proximity with her lover,
she feels, in this moment, detached from him: his loud voice “[…] roared / Through my brain
and body.” Awakening, she fluctuates between bodily sensation and cerebral acuity—“I
catch the thread of the argument / Immediately assuming my personal mental / attitude / And
cease to be woman.” What she loses when becoming intellectually attuned to the argument is
73
Burke discuses this in regards to Loy’s early poetry in “Becoming Mina Loy.” p. 149.
125
the “[b]eautiful halfhour of being a mere woman / The animal woman / Understanding
nothing of man / But mastery and the security of imparted / physical heat / Indifferent to
cerebral gymnastics.” As such, the poem satirically critiques these gender dynamics and
these Futurist men. “Mere woman” is ironic, the speaker mimicking the men who disdain the
body and divide it from the intellect. Though she is able to participate in their cerebral play,
she knows she remains to the men a “mere woman,” always separate and inferior because she
is of the body. Being animal woman—a creature of bodily sensations—gives her pleasure
and allows her to be beautifully uninvolved in their “cerebral gymnastics.” Disdainful of their
egotistical intellectual talk, she remains at a distance “regarding them as the self-indulgent /
play of children/ Or the thunder of alien gods.” In spite of this critique, she concedes, “[b]ut
you wake me up”—these being the very words Loy uses in a personal letter to describe the
invigorating relationship she had with Marinetti. She is attracted and revitalized by the
intellectual energy of the men, but alienated by their masculine egos. In the dynamics of this
moment, she understands herself as both subject and object, her consciousness fluidly
maneuvering between the two. Yet, her thoughts go unspoken, and, tellingly, the moment
ends with the poem assuming the vantage point of the men who speak of her in the
third-person: “Let us go home she is tired and / wants to go to bed.” Though she
occupies public space equally with the men—in the café, a place for social and intellectual
intercourse—she still finds herself in a different position, that of “woman,” a dependent body
that must be taken home and put to bed like a child.
126
While the speaker alternates between states of being, moving from an intuitive
sensate state into the intellectual space of the men—“I catch the thread of the argument”—
she is conflicted about occupying the masculine space where she ceases to be woman if she
participates, yet is a “mere woman” if she does not. In suggesting that these are her two
options, the poem critiques not only the division of the sexes in this public space where
woman is audience to/for the male intellect, but also the separation of mind/body
(intellect/feeling) and the Futurist degradation of woman as the body. The woman is allowed
entrance into the café—the public spaces of the flaneur, the artist, the intellectual man;
however, despite her seeming physical freedom and her illuminating vision of the situation,
she finds herself existing in this liminal space. This space is created by Loy’s poetics that
play with the language of gender—the “I” of the poem, the speaker, is never in consistent or
direct correspondence with “the mere woman” seen by the men, the “animal woman
understanding nothing of man,” or with the “personal mental attitude” that the speaker only
momentarily “assumes.” Loy challenges essential constructions of gender in her poetry
through the creation of liminal spaces in which the self exists and has freedom to move.
Janet Lyons observes, “Loy plays with Futurism’s taxonomical constructions of ‘woman’ and
extemporizes her own alternative taxonomies of ‘man.’ Frequently she highlights deferred
spaces of meaning between ‘woman’ and ‘man’ and so unhinges Futurist certitude about the
ontologically gendered foundations of avant-garde poetics” (386).
“Café de Néant,” presents an equally gender-troubling scene of café life. The café’s
ambience is both seductive and claustrophobic; its young women are as stymied and stifled
127
as the bodies in the sanitarium in “July in Vallombrosa” and in the houses in “The Costa San
Giorigio.” The poem’s unspeaking I/eye moves around the dark candle-lit café, noting its
intimate couples, their “baited bodies” at “coffin tables,” their illusory romances familiar and
recognizable. The young women have “eyes that are full of love / And eyes that are full of
kohl,” but they smolder, as they contain their bodies and suppress their inner states of being,
“projecting light across the fulsome ambiente/ Trailing the rest of the animal behind them /
Telling of tale without words.” As in “One O’Clock at Night,” despite the seeming liberality
of the urbane environment, roles must be played, bodies and feelings repressed: “young
lovers heremetically buttoned up in black/ To black cravat / To the blue powder edge dusting
the yellow throat,” so that the observer wonders “What color could have been your bodies /
When last you put them away.” The bodies in this café are covered up in restrictive clothes
and their eyes masked in this suffocating atmosphere, this “factitious chamber DEATH /
The woman / As usual / Is smiling bravely.” The brandy cherries and the flesh of the
spectators “are decomposing” in this moribund place where romance is an empty aesthetic
gesture. The putrefaction of a young woman is the result, it seems, of her inert acquiescence
to a “nostalgic youth.” “Yet there are cabs outside the door”—the final line of the poem
offers an escape, the possibility of going elsewhere.
Yet even the boulevards outside the café present impediments for the young woman.
“Magasins du Louvre,” the final poem in “Three Moments in Paris,” is filled with details of
dolls in a store window, which attract the attention of two young women, “cocottes,” walking
down the street: “One cocotte wears a bowler hat and a sham camellia / And one an
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iridescent boa.” They are a pair to be seen by those on the street and appreciated for their
attractive feminine appearance, as are the dolls for sale in the shop window, which catch the
two young women’s attention: “They see the dolls / And for a moment their eyes relax/
…And now averted / Seek each other’s surreptitiously / To know if the other has
seen.” What exactly have they seen? While the young women in Paris might have the
freedom to stroll through its streets, they encounter lifeless images that reflect back to them
their own social immobility, similar to the women in the café, who must play static
superficial roles, deadening their inner lights/lives. In seeking each other’s eyes, these two
women look at each other, and each sees her self in the other. There is an embarrassed
recognition of how they are like these frozen dolls. If in their freedom of movement and
modern attire, the young women seem to challenge their conventional “circumstantial
identities,” nonetheless, they are limited in their ability to see or move beyond appearances.
The poem’s refrain, “All the virgins eyes are made of glass,” refers both to the eyes of the
dolls and the young women—these eyes attract but have no vision of their own other than
that of seeing themselves reflected back to them in the images of womanhood that they
encounter in the world. Despite the fact that they stroll through the street, they are the dolls in
the window waiting to be bought. As the young women seek out each other’s eyes, Loy shifts
the scene to an interior space in which she sits—or her poetic persona, connecting this
familiar moment to a domestic moment of her own; the young women seek each other’s eyes
“[w]hile mine are inextricably entangled with the pattern on the carpet / as eyes are apt to be /
129
In their shame.” The line between the public and private space dissolves in this shift, which
brings these women together, and thus illuminates a moment of a shared feeling—a traveling
of distances; they share the experience of female shame and embarrassment about being
caught in such position. Whether in the home or the street, the self is hidden as the eyes look
down in shame. Being free to walk, travel, interact with others and lovers, “Three Moments
in Paris” suggests, is not necessarily liberating for women if the self remains restrained and
immobile. The “travel” that occurs in these poem, I would argue, are the distances bridged in
the women’s forms of feeling and recognition.
In Loy’s “Parturition” (1914), published in the same year as poems from “Three
Italian Pictures” and “Three Moments in Paris,” a woman, a self-in-flux, experiences labor
and childbirth alone in a room in a house as her husband runs up a set of stairs as he visits
another woman, his mistress. While the man has the freedom to traverse physical space and
partakes in a life outside his family and house, the woman moves outside the boundaries of
the self, both psychically and bodily, through the creative act of childbirth.
74
The poem’s speaker is initially a singular embodied self situated in time and space—
in the moment of labor within a room. However, as the poem unfolds, the speaker becomes
unhinged as she expands and moves outward: “I am the centre/ Or a circle of pain/ Exceeding
its boundaries in every direction.” The “I” becomes the more personalized “me,” who seeks
to “locate an irritation without / It is within / Within / It is without.” The spatial gaps
74
Janet Lyon in her discussion of Loy’s poem of maternity, “Parturition”(1914), in which consciousness is
simultaneously cerebral and phenomenological, points to Loy’s “subjective vacillation between sensate
individual egoism (I am) and transcendental type (Maternity)” as a particular and personal form of modern
double-consciousness. “Mina Loy’s Pregnant Pauses: The Space of Possibility in the Florence Writings,” Mina
Loy: Woman and Poet. p. 392.
130
create a pause, a break, a breath-taken in the identification of the irritation, the “it.” There is
confusion between what is with/in and what is with/out. These gaps and repetitions perform
the stopping and starting, oscillations between what is inside the body and what is outside the
body, as well as the contractions and expansions of labor. The “it’ moves from inside to
outside, to a place within to a place without. The active “I” of the poem is the self splitting
between an embodied woman and a self that relinquishes corporeal distinctiveness:
“[s]omething in the delirium of night-hours / Confuses while intensifying sensibility /
Blurring spatial contours/ So aiding elusion of the circumscribed.” This blurring of “spatial
contours,” this crossing of lines in the process of childbirth labor, allows the self to avoid
limits, to escape the confinements of the room and the body, to move outside time and merge
with universal: “Indivisible / Acutely/ I am absorbed / Into / The was-is-ever-shall-be / Of
cosmic reproductivity.” Childbirth is an act of creation, an art experienced as a mind-body
experience. This expansiveness of self, it seems, occurs in a moment in the confusion of
night when shadowed space and “intensifying sensibility” make lines indistinguishable:
“Death / Life / I am knowing / All about Unfolding.” And yet, the unbounded self that
knows, that has vision, is a woman who encounters social sanctions and limits; the next
morning “she,” her body, is put back in her place—in her bed in the house—by the nurses
who attend her.
Loy’s poetics of the sensate moving body and female subjectivity veered sharply
131
away from the misogynist directives of her avant-garde peers, such as the Futurists
75
and
Imagists, who called for impersonal, unemotional art—or in Pound’s words, art “free from
emotional slither.” Loy renders the labor of childbirth as an experience in which the mind,
body, and cosmos are engaged simultaneously in creative (re)production. As Lyon notes,
“Loy’s writings make use of a dialectical method which ironizes and undercuts Futurism’s
authoritative disdain for all things feminine, including maternity and conception” (386).
Of Loy’s mapping out her own direction, Burke writes, “Mina Loy was an early explorer of
that uncharted territory, the ‘new psychic geography of woman’s poetry. […] Her poems are
born of the desire to enter into a terrain where physicality embodies the spirit, where the
body is animated by the mind” (“Becoming Mina Loy” 137). For Loy, the embodied self in
its sensate empathy with others and with its environment is the occasion for travel.
Placing Mina Loy
When Pound published Loy’s poem “The Effectual Marriage of The Insipid Narrative
Of Gina and Miovanni” as “The Ineffectual Marriage” in The Little Review, he removed the
poem’s personal and contextual frame, which situated it in the Italian neighborhood that
inspired Loy and that introduced a “fluctuating female persona.” The poem, a portrait of an
estranged married couple in which the wife is “circumscribed within gender limits”
75
“Futurism’s iconoclastic poetics, absorbed from Marinetti and his crew, were compatible with Loy’s own
talents for cauterizing diction and syntax,” notes by Lyon; however, “[w]hen practiced upon such taboo topics
as orgasm and childbirth and fornication, those talents produced poems that outraged philistines, and avant-
gardists alike.” “Mina Loy’s Pregnant Pauses: The Space of Possibility in the Florence Writings,” Mina Loy:
Woman and Poet. p. 383.
132
(Churchill 205) in her marriage and house, ends abruptly with this note—a note that Pound
removed: “This narrative halted when I learned that the house which inspired it was the
house of a mad woman.” Pound’s editorial excisions of this note and other lines referring to
the central female figure, Gina, her physical situation and her desires, were part of an effort
to clean the poem up so that it conformed to his characterization of Loy’s work as
“logopoeia,” or intellectual poetry. Such excisions highlight the problems of the deletions
and disavowals that occur in housing Loy’s poetry within a singular poetic program as well
as call attention to the problems of the cordoning-off of poetry with the language of nation.
76
Pound’s deletions of personal and cultural context nullified the relationship between Loy,
the woman in the house/poem, and Italy.
77
Pound’s embrace of Loy did bring her further into
American literary spheres at a time when she and her unconventional poetry were already in
circulation in its avant-garde circles in New York City and its little magazines—Camera
Work, Trend, International, Rogue, and Others.
Yet, even though she was a key figure in New York City’s avant-garde art and poetry
circles and even though American poetry magazines did publish the majority of her work,
Loy never felt a strong allegiance to America. In the spirit of America’s embrace of Loy and
her poetry, Virginia Koudis entitled her study of the poet Mina Loy: An American Modernist
Poet and declared that “[a]lthough British by birth, Mina Loy has been considered an
76
This cordoning off of American poetry, however, is interesting given Pound’s expatriate activities and
Imagism’s indebtedness to Chinese ideogram, the Japanese haiku, and to English metaphysical and Symbolist
poetry.
77
The quotes of the poem are from Suzanne Churchill’s chapter “Mina Loy: The Poetics of Dislodging” in The
Little Magazine OTHERS and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry, which provided much of the
information for this discussion of Pound’s editing of Loy’s poem.
133
American poet ever since her arrival in New York.” Koudis sees Loy’s identity as an
American poet as corresponding with her presence in America and in American magazines,
and to her successful incorporation into the literary community in New York. While this
acknowledges and allows for the notion that presence or habitation in a location or country is
a form of belonging, in aligning Loy with American modernism, both Pound and Koudis
extricate the artist and her work from other ‘natural’ and national relationships. As has also
been argued by other scholars, Loy’s American-ness derives from not from a cultural or
national source but from, I suggest, the poet’s intercultural sensibilities. While Loy herself
never felt at home in England, nor considered herself a British artist or writer, characterizing
Loy according to a national identity not only allows for Loy to be neither American or
British, but evacuates the syntactical and cultural heterogeneity of her poetry and erases
Loy’s history of geographic and intellectual mobility. As Miller argues, “[c]ritical study of
Loy places her conceptually within an international avant-garde but misleadingly as
‘American,’ despite the fact that she spent less than three years in the United States before
1936. By examining her poetry as ‘American,’ such studies misrepresent the profound
effects of her youth in London and expatriatism in Munich, Paris, Florence, New York, and
Berlin” (12).
While naming Loy an American poet acknowledges Loy’s relationship with
American poets and her hybrid poetics, such a designation denies Loy’s complex relationship
with various spheres of influence and is in discord with Loy’s poetic “‘mongrelization’ of
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linguistic registers.”
78
Noting how Loy’s poetics resist national categorization—yet still
utilizing the language of nation to describe Loy’s language, Marjorie Perloff in her article,
“Anglo-Mongrel and the Rose” (1925), suggests that “what makes Loy so curiously
‘American’ […] is her invention of an intricately polyglot language—a language that
challenges the conventional national idiom of her British (as well as her French or Italian,
or, paradoxically, even her American) contemporaries.” Yet, I want to point out that this
intricately polyglot ‘American’ language employed by Loy appeared in her early work that
she wrote while still in Italy and very soon after she arrived in America and derived from her
life experiences in London, Munich, Paris and Italy. As Perloff notes, Loy’s style challenges
cultural and linguistic homogeneity, and it did so as early as 1912, with her first poems
published in 1914 in America—before she actually traveled there.
None of these characterizations of Loy’s poetics explicitly acknowledge what Jahan
Ramazani describes as “the cross-national reading practices of the twentieth-century,”
literary identities that “disrupt the usual dynastic narratives” (44). Characterizing Loy’s
language as “American” and affixing of the label of “American Poet” to Loy draws attention
to the conflicted attitude about national and cultural genealogies within modernist studies.
Despite the fact that modernism is born out of transformative transnational and translocal
movements, and despite the recent transatlantic turn in modernist studies, scholars still
remain invested in tracing and locating origins. To this end, Loy’s geographical and poetic
promiscuities inspire scholars and literary communities to claim, reject, label and account for
78
See Perloff’s “English as a ‘Second’ Language: Mina Loy’s ‘Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose.’”
135
her poetics.
79
Koudis’s goal of “attempting to place Mina Loy in her cultural and literary
milieu” falls within the long-standing inclination of literary criticism and institutions to
situate a writer according to a source of influence—whether to a homeland, a mother tongue,
a culture, or community.
80
However, as Ramanzi observes, “[t]he modernists translated their
frequent geographic displacement and transcultural alienation into a poetics of dissonance
and defamiliarization, and this hybrid and strange-making art also defies the national literary
genealogies into which it is often pressed” (24). Loy’s writing cannot be easily “pressed” into
a genealogy or a particular singular category given that it confounds personal, cultural and
national borders and is at cross-purposes with her translocational and transcultural
relationships, her self-professed “mongrel” identity, and her poetics of travel that conveys the
messiness of life traffic. To delimit Loy’s poetry according to categories runs counter to her
dynamic life-traffic and, more broadly, to modernism’s own dislodging movements.
79
Critics who want to characterize Loy’s poetics through the lens of Loy’s gender and sexuality run into the
same trouble of those who want to house Loy within a particular national identity or aesthetic program. Mary
Galvin in her book Queer Poetics: Five Modernist Women Writers opens her chapter on Loy with this
disclaimer: “Although not a Lesbian, I believe that by placing Loy within the context of a continuum of Lesbian
existence we may come to a clearer understanding of her politics and her poetics of disruption.” Although Loy
is “not a Lesbian,” Galvin believes Loy belongs in this category due to her the gender complexities in her
writing and her close friendships with lesbians—such as Gertrude Stein, Natalie Barney and Djuna Barnes.
Certainly aspects of Loy’s personal life and her writing can said to be queer in the sense that borders are
questioned and crossed; however, Galvin in her identification of Loy as “not a lesbian” refers soley to the fact
that Loy’s sexual partners were men. This seems to be in discord with her desire to place Loy in “the context of
a continuum of Lesbian existence,” which implies a more fluid or complex view of a lesbian identity, one that
not encompasses Loy’s queer female friends, but appreciates her poetics and personal politics as disruptive to
definitive categories of identity. It is this liminal place in which Loy’s identity and that of her poetics operate
that prompts Galvin to turn to definitions. Galvin dismisses Loy’s intimate relationships with Futurist and
Dadaist men in placing her with a Lesbian context, which I argue, actually “de-queers” Loy, erasing the
complexities of her identity. Galvin seems to want to remove impurities and dissonance, as suggested in her
stated goal to clarify Loy’s “poetics of disruption.”
80
Carolyn Burke notes that “Loy’s writing developed in and reflected as cosmopolitan artistic context that was
in tension with her English origins […]. Until very recently, Loy’s idiosyncrantic crossings of “Paris” and
“Italy,” metaphysics and feminism, have made numerous readers uneasy,” “Mina Loy,” Gender of Modernism.
p. 236.
136
Thus, Loy’s form of traveling is not the body moving from point A to point B;
it is not taking a journey to a more desirable foreign destination; it is not departing from
home in order to return—nor is it speeding into the future on a train. Travel, for Loy, is the
movement of the interactive self, and her travel writing is a poetics that understands “the
parallels between the interior spaces of the psyche and the material spaces we inhabit”
(Churchill 181). For Loy, travel among and between these spaces necessitates and allows for
a continuous reorientation of the self.
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Chapter Bibliography
Armstrong, Tim. Modernism, Technology and the Body. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1998.
Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. New York: Cosimo, 2005.
Boccioni, Umberto. “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture 1912.” Manifesto:
A Century of Isms. ed. Mary Ann Caws. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001.
Burke, Carolyn. Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1996.
--------. “Becoming Mina Loy.” Women’s Studies 7.137 (1980)
--------. “Getting Spliced: Modernism and Sexual Difference.” American Quarterly 39.1
(Spring 1987)
--------. “Mina Loy,” Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology. ed. Bonnie Kime Scott
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.
Churchill, Suzanne. “Mina Loy: The Poetics of Dislodging.” The Little Magazine Others
and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry. Burlington: Ashgate, 2006.
Clark, Steve. Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit. New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
Conover, Roger L.“(Re)Introducing Mina Loy.” Mina Loy: Woman and Poet. Orono,
Maine: The National Poetry Foundation, 1998.
Galvin, Mary. Queer Poetics: Five Modernist Women Writers. Westport, CT: Greenwood
Publishing Group, 1999.
138
Kaplan, Caren. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. Durham:
Duke University Press, 1996.
Koudis, Virginia. Mina Loy: American Modernist Poet. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1980.
----------. “Rediscovering Our Sources: The Poetry of Mina Loy,” Boundary 2 8.2
(Spring 1980) 186.
Loy, Mina. “Gertrude Stein.” The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology. ed. Bonnie
Kime Scott. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.
----------. The Last Lunar Baedeker. ed. Roger Conover. The Highlands: The Jargon
Society, Inc., 1982.
Loy, Mina. “Summer Night in a Florentine Slum,” unpublished poem. Mina Loy, Box 5,
Folder 123, Beinecke Library, Yale, New Haven.
Lyon, Janet. “Mina Loy’s Pregnant Pauses: The Space of Possibility in the Florence
Writings,” Mina Loy: Woman and Poet. Orono: The National Poetry Foundation,
1998.
Miller, Cristanne. Cultures of Modernism: Marianne Moore, Mina Loy & Else Lasker-
Scüler. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005.
Perloff, Marjorie. “English as a ‘Second’ Language: Mina Loy’s ‘Anglo-Mongrels and
the Rose.’” Jacket #5, p.144 http://jacketmagazine.com/05/mina-anglo.html
Ramazani, Jahan. A Transnational Poetics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
2009.
139
Robert, Andrew Michael, “ ‘How to be Happy in Paris’: Mina Loy and the
Transvaluation of the Body.” Cambridge Quarterly (1998) XXVII (2): 129-147.
http://camqtly.oxfordjournals.org/content/XXVII/2/129.extract
Shreiber, Maeera and Keith Tuma, “Introduction.” Mina Loy: Woman and Poet. Orono,
Maine: The National Poetry Foundation, 1998.
Solnit, Rebecca. A Field Guide to Getting Lost. New York: Penguin Books, 2005.
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But it was no use, I knew in myself that it would never happen.
That I would never be part of anything. I would never really belong
anywhere, and I knew it, and all my life would be the same, trying
to belong, failing. Always something would go wrong. I am a
stranger and I always will be, and after all I really didn’t care.
--Jean Rhys, Smile Please.
For several days after I kept planning to leave London. The names
of all the places I would go to went round and round my head.
(This isn’t the only place in the world; there are other places.
You don’t get so depressed when you think that.)
--Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark
Chapter Three
Getting On: Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark
In 1907, the same year that the English-born Mina Loy traveled from Paris to
Florence, Italy—where she lived for nine years—a young Jean Rhys, then known as
Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams, left her home on Dominica, an island in the West Indies,
for England. In the year 1924 Loy and Rhys were both living in Paris and their paths again
crossed figuratively in English writer Ford Madox Ford’s literary magazine, the transatlantic
review. The motto of this Paris-based journal was “Fluctuat,” an abbreviated version of the
city motto of Paris, “Fluctuat nec mergitur”—“She is tossed by the waves but does not sink”
(Poli 25). Unlike Loy, whose middle-class English background provided her certain
privileges that helped facilitate her entry into modernism’s international art and literary
communities, Rhys’s travels never translated into a cosmopolitan identity, and were, indeed,
always stormy. Whether or not she would remain afloat remained an open question
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throughout her life—as Rhys depicts in her novel, Voyage in the Dark, the subject of this
chapter.
Both Loy and Rhys left their countries of birth at age seventeen. Loy traveled from
England to study art in Munich, and then—in her words—“returned home for a second”;
in her migrations among many countries and communities over the course of her life, as I
discussed in the previous chapter, Loy constructed her identity and her work in relation to her
dislocations. Replete with references to and imagery stemming from the European cities and
domestic spaces she inhabited, and blending together physical and metaphysical forms of
traveling, Loy’s poetics, as we have seen, reflect her connections with the modernistic artistic
and literary communities of Paris, Florence, and New York City. She wrote of the effect of
her transcultural influences on her writing: “I left England at seventeen and think in a
subconscious muddle of foreign languages—Perhaps I have no notion of what pure English
is” (Miller 163). Rhys, who grew up in a Welsh-Creole family in Dominica, an island that
was then a colony of Britain, shared with Loy an estranged connection to her place of birth,
as well as an ambivalent relationship with England; later in life when Rhys was asked by an
interviewer about her expatriate status, she responded with the question, “Am I an expatriate?
Expatriate from where?” (Emery 14). In a letter to her daughter in 1959, Rhys writes, “As far
as I know I am white—but I have no country really now” (Letters 172). In her autobiography,
Rhys writes of the final tea she has with her Aunt Jeanette before she leaves Dominica for
England: “I was very astonished when, one of the last times I saw her, she embraced me and
kissed me and said, ‘Poor lamb, poor lamb.’ Perhaps she knew that I was bound for a stormy
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passage and would be seasick most of the time” (Smile 57). In the European cities where she
spent her adult life, Rhys never considered herself at home and always felt unable to “get on,”
as her character Anna in Voyage in the Dark is constantly encouraged to do. “Get on or get
out they say. Get on or get out” (74)—the English tell her.
Loy and Rhys did not live in England at the same time but shared conflicted
relationships with the country and its culture, which informed their writing—yet, not as
significantly, I would argue, as did their itinerancy and mixed identities. Loy’s poetry and
Rhys’s novels depict women traveling within modernity’s metropolitan landscapes,
negotiating borders between domestic and public spaces, and constructing subjectivities
through their movements and interactions within these landscapes. Their experience of
metropolitan travel forms an interesting contrast to that of Baudelaire’s and Benjamin’s
flâneur, whose identity is only reinforced by his metropolitan excursions. The travel
of the women in the city in the writing of Loy and Rhys is also in stark in contrast to
representations of the lady who returns to her home after her city outings. An example
of the latter is provided by Virginia Woolf in her essay, “Street Haunting (19), who,
after “rambling the streets of London,” happily returns home to find her sense of self
“sheltered and enclosed” in the stability and familiarity of her house. In contrast, concerned
with physical and psychological negotiations of unfamiliar terrain, Loy and Rhys depict the
self as unstable—and continually formed and re-formed through interactions and cross-
cultural identifications. Yet, they do so with a difference. For while Loy’s poetics, as chapter
two demonstrated, enacts the bodily crossing of borders and movement into new spaces as an
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occasion and opportunity for re-constructing subjectivity, Rhys’s wandering, chaotic
narratives depict women whose complex identities and liminal positions lead to experiences
of alienation as their travels take them through the metropolitan spaces of modern Europe.
She is Tossed by the Waves but Does Not Sink
The aforementioned proximity of Rhys and Loy in the pages of Ford Madox Ford’s
Paris-based magazine, the transatlantic review, a journal that aimed to showcase a new
modern transnational English literature as the means to “bring about better international
relations” (41) highlights not only the intersecting but divergent dislocations of Loy and
Rhys, but modernism’s transnational encounters. The presence of Rhys and Loy in Paris
between the wars—and in the transatlantic review—is emblematic of modernity’s enabling
of travel and “contact zones”
81
in which, as Susan Stanford Friedman argues, dynamic
juxtapositions of difference produce new modernisms: “Traveling and intermixing cultures
are not unidirectional, but multidirectional; not linear influences, but reciprocal ones; not
passive assimilations, but actively transformative ones, based in a blending of adaptation and
resistance” (430).
Loy’s essay, “Gertrude Stein,” and Rhys’s first published piece of writing, the short
story “Vienne,” appeared the transatlantic review in 1924—the one year that it ran. Ford’s
previous magazine, The English Review, had been dedicated to modern English literature,
with Joseph Conrad as Ford’s initial inspiration; the transatlantic review, however, sought to
81
This is a reference to Mary Louise’s Pratt’s phrase, “contact zones,” in her book, Imperial Eyes, as discussed
in the dissertation’s introduction.
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promote a new transatlantic modern literature. GoGwilt writes of the journal’s origin, “it was
within a French avant-garde milieu that the transatlantic review, based in Paris and edited by
expatriate British and American writers, sought to lay claim to a transatlantic ‘English’
modernism” (62). The magazine’s content was primarily English and American with
occasional Dadaist and French contributions; in response to the opinions and tastes of its
diverse editors and readers, it vacillated between honoring an older generation of modern
English literature and promoting new avant-garde writing. GoGwilt argues that the formation
of English modernism is traceable through Ford’s two literary journals, The English Review
and the transatlantic review; he sees these literary ventures and Ford’s collaboration with
Conrad and with Rhys as illustrative of different moments in the formation of English
modernism.
82
Ford’s promoting of Rhys and the presence of her writing in the latter
magazine signals a shift in English modernism, a shift that GoGwilt argues is “a scene of
crossing and contestation between different genealogies of literary of modernism and
modernity” (9).
Promoting a “universal” Anglo literature in the transatlantic review’s prospectus, Ford
wrote, “There is no British Literature, there is no American Literature: there is English
literature which embraces alike Mark Twain and Thomas Hardy with the figure of Mr. Henry
82
GoGwilt writes of this contestation in his book The Passage of Literature: Genealogies of Modernism:
“The relation between English, Creole, and Indonesian modernist formations reveals an ongoing contest over
transnational genealogies of modernism” (3). He argues, “Plotting the historical coordinates of English, Creole,
and Indonesian modernism does not, then, yield a straightforward literary history of successive formations of
modernism. It demands, rather, the kind of reperiodizing and respatializing of literary history called for by
[Susan Stanford] Friedman. It also demands renewed attention to the forms of linguistic ‘creolization’ operating
within and between different modernist formations” (7).
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James to bracket them” (Poli 37). While this is a generous embrace of native sons of America
and England, one that seeks to re-envision and reconfigure the temporal and geographical
lines of English modernism,
83
Ford’s inclusion of Rhys is uncomfortable, given her
ambivalent and—at times—hostile relationship with English culture. And more significantly,
it elides the cultural fissures and personal resistances against English culture housed within
her work. For Rhys’s writing was shaped less by her “English-ness” than by her geographical
migrations and by a Creole consciousness—a sense of always being in-between positions and
places that included being culturally at odds with this nation that sought to claim her as one
of its writers.
Although Pound edited and introduced Loy’s Italy poetry in 1914 according to the
literary parameters of his Imagist program and the American magazine, The Little Review,
she and her writing fit more comfortably in the transatlantic review’s English-American
cosmopolitan profile. By 1924 Loy had lived in London, Paris, Florence, New York City,
Mexico and Berlin, and though she was born in England, her work had been published
primarily in American magazines. In Paris at this time were Loy’s friends Natalie Barney and
Gertrude Stein, whose book The Making of Americans was also being serialized in the
transatlantic review. In addition, Pound was living in Paris, editing and contributing to
Ford’s magazine. Rhys, however, found herself in a very different position in this community
83
The magazine’s prospectus is replete with travel motifs and celebrates travel as that which brings into contact
literature from across nations. Along with the ship, the train serves as a central metaphor, with Ford as the
Conductor: “The Home [of the magazine—Paris] being determined, the Proprietors pitched Mr. F. M. Ford as
Conductor. Mr. Ford, formerly—and perhaps better—known as Ford Madox Hueffer was the founder of the
“English Review” which in its day made good along the lines which this Review now proposes to travel”
(Polis 39).
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than did Loy. Having recently fled from Vienna with her husband, who was subsequently
imprisoned, Rhys had just been “discovered” by Ford. He published in the transatlantic
review her story, “Vienne,” based on her time in Vienna when her husband served in the
position of secretary to a Japanese diplomat. Told from the point of view of a nameless
worldly observer, the story’s sharp tone, its depiction of the post-war cosmopolitan Vienna
scene, and its international ensemble of figures fit the transatlantic review’s agenda.
What the story only hints at is the fact that while Rhys had traveled to many European cities,
her geographical migrations were, rather consistently difficult and alienating experiences.
Her life in Vienna came to an abrupt end when she and her husband had to flee the city,
leaving most of their belongings and clothes behind. Soon after they arrived in Paris,
her husband was imprisoned. Even after meeting Ford in Paris, she remained on the margins
of the city’s literary community, living in the impoverished thirteenth arrondissement where,
in the words of Rhys herself, “she saw something of the other Paris” (Parson 136), that is,
areas of the city not inhabited or frequented by expatriate writers. Unlike Loy who was
connected to Stein, Pound, and other women writers and artists in Paris, Rhys was not a
member of any expatriate community. Rhys’s “outsider status,” Parson notes, “distanced her
from the authoritative view of the Anglo-American hegemony; and she also carefully
guarded this difference” (136).
In his book Ford Madox and the transatlantic review Bernard Poli characterizes the
beginning of the relationship of Rhys and Ford as one in which Ford played the role of patron
to a young English girl in need:
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Ford always generous with young starving artists to the extent of giving them
a spare bed in his apartment and free meals, had brought home at the time a
pretty English girl, called Jean Rhys, who, after an unfortunate affair in
Belgium, had come to Paris with one dress and a pair of shoes, and also,
according to Stella Bowen’s account, the manuscript of an unpublished novel.
Ford aided her in her writing, and Stella helped her to look more presentable,
but at the same time Ford developed a new attachment for the girl, which was
not of a literary kind. (125)
Despite Poli’s claims Rhys was neither English nor was she a girl when she met Ford. With
her husband in prison for fraud, the thirty-four year-old Rhys found herself stranded in Paris
and, indeed, desperately looking for ways to make money to support herself. She sought out
the wife of a Times correspondent to try to sell her husband’s writing; however, the woman
was more impressed by Rhys’s writing—in particular, the journals that contained the
material for Voyage in the Dark—and introduced Rhys to Ford, who took an interest in
both her and her writing. While Rhys’ relationship with Ford facilitated her writing career,
the personal dynamic was a complicated one, given Ford’s long-term partnership with Stella
Bowen and his eventual status as both Rhys’s editor and lover.
While Poli’s description of Rhys as “a hapless English girl” was written in 1967,
prior to significant Rhys scholarship, the cultural and economic undercurrents of this
characterization of Rhys and her relationship to Ford call attention to Rhys’s position
in this community and highlight one of the central concerns in her novels. That Poli
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depicts Rhys as a hapless starving girl, an appealing lost puppy, to whom Ford develops
“an attachment,” underplays the significance of the famous novelist’s relationship to
Rhys, creating a picture of her as an impoverished pathetic woman who must be made
“presentable” in order to fit in with his class of friends. Rhys herself depicts their dynamic in
her novel Quartet, in which she characterizes a character closely based on Ford as “a down to
earth, business-like snob, grimly determined to get on” (Frickey 4). That Ford and Stella felt
that they had to make Rhys “presentable” is both telling and ironic given that her outsider
status made her desirable to Ford and her work desirable to the transatlantic review. In his
preface to her first collection of writing, The Left Bank and Other Stories, Ford draws
attention Rhys’s background as an enticement to her fiction: “coming from Antilles,”
he writes, “[Rhys has] a terrifying insight and a terrific—an almost lurid!—passion for
stating the case of the underdog” (GoGwilt 82). Ford thus locates Loy’s status as “the
underdog” and her insight as a product of her West Indies origins—hence her exotic
otherness in his eyes. Rhys’s background and economic position indeed informed her
perspective and work; her writing is inhabited by nomadic figures who occupy in-between
identities and inhabit marginal spaces. However, Ford quite problematically romanticizes and
sexualizes the position of the marginalized woman; her writing, he suggests, serves a window
into the experiences of an exotic other. Such is Rhys’s early identity and position within this
particular community of Anglo-European modernism, illuminating modernity’s desire to
incorporate the colonized other into its discourses by exploiting difference and erasing
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ambiguity. Rhys and her writing, however, as this chapter will show, thwart such attempts at
either easy identification or incorporation.
Home
Born in Dominica to a Welsh father and a fifth-generation Creole mother, whose
family estate had held slaves, and raised in a small white Creole community on the island
of Dominica, Rhys grew up with a sense of not belonging to either the white or black
communities that were a part of her daily life. The relationship between the multiple
communities living in the Caribbean Islands during Rhys’s lifetime were informed by
overlapping cultures and turbulent histories of European imperialism and colonization,
slavery, revolt, the Emancipation Act, and anti-colonial struggles.
84
Rhys’ family was
West Indian White Creole and part of the island’s European ruling class. In her unfinished
autobiography, Smile, Please, Rhys writes of her continuous fear of Meta, the stern black
woman –“the terror of my life” (22)—who was responsible for her care, and who told her
stories to frighten her—“stories tinged with fear and horror” (23)—and of her childhood
friendship with Francine, of whom she writes, “I made great friends with a Negro girl called
Francine…Francine’s stories were quite different, full of jokes and laughter, descriptions of
84
Of this period in West Indian history, Gregg writes, “The lifespan of the historical Jean Rhys, 1890-1979,
traverses crucial periods of European and West Indian history, marked by imperialism, colonialism, anticolonial
struggles, two world wars, and the constitutional independence of formerly colonized countries. But it is the
immediate postslavery period, the 1830s and 1840s, a watershed in British and Caribbean colonial history,
which marks the obsessive beginning in Rhy’s writing on the West Indies. This period is one of the most
ideologically contested moments in Caribbean history—then and now. The ideological struggle to construct the
narrative of this definitive moment in the history of the region remains today in the ongoing debates among
professional historians of and from the Caribbean as they analyze “push /pull” factors that shaped postslavery
labor and social relations” (8).
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beautiful dresses and good things to eat” (23). Rhys’s mother came to disapprove of her
friendship with Francine when it was time for Rhys to enter into society; Francine
subsequently disappeared from Rhys’s life without a goodbye, which Rhys describes as a
source of pain and confusion—“I [had grown] very fond of Francine and admired her; when
she disappeared without a word to me I was hurt” (24). Her relationship with Meta and
Francine thus informed Rhys’s mixed feelings about her Caribbean identity as a white
Creole, engendering her anxiety about race and class and her troubled identification with a
home culture and country.
Rhys’s autobiographical writing reveals forms of self-hatred, race essentialism, and
conflicting cultural identifications that are suggestive of the split-consciousness of a modern
imperial subject—of an identity position that vacillates between identifying as both subject
and object. Rhys describes her hatred and destruction of her white doll and ruminates how
“side by side with my growing wariness of black people there was envy. I decided that they
had a better time than we did” (39). She remembers the carnivals of the island “when I used
to long so fiercely to be black and to dance, too, in the sun, to that music” (43). Of her
realization that she was hated by black people on the island after a cold look from a black
girl, she writes, “I never tried to be friendly with any of the coloured girls again. I was polite
and that was all. They hate us. We are hated” (39). The grammar of these sentences suggests
Rhys’s identification as both subject and object; the black girls, “they” are the subjects who
hate “us,” the Creole white colonizers and decedents of slave-owners who are the outsiders
on the island. Rhys is the direct object of their hate. In the second sentence, she reverses her
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position; she puts herself in the subject position, identifying with the “we” as the receivers of
an indefinite hate. As a girl, Rhys recognized that she occupied these different positions in
Dominica, including the position of the hated white colonizer. In turn, however, she writes of
her hatred of England and English people as a result of their ambivalence and indifference to
her: “I grew to hate England. No one [there] was ever kind to me. I knew nothing, nothing”
(140); “I have never liked England or most English people much—or let’s say I am terrified
of them” (Gregg 2). In her life in Europe, particularly in England, Rhys felt like a foreigner,
unsettled by her continuous peregrinations among its metropolitan centers. Such shifts
of positions inform the subjectivity of Rhys, and in turn, those of her female characters,
whose liminal positions and identities tend to mirror those of Rhys. In the words of Helen
Carr, “as a Creole, Jean Rhys was culturally mixed, marginal to the metropolitan world,
hybrid, always a foreigner, even in her native land. She became a migrant, unsettled, on the
move, with no roots to return to, no base point, a foreigner everywhere” (23). But, as Carr
also points out, “the colonial experience […] does not only bring dislocation: the position on
the margin gives a perspective, a difference of view that Ian Chambers calls the ‘oblique gaze
of the migrant’, from which the homelands’ values and institutions can be appraised and
judged: it leads not just to ‘pain,’ but to anger and resistance” (25). Thus, Rhys’s position as
a Creole, her migrant gaze, informs the way she writes about travel and her response to her
national identity and expatriate status, as Gregg suggests: “the silence, hesitations, and strong
assertions—may suggest a resistance to attempts to fix her ‘complex’ identity”(2).
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Rhys’s Voyage
Rhys’s traveling and displacements are unlike those of the modernist expatriates
described by Paul Fussell, in his book, Abroad: Traveling Between the Wars, who
characterizes post World War I’s travel as modernism’s literary diaspora:
This diaspora seems one of the signals of literary modernism, as we can infer
from virtually no modern writer’s remaining where he’s “supposed” to be
except perhaps Proust—we think of Pound in London, Paris and Italy; Eliot in
London; Joyce in Trieste and Paris; Mann ultimately in the United States.
The post-war flight from the Middle West of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and
Sinclair Lewis is the American counterpart of these European flights from a
real or fancied narrowing of horizons. (11)
If the signal of literary modernism is the post World War I diaspora in which “virtually no
modern writer is where he is supposed to be,” Rhys complicates this picture of modernism,
one in which expatriate mostly male writers are in flight—often temporarily—from their
home countries. She did not have a place she was “supposed to be,” nor was there a place to
where she would return after leaving her home in Dominica in 1907. Rhys suggests as much
in her question, “Am I an expatriate? Expatriate from where?” The many forms of
displacement that contributed to Rhys’s sense of an unsettled self mark both the form and
content her writing in ways that invite readings of her work as modernist, feminist, post-
colonialist, and postmodernist. Carr wonders, “What does it mean to call her a modernist?
A word which embraces T.S. Eliot, Stein and Woolf is a problematic term. Rhys’s poetic
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irony, her themes of loneliness, anxiety and loss, her cosmopolitan, often metropolitan
settings, all appear quintessentially modernist… There are elements in her work which can be
better understood in terms of her affinity with the French nineteenth century precursors of
modernism, and others which might be better described as postmodernist, not least the
metafictional structure of her most famous novel, The Wide Sargasso Sea”(18).
85
In his 1972
review, Trinidadian writer V.S. Naipaul observes that her unique form of expatriation puts
her in the position to write about travel differently than did her European and American
contemporaries:
She was outside that tradition of imperial-expatriate writing in which the
metropolitan outsider is thrown into relief against an alien background.
She was an expatriate, but her journey had been the other way round,
from a background of nothing to an organized world with which her heroines
could never come to terms. […] This journey, this break in life,
is the essential theme of her five novels. (54)
The “background of nothing” from which Rhys travels is “nothing” to the “organized world”
that is modern Europe. In anticipation of her journey to England, a young Rhys writes a
poem in her journal that evokes one of the latter’s nation’s Romantic poets and includes the
travel motif of journeying into the unknown: “I am going to England, what I shall find there,
no matter what, not what I sought, said Byron, not what I sought or what I seek.” Rhys adds,
85
Wide Sargasso Sea, the last of Rhys’s novels, was published in 1966.
154
“This was the last poem I was to write for a very long time” (Gregg 55).
86
Rhys’s Voyage in
the Dark, which I now will focus on in detail, was published in 1934, and though not strictly
autobiographical, it draws on her own experiences living in London from 1907 to around
1913.
87
It is a novel of a journey from nothing to nothing, a voyage of darkness in which the
central figure does not find what she seeks. Drawing on her personal journals and myriad
cultural texts, Rhys, in the words of Carr, “is trying to find a narrative, a language, a form,
which makes sense of the world she has experienced” (22).
The journey in Voyage in the Dark belongs to Anna Morgan, who has left the West
Indies and is trying to “get on” in the city of London as a chorus girl. England is a foreign
land that Anna, like Rhys, has read about in books. But as a traveler of London’s streets and
inhabitant of its shabby boarding-houses, economically dependent on other men for money
after her first love-affair ends, Anna is not the artist flâneur, nor is she Fussell’s English
gentleman traveling abroad. Anna is a wandering migrant who, in Naipul’s words, is unable
86
Gregg discusses this quote from Rhy’s manuscript, “Leaving School: How I Became a Novelist,” in her
chapter section entitled, “Writing (and) the Creole.” Gregg points out that “[t]he draft manuscripts help us to see
the process by which “Jean Rhys” becomes the subject of her writing.” Of the way in which Rhys’s shaped her
“autobiographical” texts into novels and short stories, Gregg observes, “The invention in the writing processes
the ‘life’ into a fictionalized biotext whose ‘truths’ reside not in their factual nature but in the constitution of a
self through a concern with place and writing, which are two of the central tropes of Rhys’s work” (55).
87
In Smile, Please, Rhys describes when she first began writing. She was living in a small room in an area of
London know as “World’s End.” She was walking and looking into shop windows, when she passed a
stationer’s shop with quill pens that looked like little birds displayed in the window. She purchased a dozen of
them and thick black exercise books. She writes, “It was after supper that night—as usual a glass of milk and
some bread and cheese—that it happened. My fingers tingled, opened an exercise book, and wrote This is my
Diary. But it wasn’t a diary. I remembered everything that had happened to me in the last year and a half. I
remembered what he’d said, what I’d felt. I wrote on until late into the night, till I was so tired that I couldn’t go
on, and I fell into bed and sleep” (104).
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“to come to terms” with the world that she encounters—which, in this case, is the foreign city
of London:
Looking out at the street was like looking at stagnant water. […]
I said, ‘I don’t like London. It’s an awful place; it looks horrible sometimes.
I wish I’d never come over here at all.’
‘You must be potty,’ Maudie said. ‘Whoever heard of anybody who
didn’t like London?’ Her eyes looked scornful. (47)
Such is the situation of Anna, a foreigner who finds London an awful place, but because she
comes from a “background of nothing,” she is described as “potty” and knowing “nothing.”
Voyage in the Dark revises modernity’s travel narratives that originate in the “center,”
move outward to the colonies, and return home to the Continent.
88
Reversing the colonial
encounter, Anna has journeyed from the West Indies, the Empire’s periphery, to England.
Further confusing definitive origins and destinations, the novel’s narrative switches
intermittently and unpredictably between Anna’s past on the island of Dominica and her
present in London. None of the travel depicted in the novel occurs as a straightforward
trajectory; Anna’s movements within the city of London are circuitous, and she returns
repeatedly to the place from which she came in the form of memories, dreams and interior
88
Rhys’s writing is widely understood as engaging in post-colonial discourse. Urmila Seshagiri writes,
“The novel’s complex transnationality—the contrapuntal geography that oscillates between England and the
West Indies—gives rise to its transitional literary quality; Rhys produces a new geopolitics that challenges the
continued relevance of modernist formal accomplishments, and simultaneously inaugurates what would soon
become the central goals of postcolonial literature in English” (487). “Modernist Ashes, Postcolonial Phoenix:
Jean Rhys and the Evolution of the English Novel.”
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monologues.
89
Thus, Anna’s voyage is both a voyage out and a voyage in. Of the novel’s
title that promises a voyage narrative, Gregg observes: “the title Voyage in the Dark is
suggestive of the ‘voyages,’ journals, ‘eyewitness accounts,’ ‘histories,’ and letters of
eighteenth-century European writing on the West Indies.” Yet, of the novel’s voyage’s
deviation from these travel texts, she writes,” It can be read as a récrit de voyage from the
periphery to the center. The Other voyages into the dark center of the Self and returns the
gaze” (123). While Anna’s literal voyage carries her from the West Indies to England, her
gaze is informed by an identity constructed of multiple overlapping histories. Her otherness
is one of being in-between—as a white Creole she is both colonizer and colonized; and
despite her Welsh patrilineage, her relationship with the English culture is one of dis-
identification and alienation. In London, Anna is an outsider who finds the culture foreign
despite her struggles to become acculturated. One of Gregg’s central arguments about Rhys’s
female characters is that “the self that Jean Rhys writes/invents can be read as a site where
narratives of empire; ideologies of race and gender, memory and imagination; and theories of
reading and writing are all structured interdependently and sometimes contradictorily” (53).
89
Carol Dell’Amico in her chapter on Voyage in the Dark entitled “Unhomely” sees Anna as a ghost, a
disconcerting “contagious presence” in her combination of familiarity and strangeness, and reads the novel as
an uncanny text and that […]through proliferating textual uncannies, the London the novel is constructed as a
city gestating, beset by the first intimations of the complexities and implications of imperio-colonial history.
Rhys’s London is a city, in short, where an historical, geopolitical forgetting is just beginning to lift. I approach
the novel, therefore, as a paradigmatic “unhomely” text in Homi Bhabha’s sense, as I argue that its uncannies
pertain to “hauntings of history.” […] Read as a textual uncanny, Anna’s ability to disconcert follows from her
combination of familiarity and strangeness, on the way in which in her capacity of a colonial, she agitates the
uneasy bed of imperial repression—the “there” but “not all there” of metropolitan-colonial relations. Further,
Anna is not only a ghost of history in the novel, she is also haunted. She is, indeed, the representative
metropolitan Briton and imperial subject in the novel”(41). See Dell’Amico’s Colonialism and the Modernist
Movement inthe Early Novels of Jean Rhys.
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Thus, Rhys’s voyage narrative serves as a critique of colonial narratives and the insular
English novel, and it instigates this conversation from the periphery in a form of writing that
Edward Said has characterized as “writing back to the Empire.”
90
The very title of Voyage in
the Dark evokes the English voyage novel, as its language is the incongruous marriage of
two English novels of travel—Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out, with its narrative of a
young English woman who travels to South America to experience self-awakening,
epiphanies, and death, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, with its depiction of the
horror at the heart of an empire-building voyage. Thus, the title introduces the ways in which
the novel reshapes the voyage narrative and the English novel into a narrative that enacts
Anna’s forms of travel and position of moving between myriad cultural and psychological
landscapes.
Anna’s voyage narrative is a coming-of-age story, yet one that lacks direction;
she does not change, become enlightened, marry, nor does she reach a final destination.
Instead her journey ends in darkness with a botched abortion and her possible death—
or, as the doctor says, “ready to start all over again in no time” (187), ready to resume
perpetual un(re)productive movement. This is one of the many narratives, or stories, imposed
on Anna, who, according to those in London, does not successfully “get on,” move in a
forward-looking trajectory. Thus, Voyage in the Dark has been read as Rhys’s example of a
“faltering Bildungsroman” (Parsons 134) and as a postmodern novel of multiple narrative
perspectives that dismantles the Victorian Bildungsroman form. Urmila Seshargari sees the
90
See Said’s Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism.
158
novel failing even as a modernist Bildungsroman, given that modernism’s “signature traits of
newness, youth and refusal of conventional adulthood […] only lead to stasis and paralysis”
(496) in Rhys’s rendition. Seshargari argues that even though Anna’s “alienation expresses
itself in Rhys’s emendations to modernist Bildungsroman, a subversive genre in its own
right…nevertheless [the genre] cannot deliver Anna Morgan into social stability or
heightened self-knowledge” (496). “High modernisms’ nonlinear chronologies,” she argues,
“paralyze rather than liberate her narrative” (497). On the one hand, I agree that the
Bildungsroman genre cannot deliver Anna into “social stability of heightened self
knowledge,” because she is not a suitable candidate for this plot structure; she is “a fish out
of water” in European culture, and it cannot provide her self-knowledge. On the other hand,
I would add that the novel works as both a revision and critique of this English literary
form—as Parson points out, the “Bildungsroman theme is present in Rhys’s fiction, but it is
conducted more as a fictional illusion for both the writer and her characters to cling to than as
an autonomous quest” (135). Indeed, Voyage in the Dark underscores the fictional illusion of
the Bildungsroman by revealing the ways its form is incommensurate with Anna’s particular
journey. The conventions and motifs of the Bildungsroman form are derived from and
embedded in the cultural and linguistic landscape of London in which Anna gets caught up;
the novel’s characters give voice to the form as they push her to “get on.” Thus, Anna’s
failure to “get on” in London or England can be read as a refusal of the Enlightenment
teleology of both the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman form and the travel narrative genre,
which, I have shown elsewhere, share similar plot trajectories.
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In the introduction to her essay on Bronte and Rhys, “Three Women’s Texts and a
Critique of Imperialism,” Gayatri Spivak points out the necessity of reading Rhys with
an understanding of the historical framework of the empire-building politics that inform
nineteenth-century novels: “It should not be possible to read nineteenth-century British
literature without remembering that imperialism, understood as England's social mission,
was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English” (243). Voyage in
the Dark’s intervenes in this English mission by employing a discursive fragmented plot
structure that is concerned with the “problem” of Anna’s Creole identity in European
colonial structures. I suggest that the novel’s modernist fragmented plot structure thwarts
“England’s social missions” in its allowance of instability and its challenge to static
representations and forms of discourse that seek to erase difference. Recognizing Voyage
as modernist novel calls into question Seshargiri’s argument that “newness, youth and
refusal of adulthood” are the central characteristics of protagonists in modernist novels
(her examples are Woolf, Joyce and Lawrence) and that because “high modernist” literary
aesthetics leads the narrative of Voyage in the Dark to paralysis that the novel’s multiple
narratives and fractured identities are “postmodern.” This is a reductive characterization of
modernism’s texts, one that to fails to allow for non-European modernisms or those that, as
Friedman suggests of all modernisms, result from and in transformative intercultural
encounters. To designate Voyage in the Dark as postmodern because of its multiple
narratives and fractured identities is to suggest that the field of modernism cannot include
texts that are incongruent with or outside of the dominant Euro-American modernist
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discourses.
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I contend that Voyage in the Dark’s modernism is one that illuminates the
unstable conditions and mixed discourses of modernity that inform Anna’s dislocation,
and that this modernist text enacts her forms of resistance to dominant structures by
accommodating the presence of geographical and cultural landscapes and narratives that,
as Anna says, “do not fit together.”
I Could Not Fit Them Together
On the opening page of Voyage in the Dark, Anna describes the feeling of having
arrived at a new place: “It was if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known.
It was like being born again” (8). On one hand, this reads as a conventional narrative of
travel in which a traveler describes the experience of having left home and traveled to a place
that offers a new life, or rebirth into a new world. Because her journey to this place has taken
her so far from what she has known, she describes this new place in child-like language,
struggling to find the words to distinguish the differences between the place she previously
knew and this place where she is. Like a narrator opening a travelogue, Anna begins her story
by describing this new foreign place with simple sensory language: “The colours were
different, the smells different, the feelings things gave you right down inside yourself was
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This is part of a larger discussion in the field of modernism. Of designating post-colonial texts as
postmodern, Susan Friedman writes, “Multiple modernities create multiple modernisms. Multiple modernisms
require respatializing and thus reperiodizing modernism. The centrality of colonialism and postcolonialism for
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries requires a new geography of modernity and modernism, one based on an
understanding of what the Caribbean poet and theorist Edouard Glissant calls a ‘poetics of relation’ that
produces ‘creolité’ or “the immeasurable intermixing of cultures.” Rather than positing a mosaic of different
modernisms, each separated from all others by the fixed barriers of geopolitical and cultural borders around the
world, I regard the boundaries between multiple modernisms as porous and permeable, fostering self/other
confrontations and minglings as mutually constitutive, both between different societies and within them” (427).
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different. Not just the difference between heat, cold; light, darkness; purple, grey. But a
difference in the way I was frightened and the way I was happy. I didn’t like England at first.
I couldn’t get used to the cold” (7). The narrative that began in a tone of positive
expectation—with the speaker having been “born again”—quickly switches paths; the new
sensations of this place are of cold, darkness, and grey. This description ends with a negation
(“I didn’t like England”), a declaration that establishes her sense of displacement and that
rejects this place that she now names as England. She declares with a sense of finality,
“I couldn’t get used to the cold.” While this experience includes physical travel, it seems to
lead to nothing new, as she explains, “I got used to everything except the cold and that the
towns we went to always looked so exactly alike. You were perpetually moving to another
place which was perpetually the same” (8). This perpetual movement to another same place
defines the travel that Anna experiences in London as well, travel that does not take her
anywhere new—neither physically nor psychologically. Her sense of being born again is an
arrival in a new world that will remain perpetually foreign in its sameness.
Anna’s descriptions of London form a dramatic contrast to the typical travelogue of
the English traveler abroad that includes descriptions of foreign locations filled with inspiring
spectacular sights. Anna aboard a train traveling into London, reports on an uninspiring
landscape:
This is England Hester said and I watched it through the train-window divided
into squares like pocket-handkerchiefs; a small tidy look it had everywhere
fenced off from everywhere else –I had read about England ever since I could
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read – smaller meaner everything is never mind – this is London – hundreds
thousands of white people rushing along and the dark houses all alike
frowning down one after the other all alike all stuck – the streets like smooth
shut-in ravines and the dark houses frowning down. (17)
Anna recoils from the sameness of this place—the darkness, the whiteness—and the feeling
of confinement—everywhere is fenced off, the houses are stuck, the streets are shut-in: “–oh
I’m not going to like this place I’m not going to like this place I’m not going to like this place
– you’ll get used to it Hester kept saying I expect you feel like a fish out of water but you’ll
soon get used to it” (17). The call-and-response of Anna’s “I’m not going to like this place,”
and Hester’s “but you’ll get used to it,” creates its own circular movement that is illustrative
of Anna’s resistance to this place, a resistance that becomes a determined continuous
rejection of London and “getting used to it.” Anna would prefer to be “a fish out of water”
rather than part of this ocean of sameness.
While living in London, Anna is repeatedly transported back to her home in Dominica
in the form of vivid recollections and dreams, leaving her frequently disoriented by the fact
that she is existentially situated somewhere between the two places and therefore unsure of
which cultural framework in which to construct her story: “Sometimes it was as if I were
back there and as if England were a dream. At other times England was the real thing and out
there was the dream, but I could never fit them together” (8). Anna finds it difficult to give a
straightforward account of the way in which these two places—“back there” and “England” –
exist simultaneously for her, making it difficult to decide should exist in the forefront and
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which in the background in her narrative. As a result, this mental voyaging of Anna as she
moves back and forth between geographical locations in replicated in a non-linear narrative
movement that circuitously maps the relationship she has with London and the West Indies.
This form of travel disrupts binary structures such as center/periphery, present/past and
interior/exterior that do not account for Anna’s traversal of in-between spaces.
Settled into a nice English room, one that appears to be devoid of any remnants of
outside or “other” contamination, she travels back to her home:
This is England, and I’m in a nice, clean English room with all the dirt
swept under the bed.
It got dark, but I couldn’t get up to light the gas. I felt as if there were
weights on my legs so that I couldn’t move. Like that time at home when I
had fever and it was afternoon and the jalousies were down and yellow light
came in through the slates and lay on the floor in bars. (31)
Even as she reminds herself, “[t]his is England” and that she is in an English room, one with
all signs of “dirt swept under the bed,” she is simultaneously in her home in Dominica, that
memory much more vivid and real to her than is this white sterile room. This mind traveling
of Anna is enabled by novel’s repeated dissolving temporal and spatial boundaries. Anna’s
movement between England and the West Indies—between a Euro-centered history and
West Indian history—does not link them together in a straightforward account; Rhys
attempts to tell Anna’s story from a position of migrancy and dislocation. Thus, Voyage in
the Dark is a travel narrative that refuses to organize itself into a journey that locates England
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as its center and that refuses to construct a coherent picture of “back there” so that the West
Indies and Anna can be easily swept under the rug.
Story Demands
Teresa de Lauretis has argued that according to the Oedipal logic of narrative
the central character must undergo a change in accordance with the demands of plot
structure: “Story demands sadism, depends on making something happen, forcing a change
in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory/defeat, all occurring in a linear time
with a beginning and an end” (133). I argue that Voyage in the Dark enacts Anna’s resistance
to the “sadism of story” through her resistance to everyone’s dictum to her to “get on.”
The novel’s narrative rejects a linear trajectory and thus, more broadly, it refuses a Western
teleology, which informs both the structure of Bildungsroman novel and the conventional
travel narrative. If the English coming-of-age, forward-moving-trajectory is incompatible
with Anna’s dislocations and circuitous forms of movement, so is the voyage or travel
narrative, given its ideological history of classifying, regulating, producing and positioning
social subjects according to the colonial projects of the Empire. Gregg points out the novel’s
references to travel writing: “One of the genres to which the novel ceaselessly refers is
eighteenth and nineteenth-century travel writing on the West Indies” (123). The function of
the travel genre, Gregg adds, has historically included the ideological management of race
and empire. The novel’s references to travel literature—from the novel’s title to the travel
discourses and motifs of travel interspersed throughout the narrative—expose the novel’s
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tensions between conventional depictions of travel and novel’s representation of the realities
of Anna’s experiences of traveling, representations that include her forms of movement that
seek to resist England’s national ideological management of her race, class, and gender.
The novel’s references to, and revisions of, these two genres draw attention to the way
its plot structure runs counter to these forms; its deviations reveal the ways in which story
conventions operate as part of larger cultural and national projects that would define,
manage, and act on such a figure as Anna, whose in-between status creates anxiety for those
who encounter her. Thus, the “plot” of Voyage in the Dark underscores Lauretis’s argument
that plot structures emerge out of cultural conversations: “plots do not directly ‘reflect’ a
given social order,” she argues, “but rather emerge out of the conflict, the contradictions,
of different social orders as they succeed or replace one another; the difficult coextensive of
different orders of historical reality in the long period of transition from one to other is
precisely what is manifested in the tensions of plots and in the transformations or dispersion
of motifs and plot types” (113). Thus, the tension of Voyage in the Dark is produced from
such dispersions of competing discourses and the interplay of travel and Bildungsroman
narratives and of European colonial discourses. The novel’s engagement with the master
narratives of empire, argues Dell’Amico, happens in its assemblage of “aspects of imperial
politics and history” in conjunction with “contemporary cultural artifacts.” She argues that
the juxtaposition of these texts and artifacts provide the framework through which the
narrator’s story is transmitted.” I would argue, however, with Dell’Amico’s conclusion,
namely her point, that since the “loss of temporal (historical) referents” results in empty
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utterances, Anna’s “function is hardly to communicate her story” (40). I argue that the
novel’s interspersing of literary genres, cultural references, dreams and geographical texts
produce a form of travel writing that, as I will show, does indeed “communicate” Anna’s
story of negotiating her subjectivity through and within these discourses.
This is England
Anna finds London as alien as it finds her. Not at home in this world, she goes
through the motions of living as a poor “English” chorus girl in London. Listening to a friend
talk endlessly about the details of the end of a love affair, about the cold nights and about an
English cold cream that makes a skinny neck look fat—“Venus Carnis. ‘No fascination
without curves. Ladies, realize your charms”—Anna ceases to hear the chatter, and the island
of Dominica comes to the forefront of her thoughts in the form of a textbook description:
Lying between 15º 10´and 15º 40´N. and 61º 14´and 61º 30´W. ‘A goodly
island and something highland, but all overgrown with woods,’ that book said.
And all crumpled into hills and mountains as you would crumple a piece of
paper in your hand – rounded green hills and sharply-cut mountains. (17)
After this brief appearance of Dominica—as a series of objective geographical facts—
England reasserts itself in the narrative: “A curtain fell and then I was here…this is England
Hester said” (17). Anna is now “here”—in England—where she is a chorus girl who
depends on men picking her up and paying for her stockings, a girl who must “realize her
charms” and use Varnis Carnis cold cream on her skinny neck in order to “get on.”
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This abrupt narrative switch to encyclopedic facts about Anna’s home island of Dominica
suggests both its presence in her mind and the distance she feels from it at this moment.
This picture of Dominica suggests an English perspective of the island, not a native one:
the curtain having fallen, Anna is physically here now, and this is what it means to be in
England,” a place where she as a young English woman must “realize her charms.”
In a similar moment, alone in her room where she keeps “the curtains drawn all the
time” (105), Anna’s thoughts move back and forth between locations. Remembering a song
she heard in a Glasgow music hall, she begins to sing it to herself and its words cause her to
recall the history of Dominica, specifically the colonization of the Caribbean islands by white
Europeans and the violence done to the Carib people:
‘And drift, drift
Legions away from despair.’
It can’t be ‘legions’. ‘Oceans’, perhaps. ‘Oceans away from despair.’
But it’s the sea, I thought. The Caribbean Sea. ‘The Caribs indigenous to this
island were a warlike tribe and their resistance to the white dominion, though
spasmodic, was fierce. As lately as the beginning of the nineteenth century
they raided one of the neighbouring islands, under British rule, overpowered
the garrison and kidnapped the governor, his wife and three children. They are
now practically exterminated. The few hundreds that are left do not intermarry
with the negroes. Their reservation, at the northern end of the island, is known
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as the Carib Quarter.’ […] But, they are now practically exterminated.
‘Oceans away from despair…’
I ate the lemon-cheese tart and began the song all over again. (105)
The abrupt narrative switches between Anna’s physical locations depict the shifts of
her psychological landscape, illustrating both her perpetual sense of dislocation in her
London life and the futility of any attempt to “fit things together.” She is oceans away from
despair, from the tragic history of Dominica, and the extermination of the native Carib
population—and yet, she is not. As she recalls the colonial history of Dominica, she sings an
English song; its words of travel lead her to think, “The Caribbean Sea.” This movement of
deconstructing and reconstructing the song, eating an English lemon-cheese tart while
remembering the history of the Carib people, puts into dynamic conversation the multiple
places, histories and cultures that inform her own subjectivity and her relationship both to the
Carib people and to England—as enacted by the narrative’s abrupt switch from her song to
the history. Anna’s simultaneous consideration of all of these discourses, her movement
between them, is indicative of her conflicted relationship with England and her identification
with a Creole identity, an identity that England designates as foreign and other—as it did the
Carib people. Her personal private questioning of the word “legions”—“It can’t be legions.
‘Oceans’ perhaps”—rewrites the English song, reinterprets it as she remembers it, as she is
carried into a recollection of the violent colonial oppression of the native people of
Dominica, her home. This revision is another instance of what is Anna’s continuous
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intervention in English culture through language.
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More specifically, Anna’s intervention
challenges the discourse of European colonial narratives, mirroring that of Rhys’s work as
a whole. Of Rhys’s incorporation of historical texts into her writing, Gregg comments,
“She uses and reworks historical and autobiographical data as a means of resisting the
cannibalizing of West Indian history by the dominant European narratives, while producing
the Creole’s version of that history. Her writing is consumed by the determination to free the
self and the West Indies, as she knows it and imagines both, from their containment within
dominant discourses of European history and subjectivity” (72-3).
However, what happens outside of the interior spaces of Anna’s world—in the public
social world of London—thwart her attempts to construct a dynamic subjectivity within the
metropolitan cultural framework of London, England. After having watched a film with her
friend Ethel, Anna listens to her disparage the foreign actress. Anna attempts to participate in
this conversation in which Ethel complains about the actress being a foreigner: “Couldn’t
they have got an English girl to do it. It was just because she had this soft, dirty way that
foreign girls have. … Everybody was laughing at her behind her back, my friend said.’
‘I didn’t notice,’ I said. ‘I thought she was very pretty’” (109). Anna’s perspective, her gaze,
is that of an outsider; she is the foreign girl who everybody is laughing at—and yet, she is an
English girl, like Ethel, a chorus girl who stays in boarding rooms. When she goes up to
Ethel’s room, she notes, “Her room was exactly like mine except that her wallpaper was
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Emery observes, “What may appear to be subjective musings linking eccentrically one random thought to
another actually juxtaposes an intensely private memory to a public statement, pointing away from the self to
the system of language and its formal conventions. This juxtaposition creates a dynamic movement and a new
symbol that bridges the gap between Anna’s fragmented fields of consciousness and the social world outside
her drawn curtain” (28).
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green instead of brown” (109). Anna struggles to reconcile that is both English and that
which the English designates as foreign and other. In her interactions with people in London,
she consistently finds that she does not have the language to explain herself or her
background. Moreover, the fact that her life in Dominica frequently appears very vividly in
her mind, suggests that, she is unable, and at particular times, unwilling, to articulate her
identity to others, to describe where she came from and to explain herself to the English.
Her friend Maudie, also a chorus girl, tries to explain Anna’s difference to men they meet on
the street: “She’s always cold,” Maudie said. She can’t help it. She was born in a hot place.
She was born in the West Indies or somewhere, weren’t you kid? The girls call her the
Hottentot. Isn’t that a shame?” (13). To them, Anna is a an exotic “freak,” nicknamed for a
savage African native in a European travel account.
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She is an other who is displaced and
out of place in England, and it is a “shame” she is a “soft dirty foreign girl,” a Hottentot born
“somewhere” else.
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The term “Hottentot,” writes Nicholas Hudson, was a familiar insult exchanged among Europeans for
any behavior deemed uncivilized, filthy or ill-mannered.” In his article, “‘Hottentots’ and the Evolution of
European Racism,” Hudson theories Western racism through an examination of the depiction of the Khoikho—
popularly known as “Hottentots”—in 18
th
century European travel accounts, letters and anthropology.
He writes that although a peaceful nomadic herding society, “by the eighteenth century Hottentots had become
proverbial as the most savage of all savage peoples, occupying a rung, according to many, elevated just above
the beast. As Sir Joseph Banks commented after his visit to the Cape on Cook's Endeavour in 1771, Hottentots
'are generally represented as the outcasts of the human species, a race whose intellectual faculties are so little
superior to those of beasts, that some have been inclined to suppose them more nearly related to baboons than to
men' (Banks, 1896: 439) (2).” Hudson argues “that what might appear, at first, a paradoxical position: the
evolution of European attitudes towards the Khoikhoi from contact to the rise of nineteenth-century raciology is
characterized not by increasing belief in their Otherness or beastliness but rather by the increasing insistence on
the Hottentot's humanness and cultural banality.” Journal of European Studies December 2004 vol. 34 no. 4
308-332.
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Anna’s otherness includes her linguistic difference from the English. During a visit
with her English stepmother, Hester, in London, Hester shames Anna for her speech, which
to her signals racial and class inferiority:
I tried to teach you to talk like a lady and behave like a lady and not like a
nigger and of course I couldn’t do it. Impossible to get you away from the
servants. That awful sing-song voice you had! Exactly like a nigger you
talked—and still do. Exactly like that dreadful girl Francine. When you were
jabbering away together in the pantry I never could tell which of you was
speaking. (65)
To Hester, who has the voice of the English gentlewoman, Anna’s “sing-song” voice as a
child rendered her the same as and indistinguishable from the black servant, Francine,
Anna’s close childhood friend. Thus, Hester, who embodies English cultural supremacy,
links Anna’s failure as a respectable English woman with her linguistic otherness; she finds
Anna’s patois and African Dominican speech rhythms a signal of a degenerative position that
has resulted from over-familiarity with Francine and adoption of her linguistic patterns.
Of her bond with Francine, Anna remembers, “When she wasn’t working Francine would sit
on the doorstep and I liked sitting there with her. Sometimes she told me stories, and at the
start of the story she had to say ‘Timm, timm,’ and I had to answer ‘Boise sèche” (71).
Concurrently, Anna rejects intimacy and familiarity with Hester, who had “an English lady’s
voice with a sharp, cutting edge to it” (57). Anna remembers thinking Francine disliked her
because she was white and wanting to tell her that she hated being white: “Being white and
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getting like Hester and all the things you get—old and sad and everything. I kept thinking,
‘No… No… No…” (72). Rejected by Francine for being white, Anna in turn rejects “being
white” like Hester and retains the speech patterns and songs of her childhood in Dominica as
an adult. When Anna, having been reprimanded by her disapproving landlady for “crawling
up the stairs at three o’clock in the morning,” argues back and the landlady responds, “I
won’t ‘ave you calling me a liar […] You and your drawly voice […] I don’t want no tarts in
my house, so now you know” (30). Anna’s “drawly voice” marks her as neither English nor a
lady, and her behaviors and values as suspect. To the degree that Anna’s speech is an act that
rejects Hester and English “sharpness,” it enables her to retain a connection to Francine and
to her identification with her West Indian home.
Anna attempts to communicate and make herself known and familiar to the English
by articulating the “somewhere,” or the “nowhere,” from which she came to Walter, the man
with whom she begins her first love affair. But when he inquires about her background—
“Have you got flowers like these in your island?”—Anna is unable to answer. She cannot
find the language that will name the flowers in such a way as to be understood by Walter:
“When I began to talk about the flowers out there I got that feeling of a dream of two things
I couldn’t fit together, and it was if I were making up names” (89). What she knows is
useless here, and therefore, her words seem “made up,” not real to this audience. This feeling
dovetails with what Gregg notes of England’s understanding of the Caribbean: “the invention
of the Caribbean as a European enterprise required little knowledge of the region, and, in
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fact, depended upon a willed ignorance, an always already constructed narrative of the Other
within and by metropolitan discourses” (11). Where Anna comes from is “somewhere,”
“an island,” a place she cannot convey. “I wanted him to make him see what it was like,”
she thinks, as she tries to put her memories of Dominica into words: “it all went through my
head, but too quickly. Besides you can never tell about things” (53). Her inability to fit things
together, the two places and her two lives into a cohesive narrative keeps her at a distance
from Walter and his world. Unlike the travel narrative in which the traveler describes in great
detail the foreign location in order to make it recognizable to the reader back home, Anna
cannot paint a clear picture of her home in the West Indies to Walter because they do not
share the same perspective:
‘I wish you could see Constance Estate,’ I said. ‘That’s the old estate –
my mother’s family place. It’s very beautiful. I wish you could
see it.’
‘I wish I could,’ he said. ‘I’m sure it’s beautiful.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘On the other hand, if England is beautiful, it’s not
beautiful. It’s some other world. It all depends, doesn’t it?’ (52)
Because Anna’s home on the island of Dominica is “some other world,” she feels its beauty
cannot be seen or assessed by England; she recognizes that the idea of beauty depends on
one’s position, one’s gaze. This understanding conveys that the knowledge she derives from
her position of migrant, a flexible position that allows for a shift in perspective de-centers
England as the place from which all knowledge is derived. As she found the foreign actress
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to be pretty—unlike her friend Esther, Anna sees her island as beautiful. Therefore, she does
not feel herself in a position to provide an “objective” account of her world and its beauty to
Walter. As long as her home and her self are unknown to Walter and to others, Anna’s
“world,” as she knows and understands it, remains outside the imperialist or colonialist
discourse of this public world—that of England. And yet, being unknown and “outside”
results in being made into an exotic the other. Anna attempts to describe her family and
culture to Walter, to make her self visible to him and give him access to her—to fit their
worlds together: ‘I’m a real West Indian,’ I kept saying. ‘I’m the fifth generation on my
mother’s side” (55). However, Walter consistently dismisses Anna’s need to be seen and
known outside or separate from his own knowledge and that of English culture; he only
recognizes her difference in relation to his position. Walter responds in the language of a
patronizing English colonizer: ‘Well, let’s go upstairs,” he says to her after this exchange,
“you rum child, you rum little devil’” (55), characterizing Anna as the embodiment of the
colonial effort in the West Indies, as an export—“rum”—to be had and enjoyed by the
English.
Not Knowing, Not Getting On
Anna does not “get on” and move in a forward trajectory in the fashion of the English
who tell her she must do so. Anna observes, “Everybody says, ‘Get on.’ Of course, some
people do get on. Yes, but how many? What about what’s-her-name? She got on, didn’t she?
‘Chorus-Girl Marries Peer’s Son.’ Well, what about her? Get on or get out they say. Get on
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or get out” (74). For a young woman in Anna’s position, this means marrying into a higher
class or achieving upward mobility as is appropriate for her class and gender. Anna is a naïve
nineteen year old virgin, disoriented by London and her relationship with Walter. Along with
providing Anna with cash, clothes and an apartment, he wants to pay for singing classes: “I
want to help you; I want you to get on. You want to get on, don’t you?” “I don’t know” (50),
Anna responds. Of her resistance to his help and advice, he admonishes: “Don’t be like that,
he said. ‘Don’t be like a stone that I try to roll uphill and that always rolls down again” (50).
Walter characterizes Anna as an object that he manages, an object afraid to move: “Like a
stone,” he says to her, a stone who thinks, “‘It won’t hurt until I move.’ So you sit perfectly
still” (50). Walter attempts to move Anna in the direction he thinks she should go and
manage their relationship as he has his previous one to a young woman he refers to as Anna’s
predecessor: “You’re a perfect darling,” he tells Anna,” but you’re only a baby. You’ll
be all right later on.…Some people are born knowing their way about; others never learn.
Your predecessor—” (51). Walter’s language echoes Anna’s language and reinforces her
sense of “not knowing” her way about England, and in this instance, her ignorance includes
not knowing how to act in this position—unlike her predecessor who did. It also emphasizes
her status as a commodity in this relationship, an exchangeable and replaceable object who
lacks agency and must learn from him the knowledge that will enable her to “get on.”
Uncomfortable with this position, Anna resists his direction—and continues to resist while
on a weekend trip in the country with him, his cousin Vincent, and Vincent’s “girl.”
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Anna increasingly becomes annoyed by the men’s patronizing attitude towards her and
refuses to participate in their banter:
Vincent started off again about books.
I said, ‘I haven’t read any of these books you’re talking about.
I hardly ever read.’
‘Well, what do you do with yourself all day?’ he said.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. (86)
Anna’s blunt interjection puts an end to Vincent’s talk about books, and her response,
“I don’t know,” operates as a refusal to participate in the conversation and the knowledge
that they represent; she will not tell him what she does with herself all day. Anna seems to
feel her actions are not translatable to these men; in staying unknowable, she deliberately
positions herself outside the role in which they would attempt to place her. (The reader
knows that Anna does read books, as evidenced by the fact the narrative begins with her
laying on her sofa in her room reading Zola.) Later when she and Walter are together in his
apartment, Walter announces he is going away for awhile. He tells her he will write her about
money and that she should take a trip: “I want you to go away for a change somewhere.
Where would you like to go? ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ll go somewhere.’ […] We went
downstairs. When he opened the door there was a taxi passing and he stopped it” (89).
Anna’s response of “I don’t know” to Walter’s attempt to send her somewhere, and to the
men who want her to read books, is a refusal to engage and participate in their control of her.
Walter, however, singlehandedly decides the end of their relationship without giving Anna
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the opportunity to have a say about it. Vincent writes Anna with the news that Walter no
longer loves her and offers these words of wisdom that he always repeats for such occasions:
“I believe that if you will work hard there is no reason why you should not get on. I’ve
always said that and I stick to it” (94). Vincent’s imparting of this standard piece of advice,
which he presumably says to all the young women that come and go in his life, underscores
Anna’s position as an exchangeable object to be moved along out of sight.
Anna sticks to the fact that she does “not know,” which, I argue, operates as a refusal
to make her self known to these men and a refusal to change and move forward according to
the terms and expectations of English culture. Her refrain of “I don’t know” suggests an
insistent stubborn rejection of the logo-centrism that informs their world. That she does not
translate her knowledge to the men indicates, to some degree, her awareness that her
knowledge exists separate and outside theirs. Gregg points out that Anna apprehends
“experience through her sense, feelings, body, and memory,” and Dell’Amico suggests that
“Anna’s thinking through her senses and feelings contributes to her crippling identity crises”
(44). I would agree, to an extent, that Anna’s thinking through her body contributes to the
ambiguity of her verbal responses and to her hesitation in asserting her knowledge within and
against the constraints of the logo-centric and teleological narratives in which she finds
herself. In her autobiography, Smile, Please, Rhys writes, “When my first love affair came to
an end I wrote this poem: ‘I don’t know / I don’t know/ I don’t know.’ Then I settled down to
be miserable” (92). Rhys and the women of her novels have been characterized as passive
female victims who are dependent on relationships with men and who do not break out of
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their marginal positions, which is perhaps appropriate given their frequent self-negating and
self-defeating attitudes. Nonetheless, I would argue that the critics that would have the
female characters “get on” and make something of themselves unwittingly participate in the
national and culture discourses that Voyage in the Dark critiques.
It will be Different
Anna’s bodily travel to and within London does not touch her or move her;
her experience in the city is one of physical and psychic stasis. Her movements consist
of walking around its streets, shifting from one boarding house to the next, leaving one man
for the next. Her traveling is repetitive and results in her world becoming smaller instead of
expanding. Of her room she thinks, “I believe this damned room’s getting smaller and
smaller…And the rows of houses outside, gim-crack, rotten-looking, and all exactly alike”
(30). Rhys writes of her first love affair in London, the one that serves as the model for
Anna’s: “He had money. I had none. […] He was like all the men in all the books I had ever
read about in London” (92). Similarly, Anna’s Walter is a romantic English figure—an older,
wealthy, handsome man, whose lead she attempts to follow in their relationship, imaging it
might be to her advantage as it is typically for the heroine in the English Bildungsroman.
Yet, an alternative ending seems to have already been established for Anna, as suggested in
Anna’s reference to Zola’s Nana early in the narrative—“I was lying on the sofa, reading
Nana” (9). Nana, a prostitute in Zola’s nineteenth-century French novel, spends her entire
life trying to “get on,” successfully making the transition from being a street-walker to a
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high-class prostitute—only to come to an ugly and tragic end, dying from smallpox in bed.
Nana’s reduction to a pile of rotting flesh forms Zola’s social commentary on her mercenary
and immoral behavior, as well as on the decadent society of men who vie with one another to
make her their mistress.
94
In an indirect parallel, Anna’s love affair with Walter initially
allows her to entertain the illusion that she might be able to “get on” in London. While trying
on a new dress that she will buy with the money Walter has given her, she thinks, “This is a
beginning. Out of this warm room that smells of fur. I’ll go to all the lovely places I’ve ever
dreamt of. This is the beginning” (28). Anna’s language is romantic and optimistic; her
relationship with Walter has provided her entry into a room of warmth and comfort,
a place that not only provides the clothes that will allow her to play her role appropriately,
but temporarily inspires her to entertain her story as one of mobility; her desire to travel to
“lovely places” suggests a position of privilege and stability and evokes English narratives of
travel to exotic sunny locations. Anna conveys a desire to arrive somewhere different, to feel
different, to become part of a story that takes her somewhere new. She thinks, “I don’t know
how people live when they know exactly what’s going to happen to them each day” (75).
Despite such desires, however, she is continually wandering, never finding her footing in the
94
Much has been made of the fact that in Voyage in the Dark Anna reads Nana, GoGwilt sees this reference
to a French novel as illustrative of the novel’s reframing of “the metropolitan Paris/London axis of English
‘monolingualism’ onto a West Indian Anglophone/Franchophone colonial axis of linguistic and cultural
identity.” He contends that “Voyage in the Dark provided the most economical Francophone English
displacement of literary consciousness in the puzzle of its protagonist’s name, whose claim on the reader’s
sense of narrative consciousness emerges from an anagram of the Zola novel, Nana.” GoGwilt argues that while
this “invites the reader to consider possible contrasts and parallels between Anna’s journey into lower middle-
class prostitution and Zola’s classic portrait of the decadence of the Second Empire in the figure of the high-
class prostitute, Nana” that this moment in the text refuses what is inside and out the text and inaugurates
“displacement and reconstitution of literary form around the identification of narrative consciousness” (115-
117).
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situations and relationships in which she becomes involved; her physical movements tend to
be limited to those of hesitation or resistance to the restrictive structures she encounters.
She feels weary of the repetitiveness of her life: “I was thinking, ‘I’m nineteen and I’ve got
to go on living and living and living’” (109). Naïve and unfamiliar with the trajectory she
imagines the romantic affair will take, Anna struggles to play the role of mistress, one in
which she is receives money, food, and clothes by men in exchange for sex. But given that
London is a land of sameness, in order to get ahead in this role and go to “all the lovely
places” she has dreamt of, she must behave “the same” as the others—England’s inhabitants,
her predecessor, and the heroines in England’s books.
In the descriptions of her interactions with Londoners, including those with Walter,
Anna repeatedly employs the words “same” and “different” to characterize what is and is not
happening, as well as what she wants to happen. This language suggests her attempts to
script her own narrative, one in which she tries “get on” and not be “a fish out of water,” and
yet one which allows for a narrative of difference. She must be “different,” but she does not
know how to articulate that difference. Anna finds it difficult to write such a narrative given
the cultural and social landscapes in which she is presently immersed and given the
discourses to which she has access. After a dinner in Walter’s apartment, she reacts to him as
if she hates him: “‘Damn you, let me go, damn you. Or I’ll make a hell of a row.’ But as soon
as he let me go I stopped hating him” (23). A virgin, inexperienced with men, and anxious
about finding herself in this situation, Anna reacts angrily to what she knows are his
expectations, which his physical advances make clear. She wants him to “let her go,” and
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once free, she struggles to get control of herself and the situation. Alone in his bedroom with
“red carnations on the table and the fire leaping up,” she thinks, “If it could go back and be
just as it was before it happened and then happen differently…Soon he’ll come in again and
kiss me, but differently. He’ll be different, and so I’ll be different. I thought, ‘It’ll be
different, different. It must be different” (23-24). Anna’s desire to go back and act differently
indicates that she feels she has not behaved in accordance with Walter’s expectations—her
reaction of hate and disgust does not accord with how most women in her position respond,
or so she imagines. Conversely, this interaction is not the way she wants things to be and to
go. Anna’s repetition of the word “different” creates movement that insists on the possibility
for variation—each “different” is an attempt to move the rigid sameness, the pre-determined
storyline, into differences that would give her freedom of movement, alternative positions
and paths to what is being determined about and for her. In imagining the possibility of a
different Walter, one who is not in the position of power and who does not kiss her with a
predetermined outcome in mind, she imagines how she could be different; if he is different,
she can be different, and “it” will be different. She wants to revise her position and the
trajectory of the relationship, which is set by Walter, who is determining the course of their
relationship and will determine the outcome of the love affair. With her repetition of the
word “different,” Anna moves towards difference, vaguely imagining it and attempting to
articulate what “it” is.
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If You Know the Country It Makes All the Difference
Anna seeks to revise the cultural discourses that define her and her history as separate
and other from England and its stories that would have her “get on” according to its values.
She does this through a language of resistance—her insistent response of “I don’t know” in
the face of imposed dominant Euro-centric discourse and in her imagining and constructing
of counter narratives through reversals and revisions that allow for difference and alternatives
to dehumanizing sameness. I want to argue in this final section that ultimately it is in the
novel’s narrative dislocations that the expansive “traveling” of Anna and The Voyage in the
Dark occurs.
Gregg writes, “In England there is no way out. The repeated focus on the houses and
inhabitants in England rewrites the precise botanical and ethnographic accounts of the West
Indian islands in European travel writing even as it suggests the ways in which the peripheral
Other is trapped within and between the ‘houses and streets’ of the imperial space” (133).
Indeed, Anna does become trapped in the imperial space of “streets like smooth shut in
ravines and dark houses frowning down” (8), England’s foreign environment never ceasing
to frighten and repel her, as it has from her arrival. However, countering the perpetual
sameness that seeks to elide her Creole identity, Anna’s narrative is replete with jarring
juxtapositions of incongruous discourses, locations, and language. For example, when Anna
is alone in her room and strategizing a plan to leave London, her thoughts return her to her
home in Dominica:
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I kept telling myself, ‘You’ve got to think of something. You can’t stay here.
You’ve got to make a plan.’ But instead I started counting all the towns I have
been to, the first winter I was on tour— […]
And then I tried to remember the road that leads to Constance Estate. It’s
funny how well you can remember when you lie in the dark with your arm
over your forehead. Two eyes open inside your head. The sandbox tree
outside the door at home and the horse waiting with his bridle over the hook
that was fixed in the tree. (150-1)
This travel occurs within her room and her head; she is unable to make a plan for moving
forward, but finds comfort in her recollections of her past. The narrative movement among
seemingly incongruous locations—the West Indies, towns in which she has traveled, and
London—is akin to Anna’s linguistic attempts at cultural interference and revision in serving
to counteract the numbing repetitiveness of the movement that she is allowed within the
English structures that will not let her out.
The movement created by the spontaneous juxtapositions of locations contrasts
contrasts the stasis of Anna’s relationship with Walter; the love affair produces a temporary
change of location, but one characterized by repetitive sameness. No longer a chorus girl
who travels from city to city, her physical movements and interactions become even more
circumscribed as she aimlessly wanders the city and sits in her apartment waiting to be
summoned by Walter in the evening:
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My new rooms were in Adelaide Road, not far from Chalk Farm Tube station.
There wasn’t anything much to do all day. I would get up late and then go out
for a walk and then go back home and have something to eat and watch out of
the window for a telegraph-boy or a messenger. (39)
As he does at the end of every evening they spend together, Walter puts Anna in a taxi early
in the morning and sends her back to her own room. The first morning she arrives back at her
apartment, “somebody went past in the street, singing. Bawling […] over and over again”
(24). Simultaneously, Anna notes that as “the words went over and over again in [her] head
and [she] begin[s] to breathe in time to them” (25). Breathing in time to the words of the city
that have penetrated her room, mind, and body, Anna ceases to be in touch with her own
rhythms. Dominated by the city, she is acutely aware that her position, lack of money, and
inability to participate in the city’s economic and social exchanges result in her lack of
agency and inability to make things different for herself. Traveling through the city’s streets,
cafes, and shops, she is constantly made aware of her poverty:
‘But it isn’t always going to be like this, is it?’ I thought. ‘It would be too
awful if it were always going to be like this. It isn’t possible. Something must
happen to make it different.’ And then I thought, ‘Yes, that’s all right. I’m
poor and my clothes are cheap and perhaps it will always be like this. And
that’s all right too.’ It was the first time in my life I’d thought that. (26)
That something must happen to make “it” different conveys Anna’s feelings of powerlessness
to alter her current position and course. Her travels within the metropolitan environment have
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put her into a system of circulation among men that becomes a series of repetitive exchange
interactions; these temporary relationships may enable her to buy new clothes, but they do
not take her anywhere new or different, and she continually finds herself back where she
began. The sameness that she initially abhorred when she arrived in England has now
become familiar: “Of course, you get used to things, you get used to anything. It was as if I
had always lived like that” (40). Increasingly, Anna understands that in this place “it is
always going to be like this.” However, in her acceptance of the fact she might always be
poor and wear cheap clothes, she decides, “that is all right too.” With the realization she can
live with that, she takes up her position of “a stone” “sitting perfectly still,” a position of
resistance to “getting on” in this system of empty exchanges in which she is marginalized
and her freedom of movement restricted. Anna entertains more than one identity of herself
and possible outcome for her life in England, which is illustrative of her “oblique gaze of the
migrant” (Carr 25), her position on the margin that allows her to appraise this system and
negotiate multiple narratives simultaneously; she can envision the story in which she is
control of how she moves or does not move—in this case, it is a story in which she ceases to
travel along the route laid out by English expectations.
On reading the letter from Vincent that reports “Walter doesn’t love you like that
anymore” and includes the follow-up advice that she read books because “it makes you see
what is real and what is imaginary” (40), Anna mentally travels to her home in Dominica in
what is another example of a narrative shift that intervenes in the story that is happening to
Anna. This narrative movement depicts Anna’s story—her experience of geographical,
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personal, and psychological dislocation. In response to Vincent’s cold painful information
and advice, Anna returns mentally to what is familiar, or “real” to her. She thinks of a related
experience of paralysis from fear—her Uncle Bo and his false teeth that scared her so much
that she couldn’t speak:
I thought, ‘What the hell’s the matter with me? I must be crazy. This
letter has nothing to do with false teeth.
But I went on thinking about false teeth, and then about piano-keys
and about the time the blind man from Martinique came to tune the piano and
then he played and we listened to him sitting in the dark with the jalousises
shut because it was pouring with rain and my father said,
‘You are a real musician.’ […]
When I looked at the clock it was quarter-past give. I had been sitting there
like that for two hours. (94-95)
The feeling of fear that she experienced from seeing her uncle’s false teeth, a fear that
silenced her, is commensurate with the fear that she feels in this jarring rejection by Walter.
Though Anna’s response to Walter ending their relationship indirectly in a letter appears to
be complete passivity, as she sits still for two hours, her mobile thoughts glide along
associating the teeth to the music played by the blind man from Martinique to her house and
the words of her father. She is moved to remember something associated with her feelings of
losing Walter, which is the sound and feel of her home, which she has also lost. While these
two places and stories do not “fit together” to Anna, who thinks to herself that she must be
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“crazy” to jump from thinking about the letter to her uncle’s false teeth, it is this cutting from
one event to another that maps the indirect relationships that form the novel’s narrative
landscape. This narrative technique brings together and puts into conversation the West
Indies and England by enacting the shifts of Anna’s psychological landscape as a form of
travel that is non-hierarchal and unsettling.
95
Walter’s ceasing to love her puts an end to the story in which she will get on
and “go to all the lovely places she’s ever dreamt of.” If Anna’s interior narratives are
mobile and reflect her desire to negotiate her identity and direct the course of her life,
in the world of London she is now at a loss about how to proceed. After her confused
response to Walter’s letter, Anna leaves the rooms in which he has put her, but is unsure
where to go next in the city: “I got out into the street. A man passed. I thought he looked at
me funnily and I wanted to run, but I stopped myself. I walked straight ahead. I thought,
‘Anywhere will do, so long as it’s somewhere that nobody knows” (100). The “anywhere”
that Anna goes is another room where nobody knows her, but, predictably, nothing appears
different. Of her new landlady in her new room, Anna thinks, “She was exactly like our
landlady at Eastbourne” (103). Anna has found herself back where she started. Walking
along the street, looking in the shops, Anna again stops and questions the vicious circle in
which she is trapped:
95
In conversation with Fredric Jameson’s theory of a postmodern aesthetics of “difference relates” that is a
response to different time zones and unrelated parts of “the social and material universe,” Dell’Amico suggests
that collage within the work of a modernist thinking globally might also be an aesthetic of “difference relates.”
She writes, “The text’s/Anna’s disruptive cutting between London and the Caribbean functions in addition to
representing Anna’s paralyzed suspension “between two different signifying systems.’ It is disjunction
deployed, additionally, to coax the reader to (re)conceive the relation between colony and London” (49).
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The clothes of most of the women who passed were like caricatures of the
clothes in the shop windows, but when they stopped to look you saw that their
eyes were fixed on the future. ‘If I could buy this, then of course I’d be quite
different.’ Keep hope alive and you can do anything, and that’s the way the
world goes round, that’s the way they keep the world rolling. […] But what
happens if you don’t hope any more, if your back’s broken? What happens
then?
‘I can’t stand here staring at these dresses for ever,’ I thought. (131)
In this position, standing still staring at the women and the dresses, Anna adopts the gaze of
the English and contemplates how one, if properly attired and able to buy “this,” might move
forward into the future. However, Anna is neither one of these English women, nor is she,
as a foreign outsider, the flâneur who is “properly at home in the commodified spaces of the
imperial metropolis,” and who can “even revel in the ‘emporium’” (Dell’Amico 10). In spite
of her best efforts to resist, revise, or stand outside of this environment—telling herself
“I’m poor and my clothes are cheap and perhaps it will always be like this. And that’s all
right too’” (26)— Anna finds her self with no hope, rolled along in this world without the
ability to intervene in its movement. Because she is unlike the women on the street whose
eyes are fixed on the clothes in the shop windows and on a future of English upward
mobility, Anna does not look forward but back to her home in Dominica as the means to
find her footing.
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Settling into bed in her new room, the one in which she will begin her life as a
prostitute, Anna imagines herself back in Dominica and talking to Francine: “She’ll smile
and put the tray down and I’ll say Francine I’ve had such a awful dream—it was only a
dream she’ll say” (135). In this new place, but unable to alter her path in this nightmare that
is England, Anna begins the job of manicuring men’s hands, a job that seamlessly routes her
into prostitution. Her relationship with Walter is repeated in empty versions as she goes
through the motions of sexual interactions with men in endless succession. Because she is
rudderless and without direction, Anna is vulnerable to the forces of the city and is an object
carried along by the currents of the English metropolitan capitalist system of exchange:
“I felt emptied out and peaceful—like when you’ve had a toothache and it stops for and you
know quite well it’s going to start again but just for a bit it’s stopped” (118). When she runs
into a friend on the street who asks her to join some men for a drink, she first says, “No…I
didn’t want to talk to anybody. I feel too much like a ghost,” but then agrees to go along:
“All right. I wasn’t going anywhere in particular” (114). A ghost with nowhere to go, Anna is
mute and lacks the strength to put up any more forms of resistance. She goes along with
others’ stories about her and their agendas for her, including the nameless men who now
dictate her movements: “He said, ‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do. You go and get dressed and
we’ll go out and have some dinner somewhere…All that evening I did everything to the tune
of Camptown Racecourse. ‘I’se gwine to ride all night, I’se gwine to ride all day” (154).
This American minstrel song about horseracing, money, and betting serves as the backdrop
for this “perpetual moving to another place that was perpetually the same” (8). That Anna
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sings a minstrel song that would have been originally performed by white performers in
black face suggests an awareness—consciously or unconsciously—that she is performing
multiple roles; she is a Creole woman performing as a white woman performing blackface
who enjoys entertaining men. Anna’s passivity and performance alter when she returns to her
room:
Up in the bedroom I started singing:
‘Oh, I bet my money on the bob-tailed nag,
Somebody won on the bay,’
and he said, ‘It’s ‘Somebody bet on the bay’.
I said, ‘I’ll sing it how I like. Somebody won on the bay.’
He said, “Nobody wins. Don’t worry. Nobody wins. (155)
In her room, a place where she often “travels” more expansively than she does in the city,
Anna “starts singing,” and her retort, “I’ll sing it how I like,” to his correction of the song’s
lyrics signals her continued efforts to shape her own narrative through speech acts that
engage, thwart, and revise the cultural discourses that would dictate her movement. In this
particular revision, Anna voices an optimistic outcome—for “somebody to win on the
bay”—whereas the man’s insistence that “nobody wins” echoes her own language and fear
of stagnation, poverty, a broken back that will prevent her from getting on. And yet, she
continues to hope and make her own plan: “Sometimes not being able to get over the feeling
that it was a dream. The light and the sky and the shadows and the houses and the people—
all parts of the dream, all fitting in and all against me. But there were other times when a fine
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day, or music, or looking in the glass and thinking I was pretty, made me start imagining that
there was nothing I couldn’t do, nothing I couldn’t become. Imagining God knows what…”
(157). The final scenes of the novel transpire almost solely in the interior spaces of the “dark
houses all frowning down” in which the music and memories of her home in Dominica
intervene and serve as the backdrop to Anna’s increasing sense of disorientation.
Soon after, in a different version of the same scene, Anna brings a man up to her
room and they have an exchange about the music: “Going up the stairs it was pretty
bad but when we got into the bedroom and had drinks it was better. ‘You’ve got a
gramophone,’ he said. ‘Splendid!’” (160). Again, Anna seeks control of the situation through
music:
I put on Puppchen and went on turning over the records.
‘What’s this one? Connais-tu le Pays? Do you know the country where
the orange-tree flowers? Let’s try that.’
‘No, it gives me the pip,’ I said. (161)
She rejects the song, “Connais-tu le Pays?” (Do you know the Country?), because it “gives
her the pip”—an English expression that means to be annoyed or depressed. Despite her
attempt to avoid the song, it nonetheless plays over and over in her head as she dances with
the man in the room; the picture, Loyal Heart, of a begging dog over the bed “stared down at
her smugly,” and the song becomes a voice in her head that mocks her: “Do you know the
country? Of course, if you know the country it makes all the difference. The country where
the orange-tree flowers?” (161). The song resonates for Anna because it is a song of
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lamentation sung by a young girl who has been abducted from her homeland and misses her
lovely island of orange trees, fruit, and blue skies, where she longs to return to love and to
die.
96
The song taunts Anna, demanding that she remember her lost country of beauty, a
country that perhaps she never knew or that was never hers to lose given her position in a
non-native family. The questions the song asks recall Anna’s conversation with Walter about
her island and her question to him—“if England is beautiful, [Dominica] is not beautiful.
It’s some other world. It all depends, doesn’t it?” (52)—and the song challenges her about
what she knows, what it is to know. If she knows the country where the orange-tree flowers,
it asks, doesn’t that make “all the difference” in what she sees and knows of this country,
England? And if so, what is she doing here in this moment with this man, with all these men?
Anna has become distanced from her island and beauty in these ugly exchanges, this
particular exchange resulting in a physical struggle and the man calling her a swine and a
bitch when she struggles to break free of him in order to vomit, at which time she realizes she
is pregnant.
Anna’s bodily response of sickness to this pregnancy reminds her of ship travel and
subsequently of her home: “Like seasickness, only worse, and everything was still heaving
up and down” (162). This sensation triggers a deluge of memories, and lying in bed, Anna
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The song is from the Italian opera, Mignon (1866), which was performed in French in London beginning in
1870. The young girl, Mignon, sings of her childhood memories of the beautiful land from which she was
abducted. The following are the lyrics: Do you know the land where the orange tree blossoms? The country of
golden fruits and marvelous roses where the breeze is softer and birds lighter, where bees gather pollen in every
season, and where shines and smiles, like a gift from God. An eternal springtime under an ever-blue sky!Alas!
but I cannot follow you to that happy shore from which fate has exiled me! There! It is there that I should like to
live, To love, to love, and to die! It is there that I should like to live, it is there, yes, there!
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recalls, in a stream-of-consciousness flow of images, childhood singing lessons, the
mountainous landscape, the obeah zombie soucriants that suck your blood in the night, and
grimacing disapproving faces. She thinks to herself of her condition of pregnancy, “It can’t
be that. Pull yourself together” (164). But her dreams carry her back to her Dominican home,
depicting her disorientation and her sense of being pulled apart in different directions and
unable to making it ashore on her island:
I dreamt that I was on a ship. From the deck you could see small
islands—doll islands—and the ship was sailing in dolls’ sea, transparent as
glass.
Somebody said in my ear, ‘That’s your island that you talk such a lot
about.’
And the ship was sailing very close to an island, which was home
except that the trees were all wrong. These were English trees, their leaves
trailing in the water. I tried to catch hold of a branch and step ashore, but the
deck of the ship expanded. Somebody had fallen overboard. […]
I was powerless and very tired, but I had to go on. And the dream rose
into a climax of meaninglessness, fatigue and powerlessness, and the deck
was heaving up and down, and when I woke up everything was still heaving
up and down. (164)
As does the dream, the narrative’s increasing fragmentation mirrors Anna’s increasing sense
of powerlessness, her sense of “falling apart,” of “falling overboard,” in her struggle to find
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any correct place in which to position her self. Anna’s narrative, like her dream, rises to a
“climax of meaninglessness” in its rocking back and forth between worlds. As suggested by
Seshargiri, “Anna finally becomes unrecognizable to herself, her consciousness splitting
between the competing narratives of colonialism and urban modernity” (499).
In this representation of Anna’s voyage in the dark, Rhys has successfully
“fit together” a novel that does not get on but that serves as a dialogue between a West
Indies past and an English present. Unsettling English discourses that would keep at bay
the histories of colonized others, this narrative of dislocation allows for a continuous
re-visitation of a personal and political history—a history the illuminates the complexity
of relationships housed within colonialism and the problems inherent in constructing a
subjectivity in and through its discourses. However, “if Anna as a discursive object is a site
traversed by dominant discourses and codes,” argues Gregg, “Anna as a resistant subject
derives her status from her experience in another social space, organically linked to but
not exclusively defined by the imperial text. The novel simultaneously historicizes the
subjectivity of the white West Indian woman showing the effects of colonization even as it
attempts to forge another subjectivity out of memory, senses, and the imagination” (132).
The result of being a discursive object traversed by dominant discourses, I want to add, is
untenable for Anna. If her resistance takes the form of constructing an other subjectivity in
her own interior social spaces—a construction that allows for and engages with West Indian
histories and a Creole identity—ultimately, as the narrative illustrates, England’s dominant
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discourses and codes intrude in those spaces and do violence to Anna both physically and
psychologically.
Trying to make a plan for herself, feeling compelled to “pull herself together”
in order to get on with things, Anna seeks out Vincent, who assures her that Walter will
give her the money for an abortion. Vincent tells her, in an echo of her own words,
“You’ll be all right. And then you must pull yourself together and try to forget about the
whole business and start afresh. Just make up your mind, and you’ll forget all about it” (172).
This language of new beginnings, of starting afresh, is accompanied by the need to put things
aside and pull one’s self together. This, of course, is Anna’s anxiety, not only about how to
“fit together” the West Indies and England into a coherent narrative, but how to fit together
the incongruent fragments of a subjectivity inscribed with conflicting voices and histories.
There is irony in the empty encouraging rhetoric of cohesion and coherence; its blindness to
and elision of difference results in violence to Anna, violence that she has continuously tried
to stop.
After the abortion, she drinks gin and remembers the man who impregnated her,
who wouldn’t stop: “I said, ‘Stop, please stop.’ ‘I knew you’d say that,’ he said. His face was
white” (184). Anna cannot stop the sadism of the English story in progress. Her abortion,
meant to allow her to “forget about the whole business” and start “afresh,” symbolically
empties this past from her body, but in doing so, it literally—and also symbolically—tears
her apart, as she begins to bleed continuously. That Anna must, again, forget about her past
196
and start anew is echoed by the doctor who, as he attends to the hemorrhaging that results
from her abortion, says, “She’ll be all right’…‘Ready to start all over again in no time,
I’ve no doubt” (187). Anna, hearing the doctor’s words and his laugher with her friend
Laure, in a state of half consciousness drifts away: “When their voices stopped the ray of
light came in again under the door like the last thrust of remembering before everything is
blotted out. I lay and watched it and thought about starting all over again. And about being
new and fresh. And about mornings, and misty days when anything might happen. And about
starting all over again, all over again” (187). Yet, accompanying this vision are Anna’s
increasingly ever-present memories of her past, which have come to predominate the
narrative, the vivid descriptions of the music and costumes of the Carnival overpowering and
pushing to the periphery the language and locations of London, England. In these memories,
Anna is witness to the Carnival, and despite the disapproving voices of her family—“it ought
to be stopped somebody said it’s not a decent and respectable way to go on” (184)—she is
carried away by the revelry and knows what the Carnival participants know: “I was looking
out the window and I knew why the masks were laughing and I heard the concertina-music
going” (186). Anna, looking out the window, recognizes her marginal position in relation to
the culture of the carnival, apart from Francine, yet that she has the knowledge of the
laughter—“I know why”—and is moved by “concertina-music going” is an identification
197
with the history of Dominica and an embrace of ways of “going” or getting on that are akin
to her own forms of traveling.
97
97
Of Anna’s return to the scene of Carnival, Emery observes, “Anna has “awakened,” gone “wild,” and, in
spirit, flown to join the black and native women of her island home. Rejecting the names—“Virgin,” “tart,”
“Hottentot,” “foreigner” –given her by her English dichotomizing, she sustains her multiplicities identities.
She has not triumphed as an individual, up against society, but rather found the place and the people from
which she can envision a new life” (81).
198
Chapter Bibliography
Carr, Helen. Jean Rhys. Plymouth, United Kingdom: Northcote House Publishers Ltd,
1996.
Dell’Amico, Carol. Colonialism and the Modernist Movement in the Early Novels of
Jean Rhys. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Emery, Mary Lou. Jean Rhys at “World’s End”: Novels of Colonial Exile. Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1990.
Frickey, Pierette M. ed. Critical Perspectives on Jean Rhys. Washington DC: Three
Continents Press, 1990.
Friedman, Susan. “Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/Time
Borders of Modernist Studies.” Modernism / modernity 13. 1 (2006): 425-443.
Fussell, Paul. Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1980.
GoGwilt, Christopher, The Passage of Literature: Genealogies of Modernism in Conrad,
Rhys, and Pramoedya. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Gregg, Veronica. Jean Rhys’s Historical Imagination: Reading and Writing the Creole.
Chapel Hill: North Carolina Press, 1995.
Hudson, Nicholas. “‘Hottentots’ and the Evolution of European Racism.” Journal of
European Studies December 34. 4 (2004): 308-332.
Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana
University, 1984.
199
Marie Gregg, Veronica, Jean Rhy’s Historical Imagination: Reading and Writing the
Creole. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
Miller, Cristanne. Cultures of Modernism: Marianne Moore, Mina Loy & Else
Lasker-Scüler. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2005.
Naipaul, V.S., “Without A Dog’s Change: After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie,” ed. Pierrette
M. Frickey. Critical Perspectives on Jean Rhys. Washington DC: Three Continents
Press, 1990.
Parsons, Deborah. Streetwalking The Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Poli, Bernard J. Ford Madox Ford and The Transatlantic Review. Syracuse: Syracuse
University Press, 1967.
Rhys, Jean. Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography. New York: Harper & Row
Publishers, 1979.
----------. Voyage in the Dark. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1982.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Random House, 1978.
Seshargiri, Urmila. “Modernist Ashes, Postcolonial Phoenix: Jean Rhys and the
Evolution of the English Novel in the Twentieth Century.” Modernism / modernity.
13. 3 (2006): 487-505.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.”
Critical Inquiry 12. 1 “Race, Writing and Difference.” (Autumn, 1985), 243-261.
200
Woolf, Virginia. “Street Haunting: A London Adventure.” The Virginia Woolf Reader.
ed. Mitchell A. Leaska. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984.
Wyndham, Francis and Diana Melly, eds. The Letters of Jean Rhys. New York:
Viking Penguin Inc., 1984.
201
Epilogue
Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight (1939), begins in the cheap hotel room
of Sasha Jensen—“‘Quite like old times,’ the room says” (9). Sasha, a tourist-of-sorts,
has traveled from London to Paris on holiday to shop and to see the Art and Technology
in Modern Life international exhibition of 1937. An imposing presence that bookends the
narrative, this exhibition, which showcased the modern nation-state for a metropolitan
audience, looms menacingly in the background of Sasha’s trip—casting the dark shadow
of fascism on her movements in city. Sasha is familiar with Paris, having negotiated its
terrain with pleasure and much difficulty as a young woman—“the dark streets, dark rivers,
pain, struggle, the drowning” (10); thus, she now feels compelled to keep her movements
circumspect and under control as she revisits the city—“I have arranged my little life,”
she notes. In her previous life there, she had plunged hopefully into the city, but now,
in post-war Paris, her movements are restricted. From her hotel room, she observes,
“[t]he street outside is narrow, cobble-stoned, going sharply uphill and ending in a flight of
steps. What they call an impasse” (9). The city’s spaces are replete with dead-ends and
fraught with potential hostile encounters; she fears being recognized and misrecognized,
of running into her past in her old haunts, so she attempts to stick to a plan: “The thing is
to have a programme, not to leave anything to chance—no gaps. No trailing around aimlessly
with cheap gramophone records starting up in your head, no ‘here this happened, here that
happened’” (15). Sasha’s inclination for keeping to a programme reflects her need to feel in
202
control of what happens to her travels in the city—to stay self-contained in light of her
history there.
Despite her attempts at “planning it all out” (16), Sasha continually wanders
off-course into the wrong place and into unpleasant situations: “I am on the wrong side
of the street in the hostile café” (46). Early on her trip, she has a telling nightmare that
mixes-up the cities of London and Paris; she is trapped and lost in both cities at once as
she tries to make her way to, and out of, the Exhibition:
I am in the passage of a tube station in London. Many people are in front
of me; many people are behind me. Everywhere there are placards printed
in red letters: This way to the Exhibition, This Way to the Exhibition.
But I don’t want the way to the exhibition—I want the way out. There are
passages to the right and passages to the left, but no exit sign. Everywhere
the fingers point and the placards read: This Way to the Exhibition. I touch
the shoulder of the man walking in front of me. I say, ‘I want the way out.’
But he points to the placards and his hand is made of steel. (13)
As suggested by this dream, Paris feels claustrophobic—every café, shop, and street is
haunted by Sasha’s previous life—and by the specter of the warring nations of Europe,
“the hand made of steel” is ever present. Her employment of arrangement and a program
fail and serve as an echo of the violence of dehumanizing rationalism represented by the
exhibition, an organized display of global imperial power. Order, and the option of two
203
passages, either left or right, fails to give Sasha “the way out”—the language of direction on
the placards and the man’s hand of steel do not help or comfort her, but only contribute to
her anxiety and sense of powerlessness.
At each turn, Sasha revisits her fraught history with the city; her relationship
with Paris both then and now is one primarily of circulation and exchange of roles, positions,
money and materials in what feels like an urban nightmare of “mechanized humanity” as
she attempts to find her place in the city. (Dell’Amico 17). As she rewalks the city, she
remembers her job as tour guide for American Express, of failing to sell herself as a native
Parisian and lead tourists successfully around the city to see its impressive sights: “I try, but
they always see through me. The passages will never lead anywhere, the doors will always be
shut” (31). Existing on the periphery of this urban labyrinth, Sasha is the emblematic Rhys
nomadic flâneuse, the marginalized outsider negotiating the dominant cultural and economic
forces at work in the modern metropolis.
Post-World War I Paris houses the dislocated, the migrant, the traveler caught in-
between places and in the “wrong places,” and is therefore a suspicious figure. In the wrong
café, Sasha is the subject of scrutiny—“What is she doing here, the stranger, the alien, the
old one?” (54). She has trouble with her passport and must sort out what’s wrong—“What’s
wrong with the fiche? I’ve filled it up all right, haven’t I? Name So-and-so, nationality So-
and-so… Nationality—that’s what has puzzled him” (15). In the eyes of the state, she is a
puzzle; she cannot be understood without a legible national identity, as the passport is the
means by which a subject is constructed. Unattached to a country, Sasha is ungrounded,
204
adrift, and susceptible to currents that carry her to a frightening stillness, a dead calm in the
center:
I have no pride—no pride, no name, no face, no country. I don’t belong
anywhere. Too sad, too sad… It doesn’t matter, there I am, like one of those
straws which floats round the edge of a whirlpool and is gradually sucked into
the centre, the dead centre, where everything is stagnant, everything is calm.
(44)
Sasha forms relationships with a community of others who also exist on the city’s
periphery and are negotiating this form of (il)legibility—and therefore also vulnerable to
being “sucked into the centre.” After meeting this group of young artists on the street,
they want to get to know her better: “We stop under a lamp-post to guess nationalities.
So they say, though I expect it is because they want to have a closer look at me. They
tactfully don’t guess mine” (46). During the interwar period, Europe’s cities are home
to communities of non-natives who understandably—“tactfully”—would not “place”
Sasha according to nation. The urban metropolis is home to “the alien,” to those “with no
country,” yet, as Good Morning, Midnight suggests and anticipates that such an ambiguous
or “undesirable” identity is subject to the regulating forces of the nation-state, as is the case
with Sasha, who, despite her reticence at being sucked into its “dead centre,” is physically
and psychologically imbricated in Europe’s cultural and political landscapes. Good Morning,
Midnight understands that travel to and within Europe’s metropolitan centers during the
interwar period, and on the brink of World War II, is travel inextricably linked
205
to the politics of nationhood and to the increasing violence of proliferating racism and
systematic forced travel. Two years following the exhibition, and a year after the publication
of this novel, the Nazis occupied Paris, and Hitler traveled to the city to inspect his conquest.
Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936) shares with Good Morning, Midnight a vision
of the modern city as a conflicted terrain that houses various communities of displaced
wandering people. Barnes replaces the flâneur who observed at a distance and kept himself
clean, with the outcast, the queer, the indecipherable subject. Akin to the poetry of Cendrars
and Loy, Nightwood depicts bodily and psychical movement as that which makes intimate
encounters of disparate subjects and places familiar. As Deborah Parson observers,
“Nightwood is a study of displacement and estrangement—from place and identity” (181).
The narrative travels with its characters between the cities of Paris, New York, Vienna
and Berlin, painting a picture of the modern metropolis as a carnival wasteland, its cross-
pollinated “impure” spaces occupied by the exiled and the outcast.
Never settled, always wandering and wanting, and in various states of alienation
from themselves and others, the novel’s central characters, Robin Vote and Nora Flood,
continually travel towards and away from one another—tracking the traces, shadows,
and gestures of the absent other, through a blur of dark streets, seedy bars, cafes and hotels
in peripheries of the cities and in through the thick woods of America, wandering in search
of the other, that which is home. Similar to Robin’s singing under her breath, “snatches
of harmony as tell-tale as the possessions of a traveler from a foreign land” (62) the
novel’s characters carry with them pieces of previously occupied places and identities.
206
Robin’s first words to Nora, “I don’t want to be here” (60) captures the novel’s undercurrent
of restlessness and sense of displacement. Without definite roots, “[Robin] always seemed
to be listening to the echo of some foray in the blood that had no known setting” (48).
Nora follows Robin as she haunts “the terminals, taking trains to different parts of the
country, wandering without design” (176). A friend observes of Nora, of her continuous
need to travel to find Robin, “there goes the dismantled…running about, trying to get the
world home” (66). The characters’ attempts at the recovery of intimacy, the repetition and
recirculation of movements and language, and the re-tracing of the other’s routes, suggest
a desire to substantiate new paths on which to travel and other forms of identity connections
and community in the face of displacement—even as cohesion and completeness is
irreconcilable with transitory and forced travel.
The characters’ relationships with their countries, ethnicities, genders and classes
do not contain them; discrete categories in the modern world, in the world of Nightwood,
cannot contain or explain them. Continuously in the process of leaving behind and taking
up that which is desirable and necessary, they refashion and reconfigure their identities
and places through movement, through forms of travel that operate counter to programs.
The novel offers a fantastic other world, one that accepts the illegible taboo subject who
crosses borders and engages with the undesirable others; “wandering without design,”
moving in the shadows of the night-worlds, these are modernism’s other travelers.
207
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Abstract (if available)
Abstract
This dissertation, “Modernism’s Poetics of Dislocation,” contributes to the field of transnational modernism in its examination of writers whose birthplaces include England, Switzerland, and the West Indies, and whose writing is defined by modernity’s multi-directional movements. I examine the work of Blaise Cendrars, Mina Loy, and Jean Rhys as modernist modes of early twentieth-century travel writing. Neither they nor their writing fit into categories delineated by national or cultural lines. Thus, I argue that their texts, which have yet to be fully investigated as travel writing, complicate not only this genre, but modernism’s literary genealogies. Their models of modernist travel serve as a contrast to its narratives of exile and expatriation that rely on fixed categories of self and place. These dynamic intercultural texts of movement anticipate contemporary forms of mobility and identities that negotiate the local and the global. By focusing on these writers, whose lives and work cross myriad borders, this project remaps modernism’s terrain and challenges its mono-national literary frameworks through an interrogation of the lines that have previously delineated its literatures. ❧ Because this group of writers inhabited many communities, forming relationships across national and cultural spaces, their texts and literary methods are cross-pollinated products of synergistic collaborations and exchanges across various locations and intellectual coteries. Unlike the expatriates gathered in Paris, who more often than not remained attached to their home countries, the writers examined here demonstrate in their geographical and literary promiscuity little nostalgia for home or allegiance to a country. Enacting shifting landscapes and multiple perspectives, their texts serve as a foil to the teleological journeys depicted in conventional travel writing and modernist novels of travel, which typically differentiate between home and away, and feature a central subject anxiously safeguarding borders. If modernist writing tends to exhibit anxiety about displacement—about the self becoming unmoored from its origins—these forms of travel writing understand the self as unstable and subject to continual reconfiguration. In contrast to conventional travel writing, in which difference is a threat to a traveler’s logic of a coherent identity, the texts of the writers that I examine in this project challenge rigid constructions of the self and other. Their poetics of dislocation reflect the contacts, exchanges, and the dissonance of modernity.
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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Walser, Adrienne
(author)
Core Title
Modernism's poetics of dislocation
School
College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Program
English
Publication Date
07/26/2014
Defense Date
08/01/2012
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
modernism,OAI-PMH Harvest,poetics,Travel,travel writing
Language
English
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Electronically uploaded by the author
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Advisor
Boone, Joseph A. (
committee chair
), Lippit, Akira Mizuta (
committee member
), McCabe, Susan (
committee member
), Nguyen, Viet Thanh (
committee member
)
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adwalser@hotmail.com,awalser@bard.edu
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https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-71011
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UC11289306
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71011
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Walser, Adrienne
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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
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Tags
modernism
poetics
travel writing