10

THEATR E STUDIES

Loie Fuller (18621928)

Illicit intermissions

n 1930s literary London, ballet was everywhere. Virginia Woolf, several Stracheys, the Bells, E. M. Forster, H. G. Wells, John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield, Aldous Huxley, the Sitwells and T. S. Eliot all attended the Ballets-Russes. Louis MacNeices Les Sylphides appeared in 1939, and in the same year Henry Greens Party Going used the same ballet as a structural underpinning. It wasnt just the intelligentsia, either. Compton Mackenzie wrote two novels with a dance protagonist, and even Eric Amblers Cause for Alarm (1938) contained a reference to Diaghilev. All the more peculiar, then, that those who have since studied modernism, both in the visual arts and in literature, have barely acknowledged the movements links to dance. Where is the equivalent to Adorno on Stravinsky and Schoenberg? Where the monographs to match those on Cubism, or the modern novel? If the link between the Demoiselles dAvignon and temporality in fiction is worth examining, why not between that same painting and Nijinskys Sacre du Printemps? A few dance writers have attempted to bridge the gap, but almost no literary specialists. Now Susan Jones, a Conrad scholar as well as, before that, a dancer, is ideally placed to take the subject forward, as one who can see how, At the still point of the turning world . . . there the dance is. For the relationship between dance and literature is not merely one of the most striking but understudied features of modernism, but one of reciprocity: dance drew on modern literature as much as modern literature was shaped by dance. Until now, literary theorists seem almost deliberately to have turned away from movement and its presence in their subject. In Conrads Heart of Darkness, there is a famous scene generally referred to by scholars as the image of the African woman, even though

JUDITH FLANDERS Susan Jones

LITERATURE, MODERNISM, AND DANCE 360pp. Oxford University Press. 55 (US $99). 978 0 19 956532 0

Marlow is plainly describing movement, not a static image, a woman treading the earth proudly until she stopped . . . Suddenly she opened her bared arms and threw them up rigid above her head, as though in an uncontrollable desire to touch the sky . . . She turned away slowly, walked on, following the bank, and passed into the bushes to the left. Everything in that moment is about movement, even as its acquired tag reduces it to a tableau. Similarly, Gilles Deleuze wrote absorbingly on Samuel Becketts three languages, languages of names, voices and images, but despite Becketts fanatical care for stage directions, Deleuze never appears to have contemplated the authors language of movement. Yet Becketts knowledge of dance was formidable, and formidably integrated in his work, which drew on Eurhythmics, music hall, ballet and commedia dellarte. In a more populist vein, Sjeng Scheijens acclaimed biography of Diaghilev (2010) referred to the designer, librettist and composer of Parade as its three creators with, apparently an afterthought, Massine as choreographer. It is not Scheijens blind spot that so intrigues: it is that so few or no? reviewers even noticed the blind spot. Oversight is the norm for dance. Jones locates the origins of the modernist nexus of dance and literature in the nineteenth century, with the performances of the only now critically reassessed Loe Fuller, and with Stphane Mallarm and Nietzsches writings. Fuller was an innovator, creating mesmeric ef-

fects through swirling steps and long silks which were manipulated with her body and with hidden sticks, highlighted by new techniques of lighting. Only a year after her first dance performance in 1892, Mallarm was already describing her art as a model for literature, both dance and symbolist poetry using compressed forms of expression, with Fullers criture corporelle permitting a poetics of potentiality . . . a signifying practice that in its most abstract and ideal form dispenses with the generation of verbal meaning, the dancers gestures creating an indeterminacy that allowed each viewer to create their own meaning. Three decades earlier, Mallarms new poetics had concentrated on not the thing itself, but the effect it produced; now Fullers bodily writing gave the poet a way to become the poem. Fuller had no formal training. Classical dance was Apollonian, an art of courtly symmetry, restraint, gravity and balance, while the new dance forms that were emerging embraced the dissonance and conflict of the Dionysian, and, possibly most importantly, rhythm over melody. Now the world of nature is to be expressed in symbols, Nietzsche wrote; a new world of symbols is necessary, a symbolism of the body for once, not just the symbolism of the mouth, but the full gestures of dance . . . Then the other symbolic forces will develop, particularly those of music, suddenly impetuous in rhythm, dynamism, and harmony. The struggle between the Apollonian and Dionysian might be said to have created twentieth-century dance, and literature. Modernism turned to the ancient, to ritual, to express itself, with its dichotomies of attraction and repulsion, of the individual and the community. One of the most compelling sections in Joness book is her analysis of Bronislava Nijinskas Les Noces, recognized by the dance world as a

masterpiece on a par with the Demoiselles dAvignon, or Mrs Dalloway. It was, she demonstrates, a complement and response to Nijinskas brothers more famous (in reputation, although in reality lost) Sacre du Printemps. In both, a female is sacrificed to the greater community through ritual, and rhythm takes precedence over melody, dissonance over assonance. Both concentrate on symbolic forms, flattened, two-dimensional shapes, scenes rather than narrative, and primitive designs in Nijinskas case, constructivist art, in Nijinskys, Roerichs quasi-pastoral primitivism. Both incorporate Mallarms poetic impersonality: movement was pure, selfcontained, not a conduit for dancers to express themselves. And in both the stylized choreography required the active engagement on the part of the viewer to complete its meaning. When movement stops, Nijinska wrote, an illicit intermission begins, not a pause, for a pause is also movement a breath, as it were that is, Woolfs still space that lies about the heart of things. This is only one small example of the many cross-fertilizations that Jones so ably explores. Her chapter on Eliot breaks new ground, whether it is the discussion of Petrushka and The Hollow Men, or Murder in the Cathedral and Antony Tudors Jardin aux lilas, the two pieces staged at the Mercury Theatre in tandem. Tudors poetic evocation by elision of what might have been displayed in moments of frozen gesture may well have influenced Eliots still points. Both men similarly returned to the past Eliot to the Elizabethans, Tudor to the Edwardians to create a new present. Her chapter on Beckett is equally enlightening. But it is these chapters that make other sections of the book so frustrating. Jones has chosen to structure her book chronologically around the development of modernist aesthetics as writing, and thus privileges literature

TLS FEBRUARY 28 2014

LITER AR Y C RITIC ISM

over movement. Given that most of her readers will have a better grasp of the history of literature than of dance, this is unfortunate, as the book dashes ahistorically through the dance world wherever a literary strand takes her. It also forces her into many repetitions, some even word for word. Another, more uncomfortable reality is the ephemeral nature of dance. Jones devotes a long section to Andre Howards The Sailors Return, another vanished work. A few of its scenes were filmed, and there is a programme synopsis. But that is all, and yet Jones discusses the piece as though it can be intimately studied: Howards use of textual detail helped her express in dance the fine gradations of tone and register in the novel. This may be so, but I would like to know how Jones knows. What modernism means, for dance, too, is a vexed question, and one that needs to be confronted directly. One of Joness definitions is that, as with modernist literature, narrative and character are treated in a non-linear, nonrealist fashion. But as early as 1841, Act Two of Giselle was already reaching for the abstract, as was Act Three of La Bayadre in 1877, and Ivanovs white act for Swan Lake in 1894. Jones discusses the changes to Balanchines Apollo from its inception in 1928, when it had a prologue narrating the birth pangs of Leto, and a set with a tumulus up which Apollo climbed to reach his apotheosis as Musagte, to the 1979 version which omitted both birth and tumulus. But to describe the loss of the climb, as she does, as a shift from the Dionysian (as demonstrated in the physical manifestation of the upward struggle) to the Apollonian (achieved) is to ignore a number of productions which to this day contain a set of stairs, up which Apollo and the muses continue to progress. That ultimately encapsulates the difficulty of dance scholarship. There is no one, definitive, Apollo, and thus its meaning, or even its style, is elusive. And this example can be multiplied endlessly. Jones sees the choreographer Lonide Massine as a stark modernist, which in his choice of collaborators he certainly was, working with assorted Cubists, Fauves, even Dal, and among the first to use symphonic music for dance, and yet, she laments, his impact on modernism in a wider field has been overlooked. This might be, I would suggest, because his choreography was not modernist at all: working with modernists does not make you yourself modern. As Eliot harked back to the Elizabethans, so choreographers of real modernism Fokine, Balanchine frequently invoked the past, while old-fashioned choreographers like Massine, who resisted a deeper modernism, superficially embraced all the current tropes. As the historian Jennifer Homans has reminded us, dance, with its ephemerality of performance, is an art of memory, not history. Most of dance has vanished into the great unremembered. Where work has survived, and can be analysed Les Noces, for example Jones is a peerless guide, moving us back and forth between art forms with a dizzying virtuosity of her own. More generally, the great strength of Literature, Modernism, and Dance lies not in (the impossible) re-creation of the invisible, but in Joness exemplary account of how performances and performers endowed artists in other genres with ways to think about their process.

11

In tunnels

n February 1968, the childrens television programme Doctor Who, in its fifth year of transmission, depicted a London covered in fog that proved fatal for all who entered it. The time and space travellers arrive in the city via a system of tiled tunnels with curved roofs, and on seeing the sign Covent Garden by torchlight, the Doctor exclaims: Were in an underground station! Nodding to his nineteenth-century companion, he adds: a little after your time, Victoria, to which she replies: Is it always as dark as this? In fact, Londons underground railway lines, the first in the world, had begun to operate from the 1860s onwards, and imaginative use of those tunnels, a century later, was a well-established feature of British popular culture. Only the year before this particular episode of Doctor Who, Quatermass and the Pit (1967) had terrorized cinemagoers the pit of the title lying beneath the Victoria Line. London, the capital, is caught up not only in forces that are external, but forces drawing strength from one of the very things that made it modern. David Ashfords London Underground: A cultural geography is a rich study of the underground transport system, placing the network in its historical and cultural context. In its methodology and its emphasis on the cultural experience of space, as well as its broad frame of reference (from George Gissing to An American Werewolf in London and China Mivilles King Rat), it represents a significant advance on previous studies of the subject. The first deep-level railway line was completed in 1890, and, for Ashford, the network that grew around it serves as an emblem of post-industrial modernity. Starting from Victorian hopes about technological advancement, the railway was propelled through modernist fantasies and fears about the self. Progressing through world wars and long-term social upheavals, the Underground was both instrumental and metaphorical. It could also be problematic. Even though, in its early days, passengers were segregated into classes, the dominant impression was that all were dehumanized, reduced to an urban workforce stuffed into a vessel with windows that were often little more than an affectation, as they looked out onto dusty tunnel walls. In the twentieth century, the anxieties produced by such conditions found literary expression. In a reading of the E. M. Forster short story The Machine Stops (1909), Ashford presents this prescient work in the light of modernist concerns about technology, and how Edwardian pastoralism sought to modulate the arrival of the future. This subterranean space also offered opportunities, however, to those who were more attuned to the nature of this nowhere between locations. Ashfords early chapters deal with writers who grasped that women could be the beneficiaries of this new level of existence. Anthony Trollope, Henry James, H. G. Wells and Vernon Lee, as well as poets such as Alice Meynell, all depict female characters who experience tube travel and the jostling for social position and human connection it involves. Ashford also looks at Theodore Dreisers

ROYCE MAHAWATTE David Ashford

LONDON UNDERGROUND A cultural geography 188pp. Liverpool University Press. 70 (US $99.95). 978 1 84631 859 7

Andrew Whitehead and Jerry White, editors

LONDON FICTIONS 283pp. Five Leaves Publications. Paperback, 14.99. 978 1 907869 66 2

novelistic reimagining of the American transport magnate Charles Tyson Yerks as Frank Cowperwood in The Financier, The Titan and The Stoic as a representative of the brash capitalism and amoral forcefulness that threatened for a time to take over the underground system. Commentators in The Times were keen to point out that this system was contingent on both American technology (the tunnelling equipment and regrettable openstyle cars) and capital. What is perhaps most interesting in this lively account is the contradictory and vacillating politics of Dreiser and his cautious Anglophobia an intriguing index to Anglo-American relations following the First World War. In a detailed reading of the journal Blast and contemporary poster campaigns against modern poetry, Ashford connects the movement and the promise of cheap and easy travel with avant-garde art. The British Futurists, and the Vorticists especially, saw something auspicious in this relatively new mode of transport, which imposed an aesthetic order on modern life. Harry Becks celebrated Tube Map of 1933, meanwhile, compresses geography into an abstract, rationally organised space. The broader view of the Underground, however, was not so positive. Ashford regards Wellss The Time Machine (1895) as, in part, a speculative attack on the garden suburb, with Wells modelling the post-human Eloi community of the future on the Bedford Park suburb in Chiswick, implicitly criticizing the rise of a rootless middle class. Writers as diverse as T. S. Eliot, George Orwell and Elizabeth Bowen felt weary in the presence of suburban sprawl because, concerns of class identity aside, the commuter belt was as abstract as the network of tunnels that brought it into being and not in an avantgarde way. Though he never makes such a bold claim, Ashford presents the emergence of the London Underground as a paradigm shift. The Tube altered the self; it created a new demographic and an unforeseen cultural synthesis. In later chapters, we see how the Underground, as theorized by the Situationists, formed a crucial part of the mid-1960s immigration experience. From the immigrant fiction of Samuel Selvon to modern graffiti artists, and Banksys brandalism on the Tube, we see that bricolage and London Tube travel complement the idealism the power, speed and despair of youth and pop culture. Edited by Andrew Whitehead and Jerry

White, London Fictions has, on the surface, a similar literary and geographical project to that of London Underground. Its contributors were invited to comment on any novel about London published after 1870 (the year that Dickens, the most notable of London novelists, died). In addition, they were asked to consider how the city described in their work differs from the London of today. The result is lively and compelling. If there are gaps in your London reading, this book will help to fill them. Inspired by Betty Millers Farewell Leicester Square (1941), Susan Alice Fischer writes touchingly on the complexities of assimilated Jewish experience. Millers upwardly mobile protagonist, Alec, encounters prejudice and the pain of his own self-fashioning as he negotiates city life; the concentration camp is only spiritual here. Gregory Woods explains the stylized turns of Neil Bartletts Ready To Catch Him Should He Fall (1990) explaining why, for instance, the main characters are simply called O and boy and places the novel in the context of gay London literature and the institutionalized homophobia of the era. Perhaps the most revealing commentary comes from Sanchita Islam, who writes a rich and fair-minded response to Monica Alis Brick Lane (2003). It is a shame that Alis story takes place primarily in a flat . . . . Perhaps Mile End would have been a less misleading title. London Fictions also exposes a quality of the city that the brief does not seem to anticipate. The comparisons between the fictional and contemporary London, for the most part, lack the energy and commitment found in the discussions of the chosen novels. London Fictions in fact takes an opposite approach to that of London Underground in that it seeks to make the representational geographical, and the result is in places a little flat more streetmap than guided tour. Andrew Lanes discussion of Arthur Conan Doyles The Sign of Four (1890) reveals that you can read all fifty-six short stories and four novels . . . about Sherlock Holmes without finding out much about the London of the time. It seems that Conan Doyles London is organized around narrative principles rather than cartographic ones, as Lane acknowledges. Conversely, David Ashford, in London Underground, uses Conan Doyles The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans (1908) to show how the District Railway (opened in 1868) could raise fears of a foreign invasion. While it may be misleading of London Fictions to present fictional versions of London as if they were more faithful to geographical principles than to those of genre, the final chapter of London Underground considers the postmodern notion that there are living ghosts beneath the feet of every Londoner. Here Ashford draws on the experimental fiction of Conrad Williams and Geoff Ryman two writers who would not fall into the category of London fiction according to London Fictions. Through their visions of the city, however, both of these books reveal London as a place of the imagination, webbed over by fantastical commonplaces and unpredictable new developments.

TLS FEBRUARY 28 2014