While plain paneling, if well-designed, is never out of keeping, the walls of a music-room are especially suited to a somewhat fanciful style of decoration. Fewer changes are possible in the “upright” [piano]; but a marked improvement could be produced by straightening its legs and substituting right angles for the weak curves of the lid. The case itself might be made of plainly paneled mahogany, with a few good ormolu ornaments; or of inlaid wood, with a design of musical instruments. (Decoration, 146-7)
Slavoj Zizek, lecturing at New York University, once urged the audience I was in to throw out the baby but keep the bathwater. Wharton wanted to keep the bathwater. Her disinclination to throw out everything — except what she called the “horrors”—makes her a vital candidate for rereading and rethinking. Wharton relentlessly forced her characters to live, and die, struggling against or submitting to conventions, acknowledging their contradictions, while trying to create paths through or around rigid social customs. They were usually blocked. She did not imagine a utopia. She didn’t see a way of divorcing the past from the present. She didn’t see the necessity of abandoning all traditions or styles. Even molding, in proportion to the room, could be beautiful.
It is a curious perversion of artistic laws that has led certain critics to denounce painted architecture or woven mouldings. As in imaginative literature the author may present to his reader as possible anything that he has the talent to make the reader accept, so in decorative art the artist is justified in presenting to the eye whatever his skill can service to satisfy its requirements nor is there any insincerity in this proceeding. (Decoration, 40)
Her ideas were modern — she wanted to clear house of nineteenth-century vestiges, stuffed chairs and stuffed shirts, to question conventions and numbing, absurd traditions, but she was far from being a card-carrying modernist. Wharton was skeptical about the new, not positive that progress was progress, not sanguine about the future of the joys of speed and flight, as the futurists were; she took off and looked back over her shoulder at the past. She doesn’t fit comfortably into the modernist canon and has suffered for it.
Architecture articulates space, the movement within walls and without them, delineates the relationships of the built to the unbuilt and surroundings. Wharton’s prose makes its own particular space, its complex borders pierced by new and old. It’s one of those uncanny pieces of fate — less colloquially, historical overdetermination — that her reputation, her literary place, is inflected not just by her idiosyncratic relationship to Modernism but also by three biographical facts: She was female, upper-class and Henry James’s younger friend. Not mentioning James in relation to her is like not mentioning the elephant in the room, a room which she did not, of course, design. Her critical reputation stands mostly in his large shadow. (Her primary biographer R.W.B. Lewis’s first sentence in his introduction to the House of Mirth begins “Henry James. ”)8 Few U.S writers who are women make it, as the song goes, to standing in the shadows of love, critical love. (And her books were about love, its promise and seductiveness, its inevitable impossibility within a harsh, prohibitive world.)
The ironist Wharton might have appreciated, in her perverse way, the secondary or minor position she has attained. (Perhaps in the way Deleuze and Guattari appreciate minor literature) Ironically, undidacitally, Wharton teaches that separate isn’t equal; difference shouldn’t be but usually is hierarchical, and change in any establishment or tradition is like her sentences, slow.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author would like to thank Gregg Bordowitz and Kenneth Frampton for their invaluable help in the writing of this essay.
A brief, preliminary version of this essay appeared in Conjunctions: 29, Tributes, Fall 1997 (pp. 122–125); it was entitled “Edith Wharton: A Mole in the House of the Modern.”
NOTES
2. Edith Wharton, The Writing of Fiction (New York: Touchstone, 1997); first published in 1924.
3. Sigmund Freud, “Contributions to the Psychology of Love,” in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier Books, 1963), 63.
4. Edith Wharton, The Letters of Edith Wharton, ed. R.W.B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis (New York: Scribner’s, 1988), 450-1.
5. Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” in A General Selection from the Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. John Rickman, M. D. (New York: Doubleday, 1957), 116.
6. Charles Baudelaire, Intimate Journals, trans. Christopher Isherwood (London: Picador, 1990), 14.
7. Adolf Loos, “Ornament and Crime,” in Adolf Loos: Pioneer of Modern Architecture, ed. Ludwig Munz and Gustav Kunstler (New York: Prager, 1996), 226-8.
8. R.W.B. Lewis, “Introduction” to Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (New York: Bantam, 1984), viii.
X is for X-rated
History of Shit
A cesspool is not just a metaphor. In the suburbs, it’s under the driveway or front lawn, and, sometimes, during long, hot summers, it seeps. What escapes is an olfactory embarrassment that reminds the neighborhood of stuff no one wants to talk about. Dominique Laporte’s History of Shit reveals and revels in dirty, unmentionable stuff, digging beneath the beautiful to find the unspeakable it hides. Laporte sniffs bad smells, waxes rhapsodic about the odoriferous body and explores the division between private and public.
The story of shit is older than human beings, of course, but Laporte begins his account in 1539, with the proclamation, in France, of two edicts. One, the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterets, stated that “henceforth justice would be administered and civil documents and notarized acts registered in the French language.” The other edict, Laporte writes in characteristically florid style, “we need exhume. for its substance, and in so doing, may as well abandon ourselves, albeit briefly, to the strange beauty of its language.” It forbade “all emptying or tossing out into the streets and squares of [Paris] and its surroundings of refuse, offals, or putrefactions, as well as all waters whatever their nature. ” Of the coterminous moves toward purging “maternal French” of Latin and Parisian streets of shit, Laporte comments: “We have known since Barthes that ‘when written, shit does not smell.’. No doubt beautiful language has more than a little to do with shit, and style itself grows more precious the more exquisitely motivated by waste.”
This playful treatise, wryly translated by Nadia Benabid and Rodolphe el-Khoury, links asshole to mouth, excrement to language. Laporte claims that efforts to contain, deodorize and sanitize the body’s products have shaped language and consciousness. “To touch, even lightly, on the relationship of a subject to his shit,” Laporte writes, “is to modify not only that subject’s relationship to the totality of his body, but his very relationship to the world and those representations that he constructs of his situation in society.” Representations, such as language, must be censored, elegant phrases and stylistic flourishes invented to cover and disguise, like literary kitty litter, the human capacity to foul and be foul. “But the incapacity of this system to manage its own filth is lucidly betrayed by its intrepid fantasy of an elimination so complete it leaves no trace of waste.”