Moveable Designs : Liminal Aesthetics and Cultural Production

Brandt, Stefan L.

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-13611-5_2

Stefan L. Brandt³

Part of the book series: Renewing the American Narrative ((RAN))

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Abstract

This chapter offers a theoretical overview of liminal aesthetics and cultural production in the context of American national self-fashioning. The idea of ‘America,’ constructed throughout the centuries, is grounded in what I call ‘moveable designs,’ by which I define a set of constructed, yet dynamic features within a given text as well as within the cultural imaginary of each period. The artificial ‘unity’ imposed upon these texts and periods is designed to mask real-life experiences of actual disunity and disparity lurking underneath. Taking Hemingway’s memoir A Moveable Feast as a springboard, the chapter demonstrates that all artistic works harbor the potential for becoming ‘moveable texts.’ A.E. Hotchner, Hemingway’s editor, famously called A Moveable Feast a “moveable book,” hinting at the degree to which the volume was influenced by external factors. Just like Hemingway’s memoir lends itself to “multiple readings” (Brenner) in which the ‘moveable designs’ of the book’s structure become effective, other key texts of American culture offer manifold and often contradictory ways of interpretation as well. Paradoxically, it is precisely through their ‘moveable designs’—that is, by means of a liminal aesthetics connected to what Bauman calls “liquid modernity”—that representative U.S. texts construe America as a homogeneous vision.

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Notes

1.
S. Hemingway, “Introduction” to E. Hemingway, A Moveable Feast. The Restored Edition, ed. Seán Hemingway (London: Arrow Books, 2009), 1–13; 1.
2.
This description comes from Seán Hemingway, the editor of the restored edition. Ibid., 229; italics in the original.
3.
Ibid., 1–2.
4.
Mary Hemingway, “Note” to E. Hemingway, Moveable Feast (1964; London: Vintage, 2004), ix.
5.
S. Hemingway, “Introduction,” 2. Accordingly, there were “several drafts of the main text” written “in prior years,” but Ernest Hemingway “had not written an introduction or final chapter to his satisfaction, nor had he decided on a title.” Ibid.
6.
Ibid., 10.
7.
Gerry Brenner, A Comprehensive Companion to Hemingway’s ‘A Moveable Feast,’ books 1 and 2 (Lewiston et al.: The Edwin Mellen P, 2000), vi.
8.
As Seán Hemingway reports, various materials that Ernest Hemingway had resolved not to include in the final version were added to the 1964 edition, most notably the chapter “Birth of a New School,” passages from the chapters on Ezra Pound and Hemingway’s stay in Schruns. S. Hemingway, “Introduction,” 5.
9.
Ibid., 7.
10.
Ibid., 11.
11.
A.E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir (New York: Random House, 1966), 57.
12.
E. Hemingway, Moveable Feast (1964 ed.), iii.
13.
See S. Hemingway, “Introduction,” 2–3. Cf. Brenner, Companion, 1–8.
14.
As item 122 in the Hemingway Collection indicates, the author played with various formulations regarding the fictionality of the book, a recurring phrase being “This book is fiction.” The addition made to some notes, “and should be read as such,” supports this claim to the imaginative quality of the work. E. Hemingway, Moveable Feast (restored ed.), 229–232.
15.
E. Hemingway, Moveable Feast (1964 ed.), vii.
16.
Ibid., 116–126.
17.
Ibid., 126.
18.
E. Hemingway, Moveable Feast (restored ed.), 231.
19.
This long-lost chapter was published as “Winters in Schruns” in the restored edition. Ibid., 113–123.
20.
See ibid., 236.
21.
E. Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926; New York: Penguin, 2022).
22.
Fragments of Hemingway’s notes already featured the sentences such as “There is never any end to Paris” and “There is never any ending to Paris” that were tailored into the famous final chapter of the 1964 edition. See E. Hemingway, Moveable Feast (restored ed.), 234, 236. Cf. E. Hemingway, Moveable Feast (1964 ed.), 116–126.
23.
Qtd. in Kenneth Lynn, Hemingway (1987; Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP, 1995), 586.
24.
See Gerry Brenner, “Are We Going to Hemingway’s Feast?” in Linda W. Wagner (ed.), Ernest Hemingway: Six Decades of Criticism (1982; East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1987), 297–311. Cf. Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin, “The Manuscripts of A Moveable Feast,” Hemingway Notes, 6 (Spring 1981): 9–15.
25.
The editorial changes made by Seán Hemingway in the ‘restored edition’ and especially the claim that the 1964 edition did not reflect the author’s intentions have been rejected by A.E. Hotchner, who read a draft of the book in 1959. “What I read on the plane coming back from Cuba was essentially what was published. There was no extra chapter created by Mary.” A.E. Hotchner, “Don’t Touch ‘A Moveable Feast,’” The New York Times (19 July 2009), https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/opinion/20hotchner.html (accessed 16 May 2022).
26.
S. Hemingway, “Introduction,” 3.
27.
As usual, Ernest Hemingway considered a whole array of possible titles during his work on the manuscript, but never settled on a particular one for posterity. As his grandson points out, Hemingway leaned toward the title The Early Eye and the Ear (How Paris was in the early days), but also put many other options on his list. S. Hemingway, “Introduction,” 11.
28.
Patrick Hemingway, “Foreword” to E. Hemingway, A Moveable Feast. The Restored Edition, ed. Seán Hemingway (London: Arrow Books, 2009), ix–xii; xii.
29.
S. Hemingway, “Introduction,” 12.
30.
The last chapter of the 1964 edition, “There Is Never Any End to Paris,” appears, in abridged form, as the 16th chapter “Winters in Schruns” in the restored edition. E. Hemingway, Moveable Feast (restored ed.), 113–123.
31.
Ibid., 221–225.
32.
E. Hemingway, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” in E. Hemingway, Winner Take Nothing (1933; London: Arrow Books, 2006), 55–59.
33.
E. Hemingway, Moveable Feast (restored ed.), 222; emphasis in the original.
34.
Ibid., 225; emphasis in the original.
35.
Ibid.
36.
Cf. P. Hemingway, “Foreword,” xii.
37.
Hotchner, “Don’t Touch.”
38.
Ibid.
39.
Brenner, Companion, xii.
40.
Writing in 2000, Brenner anticipated much of the editorial decisions made in Seán Hemingway’s 2009 version of A Moveable Feast, arguing that “serious students of Hemingway’s work appreciate the labors that went into Feast’s [1964] publication. But most would better appreciate a printing of Hemingway’s authentic, ‘finished’ text of nineteen chapters with addenda and appendices that include some of the altered or deleted material.” Ibid., 8.
41.
Schwartz, “De-Signing,” 55.
42.
Levine, Forms, 13.
43.
E. Hemingway, Moveable Feast (1964 ed.), vii.
44.
Brenner, Companion, ix.
45.
Jean Baudrillard, America (London and New York: Verso, 2010), 29.
46.
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (1994; New York: Routledge, 2004), 212.
47.
J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (eds. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisá, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1975), 6–7.
48.
In Austin’s terminology, ‘locution’ refers to the mere contents of words and meanings; ‘illocution’ points to what is done in a speech act; ‘perlocution’ denotes the effects of speech acts. Ibid., 101–107, 117–124.
49.
Ibid., 6.
50.
The triad of ‘the real’ (reality itself), ‘the fictive’ (literary fiction), and ‘the imaginary’ (the broad set of cultural conceptions that permeate a nation’s collective imagination), developed in reader-response theory, is essential to understanding this relationship. All three components are viewed as interrelated, building a dynamic connection with each other. In the act of meaning-production, the imaginary is “shaped and transmuted,” adopting elements of both the real and the fictive. The fictive, on the other hand, is turned into what Iser, citing Rainer Warning, calls “enacted discourse,” a kind of performative object that is located between the reader and the imaginary. Iser, Fictive/Imaginary, 19, 12.
51.
Ibid., 3.
52.
Ibid., 7. Iser takes the term “transitional object” from psychologist D.W. Winnicott, who thereby refers to “[t]he intermediate area […] that is allowed to the infant between primary creativity and objective perception based on reality-testing.” Qtd. in ibid., 307; italics in the original.
53.
Bercovitch, Rites, 1.
54.
Ibid., 3.
55.
See Bercovitch’s chapter in the same book, “The Music of America.” Ibid., 1–28.
56.
Ibid., 12.
57.
Bhabha, Location, 213–214; emphasis in the original.
58.
Iser, Fictive/Imaginary, 83.
59.
Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production, 35.
60.
Ibid., 37.
61.
Iser, Fictive/Imaginary, 84.
62.
Ibid., 20.
63.
Ibid.
64.
Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, (1941; Berkeley & Los Angeles: U of California P, 1974), and Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley & Los Angeles: U of California P, 1966).
65.
Jane Tompkins makes a similar observation in her analysis of the cultural function of literary texts. In fictional works, she argues, readers are provided “with a means of ordering the world” and thus learn about the unwritten laws and hidden desires of the cultural imagination. Tompkins, Sensational Designs, xiii.
66.
Burke, Philosophy, 110–111.
67.
Luhmann, Social Systems, 65.
68.
Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, 36.
69.
See ibid., 2. Cf. Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” 1969, in Toril Moi (ed.), The Julia Kristeva Reader (Oxford, UK, and Cambridge, USA: Blackwell, 1986), 35–61.
70.
Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, 36; emphasis in the original.
71.
Ibid.
72.
Kristeva, “Word,” 42.
73.
Ibid., 40.
74.
Ibid., 41.
75.
Ibid.; emphasis in the original.
76.
In his influential essay “Discourse in the Novel,” Bakhtin introduces the concept of dialogism, by which he identifies the continual ambiguity of literary texts. M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin (ed. M. Holquist, Austin: U of Texas P, 1981/1996), 259–422; 280.
77.
Ibid., 288.
78.
Ibid.
79.
Ibid.
80.
Ibid., 289.
81.
Ibid.
82.
Ibid., 305.
83.
Iser, Act of Reading, 129.
84.
Michel Foucault, “Réponse au cercle d’épistémologie,” 1968, qtd. in Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production, 33.
85.
Cf. M. Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh,” interview, 1977, in M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings (ed. Colin Gordon, New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 194–228; 194.
86.
Baudrillard, America, 27.
87.
Ibid.
88.
Ibid., 29.
89.
I have elaborated on the concept of liminal aesthetics in the context of Canadian cultural identity in a previous publication. Stefan L. Brandt, “The Canadian Cultural Imaginary and Its Liminal Aesthetics,” in S.L. Brandt (ed.), In-Between: Liminal Spaces in Anglo-Canadian Literature, Canadiana Series (New York et al.: Peter Lang, 2017), 11–31.
90.
Following Terry Eagleton, I define ‘aesthetics’ as a set of sensory interactions between the world and the body that reflects “the whole of our sensate life together.” T. Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990), 13.
91.
The Macmillan Dictionary defines ‘liminal’ (from the Latin word ‘limen’ for ‘threshold’) in two ways: first, as “relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process,” and, second, as “occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold.” “Liminal,” Macmillan Dictionary, https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/liminal (accessed 5 Nov. 2022).
92.
Katie Wales, A Dictionary of Stylistics (3rd ed., London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 250.
93.
Gerald Graff, Literature against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979), 57.
94.
Victor Turner, The Anthropology of Performance (New York: PAJ Publications, 1986), 76.
95.
Ibid., 107.
96.
Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (1991): 33–40; 34.
97.
See Jochen Achilles and Ina Bergmann, “‘Betwixt and Between’: Boundary Crossings in American, Canadian, and British Short Fiction,” in J. Achilles and I. Bergmann (eds.), Liminality and the Short Story: Boundary Crossings in American, Canadian, and British Writing (New York and London: Routledge, 2015), 3–31; 3–4.
98.
See V. Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (New York: Cornell UP, 1973), 94.
99.
Ibid., 97.
100.
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA et al.: The Belknap P of Harvard UP, 2002), 88.
101.
Ibid., 494.
102.
Ibid.
103.
Louis Aragon, Le paysan de Paris, 1926, qtd. in Benjamin, Arcades Project, 494.
104.
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995; Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1998), 24.
105.
Ibid., 27; cf. 63–67.
106.
Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (1909; Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1960).
107.
According to anthropologist Clifford Geertz, it is through culturally designed borders and demarcation lines that a society is able to model itself and define its identity. Cf. Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures, 44.
108.
V. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Antistructure (New York: Aldine, 1969), 95.
109.
J. Achilles, “Modes of Liminality in American Short Fiction: Condensations of Multiple Identities,” in J. Achilles and I. Bergmann (eds.), Liminality and the Short Story: Boundary Crossings in American, Canadian, and British Writing (New York and London: Routledge, 2015), 35–49; 35.
110.
Ibid.
111.
Bjørn Thomassen, Liminality and the Modern: Living through the In-Between (London & New York: Routledge, 2016), 1.
112.
Ibid.
113.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. and foreword by Brian Massumi (1980; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987), 380.
114.
Ibid., 277.
115.
Ibid.; capitalization in the original.
116.
Oxford English Dictionary, “Rhizome,” OED Online, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/165259?redirectedFrom=rhizome (accessed 18 Sept. 2022).
117.
Deleuze, “Rhizome versus Tree,” in Constantin V. Boundas (ed.), The Deleuze Reader (New York: Columbia UP, 1993), 27–36; 33.
118.
Ibid.
119.
Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 25.
120.
For a discussion of cultural formations incorporating a “rhizomorphic, fractal structure,” see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993; London and New York, NY: Verso, 1999), 1–40; 4.
121.
The Cambridge Dictionary defines the term ‘hybrid’ as “a mixture of two very different things.” “Hybrid,” https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/hybrid (accessed 17 Sept. 2022).
122.
Bhabha, Location, 298.
123.
Ibid., 162.
124.
Cf. Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (1919; London et al.: Penguin, 2003), 339–376.
125.
Bhabha, Location, 206.
126.
Ibid.
127.
Ibid.
128.
Ibid.
129.
M. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 1967/1984, Diacritics, 16.1 (Spring 1986): 22–27.
130.
Ibid., 24.
131.
Ibid.
132.
Ibid.
133.
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1974; Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 59.
134.
Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 276.
135.
Ibid., 10; upper-case spelling in the original.
136.
Ibid., 56–57; emphasis in the original.
137.
B. Thomassen, “The Uses and Meanings of Liminality,” International Political Anthropology, 2.1 (2009): 5–27; 23; emphasis in the original.
138.
According to the OED, a palimpsest is defined as “a manuscript in which later writing has been superimposed on earlier (effaced) writing” or, more generally, as something “reused or altered while still retaining traces of its earlier form”. https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/136319?rskey=yW5Wf0&result= (accessed 18 Sept. 2022).
139.
Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (1982; Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 1997), 1.
140.
Sarah Dillon, The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2007), 29.
141.
Ibid., 3.
142.
J. Derrida, “The Supplement of Origin,” 1967, in Barry Stocker (ed.), Jacques Derrida: Basic Writings (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 137–156; 142.
143.
Ibid.
144.
Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (2000; Malden, MA: Polity P, 2012), viii. Cf. Martin Jay, “Liquidity Crisis: Zygmunt Bauman and the Incredible Lightness of Modernity,” Theory, Culture & Society, 27.6 (Nov. 2010): 95–106.
145.
Bauman, Liquid Modernity, viii; emphases in the original.
146.
Ibid., ix.
147.
Ibid.
148.
Ibid.
149.
Ibid., xiv.
150.
Ibid., x.
151.
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 10.
152.
Ibid.
153.
Ibid.
154.
Latour, “Cautious Prometheus,” 2.
155.
Ibid.
156.
Ibid.
157.
Ibid.
158.
Ibid., 9.
159.
Latour, Reassembling, 244; emphasis in the original.
160.
Ibid.
161.
Ibid., 245.
162.
Ibid., 243.
163.
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 5.
164.
Ibid., 90.
165.
Latour’s concepts of ‘network’ and ‘plasma’ bear much resemblance to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the ‘rhizome’ that interconnects the phenomena of cultural production. B. Latour, “On Recalling ANT,” in John Law and John Hassard (eds.), Actor-Network Theory and After (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 15–25.

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Department of American Studies, University of Graz, Graz, Styria, Austria
Stefan L. Brandt

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Brandt, S.L. (2022). Moveable Designs: Liminal Aesthetics and Cultural Production. In: Moveable Designs, Liminal Aesthetics, and Cultural Production in America since 1772. Renewing the American Narrative. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13611-5_2

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13611-5_2
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