Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X

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Issue 16. House / Text / Museum

House / Text / Museum

Anthony Purdy

Toute mention d'un "musée" dans un texte littéraire a par conséquent toutes les chances d'introduire, dans ce texte-là, au moment où apparaît cette mention, une réflexion de la littérature sur elle-même.

- Philippe Hamon, Imageries , 115

 

The nineteenth century has long been thought of as the period of emergence both of the modern domestic interior and of the metaphor that links it to the (possessive) individual psyche. Through its democratization of luxury, it brings both the house and the private collection it typically contains and displays within reach of the average bourgeois. It is an age in which the individual is defined as an owner - "je possède donc je suis" - and the house with its collections becomes at once the deployment of a personality and the means by which an illusion of mastery is achieved and death and history are held at bay. The house is a cosmos, claims Bachelard, "notre premier univers" (24) - a theatre of memory combining cradle and crypt, a place where the unconscious and the imagination can spread themselves out and feel at home. But it is also a museum, a house of fossils and fetishes, in which time stands still and distance is abolished. The six essays gathered here explore some of the relationships between house and museum (or private collection) as they appear both in real nineteenth-century artists' houses - Sir John Soane's in London, Pierre Loti's in Rochefort - and in textual houses animated by Stendhal, Edmond de Goncourt, and J.-K. Huysmans. The final essay adds a twenty-first century postscript through its 'reading' of Isaac Julien's short artist's film, Vagabondia , shot in the Soane Museum.

Références

Bachelard, Gaston. La poétique de l'espace . Paris : PUF, 1974.

Hamon, Philippe. Imageries - Littérature et image au XIX e siècle . Paris : José Corti, 2001.

Anthony Purdy is Professor of French Studies at the University of Western Ontario, where he also teaches in the graduate programs in Comparative Literature, Visual Arts, and the Centre for the Study of Theory & Criticism. His recent research is supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and focuses on time, place, and memory in literature and visual culture.

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