Domestic interiors, decorative objects and their multiple temporalities. The case of the Dutch modernist novel

Abstract

In reaction to Marvin Trachtenberg’s ideas about the atemporal and chronicidal nature of modernist architecture (2010), this article charts the temporal heterogeneity characteristic of the domestic interior as it is represented in the Dutch modernist novel in the interwar period. Although, on par with modernist architectural theories, the new novel finds itself involved in a battle against the overfurnished domestic interiors typical of the nineteenth-century realist novel, writers de facto react in very different ways to the so-called “fashionable artistic interior”, full of the most diverse antiques and curiosities, as it was propagated as a model for the tasteful decoration of houses in the last decades of the nineteenth century. If the Joycean novel Meneer Visser’s Hellevaart (Mr Visser’s Descent into Hell) (1936) by Simon Vestdijk can be read as a straightforward rejection of the over-stuffed domestic interior, the temporal regime of tradition and the corresponding bourgeois ideology, Menno Ter Braak’s Hampton Court (1931) offers a more ambivalent account of the museum-like interior and the historical decorative object. As the novel displays at least three different (and partly incompatible) temporal regimes (from prehistorical time, over historical time, to the time of the present), it is argued, it can be read as a modernist critique of modernism’s atemporality and chronicide.

Keywords:

• literature and architecture
• domestic interiors
• decorative objects
• temporal regimes
• modernist novel

Notes

1. Thanks to Meriel Benjamins, Erica van Boven, Ben de Bruyn, Ryanne Keltjens and above all Koen Rymenants for their most valuable comments and suggestions, at different stages of this paper’s conception.

2. The distinction between the polychronic and the multitemporal object derives from Michel Serres and is introduced by Harris to account for the temporal modes of existence of the Renaissance object. The former label refers to the idea that “objects collate different moments,” the latter to the idea that “in its polychronicity, an object can prompt many different understandings and experiences of temporality—that is, of the relations between now and then, old and new, before and after” (Harris 2009: 4).

3. All translations from Dutch are mine, PV.

4. For an in-depth discussion of the analogies between Vestdijk and Ulysses by James Joyce, see Beekman (1983). The reception of Joyce in the Netherlands is dealt with in Kosters and Hoffman (2004).

5. Fokkema and Ibsch (1987: 252–257) offer a concise introduction to the early work of Vestdijk against the backdrop of European modernism.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pieter Verstraeten

Pieter Verstraeten works as a postdoctoral research fellow in modern Dutch literature at Groningen University (The Netherlands) and Leuven University (Belgium). He is currently involved in an NWO-funded research project on Dutch middlebrow fiction and is preparing a monograph on objects and material culture in the modern novel. [email protected]