In the artist Andrew Lanyon’s playful textual exploration of the creative process, The Only Non-Slip Dodo Mat in the World (2013), his protagonist Ambrose Fortescue takes up residence in the heads of a series of public statues. He treats them like themed hotel rooms, literally looking out through their eyes, and choosing his hosts according to the direction he wants his writing to take:
His progress from one character to another was colouring his thinking as well as initiating new trains of thought […] A week spent inside Peter Pan was different from what it might have been had he not first spent a week in Sigmund Freud.1
Lanyon’s collaborator Carlos Zapata created a richly suggestive model of Fortescue at work, a photograph of which is on the front cover of this book. It shows Fortescue writing at a desk in an attic that is located in a cut-away sculpture of a head. This is not the head of a recognisable figure such as Freud or Peter Pan. Rather, it is anonymously generic, and the way its white expanse is mirrored by the bald dome of Fortescue’s head as he bends over his paper implies a close correlation between the two: that the head in which he is at work is his own. This collapses the distinction between house and mind; they are equated as both the space where creation occurs and the space that informs and directs such creation.
The representation of Fortescue at work neatly encapsulates the interests of the essays collected in this volume, which explore the interplay between architectural space and the literary imagination. Bringing together research into a range of periods, and with contributions from architectural and art historians, poets, and artists as well as from literary scholars, it aims not simply to complement existing research into the house in literature and art, but also to suggest how this field of enquiry might be developed. In recent years, both representations of architectural space and individual writers’ and artists’ houses (as well as the relationship between them) have been the focus of a great deal of critical attention. In particular, they have been linked to questions of nationhood and political identity, as well as to questions of gender—as witnessed, for example, in Gill Perry’s discussion of home and identity in Playing at Home: The House in Contemporary Art (2013), and in Imogen Racz’s Art and the Home: Comfort, Alienation and the Everyday (2015). The national and gendered politics that inhere in domestic spaces are at the forefront in such academic studies as Karen Lipsedge’s Domestic Space in Eighteenth-Century British Novels (2012), as well as Monika Shafi’s Housebound: Selfhood and Domestic Space in Contemporary German Fiction (2012). Further, they have been the subjects of the essays in Gerry Smyth and Jo Croft’s Our House: The Representation of Domestic Space in Modern Culture (2006) and, more recently, Terri Mullholland and Nicole Sierra’s edited collection Spatial Perspectives: Essays on Literature and Architecture (2015). More recently still, the essays in Rhona Richman Kenneally and Lucy McDiarmid’s edited volume, The Vibrant House: Irish Writing and Domestic Space (2017), have combined contemporary theories on the agential qualities of material with more traditional preoccupations with gender, nationality, and identity. Such critical and scholarly attention has extended to the actual houses inhabited by writers and artists, as seen in studies including Phyllis Richardson’s The House of Fiction: From Pemberley to Brideshead, Great British Houses in Literature and Life (2017)—which examines actual houses such as Walpole’s Strawberry Hill and Sterne’s Shandy Hall as well as fictional structures such as Pemberley and Brideshead—and Kirsty Bell’s The Artist’s House: From Workplace to Artwork (2013), which is concerned both with work that is shaped by the house an artist lives in, and with houses that are shaped by the resident artists’ work.
While this volume reflects many of these areas of interest, its primary focus is on direct relationships between the house and the creative imagination, specifically on architectural space as the object of the imagination, the house as shelter for the work of the imagination, and (significantly) architectural space as a means of envisaging the shape and the workings of the imagination itself. Its contributors acknowledge the importance of current scholarship on house and nation, house and politics, house and the uncanny, house and gender identity, but its main interest is in the various ways in which the house may be ‘in the mind’. Like Lanyon’s and Zapata’s work, it explores the points where the boundary between house and mind becomes indistinct: houses that are coterminous with the writer’s mind, and minds that are imagined in architectural terms.
It is not surprising, then, that Heidegger’s ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’ (1951) and, especially, Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1958, first English translation 1964) are recurrent points of reference.2 Heidegger’s cornerstone essay inverts the traditional view that humans are dwellers because they have built spaces in which to dwell. Rather, according to Heidegger, building arises from the impulsion to dwell. ‘To be a human being’, he wrote, ‘means to be on the earth as a mortal. It means to dwell’.3 The primordial dwelling place, a built space that symbolised urges that could perhaps be better described as expressive than literary, is famously exemplified by Heidegger’s own simple, slope-roofed hut in the Black Forest—a place that contained almost no books, but copious supplies of writing paper.4 In the work of both Heidegger and Bachelard, ideas of the built dwelling place as a fundamental element of human experience loom large. For Bachelard, as for Heidegger, the idea of the house is one that is embedded deeply in the collective unconscious as an image of shelter and protection.5 He argues that this image is informed by memories of a childhood house as an entirely safe and private space for daydreaming. As the locus of remembered daydreaming—the lost great good place—the house becomes embedded in the adult imagination as ‘one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind’.6 For Bachelard, the house as object of the imagination is inseparable from the idea of the house as shelter for the work of the imagination, and it is the fusion of these two roles that gives the image its universal appeal. Indeed, when he writes that it is ‘thanks to the house [that] a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated’, he comes close to representing thought itself in explicitly architectural terms; when he states that ‘our soul is an abode […] by remembering “houses” and “rooms”, we learn to “abide” within ourselves’, he seems to imply that Heideggerian dwelling takes place not in the world, but in the imagination.7
Through their emphasis on the embodied nature of dwelling, both Bachelard and Heidegger are closely associated with phenomenology. Although debate as to what phenomenology constitutes is almost as old as the word itself, the term most frequently connotes a preoccupation with what has been described as ‘space, time, and the world “as lived”’.8 Its focus, therefore, is neither on causality nor on the nature of being, but rather on the granular, irreducible nature of experience itself. According to David R. Cerbone, its central concerns with experience and consciousness make the practice of phenomenology inextricable from ‘introspection’.9 This turn inwards can readily be imagined in spatial terms; conversely, the house, where space is first known and experienced, becomes a basis for how ‘the world “as lived”’ is understood. Such phenomenological theorisations of the house in the mind are as central to this volume as they are to Bachelard’s and Heidegger’s work. Yet with contributions drawn from a range of periods and disciplines, it also extends and challenges their positions, setting contrasting views of the interrelationship between architectural space and the imagination in dialogue. Prefaced by the poem ‘Christina’s World’, which speaks to the possible ways in which an artist might imagine a house, the first three chapters, grouped under the heading ‘Foundations’, establish a number of ideas and approaches that recur throughout the volume. The first of these, an extract from Andrew Lanyon’s privately printed Bifurcated Thought (2013), does so with remarkable flair.10 As a piece of imaginative writing, a cross between essay and short story, it is, perhaps, an unusual opening for a book of academic essays. Its presence is vital, however. An extended exploration of the house as image of the thinking mind, it does not just illustrate the possibility of imagining the mind in architectural terms, forming the equivalent of the ‘pertinent literary documents’ that Bachelard quoted in support of his reading of the symbolism of the house.11 It also displays an almost uncanny consonance with classical and medieval traditions that discuss the mind as architectural structure, playfully introducing connections that will be the subject of more traditional forms of investigation later in the volume. Lanyon’s piece suggests how closely theory and artistic practice may be related, and how new perspectives may be gained from their juxtaposition. He dramatically riffs on the idea that the house may serve as image of the thinking mind, seeming to stumble upon it almost by accident. Setting out to write about thought, he claims that the metaphor he had originally intended to use...