The Bourgeois Interior

Conclusion: John Updike,W. G. Sebald, and theAfterlife of the Bourgeoisie

137 Conclusion: John Updike, W. G. Sebald, and the Afterlife of the Bourgeoisie Yet one of the oddities of our life as it rushes past is that we are so eager in our work, so avid for pleasure, that we are seldom able to treasure and hold fast the given particularities of the moment. And so, even at an advanced age, we still have a duty to acknowledge the human—which never leaves us—in its singularities. —Goethe, Letter to Moritz Seebeck (1832) In the course of writing this book, I was frequently reminded of a passage in German Men and Women, Walter Benjamin’s edition of letters written by “the great exemplars” of the preindustrial German middle class.1 In this collection, Benjamin pays homage to the spirit of an earlier bourgeoisie, one that existed before “wealth and speed [became] what the world admires.”2 The letters reach deeply into daily life in their references to the weather, to family, and to the domestic interior. Commenting on a letter written by a visitor to Immanuel Kant’s dwelling in Königsberg, Benjamin points to the unpretentiousness of the interior and suggests that “the human” is contingent on certain “conditions and limits”: “Conditions and limits of humanity ? Certainly. . . . [W]henever there is talk of humanity, we should not forget the narrowness of the middle-class room into which the Enlightenment shone.” Throughout German Men and Women, Benjamin stresses the “interdependence” of the more modest interiors of an earlier age and “true humanity,” implying that one of the forces to destroy the humane spirit of this class was the immense prosperity brought by industry.3 Benjamin’s use of the word human in this context may come 138 The Bourgeois Interior from Goethe’s letter to Moritz Seebeck, a quote from which serves as the epigraph to this chapter.4 It comes as no surprise that in reflecting on the Enlightenment from the perspective of Europe in the first decades of the twentieth century, a period in which the status of the human had been called into question, Benjamin should look for signs of humanity in an earlier era of German history. What is surprising is that he locates these signs in the domestic interior . Benjamin’s analyses of the phantasmagoric interiors of the nineteenth century suggest that he understood them to represent a kind of “afterlife” to the more vital spaces of the past. In his image of the Victorian dwelling as a “receptacle for the person ,” for example, he imagines the residence as a kind of coffin, enfolding the dweller in a cushioned space that resembles the inside of a velvet-lined compass case. Another “afterlife” occurs at the beginning of the twentieth century, when modern architecture renders obsolete the already moribund humanity of the nineteenth-century interior , and the signs of embedded human presence seem to disappear altogether. In the modernist interiors of Le Corbusier, constructed with materials like steel and glass on which it is impossible to leave a human imprint, all trace of the human is left behind. An “afterlife” implies a past, however, and from its earliest appearance in fiction, the bourgeois interior has always registered and sought to compensate for the loss of a more secure state. Coming after authors who for nearly three centuries have examined the homesickness inherent in the experience of home, the contemporary writers I shall consider here are fully conscious of their inheritance. Both John Updike’s “The Afterlife” (1994) and W. G. Sebald ’s “Dr Henry Selwyn” (1997) are set in English country houses inhabited by characters who have left their country of origin to settle in the county of Norfolk. “Flinty Dell” is the name given to Updike’s house by its American inhabitants , and Sebald’s residence is called “Prior’s Gate.” A dell is a secluded place or haven, and “Prior’s Gate” suggests entrance Conclusion 139 into an earlier life. Both associations are familiar to bourgeois dwellings I have considered thus far. A flinty dell further hints at the nature of most bourgeois havens: they are never as comfortable as we imagine them to be. The main character in “The Afterlife,” Carter Billings, suffers an accident in the interior of Flinty Dell, and in Sebald’s story, Dr. Selwyn has removed himself from the great house at Prior’s Gate, preferring to live in a smaller dwelling on the grounds of the...