Ornament as Crisis: Architecture, Design, and Modernity in Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers by Sarah McGaughey (review)

In Ornament as Crisis: Architecture, Design, and Modernity in Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers, Sarah McGaughey probes the intertwined discourses of architecture and literature in Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers trilogy (1933) to demonstrate "the ways in which architecture and its discourses are at once a part of literature and an object of study for literature" (4). This analysis intensifies the relationship between literature and architecture by revealing the depth of architectural influence on both the content and form of Broch's trilogy and by demonstrating the literary insights generated through the application of an architectural idiom.

The book consists of four chapters and an introduction: One chapter is devoted to each of the novels that make up The Sleepwalkers, plus a final chapter that analyzes the architectonic structure of the trilogy itself. In her introduction, McGaughey acknowledges the polemic "Disintegration of Values" essay from the final novel of Broch's trilogy, in which Broch critiques architectural ornamentation. Rather than focusing on the essay—and rendering architecture an essayistic ornament within the novel—McGaughey deploys it to move beyond canonical affinities between the architectural and literary avant-gardes.

Instead, McGaughey expands aesthetic understandings of architecture to include "vernacular" structures (8) and an emphasis on spatiality. Citing Adolf Loos's rejection of ornament, McGaughey positions Broch's novel in a time of architectural transition that "relies less on ornament and points to the ways in which the individual's role in the creation of space can challenge contemporary architectural discourse" (151). Architecture is not only experienced by Broch's protagonists, it itself sculpts their narratives by creating or resolving problems, determining spaces, and mirroring the search for orientation and expression characteristic of modernist fiction. McGaughey convincingly frames Broch's trilogy as an architectural project tasked with anchoring the reader within the flow of built architectural change. This reading demonstrates the influence of architecture on literary form, but also lodges a literary critique of architectural progress that fails to create spaces of stable meaning. McGaughey's study thus successfully crafts a fragile, yet insightful relationship between architecture and literature in Broch's trilogy that illuminates both their discursive parallels and conflicts.

Chapter 1, "Searching for the Spatial Representation of Modern Experience in 1888: Pasenow oder die Romantik," examines Prussian officer Joachim von Pasenow's struggle for orientation in a world of coded binaries. Romanticized tenement housing and overdetermined bourgeois interiors serve as literal, architectural oppositions between tradition and novelty, city and country. Similar dynamics characterize chapter 2, "Early Twentieth-Century Architecture and Visual Experience in 1903: Esch oder die Anarchie." Here, McGaughey contrasts the themes of visuality and physicality, art and science to illustrate the inner conflict architecture poses for accountant August Esch. Chapter 3, "The Social Function of Architecture: Architectural Experience in 1918: Huguenau oder die Sachlichkeit," draws on a broad cast of characters to explore how the functionalization of architecture—per the late modernist mantra "form follows function"—stands in tension with architecture's ability to offer sustained structures of meaning. Chapter 4, "Structural Engineering and the Architectonics of The Sleepwalkers," proposes Broch's trilogy as essentially architectural, pointing to the author's conscious creation of a built textual environment.

McGaughey's thorough analysis of The Sleepwalkers evidences her skill as a close reader, but several well-developed discussions stand out as particularly impactful. By drawing on Loos to embed architectural coding in the tradition of the modernist language crisis, her study forges a concrete link between architectural theory and a paradigmatic modernist literary event. While literature and architecture create spaces of intelligibility, agreement, and communication, the resulting unintelligibility of architectural spaces in Broch's trilogy designates architecture as a cypher for linguistic crisis. The link between architecture and language thus enables McGaughey to simultaneously document architectural crisis as diegetic motif and the language crisis as formal challenge within Broch's trilogy. Additionally, the treatment of Hanna Wendling in chapter...