Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction

Epilogue: Open Plan

An architect of communication in the modern novel loves walls, partitions, and channels that organize vectors of movement and transfer. These structures of division—inside from outside, private from social space—indicate and make possible that from which they are divided. Corridors also connect. Thus, when Virginia Woolf draws the form of To the Lighthouse she imagines a structure analogous to both house and closed system. Ann Banfield suggests that this spatial diagram points to a constitutive multiplicity of form encoded by the corridor: “‘break’ and ‘bridge,’” as well as the rendering of time as “in-between.”1 This is a conspicuous assertion of the conduit in a moment of modernity now known for its wireless imagination, and as I hope to have shown, it is not alone. These channels, moreover, operate on the level of self-description that Woolf’s diagram makes most literal: novels are not only material artifacts of EPILOGUE Open Plan 171 Figure 24. “Two blocks separated by a corridor.” Adapted fromVirginia Woolf’s notes for To the Lighthouse. Cited in Ann Banfield, “Time Passes.” communication, but also produce that communicativeness discursively through reference to other materialities. The insistent location of novelistic communication in places of passage constitutes the crucial reflexive gesture of the wayward texts of American modernism. It can also be described as their corridoricity. The novels for which I have been providing an account enact their own medial operations in and as corridors. Michel Serres includes this form in the fable-world of The Parasite as the character of Poros, who appears at the end of Serres’s observations on the noisiness of modern communication. He asks: “But who is Poros, who comes out of the black box? Alas! he is the passage itself, the path. Poros is the name of the passage.”2 A certain horror, or vertigo , attends this rendering of self-reference as an embodied labyrinth, but also a kind of glee. Serres concludes that “the only information that comes out of the black box is that there is a channel through which information passes. The only message that comes out of the path is that there is a path by which messages pass. A thread comes out of the box. The only thing that passes in the channel is the name of the channel.”3 What amounts to the corridoricity of passage in these novels, or the naming of channels as channels, is also part of the task of a reflexive modernity: the self-thematization of communication as communication becomes also the making visible of modernity to itself in its localized and specific forms. Later in the twentieth century, after the self-theorizations of the corridor I have been discussing, the unchecked proliferation of corridors takes on a more overt aspect of horror. When the speaker of Regina Barreca’s 1986 poem “Nighttime Fires” looks into her father’s eyes, she gets her metaphors for accessing interiority all wrong: “I could see his quiet face in the / rearview mirror, eyes like hallways filled with smoke.”4 First, she mediates her gaze using a tool usually assigned to self-regard (although appropriately a “rearview” mirror), and she sees opaque hallways rather than windows to the soul. By doing so, she accesses a long history of spatial figures standing in for the interiors they contain or reflect, be they windows, corridors, or mirrors. She also calls attention to the refusal of these figurations to operate as transparent , uninterested conduits. At stake in shaping the spatial representation of interiority here is the shape of that interiority in the first place, and how its form interacts with and is encoded in its mediations . Eyes “like hallways” represent the conduit to itself, a process of 172 epilogue vertigo-inducing observation in which the architectural form can only reflect itself into infinity. Barreca’s hallway eyes instance their uncomfortable reflexivity as a problem specific to the medium: the simile renders the overtly literary project of making interiority available both literary and literal, and demonstrates how unsteady the relationship between the two may be. This in turn may be a somewhat routine slippage characteristic of a form of literary self-reflection that structurally examines itself through structures, but it also puts some pressure on a tendency in accounts of literature’s operations as a medium to take sides. The corridors I have been...