UC Irvine

The present study will examine how the scene, as both a formal entity and a mode of social organization, is transformed within the space of the Anglo-American novel beginning at the turn of the twentieth century. With the advent of film in the late 1880s, the scene achieves autonomy from its longstanding service to plot, in part because of the technical limitations of the new medium, and in part because the chief innovation of film was not its storytelling but its capacity to depict movement. Film, in effect, demonstrates the viability of the scene as an aesthetic object in its own right. Practitioners and critics of the novel follow suit. Percy Lubbock inaugurates the decade of High Modernism in 1921 with an elaboration of Henry James’s “scenic method.” What Lubbock reveals, and delivers to experimentalists like Woolf and Joyce, is that the scene in the novel need not, like its cousins in theater and film, prioritize spatial proximity as its means of assembly. Situated in time, the scene’s unity is a function of its evanescence, which enables an array of experiments in holding it together: affect, memory, and sensation become the forces that crystallize scenes. More than purely formal innovations, these experiments in scenic organization both endow the novel with the versatility needed to grasp the fluidity of social experience in urban modernity and enable it to propose models of social organization that are not predicated on presence, identity, or resemblance. For James, theater’s tendency to frame a delimited action in space allies it with the state of exception, as it creates the minimum order necessary for the law to apply. In the novel, however, the scene sustains temporally open relations between people, things, and places that render the law inoperative, and suggests an inclusive politics that avoids the gesture of relegating certain agents and materials to the status of backdrop. Both Edith Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald, explored in later chapters, likewise utilize the formal priority of the scene as a means of disarming repressive social forms and creating an entry point for new ones.