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Domestic interiors, decorative objects and their multiple temporalities. The case of the Dutch modernist novel

Abstract In reaction to Marvin Trachtenberg’s ideas about the atemporal and chronicidal nature of modernist architecture (2010), this article charts the temporal heterogeneity characteristic of the domestic interior as it is represented in the Dutch modernist novel in the interwar period. Although, on par with modernist architectural theories, the new novel finds itself involved in a battle against the overfurnished domestic interiors typical of the nineteenth-century realist novel, writers de facto react in very different ways to the so-called “fashionable artistic interior”, full of the most diverse antiques and curiosities, as it was propagated as a model for the tasteful decoration of houses in the last decades of the nineteenth century. If the Joycean novel Meneer Visser’s Hellevaart (Mr Visser’s Descent into Hell) (1936) by Simon Vestdijk can be read as a straightforward rejection of the over-stuffed domestic interior, the temporal regime of tradition and the corresponding bourgeois ideology, Menno Ter Braak’s Hampton Court (1931) offers a more ambivalent account of the museum-like interior and the historical decorative object. As the novel displays at least three different (and partly incompatible) temporal regimes (from prehistorical time, over historical time, to the time of the present), it is argued, it can be read as a modernist critique of modernism’s atemporality and chronicide.