The Shadow Modernism of Weird Tales: Experimental Pulp Fiction in the Age of Modernist Reflection
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THE SHADOW MODERNISM OF WEIRD TALES: EXPERIMENTAL PULP FICTION IN THE AGE OF MODERNIST REFLECTION by JASON CARNEY Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY May 2014 CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES We hereby approve the dissertation of Jason Carney Candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy*. Committee Chair Kurt Koenigsberger Committee Member Michael Clune Committee Member Mary Grimm Committee Member Timothy Wutrich Date of Defense March 21st, 2014 *We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein. i Table of Contents i Acknowledgements ii Abstract iii Introduction 1 Chapter 2: Loveman and Lovecraft 20 Chapter 3: The Shadow Modernism of Weird Tales 41 Chapter 4: The Age of Modernist Reflection 62 Chapter 5: The Visible Invisibility of the Pulp Magazine Marketplace 83 Chapter 6: Clark Ashton Smith: The Bitterest of the Poets 105 Chapter 7: Clark Ashton Smith and Modernism as Sensational Excess 120 Chapter 8: Robert E. Howard and the Ephemerality of Civilization 142 Chapter 9: The Populism of Robert E. Howard as Modernist Reflection 162 Chapter 10: Lovecraft, the Negative Sublime, and the Science of Modernism 188 Chapter 11: The Transgressions of Lovecraft's Fictional Modernists 208 Conclusion: Lovecraft's Final Story, Or, Am I On This Planet? 227 Bibliography 239 ii Acknowledgements I could not have completed this dissertation without the help of many people, too many to list. I would like to highlight a few of them. I would like to thank my committee members. Mary Grimm: for giving me the courage to study popular literature. Michael Clune: for his theories about what fiction and literature can do. Timothy Wutrich: for the enrichment during revision his perspective as a classicist afforded me. I want to give particular thanks to my director, Kurt Koenigsberger, who met and conversed with me regularly about this project. Our conversations were always extremely helpful. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Nicole, for her support through the process. iii The Shadow Modernism of Weird Tales: Experimental Pulp Fiction in the Age of Modernist Reflection Abstract by JASON CARNEY "The Shadow Modernism of Weird Tales: Experimental Pulp Fiction in the Age of Modernist Reflection” is a study of the fiction and poetry published during the age of modernist reflection (1923-1938) in the once ubiquitous pulpwood magazine, a medium typified by such titles as Black Mask, Dime Detective, Astounding Stories, Science Wonder Stories, Adventure, and many others. It treats a specific pulp magazine, Weird Tales (1923-1951), which in its emphasis on formal experimentation and technical innovation echoes in surprising ways modernist little magazines such as The Dial, Poetry, and The Little Review. It analyzes the short stories, poetry, and memoirs that fictionalize modernists, modernist art objects, and experiences of modern art published in Weird Tales in relation to canonical accounts of modernism in the criticism of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, H.L. Mencken, Malcolm Cowley, Edmund Wilson and other associated theorists and critics of the movement, particularly Viktor Shklovsky. It considers the rhetoric of fiction of key Weird Tales writers such as H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard, and frames it as a deliberately grotesque suturing together of a modernist aesthetic with conventionalized realism. It argues that the ambitious writers constellating around Weird Tales were animated by a troubled yet productive relationship with the aesthetic project of modernism. By situating their fiction in the context of certain poetry, correspondence, and criticism published in and around Weird Tales, this dissertation demonstrates how the writers studied sought to fictionalize modernist art objects as enduring forms that reveal "the occult truth of the ordinary," the visible yet not self-evident idea that ordinary phenomena are ordinary only temporarily. 1 Introduction Getting Behind the Veil: Poetics of Pulp and De-Reification of Literary Effect of Reality "Behind the veil of all the hieratic and mystical allegories of ancient doctrines, behind the darkness and strange ordeals of all initiations, under the seal of all sacred writings, in the ruins of Nineveh or Thebes, on the crumbling stones of old temples and on the blackened visage of the Assyrian or Egyptian sphinx, in the monstrous or marvelous paintings which interpret to the faithful of India the inspired pages of the Vedas, in the cryptic emblems of our old books on alchemy, in the ceremonies practiced at reception by all secret societies, there are found indications of a doctrine which is everywhere the same and everywhere carefully concealed." -Introduction to Eliphas Levi's Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Rituals (1910) The Unpoetry of Pulp In order to understand the popular writing we sometimes refer to as pulp and its fundamental relationship to violating the literary effect of reality, to "de-reification," we must first come to terms with the central quality that invalidated it in the past as an object of serious literary criticism, a subject of intensive (aesthetic) rather than extensive (sociological) reading: its "unpoetry," its crude "representationality," its non-theoretical reliance on a socially and commercially conventionalized rhetoric of fiction, i.e., its naive use of referential language to create imaginary, virtual worlds of the ordinary and extraordinary. In contradistinction to the diverse plot elements of pulp--the hardboiled detective, the flying saucer, the spellbinding sorcerer--the literary techniques executed in these types of writing are often dismissed as homogeneous, as a hardly distinguishable 2 repetition of "conventionalized realisms." Compared to the minimalism of Hemingway or the lyricism of his sometime patron, Stein--a formal rhetoric where the "medium" of literary language is largely the message--pulp fiction seem oblivious to the "textual" nature of the literary sign and to concentrate on the imaginary "extra-textual" signified or the virtual it evokes. Put another way, pulp relates in an "unpoetic" fashion to the "ready- to-hand" aspects of language rather than its "present-at-hand" aspects. Pulp mimetically represents, fictionalizes a world; its other, the high literary text, has been understood as working against this representational function by exposing linguistic signifiers and the literary effects of reality they produce as aesthetic form. To refer to the formal rhetorics of pulp as "conventionalized realism" is not, at base, to dismiss that technique as an unfit subject of inquiry. "Realism" is a complex technique. J.R.R. Tolkien appropriately assessed "literary realism" when he referred to his "realism" as "subcreation" and seriously described it as a form of emulating god, a form of worship. Moreover, the extent to which pulp works succeed in creating literary effects of reality and even reifying their virtual worlds has merited productive scholarly attention of late, as exemplified by Michael Saler's study of the literary virtual worlds of Doyle, Lovecraft, and Tolkien, As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Pre-history of Virtual Reality (2012). Instead, to emphasize the "conventional" nature of the rhetoric of fiction of pulp is to theorize its widespread unattractiveness and superficiality to literary criticism and literary elites in the past, an unartistic appearance that demands distracted "extensive" reading practices rather than attentive "intensive" or scholastic modes of reading. Scott McCracken, in his celebrated Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction (1998), sums up the interpretive constraint we must absolutely disregard if we are to 3 proceed productively here: "Despite their differences, all theorists of mass culture agree that popular culture cannot be understood in terms of individual texts" (24). Two arguments rationalize and justify modern literary criticism's contempt for "pulp," justify "extensive" reading over "intensive" reading, and they are linked to distinctive formalist and ideological perspectives. Case studies of the formalist apologist (e.g. Ezra Pound and T.E. Hulme) suggest that such critics believe that literary criticism is animated by an awareness of the aesthetic and not representational/referential capacities of literary language, an awareness spawned in the early decades of the twentieth-century; thus, pulp is unworthy from this perspective for its lack of formal or technical complexity and sophistication, its indifference to the unique essence of literary language as self-referential textuality. This explains Pound's awkward celebration of the non-translated hieroglyph or Chinese ideogram as a sufficient example of, and even pure form of, poetry. Considering cases of ideological apologists (e.g. Ortega y Gasset, Adorno, and later, Bourdieu) suggests that such critics have identified a particular "anti-human" and "anti-representational" taste that derives not from "pulp's" indifference to the textual and formal potential of literary language and narrative but from its contaminating alliance with the profane, the Real figured as degraded. The sociological, real or virtual, referents entailed in the naively representational language of pulp are rationalized as evidencing a quasi-partisan commitment to the fleshy elements of the "bodily," the "market," the "propagandistic," the somatic pleasures of entertainment.