Modernism and Environmental Recovery a Dissertation Submitted

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara Places of Rest: Modernism and Environmental Recovery A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in English by Andrew Kalaidjian Committee in charge: Professor Enda Duffy, Chair Professor Bishnupriya Ghosh Professor Teresa Shewry June 2015 The dissertation of Andrew Kalaidjian is approved. _____________________________________________ Teresa Shewry _____________________________________________ Bishnupriya Ghosh _____________________________________________ Enda Duffy, Committee Chair May 2015 Places of Rest: Modernism and Environmental Recovery Copyright © 2015 by Andrew Kalaidjian iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Chapter I includes material reprinted with permission from “Positive Inertia: D. H. Lawrence and the Aesthetics of Generation.” Journal of Modern Literature 38.1 (Fall 2014). 38-55. © Indiana University Press, 2015. Chapter IV includes material reprinted with permission from the essay “‘The Good Life Will Start Again’: Rest, Return, and Remainder” in the essay collection Rhys Matters edited by Kerry Johnston and Mary Wilson, published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Support from the UC Humanities Network, the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, Albert and Elaine Borchard, the Humanities Division and the English Department of UCSB allowed for archival research and release from teaching duties to focus on writing. Images from the Djuna Barnes Collection at University of Maryland are used with permission and are ©Copyright, The Authors League Fund and St. Bride’s Church, as joint literary executors of the Estate of Djuna Barnes. The image of gold bars from the Royal Mint Refinery is reproduced with the permission of The Trustees of The Rothschild Archive Trust Limited. Other images are used with permission from The National Archives and The Wildlife Trusts. Thanks, above all, to my dedicated committee Enda Duffy, Bishnupriya Ghosh and Teresa Shewry, for their tireless engagement with the project, illuminating insights and continual support to see the project through to completion. iv Vita of Andrew Kalaidjian EDUCATION Doctor of Philosophy in English, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2015 Master of Arts in English, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2010 Bachelor of Arts in English, Columbia University, English, 2006 PROFESSIONAL EMPLOYMENT 2008–2012: Teaching Assistant, Department of English, University of California, Santa Barbara 2012–2014: Teaching Assistant, Department of Writing, University of California, Santa Barbara Summer 2012, Summer 2014: Teaching Associate, Department of English, University of California, Santa Barbara PUBLICATIONS “Positive Inertia: D. H. Lawrence and the Aesthetics of Generation.” Journal of Modern Literature 38.1 (Fall 2014): 38–55. Print. “The Hardest Task: Work and the Modernist Novel.” Modern Horizons 4 (June 2013). Web. “‘The Good Life Will Start Again’: Rest, Return, and Remainder in Good Morning, Midnight” in Rhys Matters: New Critical Perspectives. Eds. Kerry Johnson and Mary Wilson. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Print. AWARDS 2014–2015 UC Graduate Fellow in the Humanities 2014 Albert and Elaine Borchard European Studies Fellowship 2013 Richard Helgerson Graduate Student Achievement Award 2013 UCSB Humanities Research Grant 2013 UCSB Dean’s Advancement Fellowship 2011 ASLE Graduate Student Travel Award 2006 Seymour Brick Prize in Playwriting v ABSTRACT Places of Rest: Modernism and Environmental Recovery by Andrew Kalaidjian Places of Rest outlines a modernist aesthetic of slowness, immediacy and introspection in relation to a cultural history of nature protection in the United Kingdom. It draws on the archives of the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves, founded in 1912, which invoked a threatening rhetoric of Nature’s total exhaustion under the march of modern development. Literary modernism’s presentation of human fragility amidst exhausted environments challenged problematic industrial and imperial narratives of unlimited progress and generated new modes of ecological awareness in the 20th century. Faced with the restless and inescapable forces of modernization, modernist writers shifted away from the withdrawn, “restful contemplation” of the Romantics and moved towards an increasingly materialist attention to the world as an immersive stream of human and nonhuman connections that are interdependent and hierarchical in problematic ways. The Anglophone novel, as it develops through D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Jean Rhys and Chinua Achebe, becomes increasingly attuned to constructions of personal, social and planetary identity in relation to environmental exploitation. Highlighting the physical limitations that deny autonomy to human life, these writers communicate the unsustainability of relentless modernization and foreground the importance of recovery for communal wellbeing. vi Table of Contents Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………1 I. Nature’s Reserves: Rural Exhaustion, Inertia and Generative Aesthetics…………………37 II. Urban Environs: The Politics of Shared Atmosphere in the Metropolis………………….70 III. Waste Lands: Late Modernism as Dark Pastoral……………………………………….112 IV. Decolonizing Ecology: Global Unrest and Postwar Environmentalism…….………….157 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………….206 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………..213 Notes………………………………………………………………………………………..230 vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Carr Bush at Woodwalton Fen Nature Reserve……………………………….........4 Figure 2. Gold Bars, Royal Mint Refinery.….……………………………………………..115 Figure 3. Large Copper Butterfly…………………………………………………………...124 Figure 4. George Mason, Keeper of Woodwalton Fen……………………………………..125 Figure 5. The Beast…………………………………………………………………………145 Figure 6. “Vagrant Spring”..………………………………………………………………..155 Figure 7. Nature Preservation in Post-War Reconstruction.………………………………..160 Figure 8. Imperial Road — Red Gully under Landslides.………………………………….178 Figure 9. Cameron Road, Ikoyi……………………………………………………………..192 viii Introduction Shall I at least put my lands in order? —T. S. Eliot. The Waste Land T. S. Eliot perhaps expected no answer to this question. It was, however, taken quite literally by British environmentalists in efforts to protect significant areas of the United Kingdom between 1912, with the formation of the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves, and 1949, with the establishment of the Nature Conservancy. What began as an avant garde pursuit met with repeated setbacks during WWI and the interwar period. Yet the early efforts of these self-fashioned “modern” environmentalists provided the framework for a national movement that would firmly resonate during WWII and proliferate throughout Great Britain in the postwar era. The case for protecting nature required new linguistic and imaginative registers in order to communicate the cultural value of reserve and preservation. While environmentalists largely began with economic registers, citing the “value” of putting Nature in “trust” for future generations, it was not until activists moved towards a rhetoric of Nature as a place of rest, recovery and regeneration for a traumatized society suffering from the ravages of war that protection efforts firmly resonated with a wider public in the postwar era. The interest in protecting Nature grew in relation to the increasingly exhaustive and exhausting conditions of modern life. While critics often cite the influence of Romantic writers such as Wordsworth and Shelley on early British environmentalism, the work of modernist writers to challenge the rampant anthropocentrism of the first half of the 20th century remains a crucial site of critical neglect. Places of Rest argues that literary modernism’s presentation of human 1 fragility in relation to exhausted environments challenged problematic industrial and imperial narratives of unlimited progress and generated new modes of ecological awareness in the 20th century. Literary modernism is too often synonymous with an autonomous or insular “art for art’s sake.” A world to itself, the modernist text has little need for “nature” or the external realities of the physical world. Against this view, Places of Rest connects the formal innovations of modernist writers to rapid changes occurring in the surrounding environment. I argue that new narrative techniques that represent slowness, immediacy and introspection provide an early critique of resource consumption and ecological degradation. Modernist literature, read ecocritically, presents a shift from viewing humans as transcendent and autonomous masters of nature to susceptible, immersed and engaged with their environment. T. E. Hulme’s assertion that humans are intermixed with the earth, T. S. Eliot’s iconic fragmentation of psyches and landscapes in The Waste Land, D. H. Lawrence’s presentation of the exhausting effects of industrialization on rural England in The Rainbow, James Joyce’s overlapping of atmospheres in the urban environment of Ulysses, Djuna Barnes’s mixture of creatural life in Nightwood, Jean Rhys’s blending of mental spaces and built environments in Good Morning, Midnight, the work of modernist writers in the early 20th century was not necessarily to spread a spirit of respect for nature, but to interrogate humanity’s constructions of identity and community in relation to environmental control, a project that remains indispensible for contemporary environmental justice issues. Places of Rest highlights ecological thought among modernist writers

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