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Shaw Among the Modernists Shaw Among the Modernists Lawrence Switzky SHAW The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, Volume 31, 2011, pp. 133-148 (Article) Published by Penn State University Press For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/shaw/summary/v031/31.switzky.html Access provided by UFMG-Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (29 Jan 2014 15:34 GMT) Lawrence Switzky SHAW AMONG THE MODERNISTS [Freud] quoted Bernard Shaw from Man and Superman. “As a rule there is only one person an English girl hates more than her mother; and that’s her eldest sister.” In England that remark is fl ippant, a drawing-room witticism, an Oscar Wilde shocking paradox. In Germany, where Max Reinhardt put on Shaw’s plays along with Wedekind’s Spring Awakening and Gorky’s Lower Depths, it would be received with a difference. —A. S. Byatt, The Children’s Book Who, exactly, counts as Shaw’s contemporary? And is there any benefi t to thinking of him as a modernist, an outlier in the avant-garde, or both? Shaw was unquestionably contemporaneous with a particular coterie of late Victorians, from Sydney and Beatrice Webb and Samuel Butler to William Archer, Ellen Terry, and Gordon Craig. He may have been a contemporary of Ibsen and Zola and he was a generation behind Wagner (though a generation ahead of the tastes of his fellow Englishmen regarding the latter). There is an established Shavian “smart set,” with whom G.B.S. collaborated and corresponded; they appear in all the biographies and made him what he was. Then there are the fi gures that are more generally acknowledged as modernists and members of the European avant-garde and avant-guerre, many of whom knew Shaw (or at least knew of him) and often attempted to condemn him to an era of harmless “eminent Victorian” eccentricity: what Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound refer to in the inaugural issue of Blast, the organ of the British response to Futurism known as Vorticism, as the “years 1837 to 1900/abysmal inexcusable middle-class/(also Aristocracy and Proletariat).” 1 The parenthetical addition at the end of the line, which comically indicts every Victorian in a mire of class confl ict, is a strategy of supplementation and subtle self-contradiction that was the prerogative of the Vorticists, and, as I hope to show, of Shaw as well. Shaw lived an awfully long time. Although he worked alongside modernists and members of the avant-garde, what might be gained by placing him in those categories? SHAW 31_11_Switzky.indd 133 25/08/11 12:43 PM 134 lawrence switzky In the epigraph to this article, novelist A. S. Byatt proposes that Shaw ought to be thought of alongside more aggressively experimental Continental modernists, yet many English modernists saw Shaw less as a chameleon than as a relic, a malingering Victorian. When T. S. Eliot, in The Criterion, referred to the protagonist of Shaw’s Saint Joan as a “great middle- class reformer” and “a disciple of Nietzsche, Butler and every chaotic and immature intellectual enthusiasm of the later nineteenth century,” he was also launching a broadside against Shaw himself—and ousting him from the country club of twentieth-century experimental formalism. 2 With some exceptions, particularly regarding Shaw’s relationship to William Butler Yeats and James Joyce, Shaw’s critics have followed suit. In Shaw’s Sense of History, J. L. Wisenthal locates Shaw within traditions established by the Victorian historians Thomas Babington Macaulay and Thomas Carlyle. 3 “History” was an important perceptual category for the Victorians. But we have no comparable volume about Shaw’s sense of time, even though time, particularly the subjective experience of durée as explained by Henri Bergson, was an important subject for Shaw and the modernists. 4 One does not of course need to be a modernist or a member of the avant-garde to be a good artist. But since Shaw wrote plays, prefaces, broadsides, radio addresses, television plays, and fi lm scripts alongside various “contemporaries” who are often thought of as modernist or avant- garde, and who negotiated similar relationships between high culture and mass culture, as well as tradition and rupture, it seems worthwhile to begin to consider how Shaw might fi t into the jigsaw of British and Continental modernism. Toril Moi’s Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism (2006) argues that in order to recuperate Ibsen as a modernist and an experimental dramatist, we need to redefi ne modernism in terms of its historical emergence. For Moi, modernism, read through rather than despite Ibsen, is a reaction to “aesthetic idealism,” the congruence of the true, the good, and the beautiful that dominated nineteenth-century “offi cial” aesthetics. What Ibsen reveals about artistic history for Moi is that the explosion of formal experiments that accompanied the “birth of modernism” was a reaction not against mimetic realism, but against a regime of idealization in which Ibsen led the charge: “Ibsen, for his part, turns to the ordinary and the everyday, not as something that has to be overcome, exaggerated, or idealized, but as a sphere where we have to take on the task of building meaningful relationships.” 5 Moi’s distinction between idealism and realism has ready applicability to Shaw scholars, as does her diagnosis of aesthetic “realism” and “idealism” as terms that underwent radical alterations in denotation—in the case of realism, for instance, from Balzac’s depiction of the melodrama beneath superfi cial ordinariness to Flaubert’s critique of the dullness of everyday bourgeois life. But beyond the realist/idealist taxonomy of The Quintessence SHAW 31_11_Switzky.indd 134 25/08/11 12:43 PM shaw among the modernists 135 of Ibsenism, Moi also invites us to think about how modernism needs to be reconfi gured each time one wishes to accommodate any fi gure, even the most canonical, into the canon of modernism. By recuperating Shaw within the short-lived British prewar avant-garde, we might be able to recalibrate a diffuse, if academically overdetermined, period in artistic history by accommodating one of its more contentious citizens. Locating Shaw within modernism, in other words, might help to redefi ne modernism more expansively. Although this article will mostly take up Shaw’s relationship with Futurism and Vorticism as a case study of his modernist engagements and his resistance to simple categorization, Shaw’s example provides grounds for exploring how modernism in general toyed with both the rigidity and vagueness of categories, camps, movements, and historical periodization. Shaw’s response to the enormously publicized visit of the Futurists to England and the formation, in their wake, of what Samuel Feppis has called the “only indigenous British avant-garde” movement, Vorticism, provides a window into Shaw’s embattled modernist affi liations.6 I am going to avoid a programmatic defi nition of the avant-garde—another contentious and overdetermined category—in favor of a snapshot history of the Futurist movement in England, one of the founding moments in the Continental, and then the British, avant-garde. 7 In December 1910, Filippo Tommaso (F. T.) Marinetti, the front man for the Italian Futurists and one of the pioneers of the modernist manifesto, caused a sensation by reading the fi rst Futurist Manifesto (written the year before in Paris), in French, at the Lyceum Club for Women. This was followed by an onslaught of Futurist publications in major British journals, Futurist visual art exhibitions at a number of prominent British galleries, Futurist performance art on London stages and at private parties, and—perhaps most surprisingly, given the movement’s masculinist posturing—the participation of some Futurists in suffrage demonstrations. Edward Comentale has colorfully documented the ecstatic early reception of Marinetti in London: “London fell in love with him. The primitive destruction of values titillated the British; each new speech, each new painting, was greeted with gleeful cries of indignation.” 8 Marinetti, in turn, was galvanized by the internal contradictions of the British bourgeoisie, whom he imagined as inhabiting a Venice of the north. He saw their energy and industriousness as an outgrowth of their contradictions: their simultaneous fascination with progress and stability, their feverish economic productivity and their social prudery. Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis were among Futurism’s earliest champions and, eventually, its most vitriolic enemies, chiefl y on nationalistic grounds, though Pound apparently nabbed the image of the “vortex”— “The Vortex is the point of maximum energy. All experience rushes into the Vortex”—from a 1914 book by the Italian Futurist Boccioni, Pittura Scultura SHAW 31_11_Switzky.indd 135 25/08/11 12:43 PM 136 lawrence switzky Futuriste. 9 In the founding manifesto of Futurism, Marinetti described the emergence of the Futurist program as inspired by the sound of motorcars outside a museumlike enclosure: “We caught the sudden roar of ravening motorcars, right there beneath our windows. We approached the three panting beasts to stroke their burning breasts, full of loving admiration.” 10 Lewis framed his Oedipal revolt against Vorticism in terms of Italy’s backwardness; its fetishization of machines was a function of coming late to the world of mass-produced goods. In his essay “Automobilism,” Lewis names England as the rightful birthplace of industrialism as opposed to the swampy, preindustrial Mediterranean: The extraordinary childishness of the Latins over mechanical inventions, aeroplanes, machinery, etc., is familiar to anyone who has lived in France or Italy. For everything that is rubbishy puerile in the Latin temperament machinery has come as an immense toy. They are in a perpetual state of vulgar and gesticulating ‘émerveillement. ’ Now, England practically invented this civilization that Signor Marinetti has come to preach to us about.
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