The Death of the Character in Modern Fiction and Criticism

Nathan Murray

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto

Nathan Murray

Doctor of Philosophy

English Department University of Toronto

2019

Abstract

This study is a critical history of the conflict over literary character in the first half of the twentieth century. It explores the tension between conceiving of character either as a linguistic construct or as a simulated person. Rejecting the teleological metanarrative that modernist characters represented the self more authentically than earlier writers, the study treats that metanarrative as a mythos and reveals the intellectual labour that modernist writers and critics put into constructing it. The first chapter deals with A.C. Bradley, F.R. Leavis, T.S. Eliot, G.

Wilson Knight, and L.C. Knights and their debates over representation of character in Hamlet. Bradley emerges as a nuanced critic, who, far from seeing Hamlet as merely the imitation of a real person, recognizes the role of the reader in filling narrative gaps, smoothing over inconsistencies and errors, and, ultimately, accepting the incompleteness of the text. The second chapter deals with the disagreement between, on one side, E.M. Forster and Lytton

Strachey, who both assert the power of text to communicate both fictional and historical people, and, on the other, Virginia Woolf, who in her criticism and experimental biographies challenges readers’ assumptions that we can ever know another individual – even a fictional one. The final two chapters explore grassroots organizations of readers who resisted modern trends in criticism because they viewed a character’s reality as an essential aspect of a great work of literature. First

are the Holmesians, who circulated mock-essays with the conceit that Sherlock Holmes and Dr.

Watson were real people. Second are the first Bloomsday celebrants, who followed the path of the protagonists of James Joyce’s Ulysses through the streets of Dublin, reading the work as a passionate national epic. This model of reading character emphasizes the vivid feeling of reality that simulated persons produce and rejects any attempt to reduce characters to a mere collection of words on a page. The legacy of this divergence between enthusiastic lay readers and academics can still be felt in the academy today and demonstrates the urgent need for a new understanding of how character is communicated, and how character is read.

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Acknowledgements The writing of this dissertation was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Graduate Scholarship, an Ontario Graduate Scholarship, and a University of Toronto Fellowship. This dissertation is a pot that has been stirred by many cooks. A primary debt of gratitude is owed to Greig Henderson, who has helmed this project since 2017, and in that time, impressed me with his hard work, thorough feedback, and unwavering guidance through some difficult times. My other committee members, Garry Leonard and Nick Mount, have provided invaluable feedback in shaping the final product, helping transform it into a polished work. I also want to thank Deidre Lynch, who helped develop this project with me and supervised it until her departure to Harvard. I must also thank all the former members of the committee, many of whom offered important guidance before departing the University of Toronto, including Sarah Wilson, Mark Knight, and Joshua Gang. I wish to thank Allan Hepburn, my External Appraiser, for his generous and thoughtful assessment of my work, and Larry Switzky, my Internal Appraiser, for his insightful comments. My years in Toronto have been challenging but rewarding years, and I owe a great deal to many friends who have read and re-read sections of the dissertation, including Matt Risling, Elisa Tersigni, Katherine Magyarody, Joanne Leow, Claire Battershill, and Justine Leach. Your feedback and friendship has helped shape my work in many ways. I also want to thank my friends who shared camaraderie, offered insights and extended support through the last seven years, including Jon Kerr, Kaelyn Kaoma, Aaron Donachuk, Jeff Espie, Irene Mangoutas, Noa Reich, Cristina D’Amico, Elissa Gurman, Giuliano Gullotti, Leslie Wexler, and Matt Schneider. You all have helped to make this time an enjoyable one. I have also been lucky enough to share much of this time in Toronto with my brothers, Peter and Scott, and I have treasured your company. I also need to thank my parents, Christine Johnson and James Murray. You helped inspire a love of reading in me and a desire for knowledge, and offered unwavering stability, love and support to me growing up, which shaped who I am today. Your thoughtfulness and moral example have provided me with a model of who I have sought to be. Just as importantly, I want to acknowledge and thank you for the emotional and financial support you have offered me throughout this degree, without which it would not be complete. I love you both. A heartfelt thanks is also due to my grandmother Elizabeth and grandfather Ken, who have also provided love and support in many ways throughout my life. I also want to thank my mother and father-in-law, Lorraine Auclair and Thomas Beauchamp, who in the years since I have met them have become an essential part of my life, and who have also provided emotional and financial support to our family. Your generosity of spirit is inspiring and I cannot thank you enough. Finally, and most importantly, I want to thank my wife Melissa and my daughter Evelyn, without whom none of this would have been done. Melissa, your curiosity and sharpness of intellect have shaped my mental life for ten amazing years. Nothing in this world has defined me or my work more than my partnership with you. I am who I am because of you and Evelyn, and your love offered me both support and motivation when the completion of this work seemed impossible. This dissertation is dedicated to the both of you.

Table of Contents “I was perhaps not altogether guiltless of trailing my coat”: Hamlet and Character in Modern Criticism ...... 1 A.C. Bradley and the Reader ...... 8 T.S. Eliot, the Objective Correlative, and De-Centred Character ...... 16 G. Wilson Knight and Spatial Reading………………………………………………………..21 Tracing Character: Plan of the Present Work ...... 26 Homo Fictus: Character, Person and Biography in the Bloomsbury Circle ...... 33 E.M. Forster and Homo Fictus ...... 38 What Can Be Said about Jacob? ...... 43 Flush and the Legibility of the Subject ...... 50 Orlando and the Exploded Self ...... 60 The Best Loved Man Who Never Lived: Character, Anti-Modernism, and the Holmesians ...... 68 Ronald Knox and the Hermeneutics of Trust ...... 77 Dorothy L. Sayers and Serious Play ...... 85 T.S. Eliot and the Modern ‘Real’ Character ...... 93 S.C. Roberts and Scientific Character ...... 98 Playing Bloom: The Characters of Ulysses, Irish Criticism, and Bloomsday ...... 105 “I am other I now”: Character in Ulysses ...... 110 Stuart Gilbert, Frank Budgen, and the Schema ...... 115 Character, Author, Authority ...... 119 “A Bash in the Tunnel”: Envoy reclaims Joyce ...... 122 The Bloomsday “Pilgrimace” ...... 130 O’Nolan and the Overthrow of Joyce ...... 135 After 1954: Bloomsday’s Legacy ...... 137 Conclusion ...... 143 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………….148

List of Figures

Figure 1: The Gilbert Schema Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce’s Ulysses, (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963), 41.

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Chapter One: “I was perhaps not altogether guiltless of trailing my coat”: Hamlet and Character in Modern Criticism

Why is it that between 1919 and 1960, a significant number of British academic critics agreed that either Hamlet the character or Hamlet the play was a failure? Unlike in almost any other period in English history, with the possible exception of the mid-seventeenth century, the play and its central character were poorly regarded by England’s best-known critics. Hamlet’s naysayers included T.S. Eliot, G. Wilson Knight, F.R. Leavis, L.C. Knights, J. Dover Wilson and J.M Robertson. Eliot declared the play “most certainly an artistic failure," and Wilson Knight attacked the main character by labeling him an “inhuman presence [. . .] centred on death.”1 Subsequent readers, including P.R. Grover, Kenneth Muir, and Maurice Charney, generally portray these mid-century writers as prim critics of poetry who found the rough edges and melodramatic aspects of Elizabethan tragedy distasteful.2 Charney, to give the most recent example, suggests that “the harshness and insolubility of [Hamlet], its preoccupation with sex and death, its insistence on revenge and murder even of the mostly innocent, its madness and histrionic posturing all offend Knights and other Scrutiny critics.”3 However, moral conservatism was not the root of the Scrutiny critics’ issue with Hamlet or Hamlet. In fact the critical attack on Hamlet was not motivated by an antipathy towards Hamlet himself so much as by what Hamlet represented to nineteenth and early twentieth-century criticism: the well-made character whose psychological detail and coherence made him feel like a ‘real person’ to readers. Invested as they were in redefining the relation between exterior personal character and the self, Eliot et al would alter critical perception of fictional character for generations, with lasting consequences. A specific target of modern critics was the popular reading of Hamlet by A.C. Bradley found in his 1904 Shakespearean Tragedy. Bradley discusses Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and

1 T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921), 96. G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy (London: Methuen & Co, 1949), 55. 2 Charney, Maurice. Hamlet’s Fictions. New York and London: Routledge, 1988. Grover, P.R. “The Ghost of Dr. Johnson: L. C. Knights and D. A. Traversi on Hamlet.” Essays in Criticism 17, no. 2 (1967): 143–57. Muir, Kenneth. “Recent Studies in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama.” Studies in English Literature 2, no. 2 (Spring 1962): 241–54. 3 Charney, Hamlet’s Fictions, 6.

King Lear as fundamentally realistic narratives concerned primarily with the experience of the titular tragic heroes. Bradley frequently calls attention to the inconsistencies that confront readers within the plays as evidence of subtler elements of the characters’ backstories. While most discussion of this conflict considers this question in the context of Shakespeare studies, I aim to cast the debate between Bradley, Eliot, and Knight as an essentially twentieth-century conflict. In accounts of Shakespeare’s role within Modernism, numerous scholars have recognized Hamlet’s role as a model for new understanding of human character.4 The character of Hamlet is also central to Modernist conceptions of self.5 Freud uses Hamlet to illustrate the Oedipus complex, D.H. Lawrence describes the prince as the “the convulsed reaction of the mind from the flesh, of the spirit from the self,” and James Joyce, by way of Stephen Dedalus, expounds a theory of Hamlet as the self-siring progenitor of the character of the English race.6 Indeed, Hamlet's alienation, self-doubt, and self-criticism would appear to make him a spiritual predecessor to the age. Through his madness, “Hamlet from himself be ta'en away.”7 He is thus a perfect model for the modernist hero who asks “am I now I?”, as Leopold Bloom does in Ulysses.8 It may therefore be surprising to learn just how hostile modernist criticism was to the figure in the mid-twentieth century. At bottom, these critics rejected Hamlet because the traditional criteria of literary valuation that were dominant in English criticism could not value both Hamlet and The Waste Land. In order to produce a criticism which celebrated the work of the high modernists, Eliot and his associates needed to drastically change exactly which elements of literature were indicative of a successful work. This meant changing the character of literature itself. A great modern character did not have to be instantly recognizable and marked by distinctive quirks. Instead, the

4 Including in Hugh Grady, Shakespeare and Modernity: Early Modern to Millennium. (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), Richard Halpern, Shakespeare Among the Moderns (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), and Cary DiPietro, Shakespeare and Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 5 In the recent Modernism: Keywords, Hamlet is the only fictional person that receives his own entry. Melba Cuddy-Keane, Adam Hammond, and Alexandra Peat, “Hamlet,” Modernism: Keywords (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 107-110. 6 D. H. Lawrence, Twilight in Italy and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 144. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Vintage, 1986). 7 William Shakespeare, “Hamlet,” in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co, 2008), 5.2.171. Subsequent citations will refer to act, scene, and line from this edition. 8 Joyce, Ulysses, 137.

great characters in this new system of thought had to function as symbols first and people second. Accounts of the debate over character in twentieth-century criticism typically portray the Bradleyan mode of character criticism as discredited to the point of extinction.9 Bradley used, they claim, a naïve and overly trusting method that gives too much credit to the author’s power of creation. However, Bradley’s harshest critics tend to overlook the sophistication of Bradley’s argument. The stereotype of Bradley’s work, a product of F.R. Leavis’s antagonistic misreading, is that Bradley is unable to distinguish between real people and fictional characters. As a result, Bradley does not often receive the credit he deserves for analyzing characters as the collaborative product of the reader and author. Great characters, he asserts, are created when readers fill in the blanks left in the character by the author. Bradley recognizes that Hamlet is both a simulated person with whom readers can interact as if he were a real individual, and a group of words on the page that have been written and rewritten over time. Because the representation of Bradley that survives in contemporary criticism is a caricature, we have failed to recognize where his approach to character lives on in literature and criticism, either through direct influence or through cultural resonance. Bradley remains popular among readers (Shakespearean Tragedy has been continuously in print for over a century) because his critical approach empowers them to take their own positions on great literature, rather than deifying Shakespeare and other imposing literary figures. The goal of Eliot, Knight, and Knights’ attacks on Hamlet is to reject expressive realist modes of criticism more than it is to redefine the specific character of Hamlet. These scholars of Renaissance drama made important changes to the role of the critic, but their insistence on stamping out character-based ethical criticism restricted critical approaches to character for generations. This project does not seek to model a new way to resolve these reading styles through character-centric close readings, although I do assert that such a resolution would be necessary to capture the complexity of contemporary reading practices. I therefore do not read any literature in this project using a method that accentuates the reality of character. Instead this project provides a history of reading character in the twentieth century. I also do not claim that the

9 See Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980). Ian Hunter, “Reading Character,” Southern Review 16, no. 2 (July 1983). Michael Taylor, Shakespeare Criticism in the Twentieth Century (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (New York: Routledge, 2002). John Frow, Character and Person (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

Bradleyan approach to reading character is superior to that of the Symbolist critics who followed. However, simply by directing focus towards the mostly ignored Bradley and those who were either direct or indirect inheritors of his method in an account about modern character, I seek to change the shape of the conventional account. Omri Moses’ 2014 book Out of Character: Modernism, Vitalism, Psychic Life, for example, discusses the work of Eliot, James, and Stein in relation to Darwin, Nietzsche, and Bergson.10 Though Moses’ book is incisive and deeply engaged with the question of the represented self, its choice of subjects is reflective of the trend within Modernist studies to focus only on writers whose characters are written in an avant-garde, revolutionary style. By implication, these difficult writers made the most significant stylistic contribution to our contemporary understanding of character. The figures I consider in this dissertation often viewed opposing approaches to character with hostility. F.R. Leavis and the editors of Scrutiny warned that unless the English rejected Bradley’s methods and other intellectually inferior approaches, “the end of Western civilization [was] in sight.”11 Dorothy L. Sayers referred to the contemporary symbolist approaches of Leavis and others as “unscrupulous pseudo-scholarship.”12 What I hope to demonstrate through the juxtaposition of such disparate figures as Bradley, Eliot, Knights, Forster, Woolf, Knox, Sayers, Ryan, O’Brien, and Joyce, is the value of a holistic consideration of character in the twentieth century, an approach that recognizes the whole person that is implied by a realist depiction of character and the relationships that readers form with those implied persons. The continued focus of scholars on the canonical Modernist figures who helped deconstruct character, as well as the casting of their deconstruction as a heroic resistance to social and intellectual norms, presents a teleological narrative of character that obfuscates the more fragmented intellectual landscape of the time. In her 1998 book The Economy of Character, Deidre Lynch effectively challenges the traditional narrative that ‘round’ characters created by nineteenth-century novelists improved upon the ‘flat’ characters of eighteenth-century writers like Richardson, Swift, and Defoe. Instead, she argues, the two different character types reflect overarching concerns with the self in

10 Omri Moses, Out of Character: Modernism, Vitalism, Psychic Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014). 11The Editors, “Scrutiny: A Manifesto,” Scrutiny 1, no. 1 (May 1932), 2. 12Dorothy L. Sayers, “Foreword,” in Unpopular Opinions: Twenty-one Essays (London: Victor Gollancz, 1946), 7.

a developing capitalist and individualist society.13 Similarly, I argue that as critics, we must be suspicious of the metanarrative that Modernist literature was able to represent the self more authentically than its Victorian predecessors. Instead, as I will show, this metanarrative was constructed by authors and critics at the time in order to influence shared cultural values and traditions. In place of Bradley’s method, British academic critics advocated for a depersonalized reading that examines the utterances of dramatic characters “spatially” rather than chronologically, paying attention to the holistic and structural pattern of a work rather than working through a narrative in its original chronological order. Given its outsize status within world culture, Hamlet represented much more than a single play or character. Most of its conflict is internal to the protagonist’s character and lacks thereby any sort of perceptible “objective correlative:” “A set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”14 It thus became necessary for Eliot and subsequent critics to reject the play outright. While much subsequent criticism on Eliot, Wilson Knight, and Knights’ approach to Hamlet puzzles over their curious readings of the text, the reasoning becomes clearer when recontextualized within the contemporary dialogue. Indeed, most of these critics admitted, decades later, that they were taking provocative and slightly disingenuous stances that intentionally attempted to smear Hamlet. Their goal was to destroy his status as a ‘great’ character and, in doing so, to change the critical standards for ‘great’ literature. Post-Frye, evaluative criteria often seem alien to contemporary scholarly methods; what makes literature good or bad is apparently now a question best left to book reviewers and Harold Bloom. However, the change in criteria that I trace had a ripple effect that transformed British and Irish literary culture. The transition in the status of character as a criterion is consistent with the transition happening at the time for all criteria of quality: while these critics carefully discussed evaluative criteria, theory was coming for criticism, spearheaded by Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957). In the book, Frye refused to make value judgements about literature, providing classification instead of evaluation. Soon afterwards, the question of what

13Deidre Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 14 T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921), 98.

makes a work of literature good or bad would be rejected wholesale.15 Accounts of the debate over character are typically separate from accounts of the turn to theory, but they are inextricably linked.16 The rejection of character criticism made structuralist conceptions of character as a purely linguistic construction possible, while the turn away from evaluation made most of the questions asked within character criticism irrelevant. Two linked definitions of the word ‘character’ are important for the discussion that follows. The first is the character of a person, the outwardly perceptible qualities that together form his or her personality. Returning to Hamlet, when Polonius instructs Laertes to “see thou character” (1.3.59), the aged patriarch rattles off a long list of suggestions that that he believes will advance Laertes in French society. Laertes should, for example, give his thoughts “no tongue,” and while he should not be overly familiar with too many, he should clasp good friends close “with hoops of steel” (63). Polonius’ ideal of character include aspects we would traditionally include in an estimation of a person’s character, such as his reliability and honesty, but also more superficial aspects such as the quality of his wardrobe, “for the apparel oft proclaims the man” (72). Polonius’ advice is a famously mixed bag; he eventually concludes by telling Laertes “to thy own self be true” (78), implying that one’s character is determined by an honest and direct representation of the self. However, as Reina Green argues, this advice would be understood to be ironic and facile. The early modern character was understood to be unfixed, as changeable as a set of clothes and primarily determined by the shifting estimation of others.17 Michel de Montaigne would articulate the early modern conception of character most clearly when he warned that “to compose our character is our duty, not to compose books.”18 Outwardly perceptible personal character was a conscious composition, a text one wrote upon oneself. The second relevant definition of the term ‘character’ involves those figures that exist in fiction and drama, genres which aim to reproduce a person-like entity through text. The author of

15 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957). 16 With the exception of Blakey Vermeule, whose Why Do We Care About Literary Characters? explicitly identifies Knights as the progenitor of this line of thinking and links the turn to theory with the rejection of character. Blakey Vermeule, Why Do We Care About Literary Characters? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). 17 Reina Green, “Poisoned Ears and Paternal Advice in Hamlet,” Early Modern Literary Studies 11, no. 3 (January 2006). 18 Michel de Montaigne, “Of Experience,” in The Complete Essays of Montaigne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976), 851.

fiction describes the actions performed by a character within the narrative of the work. They invent dialogue and attribute it to the character. Their narrator can describe the physical attributes of the character. The narrator can also, if the author so chooses, describe the moral qualities of the character and make value judgements about his or her actions, speech, and attributes. The playwright is primarily limited to dialogue and action; without a narrator, the dialogue must reveal attributes of the character to the audience. The playwright must also write with the awareness that they will not be able to unilaterally decide on, for example, the character’s physical attributes, as the actor’s embodied presence will define some of this work. My discussion of readers of dramatic character in Chapter One will not fully engage with the complexity of this collaborative creation, such as the actor’s role in creating a dramatic character in an individual performance. This is because the academic critics of Shakespeare, who had a pitched battle about the value of character criticism, were for the most part interested in Shakespeare’s characters as textual creations rather than as blueprints for performances. At the crux of the debates over character is the question of whether a fictional character can effectively reproduce (or simulate) a personal character. As John Frow observes, the poststructuralist approaches to literature that are presaged by the work of critics such as Eliot are based on a rejection of what Frow terms “representational criticism,” and what Fredric Jameson similarly calls “ethical criticism.”19 Frow observes that for representational critics, character is “a resource for moral analysis and is closely tied to literary pedagogies in which the analysis of ethical issues and dilemmas relating to literary figures—‘what was the fatal flaw in Hamlet’s character?’—forms the basis of an institutionalized practice for constructing ‘moral selves or good personal character.’”20 Nineteenth-century approaches to Shakespeare along these lines include Anna Jameson’s Shakespeare’s Heroines and Mary Cowden Clark’s Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines. Both works either comment directly on the character of Shakespeare’s heroines or creatively imagine what their lives were like before the play. Bradley’s work grounds this genre of ethical criticism in the events of the play, combined with a systematic investigation of the inferences that may be drawn from the play. These methods are put in service of discovering the true self underlying the exterior character of Shakespeare’s people, much of it in the service of learning what makes a “good” person.

19 Frow, Character and Person. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 59-60. 20 Frow, Character and Person, 15.

Eliot, Wilson Knight, and Knights’ attacks on ethical criticism are grounded in the changing relation between the personal character and the self in the Modernist period. When creating a fictional character, a realist author attempts to reproduce the external, personal character of a flesh-and-blood person. In an analagous process, the individual in society attempts to reproduce and communicate the unseen, almost ineffable self in the form of his or her external character. However, the self in the Modernist period is an unfixed entity, and so to these critics, there are no stable truths that can be communicated about the self through character. Eliot is representative of the age in his belief that fictional characters are no more stable than people. Each person’s internal self is changing moment to moment, which changes the character that he or she projects to others. In Eliot’s play The Cocktail Party (1948), the Unidentified Guest claims that “we die to each other daily . . . [as] at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.”21 Throughout his critical and creative corpus, Eliot repeatedly makes the claim that the examination of moral character cannot result in the discovery of universal impersonal truth, because of the fundamental variability of the self. Wilson Knight adds, “‘Character’ in the ethical sense is the result of co-ordinating and controlling varied impulses. Men do this in different ways, expressing some, repressing others. Hence they present different ‘characters’ to the world, and thus we have ‘character’ in its literary sense.”22 Bradley is usually portrayed as a naif who trusts too much in the wholeness of fictional character, but, as I will demonstrate, Bradley supports his argument about Hamlet’s character using textual evidence which he acknowledges is partial, contradictory, and shifting, and asserts that both critics and readers can still undergo a meaningful experience in building a relationship with an individual character.

A.C. Bradley and the Reader Bradley’s 1904 Shakespearean Tragedy is one of the most popular books of Shakespearean criticism ever published. It has been continuously in print for over a century, a rare feat for a book of literary criticism. Cary DiPietro asserts that Shakespearean Tragedy is “arguably the most significant volume of Shakespeare criticism ever written” and that “as much as professional criticism has moved on - in many cases, by openly rejecting Bradley’s character analysis - the persistence of the discipline of English is due in no small part to the kind of liberal humanist

21 T. S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1950), 62. 22 Wilson Knight, Wheel of Fire, 285.

idealism shared by Bradley and his early contemporaries.” 23 Terence Hawkes suggests that Bradley’s greatest work “ranks as almost synonymous with the study of ‘English’ and which, despite earnest efforts to unseat it, remains a key, and vastly formative work.”24 Bradley’s enduring appeal testifies to a lingering fondness among many readers for his character-centric method. However, his reputation has never fully recovered from Leavis and Knights’ direct attacks. Attempts to recuperate Bradley have been mostly unsuccessful because his defenders seek to shape him into something he is not. Katharine Cooke asks why so few have recognized that he “was not as interested in character as the general opinion seems to think,” while Robert Shaughnessy claims that Shakespearean Tragedy “is by no means as fixated on ‘character’ as the critical caricatures of it have suggested.”25 These claims are inaccurate; Bradley is almost exclusively focused on character when discussing drama. Both Cooke and Shaughnessy have capitulated to criticism’s general disregard for character as a point of entry into a text, choosing to construct a modern Bradley to make him more acceptable to contemporary readers. Only Seymour Chatman makes a case for reclaiming Bradley as an analyst of character and for reconsidering Bradley’s method as having value in and of itself. He notes that Bradley encourages readers to join him in a “careful re-scanning of the text, especially in places where tradition may have blinded us by simplistic attitudes.”26 Bradley’s willingness to make claims based on implications or inferences is problematic, but his work is worth re-examining because his methods have a persistent resonance throughout the twentieth century. If we are to recuperate Bradley, it should be because his project of articulating the implied experiences of fictional characters suggests an evolving sense of what Catherine Gallagher calls fictionality, a fictionality that refuses to be limited by the existing words on the page. In short, Bradley’s reading of character helps us recognize the creative and imaginative potential of the reader. Bradley argues that there is no more significant facet to Shakespeare’s tragedies than the dramatis personae. He says that while it may be an exaggeration to apply Heraclitus’ epigram

23 Cary DiPietro, “A. C. Bradley,” in Bradley, Greg, Folger (London and New York: Continuum, 2011), 6-8. 24 Terence Hawkes, That Shakespeherian Rag (Abingdon: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), 31. 25 Katherine Cooke, A. C. Bradley and His Influence on Twentieth Century Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 121. Robert Shaughnessy, “Introduction to the Fourth Edition,” in Shakespearean Tragedy (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), xxxviii. 26 Chatman, Story and Discourse, 134.

“character is destiny” to Shakespeare’s tragedies, “it is the exaggeration of a vital truth.”27 In his two lectures on Hamlet, Bradley claims that the achievement and value of the play is “so obvious that I pass it by, and proceed at once to the central question of Hamlet’s character” (66). As Ian Hunter suggests, Bradley’s primary interest in Shakespeare’s plays centres on them are as sites of “moral interrogation and moral training,” sites in which “character appears as a moral object common to the play and the reader.”28 Literature presented an ideal model for the study of how personal character is constructed, a model which Bradley and others embraced. Bradley argues that Hamlet is Shakespeare’s greatest achievement because of the profundity of the protagonist’s tragic situation. Hamlet is a genius who is weighted down with melancholy because of his father’s death and mother’s remarriage. Hamlet’s tragedy has at its root a mismatch between the circumstances and capability of a great man: “Hamlet most brings home to us at once the sense of the soul’s infinity, and the sense of doom which not only circumscribes that infinity but appears to be its offspring” (93). For Bradley, the nature of the central character must be understood before any other question, because the play would not be widely loved were it not for the greatness of its protagonist. Bradley rejects the “Schlegel- Coleridge” theory that Hamlet delays because he is in a state of indecision caused by excessive thought. Instead, Bradley argues that Hamlet is in a “state of profound melancholy” (78). Bradley’s evidence depends on a set of counterfactuals: if King Hamlet had not died, and if Gertrude had not married Claudius, Prince Hamlet would probably not be depressed, and we would then have a different impression of the character. In her account of modern critical practice, Belsey characterizes the period between the late eighteenth century and the early twentieth century as the age of expressive realism, a style of criticism which was effectively challenged by the New Critics and Northrop Frye, who were themselves succeeded by post-Saussureans like Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida. The expressive realists differed from the later Symbolists in their belief in both the ontological stability of the self and the epistemological stability of art to represent the self through characters. The expressive realist approach to character reifies the bourgeois subject, Belsey argues, as natural and “obvious.”29 Literature reinforces the construction of the self as clearly demarcated, stable,

27A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 7. 28 Hunter, “Reading Character,” 231. 29 Belsey, Critical Practice, 15.

and independent from social forces; each individual has a stable ego that marks him or her as unique but simultaneously capable of growth. Belsey argues that the common belief that aligns most of these ‘common-sense’ critics is that ideas precede their expression in language. Writers of poetry, drama, and fiction merely attach form to an idea by expressing it. Thus, the message precedes the poem’s actual verses, and, more important for my purposes, the fictional person precedes his/her representation as a character. Belsey, following Barthes, argues that language is not a neutral medium but the primordial soup from which ideas and subjectivity are born. No character can be said to exist without the words and semes that make up its expression. To Bradley, however, there is no inherent epistemological error in describing something not directly portrayed or described in a dramatic work. If the character precedes its expression in the composition process, then it logically has undescribed features that can be said to exist. Bradley makes Hamlet literally precede the play by theorizing about his actions before the play’s opening: Hamlet had speculative genius without being a philosopher, just as he had imaginative genius without being a poet. Doubtless in happier days he was a close and constant observer of men and manners, noting his results in those tables which afterwards snatched from his breast to make in wild irony his last note of all, that one may smile and smile and be a villain. (83) Bradley asserts that through careful analysis of the play itself we can logically deduce aspects of the characters’ lives that are not explicitly represented. However, as I will explore below, Bradley does not situate the character before the play, but instead argues that a successful work of drama will prompt the reader to fill in unwritten details of the character’s life for the author. In most senses, Bradley belongs among the expressive realists of the nineteenth century as Belsey describes them. He emphasizes the power of personal expression and of the Romantic imagination, as well as a shared reality that is expressed within art. However, and importantly, he does not argue that ideas precede their expression in literature. In his lecture “Poetry for Poetry’s Sake,” Bradley argues that great literature enchants reality by obscuring the role of its own composition: Pure poetry is not the decoration of a preconceived and clearly defined matter: it springs from the creative impulse of a vague imaginative mass pressing for development and definition. […] The poem […] was not a fully formed soul asking for a body: it was an inchoate soul in the inchoate body of perhaps two or three vague ideas and a few scattered

phrases. […] This is the reason why such poems strike us as creations, not manufactures, and have the magical effect which mere decoration cannot produce.30 ‘Pure’ poems, like Shakespeare’s greatest creations, are the result of composition and editing, of hard work. They are not put onto paper fully formed, because then they would not be poetry but simply those obvious, clichéd truths of life. Simultaneously, however, finished poems have a “magical effect” that enchants the reader by producing the illusion of a complete and perfect shape (partly because the texts that Bradley has in mind are not composed in a fashion that displays the minute struggles of the composition process). In the same way, characters are not created already complete. Instead, characters project the illusion of completion in order to draw the reader into a state of enchantment. Rather than expressive realism, Bradley’s approach should more accurately be described as an enchanted reading of Shakespeare. In Uses of Literature, Rita Felski, develops her account of enchantment as part of her attempt to explore in detail the reasons for which non-professional readers use books. Felski observes that “enchantment is characterized by a state of a state of intense involvement, a sense of being so entirely caught up in an aesthetic object that nothing else seems to matter.” 31 Felski aims to present enchantment not as a simple surrender of objectivity, but an embrace of the aesthetic “richness and resonance” of a work.32 Enchanted readers do not forget that what they are reading or viewing is a constructed work, but they allow themselves to suspend their disbelief, and for a time credit the world of the text as complete. Bradley insists that he is not treating the characters as completely knowable; he says what drives Shakespeare’s readers is not the complete vision of his characters but intense impressions mixed with frustrating gaps. The gruelling pace of theatrical production and the financial pressures of running a theatre meant that Shakespeare needed to cut corners time and time again: unlike Milton, Pope, or Tennyson, “Shakespeare lacked the conscience of the artist who is determined to make everything as good as he can” (54). Standing in the way of our complete knowledge of Hamlet are irresolvable “inconsistencies and contradictions” and questions which are “impossible for [the reader] to answer with certainty” (51). Bradley laments, “who can ever

30 A. C. Bradley, Poetry for Poetry’s Sake: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered on June 5, 1901 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901); Bradley, Poetry for Poetry’s Sake: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered on June 5, 1901, 28-29. 31 Rita Felski, Uses of Literature (Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2008), 54. 32 Felski, Uses of Literature, 68.

feel sure that the doubts which vex him as to some not unimportant points in Hamlet are due to his own want of eyesight or to Shakespeare’s want of care?” (55). L.C. Knights asserts that Bradley’s “detective interest supersedes the critical,” especially in the long discursive Notes which conclude Shakespearean Tragedy on questions such as “Where was Hamlet at the time of his father's death?” and “Did Emilia suspect Iago?”.33 While Knights and Leavis would attack Bradley’s detective impulse, I argue that Bradley’s reading of character is not formed out of a mistaken or naive trust in the completeness of Shakespeare’s vision, but a trust in the imaginative faculties of readers. Unlike the essays of contemporaries such as W.W. Greg, Bradley’s essays were not dependent on Shakespeare writing psychologically complete and consistent characters.34 In his notes on Hamlet Bradley articulates his clearest statement on the hybrid nature of characters. Bradley asks whether Hamlet was at the University of Wittenberg when his father was killed. On the one hand, Hamlet speaks in early scenes as though he has just left the university, but on the other, the gravedigger suggests that Hamlet is thirty in the fifth act, far too old to be a student. Through exhaustive analysis of contradictory details, Bradley tries to resolve whether Hamlet wishes to return to Wittenberg after a brief absence, or many years following his graduation. Bradley points out a number of inconsistencies that suggest Hamlet has not recently been at Wittenberg, such as Hamlet barely remembering Horatio’s name. In addition, Bradley examines Hamlet’s greeting to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, when Hamlet declares in the First Quarto, “welcome, kind school-fellows, to Elsanore.” Bradley argues that this is not “the greeting of a man to fellow-students he left two months ago,” but “the welcome of an old fellow student” (312). He concludes that Hamlet is not a current student; the aging prince actually wishes to return to school after many years away. This theory is often presented as evidence that Bradley attributes god-like powers to Shakespeare, crediting the playwright with an inexhaustible attention to detail and assuming an unreasonable level of care. What I want to emphasize, however, is that Bradley does not attribute this level of care to the author, but to the reader. Professional writers have practical limits on their ability to mimic people, just as they have limits on every aspect of their writing. Most obviously, there are limits

33 L.C. Knights, “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?,” in Explorations: Essays in Criticism (New York: George W Stewart, 1947), 3. 34Cf. the obtuse logic necessary to resolve Greg’s claim that Claudius is innocent in his essay. W.W. Greg, “Hamlet’s Hallucination,” The Modern Language Review 12, no. 4 (October 1917).

on the time they can devote to a work. There are, however, no limits on the time that a reader— or many readers—can spend on a single work.35 As Bradley attempts to answer the question of Hamlet’s age, he encounters evidence that contradicts his hypothesis. Given the skimpy evidence that he bases this conclusion on, he admits that “the only solution I can suggest is that, in the story or play which Shakespeare used, Hamlet and the others were all at the time of the murder young students at Wittenberg, and that when he determined to make them older men . . . he did not take enough trouble to carry this idea through all the necessary detail, and so left some inconsistencies” (313). A naive reading that trusted the author’s vision of the world too much would not admit that a series of editing errors simply survive in the published text. What marks naive readings in general is their near-absolute trust in the text’s wholeness. Thus even obvious errors are resolved through circuitous logic, sophistry, and elaborate displays of cleverness. Bradley has long been dismissed as making naive errors, but he emphatically resists simple conclusions. Even when trying to resolve his primary argument that Hamlet is unable to act because of his melancholy, he admits that despite all his effort to better understand Hamlet’s character through the text, it is possible that because of “carelessness or because he was engaged on this play for several years, Shakespeare left inconsistencies in the exhibition of the character which must prevent us from being certain of his ultimate meaning” (66). The question of who Hamlet really is, and who comes closest to understanding Hamlet, is unanswerable on the simplest level because Hamlet does not exist, but also, perhaps, because Shakespeare never planned an answer. Bradley’s general emphasis on the potential of the “unscholarly lover” (xlvii) of Shakespeare and the infinite possibilities of a great work of literature, absolutely independently of any sort of theory of Shakespeare as a ‘great man’ or genius, emphasizes the creative power of the reader and of the critic in constructing literary character. The answer is up to us. The stakes of such a reading are high, which makes it all the more shocking that this key element of Bradley’s method has been ignored by later critics. There has been a repeated failure to recognize Bradley’s characterization of Hamlet both as a figure who is known intimately by readers as a whole person, and as a character who is fundamentally unfinished. Bradley’s

35 Witness, for example, R.W. Desai’s Hamlet Studies: An International Journal of Research on The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke, an annual journal on the single play which ran for 25 volumes from 1979 to 2003. Desai’s lifetime engagement with the play dwarfs Shakespeare’s composition of the play, which given the pace of production was likely less than a year.

approach does more than prefigure reader-response critics like Wolfgang Iser, whose writings of the late 1970s articulate a more complete vision of this process. Iser argues that every literary work has two poles: the artistic, or the text as created by the author; and the aesthetic, or the reader’s realisation of the literary work. A literary work exists between these two poles, and any analysis has to be conscious of both extremities. A text cannot determine meaning unilaterally, Iser suggests. Instead, to Iser, reading is half of a bi-active process in which the reader concretizes the text, fixing the meaning of the work, which was previously marked by profound indeterminacy. 36 Unlike Iser, who contrasts the implied reader constructed by the text to the autonomous actual reader, Bradley’s concept of the reader is more informal; his readers join him in a communal “we” that read the book together. Michael Taylor asserts that Bradley uses the first-person plural to subtly coerce the reader into agreement with a “tyrannical set of beliefs.”37 However, what Taylor and others fail to recognize in Bradley’s work is the ways in which Bradley includes the reader in his construction of meaning. Given a text which is filled with enigmatic but striking characters, and which has inviting gaps, some born of an aesthetic goal, but just as often born of errors and the imperfect nature of the writing process, readers will come to their own complex conclusions about the lives of the characters. Reading Shakespearean Tragedy, just like reading Hamlet in the first place, becomes a collaborative process. Bradley’s methods would later be burlesqued by critics like H.D.F. Kitto, who noted that “what the Baker Street Irregulars do for fun certain Stratford Irregulars have tried to do in earnest: to treat Hamlet as a real person, having an existence outside the play.”38 The Baker Street Irregulars were one association of players of the Holmesian game of reading Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories as if Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson were real people. Kitto dismisses Bradleyan approaches as juvenile and akin to the game, not realizing that the game is instead a direct byproduct of Bradley. As I will discuss in Chapter Three, the game was originated in 1911 by a student of Bradley’s at Balliol, Ronald Knox. Like Bradley, the Holmesians took a body of work whose author had not made “as good as he can,” works plagued by questions which are “impossible for [the reader] to answer with certainty,” and did their best to explore and explain those contradictions. Both Bradley and the Holmesians found a particularly fruitful space for

36 Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974); Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 37 Taylor, Shakespeare Criticism, 44. 38 H.D.F. Kitto, Form and Meaning in Drama: a Study of Six Greek Plays and of Hamlet (London: Methuen, 1960), 246.

engagement with characters that exhibited contradictions and of which little could be said definitively. Shakespearean Tragedy, however, is more than an individual book of literary criticism—it served as a template for literary analysis for a generation of schoolchildren. Although he means it as disparagement, it is not without reason that in his history of Shakespeare criticism, Taylor characterised the first half of the twentieth century as the “Age of Bradley.” As Cooke, Hawkes, and others note, Bradley’s methods were taught widely in hundreds of British public schools and in undergraduate English classes at non-Oxbridge schools. Into at least the early 1960s in Britain, English examination questions were focused on character experience, as in the following examples: “Coleridge speaks of Iago’s “motiveless malignity”. Is this the impression you have received from Othello?” “Write an account of the characters of Calpurnia and Portia in Julius Caesar.”39 Cooke asserts that Bradley’s writing remained the best resource for students preparing for exams for more than sixty years. The academic and literary intelligentsia diverged from a character- centric reading of Shakespeare and prose narratives, but these reading practices persisted in pedagogical practice and therefore in contemporary culture. Character-based methods remain popular, in part, because of their continued use at the secondary level. Coming to a better understanding of Bradley’s method reveals the way that he has shaped an approach to character that celebrates the enchantment that great literature can generate.

T.S. Eliot, the Objective Correlative, and De-Centred Character Bradley’s Hamlet is a melancholy figure whose weaknesses and failures are only temporary; the tragedy of Hamlet, Bradley tells us, is that Hamlet’s inherent greatness is not on full display during the period of the play. Both Hamlet and Hamlet, however, were gradually undermined and attacked by Shakespeareans with the unstated goal of restructuring the central values of contemporary criticism. Reading literature through the subjective filter of character was fundamentally at odds with Eliot’s new objective ideal for criticism, and Hamlet was an especially fertile battleground for these debates. Leading critics in the second decade of the

39 Cooke, A. C. Bradley, 225.

twentieth century asserted that ultimate meaning can not be located in personality. J.M. Robertson suggested in 1919 that we can not discover a meaningful psyche within Hamlet because the play is a composite of a number of sources.40 In the same year, the “old historicist”41 E.E. Stoll argued that because Hamlet’s plots to catch Claudius stemmed from conventions of Renaissance drama, they could not provide us with information about whether Hamlet was a ‘weak’ character.42 In his essay “Hamlet and his Problems,” T.S. Eliot took Shakespeare’s greatest play as the subject of one of his most important articulations of his program for a depersonalized modern criticism. Eliot’s essay is remembered for originating the well-known term the “objective correlative,” but as criticism on Hamlet the essay is now “easy to dismiss.”43 Janet Clare, for example, disdainfully characterizes the essay as Eliot “puzzling over Hamlet,” as if Eliot simply fails to understand the play. 44 But at the time, Knights named Eliot as a direct influence on his influential essay “How Many Children had Lady Macbeth.” While the concept of the objective correlative spread far beyond dramatic criticism, the importance of Eliot’s essay to the change in academic criticism’s position on character has been neglected. As Bradley Greenburg argues, “Hamlet and his Problems” is “one of the steps in the poet/critic’s efforts to clear the way for, while clarifying the genealogy of, his modernist project.”45 Examining Eliot’s essay on Hamlet in context calls our attention to the way that academic criticism and Modernist literature expressed thematically linked approaches to dramatic and novelistic character. Eliot calls Hamlet an “artistic failure” (90). For Eliot, the play is too character-centric. Readers struggle to identify Hamlet’s motivations, because too much of the play is defined by his internal struggle: “Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear” (92). Hamlet lacks, in Eliot’s famous term, an objective correlative—some sort of exterior manifestation of his state of mind that would cause a particular feeling to be “immediately evoked” (92). C.K. Stead suggests that for Eliot, a poem or play

40 J. M. Robertson, The Problem of “Hamlet” (London: Allen & Unwin, 1919). 41 Alan Sinfield, “From Bradley to Cultural Materialism,” Shakespeare Studies 34 (2006). 42 E.E. Stoll, Hamlet: An Historical and Comparative Study (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1919). 43 Carla Mazzio, The Inarticulate Renaissance: Language Trouble in an Age of Eloquence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2009), 175. 44Janet Clare, “Hamlet and Modernism: T. S. Eliot and G. Wilson Knight,” in Shakespeare and European Politics (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 238. 45 Bradley Greenburg, “T. S. Eliot’s Impudence: ‘Hamlet’, Objective Correlative, and Formulation,” Criticism 49, no. 2 (Spring 2007), 215.

triggers a below-conscious response which causes nearly identical responses in each reader/viewer.46 Eliot applied the concept of the objective correlative to poetry in his 1920 essay “Modern Tendencies in Poetry.”47 This expansion of the term has lead dozens of critics to use the “objective correlative” as a term for a metonymic device; the daffodils, for example, form the objective correlative for Wordsworth’s speaker’s untempered joy in “I Wandered Lonely As A cloud.”48 The poetic usage of the term has obscured the original sense of the objective correlative within drama; Eliot describes the objective correlative not as an object, but as an emotion made comprehensible by the words on the page. Despite its character-centric title, “Hamlet and his Problems” presents us with a decentred approach to character. As Eliot sees it, the most important aspect of an individual character, the objective correlative, is an element of the play that is outside the statements and actions of the character itself. The objective correlative is a dramaturgical device that externalizes the function of character; Eliot emphasizes the ways in which dramatic characters are constructed not only from their statements but from complementary features of the play, including the statements and actions of other characters. These correlative features are objective because they are visible; while Bradley expounds about Hamlet’s childhood, Eliot would insist that beyond his account of how Yorick “hath / borne me on his back” (5.1.173), the child Hamlet is inaccessible to us. Hypotheses about the backstories of characters do not produce automatic sensory experiences— the only legitimate trigger is what is said aloud and literally done on stage. Eliot argues that Hamlet cannot produce shared emotional experiences for the audience because of the structural mismatch between Hamlet and Gertrude. Eliot attributes Hamlet’s motivations, echoing J.M. Robertson, to “the feeling of a son to a guilty mother” (91). It is Gertrude’s sins that have generated Hamlet’s peculiar state of mind, but we don’t see those sins in the play: the meek Gertrude never appears to us as living “in the rank sweat of an enseamèd bed, / Stew'd in corruption” (3.4.83-4). Hamlet’s seething rage and Gertrude’s mistakes appear fundamentally mismatched, so she cannot provide a useful objective correlative of Hamlet’s grief. To Eliot,

46 C.K. Stead, The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot (New York: Harper & Row, 1966). 47 T. S. Eliot, “Modern Tendencies in Poetry,” Shama’a 1, no. 1 (1920). 48 This particular example has been frequently repeated, for example in Frederick Albert Pottle, The Idiom of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), 120., Simona Bertacco, “Postcolonialism,” in Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, ed. Richard Eldridge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 344., and Nicole Walker, Egg (New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 141.

Gertrude’s sins need to be objectively displayed to justify Hamlet’s subjective disgust; the character of Hamlet is incomplete without this complementary aspect of another character. Audiences decide that characters are ‘great’, Eliot suggests, not simply because of how well a character has been constructed but because of the ways in which the play shapes the character. In “To Criticize the Critic,” written in 1961, Eliot admitted that he had to some extent been “trailing [his] coat” with his Hamlet essay, following the model of the “controversialist” J.M. Robertson.49 The essay was not really about Hamlet per se, and had instead been written in the hopes that others would step on his metaphorical coat and justify a fight. Along with a number of other key criteria, such as an emphasis on myth, structure, and order, Eliot’s attack on character was part of the modernist critical project. Eliot sought to shift what was valued in the English literary canon in order to bring the study of literature into alignment with the goals of contemporary modernist poetry, drama, and fiction. His early positions, Eliot decided, had been taken, for the most part, as a way of “implicitly defending the sort of poetry that I and my friends wrote” (16). In so doing Eliot sought to redefine literary history to demonstrate that his own work and the work of other high modernists was the natural culmination of hundreds of years of literary history. Elsewhere, Eliot helped to devalue Milton and the Romantic and Victorian poets, as well as to bolster the reputation of Donne and other seventeenth-century metaphysical poets.50 By redefining the criteria that made past literature great, and redefining exactly which literature was in fact great, Eliot made a decentred approach to character seem like the natural (and superior) sequel to the literature of the Victorians. While Eliot would complicate his positions on character in later work, David L. Stevenson observes that he continued to republish “Hamlet and his Problems” and to allow editors to include it in critical anthologies for decades afterwards; there was something in it that Eliot continued to feel was important.51 In Chapter Three I will return to Eliot’s later writings on character, especially on the subject of Sherlock Holmes. Eliot is a key figure in the expulsion of character from the literature of the age, but in later years he attempted to find a space for character within a modern value system.

49 T. S. Eliot, “To Criticize the Critic,” in To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), 19. 50 John Guillory, “The Ideology of Canon-Formation: T. S. Eliot and Cleanth Brooks,” Critical Inquiry 10, no. 1 (September 1983), 134. 51 David L. Stevenson, “An Objective Correlative for T. S. Eliot’s Hamlet,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 13, no. 1 (September 1954).

In “Hamlet and his Problems” Eliot does not attack Bradley by name, but warns that “Hamlet the character has had an especial temptation for that most dangerous type of critic: the critic with a mind which is naturally of the creative order, but which through some weakness in creative power exercises itself in criticism instead” (87). Eliot goes on to name Coleridge and Goethe specifically, but this criticism seems most especially pointed at Bradley - after all, few could accuse Coleridge or Goethe of a general “weakness in creative power.” To Eliot, the Bradley type of critic has allowed himself to indulge in writing a set of creative variations on the theme of Hamlet, rather than performing analysis. Eliot specifically criticizes Bradley elsewhere in The Sacred Wood for over-reading Shakespeare. He argues that Bradley was “interested in extracting something from their subject which is not fairly in it.”52 By allowing personality into his writing, Bradley clouds his critical vision, which should be as strictly impersonal as possible. Bradley’s loose style, aimed at “unscholarly lovers” of Shakespeare, is antithetical to the authority that Eliot believed both critics and poets must claim in order to communicate a meaningful vision. The objective correlative is a device through which Eliot makes his case for the centrality of the author—the author, when successful, can force you to experience a set of emotions that can violently dislocate your experience. While Bradley includes the reader in his construction of meaning through character, Eliot conceives of character as a tool that only works in combination with the structure of the whole. The decentring of character was another aspect of Eliot’s Modernist project of leaving authority over literary meaning in the hands of a few. In her 1932 attack on Eliot, Rebecca West called Eliot’s influence on English letters “pernicious,” because “he has made his sense of the need for authority and tradition an excuse for refraining from any work likely to establish where authority truly lies, or to hand on tradition by continuing it in vital creation.”53 To West, Eliot sought to make poetry difficult not to express something universal, but to seize power over the production of meaning. Indeed, as Len Diepeveen observes, difficulty is one of Modernism’s defining traits, which leads common readers to respond to the great works of Modernism with bafflement rather than appreciation.54 Disassembling character in modern literature and rejecting it as an entry point for classic literature were two sides to the same

52 T. S. Eliot, “Swinburne as Critic,” in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921), 21. 53 Rebecca West, “What is Mr. T. S. Eliot’s Authority as a Critic?,” in Modernism: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence Rainey (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 713. 54 Leonard Diepeveen, The Difficulties of Modernism (New York and London: Routledge, 2003).

project, and both had the effect of limiting the power of the reader’s imaginative engagement with the text.

G. Wilson Knight and Spatial Reading In The Wheel of Fire (1930), G. Wilson Knight emphatically rejected character as a basis for critical understanding of Shakespeare’s works. One of Wilson Knight’s central goals is to demonstrate that readers are blinded to the truth when they empathize too closely with characters. Like Eliot’s, Wilson Knight’s critical approach is informed by a Modernist preoccupation with novel approaches to literary conventions; as Hugh Grady observes, his ‘spatial’ method approached Shakespearean plays in an fashion analagous to Joyce’s approach to traditional narrative. Just as Joyce, in the “Wandering Rocks” episode of Ulysses, treats the disconnected episodes in a variety of characters’ lives as part of the life of a city, Wilson Knight breaks apart the narrative of the individual characters to consider the whole of a Shakespeare play.55 The book contains “The Embassy of Death,” which features Wilson Knight’s famously absurd argument that Hamlet is a “sickly and destructive Prince, embodying the death principle, in contrast to the “healthy and robust life” of Claudius and his court.”56 All one needs to disregard, it seems, is King Hamlet’s murder. This morbid vision of the Danish prince would both influence later perception of Hamlet and help Wilson Knight decentre character within Shakespearean criticism. Critics, for the most part, seem bewildered about the reasoning behind the essay. Michael Taylor calls the essay “the most important example of how Wilson Knight can go wrong in specific ‘interpretations,’” a simple consequence of the newness of his ‘spatial’ method.57 Janet Clare asserts that in order to emphasize themes such as the “centrality of kingship and order opposed by violence,” Wilson Knight forces Hamlet into a pattern that does not reflect the actual text.58 David Auerbach comes close to recognizing the point of the essay when he suggests that the argument is “sort of a troll,” in the contemporary sense of a bad faith argument made in order

55 Hugh Grady, The Modernist Shakespeare: Critical Texts in a Material World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 99. 56 Robert Hapgood, “Introduction,” in Hamlet, ed. Robert Hapgood (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), 65. 57 Michael Taylor, “G. Wilson Knight,” in Empson, Wilson Knight, Barber, Kott (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 62. 58 Clare, “Hamlet and Modernism: T. S. Eliot and G. Wilson Knight.” 242.

to prove an opposite point.59 Wilson Knight personally attacked Hamlet the character as a figurehead of a critical style that he believed was in need of dismantling. In what is now a method that is second nature to scholars, Wilson Knight sets plot and causality aside and approaches the narrative of a work as a physical map that can be explored in any order. He terms his method ‘spatial analysis’, laying out the text in a bird’s-eye view work. Cleanth Brooks would in 1947 decry the “heresy of paraphrase” in criticism of poetry, and Wilson Knight makes a similar point here.60 Rather than begin his analysis at the beginning of the play and work through the narrative chronologically in criticism that essentially re-tells the narrative, he assembles the details that emphasize the theme that he identifies. In hunting for the “soul-dimension” from which the work has sprung, he breaks apart the narrative form that, in Bradley’s terms, would make characters seem like “creations, not manufactures.” In doing so Wilson Knight reveals the ways in which thematic elements serve as structural features that govern the play’s logic. Eliot, in his introduction to The Wheel of Fire, emphasizes how Wilson Knight pursued the design of the play above all: “our first duty as either critics or ‘interpreters’, surely, must be to try to grasp the whole design, and read character and plot in the understanding of this subterrene or submarine music.” Eliot concedes that examining characters is the “sort of work” which “must be done,” but only in order “to prepare for the search for the real pattern.” 61 Wilson Knight continues Eliot’s search for the true pattern of a great work. Wilson Knight’s reading of Hamlet is diametrically opposed to Bradley’s account of the prince as a temporarily depressed genius of both poetry and philosophy. Knight insists that there is nothing to admire in the tragic hero, who exists as a warning to readers rather than a figure to admire. While the call to revenge gives the melancholic Hamlet purpose, “good cannot come of evil [. . .] the sickness of his soul only further infects the state—his disintegration spreads out, disintegrating.” He argues that Elsinore, if we ignore the hidden crime of Claudius, is a well- governed and orderly space. Claudius is an “excellent diplomatist and king,” who has successfully taken the throne and kept Denmark in an orderly state. In opposition, Hamlet is an

59 David Auerbach, “Wilson Knight’s Chart of Shakespeare’s Dramatic Universe.” Waggish Waggish (2011): https://www.waggish.org/2011/wilson-knights-chart-of-shakespeares-dramatic- universe/. 60Cleanth Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York and London: Harcourt, 1942). 61 T. S. Eliot, “Introduction,” in The Wheel of Fire (London: Methuen & Co, 1949), xix.

“element of evil in the state of Denmark.”62 Wilson Knight pushes readers out of Hamlet’s perspective in order to force them to think about dramatic character in new ways. Pointing out Hamlet’s desire to maximize the damnation of his victims, including Claudius, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, he observes that Hamlet thus takes a devilish joy in cruelty towards the end of the play: he is like Iago. It is difficult to see the conventional courtly Prince of Denmark in these incidents. We have done ill to sentimentalize his personality. We have paid for it—by failing to understand him […] Sentiment is an easy road to an unprofitable and unreal sympathy.63 The costs of identificatory, romanticizing readings of Shakespeare are clear to Wilson Knight; readers have mistakenly come to associate the romanticized self-perception of the heroes with their true selves. By mistaking personal character for the self, readers misapprehend the nature of human existence. We are not, Wilson Knight warns, who we merely imagine ourselves to be. F.R. Leavis would perform a similar rhetorical move in his 1937 essay in Scrutiny, “Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero,” when he asserted that Bradley’s account of Othello is in fact Othello’s psychological vision of himself and not the real character that we have been presented with by Shakespeare. Othello, according to Leavis, conceives of himself as a good person who is not easily made jealous, but in fact he is not as innocent as he believes himself to be.64 In the first edition of The Wheel of Fire, Wilson Knight emphatically rejects character, which he identifies as the wellspring of a moralizing criticism that makes analytical criticism impossible. He concludes that “the persons [in Shakespeare’s dramas], ultimately, are not human at all, but purely symbols of a poetic vision.” However, by the fourth edition in 1949, Wilson Knight would come to feel that he had overstated his case about Shakespeare’s persons not being human, and removed the abovementioned sentence. Wilson Knight later admitted that his emphasis on Hamlet as embodiment of the “death-theme” was intentionally provocative, in the spirit of Eliot’s own attack on Hamlet. While he pointedly refused to retract the spirit of his remarks on Hamlet, he did “admit a certain exaggeration” in his argument. In the introduction to the fourth edition, he allowed that the essay was written “at the risk of offending those who had (very reasonably) taken the play's hero to their hearts, to see that hero not merely as an isolated ‘character’ rigidly conceived, but in direct and living relation to his own dramatic environment”

62 Wilson Knight, Wheel of Fire, 33. 63 Wilson Knight, Wheel of Fire, 54. 64 F.R. Leavis, “Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero,” Scrutiny 6, no. 3 (December 1937), 259.

(vii). Both Eliot and Wilson Knight were willing to misread an individual work in order to change the conversation about all works. An attack on the character of Hamlet was a necessary step to dismantle the ethical character criticism of the nineteenth century. By alienating readers from the romance of Hamlet’s interior gaze, they hoped (and succeeded) to shock readers and critics into recognizing a new ‘truth’ about literature: that we can only understand the greatness of literature if we are not enchanted by it. The work of Eliot and Wilson Knight, alongside the similar work of Stoll, Greg, and Robertson, helped transform Hamlet from Bradley’s temporarily depressed hero into a deranged and perverted murderer. (This was, as I have demonstrated, largely missing Eliot’s and Wilson Knight’s point, as these critics meant to dismantle character-based analysis altogether rather to than simply define Hamlet as a villain.) G. Dover Wilson’s What Happens in Hamlet (1935) asserted in a Bradleyan vein that “Plot is the main interest of the first part of the play, character of the second,”65 but went on to say that Shakespeare “never means us to forget that Hamlet was a failure, or that he failed through weakness of character” (268). Salvador de Madariaga’s 1948 On Hamlet reads the Prince as a ruthless Machiavellian.66 Madiaraga’s reading famously influenced Alec Guiness’ 1951 disastrous London production, which was so badly received that Guinness felt compelled to publish a long mea culpa in The Spectator which he concluded by personally apologizing to Shakespeare.67 In 1942 C.S. Lewis suggested that while Eliot was wrong to dismiss the play as a failure, he had isolated a modern quality in Shakespeare’s work: The method of the whole play is much nearer to Mr. Eliot’s own method in poetry than Mr. Eliot suspects. Its true hero is man—haunted man—man with his mind on the frontier of two worlds, man unable either quite to reject or quite to admit the supernatural, man struggling to get something done as man has struggled from the beginning, yet incapable of achievement because of his inability to understand either himself or his fellows or the real quality of the universe which has produced him. 68 While Eliot had marked Hamlet as fundamentally un-modern, Lewis recognized the continuities between the play and the spirit of Modernism—a recognition that was perhaps only possible out of the shadow of Bradley’s, Coleridge’s, and Goethe’s readings. Lewis concluded that the only

65 John Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935). 66 Salvador de Madariaga, On Hamlet (London: Hollis and Carter, 1948). 67 Hapgood, “Introduction,” 65. 68 C.S. Lewis, Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem (London: Humphrey Milford, 1942).

way to reconcile Hamlet’s greatness with the varied and contradictory responses to Hamlet’s character was to locate the achievement of the play somewhere other than character. In 1956, H.D.F. Kitto would explicitly link Hamlet’s altered status to new perspectives on character: “In Hamlet, Shakespeare draws a complete character, not for the comparatively barren purpose of ‘creating’ a Hamlet for our admiration, but in order to show how he, like the others, is inevitably engulfed by the evil that has been set in motion, and how he himself becomes the cause of further ruin.”69 L.C. Knights’ attack on Bradley in 1934’s “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth” is the best known articulation of the problems with Bradley’s method and of the consequences of Bradley’s influence throughout literary criticism. While Knights concedes that character and plot are factors that must be taken into consideration, he asserts that “to stress in the conventional way character or plot or any of the other abstractions that can be made is to impoverish the total response” (18). However, much of Knights’ criticism had been previously articulated by contemporary critics of Bradley, as well as by Eliot, Wilson Knight, Leavis and others. When he first delivered the lecture that would form the basis of “How Many Children Had Lady MacBeth” to the Shakespeare Association in 1932, Knights assumed that this shot across the bow would be received with some rearguard hostility. But to his surprise, “nothing happened, except that after a period of silence an elderly man got up at the back of the room and said that he was very glad to hear Mr Knights give this paper because it was what he had always thought. The revolution was over, and I went home.”70 By 1932, Knights’ views had been articulated in differing forms by a number of people, but his essay would nonetheless come to take a large place in the history of the debate over character in narrative. On Hamlet, Knights wrote a short essay in 1940 which characterized Hamlet as self- obsessed, disgusted by corruption and yet corrupted from the same sources as those he condemns. The value of Hamlet, he suggests, is that the play “can provide an indulgence for some of our most cherished weaknesses—so deeply cherished that we can persuade ourselves

69 H.D.F. Kitto, Form and Meaning in Drama: a Study of Six Greek Plays and of Hamlet (London: Methuen, 1960), 330. 70 L.C. Knights, ““The Question of Character in Shakespeare”,” in Hamlet and Other Shakespearean Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 201.

that they are virtues.”71 Knights returned to Hamlet when he published an adapted series of lectures in 1960. Reprising his earlier assertions regarding character analysis as a method, Knights claims that Shakespeare’s tragedies are “concerned not simply to draw the portrait of an outstanding individual but to focus the fundamental laws of human life.”72 In a curious moment, Knights assumes the voice of Shakespeare, who decides that he cannot “make my Hamlet the central consciousness of the play” without colouring the “picture of the world that my play gives” with Hamlet’s self-doubt and self-torture.73 Unlike Eliot, Knights asserts that the play is an artistic success, but a good play despite the failings of its protagonist. In Knights’ hands, the moral quality of the protagonist’s personal character cannot help us decide if a work is a success.

Tracing Character: Plan of the Present Work Today it is difficult to state confidently how Hamlet the character is viewed by contemporary critics; so thoroughly has the discourse of symbolism, followed by post-structuralism, transformed our discipline that the question “why does Hamlet delay?” is barely ever posed. This partly stems from our recognition that there can be no satisfactory answer to such questions. As Wimsatt and Beardsley established, we can never be sure of the author’s intention behind any aspect of a text, and as Derrida and Fish have shown us, even the meaning of the most straightforward textual statement cannot be confidently assumed. This rigour is necessary to build an academic discourse that is based on shared conventions and terminology, but it often blinds us as critics to the rewards and subtleties of other modes of reading, even when we indulge in them ourselves. There is also a clear value in defamiliarizing ourselves from the conventional perspective on a work of art. It is fair to ask, as Wilson Knight does in The Wheel of Fire, why readers accept King Hamlet’s death as “foul and most unnatural murder” (1.1.25), but Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s deaths can be casually dismissed as being “by their own insinuation” (5.2.60). But by estranging ourselves from the perspective of the primary characters, we risk instrumentalizing the narrative. Why shouldn’t Claudius have been allowed to usurp the throne? His reign would have resulted in only two deaths rather than the eight that result from Hamlet’s

71 L.C. Knights, “Prince Hamlet,” in Explorations: Essays in Criticism Mainly on the Literature of the Seventeenth Century (London: Chatto & Windus, 1946), 77. 72 L.C. Knights, An Approach to ‘Hamlet’ (London: Chatto & Windus, 1960), 34. 73 Knights, Approach to ‘Hamlet,’ 37.

revenge. Without an individual perspective, we lose sight of the purpose of literature, which can be distinguished from corporate and institutional writing by both its production by an individual and its focus on the experiences of individuals. One of the most important experiences that prompted Wilson Knight to revise his position was his performance as Hamlet in multiple productions. In his 1947 essay “Hamlet Revisited,” Knight observes that “the unsatisfactory nature of my own statements was brought home to me whilst acting the part, when my emphases fell differently; and differently too during performances in different productions.”74 Acting as Hamlet appears to have revealed to Wilson Knight that while symbolism and theme have an essential place in analysis of drama, character could not be entirely refused, and that individual character could not be constructed simply from the language of the text. In the programme for his 1933 Toronto production of Hamlet, Knight attempts to guide the audience’s understanding of the characters, writing that “this production is designed to present dramatically the views on Hamlet already published in “The Wheel of Fire” . . .that is, to remain true to the powerful death symbolism that permeates the play and consequently to keep in sight both the evil in Hamlet himself and the good in Claudius.”75 This counterintuitive reading of Hamlet, driven primarily by symbolism and theme, was met with some bafflement; although the play was well reviewed in Toronto papers, the Varsity commented on the “somewhat misleading programme note.”76 In the second Hart House production of Hamlet that Wilson Knight directed, the programme had no instructions on the play’s interpretation and was rewarded with a glowing review by the Toronto Daily Star with the headline, “Wilson Knight’s Staging Achieves Feeling of Reality.” The production was judged a success using the exact criterion that Wilson Knight had tried to excise from criticism.77 Only recently have literary scholars felt that they can return to character without apology. Rhodri Lewis’ 2017 Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness is one of a growing number of works of literary criticism that offers a vision of what a synthesis of analytic and holistic modes of reading

74 Wilson Knight, Wheel of Fire, 300. 75Wilson Knight, Programme for Hamlet, Hart House Theatre, 1933, Wilson Knight Collection, F2066, Victoria College Archives, Toronto. 76 Articles from the Varsity, Toronto Daily Star and the Globe and Mail with reviews on Knight’s Hamlet, October 1933, Wilson Knight Collection, F2066, Victoria College Archives, Toronto. 77 Wilson Knight, Programme for Hamlet, Hart House Theatre, 1933, Wilson Knight Collection, F2066, Victoria College Archives, Toronto.

character might look like. Lewis asserts that Hamlet is a thorough critique of humanist ideals, most especially the ideal of the self. Rather than a tragedy of a man who cannot make up his mind, Hamlet is “a tragedy in which Shakespeare confronts his audiences with the realization that they have no fixed points of reference with which to help them make up theirs.”78 In an appendix entitled “How Old is Hamlet?”, Lewis tackles Bradley’s question once more. Lewis warns us that it does not matter how many years Hamlet has been on the Earth, and suggests that this is demonstrated to us by the fact that both Hamlet and the Gravedigger are meant to be comically bad at math—Hamlet, he asserts, does not know how old he is.79 Despite his assertion that Hamlet is a play that deconstructs the notion of a stable self, Lewis trusts in the play’s characters and finds not an authorial error (as even Bradley concluded) but a diegetic explanation of the contradictions within the play which reinforces the continuity of the character throughout the work. Contemporary academics begin their training on how to produce academic discourse in the undergraduate lecture hall and seminar room; there, as Blakey Vermeule suggests, “responsible teachers wean their students off their passion for literary characters or at least teach them how to think about them in a responsible way, leavening their passion with skepticism, dialectic, and appropriately aesthetic distance.”80 While academics, like all readers, retain these passions and read work differently when they are reading ‘for pleasure’, when producing the academic work that will advance their career, they observe discursive conventions that include a dispassionate approach to character. It is part of the project of this dissertation to trouble this approach. Reading character impersonally has its roots in the work of twentieth-century academic critics and in the forms of Modernist fiction and drama and is simply one discursive approach to characters and characterization. Bradley’s approach to Hamlet in particular and character more generally has been repeatedly mischaracterized, first by Eliot, Wilson Knight, Leavis, and Knights, and more recently by those seeking to recuperate Bradley’s reputation. As I will explore in the remainder of this dissertation, these debates are not merely ‘academic’ (in the disparaging popular sense of the word). We can locate peculiar resonances of Bradley’s approach

78 Rhodri Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 8. 79 Lewis, Vision of Darkness, 315-24. 80 Vermeule, Literary Characters, 17.

to literature in a number of disparate groups throughout the British Isles as the role of character in English and Irish literary culture changed. As Jason Harding has observed, “developments in Shakespeare studies have often been regarded as prototypical of literary criticism in esse.”81 This is especially true for discussions of character, as English discussions of characters in fiction were focused on Shakespeare for centuries. For a number of Bradley’s critics, his worst fault was that he tended to discuss Shakespeare’s characters as if they were characters in a nineteenth-century novel, replete with biographical detail and psychological reality. However, for the modern school of critics the problem was no longer that Bradley talked about characters in a way that was only appropriate for prose fiction. By 1932, Q.D. Leavis was rejecting character as an entry point for prose fiction itself, a point that would be repeated by L.C. Knights, F.R. Leavis, and others throughout the thirties and forties. While their emphasis on language provided a useful corrective in criticism of verse drama, most realist fiction depends on character as a structural feature. Rejecting character entirely was, as I hope to show, a problematic change within criticism that has had lasting consequences on our ability to engage with one of the most fundamental aspects of fiction. My second chapter, “Homo Fictus: Character, Person, and Biography in the Bloomsbury Circle,” which concludes Part One of the dissertation, presents the fiction of Virginia Woolf as a representative example of the larger change regarding character in literature. Through Woolf, I argue that avant-garde British fiction and intellectual culture rejected character as the central facet of the novel. In this chapter, I take up the question of the representation of personal character through fictional characters in Woolf’s novels and experimental ‘biographies.’ As I show, Bradley’s principles influenced, either directly or indirectly, the criticism of E.M. Forster and the biographies of Lytton Strachey. Both writers were expressive realists who emphasized the power of text to communicate ‘real’ personality in the form of fictional and human character. Woolf consistently pushed back against this possibility in her critical and creative responses to Forster and Strachey. Instead, her work asserts that fiction, like life, leaves us strangers to each other. For her, the solution is to bypass traditional characterization and attempt to directly represent the uncommunicated (or incommunicable) self through individual consciousnesses. Importantly, this is only a partial solution to an irresolvable problem. While Bradley would assert

81 Jason Harding, The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networds in Inter-War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 78.

that literature’s incompleteness is what enables insight and understanding, Woolf insists that readers be cognizant of the imperfection of their knowledge. I argue that three of Woolf’s works are key to her critique of characterization: Flush, Jacob’s Room, and Orlando. In my reading, each of these novels satirizes the trust readers have in text to communicate personal character. What Jacob’s Room accomplishes by understatement, Flush and Orlando accomplish by exaggeration. In Jacob’s Room the protagonist’s character is inaccessible to us, while in Flush a creature of whom we can rightly know nothing is made perfectly transparent. In Orlando, finally, Woolf synthesizes these two positions by presenting a completely legible character whose selves gradually multiply until they cannot be adequately recorded. In Part Two of the dissertation, I explore two groups of readers whose approach to their favourite texts is focused on emphasizing the feeling of reality produced by the central fictional characters. First are the Holmesians, a network of Sherlock Holmes Societies that have been circulating essays and exchanging ideas in England, America, and elsewhere since the late 1920s and meeting in person since 1934. Second are the fans of James Joyce’s Ulysses who have been celebrating the novel annually on Bloomsday since 1954. Both associations are mostly viewed as fringe groups by the general population and by literary academics. The Holmes societies meet and present mock-scholarly essays that pretend that Arthur Conan Doyle’s characters Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson are real people. These essays are then often circulated through journals and monographs published by specialty Holmesian presses. It looks, for all intents and purposes, like an academic network for the circulation of ideas, except for its central conceit. The group pretends that Conan Doyle’s novels and short stories are non-fiction, and that Conan Doyle was simply Watson’s literary agent, or that Conan Doyle was the one who was fictional. Bloomsday is an annual holiday celebrated in Dublin and around the world in which celebrants re-enact the fictional events recounted in Ulysses. The novel follows two characters as they wander around 1904 Dublin over the course of a single day and night. Celebrants of Bloomsday do a variety of activities ranging from eating the same meals as the characters to re-tracing their exact steps throughout the city, often while re-reading the material in groups or alone. These two phenomena show how twentieth-century readers attempted to reclaim the importance of fictional character which they believed had been lost in contemporary fiction and literary criticism. In my third chapter, “The Best Loved Man Who Never Lived: Character, Anti- Modernism, and the Holmesians,” I examine the emergence of the Holmesian game in England

between 1911 and 1935. Focusing on four important figures—Ronald Knox, Dorothy L. Sayers, T.S. Eliot, and S.C. Roberts—I explore how this critical game formed the site of a debate between conservative modernists and anti-modernists over the space for ‘real’ character in the twentieth century. The Holmesian game involves treating Sherlock Holmes and Watson as if they are real people, closely analyzing the stories for clues about their existence. Two of the originators of the Holmesian game, Knox and Sayers, conceived of it as a satire of contemporary critical practice, especially in the academy. Knox took special aim at philology and Higher Criticism of the Bible, while Sayers targeted modernism and the symbolist criticism of the New Critics and the Scrutiny set. For both writers, the Holmesian game was a way to critique what they perceived as the “unscrupulous pseudo-scholarship” that had come to dominate critical conversations about English literature, the Classics, and the Bible. Using a gentle parody of Bradley’s style, Knox and Sayers asserted that character was the central tool through which the integrity of English literature could be reclaimed. While their vision of the game was fundamentally conservative and anti-modern, based in a nostalgia for Victorian mores, Eliot’s intervention into the game recasts both the Holmes stories and their striking “reality” as a modern quality. For Eliot, the ‘real’ can be found in fiction that offers the reader insight into universal, shared experiences (rather than particular, idiosyncratic experiences). Ironically, it is Eliot who has defines the Holmesian game through his publication with the Criterion of Prolegomena on Doctor Watson, S.C. Roberts’ work on Watson that uses the contemporary critical methods Knox and later Sayers would satirize, without irony. Through the influence of Eliot, Roberts, and others, later Holmesians would valorize the suspicious critical methods that Knox and Sayers sought to dismantle. In my final chapter I explore the reading of Ulysses that the original group of Bloomsday celebrants produced through their actions on June 16, 1954, and in their writing before and after the event. Focusing on three of the celebrants—John Ryan, Brian O’Nolan (a.k.a. the novelist Flann O’Brien), and Anthony Cronin—I examine the ways in which the original celebrants conceived of the holiday as a rescuing of Joyce from the excesses of academic criticism. Their solution was to follow the path of the characters through the novel, re-enacting the experiences of Stephen and Bloom. In their criticism and in their actions on Bloomsday, they argued that Ulysses was a realist novel which was being misread by those not steeped in Dublin culture and geography. Writers from elsewhere, especially England and the United States, could not read the work the way it was meant to be read. In contrast to the readings produced by writers such as

Stuart Gilbert, who dismissed the centrality of the novel’s characters, these Irish writers insisted that Dubliner Bloom is central to Ulysses, not a mere a stand-in for Greek Odysseus. Like the Holmesians, whose game was partially prompted by Conan Doyle’s own ambivalence about the Sherlock Holmes stories, early Irish Joyceans had to grapple with Joyce’s simultaneous celebration of Ireland through the setting of Ulysses and his rejection of his homeland. In returning Ulysses to the space it was set, the organizers were staking their own claim to the novel independent of Joyce. I argue that these organizers are important because their reading of Ulysses has fundamentally shaped the popular view of Joyce and Ulysses in Ireland today, the conduit through which Ireland reconciled with one of its greatest writers. At the same time that we explore what we can find using these methods, we are also prompted to ask what the value of these discoveries are. Why should we want to get to know Bloom or Stephen better? Are these answers worth seeking out in comparison to the discoveries made by scholarly work guided by textual, sociological, or historical principles? We should not simply toss out our standards for good analytical work, but I argue that literary criticism too often loses sight of what makes a work pleasurable, or of the other primary purposes that literature serves for its readers. Character, I argue, is the most crucial site of under-recognition. Forster is being reductive when he claims that the novel is a form concerned primarily with people and their interactions, but it is nonetheless an essential aspect. As Henry James asked us to consider, “what is incident but the illumination of character?”82 All of fiction is structurally bound up with the representation of human experience and the construction of the human, and many readers instinctively recognize this. As scholars we risk ensuring our irrelevancy if we continuously refrain from engaging with real reading practices, as unsophisticated as they might sometimes appear.

82 Henry James, “The Art of Fiction.” Longman’s Magazine, September 1884, 512.

Chapter Two: Homo Fictus: Character, Person and Biography in the Bloomsbury Circle

If they say “You can’t make us care a damn for any of your figures,” I shall say read my criticism then. –Virginia Woolf, from her diary entry, June 23, 192283

In the above passage from Woolf’s diary, the novelist and critic reflects on the challenge of communicating the intentions behind one of her most daring formal experiments: making the central character of Jacob’s Room inaccessible to both the reader and the narrator. Like Joyce, who published Ulysses the same year, Woolf was attempting to explore the boundaries of fictional character, sometimes venturing past what ordinary readers can comprehend unassisted. As academic debates raged over the nature of character in the first half of the twentieth century, similar questions were being asked in the literary world. In the 1920s, among novelists, biographers, and reviewers, the resonance of A.C. Bradley’s neo-Romantic approach to character was still widely felt, even as Eliot’s essays modelled a brash new approach to literature. Arnold Bennett, an emphatic critic of Woolf and her circle, was one such vocal defender of the Bradleyan method. Yet Bradley’s ideas still had some traction amongst the Bloomsbury circle. Clive Bell and Roger Fry, for example, both quote Bradley’s “Poetry for Poetry’s Sake” at different times and E.M. Forster’s “Art for Art’s Sake” has clear resonances with Bradley’s essay.84 Forster and Lytton Strachey were both to some extent expressive realists who vociferously assert that text could communicate personal character, of both human beings and fictional beings. However, as this chapter argues, Virginia Woolf often resisted the idea that character can ever be reliably (or even ethically) communicated. Woolf expressed this resistance through direct responses to Forster and Strachey, and in her own novels and imaginative biographies. Together with the great novelists of the Modernist era, Woolf shaped the approach of writers and readers to fictional character for generations to come by making the charming, eccentric, and “real”

83Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary: Being Extracts From the Diary of Virginia Woolf (New York and London: Harcourt, 1954), 45. 84 S.P. Rosenbaum, Victorian Bloomsbury: The Early Literary History of the Bloomsbury Group (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and London: Macmillan Press, 1987), 125.

characters that had dominated English fiction in previous generations look artificial and antiquated. Woolf has long been recognized as interested in the “intense scrutiny of individual psychic life.”85 Discussing what he considers Woolf’s masterpiece, The Waves, in which all features of novelistic prose are stripped away except for dialogue, Alex Zwerdling asks, “if people are permanent strangers to one another . . . why should their families, their work, their identifying characteristics be described? They are mere facades—the illusory appearance the world sees, masking the true and very different reality of individual mental life” (11). Both Julia Briggs and Patricia Ondek Laurence cast Woolf’s work as a preoccupation with silences and incommunicable gaps.86 In recent years, however, several scholars, including Eric Sandberg, Jane Goldman, and Laura Marcus have expended considerable effort reorienting criticism on Woolf to argue that her work overcomes these silences to triumphantly bridge difference.87 Sandberg suggests that on the question of character, Woolf “is not so much rejecting classical traditions of characterization as she is working within the main stream of the development of the novel as a genre.”88 This well-intentioned reading of Woolf as a great communicator dislodges her from an important place alongside Joyce and to a lesser extent Barnes, Mansfield, Lewis, and others in the history of characterization. Alongside other High Modernist writers, Woolf uses characterization to explore the possibility of a failure to know the other—indeed, the impossibility of knowing the other. Woolf receives the most attention for her works such as Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, in which connection to the other and an understanding of their fundamental essence are possible, if only in extraordinary circumstances. However, in some of

85 Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), 9. 86 Patrica Ondek Laurence, The Reading of Silence: Virginia Woolf in the English Tradition (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). Julia Briggs, Reading Virginia Woolf (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006). 87 Eric Sandberg, Virginia Woolf: Experiments in Character (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2014). Jane Goldman, The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Laura Marcus, Virginia Woolf (Tavistock: Northcote House Publishers, 2010). See also Emily Griesinger, “Religious Belief in a Secular Age: Literary Modernism and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway,” Christianity & Literature 64, no. 4 (September 2015). Kristina K. Groover, “‘The Conditions of Our Love’: Seeking and Desiring in Jacob’s Room.,” South Atlantic Review 77, no. 3-4 (2015). 88 Sandberg, Experiments in Character, 13.

Woolf’s bestselling works in her lifetime, Woolf emphasized the failure of communication and the resultant disconnect between individuals. Like Bradley, Woolf was concerned with the gaps that constitute the other, gaps which we fill in by constructing our perception of their personal character. Unlike Bradley, who viewed this process as one that emancipates the reader, Woolf viewed this is as a limit which cannot ethically be surpassed. In his 1927 Aspects of the Novel, Forster explored the difference between a fictional character and a flesh-and-blood person, “those two allied species, Homo Sapiens and Homo Fictus.”89 A fictional person is special because “we can know more about him than we can know about any of our fellow creatures, because his creator and narrator are one.” Forster’s assertion that readers know characters better than real people in their lives is consistent with the Bradleyan view of characters that remained current among middlebrow English writers and critics.90 In this reading, the appeal of fiction stems from offering readers epistemological stability when they encounter the personal characters of others. Where, in reality, we can never be sure that we know other people, the goal of fiction is to present fully knowable beings. Any gaps that persist in these characters are portals of discovery; their incompleteness leaves space for the reader’s consciousness to fill. English critics of the novel in the nineteen-twenties like Arnold Bennett, Hugh Walpole, Percy Lubbock, and G.K. Chesterton often asserted that a well-written character must be so real, or true to life, as to become the reader’s intimate.91 Dozens of reviews of novels in publications such as The Bookman or The Nation & Athaeneum during the twenties contain the unqualified phrase “the character is real” or “the characters are real,” and the same criterion is used as a marker for a successful biography.92

89 E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (London: E. Arnold, 1928), 39. 90 Bradley had a loose association with a number of Edwardian writers and public intellectuals, including Arnold Bennett, H.G. Wells, and John Galsworthy. Bradley shared memberships with these writers in a number of societies (including the Society for Pure English, the English Association, and the Royal Society of English). 91 Arnold Bennett, “Is the Novel Decaying?,” Cassell’s Weekly, March 28, 1923. Hugh Walpole, The Waverley Pageant: The Best Passages From the Novels of Sir Walter Scott, Selected, With Critical Introductions (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1932). Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (London: J. Cape, 1921). G.K. Chesterton, G.K. Chesterton: The Critical Judgments (Antwerp: Universitaire Faculteiten Sint-Ignatius, 1976). 92 For example, in two separate advertisements on the same page of the Aug 25, 1928, issue of The Nation and Athenaeum, an ad for W.B. Maxwell’s We Forget Because we Must quotes the Sheffield Daily Telegraph noting that “the characters are real persons,” and an ad for HFM Prescott’s The Lost Flight quotes the Times Literary Supplement noting that Prescott

In 1929, Vita Sackville-West complained that ‘real’ characters were a far more important criterion for English readers and critics than prose style: “for ten times that we are told that a novel contains a good story, or that characters are true to life, we are told once that an author writes well.”93 The slippage between character and person in English letters is made all the clearer when contrasted with critics discussing biographies, who used nearly identical language: Leonard Woolf, when describing Lytton Strachey’s biography of Queen Victoria in contrast to his later Elizabeth and Essex, noted that “Strachey’s Victoria was, indeed, a real, live person whom he could use as the centre of a psychological work of art.”94 Leonard Woolf here uses ‘real’ to mean ‘credible’: ‘Strachey’s Victoria’ is not Queen Victoria, but a fictional character that gives us the impression of reality. The realness of Strachey’s Victoria has nothing to do with Strachey’s fidelity to Victoria, the historical personage, and everything to do with Strachey’s success in creating a vivid character. One of the most dramatic expressions of resistance to Forster’s formulation (and by extension, the tendrils of Bradley) would come from Woolf, in works such as Jacob’s Room. Woolf uses Jacob to model character not as an intimate friend but as a near-perfect stranger. Woolf makes a similar point with her experimental ‘biographies’ Flush and Orlando in which the subjects’ impossibly perfect legibility satirizes the confidence with which scholars discuss both real and fictional people. Woolf helped remove character from the centre of the English novel, reminding readers that no matter how compelling the illusion, characters only exist in the mind of readers. Woolf’s characters provide a particularly effective education on how to regard the other, because the flesh-and-blood other is herself, Woolf would contend, a fictional construction. As I suggested in the previous chapter, throughout the first half of the twentieth century, academic literary criticism in England slowly turned away from character as a central element of criticism. L.C. Knights, succinctly articulating the position of the Scrutiny set, asserts with severity in 1933 that there is no reality to a person who has never existed: instead, character “is merely an abstraction from the total response in the mind of the reader or spectator, brought into

“successfully conveys the impression that her characters are real folk, who just happen to have lived in a time of vivid colour and picturesque action.” 93 Vita Sackville-West, “Fiction,” The Nation and Athenaeum 44, no. 23 (March 9, 1929), 788. 94 Leonard Woolf, “The Science and Art of Biography,” The Nation and Athenaeum 44, no. 25 (March 23, 1929), 882.

being by written or spoken words.”95 In “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth” he asserts that characters in both Renaissance verse drama and modern fiction needed to be understood first as a textual effect rather than like a person. Knights rejects Hugh Walpole’s demand that great characters must feel like they are our “friends for life.” Walpole succinctly summarizes the Bradleyan perspective on character when he asserts that “the test of a character in any novel is that it should have existed before the book that reveals it to us began and should continue after the book is closed.”96 Knights also takes issue with Walpole’s complaint that in modern fiction, the preponderance of psychological detail ironically makes characters harder to know. Walpole observes that in the fiction of Proust, James and Lawrence, “we have dived, it seems, so very deep and come to the surface again with so little in our grasp.” 97 Knights responds that “It should be obvious that a criterion for the novel by which we should have to condemn Wuthering Heights, Heart of Darkness, Ulysses, To the Lighthouse and the bulk of the work of D. H. Lawrence does not need to be very seriously considered.” 98 Just as critics helped articulate the principles of the modernist writers, the shift in aesthetic values amongst the most esteemed avant-garde writers influenced the standards of criticism; Knights explicitly rejected the primacy of character in Shakespeare in order to better align the dramatist with Joyce, Lawrence and Woolf. The turn away from character among the Scrutiny set, and across the Atlantic with the New Critics, is rarely linked to the turn away from character in modernist fiction, but there was a great deal of exchange between the critical, academic, and literary communities in the ‘twenties and ‘thirties. Eliot’s The Sacred Wood was reviewed by Leonard Woolf in 1920, and he praised the book for its assertion that “criticism is not concerned with the personal psychology or psychological experiences of either author, character, or reader, nor is the critic right when he attempts to interpret a poem or a play […] by rewriting it.”99 It is important to understand this shift in both criticism and fiction as a set of reciprocal influences. As a result of this change, even today, the question of how to read character is a site of tremendous divergence between literary

95 L.C. Knights, “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?,” in Explorations: Essays in Criticism (New York: George W Stewart, 1947), 17. 96 Walpole, Waverley Pageant, 15. 97 Walpole, Waverley Pageant, 16. 98 Knights, “How Many Children,” 16. 99Leonard Woolf, “Back to Aristotle,” Athenaeum, December 17, 1920.

critics and the general reading public. The death of the character parallels the better known death of the author, a concept whose counterintuitive logic “functioned to keep the non-academic at bay” by insisting that one of the prime points of interest for the general reader (the author’s biography) be completely ignored.100 Examining the death of the character requires a re- evaluation of exactly who killed it, and why.

E.M. Forster and Homo Fictus In 1927, E.M. Forster published a collected edition of his Clark Lectures, delivered originally at Trinity College in Cambridge, entitled Aspects of the Novel. Forster’s application of pseudo- Bradleyan techniques to the novel would be an important point of departure for Woolf, who thoroughly and explicitly rejected Forster’s conclusions on character. In his discussion of “People,” Forster begins with a proto-structuralist description of novelists’ relationship to their characters: “The novelist, unlike many of his colleagues, makes up a number of word-masses roughly describing himself (roughly: niceties shall come later), gives them names and sex, assigns them plausible gestures, and causes them to speak by the use of inverted commas, and perhaps to behave consistently. These word-masses are his characters” (64). Forster’s description anticipates Barthes’ description of character in S/Z; Barthes writes that “when identical semes traverse the same proper name several times and appear to settle upon it, a character is created.”101 For Forster, too, characters are in the strictest sense ‘word-masses,’ or a set of ‘identical semes.’ However, unlike Barthes, Forster sees little value in this structural definition of character, or in character’s relation to other structural elements of fiction. Instead, he moves quickly from this definition to characters’ “relation to real life” (65). J. Hillis Miller observes that readers, even expert literary critics, “pass through the language of a novel as if it were transparent glass. They begin talking about the characters in the story as if they were real people, seen perhaps through that glass and perhaps distorted by it, but not created by language.”102 Forster recognizes the glass that is language, but he chooses to look through the glass rather than at it.

100 Seán Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), ix. 101 Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 67. 102 J. Hillis Miller, Ariadne’s Thread: Story Lines (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 29.

Forster proposes a thought-experiment in which he describes fictional characters as if they were a distinct real-world species, Homo Fictus. The effect is primarily comic; he spends much of the chapter delineating the differences between people and characters in terms of basic human needs, such as food, sleep, excretion, and sex. However, our epistemological relationship with a specimen of Homo Fictus is vitally different. He concludes that “Homo Fictus […] wants little food or sleep, he is tirelessly occupied with human relationships. And—most important—we can know more about him than we can know about any of our fellow creatures, because his creator and narrator are one” (78-79). Fictional characters are our intimates because their story encapsulates them totally; they have nothing that is hidden from us. Forster suggests that when we describe a successful character as ‘real,’ we are making a fundamental error about the reason that readers enjoy fiction. Characters, according to Forster, do not provide us with a recreation of a real experience. Instead, because of their fictionality, they offer a superior encounter with the other that is fundamentally unlike reality.103 A character that resembles an ordinary person possesses a fictionality that invites readers to project their own ego onto the character, while readers simultaneously receive enjoyment from the alien experiences of another. The logic of Forster’s statement can be compelling, especially applied to the fiction of classic realism such as George Eliot or Charles Dickens, in which a fictional character is given characteristics by a third-person narrator’s pronouncements about the character’s nature.104 In George Eliot’s Middlemarch, for example, Arthur Brooke is introduced as Dorothea and Celia Brooke’s “uncle, a man nearly sixty, of acquiescent temper, miscellaneous opinions, and uncertain vote.”105 Each brief clause of this sentence brings a new attribute of the character into existence: for the reader, the attributes did not exist before, nor do they exist beyond the text itself. These characteristics, in essence, come into being upon being described, an iterative process that occurs both upon composition and every first reading. Every subsequent reading brings a new, slightly altered portrait into being. An effective writer will not only communicate

103 Fictionality is Catherine Gallagher’s term for the middle space between lies and truth that fiction comes to occupy over the course of the eighteenth century. See Catherine Gallagher, “The Rise of Fictionality,” in The Novel, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 351. 104 Forster in this passage clearly has the omniscient third-person narrator in mind. The process is a far thornier one in the case of first person narrators, whose characterizations are filtered through the perception of the narrator as character. 105 George Eliot, Middlemarch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 8.

these traits through the narrator but will also construct their plot to ‘show, not tell’, using what Barthes calls exempla: “from a narrative episode . . . one induces a character trait.”106 Barthes places special importance on the proper name as the structural embodiment in a purely textual sense of the character: “the proper name acts as a magnetic field for the semes; referring in fact to a body, it draws the semic configuration into an evolving (bio-graphical) tense.”107 Every repetition of the proper name “Arthur Brooke” recalls to mind the previously demonstrated semes as well as accruing new semes, like a snowball accumulating mass as it rolls down a mountain. While a pronouncement about the personal character of a real individual is difficult to confirm or deny, Forster asserts that a narrator’s statement about a character is always true: In daily life we never understand each other, neither complete clairvoyance nor complete confessional exists. We know each other approximately, by external signs, and these serve well enough as a basis for society and even for intimacy. But people in a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist wishes; their inner as well as their outer life can be exposed. And this is why they often seem more definite than characters in history, or even our own friends; we have been told all about them that can be told; even if they are imperfect or unreal they do not contain any secrets, whereas our friends do and must, mutual secrecy being one of the conditions of life upon this globe. (77-78) For Forster, the Prufrockian feeling of isolation within the self is self-evident in daily life: it is impossible to say just what one means, even if one wanted to. Like many of his contemporaries, Forster was struck by the mass trauma of the Great War and the flu pandemic, what Paul Fussell refers to as the Modernist “collision between events and the language available—or thought appropriate—to describe them.”108 This prima facie feeling of isolation, however, is not automatically true within fiction for Forster. Because of the limitations on novelistic character, because characters are discrete ‘word-masses’ about which we cannot learn anything more, we can feel a perceived intimacy with a fictional other better than with a living other. To Forster, the character cannot hide anything from us. The comfort of nineteenth-century fiction, especially, is the confidence we can have in understanding the nature of a Dorothea Brooke or Isabelle Archer,

106 Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, 147-48. 107 Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, 67. 108 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).

guided by the narrator. As Forster asserts, “in the novel we can know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life” (86). Through fiction (and fiction only) readers can return to a Romantic conception of the continuous and developing self, in contrast to the fragmented and discontinuous self of modernity. Forster’s assertions about the epistemological relations of a textual being are often imprecise, and he allows himself to hold a number of contradictory stances that highlight the problems with his faith in the powers of text. He sometimes fails, for example, to distinguish between a biographical sketch and the person being described, obscuring the differences between a real person and a character. In a presumed nod to Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria (1921), Forster asserts that “if a character in a novel is exactly like Queen Victoria - not rather like but exactly like - then it actually is Queen Victoria, and the novel, or all of it that the character touches, becomes a memoir” (65). Forster’s language is intentionally vague here, but the implication is that a memoir or biography would be capable of producing a written recording that would be ‘exactly like’ the person; indeed, the written recording would be the person. In Aspects, Forster develops a poetics of the novel based, to a large degree, on a verisimilar character. Biography is not Forster’s focus, but the importance he places on ‘people’ prompts us to consider how his poetics might accommodate the accounts of living people. In referencing Strachey’s work, Forster makes an analagous suggestion to that of Leonard Woolf by asserting that a biography is successful if it makes a historical person as accessible as a fictional character. Beyond Virginia Woolf, whom I will discuss below, the question was a preoccupation for many: biography, after all, was undergoing an explosion in book sales and general interest.109 Augustine Birrell, quoting Egerton Brydges in 1928, would observe that “just at this moment critical attention is being called to this subject of Imaginative Biography, meaning thereby “an Imaginary Superstructure on the known facts of the Biography of eminent characters.”110 The modern biography has had a roughly contemporaneous development with the novel, and so the two forms have an history of mutual influence. Biographies are often inflected by the novelistic techniques of the time, in the same way that novels are influenced by biographical

109Claire Battershill, Modernist Lives (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 4. 110 Augustine Birrell, “Imaginative Biography,” The Nation and Athenaeum 44, no. 2 (October 13, 1928), 45.

form. Uri Margolin has commented on how “literary narratives are structured in such a way as to create an illusion that they are reports about individuals,” people who existed before the text began and who will continue to exist after the text concludes. 111 The character thus aspires to the status of the biographical subject. This is an illusion because the attributes of the character are brought into existence by their first appearance in textual form. The narrator of a realist novel does not describe something true in the sense of something that already existed. The known existing actions of a person provide the basis for their description in a biography, but it is a novel’s description of a character that brings that particular instantiation of a character into being within the mind of the reader. Forster trusts in prose to produce highly authentic experiences, whether they recount historical personages or create new, textual persons. The very incompleteness of texts is what makes them feel more complete than real-life experiences. Virgina Woolf worked explicitly to undermine this simulacrum of the real in fiction. In her October 1927 review of Aspects of the Novel for the New York Herald Tribune, Woolf criticizes Forster for his “assumption that fiction is more intimately and humbly attached to the service of human beings than the other arts,” and needles him to answer more specifically, “why, again, should the final test of plot, character, story, and the other ingredients of a novel lie in their power to imitate life? Why should a real chair be better than an imaginary elephant?”112 Woolf is unsatisfied with Forster’s approach to technique, noting that in the whole book “almost nothing is said about words.”113 She takes issue, for example, with Forster’s dismissal of Henry James. Forster criticizes “the sacrifices an author [such as James] must make if he wants his pattern and nothing else to triumph” (196). To Woolf, the emphasis on “pattern” in Henry James’ works is laudable because, like the brushstrokes in one of Roger Fry’s paintings, James’ novels are beautiful in themselves, independent of any relation to reality. James does not focus on character, but on perception and pattern; his characters can be known insofar as they contribute to larger ideas. Woolf’s characters are often designed to make this rhetorical point about fiction, whether through the absence of personal insight into Jacob, or, in her biographies, through the complete transparency of their subjects.

111 Uri Margolin, “Structuralist Approaches to Character in Narrative: The State of the Art,” Semiotica 75, no. 1/2 (1989), 10. 112 Virginia Woolf, “The Art of Fiction,” in Collected Essays, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Chatto & Windus, 1966), 54. 113 Woolf, “The Art of Fiction,” 57.

What Can Be Said about Jacob? Virginia Woolf’s best known characters cannot be comfortably described using Forster’s taxonomy. Unlike Homo Fictus, whom we know better than we know our friends, we only know a little about the secret life of a Woolf character. Sometimes this is because we have little access to his or her interiority, sometimes because the character hardly recognizes him or herself. Despite the overflow of detail that we receive about Clarissa in Mrs Dalloway or Mrs Ramsay in To The Lighthouse, the information we are presented is complex and often contradictory. At no point can we summarize either character as simply as we might Charles Dickens’ Mrs. Jellyby or George Eliot’s Edward Casaubon. The increase in psychological detail makes it harder for the reader to know a character as fully as Forster imagines. Jacob’s Room is however an especially important example, because it represents Woolf’s most extreme experiment with the failure to know characters as a central narrative device. Despite Jacob’s Room being narrated by a third-person, disembodied narrator, the speaker is explicitly not omniscient: Jacob remains to a large degree a mystery to the narrator. The narrator resembles an omniscient narrator in other ways; she is aware of a variety of types of information, such as the Christian names of one-hundred and forty-three individuals, many of whom do not interact with any of the primary characters. Moll Pratt sells violets across the street from Jacob as he dines, but no other character will at any point interact with Moll in order to learn her name.114 The world that the narrator can access is shadowed by the difficulty of human communication; all interaction is penumbral, shadowed by various bodies. The umbra, the core of the shadow where no light penetrates, is Jacob. Woolf partially articulated her goals for the novel when she asked in a letter, “how far can one convey character without realism?”115 The unconventional epistemological position of the protagonist of Jacob’s Room, notable even today for its obscurity, can be ascribed to multiple factors. Kate Flint, for instance, asserts that the gap between the narrator and the character is gendered.116 When describing her inability to express Jacob’s essence, the narrator asks the reader to “consider the effect of sex—how

114 Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 2004), 82. 115 Virginia Woolf to David Garnett, October 20, 1922, The Letters of Virginia Woolf (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 2:571. 116 Kate Flint, “Revising Jacob’s Room: Virginia Woolf, Women and Language,” Review of English Studies XLII, no. 167 (August 1991). See also Seymour Chatman, “The ‘Rhetoric’ ‘of’ ‘Fiction’,” in Reading Narrative: Form, Ethics, Ideology, ed. James Phelan (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989).

between man and woman it hangs wavy, tremulous, so that here’s a valley, there’s a peak, when in truth, perhaps, all’s as flat as my hand” (58). At the same time that we must be aware of the real-world status of a man like Jacob, we must also be aware of his status as a creation. By creating Jacob and refusing to describe him, Woolf calls attention to the ways that fictional characters are used to understand others (or refuse that understanding.) Using the London omnibus as a site of profound connectivity at the same time as paradoxically a site of incredible isolation, Woolf explores how each passenger “had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title, James Spalding, or Charles Budgeon, and the passengers going the opposite way could read nothing at all—save ‘a man with a red moustache,’ ‘a young man in grey smoking a pipe’” (52). Where for Forster the legibility of character improves upon the experience of real life, for Woolf people are as inscrutable as characters. Woolf’s metaphor transforms the other into a book, or narrative, one that is shut to all but the individual herself. Rather than contrast the experience of real human interaction with a more comforting experience, as Forster counsels, Woolf instead enacts this frustration within her fiction. This failure to recognize is dramatized on the train when Mrs. Norman is made uncomfortable by Jacob, who smokes in a non-smoking compartment. Despite her attempts to size him up, Mrs. Norman ultimately fails to identify any salient character in Jacob. The narrator of Jacob’s Room concludes that “nobody sees any one as he is, let alone an elderly lady sitting opposite a strange young man in a railway carriage” (23). The narrator’s quest to understand Jacob is echoed by many of the other characters, especially his mother Betty Flanders and his romantic interest Clara Durrant. The novel concludes with Grant Bonamy and Mrs. Flanders sorting through the dead Jacob’s possessions in the hopes of finding something that reveals anything about who Jacob was. The closest that any character comes to knowing Jacob is through his possessions left behind in the titular room. Woolf’s protagonists are all enigmatic, but some are more available to the readers than others. Clarissa Dalloway is inscrutable at various moments to other characters, the reader, or both. In the evocative refrain of Mrs Dalloway, we are reminded that “it was Clarissa one remembered. Not that she was striking; not beautiful at all; there was nothing picturesque about her; she never said anything specially clever; there she was, however; there she was.”117 Clarissa

117 Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2000), 76.

is radically present in her novel but is left undefined. Dora Zhang observes that the word ‘there’ in the phrase ‘there she was’ “conjures [Clarissa] up by the very act of pointing towards her,” without imparting any specific qualities to her. 118 Woolf uses a similar formula when Lily Briscoe observes the ghostly presence of Mrs. Ramsay, as Mrs. Ramsay casts the shadow that completes the composition of Lily’s painting: “there she sat.”119 Woolf’s later novels are better loved, I suspect partly for their willingness to give some attributes to the central character, but Jacob’s Room offers the best window on Woolf’s radical experiments in narration and character. Jacob Flanders is a cipher, a figure without agency. Stephen Kern observes that “Jacob’s conspicuous absence makes it possible to rework the scale of things that give meaning to the life of a character, as seemingly minor events grow in visibility and stature, and seemingly large events are cut down to size.”120 Calling attention to the symbolism at play in Jacob’s last name,121 Edward L. Bishop observes, “the plot happens to him . . . He is dead before he is born into the text, his patronymic already a citation from the text of the First World War.”122 Like the sailors expected to “descend with composed faces into the depths of the sea,”123 Jacob is doomed to die by the looming Great War. The calamity is waiting to wipe out Jacob’s generation impassively and without specific malice, which is why it does not even merit mention in the conclusion of the novel. Bishop, drawing on Richard J. Gerrig and David W. Allbritton, argues that Woolf uses Jacob’s lack of agency to critique readers’ sense that distinctive characters, in reality and fiction, can make a difference in events. Jacob cannot change the course of events, and he cannot survive the Great War through strength of character alone. Influenced by biography’s focus on the notable person, the novel has always focused on characters who are capable of changing their surroundings or their lot. Jacob, however, is of a type, a member of an entire generation of young men who had been blasted away in the trenches, or left deeply scarred, as Woolf would explore later with Septimus Smith in Mrs Dalloway. It is to this type,

118 Dora Zhang, “Naming the Indescribable: James, Russell, Woolf and the Limits of Description,” New Literary History 45, no. 1 (Winter 2014), 64. 119 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (London: Blackwell, 1992), 171. 120 Stephen Kern, “Cézanne’s Wife and Woolf’s Character,” in Virginia Woolf and December 1910: Studies in Rhetoric and Context (Grosmont, South Wales: Illuminati Books, 2014), 127. 121 Flanders is also the site of an important battle of WWI, immortalized in the poem “In Flanders’ Fields” by John McCrae. 122 Edward L Bishop, “The Subject in Jacob’s Room,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 38, no. 1 (1992), 154. 123 Woolf, Jacob’s Room, 129.

among many others, that Woolf feels an ethical/epistemological responsibility. Jacob can never develop beyond this type as his type has been erased from the world. What happens when the refusal to know happens between two fictional entities, the narrator and character? Woolf’s narrator implicitly poses the question, ‘what can be said about Jacob?’ with two specific valences. The first is ethical, and the second is epistemological. Ethically, what can be said without appropriating and speaking for Jacob? Accounts of ethics in literature often characterize the inter-war years as a period that rejects the ethical and moral criticism of previous generations, abandoning questions of whether a character is moral or not. Woolf, however, uses her fiction to express ethical concern about the other that is fundamentally interested in recognition rather than evaluation. In 1928, Augustine Birrell would disparagingly observe that “Our age is, as we all know to our cost, an ethical age, that is always asking itself, ‘Is such and such a thing permissible, and if so, subject to what conditions of method, time, and place?’”124 This hesitance is enacted in moments such as when the narrator refuses to record Jacob’s speech to Bonamy: “Now . . .” said Jacob. It is a tremendous argument. Some people can follow every step of the way, and even take a little one, six inches long, by themselves at the end; others remain observant of the external signs. [. . .] “It follows . . .” said Jacob. (59) This refusal is shocking; in the history of fiction there are not many examples of narrators refusing to record the dialogue of their protagonist. The narrator is not separated from Jacob by time or distance; she is not working from ancient written sources. The obstacle, for Woolf’s narrator, is simply that Jacob is another person, and can therefore only be known incompletely. What makes this refusal especially curious is the fact that Jacob does not exist outside the novel. Why not say anything one likes about a character who does not exist, or make him say what one likes? Woolf, in effect, asserts that if reading fictional character is more epistemologically stable than encountering others in reality, as Forster claims, then fiction fails to prepare the reader for real encounters with others. Woolf and the Leavises rarely agreed on anything, but Woolf might have agreed with Q.D. Leavis’ assertion that characters whose primary goal is to appear “real” simply confirm the prejudices of the reader.125 Leavis asserts that

124 Birrell, “Imaginative Biography,” 45. 125Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto & Windus, 1939).

character is a dangerous criterion for good literature, because “the ordinary reader is content with the general directions for what his literary training recognises as appropriate, and his imagination will do the rest” (82). Like Bradley, Leavis recognizes the power of the reader to fill in the gaps left by the text in order to complete the illusion of the novel’s world, and the people that fill that world. Unlike Bradley, however, Leavis characterizes this filling-in as a misrecognition. To her, shoddy novelists exploit this tendency among readers: “apparently all a novelist need do is to provide bold outlines, and the reader will co-operate to persuade himself that he is in contact with ‘real people’” (78). Jacob, who is fundamentally unlike the older, female narrator, remains misunderstood. To pretend that understanding is simple is to encourage the reader to believe that there is no difference between the self and the other, inhibiting both sympathy and empathy. The second valence is epistemological: what is physically possible to say about Jacob, one of a lost generation? Writing in 1932, Winifred Holtby observes, “when such a young man was killed, [Woolf] seems to ask, what was lost then? What was lost by him? What was lost by his friends? What exactly was it that had disappeared?”126 Woolf the author bears a responsibility to the character, one that she would set out in “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown.” The alterity of a character is an illusion, it is true, but the novelist must imitate the alterity of a person when creating a character. For Woolf, even form must reflect the loss caused by the Great War. Woolf models a respect for the character in Jacob’s Room by emphasizing Jacob’s mystery. In traditional realistic fiction we can know more about Homo Fictus than Homo Sapiens precisely because of the unreal nature of the bond between the narrator and the character. George Eliot’s characters, the quintessential specimens of Homo Fictus, are moved around geometrically like the figures in a biography, and they are known totally by the narrator. Jacob is always focalized, however, through a narrator who emphasizes the imperfect way in which characters (and people) know each other. The experiences of the other characters in Jacob’s Room simulate the experience of knowing a person, but not knowing them very well; an equally ‘real’ effect, but one that leaves the reader unsatisfied. Woolf’s use of free indirect discourse focalizes the perspectives of those around Jacob, but crucially focalizes their lack of knowledge of Jacob rather than their insights into his character. Jacob’s Room was largely panned by early critics because of the lack of satisfaction that the characters provided. Woolf herself predicted that the novel was “too much of an experiment

126 Winifred Holtby, Virginia Woolf: A Critical Memoir (New York: Continuum, 2007), 116.

to be a success.”127 One of these early critics was Arnold Bennett, who observed, “I have seldom read a cleverer book than Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, a novel which has made a great stir in a small world.”128 This was faint praise from Bennett, who earlier in his article observed that cleverness was “the lowest of all artistic qualities.” He observed that Jacob’s Room “is packed and bursting with originality, and it is exquisitely written. But the characters do not vitally survive in the mind because the author has been obsessed by details of originality and cleverness.” To Bennett, Woolf’s focus on innovation kept her from producing great literature, because “the foundation of good fiction is character creating, and nothing else.” Without fully fleshed out characters who have a distinct vitality (or ‘reality’, or ‘truth’), a novel cannot be a success to Bennett and to many other critics of the time period. Woolf’s response to Bennett in the essay “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” can thus be read as a defence of Jacob’s Room and of her approach to character. The multiple versions of Woolf’s essay are radically different: in the first version that appeared in Nation and Athenaeum in 1923, Woolf directly attacks Bennett, along with John Galsworthy and the realist works of H.G. Wells.129 In the better known third version, Woolf would satirize Bennett’s claims by ironically asserting that “in or about December, 1910, human character changed.”130 The second version of the essay is a more general treatise on character- writing, with fewer direct criticisms of Bennett et al. The essay begins with a sketch of a ‘Mrs. Brown’ that Woolf, speaking as ‘I’, encounters on the train in the same car. Woolf finds herself inventing a history for the character, imagining, for example, what ‘Mrs. Brown’s’ relationship to her son might be: “All this shot through my mind as I sat down, being uncomfortable, like most people, at travelling with fellow passengers unless I have somehow or other accounted for them” (322). Just as the omnibus in Jacob’s Room is a site of profound refusal to know, Woolf here posits that the railway carriage’s close quarters and the face-to-face orientation of its seats force riders into an intimacy that is only imagined. Indeed, as Ann Banfield observes, Mrs. Norman in Jacob’s Room sizes Jacob up “like a table-turning Mrs. Brown, observing instead of being

127 Woolf to Roger Fry, August 13, 1922, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 2:546. 128 Bennett, “Is the Novel Decaying?”, 47. 129 Virginia Woolf, “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,” The Nation and Athenaeum 34, no. 9 (December 1, 1923). 130 Virginia Woolf, “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,” in Collected Essays, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Chatto and Windus, 1966), 320.

observed.”131 The observation is always doomed to failure; in Woolf’s earliest rendition of this type of encounter, in “An Unwritten Novel,” the narrator builds an account of a strange woman in a railway car, only to have all of her assumptions proved wrong when the presumed spinster greets her son at the station.132 A stranger’s face confronts us with the character of another, and the character displayed by a socialized face is itself a mask.133 The Mrs. Brown that Woolf reconstructs is not the person who sat opposite a novelist in a railway car, but a projection and construction by Woolf herself. Woolf asserts that the Edwardians, including Bennett, Wells, and Galsworthy, have obscured the reader’s relationship to character. Bennett’s style of writing, which emphasises the social context of a character rather than the character himself, was antithetical to Woolf— unethical for its claim to authenticity, and worse, useless in revealing anything about the characters she wished to present to readers. Woolf imagines that the Edwardians’ advice on how to describe Mrs. Brown would be, “Begin by saying that her father kept a shop in Harrogate. Ascertain the rent. Ascertain the wages of shop assistants in the year 1878. Discover what her mother died of. Describe cancer. Describe calico. Describe—” (332). Ray Monk claims that Woolf’s hostility to the Edwardians leads her “not only into gross caricatures of their novelistic methods, but also into an excessive and intemperate reaction against factual descriptions.”134 (16). However, Monk misunderstands the importance of displacing character to the modernist project. Having proved that one can write a novel without realistic characters, Woolf proceeded throughout her career to build her style on a new foundation. When describing her challenges in representing Mrs. Brown to the reader, Woolf admits that “I shirked that arduous undertaking. I let my Mrs. Brown slip through my fingers. I have told you nothing whatever about her. But that is partly the great Edwardians’ fault” (322). In works such as Jacob’s Room, Woolf works through her rejection of the methods of the Edwardian realists. To her, these writers focused on the material and superficial circumstances of the character rather than attempting to represent its uncommunicated and incommunicable self.

131 Ann Banfield, The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 332. 132 Virginia Woolf, Monday or Tuesday (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1921). 133 John Frow, Character and Person (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 134 Ray Monk, “This Fictitious Life: Virginia Woolf on Biography, Reality and Character,” Philosophy and Literature 31, no. 1 (2007), 16.

Jacob’s Room represents a dramatization of the challenge she faces in representing a Mrs. Brown. Woolf is concerned about having let “my Mrs Brown” slip, not the ‘true’ character of the woman in the train.135 Woolf’s Mrs. Brown is a ‘vision’, not a person. There is a root of life in each character, and a responsibility to that character that requires an ‘arduous undertaking’ every single time. This responsibility, however, is not to a ‘life’, but to a life of the imagination.

Flush and the Legibility of the Subject Flush: A Biography presents the reader with Woolf’s most legible protagonist: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel. Flush’s intellegibility is fully ironic, however. Because Flush is in fact nonhuman and therefore, utterly alien to the reader, the narrator’s complete comprehension of the character highlights the invisible fallacies inherent to the conventions of realist fiction. When Woolf’s biographer claims to know Flush better than Barrett Browning knew Flush, it is because this biographer believes she knows the character that appears on Barrett Browning’s pages better than Barrett Browning knew the character that she recorded. Alex Zwerdling famously characterized Woolf as a “reluctant satirist,”, but much of Woolf’s most important aesthetic contributions to modern character are fundamentally satiric.136 Flush may seem Woolf’s least serious work, but the text makes a series of serious critiques of the reader’s trust in both biography and fiction to communicate personality. Long a puzzle for critics, Woolf’s dog biography crucially cites Barrett Browning’s actual letters in order to foreground the disjunction between truth and personality, or character and knowledge. The citations provide the illusion of access to the unmediated original, while simultaneously calling attention to the constructed mediation that both the biographer and Barrett Browning perform. Woolf parodies Forster’s claims about the nature of fictional character and personal human character; Woolf's biographer pretentiously claims to have better knowledge of the dog than Barrett Browning did, because the biographer has access to the dog as a character, whereas Barrett Browning only knew a flesh-and-blood dog. The biographer’s hubris also parodies the works of Lytton Strachey, best known for his sharply critical volume of character sketches,

135 Recall Leonard Woolf describing “Strachey’s Victoria” as a real entity, but one who exists separately from the historical personage, discussed above on page 37. 136 Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World, 38.

Eminent Victorians (1918) and the biography Queen Victoria (1922). Woolf wrote in a letter to a friend that “I wanted to play a joke on Lytton—it was to parody him.”137 In the tradition of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century epistolary novel and the fictional (auto)biography, such as Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling and Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, Woolf’s recourse to documents both reassures and alienates readers . Both Man of Feeling and Sartor Resartus work from an ostensibly incomplete set of documents, which inadvertently highlights the uncertainty of knowing the other. Unlike these earlier fictional works, Woolf’s sources are genuine, but her flagrant misuse of the sources encourages the reader to be critical throughout. Readers are given access to first-hand reports about Flush’s behaviour, and are able to make their own inferences about Flush. Woolf constructs the narrative to remind us that these are not Flush’s own accounts, and that they require interpretation as well as critical distance. Woolf worries that biographers, and their readers, view the people of the past as “little figures” that biographers could arrange “in all sorts of patterns of which they were ignorant, for they thought when they were alive that they could go where they liked; and as they speak we shall read into their sayings all kinds of meanings which never struck them, for they believed when they were alive that they said straight off whatever came into their heads. But once you are in a biography all is different.”138 To Woolf, writing’s someone life fundamentally alters their ‘life story’ by turning their life into a story. Things that happened out of order, or for no reason, are turned into the turning points of a narrative. Discussing the Renaissance diarist John Evelyn in 1920, Woolf observes that real life has no obvious narrative, and she makes a suggestive observation that hints at her formal intentions with Jacob’s Room. She identifies in Evelyn’s work a potential novelistic method, of “going on with the day’s story circumstantially, bringing in people who will never be mentioned again, [and] leading up to crises which never take place.”139 As with Jacob’s Room, Woolf’s worry about the manipulation of “little figures” into a workable narrative reflects an ethical concern about our interaction with the other. How do we reconcile our personal vision of the other with their stubborn existence? In “The New

137 Woolf to Lady Ottoline Morell, September 16, 1931, Letters, 5:161-62. 138 Virginia Woolf, “I Am Christina Rosetti,” in The Common Reader: The Second Series (London: Hogarth Press, 1929), 237. 139 Virginia Woolf, “Rambling Round Evelyn,” in The Common Reader (London: Hogarth Press, 1925), 119.

Biography,” Woolf observed that the two essential forces that come into opposition in biography were the “granite-like solidity” of truth and the “rainbow-like intangibility” of personality.140 Personality, or character, is an indefinable quality that is fundamentally different from factual truths. One cannot, Woolf suggests, communicate both in a biography. Flush was one of Woolf’s bestselling works within her lifetime, but the jesting tone and uncertain genre of the work have led to the work being largely ignored by critics until very recently. Indeed, Pamela Caughie suggests that Flush’s very popularity is the cause of its neglect.141 Alex Zwerdling characterizes both Flush and Orlando as embodiments of “the shallower aspects of Bloomsbury ‘sophistication,’” the unfortunate influence of “the more lightweight members of the group” like Strachey.142 For Craig Smith, the novel can only be understood by ignoring its central and most unique aspect: “Flush may be accepted as a serious object of study only to the extent that it may be represented as being not really about a dog.”143 For some recent scholars working in animal studies, however, the work is important because of its subject. Karalyn Kendall-Morwick asserts that the work represents a serious attempt to investigate non-human subjectivity, and to construct a canine Bildungsroman.144 Similarly, David Herman argues that we should read Flush as an attempt to capture nonhuman thought and to think “zoegraphically”—that is, trying to register the complexity of nonhuman life and to avoid prioritizing human experience.145 To me, reading the book seriously as a life of a dog, as Kendall-Morwick and Herman propose, misses the core of the satire. The serious critique of Flush comes at the expense of its canine subject.146 This critique is of the fictionality of life-

140 Virginia Woolf, “The New Biography,” in Collected Essays Volume Four (London: Hogarth Press, 1967), 229. 141 Pamela L. Caughie, “Flush and the Literary Canon: Where Oh Where Has That Little Dog Gone?,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 10, no. 1 (Spring 1991). 142Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World, 28. 143 Craig Smith, “Across the Widest Gulf: Nonhuman Subjectivity in Virginia Woolf’s Flush,” Twentieth Century Literature 48, no. 3 (September 2002). 349. 144 Kara Kendall-Morwick, “Mongrel Fiction: Canine Bildung and the Feminist Critique of Virginia Woolf’s Flush,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 60, no. 3 (Fall 2014). 145 David Herman, “Modernist Life Writing and Nonhuman Lives: Ecologies of Experience in Virginia Woolf’s Flush,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 59, no. 3 (Fall 2013). 146 While Woolf had a deep affection for Pinka, her dog who posed as Flush for the frontispiece of the book, she felt discomfort with the tendency of dog owners to anthropomorphize their pets: instead, Maureen Adams observes that Woolf “enjoyed watching dogs be dogs” on their own, canine terms. Maureen Adams, Shaggy Muses: The Dogs Who Inspired Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edith Wharton, and Emily Bronte (New York: Ballantine Books, 2007), 235.

writing, as well as the fictionality of life. The irony of the narrator/biographer’s subject position is explicit throughout the work. By treating Flush as an individual with intelligible feelings that the biographer understands best, Woolf gently censures biographies that make too confident a claim to absolute knowledge of their subject, or novels that too easily comfort their readers with clearly accessible realist characters. Woolf reconstructs Flush not as a dog, but as a character. Whenever she quotes from the letters of Barrett Browning and Browning, she quotes precisely and accurately, with the care that a real biographer would take. Woolf carefully draws on the sources she has available, namely the discussions of the dog between the two lovers, as well as Barrett Browning’s other letters and her two poems about Flush. Despite this focus on sources, however, the narrative structure attributes a complex, nearly-human consciousness to Flush. Woolf’s biographer often claims to know the feelings of Flush better than Barrett Browning did, critiquing both the overconfident biographer who speaks for his subject, and the over-sentimental reader of fiction who identifies too strongly with a textual effect. Woolf’s citations of Barrett Browning draw on the poet’s construction of Flush as an individual with a self-identical, developing personality. Barrett Browning ventriloquized Flush in her letters: Alison Light observes that Barrett Browning “saw a telling expression in his silent looks, a pleading significance in the twists of his tail; every twitch and every scratch, every snuffle or sniff, spoke volumes in ‘Flush-language.’”147 This ventriloquism allowed Barrett Browning to create a personality for Flush that was consistently sympathetic to her emotional needs. She would frequently put words in Flush’s mouth in her letters, especially during her long illness. In one instance where she wanted to avoid some acquaintances, Barrett heard “strange voices and then [Flush] drew back and looked up in my face exactly as if to say, ‘No! This will not do for us! We had better go home again.’”148 In another instance, after she received cakes from Browning, she wrote to him, “Flush thanks you! I asked him if he loved you even, and he wagged his tail. Generally when I ask him that question he won’t answer at all, but you have overcome him with generosity . . . as you do me!”149

147 Alison Light, “Introduction,” in Flush: A Biography, ed. Alison Light (London: Penguin, 2000), xiii. 148 Elizabeth Barrett to Robert Browning, April 18, 1846, The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, (New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1898), 2:82. 149 Barrett to Browning, August 5, 1846, Letters, 2:394.

For Barrett Browning, constructing a character out of Flush requires both embellishment of his human characteristics and effacement of his animal characteristics. When Flush behaves badly (that is, like an animal), Barrett has to work harder to project her own feelings on to Flush. In one instance in which Flush bit Browning, she beseeched Browning in a letter, Ah Flush, Flush! He did not hurt you really? You will forgive him for me? The truth is that he hates all unpetticoated people, and that though he does not hate you, he has a certain distrust of you, which any outward sign, such as the umbrella, reawakens. But if you had seen how sorry and ashamed he was yesterday! I slapped his ears and told him that he never should be loved again: and he sate on the sofa (sitting, not lying) with his eyes fixed on me all the time I did the flowers, with an expression of quite despair in his face.150 It is in a moment such as this that the animal strains at the collar of the ‘pet’, a fiction that contains the desires and projected feelings of the owner. In this passage alone, Barrett suggests that Flush is capable of complex emotions including love, hate, shame, and despair. She emphasizes that Flush sits on the sofa, as a person might, rather than simply lying on the sofa like an animal. Woolf’s biographer investigates these moments and claims that he can uncover the ‘real Flush’ hiding between the lines of Barrett Browning’s letters. He claims repeatedly that Barrett Browning herself did not know Flush as well as he does. Woolf uses this real-world example of fictionality to critique our reading relationships with fictional characters, ‘pets’ of a different variety. Throughout her corpus, Woolf, presents us with characters that cannot be easily domesticated. As the multiperspectival portraits of Clarissa or Mrs. Ramsay demonstrate, no individual is only one thing—Mrs. Ramsay appears one way to Charles Tansley and another way to Lily Briscoe. Despite the historical Flush being accessible to us in Barrett’s and Browning’s letters, he is more than two perspectives can offer us. Woolf’s biographer straddles the perspective of Flush and Barrett, focalizing both characters alternately and dramatizing the gulf between human and animal subjectivity. Flush struggles to understand the human interactions around him, and the significant moments of Barrett Browning’s life, such as her long illness, are filtered through the dog’s perspective. When Flush is first given to Barrett Browning by his former mistress, Mary Mitford, the narrator focalizes Flush’s fright and bemusement at being exchanged:

150 Barrett to Browning, July 9, 1846, Letters, 2:320.

[Flush] was aware of huge objects in commotion over him; and, unstrung as he was by the experiences of the past hour, he hid himself, trembling, behind a screen. The voices ceased. A door shut. For one instant he paused, bewildered, unstrung. Then with a pounce as of clawed tigers memory fell upon him. He felt himself alone—deserted. He rushed to the door. It was shut.151 The biographer infers from textual evidence the reasoning behind Flush’s behaviour, and reconstructs it into a confident narrative about Flush’s feelings, untroubled by ‘perhaps’ or ‘maybe’. Flush is even accorded an emotional intelligence by the biographer: “Flush, as his story proves, had an even excessive appreciation of human emotions” (11). While many of the citations of Barrett Browning’s letters merely attempt to fill in the experience of Flush based on the documentary evidence, there are several key moments where the biographer claims to know Flush better than Barrett Browning did. It is in these moments that Woolf’s biographer most clearly oversteps her bounds in order to demonstrate Woolf’s concern about the representation of the other. To generate this tension between Barrett Browning and the biographer, Woolf’s biographer bestows a greater amount of subjectivity on the dog than Barrett did in her original letters. At a key moment in the courtship of Elizabeth and Robert as represented in Flush, Barrett Browning “gave [Flush] the oddest look – as if she expected him too to feel what she felt. And then she laughed, pityingly; as if it were absurd – Flush, poor Flush could feel nothing of what she felt. He could know nothing of what she knew. Never had such wastes of dismal distance separated them” (39). The fictionalized Barrett Browning doubts Flush’s subjectivity, individuality, and perspicacity, thereby expressing a quintessentially modern concern with the incommunicability of experience. Woolf’s biographer undermines Barrett Browning through the form of the work, which features innumerable moments of Flush coming to an understanding of Barrett Browning’s feelings. There is no clear source in Barrett Browning’s surviving letters from the time period that would serve as a basis for this moment in Woolf’s text, but it helps give the biographer an authority that would otherwise be missing.152 Woolf’s biographer believes in Flush, even when Barrett Browning does not. Thus, we can trust the biographer more than we can trust Barrett Browning, and we are encouraged to believe the

151 Virginia Woolf, Flush (New York and London: Penguin Books, 2000), 17. 152 In Alison Light’s notes to her edition of Flush, which includes an exhaustive list of sources from the letters of Browning, Barrett Browning, and her family, she is similarly unable to identify a source for this moment.

assertions of the biographer when she confidently reads between Barrett’s lines to find the real Flush. In the opening of the book, Woolf situates Flush in a lineage of noble spaniels charged with hunting rabbits, known as span in Carthaginian. The biographer displays erudition and scholarship, which Barrett Browning apparently lacks: “with all her poet’s imagination Miss Barrett could not divine what Wilson’s wet umbrella meant to Flush; . . . [that] when Mr Kenyon stumbled over the bell-pull, that Flush heard dark men cursing in the mountains; the cry, ‘Span! Span!’ rang in his ears, and it was in some muffled, ancestral rage that he bit him” (27). Despite the fact that Flush is long dead, the research that the biographer has done has apparently led to a greater understanding of Flush than Barrett could possibly have. In another episode, Woolf draws on an actual moment in Barrett Browning’s letters where Flush “began by shivering with rage and barking and howling and gnashing his teeth at the brown dog in the glass, [but now] has learnt by experience what that image means, ... and now contemplates it, serene in natural philosophy.”153 After having constructed a scene in which Flush learns that he is a purebred dog, of a higher social class than the mutts who run free on the street, Woolf has her biographer claim that when “Miss Barrett observed him staring in the glass, she was mistaken. He was a philosopher, she thought, meditating the difference between appearance and reality. On the contrary, he was an aristocrat considering his points” (25). The biographer is seemingly able to divine more about the truth of the historical character of Flush from Barrett Browning’s words than Barrett Browning herself could recognize. After Barrett closes the carriage door on Flush’s paw accidentally, distracted by her romantic thoughts about Browning, Barrett Browning notes that though Flush whines and points his paw towards her, seemingly begging for attention, he runs off when the carriage door is open, apparently having forgotten about the paw. Woolf quotes Barrett Browning’s letters directly before contradicting her: “Flush always makes the most of his misfortunes—he is of the Byronic school—il se pose en victime”. But here Miss Barrett, absorbed in her own emotions, misjudged him completely. If his paw had been broken, still he would have bounded. That dash was his answer to her mockery; I have done with you—that was the meaning he flashed at her as he ran. (44)

153 Barrett to Browning, March 25, 1846, Letters, 1:578.

Barrett’s letters project an elaborate character onto Flush, a character coloured by her education and social context. Woolf’s biographer takes the same evidence, as well as Barrett Browning’s interpretation, and assumes that the evidence means something completely different. We have thus a fictionalized fictionality: Woolf’s arrogant biographer looks to the sources and finds more in the sources than the subjects themselves discovered in writing them. She laments that “it is to poetry, alas, that we have to trust for our most detailed description of Flush himself,” but is willing to poeticize Flush’s history herself, and to turn him into the Byronic hero that Barrett herself dismisses. Strachey’s biographies were another explicit target of Woolf’s in Flush, as she mentioned in her letters. Strachey freed himself of the strict limitations of historical record: Richard D. Altick describes Strachey as “assuming an Olympian pose of omniscience such as no earlier biographer had ventured to do.”154 While earlier biographers limited their statements to what could be demonstrated by the historical record, Strachey would often provide editorial correctives. In one representative moment in Queen Victoria (which Strachey dedicated to Woolf) he observes that the surviving record of Prince Albert’s “disagreement with the details of Palmerston’s policy was in reality merely a symptom of the fundamental differences between the characters of the two men. In Albert’s eyes Palmerston was a coarse, reckless egotist.”155 Influenced by psychoanalytic theory, Strachey infers a ‘true’, sometimes subconscious meaning to statements on the historical record. He frequently uses conditional or hypothetical phrases such as “it is easy to imagine, also, what might have been” in Queen Victoria. Like Woolf’s biographer in Flush, Strachey looks at the historical evidence and claims to know his subjects better than they knew each other. In even bolder moments, Strachey hypothesizes about the deeply secret feelings and thoughts of his subjects. He famously conjectured that the queen dreamt of her childhood and youth while on her deathbed: She herself, as she lay blind and silent, seemed to those who watched her to be divested of all thinking - to have glided already, unawares, into oblivion. Yet, perhaps, in the secret chambers of consciousness, she had her thoughts, too. Perhaps her fading mind called up once more the shadows of the past to float before it . . . to the spring woods at Osborne,

154 Richard D. Altick, “Eminent Victorianism: What Lytton Strachey Hath Wrought,” The American Scholar 64, no. 1 (Winter 1995), 82. 155 Lytton Strachey, Queen Victoria (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1921), 222.

so full of primroses for Lord Beaconsfield - to Lord Palmerston’s queer clothes and high demeanour, and Albert’s face under the green lamp, and Albert’s first stag at Balmoral . . . (457-458). Strachey has few ethical or epistemological concerns about presenting such a hypothesis within a book of biography: to him, personality trumped truth. It is in moments such as these that we can recognize commonalities between Strachey and Bradley, who similarly took license with his critical subjects in order to better express their personalities.156 Strachey includes a moment in Queen Victoria, likely apocryphal, in which Prince Albert refuses to let the Queen into his room unless she enters as his wife and not the Queen of England. Rather than omit the story, Strachey instead notes that the story is “ill-authenticated and perhaps mythical, yet summing up, as such stories often do, the central facts of the case” (160-161). For him, the story gets to the heart of the subject better than the people themselves did. It is perhaps ironic for Woolf to parody Strachey when so much of Strachey’s innovation is based in the comic and satirical modes; but Strachey’s satirical techniques involved both narrative epistemological certainty, and a distillation of the historical record into the biography’s narrative that Woolf sought to critique. Strachey took well-loved historical figures as well as widely despised personages and mocked them both, reducing moments of serious national importance to petty squabbles. Strachey often dramatized long interpersonal conflicts using condensed anecdotes, the way one might write historical drama. To explain the conflict between the Prince Regent and the Duke of Kent over Victoria’s name, Strachey distills the months-long contention into a single moment at the actual christening: The Regent . . . seeing a chance of annoying his brother, suddenly announced that he himself would be present at the baptism . . . [a]nd so when the ceremony took place and the Archbishop of Canterbury asked by what name he was to baptize the child, the Regent replied ‘Alexandrina.’ At this the Duke ventured to suggest that another name might be added. ‘Certainly,’ said the Regent; ‘Georgina?’ ‘Or Elizabeth?’ said the Duke. There was a pause, during which the Archbishop, with the baby in his lawn sleeves, looked with some uneasiness from one Prince to the other. ‘Very well, then,’ said the Regent at last,

156 F.R. Leavis characterized Strachey as a member of the “Bradley-Archer” school because of Strachey’s own insistence on reality as a marker of dramatic success. F.R. Leavis, The Common Pursuit (New York: New York University Press, 1964), 179.

‘call her after her mother. But Alexandrina must come first.’ Thus, to the disgust of her father, the child was christened Alexandrina Victoria (26). The anecdote functions as the Barthesian exemplum, attaching semes to the proper name through actions. Unlike earlier biographers who attached semes to their subjects through citation, Strachey avoided it as much as possible; the quotations in the above scene are in fact paraphrases and condensations of longer conversations. In 1929, Woolf presented the second talk in a three-part series entitled “Miniature Biographies,” broadcast on BBC Radio. The other two speakers were Harold Nicolson, the husband of Sackville-West, and Desmond MacCarthy. MacCarthy’s biography begins with a similar ribbing of Strachey, observing This is a biographical age. At no other period of literary history have biographers shown such brilliant independence of documents, such ingenuity in surmise. Biographers of an earlier date would never have told us, for instance, that cats were playing in the area, or a milk-cart was passing by when Keats was born, or have described the thoughts which lay behind the cold grey eyes of Napoleon at a moment when (conceivably) they filled with tears.157 MacCarthy’s style is far blunter than Woolf’s; he emphasizes the irresponsibility of the modern biographer. MacCarthy’s biographical subject heightens the joke; where Nicholson and Woolf chose William Fletcher and Beau Brummell, respectively, MacCarthy discusses John H. Watson, Sherlock Holmes’ friend. The lacunae that exist in Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories provide the basis for MacCarthy to comment on the “curious difficulty with which the biographer of Dr. Watson is confronted.”158 MacCarthy’s parodic biographer shows no respect for history in the name of pursuing the ‘true’ personality of Watson. Woolf’s “joke” at Strachey’s expense was far gentler than MacCarthy’s, perhaps because of Strachey’s illness during the composition of Flush. Woolf attempts to outdo Strachey on two fronts: first, Woolf cites her sources more conscientiously than Strachey does. Second, Woolf’s parody of Strachey is often, ironically, a more serious enterprise than Strachey might have been able to undertake himself. Her utterly deadpan satire, which concludes with a meditative chapter on Flush’s old age and death in Italy, treats Flush as a serious subject in order to broaden the

157 Desmond MacCarthy, “Miniature Biographies III – Dr. Watson,” The Listener 48 (December 4, 1929), 775. 158 MacCarthy, “Miniature Biographies,” 776.

subject of her critique to all biographers who over-read their subjects. Flush the individual dog is a figure that is as inaccessible to the contemporary reader as the Queen of England. The reader’s natural tendency is to fill gaps with the familiar; unsatisfied with a Prufrockian world in which it is impossible to communicate accurately, readers rewrite the unknown other as a version of themselves or as one of a gallery of types encountered in fiction. Woolf counsels the reader to live in a state of impenetrability, to accept that fictions of the other are just that—fictions. We can never fully understand characters, she asserts, whether they are entirely fictional or constructed out of people (or creatures) that we know.

Orlando and the Exploded Self While Jacob’s Room and Flush represent the two extremes of legible character in Woolf’s corpus, Orlando: A Biography is her most balanced and readable critique of realist character and its proponents. Woolf conceived of the work as being, very explicitly, not a novel, although its form remains indeterminate. Despite the fact that its characters resemble those of classic realism far more closely than in Jacob’s Room, Orlando is explicitly marked as a ‘biography’. To Kari Elise Lokke, Orlando is a comic satire of the Romantic formulation of self. 159 More directly, however, Orlando satirizes the Victorian biography whose roots lie in the Romantic idea of a self-identical, developing individual. Woolf begins the biography in an exaggerated, overconfident biographical style in order to make the same critique she made in Jacob’s Room: that the reader’s trust in text to communicate personality in the form of fictional or real character is naive, and sometimes dangerous, leaving us unable to recognize difference. As the work progresses, however, we are confronted with the limits inherent in describing an individual as a singular, self-identical character who stays the same person throughout his or her lifetime. Elizabeth Cooley observes that Orlando “goes beyond satire to reveal the paradoxical limits of language and the biographer’s insistence upon trying to cross these limits and express the ‘reality of characters.’”160 Orlando calls our attention to the over-reaching links made by biographers between the ‘facts’ of history and the truth of personality.

159 Kari Elise Lokke, “Orlando and Incandescence: Virginia Woolf’s Comic Sublime,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 38, no. 1 (Spring 1992). 160 Elizabeth Cooley, “Revolutionizing Biography: “Orlando,” “Roger Fry”, and the Tradition,” South Atlantic Review 55, no. 2 (May 1990), 76.

The work’s satire, however, does not explore these issues in a vacuum; Woolf carefully based the work on her friend and sometime lover, Vita Sackville-West. Orlando exists in an interstitial state between biography and fiction - it takes real events and turns them into semi- mythical legends. The titular character, Orlando, interacts with a variety of characters, some of whom are famous figures such as Queen Elizabeth or Alexander Pope, but many of whom are based on people in Sackville-West and Woolf’s lives. Nigel Nicolson, Sackville-West’s son, observed in his copy of Orlando that Woolf’s references got her into trouble more than once. A reference to a pompous and misogynist Mr. S.W. in Orlando led Edward Sackville-West to believe that the character was meant to refer to him, and that he was being mocked: according to Nicolson, Woolf “assured him, mendaciously, that she meant Sydney Waterlow.”161 It is intriguing that Woolf would consider the feelings of her own creations more carefully than the feelings of real-life acquaintances and friends, but perhaps not out of keeping with her arguments in “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown.” Woolf argues that because they are her own creation, she has a responsibility not to let characters slip through her fingers. Her concern is for her Mrs. Brown, not the woman in the railway carriage who has been threatened with some indeterminate reproach. What then can we make of Woolf’s unwillingness to explore the interior of the mind of Jacob, of her epistemological and ethical hesitance, when contrasted with her decision to explore the mind of Sackville-West, and more, to project Vita’s consciousness onto the entirety of modern English history? Sackville-West, after all, was an actual person, for whom there are more concrete epistemological and ethical questions at stake. Woolf did not repeat the experiment of Jacob’s Room, exploring different levels of access to her characters’ interiority in each new work. But what Jacob and Orlando reveal together is the fundamental difference between a character and a person for Woolf. A character cannot defend itself from being falsely conceived or described; as I have shown above, the way that a character is shaped by either the reader or the writer makes the character take that shape. But Woolf seemed to have little trouble turning people into characters—Orlando represents Woolf’s Vita, in a similar fashion to Strachey’s Victoria. This is not mere solipsism. To Woolf, the only difference between a character and a person is that the person continues to exist when you do not think about them. If Orlando is a false

161 Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford’s World Classics, 2000), 333. This edition includes Nicolson’s unpublished annotations to his copy of Orlando in its endnotes, without explanation or qualification, encouraging readers to view the book as a roman-a-clef.

representation of Sackville-West, then Sackville-West herself can articulate that error, which Woolf sought through constant correspondence during the composition of Orlando. As Louise A. DeSalvo has suggested, the writing and publication of Orlando may have strained the friendship of Woolf and Sackville-West permanently. Woolf’s first letter to Sackville-West after completing Orlando asked, “Did you feel a sort of tug, as if your neck was being broken on Saturday last at 5 minutes to one? […] The question now is, will my feelings for you be changed? I’ve lived in you all these months—coming out, what are you really like? Do you exist? Have I made you up?”162 Woolf’s experience in attending to a personal vision of the other dramatizes the precise dangers she warns against in “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown.” As she repeatedly demonstrates, it is far too simple to lose sight of the stubborn boundaries of the other’s personal character in favour of a self-determined vision. Sackville-West, for her part, responded that “I won’t be fictitious. I won’t be loved solely in an astral body, or in Virginia’s world.”163 Like the biographer who implicitly compares knowing a dog’s mind to knowing a literary character, Orlando’s biographer uses the vast canvas of English history to contrast the granite and the rainbow of truth and personality. The biographical form was important enough to Woolf that she insisted on calling it a biography, despite believing that this would damage the book’s sales. In her diary, she lamented that “we may sell a third that we sold of Lighthouse before publication - not a shop will buy save in sixes and twelves. They say this is inevitable. No one wants biography. But it is a novel, says Miss Ritchie. But it is called biography on the title page, they say. It will have to go to the Biography shelf.”164 Orlando needed to be called a biography because it is structured by the progression of a real life. Although her brother Thoby Stephens, who died suddenly in 1906, is a clear model for many of Jacob’s characteristics, Jacob is a

162 Woolf to Sackville-West, March 20, 1928, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 3:474, qtd in Louise A. DeSalvo, “Lighting the Cave: The Relationship Between Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf,” Signs 8, no. 2 (Winter 1982), 206. 163 DeSalvo, “Lighting the Cave: The Relationship Between Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf,” 206. 164 Woolf, A Writer’s Diary: Being Extracts From the Diary of Virginia Woolf, 130. Perhaps to Woolf’s surprise, Orlando actually sold quite well, as Claire Battershill notes in Claire Battershill, “'No One Wants Biography': The Hogarth Press Classifies Orlando,” in Interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary Woolf: Selected Papers From the 22nd Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, ed. Ann Martin, and Kathryn Holland (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Digital Press, 2013).

composite of a number of male acquaintances.165 Orlando is governed by the logic of a ‘life’, not the conventions of a realist novel. It revives the ethical questions prompted by Jacob’s Room, but takes a diametrically opposed approach: Cooley notes that “rather than regret that he can say no more about his subject than facts allow, [the biographer] simply accepts his dilemma; by expounding the limits of biography and submitting to its gods, ‘Truth,’ ‘Candour,’ and ‘Honesty,’ he excuses himself from any attempt to pursue the inexpressible.”166 Orlando, like Flush, begins the work in an intrinsically legible state. Unlike in the latter sections of the book, the opening sentence observes that “there could be no doubt of his sex” (11). The biographer has access to most of Orlando’s thoughts and is willing to infer other aspects of Orlando’s character from his face and body. Looking upon his face, the biographer exclaims, “a more candid, sullen face it would be impossible to find. Happy the mother who bears, happier still the biographer who records the life of such a one! Never need she vex herself, nor he invoke the help of novelist or poet” (12). The biographer, confident in his ability, dismisses the literary arts as unnecessary crutches for such an individual, whose character is so self-evident as to make his job straightforward. Queen Elizabeth, who takes a fancy to Orlando, is able to “[flash] her yellow hawk’s eyes upon him as if she would pierce his soul. The young man withstood her gaze blushing only a damask rose as became him. Strength, grace, romance folly, poetry, youth - she read him like a page” (17). Unlike the ‘leaves of a book’ that are shut in the heart of each omnibus rider in Jacob’s Room, text becomes a model for legibility once again. As in the later Flush, Woolf emphasizes the ‘sources’ from which the biographer derives the narrative in a broad, satirical fashion. These sources vary from overheard conversation to written sources that the biographer occasionally mentions. These sources are emphasized most when they are insufficient, as in a moment that recalls MacCarthy’s parody of Strachey: Up to this point in telling the story of Orlando’s life, documents, both private and historical, have made it possible to fulfil the first duty of a biographer, which is to plod without looking to right or left, in the indelible footprints of truth […] But now we come to an episode which […] is dark, mysterious, and undocumented; so that there is no explaining it […] Our simple duty is to state the facts as far as they are known, and so let the reader make of them what he may. (41)

165 See Julia Briggs, “In Search of Jacob: Jacob’s Room (1922),” in Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life (Orlando: Harcourt, 2005). 166 Cooley, “Revolutionizing Biography,” 75.

Here, Woolf resurrects eighteenth-century truth claims in the style of Gulliver’s Travels, a book that similarly straddles ‘biography’ and fiction. In this episode of Orlando, the biographer gestures to the unknowability of the mind of the other, but implies that this is a unique situation: when she has the primary sources of letters and diary entries, she has access to the mind of the other. These sources are imperfect, but not imperfect enough to doubt. Satirizing Forster’s broad statement that “if a character in a novel is exactly like Queen Victoria - not rather like but exactly like - then it actually is Queen Victoria,” Woolf uses the ‘document’ as a key to following “the indelible footprints of truth.” Forster’s under-theorized approach to character draws a direct line between a representations of individuals and the individuals themselves. Woolf satirizes Forster’s claim in a similar way when she cites directly from Barrett’s letters to correct Barrett’s perceptions of Flush. In the conclusion of the novel, the biographer’s attempts to maintain access to Orlando’s personal character is made more complicated by the sudden explosion of selves that Orlando experiences. Orlando comes to recognize the distinct selves that comprise her, from the young boy swinging a sword at the severed head of a Moor to the middle-aged woman driving a motor- car. Woolf challenges the idea of a self-identical, developing individual and instead puts forward the idea that individuals are a mesh of dozens (or hundreds, or thousands) of distinct selves. Some of these selves are specific to certain periods in life, while others depend on the social realm within which the individual is interacting. The biographer notes that “she had a great variety of selves to call upon, far more than we have been able to find room for, since a biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many thousand” (179). The biographer excuses himself for not being able to account for the full complexity of Orlando’s multiplicitous selfhood, but then makes a valiant attempt nonetheless to record the rapid shifts between selves, and even to try to explain from which sources the biographer is deriving this information: She was, to hear her talk, changing her selves as quickly as she drove--there was a new one at every corner—as happens when, for some unaccountable reason, the conscious self, which is the uppermost, and has the power to desire, wishes to be nothing but one self. This is what some people call the true self, and it is, they say, compact of all the selves we have it in us to be; commanded and locked up by the Captain self, the Key self, which amalgamates and controls them all. Orlando was certainly seeking this self as the reader can judge from overhearing her talk as she drove (and if it is rambling talk,

disconnected, trivial, dull, and sometimes unintelligible, it is the reader's fault for listening to a lady talking to herself; we only copy her words as she spoke them, adding in brackets which self in our opinion is speaking, but in this we may well be wrong) (180). Woolf’s biographer takes a perverse delight in the impossibility of his task, although this does not stop him from undertaking it. Instead, he downloads the responsibility for any imperfection in the text onto the readers, who are likened to eavesdroppers and spies; it is the reader who is perverse, for her interest in an otherwise unremarkable lady. Woolf creates a dichotomy between the ‘true self’ and the ‘Captain self,’ which is the biographer’s name for the character that we understand ourselves to be. The captain self regulates our true self and grants it access to the exterior world only at certain times, undermining the biographer’s earlier claims to have a thorough understanding of Orlando’s selves. Orlando also profitably deconstructs Forster’s trust in the reader to utterly immerse him/herself into the work and engage fully with the characters. For most, the experience of feeling a perceived intimacy with a fictional character is an infrequent occurrence. Describing all of Homo Fictus this way is surely to idealize and standardize a rare experience, although it is an experience which readers seek throughout their reading lives. Orlando’s biographer seeks out the reader who can perform the “reader’s part in making up from bare hints here and there the whole boundary and circumference of a living person; can hear in what we only whisper a living voice; can see, often when we say nothing about it, exactly what he looked like, and know without a word to guide them precisely what he thought and felt” (45). This reader is of course impossible, imaginary. Ironically this ideal reader, who can correctly infer meaning from the literal space between the lines or between words, is not actually needed for Orlando if it is, as the biographer claims, an account of a legible if changeable person. This reader would be more needed to decode Jacob, whose narrator refuses to even transcribe the statements that Jacob has spoken aloud.

Throughout this chapter I have been addressing the problem of knowing others as it was explored by Forster, Strachey, and Woolf. These questions were not just theoretical for any of these three: the answers had a practical effect on their daily work. Woolf’s great characters are compelling because they capture the fug of human existence, the impenetrability of the other, despite being communicated through a medium that is always already inside us. Jacob, Orlando,

and Flush are often relegated to a second tier of Homo Lupus by readers and critics, which may be because they express this goal in extremes—examples of perfect legibility, as well as utter darkness. Discussing Aspects of the Novel, Ray Monk finds it “surprising” that anyone could believe we can know fictional characters better than real people, and claims that both Woolf and Forster shared this belief.167 Monk calls Woolf’s belief that the self could best be expressed by fiction “her most pernicious legacy for the theory of biography.”168 However, he makes a fundamental error by claiming that Woolf shares Forster’s belief in the reality of character. It is true that Woolf approaches the fields of biography and the novel as theoretically linked, and subject to the same questions regarding character and self. But crucially, Woolf is troubled by those who insist on yoking fiction to reality. Classic realist fiction does not train us to do the work that is necessary to actually come to understand the other, and Woolf’s corpus represents a lifetime of groping towards this ideal. The works of Woolf that I have discussed represent attempts to de-centre the importance of realist characters to the novel, by reminding the reader of the ostensible illusion of the character. Forster’s innovation was to suggest that we do not, in fact, know people better than characters, as common sense would suggest; instead, we know (certain varieties of) characters better. To Forster’s mind, this is because we actually do not know other people very well - the alterity of other people is simply too great. To Forster, fiction offers a satisfaction denied to us in daily life: that of true knowledge of another. Woolf’s fiction models the character as a reminder that knowledge of the other is always imperfect, and that human characters are always the result of a mutual process of projection and construction. Characters appear real to us because we come to know others in very similar, imprecise, and semi-solipsistic ways: other people are already characters to us, defined by the nature of their relationship with us. The Death of the Character, like the Death of the Author, took place within a rarefied and circumscribed milieu, but it has had important effects on how character is expressed and understood. The combined effect of Modernist criticism’s flattening of character with the character experiments of Modernist fiction laid bare some of the illusions of Victorian realism, making it more difficult for readers of Modernism to continue to enjoy realist characters in the

167 Ray Monk, “This Fictitious Life: Virginia Woolf on Biography, Reality and Character,” Philosophy and Literature 31, no. 1 (2007), 21. 168 Monk, “This Fictitious Life,” 28.

same way. For other British readers, however, this attack on their reading habits would encourage them to dig in their heels about character. In the following chapter, I will explore a group of readers who insisted on the literal existence of characters in a game that “hardened into a delusion.”

Chapter Three The Best Loved Man Who Never Lived: Character, Anti-Modernism, and the Holmesians

In the traditional narrative about the development of fiction in the twentieth century, what comes after the high modernism of Woolf, Joyce, and Eliot is the world-annihilation of postmodernism, in which teleology, metanarrative, and the subject are discarded.169 In literary studies, the focus is often on the small subset of literature that progressed from the experimentation of the Modernists towards ever more daring (and often more alienating) experiments in narrative structure, perspective, and characterization. The postmodern character, in the works of British and Irish novelists like Rushdie, Carter, Beckett, Fowles, and others, is fundamentally “incoherent and fractured.” Rather than arriving at self-knowledge, the postmodern character’s journey typically raises question about the stability of the self (questions already familiar, as we have seen, to Woolf and other modernist writers).170 This familiar history, however, leaves little space for recognition of those who resisted the innovations (and later, the legacies) of the Modernists. Alison Light observes that scholars of literature in the twentieth century have focused on “endless attempts to find a canonical literature rather than allowing a wider or more generous view of literary pleasures and readerships.”171 In many cases, the contributions of these anti-Modernists, often referred to as ‘middlebrow,’ have left a lasting influence on contemporary literary culture that has been unexamined while small avant-garde movements dominate critical discussion. Their contributions have also received less attention because of their primary status as ‘readers’ rather than writers, a role too often ignored in literary studies.

169 Examples include John Frow, “What Was Postmodernism,” in Time and Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). Brian G McHale, Constructing Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1993). Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. (New York: Verso, 1991). 170 Aleid Fokkema, Postmodern Characters: a Study of Characterization in British and American Postmodern Fiction (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1991), 72. A representative example can be found in Iris Murdoch’s The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, in which David has a “fear of never being able to be a real person at all. He [feels] obscenely amorphous, globular, a creature in metamorphosis trailing a half discarded form.” Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (London: Chatto & Windus, 1974). 171 Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), x.

This dissertation is an exploration of the Character Question, of how writers, critics, and readers talked about reading and writing character in the twentieth century, and how they changed over time. In many accounts regarding the development of character in the twentieth century, the Modernists have the last word on the direction that literary character would take in the twentieth century; in these accounts, writers such as Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, Stein, James, Lewis, and Lawrence successfully decentred the realist character within fiction, drama, and criticism.172 To take a representative example, Terry Eagleton asserts that “from modernism proper, postmodernism inherits the fragmentary or schizoid self.”173 This narrative is reductive in two important ways. First, some of the most influential readers in Britain and Ireland developed new character-centred reading practices in explicit reaction to developments in modernist fiction and academic criticism. These countervailing practices include a neo-Victorian approach that has clear continuities with nineteenth-century expressive realists and A.C. Bradley, and that still shapes amateur reading practices today. The familiar history of literary character is also reductive because multiple people, including T.S. Eliot and the celebrants of Bloomsday, attempted to find space within Modernist thinking for a new understanding of real characters. The reality described by Eliot, S.C. Roberts, John Ryan, Flann O’Brien, and others is a reality derived from universality rather than particularity. When discussing Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, for example, Eliot praises the novel for achieving “reality” by providing more than an “accurate rendering of the noises that human beings currently make in their daily simple needs of communication.” Eliot asks us to consider, what features of a character transcend their historical moment? How can a character offer us insight into something greater than a single individual can communicate? The best example of the new character-centred reading practices can be found in the Holmesians, who use a set of sophistic reading practices that mimic academic criticism and language in order to repeatedly and insistently assert the reality of characters. Organized around a set of highly codified reading practices, the Holmesians are a community of devotees of Arthur

172 These include John Frow, Character and Person (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). David A. Brewer, The Afterlife of Character, 1726-1825 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Alan Palmer, Fictional Minds (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2004); Uri Margolin, “Characterization in Narrative: Some Theoretical Prolegomena,” Neophilologus 67, no. 1 (January 1983); Omri Moses, Out of Character: Modernism, Vitalism, Psychic Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014). 173 Terry Eagleton, “Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism,” in Against the Grain: Essays 1975-1985 (New York and London: Verso, 1986), 146.

Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. To play what they call the Grand Game, participants must read Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories as if they are non-fiction and accept that Watson, the diegetic writer of the stories, is the true author. Playing the game takes the form of essays circulated in Holmesian journals such as The Baker Street Journal and The Sherlock Holmes Journal, as well as lectures delivered to regular meetings of local Sherlock Holmes societies. There are more than three hundred Holmesian societies operating today in twenty-four countries,174 but the traditions for these groups originate collectively from a small number of essays written in England and America between 1911 and 1934. Of particular interest for my purposes is the brief period between 1928 and 1934 in which these essays were distributed and published in mainstream literary magazines. The essays of the Holmesians are the site of an important debate over what role real characters can play in the literature and culture of the twentieth century. Today’s Holmesian societies seem to be primarily organized around a shared love of Conan Doyle’s stories and a nostalgia for a time period none of the members experienced, but the original essay writers were motivated both by a shared passion and by a latent sense of anger at the directions that contemporary literary culture was heading. Michael Saler, whose As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality includes the most extended academic engagement with the Holmesian phenomenon, suggests that the cause for this dissatisfaction among the Holmesians has its root in the general “discourse of disenchantment that circulated among intellectuals during the waning decades of the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth.”175 He also suggests that what encouraged these writers was “the establishment of English literature as an academic discipline” as it “further contributed to the autonomy of fictional characters and worlds […] By receiving formalist scrutiny within respected havens of knowledge, fictional characters and worlds were legitimated as objects of critical attention in their own right” (48). It is here that I fundamentally disagree with Saler. The development of an academic discourse surrounding English literature prompted resistance rather than emulation from the Holmesians. Along with the avant-garde literature of the time period, academic discourse was breaking down the central facet of the Holmesian appeal: character. The character

174 Willis G Frick, “Active Sherlockian Societies (Geographical) (as of July 17, 2017).” Sherlocktron (2017): http://www.sherlocktron.com/three.pdf. 175 Michael T. Saler, As if: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Pre-History of Virtual Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 107.

of Sherlock Holmes is Conan Doyle’s supreme accomplishment, and the changes in criteria that shifted literary value away from character and towards more abstract elements of language and symbol threatened to totally devalue the Holmes stories. In general this group has been ignored by literary critics, including writers on the works of Arthur Conan Doyle. When the group is mentioned, they are usually summarily dismissed as “infantile,” “pedantic,” “drainingly inconsequential,” “interminable,” “coy” or “depressing.”176 Charles M. Rzepka identifies them as a significant group in the history of author love because of their curious and ironic effacement of Conan Doyle; the Holmesians celebrate Conan Doyle’s accomplishment by pretending that he does not exist. However, Rzepka pathologizes the group by claiming that “readers who identify with Holmes, whether male or female, are not and never were envisioning themselves as adult men or women, but as adult children.”177 As I hope to demonstrate, however, the early developers of the Holmesian game were not simply retreating from adult responsibility but also working to change literary culture through satire and humour. As a group focused on textual detail and literary history, the Holmesians are frequently inward-looking, and much of my research has been guided by amateur historians who are Holmesians themselves.178 With the exception of the recent 2017 special issue of the fledgling journal The Journal of Transformative Works and Culture, “Sherlock Holmes Fandom: Sherlockiana and the Great Game,” there has been almost no academic attention paid to the significance of the group’s contribution to modern literary culture. In this issue, George Mills

176 Edmund Wilson, Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1950), 290; Clive James, “Sherlockology,” New York Review of Books 22, no. 2 (February 20, 1975), 17-18, both cited in Vera Tobin, “Ways of Reading Sherlock Holmes: the Entrenchment of Discourse Blends,” Language and Literature 15, no. 1 (February 2006). See also Ava Jarvis, “On the Fannish Phenomenon of Sherlock Holmes.” Tor, Feb 10 2009: https://www.tor.com/2009/02/10/on-the-fannish-phenomenon-of-sherlock-holmes-or-my- fandom-is-crazier-than-your-fandom/. 177 Charles J Rzepka, “‘The Unofficial Force’: Irregular Author Love and the Higher Criticism,” in Transatlantic Literature and Author Love in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Ann Wierda Rowland Paul Westover (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 309. 178 These include the works of Holmesian historians Jon L. Lellenberg, Christopher Redmond, and Richard Lancelyn Green. See Jon L Lellenberg, Irregular Records of the Early ‘Forties (New York: Baker Street Irregulars, 1991); Jon L. Lellenberg, Irregular Memories of the ‘Thirties (New York: Fordham University Press, 1990); Christopher Redmond, Sherlock Holmes Handbook (Toronto: Dundurn, 2009); Christopher Redmond, About Being a Sherlockian (Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2017); Richard Lancelyn Green, “The Sherlock Holmes Society (1934-1938),” The Sherlock Holmes Journal 22, no. 1 (1994).

discusses the Baker Street Irregulars, the first American organization of Sherlockians,179 and suggests as I do that the group was in part resisting the systematic formalism of the New Critics in favour of an affective appreciation.180 Kate M. Donley attempts to situate the Holmesians within Modernist experimental culture, arguing that the Holmesian game is, like Woolf’s Orlando and Harold Nicolson’s Some People, “a playful use of nonfictional genres.”181 As I will show, however, Donley’s assertion ignores the fact that genres can be blended with different intents. The Holmesians blended traditions in order to resist, rather than celebrate, Modernist innovation. In opposition to the shifts in criticism and modern fiction, these analysts of middlebrow fiction stake a claim in how best to talk about character. Ronald Knox and Dorothy L. Sayers, two major originators of the Holmesian practice, insist that successful characters who give the impression of being living people are the only true measure of a novel. Like other anti- modernists such as Arnold Bennett, J.B. Priestley, G.K. Chesterton, John Buchan, Gilbert Frankau, and Storm Jameson, Knox and Sayers attack both highbrow novelists and university scholars for misunderstanding the heart of literature.182 Alan Filreis argues that scholars of modernism should recognize the spectrum of contemporary perspectives, spread across two axes: political ideology and modernist aesthetics. Thus he identifies conservative modernists, liberal modernists, and conservative anti-modernists as major groups in the US and the UK, both during

179 A note on nomenclature: British Sherlock Holmes devotees refer to themselves as Holmesians, while Americans refer to themselves as Sherlockians. 180 George Mills, “The Scholarly Rebellion of the Early Baker Street Irregulars.” Journal of Transformative Works and Cultures 23 (2017): n.p., http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/864/781. 181 Kate M. Donley, “Early Sherlockian Scholarship: Non/fiction At Play.” Journal of Tranformative Works and Cultures 23 (2017): n.p., http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/837. 182 For more perspectives on antimodern writers in the twentieth century, see Nathan Waddell, “John Buchan’s Amicable Anti-Modernism,” Journal of Modern Literature 35, no. 2 (Winter 2012). Luke Seaber, “The Meaning of Margate: G. K. Chesterton and T. S. Eliot,” English 59, no. 225 (June 2010); Martin Harries, “Misrecognition and Antimodernism in the Grove Plays of the Bohemian Club,” Modern Drama 47, no. 3 (Fall 2004); Keith Tuma, and Nate Dorward, “Modernism and Anti-Modernism in British Poetry,” in The Cambridge History of Twentieth- Century English Literature, ed. Laura Marcus, and Peter Nicholls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Jennifer Haytock, “Antimodernism and Looking Pretty: Wharton’s Artistic Practice,” in Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

the modernist period and immediately after.183 Both Knox and Sayers were noted conservative anti-modernists, but conservative modernists like T.S. Eliot, Desmond MacCarthy, and S.C. Roberts also participated in the Holmesian Game. While all of the figures I discuss agreed that there were traditional values that needed to be reclaimed in contemporary culture, they disagreed about the best way to do so. For both Sayers and Knox their Holmesian essays only represented a part of their public critique of literary criticism, a critique which took the form of satirical essays, polemics, and satirical treatments in fiction and drama. Their parodic form means that they are always halfway between critiquing and replicating the issues within literary criticism. In the early years of the Grand Game, Holmesians regularly positioned their ‘scholarship’ relative to the literary work produced by the academy. In a review of a 1933 volume of Sherlockian criticism in the Saturday Review of Literature, Vincent Starrett’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, Elmer Davis claimed that Research into the history of a figure of such universal interest is considerably more worth while than the dreary trivialities of the average Ph.D. thesis . . . the sort of research worker who delights in studies of the iota subscript, or the use of prepositions in Chaucer, or an analysis of the duties of the high-school janitor, may feel himself superior to these investigations of the history of Holmes and Watson; actually competent historians should not.184 Davis situates the detail-oriented scholarship of the Holmesians against the increasing specialization and professionalization of the academy. The Holmesians, Davis suggests, are producing valuable knowledge that provides pleasure to readers, in contrast to the esoteric and dull work produced by academics. Like the Holmesians, a number of anti-modernists including G.K. Chesterton, J.B. Priestley, and Edith Wharton insist on the central importance of character and the need to defend it against the attacks of the modernists. Priestley claims that “the novelist, whatever else he does, should be able to show us people who by some means or other, through delighted fascination, repulsion, or mere conviction that in their own world they exist, catch and hold our imagination.

183Alan Filreis, Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-1960 (Chapel HIll: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 184 Davis, Elmer, “The Real Sherlock Holmes.” The Saturday Review of Literature, 1933, 307.

If his characters fail to do this, then the novelist has failed” (emphasis added).185 Mimesis remains enough for Priestley, and any fiction that failed at this mimetic representation of a verisimilar person has failed prima facie. Writing in 1934, Wharton asserts through her title that there are “Permanent Values in Fiction” which are not subject to change, whatever modernist writers might imagine. The most important of these values is that the novel must be “a work of fiction containing a good story about well-drawn characters.”186 Wharton takes especial issue with Woolf and Joyce, who in her mind have failed to write fiction at all, instead writing extended histories or philosophical investigations disguised as novels. The permanent value that unites all great fiction, Wharton argues, is “the creating of characters which so possess us with the sense of their reality that we talk of Anna Karenina, Becky Sharp, the Pere Goriot, and Tess, as of real people whom we have known and lived with” (604). Wharton’s article was published in the Saturday Review, a “conservative literary magazine that aggressively opposed the avant- garde in literature and art”187 and the same magazine where the founder of the New York Sherlock Holmes society (the Baker Street Irregulars), Christopher Morley, wrote a regular column that promoted Sherlockian works. Unlike Wharton and other anti-modern champions of character, the Holmesian focus on character is implicit; in their Holmesian writing, none of the players specifically defend character as a category within fiction. However, both Knox and Sayers discuss character in detail in other essays and in letters. Their choice of Sherlock Holmes as the subject of their game is telling. Conan Doyle made a number of structural decisions that made Holmes feel especially real. Watson pretends to be not the narrator but the author of the stories, making regular references to his having published the earlier stories. Because Sherlock Holmes was serialized, in fact the first prominent serialized character in which each episode was self-contained, readers were given the sense that the characters went on living in between the stories.188 In the stories themselves, Watson referred to untold cases, some of which became later stories and some of which

185 John Boynton Priestley, Literature and Western Man (New York: Harper, 1960), 224. 186 Edith Wharton, “Permanent Values in Literature.” The Saturday Review of Literature, April 7, 1934, 603. 187 Karen Leick, “Ezra Pound v. The Saturday Review of Literature,” Journal of Modern Literature 25, no. 2 (Winter 2001-2002). The Saturday Review, as Leick explores, is also noted by scholars of Modernism for the extended campaign they ran against Pound. 188 Douglas Kerr, Conan Doyle: Writing, Profession, and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 13.

remained untold. Finally, the characters aged in real time; introduced as a young man in A Study in Scarlet (1888), Holmes’ final appearance involves him coming out of retirement to aid with the war effort in “His Last Bow” (1917). In 1906, G.K. Chesterton noted that “Sherlock Holmes is the only really familiar figure in modern fiction.”189 Chesterton elsewhere wrote, Mr. Conan Doyle’s hero is probably the only literary creation since the creations of Dickens which has really passed into the life and language of the people, and become a being like John Bull or Father Christmas . . . In no other current creation except Sherlock Holmes does the character succeed, so to speak, in breaking out of the book as a chicken breaks out of the egg.190 The Holmesian game is a natural response to a character who is so ‘lifelike’ that there is now genuine confusion over his existence: a 2008 UKTV poll of British teenagers revealed that 58% thought Holmes was real.191 The nature of the game means that explicit statements of why the Holmesians think the game is worthwhile are rare; it is considered impolitic to admit the game is a game, just as one doesn’t admit that Santa Claus does not exist in front of small children.192 But the group’s insistence that Holmes and Watson are real people means that an approach to character is central to their game, as the reasons for any particular textual mystery never come down to Conan Doyle’s formal choices as a writer, but to Watson’s or Holmes’ choices as characters. It is in the game’s form that we see the influence of Bradley. Knox, the writer of the original Holmesian essay in 1911, was a student of A.C. Bradley’s at Balliol.193 The essay, “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes,” which forms the basis of the Holmesian game, is a satire of Biblical, Classical, and Literary Criticism of the nineteenth and early twentieth

189 G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co, 1906), 103. 190 G. K. Chesterton, “Sherlock Holmes,” in On Lying in Bed and Other Essays, ed. Alberto Manguel (Calgary: Bayeux Arts, 2000), 269. 191 A number topped only by King Arthur (68%), but greater than Robin Hood (51%). Meanwhile, 27% of the respondents thought Winston Churchill was fictional. Aislinn Simpson, “Winston Churchill Didn’t Really Exist, Say Teens.” The Telegraph, 2008. 192 To my knowledge, the Holmesian game is unique in world history as a sustained scholarly game. It is thus a challenge to find meaningful comparisons. 193 Ronald Arbuthnott Knox, A Spiritual Aeneid (London and New York: Longmans Green and Co, 1918), 61.

century.194 In the face of criticism that deconstructs authors and characters and emphasizes the non-diegetical reasons for a text’s structure, Knox doubles down on the essential wholeness and continuity of plot, character, setting. A high church Anglican priest who would eventually convert to Catholicism, achieve the rank of canon, and only quit writing detective novels to translate the Vulgate on the orders of his superiors, Knox proudly admits to being “irrepressibly orthodox.”195 Indeed, his mystery novels follow the Golden Age rules of fair play so closely that they include footnotes in the conclusions to point the reader to where the clues were located. In the traditional narrative surrounding Bradley, the Leavises, and Knights, the Scrutiny critics have the last word on Bradley, save for a few last-gasp attempts at critical revival such as those of Katherine Cooke and Robert Shaughnessy.196 I argue that we need to study Knox, Sayers, and the Holmesians because they are one of the major conduits through which Bradley and character criticism still exerts an important influence on contemporary reading practices. Bradley argued that the power of Shakespeare’s characters came, to some extent, from their gaps and inconsistencies. Because Shakespeare was not “determined to make everything as good as he can” and because the work was littered with irresolvable contradictions, the reader was provided with spaces with which to fill in the details themselves.197 Whether this is really true or not of Shakespeare, Conan Doyle was inarguably haphazard in his composition of the Holmes stories. To Conan Doyle, “his work might be improved by editing, but not by him. He had given all in his first effort and any further tinkering would be ‘gratuitous and a waste of time.’”198 The stories are filled with chronological errors and major lacunae in the lives of the characters, errors and lacunae that have led to generations of intense disputes, both in print and in person.

194 While Knox’s essay was the more widely read essay, the first published Holmesian essay is Frank Sidgwick, “The Hound of the Baskervilles At Fault: An Open Letter to Dr Watson,” Cambridge Review 23 (November 11, 1902). In it, Sidgwick directly addresses Watson, and engages with him as the real author of the stories. Sidgwick criticizes factual and chronological inconsistencies within the stories - all hallmarks of later essays. However, while there is a minute chance that Knox read Sidgwick’s article, which was published in the Cambridge Review when Knox was thirteen years old, odds are slim that anyone else took up the game from Sidgwick directly. 195 Knox, Spiritual Aeneid, 125. 196 See Chapter 1, p.9. 197 A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 54. 198 Russell Miller, The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle (London: Harvill Secker, 2008), 145- 146.

Ironically, while Knox and Sayers adopted the positions and methods of contemporary criticism in order to expose their weaknesses, these same contemporary methods ended up being adopted wholesale by conservative modernists who used Holmes to find a space within modernity for real character. As we have seen in “Hamlet and his Problems” and elsewhere in his early writing, T.S. Eliot took a firm anti-realist position on character. However, his later writing acknowledges the legitimacy of discussing the “reality” of character in certain limited circumstances. Eliot, a lifelong fan of detective stories, engaged with the Holmesian game in a review of the Holmes stories, as well as through the publication of S.C. Roberts’ Prolegomena on Doctor Watson, and helped to codify a hermeneutic approach to the stories that found a middle way between the criticism of the Scrutiny set and the traditionalist approach of Knox and Sayers. In Roberts’ Holmesian criticism, the gaps that are left open offer proof to the reader that the character is complete. Taking on the hermeneutic approach of contemporary academic criticism, which approached texts spatially and aspired to scientific dissection of the text, the Holmesians who have followed Roberts tirelessly and repeatedly perform a ritual in which they attempt to find fault in a character by using a critical mode that would typically reveal the inadequacy of the fictional character. Inconsistencies and errors are often presented as evidence that a fictional work does not and cannot represent reality. However, by explaining away each fault and error within the text, often by twisting logic to extremes, Holmesians conclude that there is no imperfection in Holmes, and in so doing reassert the reality of their beloved character. As Christians ritually destroy the body of Christ each Good Friday, only for the Son of God to overcome this destruction with resurrection at Easter, so too does the Holmesian ritually destroy Holmes with the essay that destroys the character’s integrity, only for the same essay-writer to resurrect Holmes by discovering hidden meaning that explains the errors.

Ronald Knox and the Hermeneutics of Trust In 1911, Ronald Knox, then a fellow at Trinity College, delivered a paper to Trinity’s debating society, the Gryphon Club. Entitled “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes,” it became one of Knox’s most successful and well-liked essays. In Knox’s own estimation, by 1928 it had “been read to various societies, I suppose, above a score of times, and twice published.”199 In

199 Ronald Arbuthnott Knox, Essays in Satire (London: Sheed and Ward, 1928), vii.

1912 it was published in the Blue Book, where it made its way to Conan Doyle himself. It did not reach a wide audience, however, until it was reprinted in Essays in Satire, published in 1928 in England and in 1929 in America. The essay begins with an ode to modern criticism, an incisive passage that could easily have burlesqued the foibles of dominant critical tendencies in any moment in the twentieth century: If there is anything pleasant in life, it is doing what we aren’t meant to do. If there is anything pleasant in criticism, it is finding out what we aren’t meant to find out. It is the method by which we treat as significant what the author did not mean to be significant, by which we single out as essential what the author regarded as incidental. Thus, if one brings out a book on turnips, the modern scholar tries to discover from it whether the author was on good terms with his wife; if a poet writes on buttercups, every word he says may be used as evidence against him at an inquest of his views on a future existence. On this fascinating principle, we delight to extort economic evidence from Aristophanes, because Aristophanes knew nothing of economics: we try to extract cryptograms from Shakespeare, because we are inwardly certain that Shakespeare never put them there: we sift and winnow the Gospel of St. Luke, in order to produce a Synoptic problem, because St. Luke, poor man, never knew the Synoptic problem to exist.200 The picture that Knox paints of modern criticism is one in which scholars value argument above explication and reduce rich and valuable cultural documents to narrow treatises, historical reports, and puzzles. Knox does not merely oppose radical critical and theological movements such as Catholic Modernism,201 but also groups historicism, psychoanalytic criticism, and other, more conventional approaches to literature with fallacious Baconian cryptograms in order to pathologize them all.

200 Ronald Arbuthnott Knox, “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes,” in Essays in Satire (London: Sheed and Ward, 1928), 98. In 1903, Arthur Fairbanks began an article on Aristophanes by observing “the fact that Aristophanes is a most important witness to the social and economic conditions prevailing in Athens in the latter part of the fifth century B.C. is generally recognized.” See Arthur Fairbanks, “Aristophanes as a Student of Society,” American Journal of Sociology 8, no. 5 (1903), 655. 201 An evidentiary approach to the Gospels and Biblical histories that denies the literal truth of the events of the Bible in favour of a spiritual, metaphorical truth. The Synoptic problem to which Knox refers above is a key issue for Catholic Modernists: it is the question of the textual genealogy of the three Synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

Decades before the hermeneutics of suspicion would be articulated by Paul Ricoeur, Fredric Jameson, and others, Knox sees this mode as dominant in criticism. In Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, Ricoeur described the hermeneutics of suspicion as “not an explication of the object, but a tearing off of masks, an interpretation that reduces disguises.”202 Fredric Jameson helped formalize this suspicious method by insisting that “if everything were transparent, then no ideology would be possible, and no domination either.”203 Thus, the text cannot simply ‘mean what it says’, as every text is a inevitably a contributor to ideology. The suspicious reading of the text cross-examines a work and investigates its implications in ideologies such as racism, sexism, or classism. Recent polemics by Rita Felski and others suggest that it might now be on its way out as a dominant mode of criticism, but suspicious reading has defined criticism for the better part of forty years. Knox recognized the birth of this movement as it was happening, at the turn of the twentieth century, and felt a need to respond directly to it, via satire. As Ricoeur observes, the hermeneutical motive is janus-faced, as there is always both a hermeneutics of restoration and a hermeneutics of suspicion: “hermeneutics seems […] to be animated by this double motivation: willingness to suspect, willingness to listen; vow of rigor, vow of obedience.”204 As early as 1923, for example, Knox attacked psychoanalysis in a short satire called “Jottings from a Psycho-Analyst’s Note-book (From the German of Dr. Freud—Struwwelpeter),” in which an analyst concludes that a man who dreams about a hare “is clearly a Chauvinist patriot, who has suffered from some loss or shock during the war. The word ‘hare’ should have given me the clue much earlier; it should really, of course, be ‘Herr,’ a representative of the German nation.”205 Like modern critics as Knox saw them, the psychoanalyst routinely misses the obvious solution to each problem with which he is presented and invents solutions on the subconscious level. Knox wrote similar satires on a number of subjects, but it is his Sherlock Holmes essay that has resonated most widely. In general terms, his essay on Holmes offered later writers a form

202 Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 30. 203 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 61. 204 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, 27. 205 Ronald Arbuthnott Knox, “Jottings From a Psycho-Analyst’s Note-Book (From the German of Dr. Freud – Struwwelpeter),” in Essays in Satire (London: Sheed and Ward, 1928), 270-71. The essay is structured around the classic German children’s book Der Struwwelpeter, which features ten cautionary tales about the misbehaviour of children.

within which they could exercise their critical skills while simultaneously resisting the presumptions of most mainstream criticism by reasserting the primacy of character. For Knox, Holmes also provided an example of methods that worked well for a fictional detective but not so well for a literary critic. Knox observes that whatever the problems with modern criticism, Holmes may be the only truly appropriate subject: “there is, however, a special fascination in applying this method to Sherlock Holmes, because it is, in a sense, Holmes’s own method” (99). Knox calls special attention to the way that Holmes asks us to pay attention to meanings found in silences and gaps, (mis)quoting Holmes in “The Silver Blaze”: “Let me call your attention to the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” “The dog did nothing at all in the night-time.” “That was the curious incident,” said Sherlock Holmes. (175) Like a good modern critic, Holmes asks the reader to pay attention to the negative space in a narrative, to what is not said or not done. Knox attempts to demonstrate that while the method may be productive for detectives, it is faulty for critics. Holmes insists that anyone can recreate his feats of logic if they are observant enough. In “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” he tells Watson to examine a hat for clues, noting “here is my lens. You know my methods.”206 But as Rosemary Jann points out, Holmes’ trick of cold reading the life story of a stranger is made possible by a fictional system of signs marked onto the body of the (especially working-class) individual.207 As Marcello Truzzi observes, no reader can recreate Holmes’ observations, because Holmes has been performing a magic trick all along, made possible by Conan Doyle having constructed the plot in a way that allows only one correct interpretation, the one provided by the master detective Sherlock Holmes.208 Like Holmes,

206 Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Blue Carbuncle,” in The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes (New York and London: Penguin, 2009). 207 Rosemary Jann, “Sherlock Holmes Codes the Social Body,” ELH 57, no. 3 (Fall 1990). 208 Marcello Truzzi, “Sherlock Holmes: Applied Social Psychologist,” in The Sign of Three, ed. Umberto Eco, and Thomas A. Sebeok (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 70. Pierre Bayard provocatively challenges this reading in Sherlock Holmes was Wrong when he suggests that Conan Doyle misidentified the murderer in The Hound of the Baskervilles: “These characters are not, as we too often believe, creatures who exist only on paper, but living beings who lead an autonomous existence - sometimes going so far as to commit murders unbeknownst to the author. Failing to grasp his characters’ independence, Conan Doyle did not realize that one of them had entirely escaped his control and was amusing himself by misleading the detective.” Pierre Bayard, Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong: Re-Opening the Case of the “Hound of the Baskervilles” (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2008), 7.

modern literary critics insist or more often imply that their interpretation is objective, that another critic with the same interests would have made the same observations. Knox insists, however, that they have actually invented an interpretation, one which would not be found by any other, because they have insisted upon cleverness instead of “common sense.” In “Studies,” Knox performs an intentionally naïve reading of the Holmes corpus, beginning his examination with its most glaring error. In “The Man with the Twisted Lip” (1891), Mary Watson refers to her husband as ‘James’ instead of ‘John’, which is clearly indicated as his first name on the title page of the first Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet (1887).209 is a particularly troubling error to devotees of the stories, as it suggests that Conan Doyle cared so little about his creations that he forgot Watson’s first name. Knox attempts to provide a reading of the Holmes corpus that explains this divergence, and in doing so uncovers a complex, unwritten history of Watson’s secret life. Knox structures his analysis around the character of Holmes, asserting that there is a true Holmes represented in the books written before his ‘death’ in 1893’s “The Final Solution,” in contrast to the false Holmes featured in the inferior stories written after his resurrection in “The Empty House,” written ten years later. Knox observes that in the later stories, there are multiple examples of how Holmes is untrue to his prior self: for example, the false Holmes “deliberately abstains from food while at work: the real Holmes only does so through absent-mindedness” (151). Collecting this evidence, Knox asserts that the stories are indeed by a single Watson, who after the death of Holmes falls into alcoholism and is forced to invent stories to support himself, just as Conan Doyle was forced to revive Holmes for financial reasons. Though Knox’s inquiries are prompted by the question of Watson’s first name, at no point does he satisfactorily resolve the problem, and his ‘solution’ only raises more questions about why Watson, even if in a drunken impecunious state, would forget his own first name. Knox’s ‘modern critic’ has become so invested in interpretation that he has forgotten to answer the question he posed. In A Spiritual Aeneid, Knox’s memoir of his conversion to Catholicism, Knox accords “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes” an important place in his life narrative. For him, the essay articulates an approach to both literary criticism and life, one that places trust in

209 Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Study in Scarlet,” in The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes (New York and London: Penguin, 2009); Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Man With the Twisted Lip,” in The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes (New York and London: Penguin, 2009).

traditions and common sense. Knox explains how his student work on Homer, Shakespeare, and the New Testament helped him consolidate a worldview that was, in his words, “irrepressibly orthodox.”210 The skepticism that pervaded literary scholarship at the time, especially on questions of authorship, troubled Knox. For Knox, the stakes of this approach to text were not simply academic; they were a symptom of a larger cultural problem surrounding skepticism and belief. Reflecting on his decisions, he wrote, “it was all very well to disagree with Prof. Murray about Homer, in spite of my respect for him; for no eternal issues hung on my criticism of the Iliad” (125). However, his disagreements about the composite authorship of the individual books of the Bible raised questions regarding both his conception of his intellectual self and his eternal salvation. Knox’s satirical essays suggest that the contemporary critical need to deconstruct authors, characters, and texts was part of the same project that was undermining Christian faith. Like Leavis, Knox was convinced that critical methodology would help determine the future of English civilization; unlike Leavis, he believed that it was the new, emerging methods that were dangerous. Though Knox was not consciously following anyone in particular in “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes,” he later observed that “I must have had in mind A. C. Bradley's interpretations of Shakespeare” (121). And indeed, Knox’s essay recalls Bradley’s format closely, especially Bradley’s notes. Seven years earlier, Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy had asked involved questions about where Hamlet might have been at a precise moment before or during the play, and famously proposed diegetic solutions to the inconsistencies in Hamlet’s age, like Hamlet having been actually living in Elsinore and only now wishing to return to Wittenberg.211 Knox takes on the Bradleyan approach throughout the essay, partially to satirize the wrongheadedness (in his view) of the works of classicists who pointed to inconsistencies in the text as evidence that Homer’s works were not continuous works but composites by multiple authors.212 Characters like Holmes, or Odysseus, are incomplete and self-contradictory because they are the product of a human writer, whose imperfections are like our own. These characters’ greatness, Knox suggests, is a result of their authors’ human imperfection, rather than in spite of it. “Poor Homer,” he says in a similar satire on chronological inconsistencies in the works of

210 Knox, Spiritual Aeneid, 125. 211 See Chapter One, p.13-14. 212 In A Spiritual Aeneid Knox names Gilbert Murray, William Duguid Geddes, and Walter Leaf as his primary targets.

Trollope, “would not be allowed, by our modern critics, nearly so much nodding-space. What blundering redactors, what recensions, what insertions of spurious lines, what contamination of documents would have been invoked if all these inconsistencies were laid to the charge of the ancient author!” He concludes that these errors are inevitable and that “consistency is, in romance, almost unattainable; if Homer missed it, so did Virgil, so did Mallory, so did Spenser […] to say that [Trollope] was sometimes inconsistent is to say no more than that he was a man.” 213 Like Bradley, Knox emphasizes the imperfect nature of text and suggests that our appreciation of a text is dependent not on over-analysis and clever argument but on recognizing the common-sense truths that a text can reveal to us. To Knox, treating imperfections as symptomatic of a hidden meaning leads scholars away from understanding, rather than towards it. Although the question of authorship is paramount for Knox, the implied solution in his discussions of Trollope, Boswell, and Conan Doyle is always character; by returning to character, critics can avoid these follies. In his essay on Trollope, he echoes Forster’s comments on the reality of characters when he observes that “Barchester has reality, and how different a thing is reality in literature from realism!” Knox uses the term ‘realism’ to refer to the grim verisimilitude of contemporary naturalist fiction by authors such as Thomas Hardy and Emile Zola. In contrast, ‘reality’ in literature comforts readers by reassuring them that there is an ontologically stable world that is continuously accessible through literature. The reality of Trollope’s fiction, he argues, stems from the characters’ reality, as well as something more fundamental about Victorian fiction: Is it only because they are so nearly men and women that our eyelids quiver on the verge of tears over the conventional tragedies of Trollope’s character? Or do we regret the passing of something that was not mere shadow, a world we were not born into, yet one that coloured for us the outlook of boyhood?214 The Victorian novel evokes for us the Victorian past. For Knox, this identification with the past takes three forms: an identification with the actual setting of the past, with the fiction of the past, and with the systems of thought of the past. Knox sees modern readers as having lost access to traditional Victorian values (indeed, as a Catholic Knox locates the ideal past sometime even

213 Ronald Arbuthnott Knox, “A Ramble in Barsetshire,” in Essays in Satire (London: Sheed and Ward, 1928), 195-196. 214 Knox, “Barsetshire,” 197.

earlier, before the Reformation), to the achievements of writers like Trollope, Scott, and Dickens, and to the form in which they wrote. For the men and women who first indulged in the Holmesian game, much of its rationale was nostalgia for the late Victorian and Edwardian period, a return to the golden age of childhood. Vincent Starrett’s poem “221b,” written in 1942, makes explicit this link between the game and a prior age: Here dwell together still two men of note Who never lived and so can never die: How very near they seem, yet how remote That age before the world went all awry. But still the game’s afoot for those with ears Attuned to catch the distant view-halloo: England is England yet, for all our fears— Only those things the heart believes are true.

A yellow fog swirls past the window-pane As night descends upon this fabled street: A lonely hansom splashes through the rain, The ghostly gas lamps fail at twenty feet. Here, though the world explode, these two survive, And it is always eighteen ninety-five.215 Writing at the bloody apex of WWII, Starrett might be forgiven for thinking the world has gone “awry” and to want to return to a past time. The present is a fallen state in which England has been weakened by war and a degradation of moral values, unlike the past in which “only those things the heart believes are true.” The implicit solution to the existential problem of the age is to return to characters who “can never die,” to remain in stasis, in a time and place (in what has become a refrain for Holmesians) that is “always eighteen ninety-five.”216 While the Holmesian Game lay mostly dormant between 1911 and 1928, the republishing of “Studies” in Essays in Satire, combined with the publication by John Murray of the Complete

215 Vincent. Starrett, “221b,” in Sherlockiana: Two Sonnets (Ysleta: Edwin B Hill, 1942). 216 “Where it is always eighteen ninety-five” is, for example, the motto of the Bootmakers of Toronto, Canada’s premier Sherlockian society.

Sherlock Holmes in 1929, sparked an explosion of commentary circulated privately and published by enthusiasts. These included S.C. Robert’s 1931 Doctor Watson: Prolegomena to the Study of a Biographical Problem, with a Bibliography of Sherlock Holmes; T.S. Blakeney’s 1932 Sherlock Holmes: Fact or Fiction?, H.W. Bell’s 1932 Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson: A Chronology of Their Adventures, and Vincent Starrett’s 1933 The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Each of these books was widely reviewed. Holmesian essays and reviews were broadcast on the BBC and published in dozens of mainstream magazines and newspapers in England and the USA, including the Saturday Review of Literature, the Atlantic, Life and Letters, the Chicago Tribune, and the Bookman. While Knox had attempted to perform similar jokes with Trollope and Tennyson, the essay on Holmes resonated more than any other. Though similar work was possible with much of Victorian fiction, Holmes’ persistent reality with readers, as well as his unique state as what G.K. Chesterton called the only modern Victorian character, gave the Holmesian game a unique appeal.217 As the game progressed with the help of writers like Dorothy L Sayers, it responded to new developments in criticism that confirmed Knox’s predictions about its shift away from character.

Dorothy L. Sayers and Serious Play The most academically minded of the Holmesians who followed Knox, Dorothy Sayers wrote her main contributions to the game in the mid 1930s, at a time when Scrutiny’s attacks on literary orthodoxy were receiving public attention. Her Holmesian essays are intended, at least partly, as a critique of contemporary literary criticism. Sayers today is characterized by Rosemary Erickson Johnson as a woman intellectual who represents an opposite extreme to a figure such as Woolf; unlike the avant-garde, atheist Woolf, Sayers was a popular novelist, and a fervent Anglo- Catholic.218 Sean Latham accords her a prominent place in his account of snobbery in modernism, offering her the last word on the snobbery of Thackeray, Wilde, Joyce, and Woolf; in every aspect of her work she fought against modernist tendencies, which she perceived as intellectual self-justification and nothing more.219 Her detective novels offer blistering rejoinders

217 Chesterton, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study, 269. 218 Rosemary Erickson Johnsen, “Dorothy L. Sayers and Virginia Woolf: Perspectives on the Woman Intellectual in the Late 1930s.,” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 87 (2015). 219 Sean Latham, “Am I a Snob?”: Modernism and the Novel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).

to bohemian culture and aristocratic modernism, asserting instead the importance of traditional novelistic form and of traditional values. Her essays on Sherlock Holmes, however, are mostly viewed as a curiosity by literary scholars—part of her corpus that must be ignored, along with her advertising work,220 in order to include her among other, more serious writers. But Sayers’ Holmesian criticism needs to be read in the context of her disagreement with Q.D. Leavis over the role of the critic, which stemmed from Leavis’ scathing review of Sayers’ novel Gaudy Night. Gaudy Night conceives of the work of the literary scholar as a search for confirmation of the permanent values of fiction such as character, verisimilitude, and moral uplift. The novel hearkens back to a time when philology and prosody were the most cutting-edge schools of literary study. In this context, the Holmesian essays read as both a celebration of an older, literalist mode of criticism, and a satire of the tortured logic necessary to uncover hidden meanings within fiction. Like Knox, Sayers had a relation with the academic world that was at once intimate and adversarial. Sayers attended Somerville College, Oxford, from 1912 to 1915, and was among the first women to receive a degree from Oxford, retroactively in 1920. In the later years of her career, she devoted herself to translating Dante’s Divine Comedy and writing religious plays, one of which, The Man Who Would Be King, prompted the Archbishop of Canterbury to offer her a Doctorate in Divinity from Oxford, which she refused.221 Remaining outside of the academy for most of her life, she frequently expressed frustration with contemporary trends in literary criticism and in literature itself. Unlike Knox, whose focus as a junior scholar was on trends that were decades old like the question of the Odyssey’s authorship, Sayers responded directly to contemporary trends in the academy and in the literary world, and while publicly she was loath to start quarrels, privately she took aim at William Empson, I.A. Richards, F.R. Leavis and others of the Scrutiny set as well as the New Critics. To Sayers, the work of the modern critic seems designed “to persuade us that we are a bunch of smart-alecks too knowing to be fooled into veneration,” but in so doing “has only

220 Sayers worked for years at a London advertising agency and developed the “Guiness is Good for You” campaign as well as the Guinness Toucan mascot. 221 Steven P. Mueller, “Sayers, Dorothy L. (1893-1957),” in The Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization, ed. George Thomas Kurian (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2011), http://doi.wiley.com/10.1002/9780470670606.wbecc1212.

robbed us of a rich source of human happiness, without adding a cubit to our stature.”222 The failure of the modern critic is that he or she has forgotten the importance of the “pure interpreter, who will sit down before a poem, or whatever it is, with humility to it and charity to the reader, and begin by finding out and explaining what the author actually did say, before he starts to explain what the author ought to have said and would have said if he had been as enlightened a person as his critic.”223 Sayers’ main complaint centred on the secularization and modernization of criticism and fiction. In her opinion, modern literature in general had lost its sense of direction, and its “demand for ‘originality’—with the implication that the reminiscence of other writers is a sin against originality and a defect in the work—would have seemed quite ludicrous to poets of the Augustan Age, or of Shakespeare’s time.”224 A focus on novelty was “carried to excess” by Eliot and Joyce, whose many allusions to past writers nonetheless failed to invoke any of the “spirits” of literature.225 Further, the shift in modern literature was intimately linked, in her view, to the problems in contemporary criticism: “more than half the obscurity of the Moderns, you know, is due simply to indeterminate syntax. One would call that a fault, if people like Empson didn’t erect it into a principle, and hold forth on the beauty of Ambiguity.”226 This hostility towards Modernism, as well as her portrait of Oxford in her tenth Lord Wimsey novel Gaudy Night (1935), earned her the opprobrium of the Leavises. In Gaudy Night, Sayers presents the academic world as disconnected from reality, asking questions that are fundamentally trivial in the face of the ethical demands of the real world. The book, often called Sayers’ masterpiece, expands on the boundaries of the detective genre as it includes an extended romance between its two main characters, Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey, and does not feature a single murder.227 Harriet represents Sayers’ literary alter ego; a

222 Dorothy L. Sayers to the Editor of The New English Weekly, May 10, 1946, The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, ed. Barbara Reynolds, (Cambridge: Hodder and Stoughton, 1995), 3:230. 223 Sayers to C.S. Lewis, October 22, 1948, Letters, 3:401. 224 Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker (London: Methuen, 1941), 96. 225 Sayers, Mind of the Maker, 96. 226 Sayers to Richard Church, April 3, 1950, Letters, 3:497. 227 The prohibition against romance in detective novels was codified in S.S. Van Dine’s “Twenty Rules For Writing Detective Stories,” in which Van Dine warned “there must be no love interest in the story. To introduce amour is to clutter up a purely intellectual experience with irrelevant sentiment.” He further cautioned, “there simpy must be a corpse in a detective novel . . . no lesser crime than murder will suffice.” S.S. Van Dine, “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories,” The American Magazine 106, no. 3 (1928), 129.

university-educated, female writer of detective novels, the character begins the novel frustrated with the commercial pressures of her mass-market work. Nostalgic for her school days, and asked to consult on a malicious prankster terrorizing her alma mater, the fictional Shrewsbury College at Oxford, Harriet returns to college life: “if only one could come back to this quiet place, where only intellectual achievement counted; if one could work here steadily and obscurely at some close-knit piece of reasoning, undistracted and uncorrupted by agents, contracts, publishers, blurb-writers, interviewers, fan-mail, autograph-hunters, notoriety-hunters, and competitors.”228 Harriet’s idyllic sense of what Oxford represents is, for the most part, borne out by the experience that Sayers gives her. Shrewsbury College is peopled by sympathetically painted dons, ranging from the literature tutor Miss Lydgate, who, “as any student of literature must, […] knew all the sins of the world by name, but it was doubtful whether she recognised them when she met them in real life” (19), to the research fellow Miss De Vine, who “was a fighter, indeed; but one to whom the quadrangle of Shrewsbury was a native and proper arena; a soldier knowing no personal loyalties, whose sole allegiance was to the fact” (19). Lydgate is in the midst of completing her masterwork on “the prosodic elements in English verse from Beowulf to Bridges,” which involves the creation of “an entirely new prosodic theory, demanding a novel and complicated system of notation which involved the use of twelve different varieties of type” (33). The fictional don’s approach to the study of metre is presented as cutting-edge in the novel but is in fact a very old-fashioned-looking project; the character’s research is clearly modeled on George Saintsbury’s History of English Prosody From the Twelfth Century to the Present Day (1906-1910).229 (I.A. Richards disputed Saintsbury’s theories on prosody, rejecting the possibility that the “mere sound of verse has independently any considerable aesthetic virtue.”230) Unlike Cambridge, which had been polluted by what Sayers privately referred to as the “Leavis miasma,”231 Sayers’ Oxford (in her novel’s fantasia) is a centre of tradition and solid, direct criticism. The university may be marked by its English idiosyncracies and eccentricities, but it is fundamentally committed to the search for the unknown, and harbours no radical pretensions.

228 Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night (London: Victor Gollancz, 1935), 18. 229 Saintsbury provided a critical introduction to Sayers’ 1929 translation of Tristran in Brittany. 230 I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1929)., cited in Encyclopedia Britannica Online, s.v. “Prosody,” by Harvey S. Gross, https://www.britannica.com/art/prosody. 231 Sayers to Mrs Austin Farrer, June 18, 1954, Letters, 4:168.

The only mark against the college is the cloud of suspicion that hangs over the Senior Common Room as it is terrorized by the prankster. As Harriet and Lord Peter investigate, they are forced to consider each of the dons as a suspect. Sayers closely links the search for truth in criticism to the search for truth in literature. Harriet undergoes an artistic transformation influenced by Miss de Vine’s unerring focus on truth; she realizes that the only way to regain satisfaction in her own novels is to endow her characters with true humanity. Harriet attempts, while at Oxford, to continue work on her detective novel, but as she attempts to construct her plot, her characters begin to take on an unnatural, an incredible symmetry. Human beings were not like that; human problems were not like that; what you really got was two hundred or so people running like rabbits in and out of a college, doing their work, living their lives, and actuated all the time by motives unfathomable even to themselves, and then, in the midst of it all--not a plain, understandable murder, but an unmeaning and inexplicable lunacy. How could one, in any case, understand other people’s motives and feelings, when one’s own remained mysterious? (161) Harriet is backed into a corner by her writing that reveals the inadequacy of her genre to the matter she wishes to express. The passage recalls Forster’s despair at real human connection, as well as Woolf’s concern about understanding the other. Grappling both with the problem of Shrewsbury College and of whether to accede to Peter’s proposal of marriage, Harriet begins to recognize that she needs to expand upon the limits of the genre, as Sayers herself does in the form of Gaudy Night. As with the actual mystery, Vane is led to a solution by Wimsey, who suggests that she give her main character “violent and lifelike feelings” that resemble a “human being” rather than a figure in a “jig-saw kind of story” (231). By this metric, the height of expression, is the character of classic realism. Harriet revises the character, only to realize that her protagonist’s “tormented humanity stood out now against the competent vacuity of the other characters like a wound” (283), forcing her to rewrite the whole work. In the conclusion, Harriet is led to truth both by the example of the dons, and by Peter, whose Holmes-like detective impulse motivates him throughout the novel. Moments before she decides to accept Peter’s marriage proposal, she triumphantly announces that her protagonist has been made “almost human” (345). While Gaudy Night was well received by most critics, Q.D. Leavis aligned Sayers’ writings with outdated critical modes and asserted that her picture of the modern college was

hopelessly conservative, especially her portrayal of literary studies. In her most vitriolic attack on a popular novelist, Leavis attacked Sayers’ style and her portrayal of university life in Gaudy Night in a 1937 review in Scrutiny. Leavis found Sayers’ portrayal of the university laughable, especially its innocent treatment of scholarly life. She writes of Sayers that her tendency towards uninspired allusion “is a habit that gets people like Harriet Vane firsts in English examinations no doubt, but no novelist with such a parasitic, stale adulterated way of feeling and living could ever amount to anything.”232 Leavis concedes that Sayers is “probably quite sound on the philological side,” but that “studying English prosody will not show anyone why Miss Sayers isn’t a good novelist” (340). Sayers’ sins, according to Leavis, are to imagine that the Oxford of her youth (still very much influenced by Bradley) represented the height of intellectual achievement. To Leavis, no amount of scholasticism can teach good taste, especially if scholars come to believe that Sayers is a good writer. George Simmers observes that to Leavis, Sayers “crossed a boundary between light fiction and serious literature, and this was a boundary that Leavis was eager to defend.”233 No direct response on the part of Sayers to Leavis’ scathing review survives, but Sayers would later note that “nothing is more distasteful than the more-than- theological odium with which literary critics pursue one another, as though it were positively wicked to write poetry of a kind which does not appeal to them.”234 In a 1940 letter, she refused to weigh in on criticism of Milton, “lest one should be accidentally found in the same camp with Mr. F.R. Leavis and the debunkers. For of all the beastly pastimes, the game of ‘let us now debunk famous men and our fathers that begat us’ is the most despicable.”235 Sayers, however, played at least one kind of scholarly game herself, even if one she considered morally uplifting rather than “beastly.” Although Sayers had written two of her four Holmesian essays before 1937, in her 1946 collection of essays, Unpopular Opinions, Sayers collected her Holmesian essays with mostly unrelated writing on religion and politics. In the foreword to the collection, she puts the mock-essays in opposition to contemporary criticism, and situates her own essays in a tradition of criticizing criticism. She observes that Knox applied the

232 Q. D. Leavis, “The Case of Miss Dorothy Sayers,” Scrutiny 6, no. 3 (December 1937), 336. 233 George Simmers, “Cambridge Versus the Cosy: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Q. D. Leavis and Dorothy L. Sayers.” Culture Wars 1900-1950 (June 2014): https://www.middlebrow- network.com/Events/CultureWarsconference.aspx. 234 Dorothy L. Sayers, The Poetry of Search and the Poetry of Statement (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2006), 9. 235 Sayers, Letters, 54.

methods of “Higher Criticism” to Holmes “with the aim of showing that, by those methods, one could disintegrate a modern classic as speciously as a certain school of critics have endeavoured to disintegrate the Bible.”236 Sayers argues that by reading the Holmesian essays—both her own and those of others—“those who like their recreations to exert a moral influence may take note of how easy it is for an unscrupulous pseudo-scholarship to extract fantastic and misleading conclusions from a literary text by a series of omissions, emendations and distortions of context.”237 She further notes, condemning much of contemporary literary criticism, that “there are a number of literary biographies and works of criticism at present enjoying an undeserved popularity which have been perpetrated by precisely such methods—and not as a game.”238 Like Knox’s parodies of criticism, Sayers’ Holmesian essays are written primarily for fun. Following the logic of their joke rather than a rigorous method, they exist on a shaky, sometimes contradictory dialectic: are they aping the sins they wish to critique or presenting a new, corrective method? Depending on the particular context, the answer is often one, or the other, or both. Like the essays of Knox, the essays take on the form of Bradley’s method, which uses diegetic explanations to resolve apparent contradictions within the work in question. This method celebrates Holmes as a character, even as it presents fallacious arguments that critique the methods of modern critics. In “The Dates in the Red-Headed League” (1934), Sayers tries to reconstruct the internal chronology of the “The Adventure of the Red-Headed League,” which was first published in The Strand in August 1891, and republished in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in 1892. The dates in the original story are hopelessly contradictory: she notes, in dialogue with H.W. Bell, that Jabez Wilson visits Baker Street on Saturday, October 9th. However, by referring back to a calendar, she discovers that, October 9, 1890, was a Thursday. More important, the advertisement that put the plot in motion appeared on April 27th, which is described as being “just two months ago.”239 Sayers questions why Watson would have such a shaky memory of such a recent date. She resolves these issues by deciding that both dates are in error and that

236 Dorothy L. Sayers, “Foreword,” in Unpopular Opinions: Twenty-one Essays (London: Victor Gollancz, 1946), 7. 237 Sayers, “Foreword,” 7-8. 238 Sayers, “Foreword,” 8. 239 Dorothy L. Sayers, “The Dates in the Red-Headed League,” in Unpopular Opinions: Twenty- one Essays (London: Victor Gollancz, 1946), 168.

these dates suggest “the error of a not-too-intelligent compositor at work upon a crabbed manuscript. Watson was a doctor, and his writing was therefore probably illegible at the best of times.”240 Sayers here implies that Watson is the author of the stories, not Conan Doyle, and focuses on the ways in which Watson’s handwriting has obscured our access to the “reality” behind the story. In “Dr. Watson’s Christian Name,” Sayers tackles Knox’s thorny problem of why Watson has two different first names. Sayers claims that Mary Watson must have been involved in the editing process, as shown when the orphan Mary is represented visiting her mother, which is corrected to ‘aunt’ in the collected Adventures.241 However, the wrong name for James goes uncorrected. Sayers concludes that John H. Watson’s middle name is in fact Hamish, which his wife Anglicized into James as a pet name. As for Bradley, authorial mistakes offer satiric portals of discovery into the complex and complete psychology of the characters. Knox’s original essays used satire to defend ancient authors against scholars who used inconsistencies in characters to seek non-diegetic explanations that attacked the integrity of the text. Errors, Knox asserted, simply confirmed the human nature of the author. Characters, by their nature as creations, were bound to have inconsistencies. In Sayers’ essays, errors are used as the portals of discovery for insight into the characters, rather than offering insight into the author. Sayers ironically defends the importance of character to an understanding of literature by attacking the reliability of the central focalizer of the Holmes stories. Holmesians attribute errors to Watson because Watson, unlike Conan Doyle, is invested in the telling of Sherlock Holmes’s stories: indeed, in the stories themselves Watson almost desperately seeks Holmes’ approval and is wounded when Holmes insults his written accounts of the tales.242 Watson, like the reader, is invested in figuring out what Holmes is thinking and eagerly awaits his solutions, and a Watson that makes many mistakes while writing is congruent with his status within the stories as the slow-witted character. Conan Doyle’s distaste for the

240 Sayers, “Red-Headed League,” 171. 241 Dorothy L. Sayers, “Dr. Watson’s Christian Name,” in Unpopular Opinions: Twenty-one Essays (London: Victor Gollancz, 1946). 242 In the second Holmes novel The Sign of Four, for example, Holmes observes that he has read Watson’s previous work, A Study in Scarlet, and dismisses the work as too emotional. Watson is “annoyed at this criticism of a work which had been specially designed to please him.” Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Sign of Four,” in The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes (New York and London: Penguin, 2009).

stories can make the study of the stories seem like wasted intellectual effort.243 Turning the stories into reality salvaged the integrity of their universe: a diegetic reading where every textual issue can be explained through a subtle or even hidden feature of the story itself is obviously preferable to an extradiegetic reading that simply reveals errors on the part of the creator. Seemingly random cruxes that break down the integrity of the work can be disconcerting, but the diegetic solution reassures readers that underneath chaos, one can always find order (if one only looks hard enough). In this approach to text, the great authors left nothing to chance. Equally concerned with the danger of literary criticism and with its effect on “human happiness” writ large, Sayers is the direct inheritor of Knox’s method. Her essays are still frequently anthologized by Holmesians and Sherlockians. But before Sayers used the Holmesian game to resist the pull of Modernism away from character, there were others who worked carefully to synthesize the Holmesian approach with a thoroughly Modern approach to literature.

T.S. Eliot and the Modern ‘Real’ Character T.S. Eliot attacked character in the famous “Hamlet and His Problems,” an essay that helped inspire a generation of literary critics to dismiss the criterion of ‘real’ characters. Along with its emphasis on myth, structure, and order recalling earlier traditions, Eliot’s early attack on character was part of the Modernist critical project that sought to redefine criticism of past literature in order to align its standards with those that would best value Modernist poetry and fiction. In later years, however, Eliot found space for nuance on the subject of characters’ reality. In essays written between 1927 and 1936, by then out of the shadow of Georgian literature and criticism, he described characters in the fiction of Conan Doyle, Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Djuna Barnes that were successful because of their “reality.” His later-career musings on real character have one unifying principle: the characters’ reality comes not from their verisimilitude, but from their evocative symbolic function. Through a review of Conan Doyle’s stories that lightly participated in the Holmesian game, and his publishing of an influential Holmesian

243 Conan Doyle killed Holmes off in 1891 to be free of the character and to move on to more serious work. He complained that “If I had never touched Holmes, who has tended to obscure my higher work, my position in literature would at the present moment be a more commanding one.” Arthur Conan Doyle, Memories and Adventures (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1924), 81.

pamphlet, Eliot helped take the game in a surprising direction that should change what we think we know about the role of character among the modernists. Eliot asserts in 1927’s “Wilkie Collins and Dickens” that “Dickens excelled in character; in the creation of characters of greater intensity than human beings.”244 Like Forster’s perspective in Aspects of the Novel (in which, it must be noted, Forster discussed all fiction as if it had been written by George Eliot or Dickens), the important metric that Eliot uses is the characters’ relation to humans. However, the key difference between Forster’s approach and Eliot’s is that to Eliot, “Dickens’s characters are real because there is no one like them.”245 The characters of the Victorian masters are real, he observes in a number of different moments, when they most successfully present an alternative to quotidian reality. Similarly, in his introduction to the 1937 Harcourt Brace edition of Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, Eliot praises Barnes’ characterization for its atypical reality. “I cannot think of any character in the book,” he says, “who has not gone on living in my mind.”246 Eliot reserves this praise, however, for a novel utterly unconcerned with literary realism; in the Melvillean fifth chapter, “Watchman, What of the Night?”, for example, the Doctor, over the course of more than thirty pages, lists every feature of the night that he can think of.247 To Eliot, the living quality of Barnes’ novel comes not from the novelistic realism of the nineteenth century, which invested effort in replicating the mundane details of life, or the literary modernism that attempted to replicate mundane details of thought in techniques such as stream of consciousness. Instead, Eliot suggests that characters feel the most real when they evoke the myriad possibilities of the human self, the “deeper design” which reveals “universal” human experience (xx). Eliot articulates a similar vision of real characters in his April 1929 review of The Complete Sherlock Holmes in The Criterion, a review which lightly engages with the Holmesian game. The publishing of the Complete Sherlock Holmes was a significant milestone for Holmesians, as it simplified the process of comparison and analysis. In the review, Eliot questions why “when we talk of [Holmes] we invariably fall into the fancy of his existence.”248

244 T. S. Eliot, “Wilkie Collins and Dickens,” in Selected Essays (London: Faber, 1951), 462. 245 Eliot, “Wilkie Collins and Dickens,” 462. 246 T. S. Eliot, “Introduction,” in Nightwood (New York: New Directions, 2006), xx. 247 Joseph Frank observes that Nightwood proudly “abandons any pretensions to [internal] verisimilitude.” Joseph Frank, The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1963), 31. 248 T. S. Eliot, review of the Complete Sherlock Holmes Short Stories by Arthur Conan Doyle and the Leavenworth Case by Anna Katherine Green, The Criterion 8 (32), no. 32 (1929), 554.

As Michael Saler has documented, evidence abounds, dating back to the early 1890’s, of naïve readers of Conan Doyle who believed that Holmes was a real person. To Eliot, however, this feeling is also one held by intelligent people. Eliot made several references to Conan Doyle’s stories throughout his poetry and drama, in works like Four Quartets and Murder in the Cathedral. Eliot’s review, however, treats Conan Doyle almost as a footnote in his own creation: “it must be remarked that the author (for we must mention Sir Arthur now and then) shows wisdom or instinct in keeping the sentimental interest down.”249 For Eliot, Conan Doyle has largely written himself out of the narrative he created. This self-effacement is not necessarily a failure: instead, Conan Doyle has successfully depersonalized the text, a tactic that Eliot himself of course recommended. As he had famously put it in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” “the progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”250 Conan Doyle’s vivid characters are a consequence of his own depersonalization, partially achieved by the complex interplay of stories in which Watson refers back to the publication of earlier stories, which he claims to have authored. As Charles J. Rzepka notes, “Conan Doyle’s historical existence poses a unique problem for the Grand Game because it lies outside the fictional ontology of the Canon he created, and thus beyond the reach, strictly speaking, of the evidentiary rules his acolytes have devised.”251 Despite the ostensibly serious setting of the review—Eliot was not prone to levity in the pages of The Criterion—he takes up Knox’s joke within the essay. He begins the essay by noting that “It might seem that Father Knox, in his definitive Studies in Sherlock Holmes had said the last word on Sherlock Holmes: yet he overlooks several interesting points, and commits one gross error in saying that Rouletabille was the natural son of Ballmayer.”252 Here Eliot, never one to focus within criticism on minute details, takes on Knox’s approach, focusing on Knox’s minor mistake about a French nineteenth-century detective story. In the Holmesian mode, Watsonian carelessness with detail serves as an unanswerable objection to Knox’s argument. When Eliot discussed detective fiction by other authors, such as his “Homage to Wilkie Collins,” he took the subject seriously, but here is playing a critical game in which he allows himself to confuse the author and the character. When Knox compares the stories to the Dialogues of Plato,

249 Eliot, “Holmes,” 554. 250 T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921), 47. 251 Rzepka, “‘The Unofficial Force’: Irregular Author Love and the Higher Criticism," 305. 252 Eliot, “Holmes,” 552.

it is a joke whose humour derives from the ridiculousness of taking detective stories seriously. Eliot plays the game in order to engage with the characters and pretenses of the Holmes stories more fully, and to analyze the stories in their rightful context as significant works of fin-de-siecle prose fiction. As he continues, Eliot both explores the alternate possibilities of character beyond the text (suggesting that Holmes could have made choices other than those in the book) and intentionally muddles the difference between the characters Holmes and Watson, and their creator Conan Doyle: It was wrong of him to go mountain climbing in Switzerland when he could better have eluded Moriarty in London. The last two volumes show him in mental decay: he repeats himself; in His Last Bow he descends to the level of Bull-Dog Drummond; he repeats the name Carruthers for a new character, and again uses the name Lucas.253 Although “him” first refers clearly to Holmes, its referent changes to either Watson or Conan Doyle, whoever the ‘writer’ of the stories may be. Here, Eliot plays the same game that Knox does, blurring the lines between character and creator. Eliot falls into this creative mode whenever he discusses Holmes. Even in his 1949 essay on “Poe and Valéry” he invents a conspiratorial, Holmesian metaphor to denote Poe’s literary influence on Conan Doyle: he notes that “Holmes was deceiving Watson when he told him that he had bought his Stradivarius violin for a few shillings at a second-hand shop in the Tottenham Court Road. He found that violin in the ruins of the house of Usher.”254 The only way to adequately respond to the vividness of the Holmes stories, it appears, is to engage with them in the Holmesian fashion. Holmes demands this style, Eliot shows in his 1929 review, because he violates what has previously been understood about the reality of character. Despite all his critiques of Holmes and Conan Doyle, Eliot insists that the stories have contributed something concrete to modern fiction: Every writer owes something to Holmes. And every critic of The Novel who has a theory about the reality of characters in fiction, would do well to consider Holmes. There is no rich humanity, no deep and cunning psychology and knowledge of the human heart about him; he is obviously a formula. He has not the reality of any great character of Dickens or

253 Eliot, “Holmes,” 554. 254 T. S. Eliot, “From Poe to Valery,” The Hudson Review 2, no. 3 (Autumn 1949), 330.

Thackeray or George Eliot or Meredith or Hardy; or Jane Austen or the Brontes or Virginia Woolf or James Joyce: yet, as I suggested, he is just as real to us as Falstaff or the Wellers. He is not even a very good detective. But I am not sure that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is not one of the great dramatic writers of his age.255 Note the curious presence of fellow modernists Virginia Woolf and James Joyce in this list of authors who have created “great characters.” In Eliot’s earlier criticism, he had represented Joyce as a clear break with Victorian literary tradition: he called the innovative structure of allusion in Ulysses, for example,” “a scientific discovery” that made the novel obsolete.256 Here, however, he lists Joyce and Woolf in the same tradition as Dickens and Thackeray. In particular, Eliot here suggests continuities between the Modernists and the Victorians in their treatment of character— that both, in their own way, created characters that feel real. And crucially, Holmes provides the bridge between the two eras and their ostensibly different aesthetic projects. As Eliot explains, Conan Doyle breaks every rule that critics have developed as criteria for the development of living characters. Eliot’s explanation of what makes Holmes a great and “real” character seems to hinge on the character’s “dramatic” nature. As with the Leavises who insisted on referring to Dickens as a “poetic dramatist,”257 Eliot locates Conan Doyle’s literary success in his transcendence of the form of prose fiction. Drawing on Dickens’ vivid and clearly defined characterization, Conan Doyle quickly and repeatedly establishes Holmes within each story. Conan Doyle defines Holmes for the reader through a set of external markers, in much the same way that Holmes quickly reads each of his clients upon encountering them. While in “Hamlet and his Problems,” Eliot attacked Hamlet for attracting too much attention to its central character, here he talks about Holmes as if he is responsible for his own existence. Despite Conan Doyle's clear continuity with Victorian novelistic tradition, Eliot recognizes that Holmes represents a middle way between a Dickensian accumulation of detail and individual colour, and a modernist overflow of interiority. As Eliot’s discussion of Nightwood suggests, modern character is for him most “real” when it rejects the conventions that limit novelistic characters to accurately recording human behaviour. The psychological extravagance of the modernist character, responding irrepressibly to the disorder of the city and modern life, might seem to be at odds with the cagey Holmes, but in fact Holmes represents a similar expression of modernity.

255 Eliot, “Holmes,” 556. 256 T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” The Dial 75, no. 5 (November 1923), 482. 257 F. R. Leavis and Q. D. Leavis, Dickens the Novelist (London: Chatto and Windus, 1970).

The mystery is solved when, dammed up for too long, Holmes’ stream of consciousness bursts forth in the conclusion, leading Watson along each sense impression that led him to the identity of the criminal. Conan Doyle’s masterstroke was to thread the needle between a character who we could aspire to imitate, but who simultaneously dazzles us with such accumulation of detail that we cannot hope to reproduce his perceptions completely.

S.C. Roberts and Scientific Character It is in his role as publisher that Eliot would have the greatest influence on the Holmesian Game. Eliot’s journal The Criterion had an offshoot series of pamphlets called The Criterion Miscellany, a collection of short works including excerpts of larger works by James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence (the first excerpt of Finnegans Wake was published through this series) as well as tracts on a variety of subjects. Eleni Loukopoulou characterizes the series a “respected series […] read by the political and literary establishment,” which helped to recuperate Joyce’s and Lawrence’s image among literary circles.258 In 1931, through the suggestions of Frank Morley, a literary executive at Faber and Faber259 and a future co-founder of the Baker Street Irregulars, Eliot and The Criterion Miscellany published the second major Sherlockian work after Ronald Knox’s 1911 essay, a pamphlet by S.C. Roberts titled Dr Watson: A Prolegomena to the Study of a Bibliographical Problem. In the spirit of Eliot’s own writing on Holmes, Roberts’ pamphlet took Holmes and Watson as meaningful objects of study and helped solidify the traditions of the Holmesian game. From 1922 to 1948 a lecturer on literature at Cambridge and the Secretary of the Cambridge University Press, Roberts worked alongside I.A. Richards, F.R. Leavis, and L.C. Knights.260 He wrote multiple monographs on James Boswell in his role as biographer of Samuel Johnson. He served as the examiner on Leavis’ PhD thesis and recommended the work enthusiastically enough for an oral defense not to be necessary.261 Roberts was a modernizing force for the press and instrumental in expanding its focus on publishing works on science, logic,

258 Eleni Loukopoulou, “Lawrence and Joyce in T. S. Eliot’s Criterion Miscellany Series,” in Modernists At Odds: Reconsidering Joyce and Lawrence, ed. Matthew J. Kochis, and Heather L. Lusty 2015), 132. 259 S. C. Roberts, “Sherlock Holmes,” Sherlock Holmes Journal 8, no. 1 (1966), 5. 260 I. D. MacKillop, F. R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism (London: Penguin Books, 1997), 80. 261 S. C. Roberts, Adventures With Authors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 55.

and math by writers such as Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, Ernest Rutherford, and Niels Bohr.262 Roberts also sought to publish Eliot’s 1927 Clark Lectures, but Eliot had already promised them to another publisher.263 Despite Roberts’ private admiration for Leavis, however, the press tended to publish more conservative literary criticism, refusing a submission by Wilson Knight and failing to publish anything by Leavis until after Roberts’ departure. The press instead published works by Arthur Quiller-Couch and J. Dover Wilson’s What Happens in Hamlet. Roberts was described by colleagues as congenial and clubby, never one to make direct attacks. While he never stated outright what his reservations were about publishing work by the New Critics and the Scrutiny set, we can unearth some of these reservations through a close reading of his Holmesian work. Roberts’ entry to the Holmesian game began as a 1929 review of Knox’s Essays in Satire, published in the Cambridge Review. Rather than evaluate the collection, Roberts instead played along with Knox’s conceit and responded gravely to his various claims about the Holmes stories.264 While Knox attacked Watson’s reliability and accused him of drunken fabrications in later stories, Roberts worked to emphasize Watson’s consistency and value as both a person and a narrator. Like Knox’s essay, the review is obviously satirical in tone and similarly addresses a number of fictional scholars. Roberts followed this review with an essay published in Desmond MacCarthy’s magazine Life and Letters, appearing only a few months after MacCarthy’s own miniature biography of Watson for the BBC.265 The essay was collected in Argonaut Press’ annual Essays of the Year. Roberts combined the review and the Life and Letters essay to form the Criterion Miscellany pamphlet, which was edited to make the tone of the pamphlet much more serious than its origins. Sayers would later insist that “the rule of the [Holmesian] game is that it must be played as solemnly as a county cricket match at Lord’s: the slightest touch of extravagance or burlesque

262 David McKitterick, A History of Cambridge University Press (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 273. 263 McKitterick, History of Cambridge UP, 274. 264 S. C. Roberts, “A Note on the Watson Problem,” in The Grand Game: A Celebration of Sherlockian Scholarship, ed. Laurie R. King, and Leslie S. Klinger (New York: Baker Street Irregulars, 2011). 265 Discussed above in Ch. 2, p.60. Life and Letters was a short-lived periodical whose circulation seems to have mostly been boosted in early years by the frequent appearances of members of the Bloomsbury Group including Woolf, Sackville-West and others.

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ruins the atmosphere.”266 In the hands of Roberts, the winking tone of Knox’s essay is gradually replaced by a far more scholarly approach. The fun of the game becomes digging through the stories to make earnest arguments that satisfy the reader. It is a scholar’s game with unspoken rules. The argument must be made in good faith; one cannot haphazardly pick and choose details from the texts in the canon to make a point. Moreover, the extratextual support one provides for one’s argument must be drawn from the real world. Thus, fabricating additional sources to prove a point is forbidden. One cannot create or argue with fictional scholars, or pretend that one has intimate knowledge of Holmes’ monograph on cigar ash. The Holmes stories must match up with reality and Watson must be castigated if he has failed. The short pamphlet presents itself as a biography of Watson and refuses to wink at the reader regarding why a biography of Watson should be required. The flyleaf demarcates the author as a critical authority, and notes that Roberts, “well known for his Johnsonian Studies, here turns his shrewd eye from Boswell to Dr. Watson.”267 The tone is serious throughout, even when Roberts attempts to resolve questions like where Watson was born and how many wives he had. He does so by referring to the internal evidence of the stories, and in a more metaleptic fashion, to real historical sources such as the records of St Bartholomew’s Hospital and histories of the Afghan War. In his footnotes, he makes mention of historical figures who are likely to have met Watson. Unlike Knox, he makes no mention of Conan Doyle whatsoever. Ironically, Roberts solidifies the character-centric focus of the Holmesian essay by denying that he is discussing characters at all. In the face of critics who accused Bradley of mistakenly writing about characters as if they were real people, Roberts implicitly insists that critics have mistaken real people for characters. Where both Knox and Sayers used these methods to satirize current critical trends, Roberts took Knox’s seemingly paradoxical blend of hostile hermeneutic investigation and trust in self-identical, holistic fictional character and accepted it as a legitimate critical method. Although most Holmesians and Sherlockians point towards Knox as the founder of the Game, Jon L. Lellenberg insists that “our scholarship’s cornerstone is S. C. Roberts’ Doctor Watson,”268

266 Sayers, “Foreword,” 7. 267 S. C. Roberts, Doctor Watson: A Prolegomena to the Study of a Biographical Problem, With a Bibliography of Sherlock Holmes (London: Faber and Faber, 1931). 268 Jon L. Lellenberg, “The Ronald Knox Myth,” Sherlock Holmes Journal 30, no. 4 (2011), http://www.bsiarchivalhistory.org/BSI_Archival_History/Hard_Knox.html.

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as it had far more of an impact on those who helped form the Baker Street Irregulars. In fact, later Holmesians and Sherlockians criticized Knox because his principal intent was academic satire rather than a celebration of the Holmes stories. In 1955 Edgar Smith, the president of the BSI, criticized Knox because “his essay was not inspired so much by a profound curiosity about the Master’s life and times as by a desire to poke fun for its own sake at Higher Criticism.”269 In his 1966 memoir, Roberts himself expressed his sadness that “Knox was entirely out of sympathy with the later cult. For him the Sherlock Holmes satires were simply a peg on which to hang his satire on the biblical criticism of German scholars.”270 In contrast to Knox and the later Sayers, Roberts’ seriousness was for its own sake: none of the mistakes found in the text are actual mistakes, but are instead evidence of a more complex and complete backstory to the characters. Anticipated by the seriousness with which Eliot played the Holmesian game, Roberts’s method synthesizes the spatial, thematic approach of Wilson Knight with the trust in character of Bradley. Wilson Knight’s attempts to dismantle character involved the rejection of criticism that produced a narrative re-reading of the original work in favour of a spatial view of the text, examining the work as a physical space instead of a continuous narrative. Wilson Knight examined the work thematically, assembling an argument from the work by piecing together aspects from chronologically separated material. Ironically, Roberts uses the same method to produce the opposite effect. Because the Holmes stories are told out of chronological order (Watson will sometimes indicate the date of the events related in the story, but as often as not provides no direct statement of date), putting them into a chronological order in order to produce a complete biography of the characters involves first reading the stories spatially. Where Wilson Knight exploded Hamlet as a character, Roberts reconstructs Holmes from the fragments of his life presented in the stories. Roberts looks under the obvious surface of the stories and discovers, instead of the tortured and ridiculous misreadings that Knox found, compelling and hidden layers to the principal characters of the stories. Intimately familiar with the controversial work being produced by his own colleagues lecturing on English, Roberts implicitly concedes the premise of the Scrutiny set that one can no longer talk about character as a central feature of fictional text. In

269 Edgar W. Smith, “Preface,” in Baker Street Studies (New York: Baker Street Irregulars, 1955). 270 Roberts, Adventures, 232.

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order to bypass this controversy altogether, Roberts sets aside the familiar rhetoric of the character critics. For him, Holmes does not feel real, he is real. He does not go on living in our minds—instead, he simply went on living.271 The methods that Sayers would later burlesque could, to Roberts, be sincerely applied for a definite purpose: the celebration of a work that could bridge the past and the present in its content and the methods of its analysis. Although the Holmesian game appears to be nothing more than a short-lived joke that begat a long tradition, it played a key part in building a new approach to literature, one that combined the methods of a nascent hermeneutics of suspicion with a commitment to restoration and trust in the wholeness of literature. It is for this reason that Rzepka’s account of the Sherlockians as stuck in a perpetual adolescence is unsatisfactory. While the societies that followed the original public vogue for Holmesian articles in the late twenties and early thirties had a clubbish atmosphere (and in the case of the New York Baker Street Irregulars, a men-only policy) the early British participants in the game were not retreating from adult responsibility: as public intellectuals, they were articulating a plan for literary engagement in the twentieth century. While Knox and Sayers articulated their plan through satire, Eliot and Roberts used humour. Sayers and Knox meant to demonstrate the fallaciousness of their own method while Roberts, as with his contemporaries Bell, Starrett, and Morley, embraced the method as valuable on its own terms and reflective of a new way forward in literary study. Both Knox and Sayers lost interest in the game as it lost its original satirical intent. In 1951, as the Sherlock Holmes Society of London was forming, the organization wrote Sayers and asked if she would be interested in joining. She declined, noting that “I feel that Holmes- worship has been a good deal over-done of late, especially in America; so that one tends to lose interest. I have added my little quota to Holmes 'research' and am pretty well played out on the subject.”272 Similarly, Knox wrote in a letter in the early fifties that “I got so bored with this rather humourless extension of the Holmes cult, that I now try to disclaim all connection with it.”273 For both Sayers and Knox, the Holmesian game had no purpose to it without humour. The Holmesians who followed Sayers turned their game into the recreation of a lifetime, often recreating sins of the critics who were the original targets of derision. These lawyers,

271 Given Roberts’ estimates of Holmes’ and Watson’s age, in 1930 it would not have been impossible for the characters to still be alive. 272 Trevor H. Hall, Dorothy L. Sayers: Nine Literary Studies (London: Duckworth, 1980), 25. 273 Michael J. Crowe, Ronald Knox and Sherlock Holmes: The Origins of Sherlockian Studies (New York: Gasogene Books, 2011), 30.

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businessmen, and economists, often less literary in their backgrounds and thus less aware of the original targets of satire, saw this social practice as the best way to express their love for Holmes. The later Holmesians used these detail-oriented techniques as the means through which they could gain insight and understand the life of the character beyond the text, even if it was partly a life they had created for him. G.K. Chesterton voiced concern in 1935 that Holmesian games were masking the true greatness of Holmes’s reality: although Knox’s satire had been humourous, and meant for fun, later texts were Not only solemn but solid. They are, like very learned reports on purely scientific questions, almost avowedly dull. They also may be written for fun; but they are not funny. [...] The hobby is hardening into a delusion. Not once is there a glance at the human and hasty way in which the stories were written; not once even an admission that they ever were written. The real inference is that Sherlock Holmes really existed and that Conan Doyle never existed. If posterity only reads these latter books, it will certainly suppose them to be serious. It will imagine that Sherlock Holmes was a man. But he was not; he was only a god.274 To Chesterton, Sherlock Holmes the god, the fantastical character who is beyond the limitations of an ordinary human, who should only be subject to the limitations of the imagination, is reduced when he is subjected instead to the laws of history. The reality of Holmes is undermined by pretending that he is a historical individual, because fictional reality is more lasting than, though not the same as, historical reality. By picking apart the stories, these mock essays lock their gaze on the Holmes canon’s weakest feature—consistency—rather than celebrating what Conan Doyle did well.275 Without a target for their satire, the Holmesians took on the style of the academics of the time period. Chesterton compares the new Holmesian essays to scientific reports, reminiscent of Eliot’s goal of approaching science through the depersonalization of art.276 Perhaps without even realizing it, the Holmesians had crafted a system that synthesized the pleasures of literature with an exacting, modern, scientific method.

274 Richard Lancelyn Green, ed. Letters to Sherlock Holmes (London: Penguin, 1985), 37. 275 Indeed, when I attended a series of meetings of the Toronto Bootmakers, the local chapter of Holmesians, there were participants who expressed fatigue with the Holmesian game. “Couldn’t we just enjoy the stories and Conan Doyle,” asked one attendee, “without asking what brand of tobacco he smoked in each story?” 276 Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”

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The Holmesians have proven to be a forward-looking community in their development of an idiosyncratic hermeneutics of restoration. They approach fictional character through a hostile hermeneutic investigation into the details, errors in continuity, and inconsistencies of a character’s actions. This attention to inconsistency is ultimately resolved by a thorough diegetic solution that reaffirms the consistency and wholeness of the work’s characters and the universe they occupy; there is always a hidden, compelling reason for the textual crux. As Michael Saler argues, this method laid the framework for the science fiction and fantasy fans of the second half of the twentieth century, fans like Trekkies whose approach to characters mixes intense affective involvement with a hermeneutic investigation of inconsistencies and possible errors in order to build a more complete vision of the character. The Holmesian critical mode takes direct inspiration from the scientific approach of Holmes, which as Franco Moretti suggests, questions everything but the existing social order.277 Holmes is the ultimate symbol of the common sense critic; his deductions surprise in their directness but never in their logic, and always reaffirms the rightness of authority. In popular culture, fixated fans who think ‘too hard’ about the backstories of characters tend to be pathologized as obsessed. What is usually misunderstood is that writing a forty-five page treatise on the spinning top at the end of Inception is an experience that brings pleasure for the engaged fan, rather than simply the satisfaction of a compulsion. Engaging with fictional people and occupying fictional worlds do not necessarily involve a surrender of one’s rational capacities. Instead, as the Holmesians show, there are ways to use rationality in an entirely recreational venue that provide a enjoyable and meaningful practice for non-academics. All the Holmesians and their inheritors need, it appears, is an entry point through their beloved characters. In my final chapter, I will examine a group that also negotiated an ambivalent relationship with the author of a beloved work by centring their reading of the book on its characters. The celebrants of the first Bloomsday in Dublin, however, had the additional challenge of negotiating a claim to the work in opposition to foreign modern critics, who sought to discount character as a central aspect of the work. The group began a tradition of celebrating one of the most difficult novels in the English literature canon through a re-enactment of its events, which has grown into one of the largest literary festivals in the world.

277 Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms (London: Verso, 1988).

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Chapter 4: Playing Bloom: The Characters of Ulysses, Irish Criticism, and Bloomsday

Who killed James Joyce? I, said the commentator, I killed James Joyce For my graduation.

What weapon was used To slay mighty Ulysses? The weapon that was used Was a Harvard thesis. […] And did you get high marks, The Ph.D.? I got the B.Litt. And my master’s degree.

Did you get money For your Joycean knowledge? I got a scholarship To Trinity College.

I made the pilgrimage In the Bloomsday swelter From the Martello Tower To the cabby’s shelter. –Patrick Kavanagh, “Who Killed James Joyce?” (1951)278

On June 16, 1954, in Sandycove, Ireland, six men dressed in funeral black set off for Dublin on two horse-drawn carriages. Brian O’Nolan, John Ryan, Patrick Kavanagh, Anthony Cronin, Tom Joyce, and A.J. Leventhal had gathered to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Leopold Bloom’s perambulations around the city of Dublin, as documented in James Joyce’s Ulysses. O’Nolan and Ryan had selected distinct roles for each of them to represent. The plan was to follow the entire day’s path through Ulysses by horse-drawn carriage, beginning at the Martello Tower where Joyce had lived and the setting for the opening of the novel. The group visited Dalkey, Sandymount Strand, number seven Eccles Street, Westland Row, Glasnevin Cemetery, and the office of the Irish Times (chosen as a substitute for the defunct Freeman’s Journal). Unfortunately, due to the number of pubs visited along the way, the group fell victim to fatigue

278 Patrick Kavanagh, “Who Killed James Joyce?,” Envoy 5, no. 17 (1951).

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and spent the rest of the day in the Bailey, down the street from Davy Byrnes Pub, where Bloom eats his lunch halfway through the novel.279 The group was starting a tradition of re-enacting Joyce’s novel that continues to be celebrated each June 16th around the world. In Dublin, Bloomsday is one of the largest festivals of the year, second only to St. Patrick’s Day. Celebrating Bloomsday in Dublin has become a favourite pilgrimage for any Joycean, and is often compared to the pilgrimage to Mecca.280 Each year, celebrants dress up in Edwardian clothes, attend public readings from Ulysses, and follow along with re-enactments of sections of the novel on the exact streets in which they were set. Choosing among dozens of events, attendees can listen to music from 1904, drink at pubs mentioned in the novel, or eat the same meals as the characters, like breakfast with kidneys or gorgonzola sandwiches. Bloomsday’s popularity today produces a host of anxieties among professional Joyce scholars, who have variously described the event as “mad,” “a travesty,” and “an opportunity for cultural validation that’s about as substantial as sharing an author quote on Instagram.”281 Declan Kiberd describes Bloomsday as an important and unique event, admitting that “it is quite impossible to imagine any other masterpiece of modernism having quite such an effect on the life of a city […] And yet, one has to ask the obvious question—how many of those celebrants have actually read the book through?”282 Kiberd’s complaint about the holiday is a common refrain: that the celebrants are not sophisticated or thorough enough in their relationship with Ulysses. John Banville, writing in The Irish Times, calls the Dublin Bloomsday “a more than usually depressing extravaganza of kitsch.”283 These anxieties have their root, I argue, in opposition to

279 Accounts of the day can be found in John Ryan, Remembering How We Stood: Bohemian Dublin At the Mid-Century (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1975); Anthony Cronin, Dead as Doornails (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1976); Anthony Cronin, No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O’Brien (London: Grafton Books, 1989); Peter Costello, and Peter van de Kamp, Flann O’Brien: An Illustrated Biography (London: Bloomsbury, 1987). 280 Huler Scott, No-Man’s Lands: One Man’s Journey Through the Odyssey (New York: Broadway Books, 2008), 2. “Dublin Wakes Up to 100 Years of Bloomsday.” Telegraph India, June 16, 2004. 281 Anthony Burgess, qtd. in Bloomsday, directed by Paul Howard, (Dublin: Imagine Productions in association with RTE, 1992), videocassette, 52 min; Murphy, James S., “Bloomsday is a Travesty, But Not for the Reason You Think.” Vanity Fair, June 16, 2014, https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2014/06/bloomsday-james-joyce-ulysses. 282 Declan Kiberd, Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce’s Masterpiece (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co, 2009), 4. 283 Banville, John, “The Joyce Business: John Banville Examines the Controversial Background to the Publication of a New Edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses Today.” Irish Times, June 12, 2004.

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the character-centric style of reading practiced by the original Bloomsday celebrants. I aim to provide a history of Irish Joycean scholarship from a new perspective. By understanding what might appear to be a themed day of drinking as an act of criticism, we gain new insight both into how Ulysses was gradually reclaimed as an Irish text and how the Bloomsday group set out to make space for an older, character-centred style of reading when reading a thoroughly modern book. Beginning with its first celebration in 1954, Bloomsday needs to be reconsidered as an act of reading, a political reclamation of Ulysses that, for many readers, has helped to mark the novel as a distinctively Irish text and as a work fundamentally concerned with place and character rather than order, pattern, and myth. By the early 1930s Ulysses had been claimed by members of the Modernist intelligentsia like Eliot, Pound, and Stuart Gilbert as the defining work of international modernism. The treatises and dissertations of American academic scholars like Harry Levin and Richard Ellmann emphasized the rigid structure and system of allusion that governed the work, made most apprehensible through the various schemata which divided each chapter by colour, time, method, organ of the body, and episode of The Odyssey. To Ryan, O’Nolan, Kavanagh, and Cronin these “abstruse”284 readings of Joyce failed to identify the true achievement of Ulysses.285 In addition to their celebration of the book on Bloomsday, the group made up a significant portion of midcentury Irish critics (others included Denis Johnston and Niall Montgomery) who argued that the book was most valuable when considered as a work of realist fiction. While the novel’s formal innovations were important, they argued that the novel should instead be primarily recognized for developing a new way to capture the reality of a city and its people through exhaustive accumulation of detail and perspective. Anthony Cronin claimed, for example, that “the whole business of Joyce criticism is a sorry mess,” and that “such dizzy, reeling heights of nonsense have been reached” that Irish readers of Joyce wished nothing more than to “shut certain people, mostly Americans, up for ever, and to close down certain

284 Ryan, Remembering How We Stood, 57. 285 Readings that particularly rankled these critics imposed elaborate structures onto Joyce’s work, such as A.M. Klein’s analysis of “Oxen in the Sun,” in which Klein claimed that the section was meant to precisely follow the gestational development of a fetus, or Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson’s Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake in which they asserted that the narrative conformed to the European “monomyth”. A.M. Klein, “The Oxen of the Sun,” Here and Now 1, no. 3 (1949); Joseph Campbell, and Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1944).

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prairie universities, apparently devoted to nothing else but the publication of commentaries on the master’s work.”286 One can detect a degree of personal resentment and perhaps jealousy in their attacks; these Irish writers had no access to the resources available to the Americans. The Irish universities were still conservative institutions, closed to the discussion of contemporary literature; just thirty years before, leading academic scholars of English literature including Robert Donovan and W.E. Thrift had spearheaded the Committee on Evil Literature, which had led to the establishment of the powerful Censorship of Publications Board. As the study of modern literature gradually advanced in the Irish universities, most literary-minded critics still had to circulate their work outside of an academic context. Like the Holmesian essays of S.C. Roberts and the late work of T.S. Eliot,287 the work of the Bloomsday celebrants should be characterized as an expression of conservative modernism that sought to reconcile the formal innovation of the modernists with character-based analysis. Like the Holmesians, who reclaimed Holmes from Conan Doyle to defend their beloved detective against an author who dismissed his own work, the Bloomsday celebrants were also reclaiming Ulysses from Joyce, who composed the greatest epic of their city ever written and then spent his life rejecting his homeland. Academic Joyceans have long exhibited a marked defensiveness against the attacks of the midcentury Irish critics like Cronin. Their responses have ranged from simple retorts to efforts to erase the Irish critics from the history of Joyce criticism entirely. In 1957 William M. Schutte noted that while “the professors have been guilty of inanities from time to time, less carefully trained critics have been guilty of more.”288 Schutte felt it was necessary to defend academic Joycean criticism against the “semiprofessionals and amateurs” who in turn dismissed academic arguments as overreading. Three decades later, in their introduction to a collection of essays in honour of Richard Ellmann, Susan Dick, Declan Kiberd, Dougald McMillan and Joseph Ronsley dismissed the Irish critics completely: Ireland, rightly famous for great writers, […] produced no critic commensurate with their capacity for complexity, and so this gifted scholar [Ellmann] became the interpreter of

286 Anthony Cronin, “A Note on Ulysses,” The Bell 18, no. 4 (1952), qtd in William M Schutte, Joyce and Shakespeare: A Study in the Meaning of Ulysses (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957).. 287 Discussed above in Ch. 3, p.94-102. 288 William M Schutte, Joyce and Shakespeare: A Study in the Meaning of Ulysses (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957).

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Irish genius for himself, and, later, the world. Not all Irish persons proved immediately or unqualifiedly grateful, however.289 Dick, Kiberd, McMillan, and Ronsley (all doctoral students of Ellmann) dismiss the Irish critics wholesale, characterizing Irish hostility to American scholarship as simple ingratitude to a community of people who were trying to “help Irish people know themselves.” Their narrow definition of criticism provides one answer why they fail to recognize the accomplishment of the Irish critics. Because their most significant contribution to Irish scholarship was not a book but a party, the group’s critical contribution is not as obvious. Although in the last thirty years a robust Irish scholarship of Joyce has developed that accentuates the role of Irish history and culture in his corpus, little effort has been invested in examining early Irish responses to Joyce’s work. In fact, with the exception of Matthew Spangler, literary scholars have paid little attention to the Dublin Bloomsday as an act of reading.290 While Spangler briefly discusses the first Bloomsday, he is focused primarily on the meaning of the holiday today, the ways the holiday conceives of Irish identity and of Joyce’s place in that national character. Only Joseph Brooker, in his account of the Irish reception of Joyce, affords Cronin, Kavanagh, Ryan, and O’Nolan an extended analysis of their role as critics. Brooker discusses their organization of Bloomsday as evidence of a newfound appreciation for Joyce in Ireland, but he does not consider the event as a reading of the novel. As a set of social practices, Bloomsday celebrations inevitably shape perceptions of the novel. As I will show, this

289 Susan Dick, et al., “Richard Ellmann: The Critic as Artist,” in Essays for Richard Ellmann: Omnium Gatherum (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), xvi. 290 There have been some excellent examinations of Bloomsday celebrations held in other cities, especially by Frances Devlin-Glass. There are major celebrations of Bloomsday in New York, Melbourne, Toronto, and in other cities in more than a dozen countries. For the purposes of this chapter, however, I will remain focused on the Dublin celebrations, where this tradition originated. Any discussion of Bloomsday abroad can only be imprecisely mapped onto Dublin’s Bloomsday; the majority of these events take place indoors. Although characters are brought to life through dramatizations and readings, the barrier between text and reader, performer and celebrant is far more rigid. These foreign Bloomsdays offer Joyceans a chance to celebrate the novel in person and also to bring the work to life through readings. These events, however, even when they feature ‘re-enactments’ outdoors, cannot do the same kind of interpretive and spatial work as the Dublin Bloomsday. For more, see Frances Devlin-Glass, “Who ‘Curls Up’with Ulysses? A Study of Non-Conscripted Readers of Joyce,” James Joyce Quarterly 41, no. 3 (2004); Frances Devlin-Glass, “Joyce, Bloomsday, and Diasporic Identity: A Report from Melbourne,” New Hibernia Review 11, no. 2 (2007).

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produces a grounded, realist, and character-centric reading of the text that is very different from the academic readings of Ulysses.

“I am other I now”: Character in Ulysses A. Walton Litz observes that since its publication, there have been two distinct poles to Ulysses criticism: the symbolist reading of Eliot, Gilbert, and Ellmann, and the realist reading of Pound, Budgen, and Kenner.291 This dichotomy informs our reading of Joyce’s characters as well; should the book be read primarily as a Homeric allegory or as a densely layered but fundamentally realistic tale of a group of Dubliners? Are characters meant to function as symbols, a reading for which F.R. Leavis and L.C. Knights advocated in their discussions of Shakespeare, or are they meant to evoke real people, as A.C. Bradley suggested in his criticism? To Ryan, O’Nolan, Kavanagh, and Cronin, the answer is obvious: readers are meant to identify with Bloom, Stephen, and Molly. In fact, they believe that readers, especially Irish readers are meant to identify the entire cast of characters in the novel as familiar figures, as well as to identify with them personally. The ease with which Joyce’s earliest critics dismissed the Irish approach to the novel as somehow the ‘wrong’ way to read the work stems in part from the form of Ulysses, as Joyce confounds our understanding what makes both primary and secondary characters ‘real.’ Almost all the secondary characters in the book are based on historical individuals, often using their real names. The “Wandering Rocks” episode, whose roving perspective moves from person to person as they perambulate through Dublin, prominently features well-known Dubliners including Father John Conmee, the publican Larry O’Rourke, and the tea merchant Tom Kernan. Joyce freely narrates their thoughts, satirizing Kernan’s vanity and Conmee’s self-satisfaction. As Kiberd observes, “the characters in Ulysses are almost all real persons, or else they are closely based on a person or persons identifiable. Only the central figures—Leopold and Molly Bloom, Stephen Dedalus—seem to have been created out of Joyce’s imagination.”292 Kiberd’s imprecise language reveals the depth of the problem: the secondary characters are not real people, but they do share names and characteristics with people who really lived. How do we meaningfully

291 A. Walton Litz, “Pound and Eliot on Ulysses: The Critical Tradition,” in Ulysses: Fifty Years, ed. Thomas F. Staley (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1974). 292 Declan Kiberd, “Foreword,” in The Real People of Joyce’s Ulysses (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2016), xvii.

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discuss the characters in the novel and their effective ‘reality’ (as a criterion for fiction) with simultaneous cognizance of their historical basis—i.e. their actual reality? In the case of the primary characters, we are faced with different obstacles to our understanding, recognition, and definition. These obstacles stem from Joyce’s narrative form, which is most easily demonstrated by an example of what it is not. When we are introduced to Bloom we are told that “Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart . . . most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.”293 Here, the narrator makes a rare declaration about Bloom’s tastes and by inference his personality, his character. Throughout the novel, Joyce generally avoids traditional character description and evaluation. Roy K. Gottfried observes that Joyce “protect[s] the characters from assimilation into that order which makes them general and predictable, a way to avoid language which cannot express particulars.”294 In place of diegesis, Joyce uses mimesis. Unlike Middlemarch’s Arthur Brooke, “a man nearly sixty, of acquiescent temper, miscellaneous opinions, and uncertain vote,” the characters of Ulysses are almost never presented to us by the narrator with a clearly defined set of characteristics.295 Instead, the reader must carefully parse character from scattered representational evidence. Like Woolf’s Orlando, Bloom exists for the reader from moment to moment. As Woolf’s narrator in Jacob’s Room asserts, “It is no use trying to sum people up.”296 According to John Frow, the popular understanding of fictional character is still widely informed by John Stuart Mill’s model in which character is “predicated on the ownership and control of the self […] this classically liberal conception of the moral self underlies the understanding of literary character as the representation of autonomous, unified, and self- identical subjects.”297 We understand character based on its continuity—we assume that if a character does change or ‘grow,’ that character growth must be gradual, believable, and prompted by a plausible set of circumstances. Joyce’s characters are not ‘unified and self-identical’; they change from moment to moment and are both conscious of and disturbed by their own lack of

293 James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Vintage, 1986), 45.1-5. References throughout will refer to page and line number. 294 Roy K. Gottfried, The Art of Joyce’s Syntax in Ulysses (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980), 115. 295 George Eliot, Middlemarch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 296 Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 2004), 36. 297 John Frow, Character and Person (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 16.

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fixity. “I was happier then,” says Bloom. “Or was that I? Or am I now I? Twentyeight I was” (135.608). Bloom cannot decide whether his past self and his present self are the same person, or which instantiation of his self can lay claim to the true ‘I’. Is it the young, idealistic Bloom, or the weathered and cynical older Bloom? Like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, shifting across the whole of modern English history, Bloom sees himself changing from point to point and cannot help but wonder what of himself remains. Shortly thereafter, Stephen takes up the same theme, observing that although a mole has appeared to be in the same spot on his body for his entire life, “all my body has been woven of new stuff time after time” (160.379). Stephen even wonders whether he should be held accountable for debts his past self accrued: “Molecules all change. I am other I now. Other I got pound” (156.205-6). Even the proper names of the characters, the fundamental “magnetic fields” without which a character could not exist, are subject to distortion and change.298 John Eglinton, a character named after and given the attributes of a historical Dubliner, variously becomes littlejohn Eglinton, Second Eglinton, and Besteglinton over the course of the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode. A persistent and divisive question for scholars of modernism remains whether, as Marianne Dekoven asserts, the fragmented figuration of fictional characters reflected a fundamental change in human character in response to the social trauma of WWI. 299 DeKoven suggests that modernist fragmentation is its own kind of realist representation of lived experience. I would, however, insist that changes in human representation cannot be adequately explained by external sociohistorical forces. Instead, as I have attempted to demonstrate, form has its own history, influenced by the broader social context but not determined by it. In her account of the emergence of “fictionality” in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, Catherine Gallagher argues that “if a fictional character created an impression of totality so strong that the incompleteness and disjunctions disappeared, there would be no inviting gaps for the reader to slip through, no subjective blanks to be overcome by her own idealized ego.”300 Such a character, she suggests, would leave the reader alienated and exhausted by overflow of detail. The reader would be unable to identify salient characteristics of the figure, given that a

298 Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 67. 299 Marianne DeKoven, “History as Suppressed Referent in Modernist Fiction,” ELH 51, no. 1 (Spring 1984). 300 Catherine Gallagher, “The Rise of Fictionality,” in The Novel, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 360.

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over-realistic account of a character would inevitably reveal innumerable contradictions in thought, action, and speech. And yet Gallagher’s description seems to apply neatly to both Bloom and Stephen, who have convinced numerous readers of their reality. As David Hayman posits, “Leopold Bloom . . . is perhaps the most particularized character in all literature.”301 Joyce uses free indirect discourse to make Bloom’s perceptions seem all-encompassing to us. In “Calypso” we follow what seems like every single step of Bloom’s trip to the butcher’s and back, and the narrator relates every one of Bloom’s thoughts. We even fail to notice what Bloom fails to notice: near the end of the chapter Bloom pauses to ask, “Where is my hat, by the way? Must have put it back on the peg. Or hanging up on the floor. Funny I don’t remember that” (4.485). As Hugh Kenner observes, if readers return to the earlier moment in the episode in which Bloom enters the house, we realize that the narrator did not mention where Bloom’s hat went, because the removal of his hat was not a conscious action.302 How, we are left to wonder, does this overwhelming accumulation of detail not alienate the reader totally? In a traditional Bradleyan account of character these characters could not possibly feel ‘real’ to readers.303 More detail, paradoxically, leaves the character feeling less lifelike, since there is less space onto which the reader can project. A simple test of the character’s reality is the character’s transferability, whether readers can imagine a character outside of their original circumstances. The great characters of nineteenth-century fiction have been repeatedly and successfully adapted, repurposed, and relocated. Sherlock Holmes can be updated to contemporary London; Lizzie Bennett can mingle with zombies; the entirety of Dickens’ dramatis personae can move together onto a single laneway.304 But who is Bloom without 1904 Dublin? For that matter, who would Clarissa Dalloway be outside of the Westminster portrayed in Woolf’s novels? Even Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, despite its use of Mrs Dalloway as a central intertext, remains on the periphery of the original work. The great modern characters, whose perceptions and thoughts stem from the locale through which they traverse, are planted firmly in the context in which they first appeared. Thus most film adaptations of Woolf and

301 David Hayman, Ulysses: The Mechanics of Meaning (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 19. 302 Hugh Kenner, Ulysses (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 46. 303 See also Hugh Walpole’s condemnation of modern fiction above, Ch.2, p.38. 304 Respectively, BBC’s Sherlock, Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and BBC’s Dickensian.

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Joyce’s works have been failures in comparison to their originals, capable only of offering homage to rather than adapting the novels.305 In his 1980 comic novel Earthly Powers, Anthony Burgess depicts a fictional musical adaptation of Ulysses (one that attempts to sensationalize the story and inject drama and action where there is none) failing spectacularly on Broadway. The humour of the scene is derived from the fact that no risk-averse Broadway producer would ever be so foolhardy to attempt such an adaptation in real life.306 The only adaptation of the novel that has had long-term success, in fact, is Bloomsday itself. Beginning in the late 1960s with David Norris, scholars, enthusiasts, and actors began incorporating dramatic readings of the novel into their Bloomsday walks. In a sense, these readings are hardly adaptations at all, given that they take place in the exact spot where they were imagined.307 This is crucial to the analytical model that Ryan, O’Nolan, Kavanagh, and Cronin created. In the late Victorian model, a character’s reality came from its ability to live on in the minds of the reader, someone whose whole life might be imagined in any number of situations. In the Bloomsday model, the reality of Joyce’s characters comes from their specificity, including the specific places in which they lived. This might help us understand readers’ desire to follow in the footsteps of Bloom, or of Holmes, in a way that seems unnecessary for Charles Dickens or George Eliot’s characters.

305 Pauline Kael called Joseph Strick’s 1967 film Ulysses “an act of homage in the form of readings from the book plus illustrated slides,” while Janet Maslin observed that Marleen Gorris’ 1998 film version of Mrs Dalloway was more of an accompaniment to the original than an adaptation, bound to “mystify viewers unfamiliar with the novel’s hidden depths.” Pauline Kael, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968), 299; Maslin, Janet, “Truths of All Lives, Comfortable or Not.” New York Times, Feb 20 1998, https://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/20/movies/film-review-truths-of-all-lives-comfortable-or- not.html. 306 Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980). 307 These Bloomsday walks are now organized by a variety of actors, academics, and literary enthusiasts. One such group are the Balloonatics, who are a theatre company that have been performing site-specific Bloomsday re-enactments since 1987. They typically lead four performances on Bloomsday, each of which takes place at the appropriate time of day, and in the exact place. Thus for “Lotus Eaters,” at 10am a small audience follows Bloom (played by Paul O’Hanrahan) as he thinks aloud, down Westland Row and ducks into St Andrews Church with him, before stopping at the post office (now Pearse Station) so that he can pick up his letter from Martha Clifford. For “Lestrygonians” Bloom begins at O’Connell Bridge, passes by Davy Byrne’s pub (which is too crowded on Bloomsday to allow the actual re-enactment), and heads towards the National Library.

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Stuart Gilbert, Frank Budgen, and the Schema Over the course of the nineteen-twenties and thirties, influential works of American and English criticism successfully defined Ulysses as a work of international modernism, divorced from place. Joyce’s early backers, like Ezra Pound, were invested in defining Joyce as a European writer rather than an Irish one. Pound wrote that Joyce “is not an institution for the promotion of Irish peasant industries. He accepts an international standard of prose writing and lives up to it.”308 In 1923, Eliot wrote that Joyce was not writing for the common people, the “half-witted,” because “a man of genius is responsible to his peers, not to a studio-full of uneducated and undisciplined coxcombs.”309 In the wake of Joyce, he proclaimed, “instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art, toward […] order and form” (483). The novel set “IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS” (96.1) had become a novel that functioned primarily as a retelling of myths central to the Western tradition. Joyce’s characters were not significant on their own terms; instead they were only important for the heroic figures they ironically evoked. By 1941, Harry Levin would confidently write that Joyce’s novels “are of Irishmen and by an Irishman, but not for Irishmen.”310 Early criticism of Ulysses defined the work for longer than usual, partly because the first thirty years of the novel’s reception was marked by scarcity of available copies: with the novel itself banned in the United Kingdom and the United States for the first decade after publication, the reviews and commentaries were often readers’ only exposure to the work.311 Even once the book’s sale was no longer illegal, obtaining a copy could still be very difficult. The actual text of Ulysses was basically unknown in Ireland until the beginning of the nineteen-seventies: Litz observes that “The extreme difficulty of the work itself, combined with the difficulty of obtaining a personal copy, meant that from the very beginning readers were unusually dependent on the available accounts of Ulysses.”312 The studies of early critics like Stuart Gilbert and Frank Budgen, both of whom quoted the novel extensively as they analyzed the work, were forced to

308 Ezra Pound, “‘Dubliners’ and Mr James Joyce,” The Egoist 1, no. 14 (1914), 267. 309 T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” The Dial 75, no. 5 (1923), 481. 310 Joseph Brooker, Joyce’s Critics: Transitions in Reading and Culture (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 89. 311 Readers like Anthony Burgess and John Ryan recount tales of literally smuggling the novel into England and Ireland, respectively. 312 A. Walton Litz, “Ulysses and Its Audience,” in James Joyce: The Centennial Symposium, ed. Beja et al. (Urbana-Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 222.

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serve as surrogates for the novel for many readers. The conflict between Gilbert and Budgen would help define the critical conversation in the decades to come, especially on the construction of Joyce’s characters.

Figure 1 – The Gilbert Schema, James Joyce’s Ulysses, (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963), 41.

Gilbert remains best known for introducing the reading public to a version of the schema that Joyce had been circulating among friends since before the novel was published, sending readers on Easter egg hunts for colours, symbols, and Homeric parallels (see Figure 1). Gilbert presented his work as authoritative, written in consultation with Joyce. He did not, however, indicate that the schema had come directly from the author, who had been frustrated at critics’ failure to recognize the parallels. Gilbert was helping to construct a paratext that defined the characters as surrogates (for myths, theories, patterns) rather than people. As Patrick A. McCarthy notes, one of the problems with Gilbert’s rigid emphasis on the schema throughout his study is “the implication that the plan predated the novel.”313 Gilbert presents Joyce’s writing

313 Patrick A McCarthy, “Stuart Gilbert’s Guide to the Perplexed,” in Re-Viewing Classics of Joyce Criticism, ed. Janet Egleson Dunleavy (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 30.

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process as fulfilling a preexisting plan, a recipe in which characters were not people but symbolic ingredients: The personages of Ulysses are not fictitious and its true significance does not lie in problems of conduct or character. After reading Ulysses we do not ask ourselves: ‘Should Stephen Dedalus have done this? Ought Mr Bloom to have said that? Should Mrs Bloom have refrained?’ All these people are as they must be; they act, we see, according to some lex eterna, an ineluctable condition of their very existence.314 Because Joyce’s novel does not encourage us to ask whether a character “ought” or “oughtn’t” do something, Gilbert concludes that they are not characters at all, but fixed stars in a pattern beyond their own understanding. Bloom does not himself know that he is the centre of an Odyssean journey, or that as he runs out of the pub in the conclusion of “Cyclops” he has become “ben Bloom Elijah,” “clothed upon in the glory of the brightness, having raiment as of the sun, fair as the moon” (345.1910-1918). To Gilbert, because Bloom cannot access this narrated imagery, cannot know the author’s plan for him and the novel, his experience and his character fundamentally do not matter. Gilbert interestingly insists that Joyce’s characters are not fictitious. Although fictitious can mean “of, pertaining to, or the nature of fiction,” it is also widely used to describe things that are “Counterfeit, ‘imitation’, sham; not genuine.”315 Catherine Gallagher explains that as realistic fiction developed, its authors had to overcome a general suspicion that to create a fiction was to tell a lie. Gilbert hearkens back to this definition of fiction as falsehood; by transcending his genre Joyce does not write fiction at all. His characters are not false copies of real individual people, but signs of something greater than the individual. Gilbert’s was not the only perspective on Joyce’s characters that was published in the years before the book was widely available. In 1934, Frank Budgen published James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses. The book is an analysis of Joyce’s novel as well as a retelling of its narrative, but it begins with Budgen’s experiences getting to know Joyce in Zurich. In Budgen’s telling, one of the first things Joyce asked him when discussing Ulysses was whether Budgen knew of any “complete all-round character.” While Joyce had Odysseus in mind, Budgen responded by

314 Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Study By Stuart Gilbert (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963), 8. 315 Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “fictitious,” http://www.oed.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/view/Entry/69837?redirectedFrom=fictitious.

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suggesting Faust and Hamlet. Joyce dismissed Faust because “far from being a complete man, he isn’t a man at all. Is he an old man or a young man? Where are his home and family? We don’t know.” He added, “Hamlet is a human being, but he is a son only.”316 The anecdote suggests that Joyce’s intention behind using heroic models for his characters was to fill them out, as completely as possible. True or not, Budgen’s presentation of this anecdote as the first detail we learn about Joyce’s approach to writing Ulysses is indicative of Budgen’s own approach to the novel. Budgen retells the narrative of the story in order, emphasizing what is happening for the characters. To Budgen, “a novel is tested by its reality, and not by its message” (74), a test that Ulysses passes. Fine-grained characterization, even if at times overwhelming, is one of the central strengths of the novel: “by the end of the day we know more about [Bloom] than we know about any other character in fiction” (65). Budgen styles the novel as a succession of universal and typical actions, all of which are presented in the name of characterization. He asks, “if the experience is common why does Joyce narrate it? Because he is building with an infinite number of pellets of this clay of common experience the character of Leopold Bloom” (75). Budgen appears to be reading a different novel from Gilbert, so different are their approaches to the central characters. Unaware that Joyce wrote it himself, Budgen critiques Gilbert’s schema. Reducing the novel to a diagram, Budgen asserts, alienates us from the experience of the central characters, and transforms the novel into an extended exercise in style. Like Budgen, the midcentury Irish critics rejected the need for paratexts to understand Ulysses. John Ryan, who was born in 1925, observed with pride in his memoir Remembering How We Stood that in his teenage years, Ulysses came to me clean and unencumbered, with no layers of pseudo-scholarship to contend with, while my mind was white, original and virginal, unreduced by the hindsight of others, and was able to entertain, with respect—but not too much awe, the almost preposterous assumptions that the book was making— the most hilarious, as far as I was concerned, being the tacit one that we were now engaged, inter alia, in folding up the route map of the English language, a chart we would not be needing these next several hundred years.317

316 Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (New York: Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1934), 14-15. 317 Ryan, Remembering How We Stood, 52.

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To Ryan, his first reading experience was superior to any that came later, unsullied by ‘charts’ or ‘maps’. Read without those maps, Joyce’s achievement is not the reawakening of Western myth or the discovery of a new method but a complex, earthy realism. The reader’s progress through the history of the English language in “Oxen of the Sun” is held up here not as the pinnacle of literary achievement but as a preposterous, though pleasurable, joke. Perhaps most important to Ryan is the need to set aside ‘awe’ when reading Ulysses. Recognizing that Ulysses, for all its accomplishments, is at bottom merely another book, meant that Ryan was able to offer a clear- eyed assessment of its successes and failures. A commonly held perspective among the Irish critics was that readers should be able to pick and choose which elements of Joyce to celebrate, or which works to embrace, rather than show absolute deference to Joyce. Free from this obligation to the author, Ryan and his compatriots were free to build their own relationship with Joyce’s books and his characters, on their own terms.

Character, Author, Authority In my discussion of A.C. Bradley’s approach to character in Chapter One, I explored how Bradley’s method empowered readers to produce literary meaning, in contrast to the approaches of critics like Eliot who emphasized the power of the writer to produce automatic, involuntary responses in the reader. Bradley wrote in a letter that his critical goal was to equip the reader so that a poem should “[become] to the reader what it was to the writer. He [the reader] has not merely interpreted the poem, he has recreated it.”318 For Bradley, characters are most capable of taking on an imaginative life beyond their work when readers have been empowered to imagine themselves as co-creators, including filling in gaps in characters’ lives. In contrast, Joyce has long been vulnerable to accusations of authoritarianism regarding the interpretation of his work. He had a direct hand, after all, in crafting a number of important early critical responses to his work, including Gilbert’s study, Gorman’s biography of Joyce, and Harry Levin’s treatise. Joyce misled Gorman about key facts in his life, withheld information, and insisted on rewrites and changes to the final manuscript. Ira B. Nadel describes Joyce’s “determination to control his public image [in] critical studies” of his work as well, noting that Joyce vetted every single chapter of Gilbert’s study, leading Gilbert to despondently describe himself as Joyce’s

318 Terence Hawkes, That Shakespeherian Rag (Abingdon: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), 32.

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“secretary,” tasked simply with broadcasting Joyce’s own opinion of his works through another name.319 Jonathan Goldman suggests that Joyce scholarship has stayed under the thumb of its author’s intentions more than scholarship of any other Modernist writer: Joyceans, he says, have “a long history of complying with Joyce’s attempt to detach word from world.”320 Goldman’s terms are important here: Joyce separates the words of the text, which he controls, from the world of shared experience in which the reader can contribute their own meaning to the text. Stephen makes a similar case for the centrality of the author in “Scylla and Charybdis.” The supreme question that a reader must ask, Stephen suggests, is what the work meant to the author. Without an answer to this question, which can only be proven through a detailed understanding of the author’s biography, all other inquiries are doomed to failure. The three librarians to whom Stephen presents his elaborate theory of Shakespeare—Richard Best, John Eglinton, and Thomas Lyster—are united against Stephen in rejecting biographical criticism as a primary means of producing literary meaning. Together, Besteglyster (Schutte’s coinage) are characterized by John P. McCombe as Bradleyans, whose ideas mostly come from “England’s ancient universities.”321 As Joyce’s fictional version of George Russell (A.E.) observes, identifying Hamlet’s true historical original is a “purely academic” question. Instead, “Art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences. The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring” (152.49-50). Russell’s statement has obvious resonances with Bradley’s assertion that tragedy’s value is “a reminder or a symbol of the connection of the limited world of ordinary experience with the vaster life of which it is but a partial appearance.”322 Stephen’s theory, that our understanding of Hamlet is faulty if we imagine that Shakespeare identified with Prince Hamlet more closely than King Hamlet, entirely rejects Bradley’s approach to characters, in which what matters is what conclusions the readers draw from the text alone. McCombe casts Joyce’s resistance (through Stephen) to Bradley’s hegemonic grip on literary studies (in both the 1904 of the novel and the time of its composition)

319 Ira B. Nadel, “Joyce and Blackmail,” in Joyce and the Joyceans (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002). 320 Jonathan Goldman, Modernism is the Literature of Celebrity (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2011). 321 John P. McCombe, “Besteglyster and Bradleyism: Stephen Dedalus’s Postcolonial Response to English Criticism,” James Joyce Quarterly 39, no. 4 (2002), 718. 322 A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 128.

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as a heroic postcolonial resistance of a foreign set of ideals. In McCombe’s reading, Joyce is asserting that “the current English version of Shakespeare criticism [i.e. Bradleyism] should not serve as a model for Irish critics as well.”323 But as I read this scene, Joyce is not attempting to liberate the Irish intelligentsia, but to impose a more authoritative approach to texts in response to what he perceives as a lapse of intellectual rigour. Lyster begins the episode by referencing Goethe’s discussion of Hamlet: “a great poet on a great brother poet. A hesitating soul taking arms against a sea of troubles, torn by conflicting doubts, as one sees in real life” (151.2-4). As with Russell, Lyster’s standard for literary achievement is the faithfulness of its rendering of complex human experience, and its ability to capture the profundity of “real life.” Lyster suggests that it is the reader’s assessment of the character’s reality that matters, that Hamlet’s accomplishment can only be measured by its relation to the reader’s lived experience. After Lyster leaves the room, Stephen dismisses the librarian’s statements as obvious platitudes, nearly tautological. Unlike Lyster, Stephen is unsatisfied with that which can be discovered from the text alone. Anyone, he suggests, can produce a reading of Hamlet that assesses his character. What requires skill and ingenuity is to discover the true and hidden meaning of the text placed there by the author. In Shakespearean Tragedy, Bradley concedes that Hamlet can be both a fictional person and an assemblage of words, someone whose inconsistencies can both offer us insight and be the simple evidence of errors. Stephen declares, however, that “a man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery” (156.228-9) Drawing on the biographical information of Maurice Clare and Sidney Lee, including his family history, his financial records, and his will, Stephen purports to discover that Shakespeare, cuckolded by Ann Hathaway and grieving his son’s Hamnet’s death, wrote himself into the play as the ghost’s father. While Eglinton holds on to a belief that “Shakespeare is Hamlet” (159.370- 1), the group is as a whole resistant to biographical criticism. Stephen, however, only admits to criticism of his theory by way of other biographical possibilities: to assert that Shakespeare “is the beardless undergraduate from Wittenberg then you must hold that his seventy year old mother is the lustful queen. No” (170.832-3). Stephen’s model for the reality of characters is much narrower than the Victorian model; Stephen cannot conceive that an author might create a person out of thin air, and thus each character must come from a real person. This was, after all, how Joyce wrote; every secondary character in Ulysses is closely based on a real person that Joyce knew, some of which he pseudonymized and some of which he did not. These are not figures that ‘go on living’ in the reader’s heads, filled with imaginative potential; instead, these are figures who have already lived, about whose interior lives it is only possible to make correct

323 McCombe, “Besteglyster,” 718.

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or incorrect assertions. Stephen emphasizes the importance of biography because to Joyce, we cannot understand the true meaning of the work without intimate familiarity with the writer’s personal experience. Joyce’s emphasis on the authority of the writer would prove a major challenge for the Irish critics of Ulysses. Indeed, through Gilbert and others Joyce sought to dictate what his book meant, without even including the basis for that meaning in the book itself. While the Irish recognized Joyce’s achievement and in many cases had a strong love for the novel, it was hard to reconcile his thorough portrait of Dublin with his complete repudiation of the country as a whole. In 1901 Joyce called the Irish “the most belated race in Europe,” and in Stephen Hero his protagonist lamented “the plague of Catholicism” that infested Ireland, as well as the daily torture involved in “living at the farthest remove from the centre of European culture, marooned on an island in the ocean.”324 American and European critics were uninvested in defending Ireland’s reputation, and enthralled by Joyce’s twin revolutions of form and representation. The Americans and Europeans were thus happy to capitulate to Joyce’s authority on his novel and his country. For the Irish, however, reclaiming Joyce, or at the very least, Ulysses, involved a variety of approaches. Some writers emphasized Joyce’s Catholicity, while others suggested ignoring Joyce’s intentions altogether. The most common reaction among the Irish, however, was to reject Ulysses altogether.

“A Bash in the Tunnel”: Envoy reclaims Joyce Between 1930 and 1950, Joyce went from a fringe experimental writer to a subject of wide study in university English departments. This was, as I have indicated, a frequent source of frustration for those in Ireland (and especially Dublin) who loved the novel or had some stake in its reception. The way in which the Irish layer of the novel was scrubbed away, as it were, to access its classical structure, felt like an act of erasure, performed by pedants and sophists. The widespread American perception that the Irish had no appreciation for Joyce was confirmed for many by the reaction of Oliver St. John Gogarty, on whom Joyce based the character of Buck Mulligan. Gogarty, by training a medical doctor, was known about Dublin as a poet and wit in the 1920s, which made his international reputation in the 1930s and 40s as a fictional character in another man’s book a bitter pill for him to swallow. The final straw for Gogarty was reading the Canadian poet A.M. Klein’s analysis of “Oxen in the Sun,” in which Klein claimed that the section was meant to follow the gestational process of a fetus. In Denis Johnston’s account, Gogarty exclaimed, “that’s what we’ve come to […] The fellow [Joyce} once spent an evening

324 James Joyce, Stephen Hero (London: Jonathan Cape, 1956), 198-99.

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with me in Holles Street Hospital. And now some character in Canada is probably getting a Ph.D for analysing [Joyce’s] profound knowledge of midwifery.” 325 The transformation of a real moment into an abstruse and elaborate metaphor enraged Gogarty enough to prompt him to attack the North American Joyceans and Joyce himself. Gogarty’s article, “They Think They Know Joyce,” appeared in the March 18, 1950, issue of the Saturday Review of Literature.326 In it, Gogarty accused Joyce of being a huckster and the Joyceans of being his rubes. He mused: “I wonder what all the worshipers of Joyce would say if they realized that they had become the victims of a gigantic hoax, of one of the most enormous leg-pulls in history.”327 Like the New Yorker cartoons mocking the socialites who had been suckered into buying one of Ad Reinhardt’s black-on-black abstract paintings, Gogarty accused the Joyceans of a failure of discernment. These critics and readers had failed to recognize a trick perpetrated by a false sage. Even worse, the work that the Joyceans themselves produced, he claimed, was nothing more than “floods of nonsense” (8). The only useful way to read Ulysses was as a comic novel that offered a record of the life of a city: I, who knew Joyce and the Dublin in which he lived and the way it treated him, find amusement here and there in “Ulysses,” even in the fact that Ulysses never comes into the book. Ulysses is the author, Joyce himself seeking his true home in gaunt Ithaca. I personally can find here and there some pay dirt in “Ulysses,” for there are sparks to be glimpsed of bawdiness and argot. But these must pass completely unrecognized by anyone not well informed about the randy songs of the old city, with its despairing degradation of human life. (35) Gogarty specifically rejects the Gilbertian reading of the novel, claiming that the title of Ulysses refers not to its structure but to Joyce himself. Like Stephen, Gogarty reads the book as a biographical key. He claims that the only value in the book is to be found in its treatment of Dublin, which no outsider can understand. Indeed, his emphasis on knowing Joyce personally suggests that the achievement of Ulysses is so specific that only those who were present at the events depicted in the novel (such as Gogarty) can have an adequate understanding of the work. Joyce destroyed his career, Gogarty asserts, when he became more obsessed with representing

325 Denis Johnston, “A Short View of the Progress of Joyceanity,” Envoy 5, no. 17 (May 1951), 13. 326 See above, Ch.3, p.75 for previous discussion of this magazine as a site for conservative anti- modernist expression. 327 Oliver St. John Gogarty, “They Think They Know Joyce,” Saturday Review of Literature 33, no. 11 (March 18, 1950), 8.

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the ugliness of humanity than with providing moral uplift. Gogarty claims that, motivated primarily by pettiness, “Joyce had come to consider all Dubliners his enemies” (9) and that Ulysses was an expression of this hatred. The article prompted a “catastrophic” response, including detailed rebuttals from Mary Colum and Stanislaus Joyce that focused on the factual errors in Gogarty’s piece as well as what the younger Joyce thought were misreadings of his brother’s intentions.328 Gogarty’s fellow Dublin literati recoiled from the “ghastliness” of his article, but the damage had been done; Dublin’s intelligentsia had been confirmed as provincials, unable to appreciate Joyce’s brilliance.329 Even if there were lovers of Joyce among the Irish critics, the stereotype persisted that their “[insistence] that [Ulysses] is a piece of realistic, if somewhat bizarre, prose,” was ultimately informed by a resentment towards Joyce and his abandonment of Ireland.330 In 1957, the American critic William Schutte characterized Ryan, O’Nolan, Cronin, and Kavanagh as “extremists” of the Gogarty group.331 Their realist approach to Joyce’s work and its characters was viewed as further evidence that the Irish simply lacked the capacity to grasp all of the levels of Joyce’s accomplishment. It was in the aftermath of this conflict that Ryan and O’Nolan assembled the May 1951 special issue on Joyce of Envoy: A Review of Literature and Art. Envoy was a short-lived monthly magazine edited and published by Ryan, to which Cronin, Kavanagh, and a host of others contributed. It ran from December 1949 to July 1951. The Joyce issue was intended to be the first in a series of special issues on Irish writers, including Swift, Goldsmith, Congreve, Farquahar, Wilde, Moore, Yeats, Shaw, O’Casey, and Synge. They had announced their plan the previous year, noting “it is the ‘Irishness of these writers we shall deal with—what, specifically, it has meant to their work and to the world.332 As Frank Shovlin notes, many of the most famous

328 Gogarty, for example, referred to Harriet Shaw Weaver, Joyce’s English patron and publisher, as an American named Miss Wearing. Colum, Mary M, “A Little Knowledge of Joyce.” The Saturday Review of Literature, April 29 1950. 329 Johnston, “Joyceanity.” 330 Schutte, Joyce and Shakespeare, 1. 331 Schutte, Joyce and Shakespeare, 7. 332 “Foreword: Mid-Way,” Envoy 2, no. 1 (April 1950).

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Irish authors were “frequently absorbed into the British canon and Envoy [considered] it only right that they be retrieved for Ireland.”333 The desire to reclaim Joyce as an Irish writer is clear throughout the issue. In order to do so, however, the contributors to the issue were often guilty of effacing characteristic features of Joyce’s writing: his stylistic complexity, his vulgarity and his blasphemy. The account of Joyce’s achievement in the issue focuses on his ear for dialogue, his attention to atmosphere, and his dedication to accuracy. In his editorial note, O’Nolan (pseudonymized as Brian Nolan) writes that Joyce’s blasphemies are just further proof of his Catholicity: “all true blasphemers must be believers.334” Far from seeing Dubliners as “his enemies,” as Gogarty had claimed, Joyce “was at heart an Irish dawn-bursting romantic, an admirer of de Valera, and one dearly wished to be recalled to Dublin as an ageing man to be crowned with a D.Litt from the National and priest- haunted University” (10). The contributors clearly wanted to distance themselves from Gogarty. Denis Johnston’s essay “A Short View of the Progress of Joyceanity” seeks to contextualize Gogarty’s attack on Joyce as well as delineate the appreciation that the other contributors have for Joyce’s work, but on their terms: the group had little interest in entering into the existing Transatlantic critical dialogue. The essays in the issue are pugnacious and highly critical of American and European scholars. Andrew Cass’s contribution, for example, describes most Joycean criticism as “worse than useless,” because it tends to “embalm [Joyce’s] works in shrouds of speculative and unfounded commentary.”335 Over the course of seventy pages, the writers attack Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Henry Morton Robinson, Harry Levin, A.M. Klein, Herbert Gorman, W.R. Rodgers, Henri Bergson, and William Carlos Williams. Johnston concedes that Joyce’s letters reveal that many of the elaborate layers of meaning uncovered by Joyce scholars are “just as Joyce intended.”336 His response, however, is a shrug: even if Joyce put these layers into Ulysses, “so what?” (15) Johnston asserts that “Joyce’s message is the least important part of Joyce,” (16) and that what he should be remembered for is the “lucidity” of his fiction. In a Barthesian move, Johnston claims that if Joyce’s intentions cannot be reconciled with a realist and regional reading of Ulysses, then Joyce’s intentions should be set aside. If Joyce chose not to include the Odyssean titles of the episodes, we should

333 Frank Shovlin, The Irish Literary Periodical, 1923-1958 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 136. 334 Brian Nolan, “A Bash in the Tunnel,” Envoy 5, no. 17 (May 1951), 5-6. 335 Andrew Cass, “Childe Horrid’s Pilgrimace,” Envoy 5, no. 17 (May 1951), 19. 336 Johnston, “Joyceanity,” 15.

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not be beholden to them. Johnston warns readers that no matter how ingenious the readings of North American scholars, there is a financial motivation behind the professional scholarship being produced by university professors (unlike, presumably, that of the magazine writer): “scholarship is just as much a trade or profession as politics and religion. In the fields of learning there are many lectures that have to be given, and many, many theses that have to be written in the course of each academic year” (18). Although the main contributors to the issue (O’Nolan, Kavanagh, Johnston, Cass, Niall Montgomery, and W.B. Stanford) vary widely in their ultimate assessment of Joyce, they agree that the scholastic approach to Joyce is wrong. Kavanagh sums it up when he writes, “What I think a mistake is reading deep symbolism into Ulysses, drawing comparisons.”337 Niall Montgomery quotes the American academic Harry Levin, who observed that Joyce “shows no more concern for his hero […] than a geneticist for a fruit-fly.” Montgomery replies, “a novel needs a hero.”338 Implicit in Montgomery’s response are two syllogistic premises, the first of which is that Ulysses is a novel. This is not a foregone conclusion; Eliot announced in 1923 that “if [Ulysses] is not a novel, that is simply because the novel is a form which will no longer serve.”339 In its place, Eliot asserted that Joyce was using the form of the myth. To Montgomery, the book should not simply be read as an extended allusive substitution for something else. It must be read as a novel, an extended prose narrative marked by its tendency towards realism (in opposition to the prose romance) and by its relation of characters and actions portrayed in a plot. As Forster observes, the novel as a genre is fundamentally concerned with people, “sogged with humanity.”340 Montgomery’s second premise is that because Joyce’s book is a novel it must have a hero. For him and the other contributors, it is a fundamental misreading to categorize Bloom as an undistinguished member of a larger genus collected together on a pin-board. In opposition to the schematic readings of Joyce that divorced him from his upbringing, the Irish critics of Joyce focused on character, place, and detail, including details of character. Unlike Gorman and others who praised Joyce’s entire corpus unequivocally, they expressed unease and ambivalence about Joyce’s later direction as he held a mirror up to language instead of to life in Finnegans Wake. Montgomery and Kavanagh agreed that Joyce’s best work was A Portrait of the Artist as a Young

337 Patrick Kavanagh, “Diary,” Envoy 5, no. 17 (May 1951), 70. 338 Harry Levin, James Joyce: A Critical Introduction (New York: Faber and Faber, 1944), cited in Niall Montgomery, “Joyeux Quicum Ulysse,” Envoy 5, no. 17 (May 1951), 40. 339 Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” 482. 340 E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (London: E. Arnold, 1928), 43.

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Man, in opposition to the American critics who lauded the Wake as Joyce’s most unparalleled achievement. Portrait, they argue, is the most successful and fully realized of Joyce’s novels, because it features the most developed characters, still unsnarled by Joyce’s later stylistic experiments and thus still accessible to the reader. For the Envoy critics, Joyce’s greatest achievement was the verisimilitude that he achieved. Montgomery, for instance, quotes O’Nolan praising Joyce for capturing the distinctive voice of Dubliners. Quoting the woman’s cry to Bloom in “Cyclops,” “—Eh, mister! Your fly is open, mister!”, O’Nolan noted that “Only a master’s mirror could catch that second mister.”341 In his introduction to the issue, O’Nolan tells a story about Richard Best. A friend of O’Nolan learned that Best was only vaguely familiar with the author and totally unfamiliar with Ulysses the novel. ‘But you are a character in one of them,” my friend incautiously remarked. The next two hours, to the neglect of wine and cigars, were occupied with a heated statement by the savant that he was by no means a character in fiction, he was a man, furthermore he was alive and he had published books of his own. “How can I be a character in fiction,” he demanded, “if I am here talking to you?” That incident may be funny, too, but its curiosity is this: Joyce spent a lifetime establishing himself as a character in fiction. Joyce created, in narcissus fascination, the ageless Stephen. Beginning with importing real characters in to his books, he achieves the magnificent inversion of making them legendary and fictional. It is quite preposterous. Thousands of people believe that there once lived a man named Sherlock Holmes.342 The picture that O’Nolan paints is of a city full of real people who have been made fictional by Joyce, people who even by 1951 had to reckon with an international reputation based on another man’s presentation of their character. The reality of Ulysses, of the represented people and the city they live in, is so total to O’Nolan that it threatens to overshadow the shared and seemingly objective reality of Dublin itself. Today, many of the locales in Dublin are not as famous for their actual history as for their role in Ulysses; the Oliver St. John Gogarty Pub receives the most patronage on Bloomsday. I have juxtaposed the Bloomsday group with the Holmesians for the same reasons that O’Brien here juxtaposes Stephen and Holmes: both groups accentuated the

341 Montgomery, “Joyeux Quicum Ulysse,” 39. 342 This anecdote is loosely based on a real exchange, prompted by Best’s refusal to be interviewed for a BBC programme on Ulysses. When one of the BBC’s representatives protested, “you are a character in Ulysses!” Best retorted, “I am not a character in fiction. I am a living being.” Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 374.

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slippage between ontological states that the original works encouraged. Both groups are invested in eliding the role that the author had to play in the creation of the work in order to stake their own imaginative claim on the creation and re-creation of the people contained within the work, as well as the world those people occupy. The issue’s most ferocious denunciation of the American approach to Ulysses came in Kavanagh’s poem, “Who Killed James Joyce?” excerpted as the epigraph to this chapter. By 1951 at least eight dissertations had been written on Joyce at Harvard, Yale, Oxford, the University of Toronto, and other institutions.343 One of these dissertations (at Yale) would eventually become Hugh Kenner’s Dublin’s Joyce. It seems unlikely that Kavanagh had personally read any of these, but Kavanagh dismisses them with a broad brush: What weapon was used To slay mighty Ulysses? The weapon that was used Was a Harvard thesis. Kavanagh presents the academic approach to Joyce as destructive, echoing Dorothy L Sayers’ attacks on “unscrupulous pseudo-scholarship” that extracts “fantastic and misleading conclusions from a literary text by a series of omissions, emendations and distortions of context.” To Kavanagh, the developing profession of literary studies was formalizing a system in which self- seekers obtained professional rewards for demonstrating erudition and knowledge of arcana: And did you get high marks, The Ph.D.? I got the B.Litt. And my master’s degree.

Did you get money For your Joycean knowledge? I got a scholarship To Trinity College. Kavanagh’s resentment towards postgraduate students is partially economical: in Ireland the opportunities for intellectual work that were both remunerative and secular were scarce. The fact

343 Based on a search for Joyce through Dissertation Abstracts International.

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that foreign academics were receiving scholarships in place of Irish students clearly galled Kavanagh, who struggled with poverty throughout his adult life. In the conclusion of the poem, Kavanagh mocks the academic’s putative source of “Joycean knowledge.” He imagines the limit of their understanding of Joyce’s hometown to be a shallow interaction with surfaces; if they have visited Dublin at all, their interaction is that of the tourist. Kavanagh’s speaker, the tourist academic, brags that he has completed the Bloomsday tour, as if that is all that is necessary: I made the pilgrimage In the Bloomsday swelter From the Martello Tower To the cabby’s shelter. When I first encountered this poem years ago, I assumed that the speaker changed in this final stanza, that Kavanagh was himself advocating for a realist, grounded reading of Ulysses based on an actual encounter with Dublin. After all, John Ryan unironically cites this stanza at the beginning of his memoir’s chapter on his relationship with Joyce.344 However, Antoinette Quinn, in her biography of Kavanagh, observes that the poem “concluded by mocking those who followed the Ulysses heritage trail,” and that when Kavanagh joined the 1954 Bloomsday, “he was being hoist with his own petard, but he was not one to let past prejudices stand in the way of the day’s merry-making.”345 (Quinn 333). Kavanagh et al were in fact not the first to visit the locations mentioned in the novel, but were in fact preceded by a number of American academics. Richard Ellmann believed that he was the butt of this joke; in 1946 he and John V. Kelleher were shown around Dublin by Niall Montgomery, with Ellmann taking notes on file-index cards.346 In 1950 Philip Phillips, a Harvard archaeology professor, toured Dublin and took photographs of the locations mentioned in the novel, treating the city like an archaeological site.347 Kavanagh’s resentment is broad enough that it seems safe to assume that there were more, unrecorded, tours

344 Ryan, Remembering How We Stood, 50. 345 Antoinette Quinn, Patrick Kavanagh: A Biography (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2001), 333. 346 John V. Kelleher, “With Dick in Dublin, 1946,” in Essays for Richard Ellmann: Omnium Gatherum (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), 15. 347 Janine M. Utell, “The Archivist, the Archaeologist, and the Amateur: Reading Joyce at the Rosenbach,” Journal of Modern Literature 31, no. 2 (Winter 2008), 59.

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of Dublin by intrusive Americans. What happened in 1954, however, was different in a number of key ways.

The Bloomsday “Pilgrimace” “Bloomsday” celebrates the date on which the book is set, the sixteenth of June, 1904.348 The tradition of celebrating the anniversary of the book’s setting rather than its publication was started by Sylvia Beach, who sent flowers to Joyce on 16 June 1924 when he was in hospital. Beach also coined the word ‘Bloomsday.’ The day was clearly of special significance to Joyce as well; despite the flowers, Joyce wrote despondently in his journal, “Today 16 June 1924 twenty years after. Will anybody remember this date.” The first major celebration of the day was the Déjeuner Ulysse on 29 June 1929, when Joyce, Beach, her partner Adrienne Monnier, Samuel Beckett, and a dozen other friends and acquaintances celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of Bloomsday at the appropriately named Hotel Leopold near Versailles. 349 Soon afterwards Bloomsday entered the lexicon of Joycean scholars to refer to the book’s temporal setting, as it still often does today. The next recorded celebration of Bloomsday is the 1954 event, which crucially was celebrated in Dublin itself. It was principally organized by Ryan and O’Nolan. Although Cronin reported years later that he was held to secrecy about the event, the Irish Times reported two days before the event on the fourteenth of June that a group of Joyce enthusiasts were going to “repeat, as nearly as is now possible, the movements of Joyce’s characters,” and noted their starting time and location if any other enthusiasts wanted to join them.350 None did. A few key aspects mark this event as different from the academic research that preceded it, and from the Déjeuner Ulysse. The previous celebrations had been a celebration of Joyce’s achievement, but the 1954 Bloomsday was centred on the novel itself. As Ryan describes their intentions, on “the fiftieth anniversary of the day on which the events of Joyce’s Ulysses took place, we decided to commemorate it by covering as much of the original ground as the book had charted.”351 Ryan describes the event in a metaleptic fashion, as a commemoration of real events. There is no

348 Joyce ostensibly chose the date because it is was the day he first went walking with Nora Barnacle, his future wife. 349 Ellmann, James Joyce, 628-29. 350 “An Irishman’s Diary.” The Irish Times, June 14 1954, 5. 351 Ryan, Remembering How We Stood, 138.

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evidence that Ellmann attempted to follow the path of the characters when he researched the locations of Ulysses, or did so on Bloomsday itself.352 Ryan et al did not need to research the locales they visited; they knew them intimately. Cronin later described the event as, in part, a “dramatic re-enactment” of the events of the novel.353 Ryan suggested that the events of Ulysses had been marked onto the city indelibly as he explained the intended route: Our plan thereafter [departing from the Martello Tower] was to take in the ’Nestor episode in nearby Dalkey, proceed directly to the ‘Proteus section of Sandymount Strand, thus to Eccles Street (the beginning of the ‘Calypso’ chapter) and then in one broad swathe, take in the ‘Lotus Eaters’ (Westland Row and environs, ‘Hades’ (Glasnevin cemetery), ‘Aeolus’ (the Freeman’s Journal office—we proposed to substitute the Irish Times for that defunct organ), pausing for lunch and liquid refreshments at ‘Lestrygonians’ (Davy Byrnes, the Bailey) (139) The repeated verb ‘take in’ suggests that the revellers viewed moving through the novel’s Dublin as akin to attending the theatre or a series of tourist sites, of viewing something that actually still exists. Ryan’s language implies that by going to the various settings of the book in a specific order, the pilgrims would somehow experience the events as they occurred. Dublin is the living stage upon which Ulysses is constantly being performed. Brooker suggests that the commemoration of Ulysses is uniquely suited to its subject matter. Bloomsday, he says, allows Joyce’s novel to recode the city, charging its everyday sites with esoteric significance, producing a surfeit of meaning that hovers just out of view, traceable only by the costumed figures going through the motions. Of course, the production of multiple, unsuspected levels of significance for the apparently quotidian also characterizes Ulysses itself, where everyday actions flip into their Homeric counterparts. Doubling this effect, Bloomsday has transformed Joyce’s book into an epic subtext for the real.354 As mentioned above, Ryan used the conclusion of Kavanagh’s poem as the epigraph in his account of Bloomsday in his memoir, recasting the poem to celebrate their accomplishment

352 Despite his explorations of Joycean Dublin, neither Declan Kiberd or Maud Ellmann, Richard’s daughter, recall Ellmann claiming that he had celebrated Bloomsday first. Private correspondence with the author. 353 Cronin, No Laughing Matter, 195. 354 Brooker, Joyce’s Critics, 211-12.

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rather than mock it. The difficulty of the task, of voyaging through the “Bloomsday swelter” of a hot June sun, became its own kind of heroic, Homeric Odyssey through the city. Anthony Cronin wrote that on the day of the celebration, despite his inebriation, O’Nolan policed the behaviour of his fellow celebrants, admonishing them not to sing or sit in the front of the horse-drawn jarvey. While we were retracing the route of the funeral party he wanted us to preserve a decorum proper to the occasion and to behave at all other times with the outward respectability of the characters in the book. It struck me then that he had a deep imaginative sympathy with them, that he was still part of their world, a world in which the appearances of respectability had to be kept up even as a life collapsed.355 It was O’Nolan who sought to turn their voyage into a spiritual reenactment of the book. (He had begun the day with one violation of the spirit of the novel by being drunk at an early hour, unlike the abstemious Bloom.) O’Nolan’s goal for the event had been to invoke a moment captured in Ulysses, one which preceded his birth by seven years. Whether the Dublin of Ulysses ever existed, the novel offered readers a detailed look backwards that prompted nostalgia for at least one citizen of Edwardian Dublin. Cronin characterizes O’Nolan as having a deep imaginative sympathy with the characters as they experienced the world around them, a sympathy something like Bloom’s own psychic dialogue with the city of Dublin in the Hades chapter. Riding in the shared jarvey to Paddy Dignam’s funeral, Bloom takes in the city as it passes him and through the city considers both the life he has lived and the lives that he might have had; it is in this chapter that we learn the most about Bloom’s triple bereavements of his father, his son, and his marriage. Observing an animal shelter from inside the cab, Bloom reflects on the dog with which his father entrusted him, pausing to dwell on his father’s suicide note: “Dogs’ home over there. Poor old Athos! Be good to Athos, Leopold, is my last wish” (75.126-7). Similarly, passing the Queen’s Theatre, Bloom is reminded of his conversation with Molly from the morning in which he announced his intention to attend the opera, which thrusts the uncomfortable fact of her affair back into his mind. Blazes Boylan will be visiting Molly: “He’s coming in the afternoon. Her songs” (76.190). Frank Delaney, echoing Marilyn French’s characterization of Ulysses as a world unto itself, wrote that Joyce made Dublin “almost indistinguishable, certainly inseparable, from his human

355 Cronin, No Laughing Matter, 195.

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characters—Dublin is a city in Ulysses.”356 Right after Bloom remembers Molly’s rendezvous, the city immediately responds by presenting Blazes Boylan to Bloom: he suddenly appears in the following paragraph. This dialogue with a city is how Ryan conceives of Bloomsday’s reading of Ulysses: by taking the same paths, the city can thrust upon the walker the experiences of the past. In insisting on re-enacting the behaviour of the characters of the jarvey in “Hades,” O’Nolan, who like Bloom had a challenging personal and professional life filled with innumerable, painful losses, might have been reflecting on the way that cultivating a connection with a great character like Bloom offers us a way through personal hardship. Reading the city through the experiences of Bloom as set out in Ulysses suggests to us that the novel’s greatest achievement is not the creation of a mythical method but a reordering of how we might consider our own place in the world. While the group did not read from the novel on the day itself or act out any particular scenes, Ryan and O’Nolan’s choice to have each attendee represent either a character from the book or a feature of the book is also an important aspect of the event. Cronin, the youngest of the group, was to represent Stephen, the Jewish Leventhal for Bloom, O’Nolan for Simon Dedalus, Ryan for Myles Crawford the editor, Kavanagh for Joyce’s muse, and Tom Joyce (James’ dentist cousin) for The Family.357 Some, like Joyce and Leventhal, had been invited exclusively for their symbolic function, although Leventhal was not told the reason until later. There is a religious dimension to Ryan’s account of the event; he refers to the event as a “a pilgrimage, a grimace, and to some extent, a disgrace.” Ryan spent much of his career fighting the combined censorship of the Catholic Church and Irish government, and he seems to have derived pleasure from using the form of the pilgrimage to celebrate a book considered so blasphemous that Irish printers refused to even set type for reviews of Ulysses.358 Ryan emphasizes the way that they were developing a new, alternative ritual, one with new heroes in place of old gods, but one not based on heroism or moral virtue. Instead, the new heroes of this ritual lived in circumstances just as degraded and degrading as they, the celebrants did. In order to re-enact the book, certain

356 Frank Delaney, James Joyce’s Odyssey: a Guide to the Dublin of Ulysses (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1981), 10. 357 Ryan, Remembering How We Stood, 138. 358 As took place in 1923, when Leventhal submitted a review of Ulysses to Dublin Magazine. Eoin O’Brien, ed. A.J. Leventhal, 1896-1979: Dublin Scholar, Wit and Man of Letters (Dublin: The Con Leventhal Scholarship Committee, 1984), 19.

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characters needed to be ‘present’ to complete the ritual they were performing, to bring the book to life once more. The importance of character is less obvious to Ryan than it has been in material that I have discussed in earlier chapters; there is no paean written by any of these writers to Bloom, Stephen, or Molly. Indeed, in the pages of Envoy and in their other writing on Joyce they barely mention the principal characters, and do not return to Bradleyan methods of character criticism. They do not claim, as G.K. Chesterton does of Conan Doyle, that Joyce is a great writer of character.359 James Maddox Jr observes that “it is a paradox of Ulysses that although no character has ever been subjected to such intense scrutiny as Mr. Bloom, neither has any character ever so triumphantly escaped final definition.”360 Instead, the clearest articulation of their relation to Ulysses comes in their discussion of the secondary characters. Joyce’s accomplishment, they argue, is more dispersed than that of earlier novelists; he has captured a city with a cast of thousands. These characters are indelibly bound to the places they were imagined inhabiting. Ryan writes of the Martello tower where the opening of Ulysses is set that “nobody who has read the book can face the tower and not see ‘Stately, plump Buck Mulligan’, boldly lit against the awakening mountains, lift his shaving bowl to the risen sun” (54). The experience of Bloomsday disperses the entire novel’s huge cast of characters across the city. Although the original Bloomsday celebrants do not focus on character in their writing, their best remembered contribution to the cultural history of Joyce’s novel—the idea to celebrate the novel through a re-enactment of its events in the city it was set, on the anniversary of the day it was set—silently returns Bloom and the novel’s other characters to the centre of the story. This was an act of public, sociable reading, in which a community expressed their relation to a literary work with a non-textual and non-verbal response. Implicit in this embodied act of reading is the claim that the most important level of Ulysses is not its narrative discourse but its story; not what the characters represent but what literally happens to them. Thus the holiday that has survived to this day is not the Fete Ulysse; celebrants do not dress in leather armour with Corinthian helmets. Similarly the holiday is not Joyceday, and while 7 Eccles Street is visited by thousands every year, the house where Joyce was born is mostly ignored. The detailed formal innovations are

359 G. K. Chesterton, “Sherlock Holmes,” in On Lying in Bed and Other Essays, ed. Alberto Manguel (Calgary: Bayeux Arts, 2000), 269. 360 James H Maddox Jr., Joyce’s Ulysses and the Assault Upon Character (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1978), 11.

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valuable to these fans of the novel because they offer us insight into the character’s experiences and psychology, not the other way around. As I discussed above, the characters in Ulysses are shifting and variable figures aware of their own inconstancy; in addition, their represented form, even their proper names, are subject to constant change. It thus becomes meaningless to try to judge their actions or personal character, as one would in the earlier models of ethical criticism. The Bloomsday celebrants wished to recreate the experience of the characters in the novel, but did not necessarily identify with them. Given that readers also have shifting feelings, identities and personal beliefs, we can only share experience and not personal character. On Bloomsday, Bloom, Molly, and Stephen become human-shaped pairs of virtual reality goggles that one slips on to see what they see, but without becoming them.361

O’Nolan and the Overthrow of Joyce For O’Nolan, celebrating Bloomsday was, ironically, a way to get out from under Joyce’s shadow, of a piece with his publication of his final novel, The Dalkey Archive (1964). O’Nolan’s fiction offers us the clearest articulation of his desire to free Ulysses, and all literature, from the “despotism” of James Joyce. His first book, At Swim-Two-Birds, published under the pseudonym of Flann O’Brien, is now celebrated as one of the first and best postmodern novels. His freewheeling and fantastical comic style earned him frequent comparisons to Joyce, which began as a source of pride but over two decades rankled into a torment. In a letter to A.M. Heath, O’Nolan wrote, “Ignorant reviewers have messed me up with another man, to my intense embarrassment and disgust, and he will be another character. I mean James Joyce. I’m going to get my own back on that bugger.”362 In The Dalkey Archive he included Joyce as a character as his final revenge against Joyce’s overbearing legacy. A civil servant his whole life, O’Nolan came to despise all forms of imposition, railing pseudonymously against the ruling organizations of Ireland, the Church and State, in his column for the Irish Times, “Cruiskeen Lawn.” At Swim- Two-Birds dramatizes this preoccupation with imposition. Specifically, O’Nolan questions the

361 A possibility made literal through a number of digital projects by Joseph Nugent in collaboration with his students at Boston College, like Walking Ulysses, which produced digital paths superimposed on historical maps of Dublin, or JoyceStick, a virtual reality game version of Ulysses which allows players to explore the Martello tower as well as the kitchen of 7 Eccles Street. 362 Ronald L. Dotterer, “Flann O’Brien, James Joyce, and The Dalkey Archive,” New Hibernia Review 8, no. 2 (Summer 2004), 55.

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author’s right to impose on his or her own character, as Woolf did when she refused to describe Jacob’s thoughts in Jacob’s Room.363 In At Swim-Two-Birds the protagonist is writing a novel about Dermot Trellis, a lowbrow novelist. When Trellis sleeps, his fictional characters conspire with each other to overthrow the tyrannical and abusive author. The strategy they choose to rebel against Trellis is to write their own novel about the author in which he is tried and executed for his crimes. At the last minute the protagonist, at the top layer of multiple narrative frames, decides to make Trellis’s maid burn the papers in which the rebellious creations are housed, saving Trellis. The unnamed protagonist, explaining the layers of his narrative to a friend, argues that the novel today is inferior because it does not give its characters freedom: the modern novel, he asserts, frequently [induces] the reader to be outwitted in a shabby fashion and caused to experience a real concern for the fortunes of illusory characters […] The novel, in the hands of an unscrupulous writer, could be despotic. [Instead,] a satisfactory novel should be a self-evident sham to which the reader could regulate at will the degree of his credulity. It was undemocratic to compel characters to be uniformly good or bad or poor or rich. Each should be allowed a private life, self-determination and a decent standard of living.364 All of the concerns of the Bloomsday group regarding Joyce that I have been discussing are here recapped in a single paragraph in the form of a satirical Declaration of the Rights of the Character. The expressive power of the reader is allied with the expressive power of the characters, in opposition to the author’s power over the meaning of his/her work. The “private life” of characters takes place not on the pages but in the mind of readers when the book is closed, which is only possible when the reader is left in control over his or her relation to the book. This is not Bradleyism or Victorian expressive realism, but it shares some affinities with both approaches. O’Nolan’s approach is similar to Bradley’s concern for the reader’s creative potential, but clearly rejects the ‘real concern’ that was the ideal of the late Victorian critic, opting instead for a clear-eyed awareness that imagines characters not as real people but as mental playthings for the reader. For all its emancipatory rhetoric, the influence (and weight) of

363 Discussed above in Ch.2, p.47. 364 Flann O’Brien, “At Swim-Two-Birds,” in The Complete Novels (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2007), 21.

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Joyce is palpable in At Swim-Two-Birds in its satiric form, its fantasy, its wordplay, and its encyclopaedic style. The Dalkey Archives represents an even more complete overthrow of an authorial authority than At Swim-Two-Birds. In the novel, the protagonist Mick discovers that Joyce is alive and well and living somewhere in Ireland. After a long investigation he finds him tending bar in Skerries, a village only twenty miles outside of Dublin. To his shock and disappointment, Joyce is not the man he thought he was; he is a devout and simple-minded Catholic who has “put [his] name only to one little book […] Oliver Gogarty and I, when we were in touch, worked together on some short stories. Simple stories: Dublin characterizations, you might call them.”365 He disavows being the author of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake; his later books are forgeries constructed by Sylvia Beach as a mad love tribute to Joyce. Ulysses, Joyce claims, was assembled by Beach from scraps written by “various low, dirty-minded ruffians who had been paid to put this material together. Muck-rakers, obscene poets, carnal pimps, sodomous sycophants, pedlars of the coloured lusts of fallen humanity” (762). Joyce is shocked to learn that dozens of “distinguished American critics” have written monographs on the book. Brooker observes that as an act of literary criticism, “the declamatory re-Irishing of Joyce negates rather than celebrates him.”366 In the novel’s dedication, which Brooker reads as addressed to Joyce, O’Nolan writes, “I dedicate these pages to my Guardian Angel, impressing upon him that I’m only fooling” (2). O’Nolan does not want to convince us that Joyce did not write Ulysses; instead, his aim is to deconstruct the mythic status of the author that Stephen encourages in “Scylla and Charybdis.” If Ulysses was written by an anonymous rabble, there is no reason why it cannot belong whole cloth to Dublin. To reject the despotic writer and allow each character a private life in the mind of the reader, O’Nolan takes Ulysses back from both Joyce and its commentators and claims it for his city and his compatriots.

After 1954: Bloomsday’s Legacy The 1954 Bloomsday was not formally repeated, but accounts of the event were widely circulated. On June 16, 1954, the Washington Post erroneously reported that “in Dublin today, as

365 Flann O’Brien, “The Dalkey Archive,” in The Complete Novels (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2007), 761. 366 Brooker, Joyce’s Critics, 200.

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on every Bloomsday, a small band of readers and writers will retrace ‘Poldy’s’ route.”367 On the same day, the James Joyce Society of New York met to celebrate. In 1960, Harry Levin reported that “sightseeing tours of Dublin are now conducted, pointing out the Martello Tower where Stephen Dedalus lodged and the pub where Mr. Bloom was insulted.”368 In 1962 Bloomsday was the date chosen to celebrate the opening of the James Joyce museum at the Martello tower, a result of Ryan’s efforts with Dorothy Cole and the James Joyce Tower Society. The 1954 Bloomsday did not resolve the tensions between Irish and American Joyceans, but it did help to change how the book was read. Starting in the mid-nineteen-sixties and continuing irregularly afterwards, an Irish Trinity College lecturer named David Norris, who was the first academic in Ireland to lead a seminar exclusively on Joyce, would take his students on Ulysses walks during which they would read aloud from the novel.369 Among the small coterie of bohemians in mid-century Dublin, the Bloomsday walk was often repeated, although not necessarily on the day: Ryan notes that by 1975 he had given more than twenty-five tours of Ulyssean Dublin to notable Joyceans.370 Ironically it was foreign academics who kept the tradition alive: the next major celebration of Bloomsday in Dublin was the International James Joyce Symposium, first held in 1967. On Bloomsday 1967 the attendees of the Symposium ventured out to do the Bloomsday tour, led by Fritz Senn and attended by Kavanagh.371 The same tensions that drove Ryan et al to celebrate the 1954 Bloomsday were still active; the Irish Times reported on the symposium that “where Joyce was concerned, the most complicated explanation was not always necessarily the right one.”372 Morris Beja notes that “more than seventy-five registrants at the first Joyce Symposium were of course on a pilgrimage, but most Dubliners either didn’t know or didn’t much care about its sacred Joyce sites . . . [while] the coverage in the Irish press was characterized by parodic reports of how pedantic and Americanized the whole fascination with Joyce was.”373 Celebrating Bloomsday was now also dismissed as an American

367 Schuchat, Theodor, “This is Bloomsday…: Hero of Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ Honored.” The Washington Post and Times Herald, June 16, 1954. 368 Harry Levin, James Joyce: A Critical Introduction (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1960), 225. 369 David Norris, in discussion with the author, June 23, 2015. 370 Ryan, Remembering How We Stood, 56. 371 Morris Beja, in discussion with the author, January 20, 2016. 372 Irish Times Reporter, “‘Complicating’ Joyce Criticized.” Irish Times, June 17, 1967, 6. 373 Morris Beja, “‘A Symposium all his own’: the International James Joyce Foundation and its Symposia,” Joyce Studies Annual (2001), 127.

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caprice. The symposium was open to the public, but Beja notes that it was not until the late seventies that Dubliners could be spotted on the Bloomsday walk.374 The symposium returned to Dublin in 1969, 1973, and 1977, but in 1982 it sponsored a significant piece of street theatre that dramatically raised the profile of Bloomsday both locally and internationally: the re-enactment of “Wandering Rocks,” spread across the city, “with the intended result that no spectator could take in more than a few of the dispersed segments of the episode.”375 The extraordinary performance, which made use of dozens of actors, made international news broadcasts. Eric Korn, writing for the Times Literary Supplement, reported that the ontological confusion of observers was such that “in the benign confusion many innocent passers-by were interviewed” by the news reporters.376 This was the ideal outcome: that the performance was almost indistinguishable from the life of the city itself, that the characters genuinely seemed to occupy living space in Dublin. In 2004, to celebrate the centenary of Bloomsday, the main thoroughfare of Dublin, O’Connell Street, was closed to host a free Irish breakfast for ten thousand people. Bloomsday became the conduit through which the Irish were reconciled with Joyce. This is the harvest of the seed that the Bloomsday group planted; the legacy of their approach to Ulysses has offered innumerable readers opportunities to explore the novel through its characters’ experiences with the city they called home. Quite literally, they made space for a character-centred approach to Modernist literature that broke simultaneously with Bradleyan and Leavisite approaches.377 This does not mean that Bloomsday does not have its detractors, both among academic Joyceans and among locals. In the alternative monthly The Slate, Barry Hughes excoriated the Joyceans: “in theory, the assembled morons follow the path taken around Leopold Bloom . . . However, most of them get lost early on, and end up walking around dangerous parts of town in their Edwardian gear, misquoting the book at the top of their voices and generally risking a well- deserved hiding . . . You are, of course, not allowed to take part if you have read the book.”378 Anthony Burgess has a more specific concern, which he expressed in an interview in Paul

374 Morris Beja, in discussion with the author, January 20, 2016. 375 Margot Norris, “Possible-Worlds Theory and the Joyce’s ‘Wandering Rocks’: The Case of Father Conmee,” Joyce Studies Annual (2007), 21. 376 Eric Korn, “Bloomsday 1982,” in The Modern Movement: A Tls Companion, ed. John Gross (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 71. 377 F.R. Leavis, of course, famously repudiated Joyce and was primarily responsible for the English academy taking longer to embrace Ulysses. 378 Qtd in Brooker, Joyce’s Critics, 212.

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Howard’s documentary Bloomsday: “It’s pleasant to know that a writer is being celebrated, but […] it seems like you’re dragging the content of the book out of the book and making it more important than the book itself […] I don’t know if it’s a good thing or bad, but it’s certainly mad, to turn a work of literature into a set of real-life reenactments.” That the content of the book—its characters, plot and setting—might be deemed more important than Ulysses’ form is troubling to Burgess, who sees Ulysses’ experimentations with form as its supreme accomplishment. For modernists and their followers, Ulysses’ displacement of character in the name of form was not an accidental byproduct but one of its principal accomplishments. Indeed, Leo Bersani uses Bloomsday as a key piece of evidence in his polemical “Against Ulysses,” claiming that the holiday provides proof that Ulysses is not truly an avant-garde novel, unlike the work of writers like Flaubert or Beckett: the extraordinarily prosperous Joyce industry. . . [depends] on the by no means unfounded or inconsiderable pleasure of recognition . . . for hordes of aficionados, June sixteenth will always be celebrated as Bloomsday, and it would not be only snobbish but critically wrong to suggest that the innovative power of Joyce’s novel lies in a questioning or breakdown of traditional novelistic assumptions about personality. 379 To Bersani, the work of the Bloomsday celebrants is proof of a vestige of the realist character in Ulysses; Joyce performed no true deconstruction but simply layered difficulty over a conventional narrative. There can be no Waiting for Go-Day because there is no realist core to uncover beneath the difficulty of Beckett’s language; while Beckett’s characters exist in a world which has outlived the self, Joyce’s characters are “at once vivid and obscure,” which prompts the reader “to take on the exegetical task of reducing the obscurity, of getting to know Bloom, Molly, or Stephen even better by completing their sentences and explaining their allusions . . . [Thus] Joyce’s avant-gardism largely consists in his forcing his readers to complete the rearguard action which the novel itself simultaneously performs and elaborately disguises.”380 Bersani asserts that underneath its facade of avant-gardism, Ulysses has a essentially realist view of both the human subject and the literary character that represents the human subject. The problem, for Bersani, is that getting to know Joyce’s characters involves clearing the rubble away from the explosion of form. Readers are encouraged to discard the words and formal innovation of the

379 Leo Bersani, “Against Ulysses,” in James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Casebook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 205-06. 380 Bersani, “Against Ulysses,” 205-206.

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novel to access the characters. For the midcentury Irish critics, this realist layer was not a weakness of Ulysses but the structural core of the novel, without which it would be worthless. The irony of the Bloomsday group’s legacy is that while their approach to Ulysses was both insular and local, the tradition they have started has opened up the novel to thousands of Dubliners and tourists alike. Ryan and O’Nolan insisted on the importance of Joyce’s local knowledge—his documentation of Irish speech, song, and behaviour. To Ryan, the primary achievement of Ulysses was its documentation of the city of his childhood. He asks, “what other city ever got a book of such stature written about it? Nothing of Dublin was too humble for Joyce to recall—nothing too dull or commonplace. Our songs, our voices, as insignificant as the twittering of the starlings on the trees in O’Connell Street . . . became, under his hand, glorious cadenzas, brilliant arpeggios and dreamy codas penned across the mighty score” (52). What was equally important, conversely, was the reader’s understanding of Dublin. Without pre-existing local knowledge, without living in the place itself, they implicitly argued that Joyce’s achievement could not be properly understood. The allusive and structured readings of Ulysses were a poor substitute for a local, geographical reading. And yet, an event that began as a reclamation of the text from foreigners and tourists has metamorphosed into an event that draws more tourists to Dublin than any other single day other than St. Patrick’s Day. Freed of the imposing structure of the novel and freed from the need to assess Joyce’s intentions, readers who follow the Ulysses heritage trail are able to forge their own relationship with the characters of the novel, regardless of their nationality. When Barthes wrote “The Death of the Author,” he was proposing the antithesis of Stephen’s model of literary analysis. Where Stephen suggests that the author’s intentions should be the primary portal of discovery for those who come after, Barthes suggested that we disregard the author completely. Literary studies in the intervening years has come to something of a compromise between these two positions, in which scholars do not trust the word of the author absolutely, but also don’t reduce the creator of a work to a counterintuitive author-function. Similarly, readers have learned in the years since 1954 that they do not need to go to such extremes to free themselves of the author and to claim the imaginative potential of characters for themselves. The author does not need to be erased a la Conan Doyle or rewritten as a complacent and parochial bartender in Skerries. The accomplishment of the Holmesians and the Bloomsday Group is their ability to find a space for character that can exist in a dialogue with criticism and fiction that aims to challenge our understanding of character. While the Death of the Character

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happened much earlier than the Death of the Author, critics are now finding ways to achieve a synthesis of the two extremes of Bradley and Knights. Recognizing the power and value of the simulated person on his or her own terms is the way, I suggest, into a rejuvenated criticism that can address itself to a wide audience of engaged readers.

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Conclusion

In every corner of the Internet today, it is a simple matter to locate evidence of contemporary readers who interact with fictional characters in a complex and emotionally meaningful way. On social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, communities of fans discuss beloved works of popular literature, comics, film, and television. In these communities, fans engage daily in discussion of the works, share creative responses such as fan fiction and fan art, and share the ways in which they have personally shaped their vision of the work and its characters. A popular neologism amongst contemporary fans is “headcanon,” which refers to invented motivations or backstories of characters, as distinct from the canonical narrative decided on by the creators of the original work. A “headcanon” is the product of one head, the mind of the individual fan; implicit in the term is the assumption that characters are the mental property of the reader and that readers have the right to shape their perceptions of characters however they please. For these fans, even if they are not currently reading or re-reading the work, their relation with the work and its characters is a defining part of their online life, which today is increasingly indistinguishable from real life. These characters, who make up a significant part of the fan’s daily activities, are “friends for life,” to use Hugh Walpole’s phrase, in a more literal way than any nineteenth century reader could have imagined. While the stereotype persists of the obsessed reader who has too much time on their hands, I would argue this is now a completely mainstream approach to fiction. We cannot pathologize these groups as outliers, because in fact, readers who build emotional relationships with popular characters in this way likely outnumber readers of literary fiction. The Harry Potter series alone accounts for between one and two percent of the total books sold worldwide in the last twenty years, and some of the online Harry Potter groups that encourage members to view the series’ characters as friends have more than ten million regular contributors. This popular style of reading does not originate with the Internet. As I have shown throughout this dissertation, this creative approach to character as an active practice surfaces first with groups of English, Irish, and American readers from the twentieth century who resisted modernist approaches to character in criticism and literature. While I refrain from claiming that these groups had a direct influence on today’s fans, I do assert that groups like the Sherlockians and Holmesians had a broader influence on English, American, and Canadian culture today. Groups like the Holmesians and the Bloomsday celebrants allowed themselves to be seen in

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public dressing up in costume, treating fictional events with the same reverence typically due to events of historical importance. These groups provided a model for others to express their own relationship to fictional characters, and gave license for others to follow in their footsteps. More broadly, however, these affective reading practices likely have their root in the form of fiction itself; which is profoundly effective at simulating people. In a recent British study 19% of more than 1500 respondents reported hearing the voices of fictional characters, even after finishing the book, influencing the tone of their thoughts and sometimes speaking to the reader directly.381 From earliest childhood we develop relationships with the characters in books, and imagine ourselves sharing adventures with them. Growing up in a culture that is completely conversant with fictionality, our parents do not need to teach us that characters are like people. Instead, characters enter the fabric of our reality so profoundly that the difficult lesson children must learn, often painfully, is that they are not real. The fact that a mass of words, assembled into the descriptions of persons, their speech, and their actions, can produce this effect on young readers is extraordinary. Admittedly, part of the project of the humanities in undergraduate education is to help students put away childish things; to puncture illusion and to attune them to the subtle forces that shape their lives. A young person who does not learn the difference between real people and characters is bound to have trouble navigating reality. And yet the central irony that I perceive in the structure of an undergraduate degree in English literature is that a byproduct of our training is that in attuning students to structure, form, ideology, they become blind to their object of study, if the object of our study is not literature qua literature, but literature as it effects the broader material world and society. As Michael Warner observes, newcomers to the study of literature are often warned, “don't read like children, like vacation readers on the beach, like escapists, like fundamentalists, like nationalists, like antiquarians, like consumers, like ideologues, like sexists, like tourists, like yourselves.”382 The ways that people actually read books (or read characters) are bred out of literary scholars over time, making it challenging to return to “uncritical” reading as a site of inquiry. When H.D.F. Kitto called Bradley one of the “Stratford Irregulars,”

381 Ben Alderson-Day, Marco Bernini, and Charles Fernyhough, “Uncharted Features and Dynamics of Reading: Voices, Characters, and Crossing of Experiences,” Consciousness and Cognition 49 (2017). 382 Michael Warner, “Uncritical Reading,” in Polemic: Critical or Uncritical, ed. Jane Gallop (New York and London: Routledge, 2004).

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comparing him to the Holmesians, he was critiquing him for being childlike; for failing to demonstrate analytical, adult, rigour. Deidre Lynch has recently demonstrated in her book Loving Literature that these rigid dichotomies between amateurs and professionals encourage critics to hastily dismiss lay readers’ experiences, but just as importantly, these dichotomies cause professionals to misrecognize the often affective basis of their own relationship with literature.383 Our discipline’s general inattention to the ways in which nonprofessional readers interact with fiction leaves us in danger of making solipsistic arguments which do more to explain and demonstrate how critics read novels than how the general reading public reads novels. Throughout this project I have endeavoured to show that the vocabulary of literary studies today is historically determined, and historically specific. The academic approach to character today appears both natural and necessary, but it has been shaped by varied pressures, including the professionalization of the discipline of literary studies, and artistic responses to the mass trauma of WWI through new forms of representation. Character is a story, just like any other that has been told about literature in the past. Though otherwise very different writers, high modernist writers like Woolf and Joyce, portrayed the self as a shifting assemblage of influences and personae presented through a variegated series of experiments that often alienate or overwhelm the reader. At the same time, modernist critics like Eliot and Wilson Knight rewrote the values central to the practice of literary studies in order to present the destabilizing poetry and fiction of the modernists as the inevitable apotheosis of literature. The intense and often hostile responses to these developments reveal the persistent appeal of character throughout the twentieth century. I have endeavoured to show throughout the second half of this dissertation that these responses were not static, nor were they based simply in a desire to return to the past. While many of these movements begin out of a place of conservative anti-modernism, the intensity and complexity of these responses ultimately reveal a desire to reconcile character- centric reading with a changing modern world. Ultimately, and ironically, these simultaneously enthusiastic and ambivalent responses have become an important part of the cultural legacy of modernism, especially through Bloomsday. A number of scholars today in literary studies are in the midst of reexamining the methods of the philologists, old historicists, formalists, and character critics to consider whether there might be valuable methodological approaches to literary studies that have been lost in the

383 Deidre Shauna Lynch, Loving Literature: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

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transitions to New Criticism and then to Theory. This includes the “surface reading” advocated by Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, the postcritique of Rita Felski and Elizabeth S. Anker, the (new) new formalism of Caroline Levine, and the character analyses of Deidre Lynch and Alex Woloch.384 Though these scholars discuss disparate subject material using disparate methods, what they share is a focus on the “obvious,” on the aspects of literature that seem self- explanatory and beneath notice. Further, and essentially, they do not argue that we should locate in the obvious facet a deeper, hidden meaning. Instead, they argue, the complexity and importance of literature often sits right in plain view. Thus, a psycho-analytic reading of Cristina Rossetti’s sensuous poem “Goblin Market” and the relationship between its protagonists might suggest that the work is in fact about lesbian sexuality. A surface reading would instead examine the far more confounding surface, and might ask what about sisterhood in Victorian culture made this kind of relationship between sisters appear normal? What this new wave of scholars have in common is not a simple desire for return; instead, for most this return involves a reinvention. In Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, Levine calls for us to pay attention to the radical and political potential of analysis of form, while in Uses of Literature Felski suggests that despite the political goals of theory and critique, they have ossified literary analysis into an inaccessible and undemocratic method. I believe there is a similar point to be made about character criticism: that we as scholars can salvage useful and important approaches to literature through character without resurrecting the ethical concerns of Romantic and Victorian character critics. We can investigate fiction through character without asking whether a character is a moral model or not. Just as importantly, however, looking to the history of criticism helps academic readers understand the profound differences between their own, ‘on the clock’ reading practices and the character-based reading practices of lay readers (and indeed, academic readers in their ‘time off’). The Death of the Character prompted a massive divergence between academic and lay styles of reading fiction, more profound than the Death of the Author. And just like the Death of the Author, time and

384 Stephen Best, and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108, no. 1 (Fall 2009). Rita Felski, and Elizabeth S. Anker, eds. Critique and Postcritique (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017). Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). Deidre Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Alex Woloch, The One Vs the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

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perspective help us to recognize when a theoretical model is unsatisfactory. However, we should not, I argue, merely seek to replace one theoretical model with another. Examining the precise mechanisms of how readers recreate and represent fictional people can offer us insight into the structures of fiction itself, a medium “sogged with humanity.” This study, which I seek to continue in future projects, can also offer us insight into the social and personal construction of the self. We love people who never lived better than we love real people because we can understand them more thoroughly. This feeling of completion and reality that we get from characters, however, is really just evidence of how easily humans fill in the empty spaces between words with pieces of ourselves.

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