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University of Warwick institutional repository: http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of Warwick http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap/4246 This thesis is made available online and is protected by original copyright. Please scroll down to view the document itself. Please refer to the repository record for this item for information to help you to cite it. Our policy information is available from the repository home page. The Poetics of Impurity: Louis MacNeice, Writing and the Thirties. Antony Shuttleworth. A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies University of Warwick. October 1991. Summary of Thesis. The Poetics of Impurity: Louis MacNeice, Writing and the Thirties. This thesis argues that the notion of 'impurity' may be taken as a model for paradigms in MacNeice's texts which are subjected to undercutting and transgression, by virtue of their presumed identity, their context, and by the workings of the text. This impurity challenges notions of MacNeice as an exponent of 'common-sense' empiricism. Chapter One examines notions of purity and impurity as promoted by MacNeice in the thirties. MacNeice's exposition in Modern Poetry is shown to be contradictory. Comparison with the figure of Orwell indicates that Modern Poetry, and its promotion of common-sense 'experience' or 'life', is an unreliable guide to MacNeice's thirties work. Chapter Two examines notions of 'History' in the thirties, and of MacNeice's treatment of time in a number of poems. MacNeice's poems demonstrate a conception of time-as-difference, which is shown to be historically constructed within 'static' or 'imaginary' frames of reference. These frames of reference are seen to be imperiled by historical circumstances Chapter Three analyses MacNeice's presentation of representation in, and of, society in the thirties. Attention is paid to poems dealing with problems of representation and of observation within a given social context, particularly that of consumer culture. Chapter Four examines MacNeice's examination of the subject or 'I' of the thirties. I argue that MacNeice evidences a scepticism towards the claims of the thinking, acting, subject, inhabited as it is by the dominance of text or 'writing' within history, and the indeterminacies this engenders. Chapter Five offers a reading of Autumn Journal which emphasises MacNeice's attention to the processes of the construction of 'unreliable' fictions. Rather than asserting the values of liberal humanism in the poem, it is seen to question the implications of such an act itself. The poem is shown to question the notion of the possibility of the 'honesty' of the subject which is often attributed to MacNeice. Chapter Six argues for the necessity of further re-examination of 'Louis MacNeice, writing and the thirties' and the wider implications of 'impurity'. Contents. 1. Introduction: Impurity and 1 The Thirties. 2. In Our Time: Temporality and 40 Representation in the Thirties. 3. The Look of the People: MacNeice, 81 Writing, and Society (1). 4. The Man of the People: MacNeice, 114 Writing and Society (11). 5. Everyday Writing: Impurity in 168 Autumn Journal. 6. A Poetics of Impurity: Louis MacNeice, 215 Writing, the Thirties. Bibliography 225 1 Chapter One Introduction: Impurity and the Thirties. 'My generation was brought up to regard luxury from an aesthetic standpoint. Since the War, people don't seem to feel that any more. Too often they are merely gross. They take their pleasures coarsely, *don't you find? At times, 'one feels guilty, oneself, with so much unemployment and distress everywhere'. Christopher Isherwoodl 'Oh I do hope they'll make a revolutionl' Isabel exclaimed. 'I should delight in seeing a revolution. ' 'Let me see, ' said her uncle, with humorous intention; 'I forget whether you're on the side of the old or on the side of the new. I've heard you take such opposite views. ' 'I'm on the side of both. I guess I'm a little on the side of everything. In I I be high, loyalist. One a revolution ... think should a proud sympathizes more with them, and they've a chance to behave so exquisitely. I mean so picturesquely. ' Henry JameS2 4 My friends had been writing for years about guns and frontiers and factories, about the 'facts' of psychology, politics, science, economics, but the fact of war made their writing seem as remote as the pleasure dome in Xanadu. For war spares neither the poetry of Xanadu nor the poetry of pylons... both these kinds of poetry stand or fall together. Louis MacNeice3 2 In 1938 Louis MacNeice made, a plea for impure poetry, that is, for poetry conditioned by the poet's life and the world around him'. 4. This study seeks to analyse the implications of such a declaration, its consequences for the reading of MacNeice's texts, and for the assessment of his response to the thirties. In particular, it will examine how different notions of 'impurity' can be found in, and applied to, MacNeice's work. As a consequence, it will examine how different meanings can be assigned to the notion of literature 'writing', and how this may modify our sense of, the of the thirties. ,I ---,. Perhaps the most obvious meaning which is suggested by 'a poetry conditioned by the poet's life and the world around him' is an attitude which distrusts various kinds of artifice, style or form in preference to a poetry which is in vivid contact with the real via communication or reference. This is a poetry fully informed by the importance of experience'; it is relevant, above all, to 'fife'.,, Here, 'purity'- is associated with form, its opposite with 'content' and by extension 'the world'. As we shall see, these categories of purity and impurity are not as stable as one might think or, perhaps, wish. Moreover, this association of the categories of 'purity' and 'form', 'impurity' and 'content' only complicates such categories further. In examining these various complications this study does not aim to recuperate some notion of 'purity' in the reading of MacNeice's texts. In fact it seeks the reverse, in arguing for the continuing importance of the category of 'impurity' in an understanding of MacNeice's work of the thirties. However, in making this extension I will argue for the importance of aspects of the text which might be associated with 'purity' of various kinds, which have been underrated in existing studies of MacNeice's work. This project will necessarily involve consideration of certain areas which MacNeice is often thought to have ignored or rejected. One consequence of this examination, I will argue, is the problematization of a sense of impurity as a kind of unmediated formlessness which can be easily equated with raw 'experience'. Equally, the notion of MacNeice as a writer who unequivocally embraces the role of 'ordinary-man-in-the-street', and endorses the perspective of commonsense- empiricism will be questioned. Such an identity, I will argue, significantly damages our understanding of MacNeice's involvement in the thirties. However, since it is this 3 persona which is most often associated with 'impurity' in MacNeice's work, this is the identity with which we will begin our examination. Perspectives: Writing the Thirties. Perhaps the best way of understanding the various meanings of 'impurity' is through what may be meant by 'purity' and its implications for attendant notions of 'artifice', 'style', or most productively 'form', and their opposites. Immediately, however, we run into difficulties, as the following remarks by Christopher Norris indicate: Except in the most obvious aspect - the shape of the words on the page - it is hard to attach any clear meaning to the idea of poetic 'form'. This concept may indeed be a species of enabling fiction, having more to do with the interpretative rage for order than with anything objectively be 'dialectic 'there' in the text. Or it may the product ... of a close interplay' between poem and reading, such that the poem takes on a precarious unity of form in answer to the subtle teasing-out of unifying themes and figures. Criticism would then be caught up in a process of aesthetic mystification whereby its own desire for unity and closure was ceaselessly confirmed in the act of reading. 5 To this one should add that the elusive 'idea of poetic form' is itself subject to change over literary periods. 'Form' is defined and interpreted differently, awarded different degrees of importance, placed within different conceptual oppositions, as it figures within different frameworks of reading and writing. It is, perhaps, this instability, rather than its status as 'enabling fiction' which must lead always and necessarily towards notions of 'unity', 'coherence' and 'closure', as Norris suggests, which accounts for the elusive quality of the concept. In beginning our discussion, therefore, it is necessary to consider some of the ways in which such a concept was seen to operate within the literary context of the thirties. It seems almost inevitable that among the many features of the literary text, and its production, undergoing mo dification by new British writers in the thirties were ideas about literary form. Such changes appear all the more pronounced by the attention given to this issue by the period's immediate forbears. Comparing work in the thirties with the daring innovations of modernism would indicate that thirties writers began to grant 'form' a different status in their writing, moreover that they began to think of it 4 differently, perhaps less adequately., If an important aspect of modernism was a re- examination of the possibilities adhering in the formal properties of the text, thirties writers became concerned with what seemed to lie 'outside' it.
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