University of Southampton Research Repository
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
University of Southampton Research Repository Copyright © and Moral Rights for this thesis and, where applicable, any accompanying data are retained by the author and/or other copyright owners. A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This thesis and the accompanying data cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the copyright holder/s. The content of the thesis and accompanying research data (where applicable) must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holder/s. When referring to this thesis and any accompanying data, full bibliographic details must be given, e.g. Thesis: Author (Year of Submission) "Full thesis title", University of Southampton, name of the University Faculty or School or Department, PhD Thesis, pagination. Data: Author (Year) Title. URI [dataset] UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON LANGUAGE AND REIFICATION IN IMAGIST POETICS 1909-1930 A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF ARTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH BY ANDREW JOHN THACKER OCTOBER 1990 TO MY MOTHER AND FATHER One has to be downright obstinate not to see the complicity of artistic and social reification, and to ignore the untruth of reification, which is that it fetishizes what is a processual relation between moments. The work of art is both a process and an instant. Its objectification, while a necessary condition of aesthetic autonomy, is also a petrifying tendency. The more the social labour embodied in an art work becomes objectified and organized, the more it sounds empty and alien to the work. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, (1970). I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch: How should I use them for your closer contact? T.S.Eliot, "Gerontion". TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS INTRODUCTION 4 CHAPTER ONE - LANGUAGE AND REIFICATION 13 1. Introduction 2. Marx 3. Philology and Reification 4. Lukacs 5. Benjamin and Adorno 6. Modernism and the Look 7. Conclusion CHAPTER TWO - HOLME, MARSDEN AND THE ORIGINS OF IMAGIST THEORY 68 1. Introduction 2. "This Hulme Business" 3. War, Women and Words: Marsden and The Egoist 4. Imagist Theory Pre-1914 5. The Imagist Prefaces 6. Images and Auras 7. Conclusion CHAPTER THREE - THE SEEN AND THE PALPABLE: IMAGIST 133 PRACTICE 1. Introduction 2. Of Pools and Portraits 3. The Urban Experience 4. Images of Transport 5. Looking in the City 6. Conclusion CHAPTER FOUR - POUND, LUSTRA AND A LANGUAGE OF COLOUR 211 1. Introduction 2. Vorticism and the Metro 3. Lustra: "Like to Like Nature" 4. Further Instructions 5. Conclusion CHAPTER FIVE - A VACANT GAZE: HUGH SELWYN MAUBERLEY 254 1. Introduction 2. Mauberley, Pound and James 3. Resuscitating Poetry 4. Still Gazing and Grimacing 5. Still-Born Values 6. Coining Curious Heads 7. Stopping the Flow 8. Conclusion CONCLUSION 298 BIBLIOGRAPHY 302 UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON ABSTRACT FACULTY OF ARTS ENGLISH Doctor of Philosophy LANGUAGE AND REIFICATION IN IMAGIST POETICS 1909-1930 by Andrew John Thacker This thesis is an examination of Imagist poetry from 1909 to the date of the last Imagist anthology, 1930. I study the five anthologies of Imagist poetry (1914, 1915, 1916, 1917 and 1930) to show how they produce what I call a reification of language. In Chapter One I present an account of the theory of reification, drawing on the work of Marx, Lukacs, Adorno and Benjamin. I distinguish between reification and commodification and show how the Imagist reification of poetic language is a modernist aesthetic reaction to the abstractions engendered by commodification. I argue that conventional accounts of commodification and modernism ignore the question of gender. Chapter Two considers the origins of Imagist theory in the texts of T.E.Hulme, Dora Marsden (editor of the influential periodical The Egoist) and in the prefaces and manifestos of the movement itself. The call to reform language along the lines of a visual epistemology results in poems presenting reified images of women in modernity, which I analyse in detail in Chapter Three. Chapters Four and Five consider the work of Ezra Pound in Lustra and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. Pound is shown to develop the Imagist method towards a modernist verse in which words do not present images of things but are treated as material things in their own right. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the following people for their help in the writing of this thesis: Isobel Armstrong, Jane Clark, David Corbett, Tony Crowley, Derek Duncan, Maud Ellmann, Bill Marshall, Jo McDonagh, Peter Middleton and Tim Woods. I am grateful to the Faculty of Arts, University of Southampton for the award in 1987 of the Richard Newitt Prize which enabled me to carry out valuable research. I am very grateful to Jennie Barnsley for her scrupulous proof-reading of the thesis. Finally, I would like to express my love and thanks to my mother and father. INTRODUCTION One of the legacies of post-structuralist criticism is a re-reading of literary history stressing the processes, linguistic and otherwise, from which modernist texts are constructed. Flux is emphasised over fixity of form, and words are seen to drift irrevocably apart from their referents. This thesis will question this re-orientation by a study of Imagist aesthetics from 1909 to 1930. Imagism shows a concern for a fixity of poetic discourse before any notion of flux and the multiplicity of meaning intervenes. Reading this early modernist writing shows that Imagism desired to anchor its words in concrete images of objects. If modernism can be characterised as a fissuring of a strict reference between word and thing, then in Imagism this is a tendency appearing after an initial impetus to tie words to things. In 1915 Ezra Pound condensed his theory of Imagist poetry into one phrase: "Language is made out of concrete things^' Imagism can justly claim to be the first modernist literary movement in Britain. This is a quite different theory of language from that, for example, displayed in Roland Barthes's influential article "From Work to Text". Here the Text is "radically symbolic", refusing the definite reference of words to things: "The Text...practises the infinite deferment of the signified, is dilatory." Barthesian Texts are thus irreducibly plural entities, opposed to the sense of finished objects implied in Pound's "concrete things." In - 4 - Barthes, the Text is "restored to language; like language, it is structured but off-centred, without closure." Whereas Imagism, in its first manifesto in 1914, called for a "Direct treatment of the 'thing'", Barthes argues that language is inevitably indirect, always deferring its encounter with the "closure" of the thing. The 1915 Imagist anthology welcomed a poetry "that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite."^ Imagist language thus intends to "close" upon things, to render with visual clarity the objects of artistic perception. This nominalist project, which Pound termed "the welding of word and thing", seems somewhat at odds with Barthes'$blissful pleasure in a textual language which "undoes nomination". But it seems to be a perspective deriving from someone like Barthes which leads a recent writer upon Pound to argue that he "offers no escape from the intertextuality of reading to a 'thing' or a 'truth' before Q language and interpretation." One part of my argument, developed in Chapters Four and Five, is that if Pound does reject "things" for the tissues of "intertextuality", then it only occurs after his use of an Imagist language of "concrete things". Imagist rhetoric displays what I chose to call a reification of language. Chapter One is a theoretical discussion of reification and its applicability to language and modernist poetry, drawing upon the work of Marx, Lukacs, Adorno and Benjamin. A reified language is one in which words are treated as material entities. In Chapter Two I examine the roots of Imagist theory in the light of this idea of linguistic reification. Imagism's treatment of words as material things only develops, primarily in the work of Pound, out of an earlier adherence to using a language in which words clearly presented things. This development marks Imagism's movement away from a symbolist heritage towards a truly modernist verse practice. - 5 - Carol Christ argues that modernist theories of language "identify sensuous perception with the qualities of objects themselves; theories of language which emphasize its transparency as a medium for sensation."° This ». statement runs together the two theories I am concerned to separate. In [ Imagism, a discourse transparent to its object is the precursor of a discourse pertaining to the qualities of objects. Imagist desires to draw words closer to things are reactions to a world in which the experience of language is of something that is dematerialised. Recent Marxist critics have argued that the reification of language in modernism is introduced to compensate for the dominant commodification of early twentieth century capitalist societies. j Commodification judges all objects and forms in terms of abstract economic value, paying no attention to the different qualities shown by, for example, a Van Gogh painting and a new pair of shoes if they are of equal financial worth. For Terry Eagleton "Modernism is among other things a strategy whereby the work of art resists commodification, holds out by the skin of its teeth against those social forces which would degrade it to an exchangeable object." This resistance to economic exchange, which treats all objects as abstractly equivalent, produces the linguistic reification seen in Imagist rhetoric: To fend off such reduction to commodity status, the modernist work brackets off the referent or real historical world, thickens its textures and deranges its forms to forestall instant consumability, and draws its own language protectively around it to become a mysterious autotelic object, free of all contaminating truck with the real.11 - 6 - Eagleton thus concludes that the modernist work of art utilises the fetishism of the commodity to resist the commodity as exchange.