Primitivism in Modernist Literature: a Study of Eliot, Woolf and Lawrence
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PRIMITIVISM IN MODERNIST LITERATURE: A STUDY OF ELIOT, WOOLF AND LAWRENCE A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by William Christopher Van Esveld May 2012 © 2012 William Christopher Van Esveld PRIMITIVISM IN MODERNIST LITERATURE: A STUDY OF ELIOT, WOOLF AND LAWRENCE William Christopher Van Esveld, Ph.D. Cornell University 2012 The subjects of “civilization” are trapped in an alienating, inauthentic culture, but can escape by cultivating the “primitive” hidden within themselves: grotesque, even terrifying, but authentic in its drives, desires and relationship to the world. Known as primitivism, this diagnosis of cultural failure and its purported cure profoundly influenced modernist artists. Beyond the succès de scandale they enjoyed by inverting the hierarchy of savage and civilized, primitivists claimed to speak from a position that was, as Eliot put it, “deeper” and “older” than – and uncontaminated by – their culture. They plumbed an unchanging, inner essence, of which they saw glimpses everywhere from ancient artifacts and African masks to drawings by children and mental patients. The rediscovery of primitive mentality thus promised to overcome modernity’s characteristic epistemological anxiety – what James Clifford called “off-centeredness in a world of distinct meaning systems.” Yet while primitivism revalued the stereotype of the savage and prized the primitive as mysterious and unknowable, it never overcame the objectifying view that “primitives” were fundamentally all the same, and important primarily as a window onto suppressed aspects of the civilized personality. Primitivism informed (and in some cases deformed) Eliot’s, Woolf’s and Lawrence’s critical social theories, their justifications for writing and publishing, and their understanding of their own aesthetic projects. These writers were preoccupied with the conflict between their need for authentic, radical expression, and their relationship to the public. Primitivist aesthetics justified their art as a spiritual and societal necessity and shielded it from attack as mere neurotic acting-out. Further, each writer drew on primitivist discourse to develop theories of literature and the artistic impulse, from Eliot’s theories of poetic imagination to his and Woolf’s ideas of the importance of “impersonality.” At critical moments in their creative lives, including the writing of “The Waste Land,” The Voyage Out, and The Plumed Serpent, primitivism enabled these writers to set the criteria by which their writing should be understood. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH William Van Esveld received his BA (Honours) in Literary Studies and English Literature from Victoria College, the University of Toronto, in 1999, and his MA in English Literature from Cornell University in 2001. iii To my parents, Bill and Elizabeth Van Esveld, and my sister, Kimberly Van Esveld Adams. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My research for this dissertation was generously supported by a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Education, which among its benefits allowed me to work in the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection. An International Travel Research Grant from Cornell University’s Mario Einaudi Center allowed me to work in the special collections at the University of Nottingham, the University of Sussex and the British Library. Professor Molly Hite provided encouragement and insight over many years. I owe a special debt to Reesa Grushka for her crucial support. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch……………………………………………………………………....iii Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………....v Primitivism and the Promise of Authentic Artistic Production ................................... 1 1. Background of a movement ....................................................................................... 1 2. An aesthetic of identity crisis ................................................................................... 14 3. Primitivism’s problems: promise of renovation, reality of retrenchment ................. 25 4. The criterion of authenticity ...................................................................................... 35 5. Primitivism in Anglo-American Modernist literature ............................................... 43 T.S. Eliot’s Impersonal Primitivism .............................................................................. 45 1. Authenticity and Publicity ........................................................................................ 50 2. Primitivism, Fragmentation and Authenticity ........................................................... 59 3. The Meaningfulness of the Primitive ........................................................................ 67 4. The Inexplicability of the Primitive .......................................................................... 77 5. The Primitivist’s Happy Death ................................................................................. 90 A Jungle of One’s Own: Primitivism in Woolf’s The Voyage Out .............................. 97 1. Rachel’s Death ..................................................................................................... 104 2. A Revaluation of Values ...................................................................................... 109 3. Primitivism and the Development of Woolf’s Critique ....................................... 113 4. An Impersonal Primitivism .................................................................................. 126 Creo que sí: Primitivism and the question of belief in D. H. Lawrence ................... 136 1. Collapse................................................................................................................ 141 2. Lawrence’s primitivist turn .................................................................................. 148 3. The answer to alienation ...................................................................................... 153 4. The question of belief .......................................................................................... 160 5. Primitivist splitting............................................................................................... 169 WORKS CITED............................................................................................................ 178 Primitivism and the Promise of Authentic Artistic Production 1. Background of a movement The concept that people were better off when their relationship to the natural world was unmediated by things like clothing and agriculture dates back at least to the Biblical story of the Fall. The anthropologist George Boas traced the sentiment that life was better long ago back to Hesiod’s myth of mankind’s degeneration through “five ages” of decline.1 In fact, the act of tracing things back to the Bible or the Greeks itself exemplifies an analytical move – the creation of a criterion by returning to an “origin” seen as purer or more essential than its subsequent derivations – that Derrida argues is as old as analysis itself.2 Good comes before evil, “the simple before the complex, the essential before the accidental, the imitated before the imitation.” Yet for all the antiquity of these tropes, from the late-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, the discourse of primitivism gave them new intensity and appeal. Coined in late-nineteenth century France, “primitivism” originally denoted the “Imitation des primitifs” in the “B[eaux]-arts.”3 The term soon expanded to other languages and broader meanings. The 1934 edition of Webster’s English dictionary stated that “primitivism” meant the “belief in the superiority of primitive life” and the desire to 1 “Our own race, that of Iron, is the worst,” in Hesiod’s view. “It is a period of greater and greater degeneration and our race will disappear when it is ‘born with greying temples.’” George Boas, “Primitivism,” Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Vol. 3. Scribner’s: New York, 1973-74, p. 578. 2 Limited Inc., as discussed in Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism, Cornell University Press: Ithaca, 1982, p. 93. 3 According to the Nouveau Larousse illustré, published between 1897 and 1904; quoted in William Rubin, “Modernist Primitivism: An Introduction,” p. 2, in “Primitivism” in Twentieth Century Art: Affinities of the Tribal and Modern, Vol. 1, ed. William Rubin. MOMA: New York, 1984. 1 “return to nature.”4 Primitivism’s influence spanned the aesthetic spectrum from Gauguin (1848-1903) to Tarzan (who first appeared in 1912); art historians have identified primitivism in aesthetic movements “from Symbolism and Art Nouveau in the 1890s […] through American Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s.”5 The common thread running through these iterations of primitivism was the idea that “primitive” peoples had something vital which modern “civilization” had lost, and which writers and artists could uncover and even, perhaps, restore. Whatever the merits of primitivism’s diagnosis of the malaise of modernity, it proved alluring to artists. Primitivism promised to free the artist from conventions that foreclosed the possibility of self-expression, and restore to him his lost birthright of a meaningful external world. Modernity has been defined as “a pervasive condition of off- centeredness in a world of distinct meaning systems, a state of being in culture while looking at culture.”6 By identifying with the primitive the artist implied