A Choice of Illusions: Belief, Relativism, and Modern Literature

A Choice of Illusions: Belief, Relativism, and Modern Literature Alastair Morrison Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Columbia University 2015 © 2015 Alastair Morrison All rights reserved ABSTRACT A Choice of Illusions: Belief, Relativism, and Modern Literature Alastair Morrison This dissertation considers how defenses of traditional faith in Britain have adapted to new frontiers of cultural relativism and religious difference. Its contention is that poetry has become central to such defenses. Relativistic thinking would seem to dispose against metaphysical belief; poetry, as a parallel claimant for cultural and expressive particularity, and as a sensuously non-empirical rhetorical medium, offers a way of muffling the dissonance that might otherwise arise from positioning difference and particularity as pretext for claims of universal truth. This study traces formal and rhetorical innovations from the Victorian crisis of faith forward to literary modernism, with a brief conclusion contemplating related developments in more contemporary poetry and religious thought in Britain. Table of Contents Acknowledgements ii 1. Introduction: Belief, Relativism, and Modern Literature 1 i. works cited 11 2. Unction on the Tightrope: Religion as Culture in Victorian Britain 12 ii. works cited 60 3. T.E. Hulme: What Choice in Illusion? 63 iii. works cited 94 4. To Do the Right Thing for the Wrong Reason: The Justification of T.S. Eliot 96 iv. works cited 131 5. David Jones: Cultures in Parenthesis 134 v. works cited 164 6. Conclusion: Poetry and Postsecularism 166 vi. works cited 173 i Acknowledgements It is chastening to think how different this study might be were it not for the generous contributions others have made to it. Feedback is always the starting point for new writing and revision, and it is tempting to think of the re-imaginations that result as substantially one's own. But what is probably always an illusion would be especially unpardonable here; too many blind spots have been pointed out, too many excesses trimmed, too many half-made arguments clarified. I have been fortunate, too, in forbearance, in so often having been given time to think again. My three outstanding advisors, Edward Mendelson, Michael Golston, and Bruce Robbins, read innumerable drafts, and provided me with advice that was always apt and generous. Jed Esty and Stathis Gourgouris were invaluable in the defense process, and Sarah Cole helped me with several pieces related to this project; all of their perceptive notes have helped me greatly. My friends at Columbia have contributed to my thinking on the issues discussed here with insight and good humor; my thanks especially to Deborah Aschkenes, Gania Barlow, Tim Donahue, Emily Hayman, Lucas Kwong, Sarah Minsloff, and Adam Spry. Here and everywhere, I owe my deepest gratitude to Jackie Weatherill, without whose kindness, wit, and sanity so little would be possible. ii For my Grandmother, Mary Sue McCarthy who knows more about this than I do iii Introduction: Belief, Relativism, and Modern Literature In a 2004 essay, Charles Taylor summarizes the epistemological model which he sees undergirding much of modern secularism in the West: this structure operates with a picture of knowing agents as individuals, who build up their understanding of the world through combining and relating, in more and more comprehensive theories, the information which they take in (49) This understanding of how humans acquire knowledge, "which is only partly consciously entertained, but which controls the way people think, argue, infer, and make sense of things" (49), makes the validity of a factual claim dependent on the extent to which it can be verified by an already-constituted, observing subject. In consequence, claims about the Unseen are extremely difficult to legitimate: "I must accede to the transcendent, if at all, by inference from the natural" (50). But for all its apparent naturalness, Taylor argues, this epistemological model is highly debatable, even flatly false. Human knowledge is not in fact acquired by neutrally observing individuals; observations acquire their meaning within a process of "working out," "an ongoing activity of coping with the world by bodily, social, and cultural beings" which is prior to any given instance (50). Taylor's is a powerful challenge to a certain kind of factualist atheism, of the positivist tradition which produces statements like Bertrand Russell's, that religious belief was unjustified due to "insufficient evidence." But it makes Taylor some curious bedfellows. The idea that an autonomous and rational self is precondition to subsequent knowledge comes from Enlightenment figures like Descartes; ideas like Taylor's, that knowledge is the result of anthropologically or societally variable processes, have achieved their recent influence through the work of Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault. 1 These are, to be fair, two of the figures most troubled by the processes of thought- formation they report. There is also the venerable position that the deep backdrops to the rational and empirical intellectual agency of the individual are positive, even precious bequeathments. This position can be materialist; in the view Raymond Williams and the tradition of cultural studies, the constitution of individual subjectivities is a social, dynamic, and interactive process, in a way which implies democracy and community. The position can also be metaphysical, as it was when Samuel Taylor Coleridge expressed it in Aids to Reflection (1825). Drawing on Kantian concepts of a priori knowledge, and on Schiller's emphasis of aesthetics as a mechanism for reaching the transcendent, Coleridge proposed Understanding, and essential human faculty triggered by sensory experience, but pointing to ultimate truths far surpassing that experience. Understanding existed alongside Reason, which processed experience empirically, and reached abstract conclusions only by induction. Understanding, the faculty which allowed one to look at the mountains around Chamounix and see God, was always privileged. Reason depended on Understanding for confidence in its own observations.1 Williams admired Coleridge, and gave him a prominent role in the tradition of resistance to bourgeois rationalism to which Williams himself subscribed. This being said, their approaches are quite different, especially in terms of the ground they leave open to religious faith. The gap between these two sorts of positions - between foundational claims of non-empirical revelation and relativistic assertions of material contingency in perception - poses a considerable obstacle for Taylor's defense of faith. And not only Taylor's. I choose him as a convenient metonym for the diverse range of scholars who have disputed secularism on relativist grounds in recent 1 For an instance of the cultural studies position, see Williams' "Dominant, Residual, and Emergent" in Marxism and Literature (121). For the reference to Chamounix, see Coleridge's poem “Chamouny, the Hour Before Sunrise.” 2 years, from William Connolly in political science to Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood, and Charles Hirschkind in anthropology. On the one hand, many people are no longer likely to be moved by an intuitionist argument like Coleridge's. Paradigms of cultural diffusion, like Williams', show us how such intuitions could in fact be culturally produced, while, at the same time, we have become increasingly aware of the fact that no consensus of intuitions actually exists. Relativism supplies a much more actionable reply to the idea of naked reason "disproving" religious beliefs. Such relativism may save religion from dismissal as false consciousness by incorporating it into the contingent but continuous process of human meaning-making. If the relativism is not the sort that sees violence in normalization (if, in other words, the theorist is Williams rather than Foucault), it may even allow for an appreciation of religious practice as a cultural and conceptual flowering. What it would seem to disallow is the kind of metaphysical truth claim that is traditionally understood to accompany these practices. Relativism can be used to protect religion from certain kinds of attack, but it is not a position from which one can espouse religion, at least not on the terms whereby religion is defined by most people. I could mention some impressively acrobatic attempts to escape this difficulty. Saba Mahmood, for instance, offers an approach to religion as an "embodied practice," so as to deemphasize the potentially troubling matter of conviction.2 But I want to return to Coleridge. The categories of Reason and Understanding were predicted in the more explicitly literary 2 See Mahmood's The Politics of Piety. It could be argued (indeed it is a favourite point of scholars including Mahmood, Talal Asad, and Mark C. Taylor) that hard divisions between religious activity and other activity are only possible in an atmosphere of modern secularism which arises out of deracinated Western Protestantism. Charles Taylor begins the split in the high middle ages. The distinctiveness of the metaphysical knowledge claim from other kinds of knowledge claim is indeed deeply culture-bound, as is the idea that some actions fall into the range of "religion" while others do not. At least in the Abrahamic religions, however, it would probably be uncontroversial to say that subscription to a set of factual positions is a necessary part of religious life. 3 binary Coleridge had formulated in Biographia Literaria (1817), that of Fancy and Imagination. Fancy was the merely "mechanical" aspect of artistic endeavour, the manipulation of already- existing sense data into aesthetically pleasing configuration. Imagination, by contrast, was a "repetition in the finite mind of the eternal action of creation in the infinite I AM" (691-2). Just as it was Understanding that gave us faith, it is Imagination that gives us poetry, which by this gesture is made part of the access to the divine, and part of the check against the tyrannies of upstart reason. Poetry, however, is able to withstand its own relativization.

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