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Nineteen Thirty-Four: Generic Hybridity and the Search for a Democratic Aesthetic by Adam Hammond A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Ph.D. Graduate Department of English University of Toronto © Copyright by Adam Hammond 2011 Abstract Nineteen Thirty-Four: Generic Hybridity and the Search for a Democratic Aesthetic Adam Hammond Ph.D., Graduate Department of English, University of Toronto, 2011 This dissertation poses a fundamental question: why does a concern about the value of literary writing emerge during a felt crisis in public speech, especially in times of war? My focus is 1934, the year that Hitler became Führer and Socialist Realism was formulated in the USSR. In this year, Mikhail Bakhtin and Erich Auerbach developed the foundations of their narrative theory, while Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis embarked on new ventures in genre. Despite their differences, I argue, these writers all sought to challenge the linguistic basis of political power by developing new forms that engage readers in independent, active ways. Woolf, Eliot, and Lewis responded to totalitarianism with experiments in generic hybridity, believing that inter-generic dialogue could promote social dialogue and democratic modes of thought. My introduction analyses the political and aesthetic implications of German and Soviet propaganda in 1934. Chapter 1 establishes a theoretical frame through two works written in exile from these totalitarian regimes. Bakhtin’s “Discourse in the Novel” and Auerbach’s Mimesis both posit the centrality of genre to political freedom, but Bakhtin’s binary of monologic poetry and dialogic prose contrasts with Auerbach’s arguments for the political potential of mixed forms. Chapter 2 shows how similar concerns about pluralist voicing inform debates concerning the “death of poetry” in England; nonetheless, I conclude that the political poetry of Thirties Poets often privileged ideology over dialogism. Three chapters then explore the emergence of hybrid genres in Woolf, Eliot, and Lewis. I argue that Woolf’s unpublished “Ode to Cutbush” is a prose-poetic hybrid that employs poetic rhythm and free indirect discourse to instill democratic values of ii empathy and tolerance; that Eliot’s first completed play, The Rock, invokes the ideological complexities and unresolved political contradictions of his journalism and editorial practice to incite the audience’s active collaboration; and that Lewis’s novelistic poem One-Way Song attempts to escape the increasingly monologic voice of his political writings and return to the polyphonic style and polyvalent thinking of his earlier work. My conclusion demonstrates these writers’ continuing commitment to the democratic potential of generic hybridity during World War II. iii Acknowledgments The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada provided funding for this project. Funding was also provided by the University of Toronto through scholarships and a Chancellor Jackman Graduate Fellowship in the Humanities. iv Table of Contents 1 Introduction The Hybridizers of 1934 22 Chapter One Mikhail Bakhtin and Erich Auerbach: The Case Against Poetry and the Case for Hybridity 66 Chapter Two The Death and Rebirth of Poetry, 1925-1934 106 Chapter Three I Salute Thee; Passing: Virginia Woolf’s “Ode to Cutbush” and the Democratic Art of Hybrid Poetry 151 Chapter Four Cacophonous Irreducibility: T. S. Eliot’s The Rock and the Detritus of Contemporary History 196 Chapter Five Delight in Contradiction: The Manifold Byways of Wyndham Lewis’s One-Way Song 241 Conclusion Thoughts on Genre in an Air Raid: The Hybridizers in 1941 253 Bibliography v List of Abbreviations ABR The Art of Being Ruled D The Diary of Virginia Woolf DN “Discourse in the Novel” L The Letters of Virginia Woolf MWA Men Without Art TWM Time and Western Man vi Hammond 1 Introduction The Hybridizers of 1934 Engineers of Human Souls That 1934 was a good year for the totalitarian regimes in Germany and the Soviet Union can be inferred from the enormous parties both threw for themselves that year. By the time of the Soviet Communist Party’s Seventeenth Congress in January 1934, the hardships and complications of the period of the First Five-Year Plan (1928-1932) had begun to come under control. Stalin’s grip on power was firm: his former rivals Bukharin and Trotsky were respectively in hand and in exile, and a large-scale purge of the Party in 1932-33 had eliminated several hundred thousand “undesirables.” The forced industrialization of the massive, backward country was well under way; the collectivization of agriculture had begun, and the worst of the resulting famines were over. Having faced enormous challenges and triumphed over them, the Seventeenth Congress was prepared to name itself “the Congress of Victors.” As Stalin told the delegates, “[t]here is nothing more to prove and, it seems, no one to fight” (qtd. in Kenez 105).1 In Germany, the National Socialists, having faced challenges of their own, were also triumphant. Following their assumption of power in 1933, the exigencies of rule had led to the so- called “Night of the Long Knives” in the summer of 1934. Needing to control the unruly paramilitary Brownshirts who had helped him come to power, Hitler ordered the execution of their leader and co-founder, Ernst Röhm, along with many of his lieutenants. Wishing at the same time to settle old scores and eliminate conservative opponents in the army and government, the Nazis murdered such prominent figures as the former Reich Chancellor, General von Schleicher. When these acts of extralegal political violence met with no resistance, the Nazis’ grip on power was assured. In August, following the death of Reich President Hindenburg, Hitler merged the offices of Chancellor and President and declared himself “Führer.” The next month, the Nazis convened their Hammond 2 massive, week-long Party Rally in Nuremberg, attended by roughly a million spectators (Trimborn 107). Addressing an assembly of Brownshirts and SS men, Hitler obliquely referred to the “dark shadow” that had “cast itself across our movement,” before, in the closing ceremony, celebrating his party as “an eternal and indestructible pillar of the German people.” Rudolph Hess, Hitler’s deputy, declared, “Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler.” Increasingly assured in their political control, both regimes turned to culture in order to consolidate it. It is in this respect, primarily, that 1934 was a landmark year. On the Nazi side, it saw the production of perhaps their most successful single piece of propaganda: the film documentary of that same 1934 Party Rally in Nuremberg, Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will—a film, as Jürgen Trimborn argues, that “replaces politics with aesthetics: instead of political discussion we see the image of the ‘tamed man,’ shaped into and disciplined as marching columns and organized blocks” (108). The Nazis had recognized from the beginning the importance of culture. Only two months after he was appointed Chancellor in January, 1933, Hitler established a new Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda. Joseph Goebbels, a cabinet member of the ministry, announced in November of that year, “[t]he revolution we have made is a total one. It has encompassed every area of public life and fundamentally restructured them all.” As he had already said in March, “[r]evolutions never confine themselves to the purely political sphere. From there they reach out to cover all other areas of social existence. The economy and culture, science and scholarship, and art are not protected from their impact.” He added, “[t]here is no art without political bias” (qtd. in Evans 120). Fully convinced of the importance of such works, Hitler commissioned Triumph of the Will in April 1934, and allotted enormous resources to its production. A staff of some 170 worked on the film, including 36 cameramen. They made use of such novel technologies as telephoto and wide-angle lenses and pioneered numerous cinematic techniques, including placing cameramen on roller-skates and bicycles to create steady motion shots (Trimborn 112). They also experimented Hammond 3 with perspective, for instance digging deep trenches beneath Hitler’s speech platforms to create extremely low-angle shots. The historian Richard J. Evans classes Triumph of the Will as among the most important elements in establishing the “Hitler cult” and reads its images of “vast, disciplined masses moving in perfect co-ordination as if they were one body, not thousands” as serving to assert Rudolph Hess’s statement that “Hitler is Germany” (126). The film was edited for six months and released to great acclaim in March, 1935. It won not only the regime’s own National Film Prize, but also the Gold Medal at the Venice Film festival in 1935 and the Grand Prize of the Paris World’s Fair in 1937. As Michael Burleigh describes it, it was “a propagandistic exercise so definitive that it never needed to be repeated” (211). It is the only film made about Hitler in the Third Reich, and it served its propagandistic purpose well beyond 1934, being sent along with conquering German armies to Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland (Trimborn 120). Though the first decade of the Soviet Union had been one of great cultural heterogeneity, when Stalin assumed sole leadership in 1929 he moved toward the formation of a totalitarian state along the lines described above by Goebbels.2 A key element in this movement was the formulation of the official state aesthetic, “Socialist Realism,” at the First All-Union Writer’s Congress of Soviet Writers in August 1934. In the months leading up to the Congress, Stalin remarked that whereas the successful completion of the First Five-Year Plan had depended on the work of “mining engineers, construction engineers, electrical engineers, engineers to build blast furnaces,” the next step in the development of the Soviet Union would depend on “engineers who know how to build human souls.” As he continued, “[w]riters, you are the engineers who build human souls!” (qtd.

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