We Speak a Different Tongue

We Speak a Different Tongue:

Maverick Voices and Modernity 1890–1939

Edited by Anthony Patterson and Yoonjoung Choi

We Speak a Different Tongue: Maverick Voices and Modernity 1890–1939

Edited by Anthony Patterson and Yoonjoung Choi

This book first published 2015

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-7702-6 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7702-2 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ...... viii

Introduction ...... ix Anthony Patterson and Yoonjoung Choi

Part I: Contexts

Chapter One ...... 2 “Destroying Natural Ties”: Radical Politics at the Margins of Modernism Cord-Christian Casper

Chapter Two ...... 21 Literary Modernism and Philosophical Pragmatism: Convergence and Difference John Ryder

Chapter Three ...... 35 Maverick Vices: Sexual Felicity and the Edwardian Sex Novel Anthony Patterson

Part II: Victorian and Edwardian Modernists

Chapter Four ...... 52 May Sinclair’s Modernism and the Death of the Baby Elizabeth Brunton

Chapter Five ...... 68 Last Attempt at Romance: Wells Reworking Stoker’s Gothic Romance Yoonjoung Choi

Chapter Six ...... 83 Charlotte Mew’s Castaway Modernism Antonio Jimenez-Munoz

vi Table of Contents

Chapter Seven ...... 99 “Accepting Winter Boon”: Edward Thomas, Walter Pater and the Rhetoric of Poetry Callum Zeff

Part III: Maverick Encounters with Modernism and Modernity

Chapter Eight ...... 116 A Home of One’s Own: Recollections of a Thwarted Artist in Vita Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent Elise Thornton

Chapter Nine ...... 136 Mystical Mavericks: The Influence of Gustav Fechner and Henri Bergson on Algernon Blackwood’s The Centaur Helen Green

Chapter Ten ...... 154 Neither/Nor: The Productive Frustration of Classification in Jean Toomer’s Cane Nissa Ren Cannon

Chapter Eleven ...... 168 Modernism in the Muck: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God Margaret Cullen

Chapter Twelve ...... 185 Funny Old Fatty Bowling: Coming up for Air and George Orwell’s Comedic Common Man Calum Mechie

Part IV: Maverick Voices within or on the Peripheries Modernism

Chapter Thirteen ...... 202 “Extreme Consciousness”: D. H. Lawrence and America’s Challenge to European Modernism Brian Fox

We Speak a Different Tongue vii

Chapter Fourteen ...... 220 “What in the world is this all about?” Avant-Garde and Decadence: Djuna Barnes’s Short Fiction Lucrecia Radyk

Chapter Fifteen ...... 235 Opposing Modernismus: The Variant Modernisms of Wyndham Lewis and Sir Reginald Blomfield Nathan O’Donnell

Chapter Sixteen ...... 254 “I Have To Touch, As Another Man Will Look”: The (Un)seeing Gaze in Rayner Heppenstall’s The Blaze of Noon Hannah Van Hove

Notes on Contributors ...... 268

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

“We Speak a Different Tongue”: Maverick Voices and Modernity, 1890– 1939 was conceived from a conference with the same title held in July 2013, hosted by the English Department of Durham University. First of all, we wish to express our gratitude to the American University of Ras Al Khaimah for the timely financial help. We would like to thank co- organisers, Dr Mark Sandy and Dr Kostas Boyiopoulos, for the successful conference and more importantly for their insights and input into the current volume. In addition, our special thanks go to Dr Boyiopoulos who allowed us to use his design for the cover image of this volume. We also would like to thank our keynote speakers, Professor Chris Baldick and Professor Michael O’Neill, and all the presenters. Finally, our warm thanks go to our contributors for their trust, support and help in putting this volume together. INTRODUCTION

ANTHONY PATTERSON AND YOONJOUNG CHOI

Brian Richardson has noted how the narrative of modern literary history can become an oversimplified tale of “dynastic successions” which narrates “a fairly smooth transition from Realism to Modernism and then on to Postmodernism.”1 Richardson points out the flaws in such a view of modern literary history:

The main problem with the standard narrative of modern literary history is precisely its narrative features: a distinct origin, a series of causally connected events in a linear sequence, a teleological progression culminating in the present, the absence of unconnected or distracting subplots, the unspoken but uncontested male domination of narrative agency, and the unproblematic closure implied by this version of history. There is also the inevitable moral that this structure lends itself to, that postmodernism is a superior representation of human experience, more recent and therefore more appropriate, if not also more ideologically responsible.2

Thus while searches for origins, acceptance of causal relations and teleological views of history have been thoroughly scrutinised in a range of contemporary theoretical and critical approaches, such views as they relate reflexively to literary history often fall prey to these now highly contentious assumptions. Perhaps more significant for this collection of essays, such a history aesthetically privileges certain literary movements and developments over others. If the teleological view is that Postmodernism is “a superior representation of human experience”, then, Modernism is also similarly viewed as superior to Realism. This sense of superiority can often lead to texts that fall outside the modernist canon in

1Brian Richardson, “Remapping the Present: The Master Narrative of Modern Literary History and the Lost Forms of Twentieth-Century Fiction,” Twentieth Century Literature Vol. 43, No. 3 (1997), pp. 291-309. 2 Ibid, p. 291. x Introduction terms of periodization, aesthetics, style, tone, genre and so forth being deemed inferior and concomitantly reflecting a more naive ontological understanding of the world than the texts of modernist writers. In such a view, pre-modernist or non-modernist texts are often seen as incapable of offering the richer psychological depth and more complex understanding of time and experience ascribed to modernist writing, the latter viewed as more akin to how people experience the world. This view is consonant with Virginia Woolf’s polemical distinction between an outmoded conventional material realism which concentrates on external details such as houses, clothes and salaries, and in which “life escapes”, and a fiction which seeks to capture the essence and complexity of experience.3 David Trotter has referred to “the evaluative function of modernism” and its “criterion of value” in which,

Writers who didn’t respond to its promptings can be said to have blinded themselves not only to history, but to the sources of their own creativity. Writers who did can be seen as prophets, without honour in their own age, but the creators of our own… Unfortunately, however, the concept of Modernism is still used to evaluate rather than describe: to distinguish between those writers who are considered innovatory, and thus worthy of study, and those who aren’t. 4

This of course, is not to deny the existence of techniques and practices that can be labelled modernist or indeed to belittle the importance of many writers such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce who radically changed ideas of what fiction could do and say, but rather it is to challenge, as Trotter does, the privileging of Modernism over other kinds of writing, a privileging which tends to oversimplify the complex relations between texts and between writers, to devalue the work of those not considered modernist and to undervalue the experimentation of many writers and artists who confronted modernity in a range of interesting, complex and diverse ways. The last couple of decades have witnessed many scholars both in and beyond modernist studies challenging, refining and broadening the parameters of what has been delineated as Anglo-American literary Modernism. One can point to two scholars cited in the following chapters.

3 See for example, Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction”. The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: The Twentieth Century and Beyond. Ed. Joseph Black, Plymouth: Broadview Press, 2006, p 227, or Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown. London: Hogarth Press, 1924. 4 David Trotter, English Novel in History, London: Routledge, 1993, p. 4. We Speak a Different Tongue xi

Margaret Cullen notes Michael Coyle’s recognition of many modernist scholars to view Modernism as in many ways plural,5 while Helen Green cites Michael Levenson who has recently observed the trend of scholars to view Modernism as progressively more inclusive and more flexible. 6 However, still too prevalent is, as Fredric Jameson notes, “the sterility of the standard aesthetic move, which consists in isolating Modernism as a standard by which to compare a whole series of historically and artistically incomparable writers,” and, as I have suggested elsewhere, “to marginalise those writers that fall outside its aesthetic or its periodization.”7 In such a view, writers who show some innovatory potential before the recognised periodization of Modernism are invariably described as proto-modernists. While such labels might recognise a degree of literary experimentation prior to the seismic changes Modernism wrought, a delineation such as proto-modernist still tends to consolidate the overriding centrality of Modernism through viewing pre-modernist texts through the lens of modernist experimentation. Indeed, too often Virginia Woolf’s essays “Modern Fiction” (1919) and Mrs Bennett and Mrs Brown (1924) remain keynote texts for understanding this transition from Realism to Modernism in which a material realism which fails to grasp inner life in all its complexity is supplanted by a new concern with psychological interiority evident in the fiction of new writers such as Woolf. Although the evaluative function, as Trotter calls it, has been challenged by many scholars, it still often persists in the academy and can often also lead to the detriment of richer understandings of Modernism, with modernist practices themselves being viewed as more monolithic than in actuality they are. Another combative tendency of literary scholars to challenge the predominance of a still restrictive modernist canon has been to broaden the scope and understanding of Modernism by incorporating some

5 Michael Coyle, “With a Plural Vengeance: Modernism as a (Flaming) Brand,” Modernist Cultures 1, no. 1 (May 2005), p. 18. 6 Michael Levenson, “Introduction”, to The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. by Michael Levenson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 2. 7 Jameson proceeds to disparage the idea of a clear separation between Realism and Modernism, pointing out that “each new realism arises out of dissatisfaction with the limits of the Realisms that preceded it, but also and more fundamentally that Realism itself in general shares precisely that dynamic of innovation we ascribe to Modernism as its uniquely distinguishing feature.” Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essays on the Ontology of the Present. London: Verso, 2002, p. 28. Anthony Patterson. Mrs Grundy’s Enemies: Censorship, Realist Fiction and the Politics of Sexual Representation. Oxford: Laing, 2013, p. 17. xii Introduction contemporary writers into the modernist tradition that have traditionally been seen as existing outside of its aesthetic parameters and practice. Even Arnold Bennett, the foil of much of Woolf’s polemic against realism, has been re-evaluated, in Robert Squillace’s, Modernism, Modernity and Arnold Bennett, in terms of his own modernist practices.8 This is not to deny Squillace’s subtle analysis of the complexity of Bennett’s skill as a narrator and his effective use of narrative perspective, but to indicate the tendency to locate hitherto excluded writers within a growing modernist canon. 9 As with those deemed proto-modernist, this appropriation of writers to Modernism tends to further consolidate its position not only as the predominant literary movement of the early twentieth century but as the predominant aesthetic mode by which all other writing of the period, as Jameson indicated, is compared. Chris Baldick usefully discusses the issue:

In academic literary studies especially, the major development in literature during these three decades is presented—commonly to the exclusion of all else—as the triumph of the revolution that we call modernism. There are perfectly sound reasons for dwelling in this way upon the achievements of the modernist innovators: much of their work is, as Woolf indicates, courageously original, and much of it also deserves the attention which critics have in its defence lavished upon it. Even so, if we allow our view of literature in this period to be engrossed by the heroism of a small band of modernist pioneers—James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf—then we lose sight not only of a wealth of creative work by their contemporaries but also, self-defeatingly, of the very distinctiveness of the leading 'modernists' themselves, to appreciate which requires some awareness of the mainstream from which they diverged.

This collection of essays is in broad agreement with Baldick’s view. Maverick Voices and Modernity does not seek to minimise the influence of Modernism as a significant literary movement, nor does it necessarily seek to broaden the canon of Modernism but to flesh out, as it were, some of the lesser recognised creative and experimental work within and beyond Modernism; this may be in relation to a writer’s engagement with modernist practices such as Djuna Barnes or D. H. Lawrence, but it may also often be beyond such considerations such as Calum Mechie’s analysis of George Orwell’s novel Coming Up for Air (1939). Thus some

8 Robert Squillace Modernism, Modernity, and Arnold Bennett. Bucknell, Bucknell University Press, 1997. 9 It is, perhaps, ironic that Bennett should have found himself on the wrong side of the realist debate as few did more than Bennett to introduce modernist writing to the British public. We Speak a Different Tongue xiii contributors consider the innovatory practices of writers who are not considered modernist such as Edward Thomas or Algernon Blackwood; others explore artists that have a tangential relation to Modernism such as Rayner Heppenstall; and yet others examine artists who are generally considered modernist such as Wyndham Lewis but view their work in new and illuminating light. One cumulative effect of considering such a diverse group of writers is to challenge the literary-historical narrative which Richardson describes. If writers as diverse as Charlotte Mew and Rayner Heppenstall can be interpreted in some way as modernist then the periodization of Modernism itself is brought under some scrutiny. However, whether aligned with what is considered established modernist practice or not, each essay shows writers innovatively engaging with and responding to late nineteenth and twentieth modernity in diverse and often complex ways. As the title of this collection indicates, moreover, all writers examined here can be considered to be maverick voices either in the challenge their work poses to more orthodox assumptions and presumptions of modernist practice or in their own reactions and responses to modernity, or, indeed, in both. Thus, the emphasis of this volume is not predominantly to dispute or demonstrate the modernist credentials of a range of diverse writers, although this remains a concern for some contributors, but to show how writers innovatively responded in their art to the radical changes of the era. The first three essays which comprise the first section, “Contexts” offer three illuminating perspectives of the period; the first considers politics, the second philosophy, and the third sexuality. In “ ‘Destroying Natural Ties’: Radical Politics at the Margins of Modernism,” Cord- Christian Casper examines the relationship between anarchism and early modernist writers, Henry James and Joseph Conrad. In his examination of a negative representation of political radicalism in the fin-de-siècle and Edwardian period, Casper offers a complex reading of anarchism in the work of Conrad and James seeing, on the one hand, how their utilisation of the theme of radical politics is “connoted with an incipient dissolution of order” but also how “a subset of narratives, in their work” explores “the ideology, functions and effects underlying the creation of this negative representation of political radicalism and its proponents.” Casper concludes by showing how in both James’s and Conrad’s fiction “the anarchist is not represented as a readily identifiable figure of otherness”, but ultimately as, “a restoration of residual spaces of culture” in which “anarchy is, however, shown to be preferable to the threat of breakdown that would ensue in the event of their further erosion.” xiv Introduction

In “Literary Modernism and Philosophical Pragmatism: Convergence and Difference”, John Ryder resists concentrating on the already well- documented relationship between Henry and William James, the first a proponent of literary Modernism, the latter of Pragmatism, but instead focuses on the classical pragmatists who were contemporaries of literary modernists, noting the variety of both pragmatist thought and literary modernist practice. However, Ryder sees a clear alignment between literary modernism which “regards its art as a creative engagement within and for experience” and philosophical pragmatism which “holds that ideas are ways in which we creatively negotiate our experience”. Ryder compares Virginia Woolf’s search for a writing which more closely reflects lived experience with what William James called “pure experience”. Ryder argues that “the reality that Woolf calls on the writer to convey” is consonant with this view of pure experience, or what James famously referred to as the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of experience “before we, through the course of normal living, put structure and sense to it.” Ryder also compares the modernist use of multiple narratives with the necessary multiplicity and even inconsistency of much classical pragmatist thinking in exploring the relation between reality and experience. While making no great claims for formal literary innovation of the texts he examines, Anthony Patterson in “Maverick Vices: Sexual Felicity and the Edwardian Sex Novel” challenges a still predominant view that credits modernist writers with unfettering the chains of sexual convention in fiction. Through an examination of now seldom read writers such as Victoria Cross and Hubert Wales, Patterson argues that a radical shift occurred in how sexual relations were perceived in what became denominated as the Edwardian Sex Novel. Cross and Wales both contrast loving heterosexual relations outside of marriage with the rigid confines that marriage and social expectation often place on men and women. From their perspective, the sexual act is understood as a keenly felt aesthetic experience which is central to human happiness and indeed to understanding and appreciating life itself. The next section, entitled “Victorian and Edwardian Modernists” examines writers, both poets and novelists, who challenge assumptions of the predominant periodization, aesthetics and practices of Modernism. Elizabeth Brunton in “May Sinclair, Modernism, and the Death of the Baby”, argues that May Sinclair is a true maverick of modernity who cannot be easily placed in any literary category; she is too modernist for the Victorians but too Victorian to be considered alongside modernist writers. Brunton considers a specifically but often overlooked modernist thematic, the death of babies, to consider Sinclair’s own maverick We Speak a Different Tongue xv response to modernity. Brunton shows how the thematic in Sinclair resonates with a Freudian “return of the repressed” as it does with much modernist fiction but in Sinclair the repression of sexuality often reflects a Victorian moral code which punishes transgressive characters. Brunton concludes that Sinclair’s “ongoing focus on the dangers of Victorian values is concerned less with truly “making it new” than “attacking the old”. While Brunton explores the way Sinclair’s works resist categorisation, Yoonjoung Choi’s “Last Attempt at Romance: Wells Reworking of Stoker’s Gothic Romance” situates Wells’s New Woman novel, Ann Veronica in relation both to the Edwardian novel about women and the formal experimentalism advocated by emerging modernist writers. According to Choi, Wells challenges contemporary literary trends from Victorian and Edwardian Realism to Modernism by capitalising on staples of the romance genre, in particular the Gothic devices of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Desiring a romantic escape from the conventional rules of novel writing, and at a time when the romance genre was considered inferior, Wells, as a true maverick of modernity, dexterously utilises the genre while “revising and toying with both Edwardian Realism and emerging Modernism.” In “Charlotte Mew’s Castaway Modernism” Antonio Jimenez-Munoz also argues that the now rather neglected writer Charlotte Mew is also a liminal figure as regards literary categorisation. Although recognising that Mew’s poems “in their diction and rhythm may appear Victorian”, in “the blending of poetic voices in her poems”, her use of “irony and rhetoric, distorted syntax, and the practice of sprung rhythm, her poetry is more aligned with Modernism.” Such a reading of Mew’s poetry contrasts with traditional views of Mew’s own life in which she has often been portrayed as “an example of clichéd Victorian femininity”, which has often led to a misrepresentation of her poems. Jimenez-Munoz calls for a re-evaluation of Mews innovative poems, and one which offers an alternative mode to viewing Modernist poetry. Such an alternative mode may link her poetry with that of later poets such as H.D. Jimenez-Munoz argues that Mew’s poetry can illuminate “an inclusive Modernism which, beyond tactics of disruption, dialogues with the poetic past in more ways than one.” The section concludes with “ ‘Accepting Winter’s Boon’: Edward Thomas, Walter Pater and the Rhetoric of Poetry”, in which Callum Zeff explores the complex influence of Walter Pater’s prose on the poetry of Edward Thomas, in part to consider Thomas’s exclusion from the cannon of Modernist poetry. Zeff argues that Thomas’s poetry “was a response to the same intellectual and spiritual context” as “poets associated with xvi Introduction

Modernism”. Through a subtle reading of Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence, Zeff explores the contextual importance of Paterian aestheticism. Zeff concludes his analysis by showing how Thomas’s engagement with Pater, allowed “him to begin turning his imitation of Pater […] into an imaginative struggle to accept the boon of Modernism’s spiritual winter.” The third section in Maverick Voices and Modernity, entitled “Maverick Encounters with Modernism” explores a number of writers with a tangential relation to Modernism. Elise Thornton in “A Home of One’s Own: Recollections of a Thwarted Artist in Vita Sackville- West’s All Passion Spent” challenges a still prevalent notion that Sackville-West, whose fiction is often dismissed as middle-brow, “remains trapped in Woolf’s shadow.” She shows how in All Passion Spent Sackville-West engages with many similar themes of the thwarted female artist as Woolf does in her more celebrated A Room of One’s Own (1928). Thornton argues that viewing Sackville-West pejoratively as a middlebrow writer can diminish her own subtle fictional analysis in All Passion Spent which redefines what “constitutes female artistry and creative fulfilment through its exploration of the antithetical nature of the life of the woman as artist and that of wife and mother.” Thornton convincingly argues that the novel’s “engaging dialogue about gender and creativity in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century” deserves greater recognition and, as such, Sackville-West “should be allowed a space of her own outside Woolf’s shadow.” In her assessment of Algernon Blackwood in “Mystical Mavericks: The Influence of Gustav Fechner on Algernon Blackwood’s The Centaur”, Helen Green also argues that Blackwood’s status as a middlebrow writer has led to his work being marginalised “by a critical culture, until recent decades, centred on a canonised model of modernism.” In contrast to this marginalisation, Green argues that “Blackwood’s writing can be seen to occupy an intriguing and paradoxical position within the cultural milieu of the first half of the twentieth century.” Considering how The Centaur was influenced by Gustav Fechner and Henri Bergson, both seminal figures in the “ideological and formal innovations of modernism”, Green demonstrates how the novel’s “proclivity for fragmentation, preoccupation with the interactions between subjective and material spheres and its overt ambivalence to language prove it to be, in many respects, a pioneering work anticipating many of Modernism’s key concerns.” The next two essays offer insightful examinations of two significant American writers both associated with the Harlem Renaissance, Jean Toomer and Zora Neale Hurston. In her contribution to the volume, We Speak a Different Tongue xvii

“Neither/Nor: The Productive Frustration of Classification in Jean Toomer’s Cane”, Nissa Ren Cannon argues that Toomer’s Cane “has proved elusive for scholarly classification.” Although Toomer displays modernist credentials in the sense of the explicit references to and resonances with high modernist works, Cannon argues that the foregrounding of race in the work can problematize viewing the work simply as a modernist text when it is so clearly aligned with a distinct African American literary tradition. Ultimately Cannon sees the text as liminal, fitting comfortably with “neither the Anglo-American nor the African American literary tradition” but a novel that “destabilises classification to propose the possibility of a new racial paradigm.” In “Modernism in the Muck: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Watching God, Margaret Cullen locates Hurston’s novel within the welcoming tendency of thinking of Modernism in a plural sense, a tendency that “encourages more open and flexible encounters with literary works that fall outside established conventions.” In ways that may be aligned with Jean Toomer’s Cane, Cullen notes that Their Eyes Were Watching God, emerges “among diverse literary modernities as a unique and localized African American response.” Focusing on the main character’s spiritual development, Cullen notes resonances with a Whitmanesque “impulse to directly experience” and a Lawrentian interest in nature, and concludes that Hurston’s modernist exploration of spirituality ends appropriately, in an era of “radical uncertainty”, without closure. The final chapter in this section, Calum Mechie’s “Funny Old Fatty Bowling: George Orwell’s Comedic Common Man”, is less an encounter with Modernism than with the modernity of interwar Britain. It takes as its subject the maverick voice of the main protagonist of Orwell’s novel, Coming Up For Air, George Bowling. For Mechie, “Fatty Bowling embodies, in a very literal sense, the common man; his comedic, dialectical and, indeed, maverick modern voice speaks to and for an imagined community of ordinary English chaps.” Aligning Bowling’s comedy with a broader English tradition that includes Donald McGill’s picture postcards and the music hall as well as Dickens and Shakespeare, Mechie demonstrates how comedy is utilised to attack contemporaneous political ideas such as Culture and Progress, and as such offers a subversive voice that Orwell deploys as a comedic counterpoint to the polemical patriotically socialist tracts of the war years. The final section of the volume, “Maverick Voices within or on the Peripheries of Modernism” offers a reading of a number of artists that destabilise more conventional reading of Anglo-American Modernism. xviii Introduction

Brian Fox in “ ‘[E]xtreme consciousness’: D. H. Lawrence and America’s Challenge to European Modernism” makes two central claims for D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature. The first is that Lawrence’s essays are “particular expressions of contemporary European culture and literature—specifically those works that are now generally referred to as Modernist.” In Lawrence’s view, modernist writers such as Joyce are “too mental”, overly concerned with knowledge and understanding at the expense of being and thus while Studies appears ostensibly concerned with American Literature it is a “highly calculated challenge to Modernism and even modernity itself.” Fox’s second claim is that the Studies “satisfies most standard criteria for admission into the Modernist canon.” For Fox the polyvocality of these essays, the elision between fiction and non-fiction writing, the indeterminancy of the authorial voice to the point of self-contradiction, and the self-conscious experimentation with language and forms “mark out Studies as quintessentially Modernist.” In “ ‘What in the world is all this about?’ Avant-Garde and Decadence: Djuna Barnes’s Short Stories and the Modernist Canon”, Lucrecia Radyk examines Barnes’s short prose in the context of English Decadence in order to both clarify the relations between Barnes’s literature and the literary past and to suggest an interpretation of the role this past plays in the texts. By placing her short stories in a wider literary tradition, Radyk sheds light on the difficulties that have often perplexed critics regarding Barnes’s shorter fiction. Radyk concludes that Barnes’s stories can be placed within the modernist tradition but with the important proviso that the Modernist tradition should be “conceived not as a break with the past but as a continuation of earlier literary periods.” Nathan O’Donnell’s “Modernismus: Wyndham Lewis, Sir Reginald Blomfeld and the Narrative of ‘Modernism” discusses the disputed term Modernism within the field of architecture in the nineteen thirties, comparing two significant texts of the 1930s: Sir Reginald Blomfield’s Modernismus and Wyndham Lewis’s essay, “Plain Home-Builder: Where is Your Vorticist?” Through his comparative analysis, O’Donnell complicates “the often-simplistic opposition between the conservatism of the “establishment”—embodied in the institutional bogeyman of the much-derided Royal Academy—and the pioneer-radicalism of the heroic new architects.” O’Donnell shows how much of the “shared aesthetic territory between the two critics is, however, overpowered by polemic.” The final essay in the collection, Hannah Van Hove’s “ ‘I have to touch, as another man will look’: The (Un)Seeing Gaze from the Peripheries of Modernism in Rayner Heppenstall’s The Blaze of Noon”, examines the now little read thirties novel The Blaze of Noon by the maverick author We Speak a Different Tongue xix

Rayner Heppenstall, showing how the novel “can be understood as looking simultaneously back to the modernist tradition and forward to French post-war literary developments.” The Blaze of Noon can be seen to draw “on the modernist tradition, not only with regards to its insistence on the modernist turn inwards, but also due to its preoccupation with memory”, and in prefiguring the chosisme of the nouveau roman, The Blaze of Noon can also be linked to the post-war French novel. As with many other contributions to this volume, O’Donnell shows the historical fluidity of the term Modernism, and Van Hove shows a blurring of literary classification in which texts do not readily fit into available literary categories.

PART I:

CONTEXTS

CHAPTER ONE

“DESTROYING NATURAL TIES”: RADICAL POLITICS AT THE MARGINS OF MODERNISM

CORD-CHRISTIAN CASPER

Introduction

The threat of impending anarchy looms large in the fiction of Henry James and Joseph Conrad. In this strand of modernist writing, anarchy is understood neither in its etymological sense as the absence of a ruler nor as “the highest form of order”1 attributed to it since Proudhon’s assertion that “[a]s man seeks justice in equality, so society seeks order in anarchy.”2 When James and Conrad take up a radical theme, it is, instead, connoted with an incipient dissolution of order. This drift towards social breakdown is not presented as an impersonal dynamic but is closely aligned with the stereotype of the anarchist, imagined as “a mere promoter of disorder who offers nothing in place of the order he destroys.”3 Rather than merely corroborating this image, however, the subset of narratives which includes James’s The Princess Casamassima (1886) as well as Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) and the short stories “An Anarchist” and “The Informer” (1906) explores the ideology, functions and effects underlying the creation of this negative representation of political radicalism and its proponents.

1 David Goodway, Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow: Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006, p. 6. 2 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. What is Property?, trans. and ed. Donald R. Kelley and Bonnie G. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 209. 3 George Woodcock, Anarchism. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962, p. 7. “Destroying Natural Ties” 3

Conrad’s and James’s portrayal of anarchism is characterized by its explicit treatment of this radical theme. In their strand of modernist fiction, self-professed anarchist protagonists are presented as a threat to the diegetic status quo. This threat is not restricted to an attack on a political system. In one of the few programmatic statements on the goals of his revolutionary endeavours, Paul Muniment in The Princess Casamassima (1886) calls for a wholesale relinquishing of “our affections, our natural ties, our timidities, our shrinkings.”4 According to his brand of radicalism, “[a]ll those things are as nothing” (503) in view of a lightly sketched and perennially deferred grand design for future revolution. Letting go of “natural ties” is not, however, presented as a merely destructive process: the novel stages the appeal of reducing to “nothing” restrictive claims to individual or collective identity alongside the presumed “natural” foundation undergirding them. This is, firstly, the case within the histoire, as protagonists like James’s titular Princess, lured by the promise of untying “natural ties,” embark on a project of inventing new identities for themselves. Radical projects are also, however, an occasion for experimentation on the level of discours, as the escape from stultifying social roles engendered by the promise of anarchism enables shifting modes of narrative mediation, culminating in the disjointed perspectives displayed in The Secret Agent. The ambivalent representation of anarchism in James’s and Conrad’s narratives can be connected to two main functions: firstly, a radical theme is taken up to explore the possibility of alternative identities beyond the pale of social conventions. This representation of radically reimagined identities is, secondly, contained by reintroducing stereotypes of the anarchist as a bomb-wielding terrorist devoid of political goals. While all of the texts under consideration lay bare the fabrication of such a stereotype and the interests served by its dissemination, the figure of the destructive anarchist nonetheless serves to cancel out the experimental modes occasioned by the protagonists’ exploration of political radicalism.

What is an Anarchist?

Anarchism has played a significant role in the development of literary modernism. The combination of a radical literary and political agenda contributes to what Raymond Williams describes as the “initial linkage between the violent assault on existing conventions and the programmes

4 Henry James, The Princess Casamassima. London: Penguin, 1987, p. 503. Further references appear in the text. 4 Chapter One of anarchists, nihilists and revolutionary socialists.”5 According to David Kadlec, it is especially due to the impact of individualist anarchism that “much of early modernism is marked by libertarian politics by way of autonomous form and fragmented style,” a conjunction which includes “Flaubert, Mallarmé, Pater, Ibsen, Wilde, Joyce, and T.S. Eliot.” 6 As David Weir puts it, “ideas particular to anarchism were adapted by poets and novelists in such a way that the outcome of those ideas was aesthetic rather than political.”7 Thus, while anarchism never gained the status of large-scale communal practice in Britain, it functioned as a modernist “reformist impulse” influencing the “enactment of revolutionary conceptions of identity … prohibited by realist conventions of representation.”8 It is a hypostasized version of one such revolutionary notion, namely Max Stirner’s egoist anarchism that enables Dora Marsden’s advocacy of the liberation of the ego from conventions; regarding Stirner, she exults that

[t]he entire conceptual world, the complete thought-realm he attacks and overcomes and lays at the feet of Ego. Morality, religion, God, and man are all brought low. They no longer rule as external powers influencing the Ego.9

Conrad’s and James’s narratives, although they represent protagonists in various stages of enthralment with an anarchist rejection of external powers, constitute a distinctive second modernist mode of engaging with radical politics. In contrast to the “Modernist appeals to immediate forms of expression [which] stemmed from … anarchist writings” such as Marsden’s,10 their texts mainly feature stereotypical anarchists rather than a sustained engagement with anarchism as an “ethical discourse about revolutionary practice.” 11 While these narratives revive clichés of terroristically inclined stock figures invented in late-Victorian dynamite fiction, they do not, however, reproduce that genre’s tendency to “spread

5 Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists. New York: Verso, 1989, p. 57. 6 David Kadlec, Mosaic Modernism: Anarchism, Pragmatism, Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000, p. 181. 7 David Weir, Anarchy and Culture: The Aesthetic Politics of Modernism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997, p. 161. 8 Kadlec, Mosaic Modernism, p. 14. 9 Dora Marsden, “The Growing Ego,” The Freewoman 38 (1922): p. 222, http://library.brown.edu/pdfs/1302278128435753.pdf. 10 Kadlec, Mosaic Modernism, p. 224. 11 David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004, p. 8. “Destroying Natural Ties” 5 alarm and provoke reaction,” as Jacques Berthoud has pointed out. 12 Instead, this second mode of modernist engagement with anarchism explores the appeal of radical politics whilst also evaluating the strategies and agendas of those who turn anarchists into scapegoats for a perceived cultural decline. Such strategies are encapsulated by Max Nordau’s Degeneration translated into English in 1895. This tract represents anarchism as one of several epiphenomena of modernity caused by

the vertigo and whirl of our frenzied life, the vastly increased number of sense impressions and organic reactions, and therefore of perceptions, judgments, and motor impulses, which at present are forced into a given unit of time.13

According to Nordau, the “anarchist who, according to the degree of his impulsions, either merely writes books and makes speeches at popular meetings, or has recourse to a dynamite bomb” 14 may be a threatening representative of the reiterated confusions of the modern world, but Degeneration offers the assurance of pseudo-scientific diagnostic tools in order to identify, explain and vilify him. Nordau’s insistence that a whole host of degenerative tendencies can be distinguished from sane cultural endeavours updates Matthew Arnold’s earlier notion that culture as a “disinterested endeavour after man’s perfection”15 can be set apart from the “anarchical tendency of our worship of freedom in and for itself.”16 This strategy, as Christopher GoGwilt points out, hinges on “education, national heritage, artistic production … being blurred in a single word. In this sense, Arnold’s mid-Victorian articulation of culture persists not despite but because of its confusions.” 17 Although Nordau writes in a different tradition from Arnold (Degeneration takes its cues from the discourse of criminal atavism), his evocation of anarchism pursues a similar strategy of demarcating culture and anarchy, an analogous blurring of discordant phenomena into a single explanation. The resultant

12 Jacques Berthoud, “The Secret Agent,” in The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, ed. J. H. Stape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 108. 13 Max Nordau, Degeneration. New York: D. Appleton, 1895, p. 42. 14 Ibid., p. 265. 15 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. Jane Garnett. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 21. 16 Ibid., p. 57. 17 Christopher Lloyd GoGwilt, The Fiction of Geopolitics: Afterimages of Culture, from Wilkie Collins to Alfred Hitchcock. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000, p. 57. 6 Chapter One symptoms of crisis, which, as Nicholas Daly has recognized, complement an “increasingly shrill rhetoric of decline,” 18 encompass a range of purported phenomena, from individual mental dispositions to what Nordau terms an impending “fin-de-race.”19 The radical Other is a convenient invention: as imagery of deterioration preponderates, the anarchist as a stereotypical figure of destructive modernity provides readers with the assurance of a stable index of breakdown. Rather than answering the question “what is an anarchist?” in terms of Arnold’s differentiations or Nordau’s taxonomy, Conrad’s and James’s strand of literary modernism challenges the motives of whoever is asking this question in the first place; the label “anarchist” is shown to be instructive concerning the interests of those promulgating it as a floating signifier of adaptable otherness.20 In order to question and evaluate the ways in which the stereotype of the political radical is created, reproduced and disseminated as convenient embodiment of cultural decline, the very divide between culture and anarchy is collapsed in Conrad’s and James’s fiction. Two strategies of disintegrating this binary opposition can be differentiated: firstly, the anarchist is represented as a fabrication and, secondly, anarchy acquires characteristics previously assigned to semantic spaces of culture.

The Fabrication of Anarchism

As Klaus and Knight point out, “[t]he confusions about anarchism, ranging from its equation with terrorism to its identification with disruption and chaos, are legion.”21 Conrad’s short story “An Anarchist” represents these ostensible “confusions” as deliberate strategies designed to create a convenient figure of political alterity. The text traces the violent imposition of the label of an anarchist upon a hapless protagonist by an arbiter of corporate capitalism. After pursuing and threatening an escaped convict, the manager of B.O.S., a “famous meat-extract manufacturing

18 Nicholas Daly, Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 30. 19 Nordau, Degeneration, p. 2. 20 Cf. Ernesto Laclau, “Politics and the Limits of Modernity,” Social Text 21 (1989), p. 80. 21 H. Gustav Klaus and Stephen Knight, introduction to “To Hell with Culture”: Anarchism and Twentieth-Century British Literature, ed. H. Gustav Klaus and Stephen Knight. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005, p. 1. “Destroying Natural Ties” 7 company,”22 makes good on his exultant promise to “tame you before I’m done with you” (5). Initially, the manager alternately claims that the escapee “was not an anarchist” and that “he must be an anarchist, after all” (6), only to subsequently give up this attempt at performing popular political taxonomy altogether. In order to enslave the convict, he instead decides to impose the interpretation most suitable to the company’s needs. The question “Is he really an anarchist?” (4), posed by the narrator, is shown to be irrelevant in view of the ensuing fabrication of a figure of political otherness. The manager’s answer is prompt: “I gave him that name because it suited me to label him that way” (4). This act of labelling does not have to supply any explicit characteristics; it suffices to set up the convict as a bearer of contradictory fears, all of which appear the more plausible the more he is forced to “deny nothing, nothing, nothing” (4). The manager exerts unchecked violence in order to turn the protagonist into an anarchist stereotype embodying fears of just such violence, of “subversive sanguinary rot doing away with all law and order” (8). This process recalls the B.O.S. “modern system of advertising” (1): the anarchist label prefigures interpretations, relegating the interlocutor to the moot question whether the man does or does not conform to preconceived notions of a radical. The narrator, despite stressing that he is not “gullible” (2), partakes in the labelling of the convict until the very end of the story, just as he “had to swallow B. O. S.” (2) regardless of his disgust and his avowed imperviousness to advertisements. The strategy of fabricating a stereotypical anarchist culminates in the manager’s adept use of clichés already circulating in the community adjacent to the company estate.

[T]he name he had given him would prevent the fellow from obtaining employment anywhere in Horta. … They called him Anarchisto de Barcelona, as if it were his Christian name and surname. But the people in town had been reading in the papers about the anarchists in Europe and were very much impressed. Over the jocular addition of ‘de Barcelona’ Mr. Harry Gee chuckled with immense satisfaction. ‘That breed is particularly murderous, isn’t it?’ ... he exulted, candidly. ‘I hold him by that name better than if I had him chained up by the leg to the deck of the steam-launch. (7)

The conjunction between the mass-media propagation of latent fears of anarchism and corporate interests functions although the “vaqueros”

22 Joseph Conrad, “An Anarchist: A Desperate Tale,” in The Complete Short Fiction of Joseph Conrad, ed. Samuel Hynes. Hopewell: Ecco, 1992, p. 1. Further references appear in the text. 8 Chapter One relaying the news of the purported anarchist do not even “know what an anarchist was, nor yet what Barcelona meant” (7). In order to render any solidarity with the prisoner impossible, the company merely has to enable the townspeople to project sensationalist journalistic stereotypes upon the purported delinquent. The escapee is set up as the focal point for pre- existing hyperbolic representations of terrorism and inscrutable radicalism. Considering the rich tradition of anarchism as a political philosophy and practice, Irving Howe is fully justified to regard Conrad’s representation of the radical world as a “coarse-spirited burlesque.”23 This short story, however, presents the emergence of such burlesque rather than straightforwardly proposing it as an adequate description of anarchists, their goals or their methods. The reader can trace the means by which radical stereotypes are set up as a shared set of assumptions, rendering the floating signifier of “anarchist” the more efficacious the less explicitly the threat can be circumscribed. The radical burlesque provides the anarchist as a perpetual, unquestioned obverse of communal identity. That literary anarchists “are mere shams and therefore no reflection on the radical world” should not prompt a denunciation of Conrad’s story as complicit in this misrepresentation;24 it is precisely by laying bare the way in which such a sham is fabricated and forced to endlessly reiterate the all-purpose phrase “I deny nothing” that the ideological function of exacerbated fears of anarchism can be exposed. The fabrication of a figure beyond the pale of reason embodying unconstrained violence is shown to successfully detract from literal and metaphorical corporate violence. Conrad’s The Secret Agent, likewise, revolves around the attempt to fabricate an anarchist threat. An autocratic regime, presumably Russia, attempts to create popular demand for “universal repressive legislation” by staging a faux-anarchist attack on the Greenwich observatory. 25 This simulation of terrorism is to be achieved by a meticulously calibrated “act of destructive ferocity so absurd as to be incomprehensible, inexplicable, almost unthinkable” (25). The ambassador compares bombs to “means of expression” (25): similar to concepts of defamiliarization, these are to be deployed in such a way as to “make strange” habitual explanations and to exceed any “ready-made phrases” (24). Whereas most notions of defamiliarization, as Jean la Marche has shown, posit that the “familiar

23 Irving Howe, “Conrad: Order and Anarchy,” in The Secret Agent: A Casebook, ed. Ian Watt. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1973, p. 145. 24 Ibid., p. 146. 25 Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 23. Further references appear in the text. “Destroying Natural Ties” 9 also forestalled certain liberations,” the ambassador’s simulated attack is geared towards a permanent disturbance of familiar concepts.26

A bomb outrage to have any influence on public opinion now must go beyond the intention of vengeance or terrorism. It must be purely destructive. It must be that, and only that, beyond the faintest suspicion of any other object (24).

Attributing the attack to anarchism is particularly apt due to its abiding connotations of motiveless violence: it is associated with the “shocking senselessness of gratuitous blasphemy” (24). Like the company’s tactics in “An Anarchist”, the ambassador’s construction of political radicalism is designed to evoke a homogenous alterity of revolutionary discontents. Anarchism is to be set up as a mere blanket term to conflate “the most distinguished propagandists with impulsive bomb throwers” and to misrepresent “the social revolutionary party as … a perfectly disciplined army” (22). The anarchist should emerge from the attack on the observatory—the metonym of “the sacrosanct fetish … of science” (23)—as an unknowable figure. As an inscrutable embodiment of crisis, anarchism is thus supposed to elicit an undifferentiated fear which, as Nicholas Daly notes, “had the effect of buttressing—not enfeebling—the power of the state.” 27 The explosion as the objective correlative of the intended sense of dissolution is a sign which, as Weir recognizes, is “so larded with irony that its political meaning is rendered absurd: anti-statist scientific anarchism is sponsored by the state in an attack on science,” which, in addition, “must appear pointless, so as to subvert subversion.”28 Instead of being offered a stable radical Other in the manner of Degeneration, the reader of The Secret Agent is made privy to the construction of anarchist alterity. Following Ernesto Laclau, there is a “constitutive distortion” at work in these tactics: in order “to project into something which is essentially divided the illusion of a fullness and self-transparency that it lacks,”29—in this case an international consensus on repressive measures—a concomitant outside has to be delineated, a fabricated threat against which this fullness is to be defined.

26 Jean La Marche, The Familiar and the Unfamiliar in Twentieth-Century Architecture. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, p. 6. 27 Nicholas Daly, Modernism, p. 33. 28 Weir, Anarchy and Culture, p. 77. 29 Ernesto Laclau, “The Death and Resurrection of the Theory of Ideology,” MLN 112 (1997), p. 301. 10 Chapter One

The Appeal of Anarchism

The construction of an anarchist Other calls into question the clear-cut differentiation between culture and anarchy sought by Arnold and restated by Nordau: in Conrad’s fiction, the beneficiaries of a simulated anarchist threat ensure the perpetuation of corporate or autocratic interests rather than any semblance of Arnoldian “culture,” that “most resolute enemy of anarchy because of the great hopes and designs for the State which [it] teaches us to nourish.”30 There is, however, a second reason why this differentiation is shown to fail in the political fiction by Conrad and James; the texts dramatize the appeal of anarchism. The protagonists engage in radical political activity themselves rather than accepting the manufactured images of ressentiment-ridden revolutionaries. These endeavours are not just a temporary phase of indulging in a brand of anarchism which Steven Gary Marks identifies as “the ‘radical chic’ of the 1890s, appealing for its attacks on the philistine bourgeoisie, the state, and modernity.”31 Instead, the very differentiation between culture and anarchy is called into question as the protagonists of Conrad’s “The Informer” and James’s The Princess Casamassima dabble in radical activism. In the short story “The Informer,” anarchism is en vogue among the bourgeoisie: the propagandist Mr X informs the narrator that he has sold “hundreds of thousands of copies”32 of his pamphlets to the “well-fed bourgeoisie” (24). His writings, he boasts, were “at one time the rage, the fashion—the thing to read with wonder and horror” (24). Rather than a construction of a radical Other as in “An Anarchist,” X is presented as a figure of authorial control, effortlessly catering to the popular demand for “the ideas of the day after tomorrow” (25). He even provides an explanation for the broad appeal of his screeds: a “demagogue has only to shout long enough and loud enough to find some backing in the very class he is shouting at” (25). The pamphlets constitute a literary attack upon a class unable to differentiate between “pose and gesture” (25) on the one hand and “words that have no sham meaning” (25) on the other. In this milieu, in which the anarchist becomes a source of ambivalent fascination instead of a figure of pathologized alterity, any delineation of culture and anarchy is relinquished.

30 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, pp. 149-150. 31 Steven Gary Marks, How Russia Shaped the Modern World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003, p. 45. 32 Joseph Conrad, “The Informer: An Ironic Tale,” in The Complete Short Fiction of Joseph Conrad, ed. Samuel Hynes. Hopewell: Ecco, 1992, p. 24. Further references appear in the text.