A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of Warwick Permanent WRAP URL: http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/104944 Copyright and reuse: This thesis is made available online and is protected by original copyright. Please scroll down to view the document itself. Please refer to the repository record for this item for information to help you to cite it. Our policy information is available from the repository home page. For more information, please contact the WRAP Team at: [email protected] warwick.ac.uk/lib-publications Epic Relation: The Sacred, History and Late Modernist Aesthetics in Hart Crane, David Jones and Derek Walcott By Matthew Ivan Rumbold A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Warwick Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies September 2017 CONTENTS Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………………………………………1 Declarations…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………2 Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….4 Introduction: Epic Relation……………………………………………..…………………………………………………………………………5 Chapter One: Twentieth Century Modern Epic: From Negation to Relation……………………………………….…..10 Troublesome Muse: Invocation of the name ‘epic’…………………………………………………………….10 Genre: characteristics of epic and epic as mode…………………………………………………………………28 Modern Epic! Wanted: Dead or Alive! Or ‘Epic is dead, long live epic’………………………………..40 Modern Epic Theories or ‘Why the Epic had to Die’: Hegel, Lukács, Bakhtin……………………….50 Between Negation and Relation: Modernist Epic……………………………………………………………….56 Chapter Two: ‘Transmemberment’ of Epic Song: Hart Crane’s The Bridge………………………………………………62 ‘Pindar for the dawn of the machine age’ or Absalom?..........................................................63 Spatial and Visual Architectonics………………………………………………………………………………………..92 ‘O choir, translating time|Into what multitudinous Verb’…………………………………………………119 Chapter Three: ‘What’s under works up’: David Jones’s The Anathemata and the Archaeological Epic….132 Tomb of the Unknown Modernist…………………………………………………………………………………….134 The ‘Break’ and the Bridge and the ‘Priest in the Catacombs’…………………………………………..156 Questions of Form and Aesthetics of History……………………………………………………………………177 Chapter Four: Walcott’s Omeros: Intimate Crossings and the Cultural Poetics of New World Epic……….229 Derek Walcott and the New World Epic……………………………………………………………………………230 Epic’s ruins, ancestral houses, and verandas…………………………………………………………………….238 Adamic imagination and the epic of island place………………………………………………………………278 Shipwreck Aesthetics: Poetics and History in the Epic of Relation…………………………………….300 Epic Restoration: Reassembling Antillean vase…………………………………………………………………306 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….327 1 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis would not have been possible without the generous and kind financial support of the Chancellor's International Scholarship and The Oppenheimer Fund Scholarship for South African students. I am especially indebted to Professor Emma Mason who has been my supervisor and provided me with incredible guidance, support and encouragement throughout my time at Warwick, and especially through the research and writing for this thesis. I am also grateful to John Fletcher and Professor Thomas Docherty who were sound mentors offering invaluable advice and intellectual support. My thanks also go to all my teachers, lecturers and colleagues who have been inspirational with their wisdom and dedication to literature and education. Without the love and care of my family and friends (also the furry four legged ones), I would not have been able to succeed in this epic effort. Particular thanks and love go to my mother, Denise. Lastly to my wife, Jane, who has been the most wonderful, compassionate and patient partner, I am ever grateful. 4 ABSTRACT In order to answer questions about the nature, viability and shape of what would constitute a modernist epic, this thesis explores three very different twentieth century writers, Hart Crane, David Jones and Derek Walcott. Rather than being a narrowly genre based study, however, I argue that in the twentieth century the ‘epic’ mode has become a malleable form with which to explore troubling legacies of history, empire and, to exhibit a dimension of the sacred in modernity. All three poets penned challenging epic poems (The Bridge, The Anathemata and Omeros respectively) in a condition of modernity. Haunted by the ruptures of history, in various ways, Crane, Jones and Walcott attempted to create an aesthetic which seeks cultural reintegration, recovery and reconciliation with the past. I analyse the formal experimental modernist aesthetic of each poet as they are anxiously and sometimes ambivalently influenced by the increasingly dominant institution of a particular form of metropolitan high modernism. This allows for a critique of modernity whilst contextualising a modernist inscription of imperialism. Finally, I show that the spiritual and religious concerns of these writers are essential in the recuperative or compensatory ideals of the epic. I argue that far from being an obsolete and impossible genre, for poets the epic is the very mode which best captures the transitions and conditions of an uneven and unequal modernity. I seek to show how through the trope of place (bridge, city, ruins, sacred sites and island), journey and the sea and other aesthetic devices, Crane, Jones and Walcott attempt to re-enchant emptied and destroyed cultural heritages. 5 Epic Relation: The Sacred, History and Late Modernist Aesthetics in Hart Crane, David Jones and Derek Walcott In order to examine the characteristics and concerns of the modern epic, this thesis investigates three very different twentieth century writers of epic poems: American poet, Hart Crane; Anglo-Welsh poet, David Jones; and West Indian writer, poet and playwright, Derek Walcott. Rather than being a narrowly genre based study focused solely on the assimilation and reworking of traditional tropes, motifs or conventions of the epic tradition, I argue that in the twentieth century the ‘epic’ constitutes an experimental poetic mode through which these poets explore troubling legacies of modernity, and history, and attempt to reveal a dimension of the sacred in modernity. I posit a notion of epic which is opposed to theories of epic that would characterise the genre as archaic and moribund, antithetical to modernity. Instead, I view the epic as an open aesthetic form which faces the paradoxes and tensions of modernity in an effort to produce what Ezra Pound famously defined as an epic, a ‘tale of the tribe’ and a ‘poem which includes history’. The thesis will analyse each epic in relation to three interrelated dimensions: a reaction to modernity; the encounter with history; and, the revelation of an artistic vison of the sacred or religious which offers the hope and possibility of transcendence, recovery and renewed spiritual dignity. All three poets have penned challenging epic poems (The Bridge, The Anathemata and Omeros respectively) in an unstable and turbulent condition of modernity which is characterised by fragmentation, violence, and disenchantment. In their efforts to make sense of and map the historical processes and the effects of a longue durée of modernity, each epic as a world-text engages with and reacts critically to the multiple forces of modernity. I focus on the materialist shaping dynamics of multiple modernities which will include how each epic involves a poetic transcription or rewriting of significant dynamics of modernity. In Crane’s The Bridge, I focus on temporal acceleration and spatial effects in the modernist portrayal of urban transport and space. Jones’s The Anathemata, composed in fragmentary fashion in the shadow of the recurrent trauma of his Great War experience is marked by the devastation of Total War. The text as archive and therapeutic space records Jones’s growing fears of the alienation and technological domination of modernity, 6 especially its threatening destruction of artistic practice and historical artefacts and knowledge. However, in order to challenge the dehumanising forces of an instrumental modernity that would reduce human endeavours to utilitarian objectives, Jones values the artist and interweaves this with a sacramental theology of history. For Walcott, attuned to the ecological pressures of the fragile island of St. Lucia and the Caribbean, modernity, especially in its neo-liberal late capitalist phase, threatens local culture, its heritage, rituals and ways of being. Walcott, rewrites traditional notions of epic in a hybridised form, in order to redress the fragmented and traumatic legacy of colonialism on the socio-cultural and historical nature of St. Lucia. Second, each epic engages with the material poetics and cultural politics of epic and modernity in order to fashion a form which is capable of expressing the complexity of modern life. Crane devotes his epic, in part, to reconciling the machine with the body through a use of the sublime experience of the Brooklyn Bridge. Jones, to whom Empire was a form of robbery, places an emphasis on Britain as a diverse nation space with an archaic Celtic-Welsh substrate or Matter of Britain. He lauds the forgotten and buried remains of defeated cultures and provides a haunting analogous situation in the present civilizational phase. Jones’s archaeological poetics attempt to recover and hold up the relics of a past and fragile British history, thereby