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Modernist Heresies Modernist Heresies Franke_final.indb 1 1/28/2008 4:39:43 PM Franke_final.indb 2 1/28/2008 4:39:43 PM Modernist Heresies British Literary History, 1883–1924 Damon Franke The Ohio State University Press Columbus Franke_final.indb 3 1/28/2008 4:39:44 PM Copyright © 2008 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Franke, Damon, 1968– Modernist heresies : British literary history, 1883–1924 / Damon Franke. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978–0–8142–1074–1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978–0–8142–9151–1 (CD-ROM) 1. Modernism (Literature)—Great Britain. 2. English literature—20th century—His- tory and criticism. 3. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 4. Religion and literature—Great Britain—History—20th century. 5. Religion and litera- ture—Great Britain—History—19th century. 6. Great Britain—Intellectual life—20th century. 7. Great Britain—Intellectual life—19th century. 8. Heretics, Christian—Great Britain—History. 9. Heresies, Christian, in literature. 10. Paganism in literature. I. Title. PR478.M6F73 2008 820.9’112—dc22 2007041909 This book is available in the following editions: Cloth (ISBN 978–0–8142–1074–1) CD-ROM (ISBN 978–0–8142–9151–1) Cover design by DesignSmith. Type set in Adobe Minion. Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Franke_final.indb 4 1/28/2008 4:39:44 PM E quelli a me: “Qui son li eresïarche con lor seguaci, d’ogne setta, e molto piú che non credi son le tombe carche.” —Dante, The Inferno “These are the arch-heretics of all cults, with all their followers,” he replied. “Far more than you would think lie stuffed into these vaults.” —Translated by John Ciardi Franke_final.indb 5 1/28/2008 4:39:44 PM Franke_final.indb 6 1/28/2008 4:39:44 PM Contents • List of Illustrations ix Preface xi Acknowledgments xvii Abbreviations xix Introduction The Heretical Vintage of Modernism 1 PART I The Academy of Modern Heretics 23 Chapter 1 A Society of Heretics 25 Chapter 2 The Early Years of the Cambridge Heretics, 1910–14 56 Chapter 3 Aesthetics and the Modern Heretics 76 PART II Modernist Literary Heresies 103 Chapter 4 Canonical Transformations 105 Chapter 5 Literary Paganism and the Heresy of Syncretism 142 Chapter 6 Fictions, Figurative Heresy, and the Roots of English 174 After Words The “Empires of the Mind” and the Control of Heresy 197 Appendix Meetings of the Heretics Society, Cambridge, 1909–24 219 Notes 231 Works Cited 241 Index 251 Franke_final.indb 7 1/28/2008 4:39:44 PM Franke_final.indb 8 1/28/2008 4:39:44 PM Illustrations • Figures Figure 1 The founders of the Cambridge Heretics Society, 1909–10 42 Figure 2 Triptych program of the Cambridge Heretics Society, Michaelmas term 1911 47 Figure 3 Cartoon lampooning “The Chawner Affair” at Cambridge 58 Figure 4 Announcement of Bernard Shaw’s address to the Heretics Society 109 Figure 5 The monument of Giordano Bruno, Rome 133 Figure 6 The Panoptic Eliminator 200 Figure 7 The Panopticon, or Basic Word Wheel 201 Figure 8 “Mr. Churchill Discovering Basic English” 212 Figure 9 C. K. Ogden holding the Panopticon 213 Table Table 1 The Laws of the Cambridge Heretics Society, October 1909 45 ix Franke_final.indb 9 1/28/2008 4:39:44 PM Franke_final.indb 10 1/28/2008 4:39:44 PM Preface • What follows is an intellectual history of the origins of British modern- ism. The nature of modernism constantly shifts, within its own purview, and within criticism, and this interdisciplinary study embraces such dynamic elusiveness. Aesthetic complexities abound, history is continuous and rup- tured at once, and religious concerns, in their very nature, tend to mystify certainty. At the same time, this book is an attempt at a synthesis of the discursive history of modernism, and as such it addresses the modernists in the terms of their own ambitions. For in the late Victorian, Edwardian, and High Modernist times, intellectuals faced the dying belief in a totalizing synthesis of the world. Many fought against a plunge into incoherence and fragmentation in their attempts at universalizing theories or in their inven- tion of substitute aesthetic devices. From the 1880s through the 1920s, the discursive exchange among artists, philosophers, and religious thinkers that initially sought to synthesize worldviews culminated in the pragmatic con- struction of modernist artificial or “synthetic” wholes. This is a story of the British modernists and a study of their work, and, even at a cursory glance, it raises the following questions: What do Virginia Woolf’s notion of char- acter and Walter Pater’s curious interest in the Mona Lisa share? What does a cadre of renegade priests have in common with the control of language in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four? What sort of thread weaves together Joan of Arc, The Golden Bough, and the advent of New Criticism? What link, beyond a mere study of statistics, connects compulsory chapel attendance at Cambridge with Keynesian economic theory? The answer to each of these queries is, in a word, heresy. The claim may seem bold and tenuous at first, but this common denominator underpins a forgotten dimension of the ori- gins of modernism, one deeply entrenched in Victorian blasphemy and the xi Franke_final.indb 11 1/28/2008 4:39:44 PM xii Preface crisis in faith, and one pointing to the censorship of modernist literature and some of the first doctrines of literary criticism. In April 1933, Hitler promulgated the policies of National Socialism, FDR was in the midst of the first hundred days of the New Deal, and T. S. Eliot traveled to the University of Virginia to deliver a series of lectures denounc- ing the modernist trend to insert the “diabolical” into literature. Though paltry in comparison to these worldly affairs, Eliot’s lectures, which would be published as After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (1934), are not as disparate as they may seem. Each platform positioned itself as a cor- rective to unwanted turns in twentieth-century history. Eliot’s self-righteous primer sought to teach readers how to discern whether an author wrote with a “proper” moral sense, and in such matters, he declared that “a spirit of excessive tolerance” was “to be deprecated” (20). April that year indeed was the cruelest month. For Eliot, orthodoxy could and should modernize tradi- tion, which he claimed “implies a unity of religious background” and “makes any large-number of free-thinking Jews undesirable” (20). The next winter fed a little life to tolerance when the U.S. Congress repealed Prohibition, and Judge John Woolsey overturned the censorship, on obscenity charges, of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Critics have handily debunked the intolerance, myopia, and anti-Semi- tism of Eliot’s claims, and Eliot himself later disavowed many of the senti- ments expressed in After Strange Gods. Nevertheless, the question remains: why would a major critic of the time frame modernist literature in terms of heresy? In answer, I find myself in accord with Eliot on three premises: religion is recurrently an important subject; heresy treats it as such; and scholars are responsible for confronting literary engagements with religion. At the same time, criticism handicaps itself if it assumes the rectitude of any orthodoxy and simply dismisses the opposition as wrong, or, as Eliot did, offers a sketchy and polemical moralization. In 1933, though, authoritarian answers won the day, and many modernists found themselves at the pulpit of prophecy, largely because for fifty years heretical discourses had confounded traditional accounts of the world. Part of Eliot’s frustration with modernism arises from this and from the fact that he could only define heresy as “wrong” and a characteristic result of “an exceptionally acute perception, or profound insight, of some part of the truth” (26). For purposes of this study, heresy should be understood, to quote the OED, both as “religious opinion or doctrine maintained in opposition . to that of any church, creed, or religious system, considered as orthodox,” and “by extension, opinion or doctrine in philosophy, politics, art, etc., at vari- Franke_final.indb 12 1/28/2008 4:39:44 PM Preface xiii ance with those generally accepted as authoritative.” Since the modernists accentuated the use of religious images, concepts, and festivals in their art, heresy, for them, shuttled with ease between religion and aesthetics. Religion and philosophy, conversely, never can escape the poetics of language. Heresy from 1883 to 1924, therefore, should be understood liberally, in that it was both a common interdisciplinary discursive mode and a rallying cry for the general critique of establishmentarian positions. Etymologically, “heresy” means a “choice one makes” or a “school of thought,” and a guiding principle for my investigations is to ask what happens when conflicting value systems or scholarly disciplines are placed in dialogue with each other. While heresy usually arises over differing interpretations of scripture or doctrine, often the interdicted discourse eventually becomes tolerated or even made orthodox. From 1883 to 1924 (a utilitarian demarcation explained in the introductory chapter), the prominent modernist heresy involved an attempt to syncretize contradictory schools of thought in resolu- tions which would theoretically dissolve the
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