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War Worlds: Violence, Sociality, and the Forms of Twentieth Century Transatlantic Literature

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War Worlds: Violence, Sociality, and the Forms of Twentieth Century Transatlantic Literature War Worlds: Violence, Sociality, and the Forms of Twentieth Century Transatlantic Literature by Sean F. Ward Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Michael V. Moses, Supervisor ___________________________ Priscilla Wald ___________________________ Joseph Donahue ___________________________ Aarthi Vadde Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2016 i v ABSTRACT War Worlds: Violence, Sociality, and the Forms of Twentieth Century Transatlantic Literature by Sean F. Ward Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Michael V. Moses, Supervisor ___________________________ Priscilla Wald ___________________________ Joseph Donahue ___________________________ Aarthi Vadde An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2016 Copyright by Sean F. Ward 2015 Abstract “War Worlds” reads twentieth-century British and Anglophone literature to examine the social practices of marginal groups (pacifists, strangers, traitors, anticolonial rebels, queer soldiers) during the world wars. This dissertation shows that these diverse “enemies within” England and its colonies—those often deemed expendable for, but nonetheless threatening to, British state and imperial projects—provided writers with alternative visions of collective life in periods of escalated violence and social control. By focusing on the social and political activities of those who were not loyal citizens or productive laborers within the British Empire, “War Worlds” foregrounds the small group, a form of collectivity frequently portrayed in the literature of the war years but typically overlooked in literary critical studies. I argue that this shift of focus from grand politics to small groups not only illuminates surprising social fissures within England and its colonies but provides a new vantage from which to view twentieth-century experiments in literary form. iv Table of Contents Abstract ..............................................................................................................................iv List of Figures ...................................................................................................................vii Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................... viii 1. Introduction: The World Wars, the Politics of the Small Group, and Literary Form .....1 1.1 “this sombre spectacle of disaster”..........................................................................1 1.2 Wartime, Representation, and the Politics of Twentieth-Century Literature..........7 1.3 The Enemy, Collectivity, and Literary War Worlds .............................................18 2. “Indeterminate fable”: Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the Queer Times of Revolt, and Modernist Form.................................................................................................................36 2.1 “open-eyed, not obedient”.....................................................................................36 2.2 Modernism from Insurgency to Counterinsurgency .............................................37 2.3 “out of harmony with the normal”: The Sociality of the Revolt ...........................47 2.4 “a perverse work”: The “technique-less art” of Seven Pillars .............................56 2.5 Coda: The Lawrence Machine in Deleuze, Guattari, and Wu Ming 4.................69 3. The Blitz, the Séance Circle, and H.D.'s “Spiritual Realism”.......................................77 3.1 “a sort of receiving station”: Visionary Machines ................................................77 3.2 British War Culture, Aerial Bombardment, and War Writing ..............................85 3.3 Popular Spiritualism, “Spiritual Realism,” and Occult Communities of Feeling .92 3.4 Majic Ring: The Sociality and Techne of the Séance ...........................................99 3.5 Trilogy: Time, the Fragment, and the Alchemy of Form ....................................106 4. “to be a different kind of creature”: Blackness, Colonial Enmity, and the Novel as Social Form in George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin .........................................118 v 4.1 “Only rotting cargo”............................................................................................118 4.2 War, Colonial Violence, and the Novel ..............................................................123 4.3 The “image of the enemy”: Barbadian Anticolonialism and World War II........129 4.4 “Their legacy has not yet been determined”: Lamming's Children.....................138 4.5 Novels without Subject, without Citizens ...........................................................147 4.6 Coda: “to be a different kind of creature” ...........................................................156 5. Intimacies of Resuscitation: The Contemporary History Novel, World War, and the Beleaguered Little Community .......................................................................................162 5.1 “A hundred years from now they'll still be plowing up skulls” ..........................162 5.2 The Historical Novel and Modern War...............................................................169 5.3 Collective Memory and the Memory of Collectives: The For(u)m of Barker's Fiction .......................................................................................................................176 5.4 Queerness and the Small Group in Wartime .......................................................182 5.5 Erotohistoriography and the Queer Touch of Time ............................................192 5.6 Coda: The Limits of Commemoration ................................................................198 6. Epilogue, “Mongrel company”: Heterotopia and Novelistic Tableau in The English Patient .............................................................................................................................202 6.1 “citizened by their friendship” ............................................................................202 6.2 The “tremor of Western wisdom”: Tableaux Vivants and the Violence of Empire ...................................................................................................................................210 Bibliography....................................................................................................................218 Biography ........................................................................................................................233 vi List of Figures Figure 1: Eric Kennington, “A Forced Landing,” line drawing from Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926)…………………………………………………………………………...61 Figure 2: Eric Kennington, “A Literary Method,” line drawing from Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926)…………………………………………………………………………...67 vii Acknowledgements A book is a village built and inhabited by multitudes. Here are some of the names of those who helped to build, and in some cases to populate, this one: By order of appearance: At home: Mom, Dad, Brendan, Kevin, and Christian, Nana and Papa, The Morans, The Tourangeaus, Cason Johnson, Cooper Hibbard, Stuart Phelps, Andrew Mulvaney, Will Boland, and Tom Pedersen At Gonzaga: Derek Andreason At the University of Montana: Robert Baker, John Hunt, Louise Economides, and Chris Gustafson At the University of Toronto: E. Martin Nolan, Nathan Jung, Daniel Retson, and Christine Caruso Far out in Indiana: David and Jessica Shockey At Duke: Damien Adia-Marassa, Lynne Feeley, J. Peter Moore, Fran McDonald, Timothy Wientzen, Colby Bogie, Allison Curseen, Lindsey Andrews, Ashon Crawley, Fred Moten, Priscilla Wald, Brenna Casey, Kita Douglas, Ainehi Edoro, Michael Valdez Moses, Joseph Donahue, and Aarthi Vadde In memory of Kaila Brown who, amongst many other things, agreed we’d be anxious together (we’re still anxious together) Everywhere and always: Meghan viii 1. Introduction: The World Wars, the Politics of the Small Group, and Literary Form Sometimes I hardly knew where I stopped and everyone else began. The violent destruction of solid things, the explosion of the illusion that prestige, power and permanence attach to bulk and weight, left all of us, equally, heady and disembodied. Walls went down; and we felt, if not knew, each other. Elizabeth Bowen, “Preface” to The Demon Lover and Other Stories The state of emergency is also always a state of emergence. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture 1.1 “this sombre spectacle of disaster” At the end of H.G. Wells’ 1908 dystopian novel The War in the Air, protracted global combat has brought about the end of the Western world: “Europeanized civilization was, as it were, blown up. Within the space of five years it was altogether disintegrated and destroyed” (Wells 2005, 246). In Wells’ prophecy of the near future, technological development—the invention and mass production of airships resembling dirigibles and early airplanes, automatic rifles, and an assortment of bombs—has outpaced Western society’s capacity to mediate the relationship between humans and machines. Mass violence and material destruction occasion financial and then “universal social collapse” (Wells 2005, 251). A state of emergency replaces “ordinary
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