Modernism and the Antimodern in the “Men of 1914”

Neohelicon (2016) 43:251–278 DOI 10.1007/s11059-015-0320-y

Modernism and the antimodern in the ‘‘Men of 1914’’

Kevin Rulo1

Published online: 23 December 2015 Ó Akade´miai Kiado´, Budapest, Hungary 2015

Abstract The modernism of the ‘‘Men of 1914’’—that group of writers so named by Wyndham Lewis that includes himself, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce (and to which is added here T. E. Hulme as one in total continuity with its orientations)—has long posed a conceptual challenge in that an aesthetic praxis of radical experimentation prevails in their work, but alongside a socio-cultural positioning often thought to be ‘‘reactionary’’ in the extreme. There have been many attempts throughout the history of modernist studies at reconciling these two apparently contradictory tendencies, with varying results, none of which could be considered deﬁnitive. The present article seeks to bring to bear the theoretical model of the ‘‘antimodern’’ articulated by Antoine Compagnon in his study of post-Revolution French literary history as a framework for re-conceiving modernism’s relationship to modernity. Understanding the ‘‘Men of 1914’’ to be a manifestation in the Anglophone context of Compagnon’s ‘‘antimodern’’ enables us to see, without oversimpliﬁcation or unnecessary politicization, how the modernist aesthetic of these authors, far from contradicting, actually follows from their socio-cultural attitudes. This analytical lens can also provide a richer account of the unity of the ‘‘Men of 1914’’ as an authentic literary group largely by demonstrating more profound connections (on this very question of modernity) between Joyce and the other members.

Keywords Modernism Á Antimodern Á ‘‘Men of 1914’’ Á Compagnon Á Tradition Á Satire

‘‘How can we reconcile an experimental aesthetic with a politics of the extreme right?’’ (Patke 2013, p. 61). This question, posed by Rajeev S. Patke in his recent

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1 The Catholic University of America, 620 Michigan Ave., Washington, DC 20064, USA 123 252 K. Rulo book Modernist Literature and Postcolonial Studies, has been asked by scholars of modernism many times before, a fact which suggests the difficulties that have been had in arriving at a satisfactory answer. Patke’s question—centered on the ‘‘seeming paradox’’ of ‘‘writing [that] is radical, experimental, and revolutionary’’ composed by authors with ‘‘views’’ that are ‘‘extremely conservative and reactionary’’ (2013, p. 60)—fits very well the identikit of the ‘‘Men of 1914,’’ that group so named by Wyndham Lewis that includes himself, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce (I add T. E. Hulme here as one close to the others both in terms of association and overall spirit).1 In general, answers have come in one of two variations. One possibility has been what I call, borrowing a turn of phrase from Shakespeare, the ‘‘mingled yarn’’ hypothesis, where two contrary phenomena—aesthetic leftism and cultural rightism—find themselves somehow yoked together, for some reason.2 Charles Ferrall’s study (2001) of ‘‘reactionary modernism’’ could be put in this category.3 Ferrall (2001) emphasizes how authors like Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Lawrence, and Lewis ‘‘combined a radical aesthetic modernity with an almost outright rejection of even the emancipatory aspects of bourgeois modernity’’ (pp. 9–13).4 The other possibility, not completely unrelated to the first, sees a much more

1 Lewis coined the term in his 1937 autobiographical work, Blasting and Bombardiering. Secondary literature on the ‘‘Men of 1914’’ is substantial, and expanding. See, among others, Symons (1987), Svarny (1988), Brown (1990), Scott (1995), Trotter (2001), Nicholls (2009), and Sicari (2011). 2 Much of the scholarship on the ‘‘Men of 1914’’ at least brushes up against these questions. A general progression can be discerned in the evolution of this scholarship from the radical side of the binary to the traditional. Once thought revolutionary, the ‘‘Men of 1914’’ are now often couched in terms of conservative social categories, mores, and attitudes, or as preservers of (masculine) tradition (Trotter 2001; Nicholls 2009). This view can be seen in Nicholls’s impressive guide (2009) when he notes, if only in passing, that for this ‘‘Men of 1914’’ modernism ‘‘the ‘new’ was a highly equivocal category, since cultural renovation was frequently projected as a return to the values of a previous age’’ (p. 163), and again when he writes that this type of modernism ‘‘issued a call to order in the name of values which were explicitly anti-modern, though it did so by developing literary forms which were overtly modernist’’ (p. 164). Exactly how the new is placed in the service of a return, or if it is truly a return or merely the ‘‘projection’’ of a return, is not directly pursued. The ‘‘antimodern’’ approach advocated for in the present essay conceives of these dynamics as decidedly not those of a return. As will be seen, the antimodern is an antimodern precisely by recognition of the impossibility of temporal reversals. For Sicari (2011), who deals less with the question of modernity as such, another layer of bifurcation is added to the mix diachronically with the positing in the larger oeuvres of the ‘‘Men’’ of an early 1920s blasting phase and a later phase of redemptive humanism (my argument here questions whether there might not be redemption in the blasting critique itself). 3 Also relevant to this category is a very interesting and worthwhile study by Louise Blakeney Williams (2002) arguing that Hulme, Yeats, Ford, and Pound were ‘‘radical conservatives’’ who ‘‘opposed democracy and wanted to return to a preferable system that existed in the past’’ (pp. 75–76). Although an important contribution to modernism’s views of history, Williams’s analysis fails to resolve the tensions at work in writers like Hulme. The idea of a radical conservatism expresses well the yoked polarity but her analysis leaves the matter just there (and again with the idea of a return prominent but largely unexplained in its relation to radical revolutionary aesthetic strategies). 4 Ferrall presents these modernists as charmed by fascism but yet different from it on the basis of their ‘‘assertion of aesthetic autonomy’’ (Ferrall 2001, p. 2). But if he is right that modernism rejects Enlightenment values, and if as he himself points out fascism seeks the collapse of those boundaries so central to the Enlightenment project, and if again modernism ultimately rejects fascism in favor of aesthetic autonomy, then to what extent are the ‘‘reactionary’’ politics of reactionary modernism compromised? That is, to what extent does ‘‘reactionary modernism’’ uphold the paradigm of modernity, the critique or rejection of which is supposed to be its defining characteristic? 123 Modernism and the antimodern in the ‘‘Men of 1914’’ 253 harmonious relationship between the writing and the views of modernist authors. For Frank Kermode (2000/1967), Hayden White (1999), and Roger Griffin (2007), this type of modernism’s supposed ‘‘totalitarian’’ inclinations are carried through in one way or another in aesthetic practice. According to Kermode (2000/1967), the ‘‘traditionalist modernism’’ of the ‘‘Men of 1914’’ is said to exhibit ‘‘totalitarian theories of form matched or reflected by totalitarian politics’’ (p. 108). The spatial, mythic aesthetic serves a proxy for Hitlerian fixations.5 While the ‘‘mingled yarn’’ approach falters in its accounting for the relationship between the reactionary and the revolutionary, ‘‘fascist modernism’’ runs the risk of conflating the two halves, with the result that what is conceived as reactionary and revolutionary seems no longer altogether intelligible.6 And just as important, as Gerald Gillespie and Virgil Nemoianu have labored to emphasize, such an approach fails also to consider the bare fact that the aesthetic of modernism has hardly been the sole property of the political right (Gillespie 2010, pp. 8–9; Nemoianu 2000, pp. 41–57). And if Patke’s own answer to the query on reconciling modernism with itself does take the complexity of modernism into account, sensitive as he is to its deep engagement with its own historical situation, his focus on aesthetics as ‘‘coping mechanisms’’ (2013, p. 74) for the culturally frustrated similarly leaves much unsaid about the nature of the duality and its more foundational interrelations.7 Laudable as such efforts are, useful as they are in illuminating various dimensions of modernist literature, they ultimately fall short of providing definitive conclusions about modernism’s unity (or lack thereof). The reason why may very well lie not in the analyses themselves, but rather in the deep structures of our intellectual frameworks. It may in fact be that we do not presently have at our disposal the thought categories necessary for capturing and comprehending what can appear to us now only as a kind of socio-aesthetic schizophrenia or internal self-

5 Griffin’s work (2007) is a much broader historical attempt at contextualizing modernism’s potential for fascism in a vast array of cultural activities, including politics. His reading of literary modernism, however, relies heavily on Kermode’s argument. These writers, Kermode (2000/1967) argues, ‘‘retreated into some paradigm, into a timeless and unreal vacuum from which all reality had been pumped’’ (p. 113). Their work is imbued with the ‘‘formal elegance of fascism’’ (p. 114). From a much different theoretical perspective, Hayden White (1999) comes to many of the same conclusions, arguing that the modernists’ experiments in form amounted to an escape from ‘‘historical reality’’ that enacted the politics of fascism on the aesthetic plane (p. 22). An understanding of our authors in light of the concept of the ‘‘antimodern’’ offers quite a different picture: not a modernism of aestheticist withdrawal but instead a modernism of critical engagement and genuine interest in the world. 6 The ‘‘reactionary’’ for a fascist reading ends up being mostly about an obsession for ‘‘order,’’ which seems a rather narrow definition for what is often meant in describing these authors as reactionary. As a result, what is truly revolutionary in aesthetics is transformed into rightist schemes for uniformity and neatness. In this respect we could perhaps learn from first-time readers of high-modernist texts, for whom words like ‘‘order’’ do not readily come to mind. The formal qualities of modernist texts appreciate and cultivate differentiation, mixture, lack of regulation, spontaneity, asymmetry, relativity, reflexivity, erudition, subtlety, obscurity, critique, and open-endedness: i.e., the ludic in all its multifarious tonalities. If this form were to have a politics, I would wonder whether ‘‘fascism’’ would be the appropriate appellation. 7 Patke considers in this regard specifically the triumvirate of Eliot, Pound, and Yeats. For Patke, the ‘‘formal experiments’’ of these authors’ works can be explained in relation to their ideological beliefs as ‘‘coping mechanisms’’: ‘‘modernist experiments with language and form were no mere adventures of the mind; they were symptoms of strain, frustration and apprehension’’ (Patke 2013, p. 74). 123 254 K. Rulo contradiction. In the present study, I hope to be able to show that a much thicker descriptive account of these matters is attainable and that such an account can be developed through comparative literary-historical analyses of the dynamics of French literary history as articulated by Antoine Compagnon (2005, 2011) and his concept of the ‘‘antimodern.’’ It will be argued here that the idea of the ‘‘antimodernes’’ proposed by Compagnon can provide a conceptual framework applicable not only to his French context but, with some relatively minor adjustments, to the transatlantic modernism of the ‘‘Men of 1914.’’ Compagnon’s reading of French literary history after the Revolution can be profitably employed toward furthering our understanding of Anglophone literary and cultural history, and particularly in illuminating the way in which the modernists’ so-called ‘‘reactionary’’ dimensions can be acknowledged as intimately and profoundly connected, inextricably even, to their radical aesthetics, so that after Compagnon, we can perceive these authors to be utilizing modernist aesthetics precisely because of, rather than despite, those views of theirs which are routinely referred to as reactionary. And we can do so all while avoiding overly politicized readings that too often fail to grasp the complexities of either the aesthetic or the political. What Compagnon can help us to uncover is a modernism that is neither reactionary nor revolutionary (nor a chimerical amalgamation of the two), but something else altogether. To achieve these ends, the paper will proceed as follows: an initial section will review Compagnon’s influence and approach. Subsequent parts will examine the ‘‘antimodern’’ according to a variety of special topics. Questions about the coherence of T. E. Hulme’s thought and oeuvre will be considered. T. S. Eliot’s understanding of the relations of the past and the present will be explored in conjunction with the essentially ‘‘reactionary’’ approach of Charles Maurras, from whom he learned (and borrowed) much. The antimodern topos of the artist as dandy will be studied through the lens of Compagnon’s typology of antimodern style as vituperation or imprecation, here re-read as satire (taking satire to be both an aesthetic practice and cultural posture). Finally, the work of James Joyce will be analyzed as a separate case, owing to his perhaps more controversial status within the ‘‘antimodern’’ camp. What follows can be understood methodologically as a modest contribution to the larger project of ‘‘comparative literary history,’’ which in this case takes the form of re-mapping the terrain of transatlantic Anglophone modernism along coordinates provided by a largely French national history.8

The ‘‘antimodernes’’

The term ‘‘antimodern’’ has been used only sporadically in English, and with nothing approaching semantic uniformity (Lodge 1981, pp. 3–16; Berman 1982, p. 14; Jameson 1991, p. 56; Tuma and Dorward 2004, pp. 510–527; Comentale

8 For a particularly eloquent, yet concise articulation of the principles of ‘‘comparative literary history,’’ see the General Preface for Romantic Drama edited by Gerald Gillespie (1994), part of the Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages series sponsored by the International Comparative Literature Association and published by John Benjamins Publishing Co. 123 Modernism and the antimodern in the ‘‘Men of 1914’’ 255

2004, p. 70).9 No one in Anglophone literary studies has employed it toward the kind of sustained analysis that we find in Compagnon, a scholar of French literature who nonetheless has taught at Columbia and Cambridge and who maintains a breadth of focus beyond Gallican borders.10 His 2005 Les antimodernes: Joseph de Maistre a` Roland Barthes has found a receptive audience in his native France and has spurred a burgeoning field of antimodern studies there.11 I would like to be the first to apply his findings in systematic fashion within an Anglophone context, a possibility that he himself foresees.12 So who, or what, precisely are the antimoderns? Compagnon’s canon includes a variety of authors: from Joseph de Maistre and Chateaubriand to Baudelaire, Proust, Pierre Drieu La Rouche, and Roland Barthes, among many others. Amid the cultural dialectics of the French Revolution and the longue dureé of its aftermaths, these antimoderns can be distinguished from ‘‘moderns’’ on account of their refusal to be ‘‘duped’’ by modernity, the nature of this refusal ranging from ambivalence to hatred and disgust (Compagnon 2005, p. 8). Nevertheless, the antimoderns could not be called non-moderns. To the contrary, they are for Compagnon true moderns, moderns in freedom, because they are able to reflect critically upon modernity and are not slaves to the novelty of the modern (pp. 7–14). The antimoderns are something like the (evil?) twins of the moderns, the modern critics of modernity, who move forward but with their backs to modernity, as it were, with their gaze on the past (p. 441). They exhibit an intense nostalgia, but one which does not hope for a return to the past. Just as they can be differentiated from the moderns by way of their skepticism of the modernity in which they participate, the antimoderns can similarly be contrasted with ‘‘reactionaries’’ in that to be an antimodern is to be convinced that there can be no return to the past. Modernity is irreversible (p. 76). The antimoderns, therefore, combine a modernizing ‘‘audace litte´raire’’ (p. 10) with a critique of the modern, not because they are confused or conflicted but because they wish to offer a creative response to modernity, one that participates in it without being of it.

9 To give some sense of the possible variety of meaning: ‘‘Anti-modernism’’ for Tuma and Dorward refers to traditional poetic forms (2004, pp. 510–527). It signifies an ‘‘idealization of past cultures and their organically restrictive orders’’ in Comentale (2004, p. 70). Marshall Berman comes closest to Compagnon’s perspective when he writes that ‘‘to be fully modern is to be anti-modern’’ (1982, p. 14). 10 Compagnon has published significant work on literary theory, Baudelaire, Montaigne, Bruntie`re, and Bernard Fay. He remains an established authority on the work of Marcel Proust, having edited two volumes of A la recherche as well as a volume of the author’s letters. Although the canon of his work remains resolutely French, Compagnon has shown a particularly keen sense for developments in the world of literary studies beyond the confines of his native France. Among the topics that show forth this breadth of interest is his work on modernity, most especially Les cinq paradoxes de la modernite´ (1990) and Les antimodernes (2005). 11 See, for example, Huet-Brichard and Meter (2011), with essays of considerable range and interest, though focused almost exclusively on Francophone literatures. Mention should also be made here of ‘‘antimodern’’ studies from sources outside of France and of Compagnon’s theoretical model. The work of Sternhell (2010/2006) and Garrad (2006) serves as particularly significant examples. 12 Compagnon cites explicitly T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, among other authors outside of the Francophone tradition (2005, p. 12; 2011, p. 15). For a more micro-scale use of Compagnon’s antimodern lens for avant-garde/arrie`re-garde analyses of twentieth-century literature, see Marx (2009, pp. 65–67). 123 256 K. Rulo

This concept of the ‘‘antimodern’’ can serve modernist studies in many ways. It can help us to understand something of why we might want to, and why we do, study authors who exhibit attitudes or orientations that we might consider problematic precisely from the point of view of modernity. But even more, the ‘‘antimodern’’ as a theoretical instrument can aid in discriminating and articulating persuasively certain cultural dynamics that have heretofore been imperfectly understood. For Compagnon’s ‘‘antimodern’’ is precisely not a dead reactionarism. Such a thing surely exists and remains historically primarily an item of interest only to specialist scholars or to a small subset of imitators. Instead, the ‘‘antimodern’’ as a phenomenon can be defined largely by how it includes (in ways that challenge the reigning paradigms of traditional left/right binary thinking) that quality of ‘‘audace litte´raire’’ (2005, p. 10), the verve and liveliness of aesthetic and intellectual innovation so often associated with truly avant-garde social and aesthetic movements, with at the same time the stubborn dissatisfaction and disdain of more backward-looking orientations. For the antimoderns, the lack of total enthusiasm for modernity—ranging again from passive hesitancy to active revulsion—results not in a flight into the past but in a creative response, full of excitement and freshness. It is this aspect of their work that makes the antimoderns a fine vintage even into our own day. And it is this descriptive framework that can deepen and enrich our understanding of the work of the ‘‘Men of 1914.’’ But if these antimoderns can be distinguished from moderns and reactionaries, they can no less be differentiated from the postmoderns, who also critiqued modernity through a kind of literary audacity. As Compagnon himself has said, ‘‘Le postmoderne est aussi, malheursement, le post-antimoderne’’ (2011, p. 23). Postmodernity, argues Compagnon, can be understood to be the point at which the antimodern becomes itself a doxa (at which point it ceases to be truly antimodern), when the modern/antimodern dialectic has ceased to be operative. The postmodern is in this way something of a pseudo-antimodern, where the doppelga¨nger that is an other becomes a phantom or bogeyman, which may explain the anxiety of influence at work in postmodernism, the way in which the long shadow of modernism predominates. It also may explain much of the self-conscious artifice and irony of postmodernism, which seems all too aware that it is engaging in a game whose purpose has ended (or that what it is engaging in is a game now, precisely because its purpose has ended). The one is a modern critique of modernity, a critique that is a part of rather than a part from [as Compagnon puts it, the antimodern in its own way serves and preserves modernity, and is in fact the ‘‘salt’’ of modernity (2005, p. 448)]. The other is a postmodern critique of the modern. The one is a kind of double, a saboteur, chafing against its opposite, without whom it would not exist. The other is in some sense uncompromised, on the outside, beyond.

The coherence of T. E. Hulme

Perhaps no figure so starkly evinces the sense of modernism’s potential for ‘‘contradiction’’ as T. E. Hulme (Hansen 1980, p. 379). Thus Miriam Hansen (1980) encapsulates well the idea of an irreconcilable modern/antimodern polarity in her 123 Modernism and the antimodern in the ‘‘Men of 1914’’ 257 description of Hulme’s ‘‘fumbling articulation of a modern sensibility through reactionary dogmatism’’ (p. 379). As if this were not enough, the problems of ‘‘coherence’’ (Heffernan 2014, p. 884) extend also to the many ‘‘reversals’’ and near-constant shifting of Hulme’s thinking (Comentale and Gasiorek 2006, p. 10), and there is now more than ever a certain wariness about attempts at imposing unifying structure onto what is seen as his rather messy and variegated oeuvre. In the face of such reticence, understandable as it may be, I want to suggest that reading Hulme with Compagnon’s antimodern can open up new avenues for exploring congruity in his work, both in terms of his total oeuvre as well as in its diachronic aspect. The contradictions of Hulme’s work can be illustrated well enough by the fact that he figures both in the avant-gardist movements of early twentieth-century Europe and in the history of reactionary thought (Csengeri 1994; Levenson 1984, pp. 80–102). On the one hand, he was an important contributor to Imagism, both as a theorist and one-time poet, a kind of a revolutionary prophet in art, poetry, and culture. He would write about emergent philosophical and intellectual movements for The New Age and other outlets until his death on the battle fields in West Flanders in 1917. And he would do the same for avant-garde art, possessing as he did especial enthusiasm for the abstract paintings and sculptures of Jacob Epstein, Wyndham Lewis, and William Roberts, among others. At the same time, Hulme drew significant intellectual nourishment from rightist thinkers and orientations. In 1911, he met Pierre Lasserre in Paris, read Charles Maurras, and thereby began his assimilation of the politics and aesthetics of the French neo-royalist movement, L’Action française, and of their ideal of ‘‘classicism,’’ which included a high valuation of order and tradition over what the individual can accomplish. It will be helpful to analyze Hulme in light of both of these very real influences—that is, the avant-gardist and the traditionalist—in order to show the manner in which he ultimately embodies neither. If it is clear that Hulme owed much to the reactionary traditionalism of L’Action française, it should be no less apparent that he could not be considered himself a true disciple of that movement.13 We might even say that Hulme used the movement against itself, adopting certain of its rhetorical and intellectual positions in order to promote ideals and ideologies that were its perceived antagonists (e.g., modernist art and literature). For example, the kind of ‘‘classical revival’’ that Hulme (1994c/1911, p. 59) called for was far more innovative and experimental in intent than what was envisioned by Maurras’s ‘‘reńaissance classique,’’ for which Jean Moreás and Anatole France were important models (1922b/1904, p. 183; Lasserre 1902). Hulme observed that his new classicism would not resemble Pope because what it means to be ‘‘classical’’ must be different in Hulme’s very different moment: ‘‘Although it will be classical it will be different because it has passed through a romantic period’’ (1994c/1911, p. 65). Such historicism Maurras and Lasserre would no doubt condemn as itself anti-classical Romanticism. The efforts

13 Although there is not space enough to consider them at length, it cannot be forgotten that Hulme also drew much from other right-wing movements, including the British Tories and other continental thinkers like Georges Sorel. 123 258 K. Rulo for these latter thinkers are made toward a return to the ancien re´gime by purging away the decay and rot of Romanticism. But for Hulme, antimodern that he is, there is clear recognition of the futility of such a strategy, of the irreversibility of the events of modernity and therefore of the impossibility of a simple ‘‘return.’’ Hulme’s ‘‘classical revival,’’ therefore, is not a ‘‘return to Pope,’’ not a return to an earlier classicism, but rather something ‘‘vital,’’ something that, while reclaiming lost values of tradition and order, is nonetheless ‘‘fresh’’ and full of ‘‘an intense zest,’’ something new and daring (1994c/1911, p. 70). The important point is that Hulme’s appeals to values shared by the writers of L’Action française are accompanied by something else altogether problematic from their point of view, namely an aesthetic of ‘‘audace litte´rraire’’ (Compagnon 2005, p. 10) that can be found in the antimoderns as well as in the moderns, but that is lacking in its essentials from the currents of French reaction. On the other side of the ledger, Hulme’s avant-gardist credentials are beyond reproach, yet he can hardly be called one himself. The many twists and turns of Hulme’s thinking can be attributed at least in part to his sense for and excitement about the revolutionary innovation, in all areas of life. It is not surprising, then, that we should find in his writing an advocacy for the need for ‘‘freshness’’ or the ‘‘unexpected’’ as values worthy of distinguished art and literature (and even politics). You praise a thing for being ‘fresh’. I understand what you mean, but the word besides conveying the truth conveys a secondary something which is certainly false. When you say a poem or drawing is fresh, and so good, the impression is somehow conveyed that the essential element of goodness is freshness, that it is good because it is fresh. Now this is certainly wrong, there is nothing particularly desirable about freshness per se. Works of art aren’t eggs. Rather the contrary. It is simply an unfortunate necessity due to the nature of language and technique that the only way the element which does constitute goodness, the only way in which its presence can be detected externally, is by freshness. (1994c/1911, p. 70). What is most interesting in this passage, of which there are many others to be found in his work, is not its defense of the new but its rather half-hearted endorsement of the virtues of novelty. Unlike the ‘‘moderns’’ as Compagnon would define them, Hulme sees ‘‘freshness’’ not as an end unto itself but rather as a means toward genuine artistic achievement. He is not therefore an avant-gardist in the sense of reveling in the new for the sake of the new. If the new is the only pathway toward that ‘‘essential element of goodness’’ in the work of art, it is all the same only an ‘‘unfortunate necessity.’’ And it is in the interchange of novelty and its other, and in the continuous and insistent undermining of both, that the antimodern position lies. It is in a writer who says at one point that he is ‘‘in favour of the complete destruction of all verse more than twenty years old’’ (Hulme 1994a/1908, p. 50) (a sentiment that approaches the quintessentially ‘‘modern’’ mentality of an Artaud), but who at another moment decries the abomination of the ‘‘romantic’’ who ‘‘imagines everything is

123 Modernism and the antimodern in the ‘‘Men of 1914’’ 259 accomplished by the breaking of rules’’ (1994e/1912, p. 236).14 Or, in the other vein, there is the characteristically antimodern appeal of one who exalts with little interruption the Middle Ages as a kind of golden age while denying any desire for ‘‘a new medievalism’’ (1994g/1915–1916, p. 449). Or, similarly, it is the same for one who says, almost in one breath, that ‘‘it is no good returning to humanism, for that will itself degenerate into romanticism’’ (1994g/1915–1916, p. 451) and that ‘‘[t]he humanist period has developed an honesty in science and a certain conception of freedom of thought and action which will remain’’ and which should remain amid any epochal changes (p. 449). In this way, Hulme is acceptable neither to the moderns nor to the traditionalists. Instead, he establishes the need for both a countering thrust inspired by Maurras and his followers and a freshness inspired by the avant-garde whilst rejecting both the reaction-and-return posture of L’Action franc¸aise and the zealous novelties of the avant-garde. For Hulme the only way to stand against modernity is to modernize (a modernization of audacious, dissentient critique). Still, if the idea of the antimodern can prove decisive in resolving the binary dichotomizations perceived in Hulme’s total oeuvre, there remains the no less important matter of the evolution or mutations in Hulme’s thinking, of that ‘‘particularly modernist wanderlust’’ (Comentale and Gasiorek 2006, p. 2) which some consider most distinctive of his character of mind. Nowhere is the question more acute than in the case of his devotion to, and subsequent rejection of, Henri Bergson, who as Hulme puts it lifted him out of the ‘‘nightmare’’ of the mechanistic (1994d/1911–1912, pp. 127–128). From 1907, the French philosopher would be a guiding force for Hulme’s theories, including for an aesthetic of modern poetry that was so crucial to the emerging movement of Imagism. But at least in part as a result of his interactions with L’Action franc¸aise, Hulme would move away sharply toward anti-Bergsonian positions in 1911. Several causes have been proposed for the shift, from simple misogyny to political convenience.15 More recently, the tendency has been simply to embrace Hulme’s incoherence as key to the ‘‘ephemeral … almost weightless nature of his tastes, interpretations, and observations’’ (Heffernan 2014, p. 885). While each of these explanations has its plausibility and interest, understanding Hulme as an antimodern in Compagnon’s sense of the term could go a long way toward illuminating Hulmean coherence on the diachronic plane. As Compagnon’s study makes clear, the antimodern is itself a relative term that is just as much as about posture, orientation, in other words form, as it is about a set of doctrines to be subscribed to.16 This insight can be immensely helpful in the present case. Hulme’s adoption of Bergson, after all, can be read as an

14 While these two statements are somewhat far apart temporally, it is doubtful that this can be considered simply another example of Hulme’s shifty allegiances given that his ideas of ‘‘freshness’’ surveyed above from his 1911 essay against Romanticism seem compatible, at least in theory, with a notion of the inherently impermanent value of poetry, no matter the very real differences in intellectual influence that may have been behind Hulme’s thinking in each case. 15 Matz (2004) has argued, from Hulme’s own accounting, that at least one major basis for his jettisoning of Bergson was ‘‘the unsettling presence … of crowds of women’’ in attendance at one of Bergson’s lectures in London in 1911 (p. 340). Levenson (1984) sees the change, more philosophically motivated, to be a move from concern for ‘‘subjectivity’’ to ‘‘objectivity’’ (p. 102). 16 Compagnon (2005) discusses the dynamics by which Bergson is an antimodern according to Julien Benda but a modern in the eyes of L’Action française (p. 215). 123 260 K. Rulo antimodern protest against the rationalisms of the Enlightenment tradition, as a plea for intuition, creativity, and the organic in the face of the mechanizing stultifications of modernity.17 It is a critique that extends very far, to the processes and effects of bureaucratization and industrialization, to what Max Weber once famously referred to as those ‘‘specialists without spirit, hedonists without a heart’’ at the forefront of the modern socio-economic order (Weber 2002/1905, p. 121). Just as antimodern, though, would be Hulme’s eventual rejection of Bergson, this time over and against the modernity of the new for the new, of feeling and movement, of the ‘‘deification of the flux’’ (Hulme 1994f/1914, p. 277), with its lack of foundation, its subjectivity and ‘‘sloppiness’’ (1994c/1911, p. 66). As Compagnon (2011) has already said, the antimodern has a Janus face (p. 18). The appearance, however, is from an interpretative point of view misleading, the essential thing being the positioning, which for both Bergonsian and anti-Bergsonian Hulme is the same, what the later Barthes has called the rear-guard of the avant-garde (a phenomenon that is, it is important to note, neither rear-guard nor avant-garde).18

Eliot’s tradition

Charles Maurras, who as we have seen played an important if only momentary role in the formation of T. E. Hulme’s thought, influenced greatly the work of T. S. Eliot, and the intersections of these two writers offer an important site for considering the larger aporiae of ‘‘Men of 1914’’ modernism and the ‘‘antimodern’’ hermeneutic’s potential for achieving a new synthesis. Two of the more significant studies on Eliot and Maurras illustrate well how these larger quandaries about the unity of modernism reproduce themselves on the micro-level. The first, by Joseph D. Margolis, has argued that Maurras’s overall role in Eliot’s thought and work is marginal at best: ‘‘Maurras was important in Eliot’s intellectual development more as a negative example—as a figure from whose mistakes he learned—than as a model whom he uncritically followed’’ (1972, p. 97). The second, Kenneth Asher’s magisterial effort on this topic, contends that ‘‘the Maurrasien inheritance provided Eliot with a dominant intellectual framework that he retained throughout his life’’ (1995, p. 8). This disaccord is traceable to the problems in our inability to conceptualize properly the reactionary and revolutionary dimensions of modernism. Margolis’s position appreciates the very real differences between the two writers; Asher’s, on the other hand, provides a compelling account of an abiding and strong convergence. But if Asher is able to show that Maurras may have been more than simply a ‘‘negative example’’ for Eliot, still we are left wondering (as Margolis would, no doubt): If it were the case that Eliot is essentially a Maurrasian in outlook,

17 As Hulme (1994b) said of Bergson, ‘‘Others have attacked rationalism, but his is the only radical attack, the only attack which concedes nothing’’ (p. 86). There is much in this description and understanding of Hulme to be found in Frank Kermode’s analysis in Romantic Image (1957), a still useful if largely eclipsed interpretation of Hulme’s work. 18 Barthes uses the term in an interview with Jean Thibaudeau published in the autumn 1971 issue of Tel Quel (Compagnon 2005, p. 419). 123 Modernism and the antimodern in the ‘‘Men of 1914’’ 261 then why didn’t he write Maurrasian poetry? The picture presented is of Eliot as a yarn mingling a Maurrasian Weltanschauung with an anti-Maurrasian poetics.19 An antimodern reading of Eliot, I hope to show, can lift us above and beyond the impasse. To illustrate such an approach, the analysis here will focus on two essays by Maurras and Eliot on tradition and novelty, specifically related to the literary aspects of this polarity, with the aim of emphasizing both the extent of Eliot’s debt to Maurras, in areas where it is not at present as well appreciated, and also how the very debt itself evinces Eliot’s essential divergence from Maurras along antimodern lines. Known to Eliot from very early on, Maurras’s 1896 essay ‘‘Prologue d’un essai sur la critique,’’ which has been called a kind of ‘‘overture’’ (Boutang 1984, p. 480) for Maurras’s critical oeuvre, shows great resemblances in many areas to Eliot’s famous programmatic essay ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’’ (1932/ 1919). That Eliot would himself translate and publish Maurras’s essay over two 1928 issues of The Monthly Criterion (7.2–7.3) shows its importance for him. The date of the translation, however, has obscured the fact that Eliot was more than familiar with the essay already by the 1910s, a fact underscored by the thoroughly if unacknowledged Maurrasian argot of Eliot’s ‘‘Tradition.’’20 But if Eliot’s ‘‘Tradi- tion’’ owes much more to Maurras than has been sufficiently grasped, it also owes much less in another, more important sense. For in his essay Eliot produces a kind of antimodern innovation on Maurrasian tradition, modelling the Frenchman’s discourse and taking up his categories and concerns while infusing them with new meaning and alternative understandings. The same move toward Maurras ends up being an act of distancing from Maurras. So many of the more often quoted passages of Eliot’s ‘‘Tradition’’ have their probable origins in Maurras’s ‘‘Prologue.’’ Both authors speak of the ‘‘sacrifice’’ or ‘‘submission’’ of the poet to that which is outside of the self. Both refer to the artist or writer as someone who receives his or her language, milieu, genius, and sense of tradition from something other than the self. The language is often strikingly similar (reading the two essays, one cannot help but recall Eliot’s admission that great poets steal!). And yet each of these common perspectives, when further investigated, reveals at the same time profound misalliances in viewpoint. Maurras’s notion of sacrifice, for example, displays his more ‘‘neoclassical’’ inflections. His sacrifice is a sacrifice or submission to the order and truth of nature and of the particular genre within which one is writing. It is a recognition and an expression of freedom within the limits proper to the poet, who ‘‘n’a pas invente´ les prescriptions de sa technique’’ and, as a result, must submit to those ‘‘prescriptions’’ (Maurras 1922a/1905, p. 15). For Eliot, the sacrifice is primarily to the ‘‘medium’’ by which one recombines emotions in new ways, or, in the case of tradition, to ‘‘the present moment of the

19 Asher’s study is a response in large measure to a position expressed by some, including and perhaps originally by Bernard Bergonzi (1972), that Eliot only evolves toward a more Maurrasian position later as his concerns become more cultural rather than literary in orientation (pp. 115–119). Such a viewpoint necessarily overlooks the Maurrasian aspects of Eliot’s essay on ‘‘Tradition’’ that I will argue for here. 20 Leon Surrette has dealt with connections between the essays briefly in studies of modernist religion and politics (2008, pp. 60–63; 2011, pp. 165–167). Bernard Brugie`re (2007) in his consideration of French influences on Eliot’s essay on ‘‘Tradition’’ surprisingly mentions Maurras’s ‘‘Prologue’’ only in passing. 123 262 K. Rulo past’’ (1932/1919, p. 11). There is very little here of Maurras’s preoccupation with technique or decorum. Eliot’s ‘‘tradition’’ is, in a word, less ‘‘traditional’’ and marked by a greater plurality (beholden neither to an overemphasis on the classical nor to ethno-centrism). The two essays also speak at length and in very similar ways about the individual talent’s need for tradition in order to prosper, so much so that the shared vocabulary and conceptual landscapes cannot be merely coincidental. But here again, there is much below the surface. For Maurras, ‘‘that which tries to conform to its own genius has a better chance of success’’ (1928/1896, p. 213). The writer should thus ‘‘conform’’ to the ‘‘genius’’ of his or her tradition. Eliot agrees with the premise: ‘‘Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind.’’ But then he goes on to suggest that, by that very fact, a given nation will be ‘‘oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits … [and] those of its creative genius’’ (1932/1919, p. 4). Indeed, the constant reference to the ‘‘French’’ in the opening of Eliot’s essay—and we may hear faintly the echo of Maurras as the chief Franco-referent—seems to be an implicit illustration of Eliot’s approach. By looking outside one’s micro-traditions, one can receive deeper illuminations and correctives (a principle, it should be said, that would guide Eliot’s writing of The Waste Land, one of high modernism’s foundational texts and one which incorporates a wide temporal, linguistic, and geographical range of works into its own). And of course, according to Eliot, it is not just tradition that conditions the poet but also the poet who changes and develops the tradition (1932/1919, pp. 4–6). Both essays also argue very clearly and in consonant tones about tradition as something that must be actively engaged rather than passively received. Maurras, for his part, does not believe that one can lethargically accept tradition in a passive way: ‘‘A just tradition is examined before it is accepted’’ (1928/1896, p. 214).21 A similar echo can be found in Eliot. Tradition, he says, cannot be ‘‘inherited’’ in ‘‘blind or timid adherence’’ but rather ‘‘you must obtain it by great labour’’ (1932/ 1919, p. 4). Similar though these statements are, and it is likely that Eliot’s found its inspiration in Maurras’s, they nonetheless unveil the differing orientations of their authors. Maurras emphasizes examination because of his wish to reject some traditions over others. A passive reception would mean accepting the Judeo- Germanic tradition, aesthetic and political, that gave birth to the Revolution. Eliot’s concerns lie with the work of ‘‘obtaining’’ more than ‘‘examining.’’ The ‘‘great labour’’ involved is not so much Maurrasian ‘‘critique’’ as perception and the assimilation of awareness and perspective [i.e., writing with ‘‘the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer’’ in ‘‘your bones’’ (1932/1919, p. 4)].22 The accent falls not on finding the right tradition and conforming to it but on assimilating the

21 Cf. Maurras’s original text: ‘‘Une vraie tradition est examineé avant d’eˆtre accepteé’’ (1896, p. 21). See also Maurras’s remark, ‘‘La vraie tradition est critique, et faute de ces distinctions, le passe´ ne sert plus de rien, ses reússites cessant d’eˆtre des exemples, ses revers d’eˆtre des leçons’’ (1937). 22 Brugie`re (2007) posits a vision of European totality as the true Muarrasian imprint on Eliot’s essay (pp. 80–81), an interesting suggestion given that Maurras just as much tended to divide as to unify Europe: between the Germanic and the Latin, the Protestant and the Catholic, the Jewish and the Classical. 123 Modernism and the antimodern in the ‘‘Men of 1914’’ 263

‘‘main current’’ that constitutes tradition and integrating that into one’s self- expression (p. 5). Thus we find in Maurras’s ‘‘Prologue’’ and Eliot’s ‘‘Tradition’’ clear genetic resemblances even as those resemblances manifest the antipodal differences between Maurrasian traditionalism and Eliotian antimodernity. Maurras’s tradition is on the whole more homogenous and static, more abstract and rationalist than organic, a tradition of conformity and convention. This was, after all, the lament of the Symbolists in France against Maurras at the fin de sie`cle. The Maurrasian ideal, they claimed, forces the poet into derivative ‘‘oeuvres de second ordre,’’ works ‘‘seulement estimable’’ (Saint-Antoine 1892, p. 11), because they reflect a certain technique and balance but show no verve, no ‘‘audace litte´raire’’ as Compagnon would put it (2005, p. 10). Eliot, true student of the British Idealism of F.H. Bradley, envisions a more dialectical model, a tradition for radical innovation, one that itself revitalizes and changes tradition but that also makes innovation possible.23 And so amid the apparent congruence of these authors, and notwithstanding the very real and substantial historical influence of Maurras on Eliot, and particularly of Maurras’s ‘‘Prologue’’ on Eliot’s ‘‘Tradition,’’ the two hold in actuality profoundly divergent understandings of tradition and of the poet’s relation to tradition, which produces contrasting views about the activity, value, and desirability of innovation, facts which are borne out and illustrated in the praxes of the two authors. Eliot’s ‘‘traditional writer’’ produces not Maurras’s (1925) largely conventional poem ‘‘Le mystere d’Ulysse,’’ but the Ulysses of James Joyce.24 And in his discussion of that most innovative of novels, Eliot makes plain important nuances in his thinking on the question of tradition and innovation, carving out distinctions that Compagnon will work hard to emphasize in our own time. Responding specifically to the criticisms of the novel made by Richard Aldington, Eliot implicitly refers to three categories of orientation with regard to novelty. Aldington, according to Eliot, has the same goal as he and Joyce do (what Eliot calls ‘‘classicism’’ (1952a/1923, p. 425)), but Aldington fails to see how Joyce’s Ulysses can be a part of that project of ‘‘classicism.’’ His failure consists in mistaking Joyce for a ‘‘prophet of chaos’’ who unleashes ‘‘a flood of Dadaism’’ (qtd. in Eliot 1952a/1923, p. 424). To use Compagnon’s idiom, we could say here that Aldington accuses Joyce of being a ‘‘modern,’’ an enthusiastic and full-throated advocate for the new for its own sake, for the innovation that discards the past and its traditions [one thinks in this vein of Antonin Artaud’s contention that ‘‘la poe´sie ećrite vaut une fois et ensuite qu’on la de´truise’’ (1956, p. 94) but also of Henry Miller’s quip that ‘‘Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race’’ (2007/1934, pp. 274–275)]. Eliot, though, believes that Joyce is not a modern ‘‘prophet of chaos’’ but instead a fellow ‘‘classicist.’’

23 Pound was saying much the same things as Eliot in 1917: ‘‘The unripe critic is constantly falling into such pitfalls. ‘Originality’, when it is most actual, is often sheer lineage, is often a closeness of grain. The innovator most damned for eccentricity is often most centrally in the track or orbit of tradition, and his detractors are merely ignorant’’ (1954a/1917, p. 280). 24 And, as the research of Stanley Sultan (1987) attests, Eliot was reading Joyce’s Ulysses (still in incomplete form) while drafting his essay on tradition. 123 264 K. Rulo

To show how this could be the case, Eliot outlines two forms of classicism. The first kind aims at ‘‘turning away from nine-tenths of the material which lies at hand, and selecting only mummified stuff from a museum’’ (1952a/1923, p. 425). The second way ‘‘one can be classical [is] by doing the best one can with the material at hand’’ (p. 425). He distinguishes in this way the traditionalist or reactionary impulse, with its ‘‘mummified’’ fidelity to tradition, from the truly antimodern. Rather than modernizing chaos or a reactionary classicism of ‘‘timid adherence’’ (1932/1919, p. 4), Eliot sees in Joyce, as in himself, the writer who embodies the principles of ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’’ of the ‘‘traditional writer’’ who offers the new but always with the old in view. A very similar distinction was made quite long before by the antimodern Baudelaire, who observed that ‘‘La modernite´, c’est le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent, la moitie´ de l’art, dont l’autre moitie´ est l’e´ternel et l’immuable’’ (1976/1863, p. 695). Given these two dimensions, ‘‘le transitoire’’ and ‘‘l’immuable,’’ to emphasize the former at the expense of the latter leads to a ‘‘modern’’ approach. To emphasize the latter at the expense of the former would produce a traditionalist mentality. To hold the two together is the mark of an antimodern. Although Maurras and Eliot share much in their thinking about tradition, and although Eliot borrows much conceptually and linguistically from Maurras’s writing on tradition, ultimately Maurras’s approach is heavily weighted toward the side of ‘‘l’e´ternel et l’immuable,’’ while Eliot remains an avant-gardist innovator done over in the full dress uniform of Muarrasian traditionalism. It is not simply the pastness of the past that interests Eliot, but also its ‘‘presence’’ (1932/ 1919, p. 4). And we could as well say that, for Eliot the antimodern, there is also here a recognition of the paradoxical future pastness of the present, that the present moment will soon be the past (a past which will still be present to us, but in a different way). For Eliot always, the past and the present, tradition and innovation, form a truly dialectical whole: ‘‘And the fire and the rose are one,’’ says the speaker of ‘‘Little Gidding’’ (1952b/1942, p. 145).

The dandy as satirist

Compagnon considers the antimodern writer to be a kind of dandy, perhaps most archetypically so in the case of Baudelaire, that ‘‘other’’ of bourgeois society. Certainly, one would not lack for examples of dandyism in the ‘‘Men of 1914.’’ Eliot’s description of Oscar Wilde and his ‘‘circle’’ (representing, among other things, dandyism at its best) ﬁts well enough as a model for his own conception of the writer/artist in relation to society, one generally applicable for his modernist collaborators: Here was a small group of English people, who had succeeded, in the midst of Victorian society, in acquiring a high degree of emancipation from the worst English vices; which was neither insular, nor puritanical, nor cautious … Wilde and his circle … stood for the end of a type of culture. In general, they represented urbanity, Oxford education, the tradition of good writing, cosmopolitanism; they were in contact with the continent …

123 Modernism and the antimodern in the ‘‘Men of 1914’’ 265

The greatest merit of this group of people is, to my mind, not to be found in their writings, but is rather a moral quality apparent in the group as a whole: it had a curiosity, an audacity, a recklessness which are in violent contrast with that part of the present which I denominate as the already dead (1923, p. 44). A description of the modernist as much as the Aesthete: here is a refined, cultivated minority marked above all by an ‘‘audacity’’ that serves as proof of life among the ‘‘already dead.’’ Evident enough in this passage is the perceived historical rupture between the aristocratic class and mass man, a state of affairs deeply felt by the ‘‘Men of 1914’’ as a whole even if each author offers somewhat differing analyses about causes and precise characteristics [Pound: usury; Eliot: democracy and, more broadly, the dissociation of sensibility; Lewis and Hulme: the Western aesthetic’s ‘‘naturalist mistakes’’ (Lewis 1969/1929, p. 255)]. In all of this is a theorization of modernity as decadence, one that extends ubiquitously to modernism’s contemporary moment. This decadence usually comes in the form of fragmentation of some kind, but in whatever form amounts to degradation for all. It signifies an important backdrop for modernist literature, filled as it is with metaphors of modern society as ‘‘hell’’ or as a ‘‘waste land.’’ Civilization is but ‘‘an old bitch gone in the teeth’’ (Pound 2003/1920, p. 552). It was Eliot who outlined the position of the contemporary writer in his age rather succinctly when he stated that ‘‘one either writes for a small community of friends or for an illiterate, uncritical mob’’ (2014/1939, p. 32). Pound, who was also known to use the ‘‘mob’’ trope on occasion, expresses himself even more starkly: ‘‘The artist has at last been aroused to the fact that the war between him and the world is a war without a truce. That his only remedy is slaughter. This is a mild way to say it. Modern civilization has bred a race with brains like those of rabbits and we who are heirs of the witch-doctor and the voodoo, we artists who have been for so long despised are about to take over control. And the public will do well to resent these ‘new’ kinds of art’’ (1914 Feb., pp. 67–68). There is discernible in this passage a very definite hope that the public will ‘‘resent’’ the artistic class, as such resentment alone would prove its legitimacy. This isolation of the artist-writer-intellectual, constitutive of the dandy’s identity, is manifested easily enough as well in Lewis’s various personae: be it the Enemy or the Solitary Outlaw. The dandy’s posture engenders a socio-cultural response as well as a style or rhetoric. In the course of his analyses, Compagnon outlines various ‘‘figures’’ of the antimoderns, including its more general rhetorical style of ‘‘vituperation.’’ He sees this style as originating in a distinguished post-Revolution rhetorical tradition beginning with de Maistre, with inspiration from Bousset, and including Chateaubriand, Baudelaire, Bloy, and Celine. It is a style marked by vehemence, ‘‘vitalite´ de´sespe´reé,’’ paradox, and the passion for language that gives birth to linguistic play and innovation, touching on the sublime (2005, p. 444). Compagnon also quotes Pierre Klosslowski’s genealogy of vituperative rhetoric and its antimodern targets, a rich canon in its own right: Flaubert and Baudelaire (against the bourgeoisie), Breton and the surrealists (against capitalist society), Barbey and Villiers (against atheistic positivism), Bernanos (against the ‘‘Bien-Pesants’’) (p. 151). A similar rhetoric can be detected in the school of the ‘‘Men of 1914,’’ with

123 266 K. Rulo some differing emphases. In the case of the ‘‘Men,’’ it may be more accurate to recast the ‘‘vituperation’’ of these authors toward the ‘‘slaughter’’ of the satirical, which for the Anglophone tradition is a much more consistent defining category.25 In some ways, the efforts of Eliot, Pound, Lewis, and Hulme to re-define the ‘‘modern movement’’ in terms of a new ‘‘classicism’’ can be understood only in light of the neoclassical tradition’s rootedness in satire. As is the case with their French counterparts, however, this rhetorical positioning takes on its full meaning especially in light of opposition to modern targets like the bourgeois establishment, the moneyed society, mass man. It is not an adventurous generalization by any means to say that modernism often cultivates critique as its true passion, a critique sometimes bordering on condemnation. This dandyist disgust finds its object of loathing in what could be called broadly the ‘‘hollow man,’’ a type that encompasses simply the mass man but also particular sectors of society (bankers, editors, high society types, journalists, Jews, lawyers, and, in the case of Pound and also of Wyndham Lewis, trendy pseudo-artists who are ‘‘Apes of God,’’ all of these figures predominating the city, but not absent from the rural, as Lewis’s The Wild Body shows). This ‘‘hollow man,’’ who can often enough be a woman as well (the typist in The Waste Land or Cousin Nancy, Aunt Helen; Pound’s Lady Valentine, and many similar characters), is marked by malaise, sterility, impotency, and the ineffectual. Hardly alive even, the hollow man is paradoxically the ‘‘stuffed’’ man, the ersatz man. This human model can be found to be an embedded macroimage at the heart of modernist literature and coalesces around so many of the ‘‘figures’’ of the antimodern discussed above, including the total decadence and pessimism that is often the background of the type, the universe it inhabits.26 In such an environment, it becomes for the modernists, like Juvenal before them, impossible not to write satire (1996/110s, pp. 1–2).27 And here satire marks a key antimodern feature of the ‘‘audace lite´rraire’’ (Compagnon 2005, p. 10) of modernist styles, a distinctive brand of sublime satire that draws large abstract shapes on the modern urban landscape, styled as so many waste lands. In this way, their literary innovation extends even to the satirical, where new forms are brought into being and new theories of satire are given shape. ‘‘You cannot write satire in the line of Pope or the stanza of Byron,’’ Eliot would say (1934, p. 31). The Make It New (Pound 1935) of modernism applies, therefore, also to the satirical. And modernist satire’s novelty can also be recognized in its discursive functionality and in its stunning variety of moods and attitudinal inflections, from the subtlest irony to the most vehemently censorious, the most extreme and vituperative—and, most interestingly, in the manner in which it explores the limits of satiric rhetoric and charts new ground, theoretically and practically, when it

25 This recalibration has already been foreseen with respect to Pierre Drieu La Rochelle’s novel Gilles (Loue´tte´ 2011). 26 For the theory of human and societal models, see Nemoianu (1989, pp. 113–132), a synthetic account that brings together a variety of only apparently diverging theoretical perspectives on the topic, from neo- Marxist to Geistesgeschichte. 27 From Juvenal’s ‘‘Satura I’’: ‘‘Difficile est saturam non scribere.’’ 123 Modernism and the antimodern in the ‘‘Men of 1914’’ 267 comes to the inner workings of satire.28 Perhaps the most prominent example of these efforts would be the two manifestos of BLAST no. 1, the early modernist journal published in that year of 1914, largely the work of its editor, Wyndham Lewis. On the one hand, one might be inclined to see in these pages the simplest form of satiric discourse, indeed even the most primitive: an earth scorching invective that harkens back to the originary satire of Greek fertility rituals, to the ‘‘word [that] kills.’’29 The loud, hostile topography (chockfull of large capitalized typeface, numerous exclamation points, and the ‘‘Blasting’’ and ‘‘Blessing’’ categorization suggesting stark Manichean binaries) conveys what would appear to be a most monovalent clarity. But alongside the unrelenting verbal violence coexists a certain ambiguity of target and of ideology. Martin Puchner has pointed out, for example, the ways in which the manifestos seem to position themselves toward the values of the individual, and the individual artist/writer above all, but this in a work signed by several authors collectively and written largely in the service of the movement of Vorticism (2006, p. 55) (and in a work, it should be said, that often utilizes the plural pronoun ‘‘we’’). And within the separate litanies of blasting and blessing, a genre that appears so singularly transparent, several entities, such as England and France, appear on both lists. In addition, there are many points of self-censure, or self parody, that can be pointed to as well, a striking example being the jocular, self-conscious irony of the tone and presentation, and the way in which the mood scuttles back and forth between violent condemnation and winking playfulness, so that the invective hurls in all directions, blasting even the authors themselves. The rhetoric of BLAST is at once the most tendentious and vertiginous, exemplifying that peculiarly antimodern quality: energetic disdain alongside semiotic self-reflexivity. A similarly ludic dynamic can be observed more widely, and on the very terrain of dandyism. Among the ‘‘Blasted’’ in ‘‘Manifesto I’’ can be found implicit reference to none other than Wilde and his school: ‘‘THE BRITTANIC AESTHETE’’ represented by the ‘‘blasted’’ years, ‘‘1837–1900’’ (Lewis 1914, p. 15, 18). And Eliot himself also expressed severe reservations at one time or another for the school of aestheticism, as had Ezra Pound, whose long poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, in addition to being his ‘‘farewell to London’’ (Pound 2003/ 1920, p. 1308), has also been traditionally read as a simultaneous engagement with and critique of fin de sie`cle literature and what could be called the ‘‘dandy’’ phenomenon, offering a critical reflection on the extent to which the ‘‘artist’’ really is able to escape from the society which he condemns. In contrast to much satiric discourse, this modernist satire, largely enacted it must be said against ‘‘modernity’’ in many ways, is precisely as an ‘‘antimodern’’ satire one that involves the satirist himself within the orbit of the attack (as a satire of moderns against moderns). As

28 The work of Dustin H. Grifﬁn (1994) and others have begun to explore alternative accounts of satire, but often with only passing reference to modernist literature. 29 Robert C. Elliott has made the case that the origins of satire lie in primitive forms of ceremony and ancient rite, as a form of retaliation against one’s enemies and of cultural regeneration connected with magic and ritual: ‘‘The word could kill; and in popular belief it did kill. This is the essence of Archilochus’s story’’ (1960, p. 15). 123 268 K. Rulo

Wyndham Lewis would say at one point, ‘‘everyone should be laughed at or else no one should be laughed at’’ (1964/1934, p. 109).30

James Joyce, antimodern?

Joyce enjoys robust scholarly attention, yet little consensus exists concerning certain fundamental aspects of his work. On precisely those issues that are our concern, many critics have taken to contrasting Joyce with the other ‘‘Men of 1914’’ (Materer 1979; Levitt 2004–2005; Henke 1990). According to Jeffrey Perl, for example, ‘‘modernism would appear to come in two basic kinds: one that contemns bourgeois modernity and one that (by and large) affirms it’’ (1984, p. 132). Joyce’s modernism is said to be of the latter kind, holding at least a certain ‘‘modernity’’ to be ‘‘affirmable’’ (p. 132). The idea that Joyce is an expositor of bourgeois values is of course anathema to a great many Joyceans who see him working to undermine such values and discourses (Derrida 1984; Cixous 1972/1968; Kristeva 1988; MacCabe 1979; Heath 1984; Attridge 2000). For these critics, Joyce is an essentially postmodern figure, offering a radical re-conception of reality in the areas of language, aesthetics, culture, gender, and politics. Others propose more conflicted accounts of Joyce’s relation to modernity. Christopher Butler argues that ‘‘Joyce’s extraordinary fidelity to past time thus means that the ideas he presents in his books are not those of the modernist avant-garde. It is through his style that modernism is implied’’ (2004, pp. 72–73). Weldon Thornton (2000) advocates for the ‘‘antimodernism’’ of Joyce’s work, by which is meant that Joyce sought to reconcile modernity’s dichotomies, such as those of epistemology and of the self. Taken together, this stunning range of opinion perhaps somewhat counterintuitively could be said to point to larger continuities in the oeuvre of the Dublin-born modernist. What these cleavages attest to in the aggregate, I want to suggest, is the ambivalence of Joyce regarding both modernity and its other. The resulting picture is, in other words, of Joyce as an antimodern, even if his particular style of the antimodern is quite different in tone and orientation from those of his contemporaries. Certainly, for his genuinely forward thinking and his radical innovations, Joyce is no ‘‘dupe’’ of the modern. From one of his conversations with Joyce, Frank Budgen has preserved a bit of dialogue that illustrates the point well. Budgen claims to have quoted in Italian a futurist doctrine to Joyce: ‘‘We futurists are without a past.’’ To which Joyce answered (also in Italian), ‘‘and without a future’’ (Budgen 1972/1934, p. 198).31 A witty retort, one very telling about Joyce’s own orientation to the past.

30 Here mention should be made of the aesthetic theory of Hermann Broch, who both represents a point of signiﬁcant contrast with Wyndham Lewis (in Broch’s emphasis on the ethical dimensions of satire) and of striking agreement (as a modernist who sought to focus attention on the value and preeminence of satire in modern art) (cf. Broch, (1984/1975, pp. 179–181)). 31 Pound has written very similarly, in a review of Lewis’s Timon of Athens illustrations: ‘‘The futurists are evidently ignorant of tradition. They have learned from their grandfathers that such and such things were done in 1850 and they conclude that 1850 was all ‘the past.’ We [Pound et al.] do not desire to cut ourselves off from the past. We do not desire to cut ourselves off from great art of any period…’’ (Pound 1914b, p. 234). 123 Modernism and the antimodern in the ‘‘Men of 1914’’ 269

The sentiment, one must admit, is thoroughly corroborated by Joyce’s creative work, including Ulysses most especially. In its time, it was the most radical of ‘‘novels.’’ Yet this newest of books was also the oldest, a reprisal of Homer’s ur- story, the epic of oral tradition that indeed preceded all books. This ‘‘oldness’’ extends as far as Ulysses and is inextricably caught up with every aspect of it, including its ‘‘newness.’’ The two male protagonists could be seen as together thematizing the dialectics of tradition and innovation evident in Eliot’s theoretical formulations considered above. Bloom represents the paternal, the source for the diverse elemental archetypes of human culture (as Everyman, Jew, Christ, cuckold, outsider), while at the same time being the image of stabilizing moderation and grounded earthiness. Stephen, by contrast, is an iconoclast, an avant-gardist to the last. He rejects his roots, whether they be national, religious, or familial. He is, as he himself says, ‘‘a horrible example of free thought’’) (Joyce 1986/1922, p. 17), for whom ‘‘[p]aternity may be a legal ﬁction’’ (Joyce 1986/1922, p. 170), if only a ‘‘necessary evil’’ (p. 170). But, just as Virgil guides Dante, Bloom guides Stephen, so that we can understand the relationship between surrogate father and son in the novel, between the old and the new, as one of mediation but also of reciprocity. The new is in this way taken into the old and shaped and guided by it, while the old is changed and invigorated by the new (which may explain Bloom’s request to Molly for breakfast at the end of ‘‘Ithaca’’). There can be no thought of a dualism of form and content in these matters. Ulysses is in some ways quite traditional even in its form [it follows largely the general sequencing and episodic structures of Homer’s epic; at the same time, and somewhat less acknowledged, it also adheres to the classical unities of time and place (Martin 1998, p. 211)]. In its form as in its content, in theme and characterization as in narrativity and style, rather than merely an act of conservation or, conversely, the radical wail of a ‘‘prophet of chaos’’ (qtd. in Eliot 1952a/1923, p. 424), the novel is instead an imaginative reconsideration of tradition, through the dialectic of the ‘‘timeless and the temporal,’’ through a reading of the present vis-a`- vis the past and an understanding of the past in terms of the present—through, as Eliot phrases it, ‘‘the presence of the past’’ (1932/1919, p. 4), whereby the revolution of life in modern times can be assimilated to the larger human experience, even as that experience is widened and enriched. And it is in such interfacing of the past and the present, of the universal and the particular, that the past can be critiqued and even at certain points condemned without fear of its wholesale rejection. The present itself, however, is no less brought under the microscope of creative evaluation. The satire of Ulysses is a subject that has received increasingly less attention in recent decades. Perhaps as a result, it is sometimes forgotten that early readers of the book tended to conceive of its story world as basically satirical, even if, to borrow Stanley Sultan’s formulation in a somewhat different context, the satire was seen as more gently Horatian towards Bloom and more harshly Juvenalian

123 270 K. Rulo towards modern Dublin.32 It would not be desirable to return to these readings, but recovering the iota of truth behind them in conversation with the fullness of the larger critical tradition and of current reflection on the novel cannot on the other hand be deleterious for our understanding of what is, after all, a many-sided work. The interpretative difficulties may very well lie in the ludic qualities of Joyce’s satire, which has in certain respects close affinities with what John Tilton (1977) has called ‘‘cosmic satire’’: that ‘‘more compassionate satire that transcends even the functions of the satire of attack or exposure’’ (p. 18). It might be better called a ludic satire, which, in Joyce’s case, represents a kind of staving off of despair and hatred in the face of a seemingly ever decaying world, a ‘‘parallax’’ satire fit for the author of Ulysses, a satire that, quite unlike that of the other ‘‘Men of 1914,’’ is itself a means of recuperation and brightness, of holding in tenuous balance the obviously fallible and the nonetheless lovable, playfully mixing sympathy and censure in ways that stretch the boundaries of the satirical altogether. The Joycean variety of ludic satire can be first of all seen in the backdrop of the novel. Dublin, that city which Joyce once called the ‘‘centre of paralysis’’ (Ellmann 1966, p. 134), seems in many ways cut from the same macroimage as that of Eliot’s The Waste Land or Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberely. With reference to the ‘‘Circe’’ chapter, Gerald Gillespie writes lucidly that ‘‘Joyce counts on our recognition of Dublin as Jerusalem’s shadow, as explicitly another Babylon ruled by its own scarlet whore’’ (2010, p. 146), imagery that matches well Eliot’s Unreal City and Pound’s London inferno. The vast array of characters presented from every level of Irish society evokes the satirically inclined generic categorization of the ‘‘anatomy’’ also applicable to Eliot’s and Pound’s work of the same period (all the more so in Joyce’s case given the Linati and Gilbert schemata and their structural analogy to the human body). For all their very real differences, there is much in the general mood and mode of characterization that links the urban galleries of Eliot’s and Pound’s 1910s and early 1920s poetry with figures such as Buck Mulligan, the Citizen, Deasy, the Aeolists of Freeman’s Journal and National Press, Father Coffey.33 But the satirical strategy is not always, and or we might say not even, aimed at the characters themselves, who often are just as likely to capture our concern as much as our contempt (the same could be said more generally of the novel’s depiction of Dublin, the city of Joyce’s birth and upbringing). It is for this reason that the notion of a satire on modernity can serve a useful function. If it is not Gerty MacDowell herself who is the object of critique, or even the city of which she is a part, the same cannot be said for features of the cultural and social reality—what Vincent Cheng has called ‘‘the sentimentalizing cliche´s of the society pages’’ (1995, p. 202)—that have forged much of her character and person.34

32 Concerning the ‘‘Cyclops’’ episode, Sultan (1987) remarks, ‘‘Joyce’s satiric equivocating about Bloom’s ethnicity, simultaneously both Horatian toward Bloom and Juvenalian toward the fellow Dubliners who constitute Bloom’s society’’ (p. 78). 33 Greenberg (2011) has recently re-considered the satire of Ulysses, with more primary emphasis on the ﬁgure of Buck Mulligan as manifesting the ‘‘satiric spirit’’ in the novel (pp. 34–35). 34 Here perhaps Joyce can be contrasted with the other ‘‘Men of 1914.’’ His satire on modernity is motivated by and founded in his advocacy for and embrace of the human (rather than in the more 123 Modernism and the antimodern in the ‘‘Men of 1914’’ 271

But even here there is an element of gleeful frolic, where discourse itself is employed in the novel’s ludic satire on modernity. Although there is a great deal of merit in the argument that the stylistic virtuosity of the novel is a sign of the free play of signification that the book exalts, this ludic dimension may be best understood at least in large part as a satirical gesture with simultaneously innocent and mischievous intentions. In Joyce’s Ulysses, there is utilization of certain discourses that could be called ‘‘modern’’ in the sense that they are intimately connected with modernization, such as mass literacy (e.g., newspaper, magazine, advertisement, popular novel, pop science, evangelistic).35 In many cases, although there may be multidirectional aims at any given point, Joyce often adopts such discourse for the purpose of satirical parody. Examples include ‘‘Aeolus,’’ so full of journalistic, rhetorical hot air; ‘‘Nausicaa’’ and its send-up of women’s magazines and their consumers; ‘‘Oxen of the Sun,’’ with its end in the chaos of modern discourse; ‘‘Eumaeus,’’ adorned in diffuse verbosity and false erudition; and ‘‘Ithaca,’’ with its incorporation simultaneously of catechetical and scientific genres and text types. This cooption of discourse, however, points to the general instability of such a method for satirical effectiveness. After all, one is incorporating into one’s own text, often in a spirit of ludic delight, the very discourse that one seeks to offer for rebuke. The strategy is in fact quintessentially antimodern, for it exemplifies rather well the manner in which the antimodern is always a participation in the modern, always in some sense betrayed by a sublime captivation of/by modernity. In the foreground of the book is the advertising canvasser Leopold Bloom, whose characterization contains all the basic elements of the ‘‘hollow man’’ model, even if for Joyce it remains only a template from which to innovate. Earlier readers— including Ezra Pound (1954b/1922), who read Joyce’s novel in Rabelaiseque and Flaubertian terms, but also critics of great distinction like Harry Levin (1941), Robert Humphrey (1954), and Hugh Kenner (1956)—have seen in Bloom much greater satirical valence than is generally acknowledged today. What they have seen, in my view, with their unique historical vantage point, is not by any means the ‘‘true’’ Leopold Bloom, but the outlines of the basic modernist type. Not ‘‘Bloom’’ himself, but the model which lies in the deep structure of the text. Even a cursory look reveals many of the key components of the model at work in Bloom’s character: sterility, inaction, malaise, a life narrative of decline, the bourgeois ersatz. And yet, if these basic features and elements present in many of the other ‘‘Men of 1914’’’s satirical portraits can also be found in Joyce’s protagonist, there is in the case of Bloom’s characterization unmistakably also something more, a larger canvas, with greater dimensions and a grander moral and aesthetic scope. It is worth noting that it was Ezra Pound, who, in addition to seeing Bloom as a homme moyen sensuel, a kind of hollow Everyman, also referred to him at another time as a ‘‘great man’’ (Pound 1954b/1922, p. 403; Read 1967, p. 145). While we might be troubled

Footnote 34 continued ambiguous repulsion of some of his peers, for whom the line between the contra modern and the contra human is not always so clear). 35 In the idea that Joyce adopts certain critical discourses connected with modernity toward the aim of critique of those discourses precisely in their modernity, I follow Weldon Thornton’s excellent study (2000). 123 272 K. Rulo by Pound’s seeming duplicity, especially if we are inclined to dismiss Pound’s understanding of the novel (which understanding to dismiss, then?), it is my contention that Pound’s Bloom is a profound, if in itself an inadequate and impressionistic, reading, one that deserves to be rediscovered for our time.36 For in Leopold Bloom we do in fact find that most stunning modernist paradox, the hollow man as great man. In Ulysses, then, I would argue that Joyce takes up the general condition of the world as found in much of the literature of modernism, a world of stasis and paralysis, but he does so partly in order to ask whether there might also be the possibility for ‘‘heroism’’ there as well, for a positive view of life. Joyce’s rendering of the heroic is, therefore, as some have pointed out (Ellmann 1977; Ames 2004), a re-conception of heroism, but only insofar as his answer to the question of the possibility of modern heroism is both a definitive ‘‘no’’ and ‘‘yes’’ at the same time. It is a heroism ambivalent of the ‘‘heroic’’ and is in this way a ‘‘hollowing’’ out of the very idea of heroism itself, even as the approach ultimately serves the ideal of heroism (in ways that a heroic heroism perhaps never could). Along with satire, narratives of decline are equally discernible in Joyce’s work, devoted as he was to pre-moderns like Aristotle, Aquinas, and of course the Italian G.B. Vico, widely regarded as a founding representative of the ‘‘anti-modern’’ tendency in European intellectual history and himself a devotee of cyclical, as opposed to linear-progressive, models of historical process (Lilla 1993; Nemoianu 2010, pp. 31–33). Vico’s significance is surely evident in Finnegans Wake. But the Vichian ‘‘ricorso’’ can and has been read as consonant, perhaps explicitly so, with Joyce’s allusive method in Ulysses (Hughes 1987, p. 89). For in the novel, already history is a ‘‘nightmare from we are trying to awake’’ (U 2.377), in stark contrast to the ever-upward curves of alternative historiographies. Along these lines, it is certainly plausible to read the history of language presented in the ‘‘Oxen of the Sun’’ chapter as a parallel history of culture. In this way, its culmination in what Joyce would at one point call a ‘‘frightful jumble of slang and broken doggerel’’ is of particular interest (Ellmann 1975, p. 252). A similar historiography can perhaps be gleaned from the foregrounding of June 16, 1904 as a culmination of crisis (and, to boot, a crisis saliently marked by decadence), elements of which can be found in the political climate of the novel’s world, particularly the crisis regarding Home Rule and Ireland’s right of self-governance, but which extend also to the seasonal drought and outbreak of foot and mouth disease that constitute the (somewhat obscured) backdrop of the novel.37 The narrative of decline in fact pervades Joyce’s writing from a very early stage. An essay on the Renaissance that he wrote for an Italian examination offers some interesting supplementary, if somewhat anecdotal, evidence in this regard. ‘‘The Universal Literary Influence of the Renaissance,’’ [‘‘L’influenza letteraria universale

36 Ezra Pound’s 1922 review of Ulysses has often been dismissed for being a short-sighted attempt at appropriating the novel for Pound’s own ends or, perhaps more generously, as a misreading based on a genuine misconstrual of the book’s author and its contexts (cf. Brooker 2004, p. 39). Even as I argue for the value of Pound’s writings on Ulysses as a useful heuristic at present for stimulating further reflection, it must be said that both accusations are not without foundation. 37 For a general overview of the historical context of Ireland in 1904, see Don Gifford (1989, pp. 1–8). For the waste land motifs, see Michael Beausang (1991). 123 Modernism and the antimodern in the ‘‘Men of 1914’’ 273 del rinascimento’’] written in April of 1912, while assessing in a careful and balanced way the merits of the historical development of the ‘‘Renaissance,’’ nonetheless could be said to begin from a posture of general disbelief regarding the default acceptance of the Renaissance as evidence of the ‘‘doctrine of evolution’’ in history (Joyce 2000/1912, p. 187). The grounds for Joyce’s skepticism are similar in some respects to the other ‘‘Men of 1914.’’ One of the more memorable lines of the essay has it that the ‘‘Renaissance … has placed the journalist in the monk’s chair: in other words, it has deposed a sharp limited and formal mind in order to hand the sceptre over to a mentality that is facile and wide-ranging (as the saying goes in theatre journals), a mentality that is restless and somewhat amorphous’’ (Joyce 2000/1912, p. 188). Just the same, the more playful, self-reflexive dimensions of Joyce’s historiographies cannot be overlooked. Joyce here does regard the greater sensitivities of the Renaissance as its true legacy, and an authentic corrective to the period of scholasticism, even if there is definite degradation of stature in placing the journalist in the monk’s chair. And while the ultimate effect of the piece, and of Joyce’s larger Vichian allegiances, may be seen as deflationary for fervently progressivist historical sensibilities, it is nonetheless the case that in both instances the very same appeals can be read as counters to a hopeless despair in the face of ubiquitous decadence. G. B. Vico’s cyclical historical model, while construing contemporaneity to be on the downturn, is at the same time also founded on the motif of rebirth and on the possibility for renewal.38 What goes down, we might say, for Vico and for Joyce, must come up, and there is much in decline that is more like purification and much in progress that serves to whittle down to the essentials what is actually worth preserving.

Conclusion

If the preceding analysis has been able to further our understanding of Joyce’s relations to modernity, one that captures Joyce’s enchantment with the world but as one always reﬂective, often playful, and seldom jejune, it is hoped that such a reading may also be able to demonstrate the logic of speaking of the ‘‘Men of 1914’’ as a discrete entity. Although it has become a much more widely utilized category in recent years, the precise relations between the oeuvres of the various authors, and the extent to which they really could be said to form a whole, still remain to be more fully investigated. This is perhaps more true in the case of Joyce, who should be considered in his own way something of an outlier in the grouping. Nonetheless, the concept of the antimodern can be particularly useful in showing a likeness between its members on these questions related to modernity. At the same time, Joyce as an example of an antimodern exempliﬁes the elasticity of the term, which as Compagnon’s study has shown is meant to encompass a broad array of temperaments and types and should not be mistaken for denoting world-denying

38 On this point I follow Gillespie (2010, pp. 97–98) concerning the implications for Joyce of Vico’s thought. 123 274 K. Rulo reactionaries with an experimental bent. The ‘‘Men of 1914’’ with their own unique individual understandings and perspectives attest to this diversity. Compagnon’s concept of the antimodern taken from his study of French literature after the Revolution allows us to examine more effectively the relationship between the ‘‘Men of 1914’’’s aesthetic vitality and their complicated, varied relationships to modernity. Put another way, it helps us to answer the question of how the modernists can be anything but inspired promoters of the modern. With the concept of the antimodern, it is possible to see all the more clearly how the ambivalence, the objections, even in some cases the disdain for modernity that can be found in works of the ‘‘Men,’’ are in no way problematized by their literary innovations. To the contrary, aesthetic radicalism is in fact a means by which modernity is theorized in their works, a means by which the uncertain future is grasped through a kind of ‘‘vitalite´ de´sespe´re´e’’ (Compagnon 2005, p. 444). Their innovations, ambitious and bold though they are, are engendered by skepticism of novelty as easily devolving into gimmickry. Their passion for language rejects modernity’s efﬁciencies. Their love of the literary past is marked by a recognition that it cannot be recovered by way of a tradition of return. They do not believe in the reversibility of modernity. As Eliot (1952b/1942) has written, ‘‘We cannot restore old policies/Or follow an antique drum’’ (p. 143). Therefore, a static traditionalism would be beside the point. It is this dimension of their collective oeuvre that can help to explain why, even if there is much in their work that we thoroughly reject, we tend to prefer the antimoderns to the moderns in historical study. Often enough, time makes a ‘‘dupe’’ of the moderns, because we see what they cannot. What we see, however, has already been seen. It has been seen by the antimoderns.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Virgil Nemoianu and Joseph Sendry for their readings of and responses to portions of this paper in previous forms. I am also profoundly indebted to the reviewer, whose enlightening comments were extremely helpful in revising the paper.

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