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The Worshipper's Half-Holiday: GK Chesterton and Parody

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The Worshipper's Half-Holiday: GK Chesterton and Parody Durham E-Theses The Worshipper's Half-Holiday: G.K. Chesterton and Parody SHALLCROSS, MICHAEL,RONALD How to cite: SHALLCROSS, MICHAEL,RONALD (2014) The Worshipper's Half-Holiday: G.K. Chesterton and Parody, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/10662/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk 2 The Worshipper’s Half-Holiday: G.K. Chesterton and Parody Michael Ronald Shallcross Abstract This thesis constitutes the first study of G.K. Chesterton’s status as a theorist and practitioner of parody. Employing a combination of original archival research, historical contextualisation, theoretical analysis, and textual close reading, I demonstrate that an extensive range of parodic strategies permeate Chesterton’s diverse output, from his detective fiction, to his nonsense verse, journalism, novels, and critical essays. I particularly focus upon elaborating the affinity of Chesterton’s work with the literary and cultural theory of Mikhail Bakhtin, in relation to the latter’s principle of dialogism, and his account of the parodic basis of the carnivalesque. In this context, I interpret The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) and Father Brown (1910-1936) as archetypal dialogic and carnivalesque texts. Reading Chesterton in this way not only produces a unified framework through which to understand his aesthetic method, but also enables a far-reaching reassessment of his relationship to aesthetic programmes that he opposed. In particular, I discuss his parodic engagement with the ascendant tropes of literary modernism, employing archival research into his youthful friendship with E.C. Bentley and close textual analysis of his later relationship to T.S. Eliot to trace the chronology of Chesterton’s interaction with diverse voices of cultural modernity. In pursuing this analysis, I use the simultaneous inscription of similarity and difference encoded within the parodic act as a means of questioning compartmentalising approaches to genre and literary history which militate against accurate valuation of essentially dialogic thinkers such as Chesterton. In this way, I apply Chesterton’s work as an exemplary model through which to develop a more comprehensive theory of the culturally disruptive operation of literary dialogism. 1 The Worshipper’s Half-Holiday: G.K. Chesterton and Parody Michael Ronald Shallcross A thesis presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Studies Durham University 2013 2 Table of Contents List of illustrations and statement of copyright 5 List of abbreviations 6 Acknowledgements and dedication 7 Introduction 1.1. Introduction 9 1.2. Chesterton’s Critical Reception 16 1.3. Structural Outline 22 1. Renewing the Varieties For Ever: The Political, Philosophical, and Psychological Framework of Chestertonian Parody 1.1. Introduction 28 1.2. Two Contrary Critics of Parody: Leavis and Barthes 29 1.3. The Poles of Parody 32 1.4. Dialogism and Variety: Chesterton’s Anti-Hegelian Poetics 42 1.5. Democratic Laughter and the Chestertonian Carnival 57 1.6. Chesterton, Self-Parody, and Identity 74 2. The Chesterbentley: Nonsense, Parody, and Friendship at the Fin de Siècle 2.1. Introduction 91 2.2. One Soul in Two Bodies 92 2.3. Nonsense and Decadence: Modes of Detachment and Derangement 98 3 2.4. Decadence and Dialogism 115 2.5. The Importance of Not Being Oscar 130 2.6. The Man Who Was Thursday and the Community of Authorship 142 3. Serious Things in Holiday Time London: Father Brown as Carnival 3.1. Introduction 164 3.2. Some Urgent Reforms 165 3.3. Recreating the Carnivalesque City in ‘The Blue Cross’ 176 3.4. Father Brown and ‘Class B’ 184 3.5. Metaparody, and the Limits of Utopian Brotherhood 192 3.6. ‘The Queer Feet’ as Carnivalesque Social Satire 203 3.7. A Crisis of Tedium: Ontological Vacuity and the Official Feast 217 4. Negotiating Modernity: Chesterton and T.S. Eliot Reading through the Looking Glass 4.1. Introduction 234 4.2. What mask bizarre! Eliot in 1910 235 4.3. The Emetic Ecstacy: Chesterton and Eliot in Parodic Dialogue 253 4.4. ‘The Hollow Men’ as Carnivalesque Social Satire 274 4.5. Audacious Reconciliation 289 Works Cited 306 4 List of Illustrations Page 65: ‘Stilton and Milton’. G.K. Chesterton. The Coloured Lands. Paulton: Purnell, 1938. 84. Print. Page 116: Letter from E.C. Bentley to G.K. Chesterton, January 1894. BL MS Add.73191 ff.39. Print. Page 127: ‘Mr. Alfred Beit’. G.K. Chesterton. The Complete Clerihews. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1981. 8. Print. Page 251: ‘As I’d like to be, As I am’. G.K. Chesterton. The Coloured Lands. Paulton: Purnell, 1938. 112-13. Print. Statement of Copyright The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without the author's prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. 5 List of Abbreviations Primary texts: BL MS Manuscript held in the British Library, London. See Works Cited for further details. Bod MS Manuscript held in the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. See Works Cited for further details. CDN G.K. Chesterton. G.K. Chesterton at the Daily News: Literature, Liberalism and Revolution, 1901-1913. 8 vols. Ed. Julia Stapleton. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012. Print. CPP T.S. Eliot. The Complete Poems and Plays. London: Faber and Faber, 2004. Print. CW G.K. Chesterton. The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton. 36 vols. to date. Gen. eds. George J. Marlin, Richard P. Rabatin, and John L. Swan. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1986—. Print. FB G.K. Chesterton. The Complete Father Brown Stories. Ed. Michael Hurley. London: Penguin Books, 2012. Print. Periodicals: DN The Daily News ILN The Illustrated London News 6 Acknowledgements My first and warmest thanks go to Dr John Nash, whose supervision of this project has been a model of incisive guidance, gentle pragmatism, and unerring good humour. I would also like to thank Professor Simon James and Professor Patricia Waugh, who have provided great encouragement at key intervals, and the English Department at Durham University, for offering me the Doctoral Studentship that made this thesis possible. I am also grateful to Dr Richard Christophers, Professor Denis Conlon, and Dr Julia Stapleton for the Chestertonian tip-offs that they have generously offered, and to Susan Fisher and Ellen Renner for reading and offering valuable comments and advice on the final draft. Needless to say, any remaining errors and flaws are my own. To quote Chesterton, ‘I have spoilt a number of jolly good ideas in my time’. I first picked up a battered copy of the Penguin Complete Father Brown in December 2006, knowing almost nothing about Chesterton, but guided by the half-formed idea that the stories might offer some undemanding reading over the Christmas holidays. Two stories in, I set the book aside with the thousand-yard- stare of the thesis casualty. In a late Father Brown story, ‘The Blast of the Book’ (1933), Chesterton tells the story of a volume which, when opened, apparently causes the reader to vanish without trace. While my reading of the Penguin edition didn’t produce quite such alarming physical consequences, my mind has been prone to disappear unexpectedly into abstruse regions of speculation ever since, leaving my body a cumbrous obstacle to anyone in the immediate area. It’s a fine thing for Chesterton to argue that the well-balanced individual keeps ‘one foot in earth and the other in fairy land’, but if the washing up hasn’t been done, this condition is enough to test the patience of the most tolerant of loved-ones. Consequently, my deepest thanks go to my family for the constancy of their love and support; and, most importantly, to Tracy—the Alice to my Unicorn. 7 In memory of Oliver …an arrow-shower / Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain. Philip Larkin, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ 8 Introduction The real advice I could give to a young journalist, now that I am an old journalist, is simply this: to write an article for the Sporting Times and another for the Church Times, and put them into the wrong envelopes. G.K. Chesterton (Autobiography 183) When G.K. Chesterton entered public life in 1900, as a twenty-six-year-old fledgling journalist, he brought with him a carefully thought-out cultural programme, which he immediately began to elucidate in articles for The Speaker and, a year later, The Daily News. Chesterton’s readers quickly discovered a truth already familiar to his boyhood friend, E.C. Bentley—that this highly original cultural thinker ‘had at least a double dose of the faculty of enjoying things, from a nineteenth-century sausage-and-mashed to a fifteenth-century Madonna and Child’ (Those 46). Though this remark may appear frivolous at first glance, Bentley’s juxtaposition of extremes of the corporeal and the sublime offers an insight into the deeper programme underpinning the explosion of critical appreciation that Chesterton unleashed in the first years of the century.
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