THE GREAT WAR AND THE ANNUS MIRABILIS Patrick Eichholz A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature Chapel Hill 2018 Approved by: Reid Barbour Pamela Cooper Tyler Curtain Eric Downing John McGowan © 2018 Patrick Eichholz ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Patrick Eichholz: The Great War and the Annus Mirabilis (Under the direction of John McGowan) This dissertation surveys British literary culture from 1914 to 1922, including works of fiction, poetry, philosophy, art history, and literary criticism. From each genre, I have culled prominent examples of postwar formal theory and experimentation. The three central works are Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The attention to form exhibited in each of these works has come to define what it means to be a modernist in their respected genres. Beginning in 1914, the dissertation examines Woolf, Eliot, and Wittgenstein's work in the context of the Great War and in dialogue with the various other formalisms that arose in the war's wake. Traditionally, high modernism and the war are considered to be two distinct subjects, just as formalism and historicism are commonly considered to be two distinct modes of study. This dissertation challenges both of these divisions by examining the form of high modernist literature as an index to the tumultuous historical period out of which it emerged. In the various examples, the exigencies of the war can be seen time and again leading writers to reexamine the formal assumptions upon which their genres are based. I argue that this general turn toward form does not coalesce into any one ideology, but rather yields an assortment of new literary, philosophical, and critical approaches that, a century later, remain quite useful. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS......................................................................................................vi INTRODUCTION: MODERNISM, FORMALISM, AND HISTORICISM...........................1 The Myth of 1922.................................................................................................................7 The Myth of 1914 ..............................................................................................................11 The Convergence of the Twain .........................................................................................14 CHAPTER 1: THE GREAT WAR AND WOOLF'S "NEW MOULD" .............................20 The Functions of Formalism: Night and Day ...................................................................21 A Crisis of Form: Monday or Tuesday..............................................................................30 The Postwar Novel: Jacob's Room.....................................................................................46 CHAPTER 2: DADAISM AND CLASSICISM IN THE WASTE LAND..............................66 Dada in The Waste Land....................................................................................................68 Eliot's Two Classicisms.....................................................................................................81 The Waste Land as Baroque Allegory...............................................................................95 CHAPTER 3: WITTGENSTEIN'S KALEIDOSCOPE.......................................................107 The Tractatus in the Trenches.........................................................................................111 A Provisional Boundary between Sense and Nonsense...................................................125 Enter the Philosopher, Bearing Confusion.......................................................................147 CHAPTER 4: THE BAROQUE TABOO IN POSTWAR BRITISH CRITICISM............159 The Great War and the Rise of the Literary Baroque......................................................161 iv Anti-Baroque Theory from Winckelmann to Greenberg.................................................178 Suspicion in Postwar British Culture and Criticism........................................................195 WORKS CITED........................................................................................................................214 v LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS Walter Benjamin OGTD The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborne. Verso, 1998. T. S. Eliot ECP The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition. 6 Volumes. Edited by Ronald Schuchard, Johns Hopkins UP, 2014-17. EL The Letters of T. S. Eliot: Volume I. Edited by Valerie Eliot. Faber, 2009. Roger Fry FR A Roger Fry Reader. Edited by Christopher Reed. U Chicago P, 1996. VD Vision and Design. Brentano's, 1924. Ludwig Wittgenstein NB Notebooks 1914-1916. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, Basil Blackwell, 1961. PI Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, Macmillan, 1969. TLP Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by C. K. Ogden, Routledge, 1981. Heinrich Wölfflin PAH Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Early Modern Art. Translated by Jonathan Blower. Getty, 2015. Virginia Woolf JR Jacob's Room. Edited by Suzanne Raitt. Norton, 2007. MT Monday or Tuesday. Hesperus Press, 2003. VWD The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volumes 1-5. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell. Hogarth Press, 1977-1984. VWE The Essays of Virginia Woolf: Volumes 1-6. Edited by Andrew McNeillie, Hogarth Press, 1988-1994. vi VWL The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volumes 1-6. Edited by Nigel Nicolson, Hogarth Press, 1976-1980. vii INTRODUCTION: MODERNISM, FORMALISM, AND HISTORICISM "The Great War and the Annus Mirabilus" is situated between two common stories of postwar British literature: one about an Artist, the other about a War. The first opens with a panorama of a modern city. In one of the innumerable windows, the Artist is bent over her desk absently listening to the sound of the horns and motors below. She looks a bit haggard, having worked herself to the brink of something awful. It could be any of a number of things: privation, blindness, suicidal ideation, the influenza, acedia, neurasthenia, madness. Rather than attend to any of that, however, she continues to scratch away at the work before her, knowing that the formal patterns she has inherited are obsolete and that something utterly new is required if she ever hopes to capture the energy throbbing through her city. To get at the experience of modern life, she will need to extend the boundaries of decorum and remove the handrails of chronology and causation. Only then will she be able to surrender herself to the clamor of voices in the streets below and follow them wherever they may lead. The other story begins in an age of innocence. Edwardian England had its problems, of course, with its violent labor strikes, protesting suffragists, and news of simmering discontent in colonial outposts. When viewed from the far-side of the war, however, the summer of 1914 appeared as a lost paradise in England's collective memory. It was not only the soldiers lucky enough to return from the trenches that the war had altered. Besides the unfathomable number of young men killed and maimed across the Channel, there was a sustained foreign campaign directed against British civilians for the first time since the Norman invasion. By the light of the 1 moon, German Zeppelins scattered their bombs across London, extending the parameters of the war as the machine gun and poison gas increased the quantum of violence at the front. The shadow of this war crept into every corner of postwar life, deepening the divide between the young and the old, male and female, rich and poor. The literature of the period provides an index to this larger cultural shift. The first of these stories pivots in 1922, the second in 1914. "The Great War and the Annus Mirabilis" examines the ground between these two hallowed dates, following an assortment of writers as they progress from the troglodyte war of 1914-1918 to the height of high modernism in 1922. Along the way, I find what one might expect: the war had indeed changed British literary culture. This change, however, can be difficult to generalize. For example, anti-German sentiment clearly influenced how the British literary canon was shaped during the 1920s. After the bloodiest European war in history, a network of "baroque" scholars across Europe joined in a reparative project to explore the international web of influence that united the various early modern traditions. Beginning in Germany, the study of the literary baroque quickly spread across Europe and into America between the two wars. The British, however, would have none of it. The comparative studies popular in Europe after the war, which aligned Shakespeare with Calderón and Lohenstein or Donne with Marino and Góngora, were ignored in Britain, where the literary baroque was taboo. At this same time, however, British philosophy was being transformed by Ludwig Wittgenstein, a young Austrian who had fought against the British. While the war clearly influenced both the Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus and the postwar revival of the "Metaphysical" poets, the effect on the two could not have been more different. At the front, Wittgenstein's mind does not turn to politics, but to 2 mysticism and the significance of one soldier's fragile existence in a world so fantastically