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Modernism and the Limits of Literature Benjamin David 1 THE RHETORIC OF THE ORDINARY: MODERNISM AND THE LIMITS OF LITERATURE BENJAMIN DAVID MADDEN B.A. (Hons.), Dip. Lang. PhD THE UNIVERSITY OF YORK ENGLISH DECEMBER, 2013 2 ABSTRACT This thesis contributes to the recent turn towards ordinary events, objects, and practices in scholarship on modernist literature. While modernism is typically characterized by formal experimentation and the aesthetics of shock, scholars are beginning to consider that many of the most potent energies animating modernism arise from its fascination with the ordinary. While this new approach has been productive, its tendency to minimise the rhetorical dimension of literature in favour of questions about content (what do modernist texts say about the ordinary?) and context (what ideas about the ordinary circulated in the period?) remains problematic. That is because these approaches neglect a potent contradiction: if literature uses figurative language to depict the ordinary, does it not thereby transfigure what it represents by bringing it within the “charmed circle” of art? Whatever else modernism is, it is clearly concerned with putting pressure on the means by which likenesses and illusions are produced. Modernist texts, I argue, are drawn to elaborate means to declaim their status as representations: a “rhetoric of not having rhetoric” is integral to modernist representations of the quotidian. Out of this generative paradox arises the succession of rhetorical strategies that this dissertation identifies in the works of T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, and James Joyce. Recent scholarship has set the terms for a comprehensive reassessment of literary modernism, which this thesis pursues through explorations of modernism’s relationship with realism, the avant-garde, mass culture, space and place, and the nature of modernity. My argument has specific ramifications for these ongoing debates in modernist studies, the relationship between rhetorical and historicist paradigms of literary criticism, and, above all, the fate of modernism: its legacies in twentieth century literature and its ongoing place in our public culture. 3 Dedicated to my parents, J. D. and D. K. Madden. I’d like to acknowledge the staff of the University of York Library, the Borthwick Institute for Archives, the Archives of King’s College, Cambridge, and the Archives of Trinity College, Cambridge. My thanks to all the friends and colleagues who have read and commented upon my work. Natalie Pollard, Benjamin Poore, and Stef Lambert in particular have been sources of endless support and stimulation, while Bryan Radley’s extraordinary guidance as a friend and colleague on Modernism/modernity has been vital. Prof. Derek Attridge has been a genial, patient, and incisive guide. Prof. David Attwell has made the Department of English and Related Literature a welcoming and supportive environment to study in. Prof. Jason Edwards has been an invaluable friend and mentor, as well as a passionate supporter in his role as Director of the Centre for Modern Studies. Above all, Prof. Lawrence Rainey’s supervision, and his generosity as an interlocutor, have made my studies a more enriching experience than I could have expected or anticipated. This work could not have happened without the generous support of the Holbeck Trust, Johns Hopkins University Press, and the Gavron Trust. 4 CONTENTS List of Illustrations 5 List of Abbreviations 7 Author’s Declaration 8 Introduction 9 Chapter 1: Gertrude Stein’s Queer Ordinary 68 I. William James, Gertrude Stein, and the Rhetoric of the Ordinary 77 II. The Making of Americans and Loving Repeating 94 III. “Tender Buttons” and the Queer Ordinary 119 Chapter 2: James Joyce and the Text of the Ordinary 151 I. Transubstantiation of the Commonplace 188 II. “Cyclops” and the Two Economies of the Ordinary 214 Chapter 3: T. S. Eliot’s Ordinary Ambivalence 231 I. Sweeney Agonistes and Melodramatic Modernity 232 II. The Four Quartets and Nostalgia for the Ordinary 268 Chapter 4: Wallace Stevens and the Ordinary Imagination I. What’s So Ordinary about “The Ordinary Women”? 314 II. “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” and the Modernist Grid 339 Coda: Don DeLillo and the Half-Life of Modernism 381 References 405 5 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Pg. 56: Fig. 1.: Baiocchi (on the far right) rehearses his performers. Vittorio de Sica, "Ladri Di Biciclette," 93 min. Italy: Ente Nazionale Industrie Cinematografiche, 1948. Pg. 57: Fig. 2.: Antonio and Bruno shelter with a group of German-speaking clergymen. de Sica, "Ladri Di Biciclette." Pg. 60: Fig. 3.: Bruno breaks off the pursuit to relieve himself. de Sica, "Ladri Di Biciclette." Pg. 264: Fig. 4.: Advertisement for Lysol Limited. The Times (22 April 1920): 7, Col. F. Pg. 321: Fig. 5.: Oriental Theatre (1926), Chicago. Courtesy of the Chicago Architectural Photographing Co. Collection, Theatre Historical Society, Elmhurst, Illinois, U.S.A. Pg. 324: Fig. 6.: Fox Theatre (1929), San Francisco. Courtesy of the Terry Helgesen Collection, Theatre Historical Society, Elmhurst, Illinois, U.S.A. 6 Pg. 331: Fig. 7.: Camera Obscura, from M. Brisson Dictionnaire raisonné de physique (Paris: A la Libraire éonomique, 1800), n.p. Pg. 359: Fig. 8.: Cover of Wallace Stevens, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction (Cummington, MA: The Cummington Press, 1942). Pg. 375: Fig. 9.: New Haven, detail from 1806 engraving by William L. Lyon based on a 1748 drawing by James Wadsworth, in 7 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS CPP: T. S. Eliot, Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot. MoA: Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans. SCPP: Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose of Wallace Stevens. “TB”: Gertrude Stein, “Tender Buttons.” U: James Joyce, Ulysses. 8 AUTHOR’S DECLARATION Material appearing in chapter 3 has been published as “Arnold Bennett and the Making of Sweeney Agonistes,” Notes and Queries 58.1 (2011): 106–10. Material appearing in chapter 4 has been published as “What’s So Ordinary about Stevens’ ‘The Ordinary Women?’” The Wallace Stevens Journal 36.1 (Spring 2012): 9–22. 9 INTRODUCTION I remember Yeats: “I have spent the whole of my life trying to get rid of rhetoric and have merely set up another.” — Ezra Pound1 If poetry introduces order, and every competent poem introduces order, and if order means peace, even though that particular peace is an illusion, is it any less an illusion than a good many other things… Isn’t a freshening of life a thing of consequence? —Wallace Stevens2 Ordinariness, the ubiquitous condition in which we are immersed for most of our lives, is, from one point of view, the implicit subject of a great deal of twentieth century literature and thought, though it has only recently begun to be recognized as such. The ordinary as 1 Ezra Pound, Make It New (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), 245. 2 Wallace Stevens, Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), 293. 10 a topic of enquiry is by nature capacious, and any attempt to limit it to a manageable scope will run the risk of arbitrariness. This introduction will delimit as much as possible what I mean by the ordinary, before showing that the ordinary presents itself as a special problem in the context of modernity. The rapidly shifting horizons of historical and social possibility that characterize our historical condition make the ordinary a site of continuous change. The ordinary in modernist writing is thus paradoxical: it is both a refuge from history and the strongest index of its relentless movement. Indeed, it may be that the social upheaval of modernity is necessary to bring the ordinary into view at all, by providing a standpoint outside of the immersion in custom and tradition that characterizes pre-modern societies.3 3 This anthropological dilemma has been a recurrent theme of ethnographic theory from the Bronislaw Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), which identifies the object of ethnography as “the imponderabilia of actual life,” to Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), which insists on the paradoxical necessity and impossibility of value-neutral description of culture as a precursor to theory. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 11 This, I think, accounts for the recurrent lapses into nostalgia that characterize one strain amongst modernist writers and their critics. “Modernism,” declared Louis Menand, “is a reaction against the modern,” but this, I think, accounts for only one of a variety of competing impulses among most modernist writers, and, indeed, within most modernist works.4 The challenge for the critic is to weigh these competing impulses in a way that avoids what Theodor Adorno would call a false reconciliation. “A thing final in itself and, therefore, good,” as Stevens put it in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” will necessarily elude us; in the condition of modernity, “It must change.”5 This study emphasizes the strain of modernism that Menand’s aperçu neglects: the playful, often irreverent side that turns the ordinary stuff of modernity into materia poetica. This is not to 3–30; Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (London: Routledge, 1922), 18. 4 Louis Menand, “T. S. Eliot and Modernity,” New England Quarterly 69.4 (1996): 554. 5 Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1997), 336, 350. Hereafter cited in text as “SCPP.” 12 say that modernist literature did not frequently evince anxiety about modernization and its repercussions. But the revival of modernist studies since the 1990s has generally endorsed the view that “rather than being a reaction against or an escape from the forces of modernity, cultural Modernism is implicated in numerous ways with the scientific, technological, and political shifts which characterize the modern era.”6 Throughout this study I use the term “ordinary” to denote objects, practices, and modes of attention that do not usually call attention to themselves, that seem to most of us, most of the time, unworthy of reflection.
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