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Ridiculous Modernism Nonsense and the New in Literature Since 1900

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Ridiculous Modernism Nonsense and the New in Literature Since 1900 Ridiculous Modernism Nonsense and the New in Literature Since 1900 Eric John Rettberg Elk Grove Village, Illinois A.B., Dartmouth College, 2003 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Language and Literature University of Virginia August, 2012 ! i! ABSTRACT Departing from a critical tradition that treats Arnoldian high seriousness, Eliotic difficulty, and war-induced trauma as the defining characteristics of modernist poetics, Ridiculous Modernism argues that countervailing strains of anti-seriousness, ridicule, ridiculousness, and nonsense also pervade the period. Even as philistines invoked the ridiculing cry of “nonsense!” to describe the new art and literature of the twentieth century, modernist artists and writers found in nonsense an experimental engine for poetic innovation and a conceptual basis for disrupting the common sense of an increasingly incomprehensible modernity. From mockery of modernism by figures including G.K. Chesterton and Mary Mills Lyall to the high modernism of T.S. Eliot and James Joyce and the avant-garde experimentation of figures including Hugo Ball, Gertrude Stein, and Robert Carleton “Bob” Brown, nonsense connects anti-modernists’ ridicule with modernists’ self-consciously ridiculous aesthetics. Critical framing of modernist experimentation as monolithically difficult has obscured the alternative ways of reading that many modernists imagined, who often wrote as much for un-ideal readers—skeptical, laughing, even mocking—as for the ideal reader mythologized by critical practice. By writing the role of mocking anti-modernists back into the story of the rise of modernism, the project tells a story of the avant-garde more attentive to the public’s actual experiences of novel modernism. The prevalence of ridiculous aesthetics in literary experiment continues to the present, as discussion of the contemporary poetic movements of Flarf and conceptualism demonstrates. The ridiculous, it becomes clear, plays a significant and infrequently acknowledged role in energizing art and literature in ! ii! the twentieth century and beyond. At its heart, the project puzzles over a paradox with significant implications for literary studies beyond the twentieth century: how can academic discourse take the ridiculous seriously without deflating its ridiculousness? iii TABLE OF CONTENTS 1 Introduction 35 Chapter 1 Nonsense! Ridicule of the Armory Show and Hugo Ball’s Ridiculous Modernism 87 Chapter 2 Gertrude Stein and the Modernism of Nonsense 150 Chapter 3 Nonsense Play and Ridiculous Aesthetics in Bob Brown’s Readies 195 Coda Ridiculous Poetics in the Twenty-First Century 209 Notes 224 Works Cited ! iv! ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am ridiculously grateful for the support, encouragement, and advice that so many have offered as I completed this project. The Department of English at the University of Virginia has offered me a uniquely happy graduate student experience, largely because of the wisdom, enthusiasm, and friendliness of the professors, graduate student colleagues, and undergraduate students I have encountered here. Stephen Cushman proved a supportive and patient director who saw this project through several wildly different versions. He never imposed his own vision on this material and gave me the freedom to make the project very much my own, and I hope to model his practical approach to academia and passionate approach to literature in the years ahead. Jerome McGann joined the committee at a point when my project was stalled, and he convinced me that I needed to embrace a topic that I would truly enjoy, even though that topic initially seemed risky, even unserious. My admiration for Jerry’s scholarship is exceeded only by my astonishment at his generosity. I was lucky to have Jahan Ramazani and Lorna Martens, two of my favorite teachers, join the committee at my dissertation defense. Their thoughtful responses will inform my work in the future. Two former committee members deserve special notice. Johanna Drucker was my closest advisor during the early stages of this project, and I continue to be energized by the encouragement and intellectual challenge she offered at that stage. Greg Colomb, who passed away in the last stages of this project, was both a gregarious friend of graduate ! v! students and the committee member who most forcefully pointed out the imperfections in my arguments. I miss him and feel lucky to have known him. I am grateful more generally for the teaching and professional advice of many others on the English Department faculty, especially Clare Kinney, Jennifer Wicke, Michael Levenson, David Golumbia, and Jon D’Errico. The financial support of the American Council of Learned Societies gave me a year devoted to research and writing in which I pushed the project in new directions. My friends both shaped the project in conversation and offered an escape from it. Rob Stilling and Ben Fagan both leave their imprint on this work, as do Melissa White, Kristin Gilger, Tim Duffy, Carolyn Tate, Walt Hunter, P.C. Fleming, Drew Scheler, Sara Bryant, Eric Song, Stephanie Brown, Sarah Bishop, Amanda Dysart, and Chris Forster, among many others. My mom and dad, Barbara and Paul Rettberg, have offered unerring love, support, and confidence throughout my education, as has my Aunt Debbie. I am grateful to my brothers, sister, sisters-in-law, and brother-in-law and to my nieces and nephews— Paul, Scott, Kyle, Megan, Tina, Jill, Rachel, Kevin, Aurora, Kayley, J.P., Charlie, Jessica, Ryan, Mason, Kyler, Benjamin, and Anabella—for shaping who I am and always reminding me of what’s most important. And for being the finest dinner companion in Charlottesville, reading most of these pages before anyone else, and offering love and support throughout, thanks, Anna Ioanes. I love you. 1 INTRODUCTION G.K. Chesterton and the “Literature of the Future” G.K. Chesterton begins his “Defence of Nonsense” (1902) with a sweeping vision of time, history, and possibility that contrasts sharply with the seeming triviality of his subject: There are two equal and eternal ways of looking at this twilight world of ours: we may see it as the twilight of evening or the twilight of morning; we may think of anything, down to a fallen acorn, as a descendant or as an ancestor. There are times when we are almost crushed, not so much with the load of the evil as with the load of the goodness of humanity, when we feel that we are nothing but the inheritors of a humiliating splendour. But there are other times when everything seems primitive, when the ancient stars are only sparks blown from a boy’s bonfire, when the whole earth seems so young and experimental that even the white hair of the aged, in the fine biblical phrase, is like almond-trees that blossom, like the white hawthorn grown in May. That it is good for a man to realize that he is ‘the heir of all the ages’ is pretty commonly admitted; it is a less popular but equally important point that it is good for him sometimes to realize that he is not only an ancestor, but an ancestor of primal antiquity; it is good for him to wonder whether he is not a hero, and to experience ennobling doubts as to whether he is not a solar myth. (42-3) 2 In beginning his essay on nonsense with this vision of a world sparklingly new, of a culture of endless possibilities, Chesterton breaks with the “twilight of evening” that dominated the decadent 1890s. As the prime exemplar of the radically new nonsense that he calls “the literature of the future” (48), Chesterton looks backward in time, skipping over the regrettable 1890s to the work of the famed Victorian nonsense poet Edward Lear, who died in 1888. For Chesterton, Lear’s nonsense represented an origin point for a truly new form of literature, “fresh, abrupt and inventive” that would revel in “the abiding childhood of the world” (43). Bleak decadence could only bring cultural despair and aesthetic paralysis. Nonsense presented a starkly appealing alternative: originality, innovation, and novelty were built into its very structure, and joy, rather than despair, was its presumed effect. By abandoning the strictures of reality, Lear guaranteed that his readers would never have encountered the topics of his poems before. “‘The Dong with the Luminous Nose,’ at least, is original,” Chesterton writes, “as the first ship and the first plough were original” (43). Even as he jokingly contrasts the undeniable usefulness of ships and ploughs with the avowed triviality of nonsense, Chesterton makes sincere claims that nonsense, far from useless, offers a model spiritual approach. In contrast to those who might view nonsense as an expression of artistic self enclosure, Chesterton writes that “Nothing sublimely artistic has ever arisen out of mere art, any more than anything essentially reasonable has ever arisen out of pure reason” (47). Rather, nonsense teaches a particular way of looking at the world, one that inclines toward faith and wonder: “So long as we regard a tree as an obvious thing, naturally and 3 reasonably created for a giraffe to eat, we cannot properly wonder at it. It is when we consider it as a prodigious wave of the living soil sprawling up to the skies for no reason that we take off our hats, to the astonishment of the park-keeper” (49).1 It is not design that leads Chesterton so forcefully to faith, but the erratic nonsense, the unfailing strangeness, of the world.2 “It is significant,” Chesterton writes, “that in the greatest religious poem existent, the Book of Job, the argument which convinces the infidel is not (as has been represented by the merely rational religionism of the eighteenth century) a picture of the ordered beneficence of the Creation; but, on the contrary, a picture of the huge and undecipherable unreason of it” (49).
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