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“The True God Slays” Secularization and Ethics in the Postwar British Novel

David J. Fine

A Dissertation

Presented to the Graduate and Research Committee

of Lehigh University

in Candidacy for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

English

Lehigh University

23 May 2016

Approved and recommended for acceptance as a dissertation in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

David J. Fine “The True God Slays”: Secularization and Ethics in the Postwar British Novel

28 April 2016

Defense Date

Amardeep Singh, Ph.D. Dissertation Director

Approved Date

Committee Members:

Suzanne Edwards, Ph.D.

Elizabeth Dolan, Ph.D.

Michael Raposa, Ph.D.

iii

IN MEMORIAM

BEVERLY ALDA LAW

PROVERBS 31:10 KJV

iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

At Lehigh, I have collaborated with many talented students, whose conversations have challenged my thinking, teaching, and writing. I am especially indebted to Cohorts VII, VIII, IX, and X of the Global Citizenship Program for their willingness to seek justice in interconnection. Their pragmatism, idealism, and commitment to praxis will sustain me, and the model of intellectual community they offered will ground me.

Without the energy of the classroom, this project would never have materialized. This includes the graduate seminar and, in particular, the cherished members of my dissertation writing group. Emily Shreve engaged in every aspect of this project from its conception in coursework to its final Works Cited page. This dissertation would be a very different one without her knowledge of British modernism and religion. Her friendship, conversation, and humor have structured my time at Lehigh, and I simply cannot articulate my gratitude. But I will say this. In a world of uncertainty, I know that, in the end, I’ll be telling the whole thing to Emily like Dora does to Sally. That’s saying something. I also owe immense gratitude to Katie Burton, whose attentive feedback to each chapter helped to strengthen my intervention and articulate my argument’s stakes. This criticism pales in comparison, however, to her clam pizza: the single most substantive contribution to this endeavor, bar none.

Like Emily and Katie, this project would not have been possible without Nancy. In some ways, the dissertation did not begin until it was properly discussed in that one- room flat in London. I will cherish those days of Murdoch and pies. Of course, Nancy has provided me with a model of teaching, scholarship, and service that I admire, but, more importantly, she makes me food and takes me to New York City to spend money recklessly. Her friendship was a surprise addition to my time at Lehigh, and I look forward to many more trips and a lot more communion bread.

I am grateful, as well, for the support of the English department. My graduate student colleagues over the years have sharpened my skills and sustained my passion. Jenna Lay has provided insightful guidance as Director of Graduate Studies, and her comments on article revisions and job letters made their way into this draft. She is the best reader I know: of texts, too. Jenna’s professional and academic support is invaluable and builds on the previous example of Dawn Keetley. Dawn’s presence throughout my graduate career is hard to capture concretely, so I will simply note how grateful I am to have had her help in the earliest stages of the first chapter. In this spirit, I must also thank Mary Foltz and Seth Moglen for their assistance in queer theory and American modernism, respectively. Their viewpoints framed my approach to the dissertation, and collaboration with them during the exam phase strengthened the context in which I worked. Their commitment to theory and practice will motivate me as I move among future towns and gowns. On that note, I am fortunate for the intellectual partnership I found in collaboration with Sarah Stanlick.

v I also have had friends. They are very dear to me, and they know who they are, because they are few. I especially wish to thank Carolyn Laubender for her insight. She appreciates Michael’s drive with Toby, as any student of Eros worthy of the name would. Her spirited intellect infuses this dissertation.

I also must thank Rebecca Martin, for whom this project is a trip down memory lane. She was there with Stephen Whittaker, who set the stage for the project at the University of Scranton. I owe my intervention to Mary Engel, to whom I dedicate the third chapter. Sister Mary Anne Foley, Linda Ledford-Miller, and Sharon Meagher formed the feminist sensibility that continues to search for social justice. Without Sharon’s mentorship, I would never had made the professional decisions I have made: for better or worse, they bear her stamp and her cut. I am very grateful.

My dissertation committee—Amardeep Singh, Suzanne Edwards, Beth Dolan, and Michael Raposa—continues to challenge me to think clearly and to write persuasively. Their support only deepens as I move through this project, and I am exceedingly grateful for their time, excitement, and patience.

All else I owe to my broken home.

“The false god punishes, the true god slays.” ~ Iris Murdoch

* * *

“But we cannot cling to the old dreams anymore; no, we cannot cling.” ~ The Smiths

vii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abbreviations of Primary Texts vii

Abstract 1

Introduction: Late Capitalism, Advanced Narcissism 2

Chapter 1 ANAMNESIS: Rebecca West’s Mystical Inheritance 15

Chapter 2 CONTRA MUNDUM: Evelyn Waugh’s Rebuff of Secularism 94

Chapter 3 PAX AMERICANA: Graham Greene’s Catholic Cosmopolitanism 169

Chapter 4 CONTRA NATURAM: Iris Murdoch’s Streams of Conscience 227

Chapter 5 PAIDEIA: Muriel Spark’s Pedagogies of Mass Destruction 290

Conclusion: Moses and Modernism 356

Works Cited 364

Vita 383

viii ABBREVIATIONS OF TEXTS

When a single chapter cites multiple texts by the same author, I have abbreviated the title by prominent first letters; e.g. “Greenhouse with Cyclamens I” as (GC), etc. A list of the major text’s abbreviations appears below.

B: The Bell

BC: A Burnt-Out Case

BR: Brideshead Revisited

CV: Curriculum Vitae

EA: The End of the Affair

EM: Existentialists and Mystics

H: Helena

LA: Love and Saint Augustine

LO: The Loved One

LG: “A Letter to a Grandfather”

MGM: Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

PMB: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

QA: The Quiet American

RS: The Return of the Soldier

SA: Saint Augustine

SG: The Sovereignty of Good

SL: A Sort of Life

SN: “The Strange Necessity”

WE: Ways of Escape

ABSTRACT

Religion plays an essential role in the fiction produced in England after the Second World

War: Catholic writers like Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and Muriel Spark have come to define the midcentury novel, while spirituality infuses the work of prolific writers like

Rebecca West and Iris Murdoch. Placing the moral philosophy and fiction of these authors together, “The True God Slays” demonstrates that these religious writers, whom one might be tempted to categorize as marginal figures because of religion’s decline in post-1945 England, are centrally important both to one’s understanding of religion’s contested place in the modern nation-state and to an enriched appreciation for how literature works in the late modernist period. Focusing on literature produced during the years between Hitler’s rise and Eichmann’s trial (1933-1961), I argue that religion supports these writers ethical response to the horrors of the Second World War and the emergence of global capitalism but also structures their transfiguration of high modernism’s aesthetics. In “The True God Slays,” I identify the formal strategies these authors implement in order to effect ethical awareness and to engender right action, while also exploring these novelists’ relevance to contemporary issues surrounding economic globalization, religious tolerance, and social change.

INTRODUCTION Late Capitalism, Advanced Narcissism

With Moses and Monotheism (1939), Sigmund Freud returns to religion. In what will prove his final work, Freud laments the negative effects religious superstition continues to wreak on a credulous, crumbling civilization. He insists that at monotheism’s heart lies the Jewish people’s misidentification of Moses as a Hebrew, and this mistake continues to haunt their subconscious minds. And yet, one too easily passes over Freud’s subtext:

Moses and Monotheism not only retells the Hebrews’ escape from imperial Egypt but also narrates Freud’s personal flight from fascist Europe. Freud’s exodus gives the present study its genesis: for when Freud leaves Vienna, he reaches England. On 28

January 1939, he meets Virginia Woolf, to whom he gives a narcissus flower. Woolf, soon after, begins reading Freud’s work, in her words, “to enlarge the circumference, to give my brain wider scope, to make it objective; to get outside” (MB 108). In London,

Freud finishes Moses and Monotheism, while Woolf, a few miles away, pens what will prove her last novel, Between the Acts (1941). There they sit; there they wait. The specter of Hitler looms. As British imperialism crumbles and Nazi expansionism solidifies, Freud and Woolf revisit nationhood, ethics, and subjectivity. Religion confronts both thinkers as history forces them to reconcile the Enlightenment’s project to another war. A blood-red sea of reeds stands between modernism and its milk and honey.

* * *

Freud’s gift of the narcissus flower is prescient. It reflects the preoccupation

Woolf and Freud share with the subject’s inner life, of course, but it also bespeaks the moral problem that high modernists leave unresolved as the Second World War

commences. Midcentury writers inherit its questions. For instance, how does the modernist subject—disillusioned with religion, alienated from society, liberated of custom—account, if she has turned constitutionally inward, for the alterity of persons not oneself and cultures not European? Is it possible for Western civilization to atone for its brutality, at home and abroad? What remains intact, external to that subject, to structure human beings’ lives in common? The short answer to the third provocation, at least, is global capitalism, but this economic totality seems a rather flimsy response to the deep cultural deracination engendered by two world wars and Hitler. The postwar subject requires a mode of encountering the world beyond the egoist’s gaze, and here religion matters. Hence to frame the overarching question that novelists in this project investigate: what role might literature play in the cultivation of the moral imagination necessary not only to criticize economic globalization but also to get outside its dominant picture of human subjectivity?

“The True God Slays”: Secularization and Ethics in the Postwar British Novel pursues this question in light of authors whose work continues to engage with spirituality despite an overwhelming decline of lived religiosity in England. I argue that these writers suggest, in their literary investigations of traditional religion and mystical experience, how secularism’s account of rational modernization extends Protestantism’s secularizing mission in the West. Far from oppositional beings, the Protestant subject anticipates the secular humanist, and this person is, in turn, subject to capital. Progressives have continued to believe but without knowing it: this subconscious faith in the Protestant God makes it all but impossible for Western humanists to approach, with equity and care, the religious other at their subjective borders. Secularization thus heralds an inevitable

eclipse of religious belief in the modern world while disguising its own debt to a particular faith. This invisibility feeds into what Martha Nussbaum terms the new religious intolerance, a liberal distrust of religiosity that continues, especially since 11

September 2001, to effect conflict throughout the public spheres of the developed and developing world. In fact, the secular-religious binary often distinguishes the developed from the developing world in the first place.

In the five chapters that follow, I argue that literary critics have not only discounted religion’s vital role in mid-twentieth-century fiction but have also neglected the radical critique of liberal subjectivity and global capitalism at its center. Building on the recent work of philosophers and theologians who reject the Enlightenment narrative of religion’s inevitable disappearance, I maintain that the post-secular prose of Rebecca

West, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Iris Murdoch, and Muriel Spark offers a compelling reassessment of postwar British life and morality that modernist scholars have overlooked. As I demonstrate, religion informs both their revision of high modernist aesthetics and theorization of a post-WWII ethical agent. While West and Murdoch mobilize Platonic mysticism to reimagine moral agency, Waugh, Greene, and Spark embrace Catholic discipline to chart liberalism’s limits. In so doing, they challenge both modern subjectivity’s foundation in reason and economic globalization’s imperialist practice. “The True God Slays” claims a new centrality for authors whose interest in spiritual experience and institutional religion has often led to their dismissal as reactionary anti-modernists. Their refusal of secularism’s imperial ambition harbors, however, important insights for contemporary debates surrounding international justice,

Western tolerance, and religion’s increasingly visible presence in the public realm.

“The True God Slays” opens with a chapter devoted to Rebecca West, whose liberal feminist commitment to visionary mysticism and direct involvement with high modernism, both as a novelist and a critic, introduce the contested relationship between religion and modernism in the early twentieth century. I argue that mystical intuition anchors West’s critique of modernist narcissism. The second chapter continues to explore this egoistic tension by way of Evelyn Waugh’s Catholic excoriation of liberal subjectivity. I read his critique of modernity as more than a reactionary return to premodern European society; although he advocates for Catholic belief, Waugh simultaneously demands an alternative to capitalism’s global supremacy. In the third chapter, I show how Graham Greene uses the religious difference outside secularism’s monoculture to ground a cosmopolitan yet Catholic approach to global society. Literary critics have often read Greene’s Catholicism by light of Waugh’s orthodoxy, but I suggest that he has more in common with Iris Murdoch’s non-theistic approach to religious subjectivity, which I illustrate in the fourth chapter. Murdoch’s fiction and philosophy investigate religion’s movement against societal norms as midcentury secularization speeds up, and she leaves one with a strong argument for religion’s, if not

God’s, necessary place in moral life. The fifth chapter addresses Muriel Spark, who places the ethical concerns Murdoch raises in their political context. In the end, Spark makes the case for Catholic conversion, sharply curbing the Protestant sense of election endemic to secular modernity.

* * *

To revisit the present: Sigmund Freud gives Virginia Woolf, when they meet in

1939, a narcissus flower. This blossom gestures toward the interiority and solipsism that

characterize, now in an almost clichéd sense, high modernism’s postwar reception.

Modernists like Virginia Woolf turn inward, the story goes; they abandon the real world of others and disappear into their artistic and sexual experimentation. The narcissus is, though, also a gift: it allows one to chart responses in midcentury fiction that engage, while refashioning, modernist aesthetics. These authors learn from their modernist forebears and articulate ways of escape from the narcissistic morass they locate within late capitalist society. It is far too simple to paint the novelists whom I explore in this study as reactionaries who reject modernism, modernity, and modernization tout court; in fact, they remain committed, I maintain, to many of the ideals espoused and explored by earlier writers. They contribute, in this regard, to a late rather than post modernism, and

Marina MacKay rightly claims in Modernism and World War II that to “speak of late modernism is to signal unambiguously a move away from the manifestoes of the 1910s and the climactic year of 1922, a shift that allows us to reconsider what modernism means as a description of distinct aesthetic modes that were not monolithic or static but capable of development and transformation” (15). Modernism incorporates multiple voices across time, and religion has played, as Pericles Lewis has shown, a central place in these iterations. The midcentury return to religion extends modernism’s reach beyond the Blitz.

With this assertion, I do not claim that West, Waugh, Greene, Murdoch, and

Spark are modernists, even, perhaps, late ones. I simply wish to maintain enough fluidity in literary periodization to trace new connections and lineages among twentieth-century writers. Along the way, I underscore the relevance that religious writers carry in this transitional moment and trouble some of the assumptions undergirding what and who

counts as modern. In this spirit, I assess the “public modernism” that MacKay describes emerging after the Second World War (21), while insisting that, among certain prominent novelists, religious experience supports and fosters that publicity. These religious writers share with the high modernists a sense of literature’s role in promoting a just society, but they criticize the advanced narcissism endemic to late capitalism and high modernism alike. These novelists censure the narcissistic defenses refracted throughout global society and make the case for disciplined self-diminishment. The alienated subject of modernity must learn how to reconnect with the real world; it must see the radical otherness of persons and places. Spirituality facilitates a critique and posits a remedy.

“The True God Slays” investigates the role religion holds, then, in this transitional moment from an aesthetic to an ethical modernism.

I argue that religious experience supports, in critical and understudied ways, the modern novel’s turn from the aesthetic art object of 1922 to the ethical mode of encountering, sparing, and thus loving difference. It is essential to note that these authors explicitly link their ethical interventions to secularization: the secular emerges in their fiction as both a threat and a possibility. The secular age threatens to announce the end of history and the ascendency of one world order, but it also makes possible new understandings of divinity and its role in modern life. While secularization relegates religion to the private sphere and weakens its cultural cachet, it also allows midcentury writers to articulate interiority, freedom, and faith in complicated and, often enough, surprising ways. Secularization, on Iris Murdoch’s watch, invigorates the modern novel, since the death of God allows for a genuinely religious life. Without the false picture of a personal deity, one can get on with the business of humility’s cultivation. Indeed, despite

salient differences, West, Murdoch, and Greene will all endorse a mode of post-God asceticism. Waugh and Spark persist more theistic in their approaches to the divine but also point toward spiritual discipline as a technique for achieving freedom in a decidedly modern context. The relation between secularization and ethics in this project is, therefore, a paradox: the decline of religion makes the religious life possible and, arguably, necessary.

* * *

“The True God Slays” focuses explicitly on writers wrestling with religious belief, and, in this sense, the most urgent connection I forge is between literary critics like

Michael Gorra and Marina MacKay, studying midcentury fiction, and Thomas Woodman and Ian Ker, examining the Catholic literary revival in England. The former group tends to underestimate religion’s import in late modernism’s ethical preoccupation, while the latter pair isolates Catholic writers from their non-Catholic peers in ways that minimize conversations across religious and political difference. For example, I agree with

Woodman that the development of the novel is “bound up with increasing democratization, with a degree of improvement in the education and status of women and, indeed, with the whole liberal bourgeois ethos of the modern world” (ix), and, in this sense, “the rise of the novel and the privileging of realistic fiction can be related to secularist values” (161); but I believe that Iris Murdoch, a non-Catholic writer, situates this recognition in its proper philosophical and literary context. Likewise, Gorra is correct that “modernism is not the absolute standard of artistic achievement that until recently most criticism has made it seem,” and scholars should, moving forward, reclaim novels

“that simultaneously attempted to restore, and yet acknowledged the difficulties of

maintaining, the novel’s traditional function as a mediator between subjective experience and the objective world” (xvi); however, it seems necessary to acknowledge how often religion—specifically Catholicism—has enabled midcentury writers to bridge that gap between modernist interiority and postwar externality. A capacious account of the British novel after World War II therefore necessitates that one think secularization and ethics together and bring religion from the margins of midcentury fiction to its center.

This project builds on Pericles Lewis’ Religious Experience and the Modernist

Novel (2010) by extending its claim into the post-WWII period. Literary critics’ secular biases have distorted spirituality’s role in modernist experimentation and social critique, but Lewis shows how modernism remains in dialogue with religion, drawing upon its energies and resources. If religious experience shapes high modernism, then religion’s presence in midcentury fiction echoes, as it also reimagines, themes and questions central to modernist inquiry and aesthetics. I test this hypothesis with a careful assessment of

Rebecca West’s oeuvre. In conversation with West’s century-spanning career as a public intellectual and novelist, I argue that literary critics’ uncritical acceptance of secularization’s inevitability has forced them to simplify West’s spirituality. Her mysticism, anchored in Plato’s philosophy, supports her feminist critique of modernism; it also buttresses her theorization of an ethics grounded in the defeat of a modernist and masculinist narcissism, one that she views as pathological. Her engagement with Saint

Augustine, in particular, enables me to trace an ethical arc from her early novel, The

Return of the Soldier (1918), through “A Letter to a Grandfather” (1933), to her Cold

War journalism. Her internationalist feminism takes center stage as she covers the

Nuremberg Trials for The New Yorker, and mysticism informs this account.

Although West is tempted, in light of Nuremberg and Moscow, to convert to

Catholicism in the early 1950s, she refuses. This refusal sheds light on her difference from someone like Evelyn Waugh, for whom conversion to Catholicism is a necessary response to capitalism’s automatism and atomism. The distance between their religiosity proves telling of the complexity and depth of the midcentury’s religious turn. It also introduces sexuality as a vector: for many of the writers in this project, religion assumes a queer hue when juxtaposed to a normative, progressive secularism. West explicitly condemns the Catholic Church as reactionary and queer, epithets that Waugh embraces and, to some extent, reclaims in Brideshead Revisited (1945). The queer outsider suggests a tantalizing conflation of eroticism and spiritualism that few literary critics have acknowledged, let alone explored fully. Indeed, I claim that Waugh allows one to appreciate how secularization and homophobia overlap and thereby contribute to conversations like those developed in Ellis Hanson’s Decadence and Catholicism (1997).

In this wider tradition of Catholic decadence, Waugh’s religiosity demonstrates how the

Catholic and the queer both view Protestant secularization from outside the dominant narrative. Waugh criticizes, from this particular standpoint, the Protestant secularism of the United States and Britain. This critique is most obvious in a novel like The Loved One

(1948), which decries the evaporation of meaning in postwar California.

Graham Greene furthers this movement beyond the normal and the bourgeois.

Although he converts to Roman Catholicism in 1926, he never loses sleep over doctrinal niceties. Instead, he charts a mode of critical cosmopolitanism grounded in religious difference and doubt. One notices this move in Greene’s novels from the 1960s, such as

A Burnt-Out Case (1961) and The Comedians (1965), which many have read as post-

Catholic. I argue, however, that these texts prolong the moral reach of his earlier Catholic novels. For example, my reading of Greene’s novel, The Quiet American (1955), demonstrates how religion and sexuality function to retain a space outside Western imperialism. Catholicism thus enables the travel writer to criticize the Protestantism embedded in modes of secular, economic colonization. In his influential A Shrinking

Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (2004), Jed Esty links “a fading imperialism” with “the putative death of English modernism” and explores how late modernism shifts from British universalism to English particularity (2). My project traces this decline and foregrounds the foundation religion provides for a prescient critique of economic colonization’s novel injustices. My work suggests how one might read Catholic conversion as a progressive stance. It also adds to Ian Ker’s project in The Catholic

Revival in English Literature (2003), which seeks, “in the very Newmanian sense, of making real the extent to which Catholicism informed and shaped a considerable and impressive corpus of literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (7), by bringing to it the insights of a post-secular perspective.

Iris Murdoch’s moral philosophy leads her to acknowledge how religious life become increasingly odd in the emerging welfare state. Its backwardness leads her to position the saint, like Greene, outside the normative plot; it also encourages her to articulate new paradigms for thinking through what secularization makes possible ethically. I flesh out this potential in my reading of Murdoch’s 1958 novel, The Bell.

Many literary critics have characterized Murdoch’s fiction as a realist’s rebuff of high modernist innovation, but I argue that Murdoch reimagines the tradition she inherits as she fuses realism and modernism to create what I describe as a distinct stream-of-

conscience method. In terms of her artistic technique, she transforms modernism’s amoral streams of consciousness into ethical streams of conscience. Her rumination on

Kantian aesthetics and its relation to the Bloomsbury Group situates, as it also justifies, this adaptation. The twentieth century requires novels, she argues, that captures human imperfection and difference, their unique and particular messiness. She revisits modernist interiority, then, to underscore its irreducibly moral lining. A stream-of-conscience approach reflects how egoism distorts and colors and thwarts perception. Murdoch’s fiction shows her characters’ interior thought processes as they engage in the interpretation, and often enough misrecognition, of the reality that confronts them. It also demonstrates how religion supports a formal transformation of the high modernist novel into a piece of midcentury fiction attuned to reparative ethical practices.

Secularism repackages assumptions regarding modernity, subjectivity, and ethics that it spreads among the supposed unbelievers. Talal Asad has insisted, for this reason, that “a straightforward narrative of progress from the religious to the secular is no longer acceptable” (1). Murdoch’s literary criticism underscores how the secular has veiled its

Protestant roots, and this burying leads to scholarly bias. For instance, she argues that the modern novel takes two forms: the existentialist (secular, roughly Protestant, and valued) and the mystical (religious, loosely Catholic, and undervalued). Murdoch identifies

Muriel Spark as a modern mystic, and Spark continues to probe the link between secularism and Protestantism in her 1961 novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. While

Murdoch’s novels consider how secularization makes possible a return to Plato’s moral philosophy, Spark’s text demonstrates the shortcomings of Platonism and advocates for

Catholic conversion. With the character of Miss Jean Brodie, Spark places Murdoch’s

moral concerns into their political context, because Miss Brodie’s Calvinism leads her to support fascism at home and abroad. Human self-deception runs too deep for Spark to endorse humanism outright, and she insists on the need for a Catholic corrective grounded in an institution external to the voracious ego. Spark’s critique of narcissism hence leads to the Church and its imperfect but axiomatic grace.

Ultimately, “The True God Slays” advances three interventions into current scholarship. First, contemporary reassessments of secularization and secularism in the work of theorists like Charles Taylor, Talal Asad, and Slavoj Žižek invite a reassessment of midcentury British fiction that engages religion. I ague that this fiction struggles with ethical questions at the center of global society. Second, the authors whose fiction I analyze in this study access religion to imagine an ethical response to Western capitalism’s advanced state of narcissism. Spiritual discipline enables the postwar subject to move beyond the ego through the extremely difficult labor of love. Third, secularization’s advance in the postwar period leads to the queering of the religious subject. This conflation of the religious and queer suggests the entrenchment of secularization in reproductive heteronormativity and hints at reconfigurations of desire’s relationship to the divine in a secular age. Sex sells, but love, as Iris Murdoch argues in

1959, “is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real”

(EM 215), and, in many respects, this difficult realization unites the project’s three different strands.

* * *

With War and Children (1943), Anna Freud turns to devastation. In this treatise,

Freud theorizes children’s experiences in war nurseries. She insists that nations must care

for their children abandoned by battle and prepare them to reengage with the world. The judicious reader notes the prescience of Freud’s revelation: for such orphans will inherit the wreck, and they lack the social and psychological support systems to address it. The war has interfered with children’s capacity for love, and the “opposite of this ability to love is not hate,” Freud maintains, “but egoism. The feelings which should go to outside objects remain inside the individual and are used up in self-love” (191). Children’s affection must transfer to a sphere beyond the self, and the outside world reaches Freud by way of South Africa. In the spring of 1944, Freud meets Muriel Spark, who gives her a letter. Spark smuggles this missive from Marie Bonaparte into the country, and it reminds Spark that “perhaps there were things, in those days of wartime censorship, which could not be written between a member of the Greek royal family and the daughter of Sigmund Freud” (CV 135). So they write; so they think. The specter of McDonalds looms. As Spark assumes the position that will connect her with the postwar intelligentsia, Freud makes plans to curate her father’s legacy and deepen her ego psychology. For the war will be over soon: its damages remaining to be written; its justices remaining to be seen.

ANAMNESIS Rebecca West’s Mystical Inheritance

In June 1961, Muriel Spark arrives in Jerusalem. Having just completed but not yet published The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Spark feels compelled to visit the Middle East in order to understand better her exiled, hybrid, “Catholic Gentile Jewess” identity

(Stannard 242). To this end, she attends Adolf Eichmann’s trial for five long days, sending reports to the Observer (244). She is, of course, not the only woman reporting in

1961. Hannah Arendt is in Jerusalem, too. Arendt’s report on the banality of evil will appear in The New Yorker a few months after the magazine devotes an entire issue to The

Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. The shared serial is but one overlap. One hears in Spark’s trial correspondence future echoes of, in Arendt’s words, Eichmann’s “show trial” (9).

For the inane hearing also plunges Spark into depression: to heal, she learns to view “the proceedings … as an absurdist drama” (Stannard 246). Spark’s trademark defense of ridicule bears Eichmann’s stamp, since “we have come to a moment in history when we are surrounded on all sides and oppressed by the absurd” (36). The rising absurdity

Arendt and Spark find in Jerusalem has for its precursor, however, an earlier Edinburgh woman’s writing (Stonebridge 102). Rebecca West’s 1946 reports on the Nuremberg trials, which also appear in The New Yorker, not only anticipate reactions to Eichmann’s thoughtlessness but also deal directly with evil’s tedium. As in Eichmann in Jerusalem,

Saint Augustine informs West’s response to Nazi violence, and this ethically motivated engagement with religion, I claim, lies at the generative core of both West’s modernist fiction and her feminist politics alike.

In what follows, I argue that scholars have misunderstood religion’s role in

Rebecca West’s momentous oeuvre. At best, literary critics have read West’s treatment of religion as inconsistent; at worst, they suggest religious themes merely echo, and then propagate, West’s conservative politics. In both cases, the scholarly narrative aligns

West’s early rebellious feminism with godlessness and her late political conservatism to moments of lapsed religious orthodoxy. It praises the first strand of thinking while censuring the second. I find this interpretation problematic for two reasons. First, it links feminist liberation to secularization and social oppression to faith, thereby furthering an implicit argument in the value and inevitably of Western secularization. Second, this understanding of West’s writing obfuscates her evolving relationship to literary modernism and religious experience. As her early rebellious writing cools to a more patient investigation of law in the post-WWII period, West’s oeuvre demonstrates how early modernist innovation anticipates, rather than precludes, late modernism’s religious and ethical investment. In this way, West’s career not only proves illustrative of an undervalued religious thread within literary modernism but also shows how that religiosity informs later literary and political responses to the Second World War. It is a mistake, on my reading of West, to take these responses as outright reactionary.

Rebecca West’s relation to religious experience is, as this chapter will show, much more nuanced and, at the same time, much more consistent than scholars have noticed. This steadiness emerges, I believe, from her mysticism. West’s mystical approach to religion informs both her feminism and her internationalism and finds its full flowering in her tempestuous interpretation of Saint Augustine. West’s response to

Augustine clarifies her criticism of Christianity as it also articulates the human need for

religion. West rejects God the Father but simultaneously embraces the religious life, and this paradoxical move has, understandably, befuddled critics. I argue, however, that one must attend to this twofold movement closely, because it bespeaks religion’s import in early twentieth-century literature and suggests its ethical transfiguration at midcentury.

Moreover, it gestures toward West’s unique contribution to literature and ethics, as she argues for pleasure’s centrality in human relations over and against an emphasis on inner discernment. In this sense, her argument anticipates Michel Foucault’s analysis of

Christian sexual ethics, and this chapter intends, in its conclusion, to position West as a thinker in this genealogical tradition.

With Rebecca West for its roadmap, I isolate a specific strand of literary modernism that moves from an early investigation of consciousness to a late preoccupation with law. I propose West draws from the psychological insights of early modernism to engender a new ethical language with which to condemn the Second World

War’s horror. After all, the full extent of the West’s discursive collapse becomes palpable, arguably first, at Nuremberg, where traditional moral and juridical discourses fail to articulate a black crime. It is in the pursuit of saying the ineffable that West’s mysticism matters most, for it reimagines modernism’s relation to religious experience in terms of ethical, pleasurable practice. To broach this relation, my argument opens with an analysis of West’s first novel, The Return of the Soldier (1918), to explore its latent

Platonism. My reading of the text will contextualize the subsequent analysis of 1933’s

Saint Augustine and “A Letter to a Grandfather.” Placing these texts into conversation with Hannah Arendt’s contemporaneous Love and Saint Augustine, I uncover the formative role the ancient thinker plays for both women as they report, years later, on

modern evil. I conclude with a close reading of the Nuremberg reports in order to underscore West’s ethics of mystical ascesis.

I. “Communion with Reality”: Young Rebecca’s Rebellious Religiosity

Rebecca West’s labyrinthine writing has strung a thread of faith from modernism’s origins in Blast to its eclipse during the Cold War. Perhaps most often remembered now as the “arrant” feminist of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (58), I propose West’s prose elucidates the irrevocable interpenetration of religion and modernism. Her exploration of time-bound, undying spirituality bespeaks, I will insist, the ways in which modernism’s heady iconoclasm approaches the divine anew. This study thus offers a corrective against the privileging of what Iris Murdoch has termed the modern existential novel.1 Literary critics have mistakenly read West as an existentialist when her work is best appreciated within a modernist tradition of mysticism. Her spiritual writing harbors important ethical resources, because West theorizes throughout it a mode of agency deeply invested in pleasurable relations with, and responsibility for, others

(Stetz RWC 45). While many scholars view modernism as irreligious, citing the number of modernists who were outspoken atheists, West’s work helps literary critics understand that there is another way to read the period’s genesis: modernism does not reject religion but radically rethinks its character. The many late modernists who follow in West’s wake likewise engage the iconoclasm of 1914 to demythologize religion and, in turn, use their postwar fiction to elucidate the human spirit’s irreducible ethical imperative.

1 Murdoch distinguishes between the existential and mystical novels in her essay, “Existentialists and Mystics.” The former privileges the hero’s “assertion of will,” while the latter embraces her “obedience to the Good” (223). 18

West has made considerable contributions as both a religious thinker and as a chronicler of Western secularization. I am not alone in this recognition—many fine thinkers have taken West’s religious writing seriously2—but I hope in this section to generate a productive conversation among the different, often tortuous veins of her early religious inquiry. Centering on a telling Platonic allusion in The Return of the Soldier and expanding thereafter to encircle her psychobiography of Saint Augustine, I claim West’s cyclical understanding of history coupled with her iconoclastic predilections lead her to embrace a non-dualistic, quasi-Platonic, but nevertheless religious position. Her insistence on virtue’s import in human life is spiritual to the extent that it extols truthfulness, clarity of vision, the Good. In short, it charts, as Nattie Golubov has shown, a pilgrimage from illusion to reality (208). To underestimate religion’s presence in

West’s momentous oeuvre—even, if not especially, in its non-theistic permutations—is to undervalue the depth of her philosophical response to a secular milieu. In particular, an investigation of memory in The Return of the Soldier and Saint Augustine distills, I believe, the moral imperative central to West’s thinking: one must break subconscious attachments to infantile bliss and accept the world as it really is. This section discusses

West’s demythologizing ethics of detachment in The Return of the Soldier and exposes its roots in her early feminist writing before turning to the critical year of 1933.

At its surface, The Return of the Soldier (1918) recounts an English combatant’s journey home.3 This homecoming is marred by two complicating factors: the war is not

2 Here, Bernard Schweizer remains the authority. See his recent Hating God and Rebecca West: Heroism, Rebellion, and the Female Epic. Nattie Golubov offers an important, secular corrective to Schweizer’s heretical account. 3 Samuel Hynes reminds readers that this novel is the first account of the Great War written by a woman (ix). The Great War is the first conflict covered by daily papers and shown in the cinemas (viii). Women can picture it now. 19

yet over, and the soldier has amnesia. Chris suffers from shell shock and cannot remember the past fifteen years of his life. He lives, emotionally, in the year 1901.

Caught in the past, he believes that he is still in love with his first sweetheart, Margaret.

In this remembered year, this final year, Queen Victoria reins. Chris returns to a long-lost

Victorian age of youth and self-indulgence. He forgets, then, that he is married to a materialistic woman named Kitty, whom the narrator tells readers is “cold as moonlight, as virginity” (26). He obviates the death of his son, in addition. He overlooks his duties

“to keep the mines going … to keep the firm’s head above water and Baldry Court sleek and hospitable, to keep everything bright and splendid save only his youth” (53). He neglects the Edwardians’ progress as their current bothersome squabble slips from his mind. The Great War’s carnage invites him, rather, to remember a re-imagined time of love and peace, and the narrator, Jenny, is more than happy to comply: ‘I wanted,” she explains, “to snatch my cousin Christopher from the wars and seal him in this green pleasantness his wife and I now looked upon” (5). In affluent belonging, he rests. He is in love, first love. He is safe. The novel’s plot thickens, however, when Chris requests to visit Margaret, and it is ultimately love that leads him back toward the truth that he must, painfully, accept. True love does not ultimately preserve the fantasy but eviscerates it. He remembers more than he could have ever known, religiously.

The Return of the Soldier revolves around three women—Margaret, Jenny, and

Kitty—and charts their changing relationships to the never-present soldier. Despite the painful side-effects of his memory loss, Chris remains their energy’s target. Jenny explains that “nothing could ever really become a part of our life until it had been referred to Chris’s attention” (8), and this inability to imagine a world without Chris leads

to desperation. All the women have different claims to Chris’s affection, and the plot knots. They are suspended in an arid emotional tangle. And yet, love forces the romance plot’s untying and unleashes, at least in some cases, accurate, loving perception. They must learn to see the reality of their situation clearly. For this reason, Margaret Stetz has insisted on the primacy of Jenny’s vision (64). She is the narrator, and her insight, rather than the soldier’s amnesia, is the novel’s focal point. The reader accesses the narrative’s truth only through the veil of Jenny’s consciousness. One feels, as Stetz point out, the deep influence of Henry James in the novel (63). Jenny, like a James protagonist, must learn to see the situation clearly, if the readers are, in turn, to discover anything correct.4

To obtain this right view, she must destroy the idols and images that cloud perception.

Jenny’s ability to see the reality of the political and domestic situation before her is central to the text’s investigation of the Great War’s ideological grounding. West shores up all the economic, colonial, and gendered oppressions that make one’s sleek life at Baldry Court possible: shoring up, that is, to crash and burn. One must learn the truth.

This pilgrimage from romance’s fantasy to war’s reality (or from war’s fantasy to love’s reality—both work), while awash with Henry James, grounds itself in an essential, and critically unstudied, allusion to Plato. West’s penchant for ethical demythologization unfurls as the narrator records this odd moment of oceanic transfiguration. Jenny perceptively discerns that

the subject of our tragedy, written in spiritual terms, was that in Kitty he had turned from the type of woman that makes the body conqueror of the soul and in me from the type that mediates between the soul and the body and makes them run even and unhasty like a well-matched pair of carriage horses, and had given

4 Rebecca West’s first book, published in 1916, is a critical monograph on Henry James. James’s influence is seen primarily in West’s focus on the individual character’s consciousness and, often false, perception. 21

himself to a woman whose bleak habit it was to champion the soul against the body. (66)

This description recalls Socrates’ myth of the soul in Plato’s Phaedrus. The philosopher,

Socrates argues, must train his light and dark horses to move together. Plato explains that,

for the soul’s immortality, enough has been said. But about its form, the following must be stated: To tell what it really is would be a theme for a divine and a very long discourse; what it resembles, however, may be expressed more briefly and in human language. Let us say that it is like the composite union of powers in a team of winged horses and their charioteer. Now all the gods’ horses and charioteers are good and of good decent, but those of other beings are mixed. In the case of the human soul, first of all, it is a pair of horses that the charioteer dominates; one of them is noble and handsome and of good breeding, while the other is the very opposite, so that our charioteer necessarily has a difficult and troublesome task. (246)

The human soul’s charioteer must find a way to make the good and bad horses ride smoothly. They access goodness only through training, ascesis. Socrates is quick to point out that this picture is limited by “human language”; the gods alone know the psyche’s true nature. Still, human beings work with the myths they have and make psychic forces cooperate. Once inflamed by eros, these two well-trained winged horses will lead the psyche to remember truth. It will fly up, up, up and glimpse the Forms, recalling what the soul has forgotten on earth.

West’s “spiritual” implication is clear: Jenny, as narrator, must figure out a way to make Margaret’s spiritualism cooperate with Kitty’s materialism. This harmonization is the act of love that true love inspires. West’s allusion to Phaedrus concretizes the importance of bringing the body and soul together. Decidedly, West makes the two horses indicative of soul and body. This formulation is slightly different than Plato’s vision in which the soul itself contains dark and light potential. West re-conceives Plato’s psyche in terms of the division between matter and spirit, in part because Margaret is the

Platonist and too-far-gone for West’s liking. With Jenny, West points toward another ideal: a reality-approaching harmony between the Platonic spiritualist and the Edwardian materialist. This orchestration is no easy task. All the same, the Platonic reference foreshadows the plot’s difficult conclusion. There, the novel’s characters confront a remembered truth. Alone, Kitty or Margaret will not reach this reality. Grasping Kitty permits the body to smother the soul just as unworldly Margaret’s “bleak habit” bespeaks a chaste disavowal of sensual pleasures. None will get there. Both women separate body from soul, spirit from flesh. This parting obscures accurate perception, because the materialist and spiritualist experience a necessarily limited reality.

Jenny brings the horses together, at least in recollection. Within the narrative, she cannot appreciate this Platonic relationship and only fears the loss of her perfect world.

For most of the novel, she is jealous and selfish: she confuses true love with a desire for a worldly permanence. She must work to glimpse the real situation into which life has thrust her. I suspect, therefore, that Phaedrus not only throws Jenny’s inability to perceive reality into relief but also serves as a philosophical keystone in West’s religious consciousness. Plato’s mystical joyride is exactly the sort of journey Jenny takes in the novel and one West attempts with her career. Jenny is, after all, embroiled in the drama of human events, and she cannot discern properly. One horse trips; the other beast stumbles. She supposes “the subject of our tragedy” is Platonic, but, as she states, “I could not think clearly about it” (66). She is unable to digest the Platonic interpretation; instead, she views her situation as one of conflict and alienation. Directly after this allusion to Phaedrus, Jenny offers up a version of how she now sees things. “But I saw it just as a fantastic act of cruelty that I could only think of as a conjunction of calamitous

images” (66). The “it” here refers to “the subject of our tragedy.” This perception is, in fact, perception’s failure to perceive accurately. Now, Jenny views only shadows—“a conjunction of calamitous images”—rather than truth itself. She, at this point, skirts reality: matter over mind.

A close examination of what Jenny daydreams in her swerve away from the

Platonic context is illustrative of Jenny’s, and many literary critics’, misrecognition. It marks the first gesture in her movement toward deeper understanding, but only the first.

In this baby step, Jenny records the streams of her consciousness:

I think of it as happening somewhere behind the front, at the end of a straight road …. There, past a church that lacks its tower, stand a score of houses, each hideous with patches of bare bricks that show like sores through the ripped-off plaster and uncovered rafters which stick out like broken bones. There are people still living here. A slut sits at the door of a filthy cottage, counting some dirty linen and waving her bare arms at some passing soldiers. And at another house there is a general store …. (66)

Capitalism: the bellicose landscape is bleak but realistic. This is war; this is a capitalist war, and to ignore its ugliness is the same mistake as ignoring how unfashionable poverty can be. Jenny confronts poverty’s ugliness when she calls on Margaret at Mariposa; she imagines battle’s ugliness in her attempt to come to grips with Chris’s amnesia. In both cases, West’s proto-socialist narrator encounters the complement to her wealth and peace, respectively. It isn’t pretty. The war has razed traditional structures of meaning, like the church, and even human habitation appears rotting, osseous. Sluts bear arms, too. The world observed, in this instance, is not one of beauty or goodness.

The setting is but one operative locus of cogitation. It is also a character study.

Significantly, Chris appears in Jenny’s vision as he hazards a deal with God. In the general store,

Chris is standing, facing across the counter an old man in a blue blouse, with a scar running white into the grey thickets of his beard, an old man with a smile, at once lewd and benevolent, repulsive with dirt and yet magnificent by reason of the Olympian structure of his body. I think he is the soul of the universe, equally cognisant and disregardful of every little thing, to whom I am no more dear than the bare-armed slut at the neighboring door. (66)

Chris faces a godlike figure of “Olympian structure.” He clearly resembles Daniel’s old- man-in-the-sky God. This blue-bloused god, “the soul of the universe,” holds everything in its proper place but refuses to show partiality. Jenny is no better than a slut up with the lark to do a morning’s washing. This god does not play favorites, although Jenny wants him to and her class privilege has taught her to expect it.

This “equally cognisant and disregardful” deity presents Chris’s spirit with a choice. Chris’s “body,” readers learn, “lies out there in the drizzle”; his soul is now

looking down on two crystal balls that the old man’s foul strong hands have rolled across to him. In one he sees Margaret; not in her raincoat and her nodding plumes but as she is transfigured in the light of eternity. Long he looks there; then drops a glance to the other, just long enough to see that in its depths Kitty and I walk in bright dresses through our glowing gardens. We had suffered no transfiguration, for we are as we are and there is nothing more to us. The whole truth about us lies in our material seeming. He sighs a deep sigh of delight and puts out his hand to the ball where Margaret shines. His sleeve catches the other and sends it down to crash in a thousand pieces …. Chris is wholly enclosed in his intentness on his chosen crystal. No one weeps for this shattering of our world (66-67)

Truth lies when housed in material seeming alone, but the illusion of everlasting spiritual bliss is no more forthright. It also causes destruction. The otherworldly choice destroys

“glowing gardens” of the rich and powerful, but it also refuses or is unable to see poor

Margaret “in her raincoat and her nodding plumes.” Worse yet, it entraps and isolates as

Chris becomes “wholly enclosed in his intentness.” Holiness is separation. Both globes separate matter from flesh, and, as West’s nod to Phaedrus implies, this estrangement

will never lead to an accurate perception of reality. Without true vision, echoes Socrates, goodness and choice are impossible.

The foregrounded Olympian figure suggests that West has divinity in mind as she constructs this passage. Given the setting, God’s indifference to human suffering strikes one as noteworthy, if not pressing. Bernard Schweizer has addressed this divine disinterestedness, and West’s portrayal of it, in his fresh Hating God. Schweizer coins the term “misotheism” to explicate the condition of loathing, while still acknowledging,

God’s existence. He identifies West as one of the twentieth century’s most formidable misothesists and draws attention to the passage in The Return of the Soldier that immediately follows the Platonic allusion I have unpacked. Jenny’s curious dream sequence outlines, for Schweizer, West’s relationship to the divine. There, a wasteland envelopes an old man selling Chris a choice between two worlds, and “[t]his bizarre sequence is Jenny’s way of constructing an explanatory narrative to account for the state of disorder and anomie created by the war and its effects”; it bespeaks West’s “conviction that the unhappy state of affairs on this earth, ranging from the horrors of warfare to the subversion of family relations, to sickness, is the work of a god who is insensitive, incompetent, and coarse” (132). God displays “coarse” indifference to personal melodrama. God is, one might say, paternal without being paternalistic. According to

Schweizer, West implicates God in the Great War’s carnage. Thereby, she blasts God for ubiquitous unrighteousness.

I have suggested, though, that this old man is a false god, false because he forces

Chris to make an impossible and untruthful decision. Likewise, Jenny’s desire to be recognized by this God as better than the neighborhood slut bespeaks her own entrapment

in the fantasy. As West’s reworking of Plato teaches, the good life rests in the pleasurable unification of material and spiritual spheres; this work necessitates humility, realism, and really looking. Schweizer does not note the allusion to Plato, and I believe one must take the Platonic subtext into consideration when evaluating West’s capacious comment on religion. For it seems to me that Jenny’s misrecognition produces this picture of god: the paragraph opens with an emphasis on Jenny’s inability to process the situation placed before her. “I could not think clearly about it,” she says. She supposes, in hindsight, that the subject of the tragedy is Platonic. “But,” she explains, at that particular time, “I saw it just as a fantastic act of cruelty” (65): an old man, a church without a steeple, a pair of fragile balls. She only perceives castrated, “calamitous images” rather than truth itself.

She is afraid. Schweizer’s analysis of the dream does not do enough, then, to characterize the subtleties of West’s theology. It neglects the passage’s interrogation of Christianity’s misogynist monotheism—one that makes the choice between spirit and flesh necessary— and the novel’s overarching endorsement of a, duly modified, Platonic moral transcendence that requires flesh’s reconciliation with spirit. God the Father is a dishonest picture that supports mind-body separatism and proffers ego-ennobling fantasies. In her narration, Jenny records her own recession into a fake bubble. God is shut-off, unmindful of others, but so is Jenny.

Yes, a puritanical zeal permeates West’s oeuvre. This fervent iconoclasm may appear impious—for the quest for truth abolishes many lesser idols—but it is not necessarily so. Such progression from deicide to reality rests at the heart of The Return of the Soldier, and it complements West’s early feminist rebellion. On my count, West’s career only ever refines her youthful iconoclasm. A full appreciation of her spirituality

therefore demands that one also witness her trenchant rejection of Christian superstition, and this call is in line with The Return of the Soldier’s globe-smashing. At the forefront of West’s religious critique, as Schweizer has established, is her condemnation of the

Judeo-Christian belief in God the father. As early as 1917, West singles God out as history’s much-loved “master criminal.” Human beings must bring God to justice. “Since

God has declared that he is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent,” West scathes, “he must take the responsibility of all crimes committed in his name” (23). West launches these heretical assertions in the unpublished essay, “The New God.” In this polemic, she insists that “one hates our fathers, for having committed themselves to such a worship and wonders how they could have fancied God was kind.”5 The verb “fancied” signals the extent to which God is fabrication, a naturalized illusion of kindness. Anticipating

Mary Daly’s feminist critique of monotheism, West rejects God the Father in the midst of the Great War. She holds God’s image personally responsible for the violence it has engendered and, further, sanctified. Nevertheless, I maintain that this idol-bashing is, for

West, essentially and deeply religious.

Jane Marcus has done much to establish Rebecca West’s reputation as a premiere feminist thinker, and West’s feminism, as Marcus shows, is a moral feminism. The battle for women’s suffrage is, for young Rebecca, a moral and political endeavor. “All her life,” Marcus explains, “Rebecca West has written in praise of virtue and condemning wickedness. She finds moral relativism ridiculous, and says so in essays and her fiction”

(ix). Ultimately, West supports feminist movement in order to abolish “the feminine ideal of self-sacrifice … the most mortal of sins, a sin against life itself. She roused women to

5 I take this sentence from “The New God,” quoted in Schweizer’s Hating God (123). For a more thorough reading of the essay, consult Schweizer’s Rebecca West: Heroism, Rebellion, and the Female Epic. 28

do battle with their own masochism, to weed out the natural slave, the victim in their souls” (Marcus 3). West—that “Bernard Shaw in petticoats”—uses her savage pen to expunge the world of self-sacrifice, to support women in their efforts to create. Women cannot continue to forfeit their potential and revel in masochism. At the twentieth century’s outset, West locates the roots of this sacrificial ethos in Christianity. For this reason alone, the patriarchal God must go. God enables, according to West, female oppression. Her rejection of sacrifice and her belittlement of God the Father understandably lead critics like Schweizer to label West a misotheist. This label seems to me mistaken, however, because it makes invisible the mystical position from which she argues for God the Father Figure’s elimination. Religious experience informs, and mandates, God’s extirpation.

One sees this stance taking shape as early as The Return of the Soldier. Jenny does not reject God and religion as hateful but rather takes consolation in a false image of God as hateful. The difference is subtle but salient. Jenny’s covetousness obfuscates the truth of Chris’s situation by means of a fantasy of God’s omnipotence. This false image unmoors her ethics. She swings hence from a passionate defense of Kitty’s materialism to an otherworldly commitment to Margaret’s spiritualism. It is not until the end of the narrative that she witnesses the need for soul-body reconciliation, and this anchoring has deep religious reverberations. This too-lately-apprehended love for reality reminds Jenny to stabilize her dark and white horses, her body with her spirit. This lesson must be learned for the novel to reach is climax. “The truth’s the truth,” as Margaret says, and

Chris “must know it” (88). A hard truth indeed! It takes religious discipline and stern practice to know the world for what it is, but Chris must accept his son’s death and his

wife’s bitchiness. As Margaret Steltz puts it, “West’s aim in this novel is not to comfort her reader with a fantasy about a successful return to the womb … rather, she wishes to present, through the filter of the narrator’s consciousness, an account of difficulty of reconciling one’s innate desire for comfort with one’s intellectual awareness of the hardships and dangers of life” (71). This reconciliation is moral, and it is religious in its timbre. The novel tempts its characters with so many ways of escape: materialism, romance, nationalism, heaven. It demands, however, that one reject these pacifiers for truth’s cold sip. Jenny ought to see that she is no better than the slut and that Chris cannot, despite his pure devotion for Margaret, escape combat’s actuality. For, without this knowledge, Chris “would not be quite a man” (88): he would remain puerile, pathetic. And grow up, one must.

West’s ethical stance becomes apparent as her characters learn to observe reality dutifully. This moral maxim strikes roots in an ancient tradition of mysticism. The good man breaks through consolatory memories and sparkly images to gaze at truth itself: a remembered, as Phaedrus teaches, rapture. Socrates explains that love is really “a remembering of what the soul once saw as it made its journey with a god, looking down upon what we now assert to be real and gazing upwards at what is Reality itself” (249).

The Return of the Soldier thus transmits, “in spiritual terms,” a wisdom that transcends mere knowing and forgetting. One must heed the veracity one already knows, and this recollection is what Plato calls anamnesis. In Jenny’s blind exaltation of Margaret, “who was sustained by a mystic interpretation of life,” Jenny realizes she “had of late been underestimating the cruelty of the order of things. Lovers are frustrated; children are not begotten that should have had the loveliest life, the pale usurpers of their birth die young.

Such a world will not suffer magic circles to endure” (78). Goodness requires that one face the order’s cruelty. Life is not short but so long. If there is to be any goodness, one must forget the comforts of one’s magic, maternal circles: for “the truth’s the truth.” One must overlook all the consolations of God, country, and romance: for they procure violence. One must remember, instead, what one always knew: already. Life is hard.

Chris has truly forgotten nothing yet has remembered everything of any spiritual worth. He must reintegrate this knowledge with the filth of human existence. Love is central to this process, as sex awakens the flesh to its beauty (Plato 252). Love speeds up the ego’s encounter with transcendence, because only love’s strength, and perhaps blindness, will draw the self toward the other in painful recognition. West works from a

Greek model here. It is not surprising that, at his passion’s acme, Chris takes Margaret into Monkey Island’s “small Greek temple, looking very lovely in the moonlight” (41).

Chris’s communion with the Greek god of eros mirrors Jenny’s Platonic confrontation.

With and through love for Chris, Jenny’s unification of spirit and matter happens. With and through love for Margaret, Chris’s spheres rejoin. This ecstasy allows both subjects to recollect the reality they already apprehended but unconsciously forgot. Anamnesis is central to West’s moral Eucharist, because one must move beyond what seems to be true, what feels good, to approach that which one already knows to be true, what is good.

“Thirst for this sacrament has made Chris strike away the cup of lies about life that

Kitty’s white hands held to him, and turn to Margaret with this vast trustful gesture of his loss of memory” (88; emphasis mine), and that is how it should be. What one knew is, in fact, what one will know. Sure as stars are shining, love will lead you back, back where you belonged.

West uses the language of the Christian Eucharist to describe her characters confrontation with truthful remembrance.6 Do this, Christ asks, in remembrance of me: come together in spirit, and eat the sanguinary flesh; see suffering plainly to reject its lingering, mistaken necessity. West draws from these memorable discourses as Jenny wonders how

did Kitty … by merely suffering somehow remind us of reality? Why did her tears reveal to me what I had learned long ago, but had forgotten in my frenzied love, that there is a draught that we must drink or not be fully human? I knew that one must know the truth. I knew quite well that when one is adult one must raise to one’s lips the wine of truth, heedless that is it not sweet like milk but draws the mouth with its strength, and celebrate communion with reality …. (87; emphasis mine)

It is Jenny, and not Chris, who truly remembers what she “had learned long ago, but had forgotten in my frenzied love.” One must break the fantastic orb of appearances, “for in order to fit into the pattern one sometimes has to forgo something of one’s individual beauty” (71), and accept the world in its naked brutality. West’s narrative moves its readers, in this way, from a psychoanalytically-flavored amnesia to a philosophically- motivated anamnesis.7 This love moves back—past psychoanalysis, past Christian confession—to its Greek origins.

One must align oneself to the pattern, of which William James speaks in his account of religion, to the structure beyond mere seeming. As the novel leaves amnesia and approaches anamnesis, it suggests the complex spiritual knowledge one recalls from a previous existence. In this way, the text draws from the language of mystical experience

6 Anamnesis refers, in Christian theology, to the sacrament of Eucharist, emphasizing memory’s import. 7 Steve Pinkerton has suggested that recent developments in trauma theory show the soldier’s cure to result, in fact, from “a highly convincing transferential encounter” with Margaret (1). This transference may be true, but a reading of Plato would strengthen Pinkerton’s account and complicate Margaret’s role in the process. As I have suggested, West’s engagement with Phaedrus troubles a straightforward endorsement of Margaret’s spiritualism. 32

to express its morality. Chris’s “very loss of memory,” the narrator explains, “was a triumph over the limitations of language which prevent the mass of men from making explicit statements about their spiritual relationships” (65). Chris forgets the world so that he can, wordlessly, regain it. Love sears. Desire shatters the self. The good person breaks through consolatory memories to gaze at, and recollect, truth itself: ineffably. In its recollection, The Return of the Soldier offers, Samuel Hynes proposes, “a harsh moral lesson …. It says that Reality is the highest human value—higher than love, higher than happiness, and that not to accept and honor that high value is to be less than human”

(xvi). I have suggested that West grounds this “harsh moral lesson” in an allusion to

Phaedrus. This intertextuality connects the novel’s exploration of love and memory with its quest for truth and goodness.

Eventually, Jenny sees the tripartite truth of her ménage and narrates the story successfully. West’s embrace of a Greek conception of psyche merits pause, though, because Plato’s soul complicates as it also historically predates the Manichean weltanschauung often attributed to her (Schweizer HG 141-142). Schweizer argues that, in West’s opus, there exists “an almost Gnostic emphasis on facing the unpleasant knowledge that the world is imperfect” (HG 140). This propensity to view the world as unpleasant relates, for Schweizer, to West’s undying “dualistic temper” (HG 142). The

Return of the Soldier’s allusion to Phaedrus complicates this dichotomy, I believe, because it suggests that one must perceive the world’s unpleasantness precisely in order to escape from dualism. The universe’s harshness is not the result of West’s

Manichaeism, on my reading, but rather the perception of this callousness is a moral perquisite for the flight from dualistic thinking. Confrontation with reality, which good

religion supports, is necessary. West fleshes out this principle most fully in her analysis of Saint Augustine’s love for his overbearing Christian mother.

II. “The World Has Now Grown Old”: Memory, Love, and Saint Augustine

Rebecca West’s religious inquiry is far from progressive in the linear sense but remains radical nevertheless: belief lies not dormant in the West’s past but rather projects itself into an impenetrable future. Drawing on the work of West’s contemporary, Hannah

Arendt, this section demonstrates how Augustinian temporality inflects Saint Augustine and informs, more generally, West’s ethical, mystical modernism. Memory is, of course, one of literary modernism’s preoccupations.8 When approached with Arendt’s phenomenological analysis of Augustine in mind, one sees how memory infuses as it also engenders human beings’ forward-reaching desire. In short, we always want what we have had. This recognition of the past’s incidence allows one to appreciate West’s investment in the African bishop and his haunting influence. Indeed, one feels his impact prefigured in The Return of the Solider: for here past memories’ structuring presence reveals the violence inherent in any desire to have one’s magic circles—secular or religious, personal or political—endure into the future. Remembrance of the Victorian age infuses, West shows, the lived desire for peace as that same wont also inspires just war. Hence her moral: one cannot return to the womb’s juvenile comforts without bringing harm to others. An adult must drink “the wine of truth, heedless that it is not sweet like [mother’s] milk.” West builds a career on this draught, and this communion— this anamnesis—destroys God as it also candidly witnesses truth.

8 See, for instance, Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory. For West’s account, see her “Two Kinds of Memory” in The Strange Necessity collection (243-256). 34

Remembered for her political theory written in Cold War America, Hannah

Arendt first writes a dissertation on Love and Saint Augustine under the auspice of her

Christian existentialist mentor, Karl Jaspers. She publishes it in 1929 and takes the manuscript with her when she flees Nazi Germany in 1933, the year West publishes Saint

Augustine. Arendt’s phenomenological analysis has much to offer, I contend, critical readings of West’s biography. In particular, Arendt’s account clarifies what West takes from Augustine (memory and its relevance to modernist art), what she rejects (his theory of atonement), and why this interplay matters (modernist ethics). Augustine understands time as entrenched in memory. “It is only by calling past and future into the present of remembrance and expectation,” Arendt clarifies, “that time exists at all” (15). We experience time in and through our memory. This insight explains West’s constant comparison of Augustine to Proust, for Augustine “works in the same introspective field as the moderns … and tries to do exactly what Proust tries to do” (SA 15). Subjective exploration of memory links artist with saint. Augustine’s remembered attachment to his mother breeds, however, a dualistic, violent rejection of present materiality that seeps, tea-bag style, into Western civilization through his writings. This dualism legitimizes suffering as the expiation of primordial guilt, which fans fascism’s fury.

I claim, for this reason, that West endorses Augustinian temporality and interiority—“Quaestio mihi factus sum”—without embracing his primitive ideas regarding sacrifice and redemption. She rewrites Augustine’s Confessions to reimagine modern religious experience as ethical injunction. By this light, Saint Augustine is a complex text that engages biography and fiction to explore the roots of Western warfare.

While scholars have appreciated its psychological depth and linked it directly to West’s

analysis of the Balkans in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, they have often read the narrative as evidence for West’s increasingly reactionary politics (Orel 71; Scott PI 199).

I propose, however, that West criticizes Augustine as she also learns from him. She uses his example both to reimagine modernist spirituality and to uncover buried religious alternatives. This process is especially clear when one reads the biography in light of

West’s earlier writing, as this chapter does, resisting the urge to classify Saint Augustine as a break with her radical feminist past. The biography is, in fact, psychologically ambitious, in the spirit of 1928’s “The Strange Necessity,” and its excavation of the psyche leads West to, not from, faith.

Her biography of the saint marks the extent to which Augustine fails, on West’s count, to live an ethical, religious life. He conceives of religion as a “magnified form of the relationship between a child and its parents” (SA 106), when he ought to see it as the refusal of such retrogression and use it to follow suit. Clearly, Augustine gives Rebecca

West something to react against. She often criticizes the saint—“there really is much more to the religious life than giving oneself gooseflesh over the fact that some things strike one as dirty and others do not” (SA 119)—and always reads his mother—“even as

Monnica was calm, so is the heart of a whirlwind” (SA 94)—for filth. These character sketches do not surprise, as much as they might, if one recalls that West composes Saint

Augustine to discover, in her words, “why every phrase I read of his sounds in my ears like the sentence of my doom and the doom of my age” (BL 1084). West finds within

Augustine’s life and philosophy, as Mary Anne Schofield carefully shows, a justification for fascist violence (329). His religiosity froths with dualistic vehemence, and his refusal of material pleasure sets the stage for the twentieth century’s violence.

Hannah Arendt’s analysis of desire helps make what West argues is Augustine’s religious failure lucid. Through the mobilization of Augustine’s distinction between earthly cupiditas and heavenly caritas, Arendt’s Love and Saint Augustine investigates

“the other human being’s relevance” for the Christian (4). Arendt seeks to clarify “the meaning and importance of neighborly love” in Augustine’s tortuous, often impenetrable thinking (3). Surprisingly, it is not clear why love of God would return the soul to care for her worldly neighbor. If “love that has yielded to the right order can no longer be understood as craving and desire [cupiditas] because its direction is not determined by any particular object but by the general order of everything that is” (39), then what prompts, Arendt wonders, the subject’s reentry into the world and what, furthermore, protects charity from devolving into narcissistic cupidity? This question is urgent in the postwar Germany of the late 1920s. As Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius

Stark make clear in their analysis of Love and Saint Augustine, Arendt seeks to discover, within her old friend’s writing, “the social and moral ground for action in the public realm” (116). This grounding, they argue, links the dissertation directly to Arendt’s influential account of evil in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Love speaks to justice.

To make the case for the living neighbor’s ethical relevance, Arendt must account first for Augustine’s understandings of interiority and temporality. Love always remains connected to memory, according to Augustine, “[s]ince our expectations and desires are prompted by what we remember and guided by a previous knowledge” (LA 56). You can’t always get what you want, true; but, and here’s Augustine’s key point, one has always had that which one wants before. In this way, Augustine links love and time.

Memory’s significance within the realm of desire produces his particular understanding

of duration. Time moves not forward but backward, toward and not away from us, as it races through one’s consciousness of the past. “In contrast to our own understanding,”

Arendt clarifies, “time for Augustine does not begin in the past in order to progress through the present into the future, but comes out of the future and runs, as it were, backward through the present and ends in the past” (28). Our end is, truly, our beginning:

“[t]he absolute future turns out to be the ultimate past and the way to reach it is through remembrance” (LA 49). Love remains caught up in the experiences and joys and pleasures and pains the human subject recalls, endlessly. To them, the subject returns.

Augustine’s account of temporality supports West’s critique of his thinking, for, in Augustine’s case, West links his remembrance, and the desire it engenders, to his mother. What appears to be a movement forward to God is, in fact, a thinly-veiled yield to the parent, that “strong cliff of a woman on whom the breakers of a man’s virility would dash in vain” (19-20). Augustine moves not forward to Truth but backward toward his mother’s all-encompassing embrace, as though “there should have been no one in his heart except Monnica” (38). His religiosity fails, West suggests, because it has not sufficiently cleansed itself of its infantile fixations. This miscarriage is an ethical botch:

Monnica rests as Augustine’s end, not God. His supposed caritas is simply a rationalization of a rather perverse, though terribly human, cupiditas. “It rings through the Latin today,” West underscores, “his adoring recognition of Monnica’s essential quality” (50; emphasis mine). She does not need to pressure Augustine to convert to

Christianity overtly. “Such a woman could afford to wait,” West notes. “The son of such a woman could afford to wander, knowing he would be brought home at last” (50-51).

Love’s entrenchment in memory will return Augustine to his mother’s religion, unless he

does something about it. Indeed, “Monnica could have put him into the Church as into a cradle” (26); it will save him for her. This faith will also conveniently keep Augustine chaste, as Monnica “could not bear him to assume adult status even in the Church” (29).

She choreographs, with Augustine’s cooperation, a complicated psychological dance that harmonizes their affection. The saint does not skip a beat.

Love will lead him back, in part, because Monnica is a stubborn Christian. She recreates the world in her own image; and so, “what she wanted fitted in with what was, as neatly as if she were playing cup-and ball” (50). In Saint Augustine, it appears inevitable that the son will be, in West’s carefully chosen words, “delivered over to her way of thinking, wholly and forever” (79; emphasis mine). West’s choice of “delivered” signals the shift in temporal register. As Arendt notes, “while life once saw its being in a

‘throwback’ to its source, it now understands itself as racing toward its being” (73). The human soul anticipates its cause. In this case, Augustine races toward Monnica’s uterus.

“This is the reason why,” Arendt glosses, “the return to one’s origin (redire ad creatorem) can at the same time be understood as an anticipating reference to one’s end

(se referre ad finem) … For the person who turns back to the absolute past, the Creator who made him, the Whence-he-came reveals itself as identical to the Whither-he-goes”

(56). On West’s count, Augustine returns to his earthly rather than his heavenly creator.

He chooses comfort over reality. In turn, his scholarship functions to rationalize and veil this inbred return. West’s critique of Augustine’s parental attachment rests, in this sense, on his psychic, though unconscious, conflation of Monnica with God.

The implications of this strange love are thick with gist. Augustine does not detach from Monnica, and this confusion leads not only to his inability to live ethically

but also to his wholesale endorsement of violence. “For though Augustine had the lightest possible sense of ethical responsibility”—and Arendt’s need to recover the love of neighbor from Augustine’s theological tracts lends credence to West’s critique—“he had the heaviest sense of sin” (109). “It seemed to him,” West continues, “as if humanity was saturated with the obscene, not by reason of what it did but of what it was” (ibid), and this essential degradation colors Augustine’s thinking on predestination and redemption.

As an overgrown child, Augustine conceives his religion as a return to the womb; to protect his fantasy, he endorses a theology of guilt and redemptive suffering, because it maintains the parent-child bond. God the Perfect Mother will love unconditionally. God the Father Figure will punish absolutely. Augustine projects the image of a personal God into the heavens and then mars that God with human drama. West’s crucial insight here is that this yen begets violence. Suffering becomes necessary to appease this personal

God’s anthropocentric appetites. Augustine never frees himself from baser, blind passions, so his religion comes to protect and to propagate fantasy sadistically.

Henceforth he refuses to see the world for what it is. He sees the world only for what he needs it to be.

In order to appreciate the late modernist present, one must move, with West and

Arendt, backward. West’s psychological study of Saint Augustine, which Jane Marcus has identified as one of the earliest psychobiographies in English letters (SS 153), does just that: it places Augustine’s attachment to his mother at his religious experience’s heart as it also situates Christianized Europe’s attachment to war at its generative, Augustinian origin. Saint Augustine parallels the genius and his world, past with the present. When

West describes the fall of Rome and its absorption into Christianity, she might also be

describing fascism’s spread throughout Europe. In the 300s, Christianity exploded like a boy band and “the people who, being of that temperament which finds pleasure in joining movements, were swept into the Church by the prosetylising force of St. Paul and his successors” (9). The disintegration of the Roman Empire left its peasants wanting more significance, and at Christianity’s

altar the common man found what was wholly wanting in the secular world: a sense of the uniqueness and preciousness of his individuality. Out of his relationship with his God and his Church he could devise the needed drama in which he could play his part and reveal the character of his self. He was given back the will which society had cut from him, he was alive after all. (SA 9)

The same absorption happens in the Rome of the 1920s. Fascism offers the masses a similar “uniqueness and preciousness.”9 Fascism is not cut off from Christianity, according to West, but is its imperial reiteration. In both revolutions, peasants move in one direction and join the whole to regain what individuality they have lost to industrialization, secularization, and failed wars (SA 6). Readers must keep West’s twofold, paralleled structure in mind as they approach the biography. Saint Augustine uses the Roman world as a foil for Europe in 1930s. Although Arendt approaches

Augustine from a phenomenological angle, she, in sync with West, intuits his importance as a monumental figure caught between past and future.

In her influential Refiguring Modernism, Bonnie Kime Scott describes this layering of historical and personal registers as West’s “social scaffolding of imperial cultures” (146). West’s “scaffolding” leads readers to appreciate the interconnections among imperial, gender, and class oppressions across time. In Saint Augustine, West

9 For a helpful account of fascism’s appeal for the twentieth century’s masses, I recommend the introduction to Zeev Sternhell’s The Birth of Fascist Ideology, “Fascism as Alternative Political Culture” (3-35). 41

reconstructs an altar ego to remember, reassess, revise, and reconstruct the Western tradition. If Augustine is an origin point toward which fascist Europe rushes, then one must understand the genius and his oeuvre fully. As such, Schofield rightly proclaims that West’s “process is clear: narrating the life of St. Augustine is Rebecca West telling the history of her age; St. Augustine becomes Rebecca West’s interwar years’ other self”

(330). West’s exploration of Augustine’s theology and biography does not lead her to reject the sedition of 1914, as some scholars have implied; rather, I suspect the interior excavations initiated by the men of 1914 inspire her to funnel that iconoclastic impulse into the emotional attachments that stimulate war and laud pain. Saint Augustine tracks fascism’s genesis and its relation to the Western tradition, of which West is part, and in this way anticipates Three Guineas’ critique of “unreal loyalties” (95). Like Woolf, West attempts, most urgently, to figure out what art and religion can do in a broken world.

Religion’s relationship to art is a reoccurring theme in Saint Augustine. According to West, art must bring pleasure and shed unifying light to a broken world. It will reveal and clarify patterns and promote healing thought. As she describes the activity in “The

Strange Necessity,” artists will create meaning, “taking the things which human beings can produce and compelling them into forms and patterns which are concentrated arguments concerning reality and their opinion of it” (63). Religion is similar to art in that it searches after “forms and patterns,” but it does so quite differently. Religion institutionalizes its vision. Yet faith, as West explains in 1926’s “My Religion,” must not valorize bellicose, superfluous sacrifice or promulgate irrelevant, anachronistic superstitions; and, “even when Christianity is stripped of doctrines that were created to serve a special purpose, but now serve none, there is no reason to suppose that it is the

final revelation of the Divine to humanity” (25). Faith, as opposed to religion, might search after reality endlessly and not spiral off into fantasies of permanence and consolations for pain. Reality is key, but the pursuit of it is infinite. Religion and art, then, approach the pattern behind human experience in different ways: art expresses “the consciousness of the universe at a particular moment,” while religion aims to articulate

“the consciousness of the universe through all time” (SA 52). Religion is dangerous because it can posit a final reality. Art is dangerous because the individual can imagine his vision is universal. Nevertheless, both religion and art have the potential to spread a, much needed, love for reality, clasp of pleasure, and “spirit of tolerance” (MR 25). They might even, West hints, join forces in faith.

Throughout her career, West emphasizes the significance of pleasure as a marker of human progress. “Pleasure is not arbitrary,” she maintains; “it is the sign by which the human organization shows that it is performing a function which it finds appropriate to its means and ends” (IB 323). Human beings take pleasure in artistic creation, in religious ritual, in sexual intercourse. Things so awry, on her count, when suffering becomes seen as obligatory for salvation. The need to suffer is actually a superstitious remnant of humankind’s past, when gods and demons ran amok.10 This justification attributes meaning to evil when it is rather lacking in it (SA 61), and meaning-laden suffering must, therefore, go. One ought to link pleasure, instead, to the progressive uncovering of reality. For this reason, West can appreciate Augustine’s embrace of original sin but has a difficult time with the atonement. While original sin stands in for the extreme difficulty

10 I use the phrase “run amok” intentionally to signal the link West sees between rationalizations for suffering and colonization. Amok comes from the Malay and refers, in English, to” a frenzied Malay,” out for blood (OED). 43

of thinking objectively, atonement does not bespeak a reality but clouds it. Airy doctrines like atonement are, in West’s opinion, attempts “founded on the primitive idea of the magical value of sacrifice for propitiating the powers that be” (IB 335). The powers that be are, in the 1930s, no longer simply angels and devils but fascists and communists vying to take their places. The Church’s “attempts to develop a doctrine to account for the crucifixion of Christ as an atonement for the sins of man” disguises the fact that this carnage is not the expulsion of vices but “a demonstration of them” (ibid). According to atonement’s logic, one is, by virtue of the flesh, guilty; to return to perfect union and escape adulterated sin, one must suffer and payback the debt. This reasoning adulterates reality, because evil and violence bring no purpose or redemption to the human condition.

They are empty. They point nowhere.

West avers: Christ’s crucifixion ought not to have happened. Theologians should not candy-coat Christ’s murder with promises of salvation. When they do, otherworldly transactions, and their doctrinal niceties, displace what should be the Church’s emphasis on the lived relations of love and mercy central to Christ, who “was an incarnate denunciation of cruelty” (IB 335). In place of pleasure, one receives suffering. For West, atonement risks positing violence as axiomatic. This culturally pervasive narrative prevents one from condemning fascism fully and imagining alternatives realistically. As such, she locates in Augustine, “the first modern man,” a root cause of fascism. He made suffering part of man’s daily bread. Meanwhile, the past rushes to him as his culture’s futurity, for he takes

as his subject-matter, with a far greater simplicity and definiteness and vigor than any earlier Christian writer, a certain complex of ideas which are at the root of every primitive religion: the idea that matter, and especially matter as related to

sex, is evil; that man has acquired guilt through his enmeshment in matter; that he must atone for this guilt to an angry God; and that this atonement must take the form of suffering, and the renunciation of easy pleasure. (159-160)

Augustine codifies a primitive spirituality at an epochal sea change. It demonizes matter and necessitates suffering, religiously.

Augustine’s dualistic faith comes to haunt the life of the mind and of action, for the future emerges from this past. Augustine misses the chance, West insists, to rethink the assumptions on which his cultures stand; “[i]nstead of attempting to expose these ideas as unreasonable, or to replace them by others, as nearly all the ancient philosophers had done, Augustine accepted them and intellectualised them with all the force of his genius. It would be easy to prove how closely the modern world has followed his steps”

(SA 160). She lists D.H. Lawrence, Joyce, and Proust as inheritors of this ferocious weltanschauung. Augustine’s thinking about matter and sacrifice is, in fact, “the ring- fence in which the modern mind is prisoner” (SA 161). In Augustine’s wake, the modern world seeks to escape matter and the pleasures it has held, from time immemorial, in suspicion. West identifies this intellectual ring-fence as the “fantasy of dualism and the need to wipe out guilt by suffering” (SA 161). Dualism and violence trap Western minds in sadistic repetitions: “perhaps it is this which causes the pain of history, the wars, the persecutions, the economic systems which put many to the torture of poverty and raise up rich men only to throw them down, the civilizations that search for death as soon as opportunities for fuller life open before them” (ibid). The separation of body from spirit engenders a civilization that callously posits death as a means to fuller life.

Honest pleasure will lead one away from, not toward, dualism. The desire to escape the world as it really is—matter and spirit mixed all together—enthrones a this-

worldly injustice: poverty, war, hatred. West makes it clear, however, that this ring-fence is a particular interpretation of the divine. For instance, the ancient philosophers do not view matter as evil. They saw erotic pleasure in a different light, a point she drives home in The Return of the Soldier with its Platonic subtext. There is no need, West implies, to cling to Augustine’s allegiance to sacrifice and guilt. One can refuse the Oedipal drama and grow up, since “certain forms which Christianity has to take to satisfy the needs of the man of that age are unsuited to the man of this age” (MR 23). Religions exist in certain times and places; they change as human beings do. West separates the religious superstructure from its divine base as she also asserts that the spirit continues to speak through the ages. It is possible, and essential, to reinterpret human beings’ relationship to

Ultimate Reality as time passes. The modern world needs such a reinterpretation right now.

Of course, the primeval importance of redeeming sacrifice speaks to Augustine’s remembered incestuous pleasures, too. The desire to fuse with his mother, and its attendant guilt, inspires Augustine to justify sacrifice and violence. He needs to pay off the father from whom he has stolen the mother. Augustine’s voracious delight “in the emotions of loving and being loved” leads him to adopt “an unhappy attitude toward sex, consisting of an exaggerated sense of its importance combined with an unreasoning horror of it” (SA 35-37). This desperate need for unconditional love causes him to project his perfected parent into the sky. He cannot accept the Neoplatonic cosmos then in vogue, because it had no space for a personal deity (SA 62). “This delicate Neoplatonism,” to which I believe West is quite sympathetic, “has no real chance of holding Augustine, whose most severely abstract thought is damp with his sweat” (SA 63). His cognition

remains firmly planted in the earth’s soil, although he neglects to see its roots thrust therein. When Augustine experiences his mystical vision at the window, he cannot see that the “absorption of another self” he experiences with his mother is merely a manifestation of ordinary human love in an extraordinary manner (SA 88). The revelation must be something else from somewhere else entirely; it cannot be human. This rejection of desire’s material thickets leaves Augustine blind to their weedy advances.

Ultimately, West rewrites Augustine’s Confessions for the 1930s and, in doing so, chastises the saint for his failure to love others truly. The critique is, as I have insisted, an ethical one. Augustine never separates from his mother, and this misfire leads to later dogmatism and real aggression. His deep desire for Monnica chains him to the familial bonds of love that he writes into this theology. He endlessly repeats his desire to remain a child, even when he marries for money: “what he wanted to do in marriage,” West delineates, “was not to accept responsibility but to find someone to be responsible for him; not be a father, but to be dependent on a woman as a child on its mother” (71-72).

This repetition is his religion, and one hears the echo of Freud’s claim that the “finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it” (88). West makes this deeper need palpable: “[w]e know, not by deduction but from Augustine’s own statement, that his most intense experiences were those arising out of the relationship between himself and his parents”

(106). Augustine’s relationship to the divine maintains his dependency without fail for, as

Arendt’s reading of Augustine suggests, the good of love is “what you cannot lose against your will” (4). One cannot lose an image of the Perfect Parent held eternally.

West pushes beyond the Freudian drama, however, to reveal its moral weight, for the saint “never performed any action during his seventy-six years could be possibly held up

for ethical imitation” (SA 71). This moral shortcoming is, of course, telling, and it grounds West’s ethics.

West’s Saint Augustine cracks Augustine’s “globe of ease,” his relationship with

Monnica, religiously and mandates spiritual experience’s fullness: this rupture is ethical in practice and religious in mind. In this rupture, I argue West develops a feminist mode of religiosity that disrupts binary thinking and rejects long-patient suffering. West’s Saint

Augustine seeks to aid moderns in their attempt to rethink the divine and escape from the ring-fence of dualism. It makes three important observations. First, the biography shows the structuring presence of memory—what West will also call the unconscious mind—in adult life; indeed, it is from memory that theology and poetry draw. Second, the text reveals the human tendency to refuse maturity for the comforts of infantile fusion; after all, it is memory that coyly shapes our far-from-transparent desires. Third, the biography illuminates how deeply the spiritualization of suffering shapes Western theory and practice; therefore, West argues for a novel belief system that will witness the “obvious identification between pleasure and life and light” (IB 337).

Europe is not progressing, West contends, but is moving back into its origins.

This retrogression occurs since, as Arendt notes of Augustine, “memory transforms the past into future possibility. What has been can be again—this is what our memory tells us in hope or in fear” (48). Thus what truly matters, personally and politically, is not whither we go but whence we came. This whence determines our craving, since “[i]nsofar as the happy life is remembered, it is part and parcel of the present and inspires our desires and expectations for the future” (Arendt 47). One recalls how the happy life of 1901 shaped

Chris’s Edwardian longings. The same happens with all human beings. Each person

crafts a “determined dwelling in the time of his first love”; each, like Chris, chooses, all too often, “what was to him reality out of all the appearances so copiously presented by the world” (RS 65). Drawn ceaselessly into the past, current ethical subjects must, instead, remember decisively.

West remembers, differently. Her interaction with the Western tradition is, strictly speaking, not conservative but rather reparative. I suspect West draws from the rich resources of the Western tradition to signal her reluctance to expunge, as Hitler does, all convention. This innovation engages the men-of-1914 tradition as it also widens it to include liberatory, anti-fascist politics. West uses her biography of Augustine to think through modernism’s moral and political lessons; she packages those insights and readies them for a world facing Hitler and civilization’s imminent demise. Interestingly enough,

Arendt and West turn to Augustine—as Hitler begins his rise to power, as both women distance themselves from infamous lovers11—at roughly the time. They see Augustine as perched between two eras—“the world,” as West puts it, “has grown old, and does not abide in that strength in which it formerly stood” (SA 2)—and this vantage point reflects their own situations in a modernized Europe caught between the acts of war. For war will come, and war will go. In the meantime, Augustine does not deliver an adequate mode for spiritual resistance. West will, however, articulate her revelatory resistance in “A

Letter to a Grandfather,” a missive sent to Virginia Woolf on the heels of Saint

Augustine’s late publication.

11 With the dissertation, Arendt inserts distance between her philosophy and that of her mentor, teacher, and lover, Martin Heidegger (Scott and Stark ix). By 1933, West has married her husband, Henry Andrews, and seeks to place some distance between her thinking and that of her colleague, lover, and baby-daddy, H.G. Wells. For more on West’s relationship to the “arch-muddler” (qtd xxii), see Gordon N. Ray’s H.G. Wells & Rebecca West. 49

III. “The Hereditary Faculty of Vision”: A Letter from a Granddaughter

The simultaneity of Hitler’s rise to power and Rebecca West’s overt turn to religion has invited literary critics to interpret West’s midcentury religiosity as reactionary (Schweizer RW 73; Scott RW 199). It is precisely this simultaneity, however, that I believe underscores West’s radical revision of the Western spiritual tradition. For here she uses religion to craft a very particular response to fascist violence even as she demonstrates Christianity’s tie to that real aggression: Christianity is clearly implicated but dismissing religion outright makes little gain. In the previous section, I suggested

Arendt’s phenomenological approach illuminates the ethics of West’s Saint Augustine.

Augustine wrongfully personalizes divinity to linger comfortably cradled. In what follows, I explore how West encodes this morality within a spiritual revelation. She uses this genre not to conflate spirituality and morality but rather to stress the necessary distance between them. In fact, I propose that “A Letter to a Grandfather” calcifies

West’s iconoclastic morality as it also posits the precise limitations of human knowledge.

The epistemological check this mystical vision encloses, and endorses, will prove essential to West’s journalistic response to the Holocaust’s crimes against humanity.

Therefore, this section will underscore the epistle’s mystical ethics with acute attention to its political implications.

Looking backward, 1933 does prove crucial. In this year, West publishes both

Saint Augustine and “A Letter to a Grandfather.” These experimental texts contextualize as they also articulate the salience of modernism’s mystical debt. They suggest, moreover, why early modernist aesthetic experimentation now demands stern ethical commitment, for 1933 is also an important year in history. On 30 January, Hitler receives

his appointment as chancellor of Germany. By 14 July, the Third Reich is a single-party state. It is no fluke that West’s most decidedly religious texts appear in this year. “We are simply not equipped, on a human, political level,” Arendt writes to Karl Jaspers during the Eichmann Trial, “with a guilt that is beyond crime and an innocence that is beyond goodness or virtue. This is the abyss that opened up before us as early as 1933” (qtd

Stonebridge JI 3). West’s prescient texts meditate extensively on the passing of civilizations, temporality, violence, and the void they proffer. This writing takes history and generation as its themes, ruminating on Europe’s fascist present. “A Letter to a

Grandfather” and Saint Augustine thus enable West to process fascism while generating an imagined genealogy.

“A Letter to a Grandfather” appears as part of The Hogarth Letters run, published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf between 1931 and 1933. West composes her contribution at the request of Virginia Woolf, who bemoaned the fact that it arrived, exactly, “9 months and 10 days late” (qtd. Lee xxiii). The biography of Augustine stalls the letter’s completion, in addition to, in West’s words, “family responsibilities and sudden shocks”

(ibid). Nevertheless, complete the letter she does, and its inclusion in this particular series matters to its full appreciation. These letters are, as Harold Nicolson noted, “epistles in which the generation of 1910 confronts the generation of 1932” openly (qtd. Lee xiv).

From the outset, the series thinks poetics and politics together. In fact, Selma Meyerowitz argues that, “[i]f a single volume can indicate the philosophy toward art, literature, and politics of both the Hogarth Press and the Bloomsbury Group, it may well be The

Hogarth Letters”; here, the generic “form … creates a structure of intellectual debate which clarifies thought and merges personal expression with social commentary” (78).

The letters preserve the individual’s voice in the face of fascism’s mass politics. As

Hermione Lee notes, the authors combine the 1910 “language of liberal optimism” with a

1933-style League of Nations’ opposition to the “old spirit of Empire” (xii). The writers ground this political stance in “anti-imperialism, conciliation and internationalism” (Lee xi). West’s contribution is no exception.

The political and ethical merits of “A Letter to a Grandfather,” though, have largely escaped scholarly notice. This critical oversight is, in part, due to its esoteric theme, but it also results from the letter’s technical difficulty. The narrative covers a lot of ground rather randomly, and its style appears aggressively idiosyncratic. Woolf herself claimed not to understand the letter, and she is not the last to find the letter cumbersome and its signification shadowy at best. Woolf’s perplexity is curious, though, given that

West provides her with a neat enough summation. On 26 November 1931, she writes to

Woolf,

I cannot tell you how flattered I am by the invitation to write a letter for the series. There is something I would like to do for the series. It is a letter to a grandfather, from a woman whose family has the power of seeing visions and who has just seen what is this age’s form of what would have in other ages been a vision of the Gadama or Christ. I could have it done in January. Would that do? (SL131)

Woolf accepts the premise. The letter will record a visionary’s experience of the divine in its particular historical moment. West announces her desire to produce a mystical revelation outright: this revelation is nothing short of a glimpse of God. The narrative nucleus of the letter, then, is easy enough to decipher. Its connection to the politics of

1933 is what remains, however, critically understudied. Given the series’ context, these poetic and political resonances are of utmost importance. They gesture toward West’s late modernist resistance and her continued commitment to progressive politics.

West’s forty-page dispatch, the seventh and final in the unpopular letter series,12 opens with the writer C.B.’s supplication to her paternal grandfather. She needs his advice. She is perplexed and shopping like mad. C.B. has experienced her “share of the vision that comes to each generation of our family” (170), and she is frightened. At a carnival in Paris, “there was the sense—almost the sound—of the rent veil” (171). She saw something true, stood “in front of the thing which is hidden to all other people all their lives long” (172). After this initial, cryptic description, C.B. proceeds to track the visions and artistic creations of her gifted family members. This discussion of her spiritual birthright progresses from the Middle Ages to the modernist present. Through this narrative, C.B. investigates how time shapes artistic vision and necessarily limits its expression. Notably, “A Letter to a Grandfather” narrates an individual vision, one shrouded in mystical unknowing, and advances no ubiquitous claim but rather suggests the very impossibility of mass visions or unified systems.

The speaker’s letter is bound in time, and, though theoretically ambitious, decidedly limited. It is personal, yet it is also political. As a girl, her grandfather took her to tour an abbey’s ruins. C.B. recalls how her grandfather explains the family’s visionary lineage. In 1230, Philippe de Beauchamp witnesses ultimate truth and builds an abbey in an architectural style “that would have put into the mind the idea of a man stretched on a cross” (175). The abbey’s invisible grace haunts C.B. The abbey’s beauty lingers unseen, because iconoclasts destroy the structure during the Reformation, at which point Richard

Beauchamp crafts his religious verse à la Milton. Vocations shift. Some years before, in

1453, Sir John Beauchamp paints the spirit in the style of Michelangelo, and, some years

12 Hermione Lee notes that the series did not sell well. Its style, though, was imitated, which suggests a wider readership (viii). 53

later, Geoffrey attends to the hysterias of a clergyman’s widow during the Enlightenment.

An eye’s blink later, Arthur Beauchamp despises Byron. Swiftly C.B. criticizes the

Romantics before praising the Victorian science that her grandfather practices. His pursuit of empirical truth motivates her search for metaphysical reality. Each age has its particular vision. With a knowing nod to Giambattista Vico, C.B. claims “life is a different thing at different times” (180). Each age has its particular bent, its particular encumbrance. This historicized intuition leads C.B. to document her revelation in Paris and to hint at how it fits into the early twentieth century’s milieu. C.B. closes her letter to a grandfather with the accomplishment of “what the Christians call the will to belief: that is I admit what I believe” (207). She honestly has cause to will belief afresh.

West’s grand tour of British history may seem overly ambitious for a short piece of fiction. Tracey Seeley has argued, however, that Orlando influences “A Letter to a

Grandfather” in its style and approach (6). West writes a favorable review of Orlando upon its publication and turns increasingly to appreciate Woolf’s mode of characterization. “A Letter to a Grandfather” enters into this tradition of modernism and fights for a more capacious appreciation of modernism’s influences and historical context. Margaret Stetz rightly highlights that West “remained almost unique in being able to recognize … that modernist movement did share a strong continuity with Western

European art of the past, including that of the romantic period, despite the violently anarchic rhetoric of some of its practitioners” (RWC 44). On my reading, West’s fictional essay condenses the historical arc Woolf uses to examine sexuality and implements it to explore religious experience. She condenses in order to extenuate modernism’s place within, rather than outside, history and politics. She mirrors Woolf’s modernist

investigation of subjectivity and temporality in order to distill their mystical residue.

Quite simply, West’s epistle makes Orlando’s latent mysticism apparent. Both authors view the self in relation to a larger tradition of which it is part; in turn, they observe the limits of knowledge and the need to heed reality.13 West takes the latter insight and politicizes it.

One must fully appreciate how, for West, historical location limits one’s vision as it also shapes its expression. Mysticism nails C.B. to a particular historical moment from which she narrates her necessarily incomplete account. With her narrative, C.B. engages in “the same heroic attempt to cover all, to know all, to feel all, although fixed to one point in the universe, and thereby pinned to ignorance” (207-208). This recognition provides the basis for West’s ethical encounter and political thinking. Motley F. Deakin’s comments gesture toward the political theory implicit here, since C.B.’s contemporaries,

outstretched in a tension similar to that of the medieval man on his cross, made the same attempt to know, and feel everything, though caught in the confines of ignorance and isolation common to all men. The great danger lay with those of her generation who hankered to submit themselves to authority, whether they be the neohumanists emitting the musty odor of a long-dead past, against whom [West] turned so violently, or the apologists for the proletarian dictatorships of the left or of the right. (91)

The human subject can never feel or know all. Authority cannot dictate it. Truth remains distant; its reality persists unaltered by human beings’ endeavors, hysterics, or wills. That to which religion addresses itself can never disappear or change; its shape and character superficially alter: that is all. C.B. endorses the fact, for fact it is for West, that “there is nothing more evident in history than the persistence of the life of the spirit … the spirit is

13 West also reviews A Room of One’s Own favorably. I hear West echoing Mary’s final plea to face reality, for “if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women” (114). Woolf and West share this spirit. 55

plainly not to be killed” (189). C.B. participates in the ancient and endless attempt to attend to the unseen, impermeable order behind the realm of appearances: to “stand in front of the thing which is hidden to all other people all their lives long, and look at it as much as it wants to be looked at, and take just what it wants to give one” (172). Both passive and active, the mystical ethics encounters a reality outside the self.

Cognizant of the letter’s investigation of temporality, it makes sense to look closely at C.B.’s vision in Paris, for it proffers salient insights concerning modernism and its relation to truth, tradition, and aesthetics. C.B.’s mystical encounter occurs at an ordinary fair on a “bright June afternoon” (203). She stops before “a kind of merry-go- round formed of a circle of little motor-cars” (ibid). In front of the merry-go-round stands

“a very tall negro”; the people gather there, “and he touched them with his cane, directing them to their proper seats in the automobile” (203-204). The machine starts, and the masses whirl. The director’s cane transforms into “a rod of iron, compelling the will of the people who looked up at it. They could not move, they cried out asking him to take this image of necessity so that they could be free” (204). In this description, the ride operator presents to them a picture of necessity—ananke—to which they must submit their volition. C.B. has her vision in this moment. She remembers.

The crowd made twittering, giggling noises; and at length the negro freed his arms by letting the cane dangle from a barrier on the platform and held out his hands before him. With the first finger and thumb of his left hand he described a circle, and into this circle shot the first finger of his right hand. His teeth shone, his rolling eyeballs exhibited the whites of his eyes; it was as if a gleaming bird, a dove, shot forth from his face and in its flight became his finger. (204)

As in Plato’s Timaeus, the dialogue West echoes most boldly here, the spirit emerges when the transcendent touches the immanent. The director’s hand gestures bespeak the

tension between a circular eternity (sameness) and the pointed present (difference). The interaction between the two compose the human condition, and its reality, as such.

For the first time in the family’s documented history, a woman receives a transcendent vision. The spirit survives the, for West, welcomed changes that modernity proffers. The setting is, after all, definitively contemporary. The patrons seek endless amusement in motorized vehicles. They revolve within the orb of Paris and its modernist splendors. They also, lest we forget, form a crowd and beg to “be free” from “necessity.”

Not surprisingly, they quickly transfer their wills to a proto-fascist dictator. It is through the figure of the Negro-dictator-carny, however, that West receives her vision. Racially charged, for certain, this man combines many aspects of modernity—racism, fascism, imperialism—that coalesce and condense in the apparition. What is more, these factors adhere to the revelation in the sense that they enable it to happen. Her revelation rests, as it were, on Western imperialism, fascism, and racism. C.B. describes her vision, for this reason, as “the white product of dark gestures” (208). The specificity of modernism’s historical location does not escape West, nor does its gloomy politics. This macabre relation requires careful unpacking, because scholars tend to read the oscillation between black and white in West as a Manichean digression (Schweizer RW 72). This interpretation blanches, it seems to me, the text’s larger political critique. West plants

C.B.’s mystical vision in the muddle of twenty-century injustices.

The white product has its origins in the spirit. Of the avian presence, C.B. has already described the particular bird’s merit: the white “dove, the thing that flies forth, the logos, the symbol of the spirit,” survives (176). And yet, C.B. carefully sketches the manner in which that pigeon feeds off the productive, material world. The dove, which in

the Middle Ages “only the lords of the manor and the Abbey might possess,” there swoops and “pillages the material life with its sharp, greedy beak of criticism, while the natural man stands by and curses, seeing his relationship with his environment ruptured, yet knowing himself under an ineluctable obligation to support the life of the spirit”

(176). Human life must support the spirit’s travail. It persists unchanged throughout the ages; it soars in the Middle Ages, veers into the Renaissance, and nests within modernity’s industrialization.

West’s metaphor drives the point home to roost: spirit and matter exist in relation to one another but forever separate. “The despoilers had feared to disturb the home of the doves, lest they should fly away and be lost” (ibid), which is, as C.B. shows, impossible.

Nevertheless, the spirit makes demands on the material world that are not always pleasant. It does not irrevocably appear in the guise of goodness. The granddaughter underscores, in her reflections on the French Revolution, how “Arthur Beauchamp saw in the gleam of lurid light above the housetops a godhead that had changed its company again. It walked neither with the saints, nor the virtues, but with the passions that are behind human thought and conduct” (193). The spirit behind the French Revolution was laudable but its methods uncouth. Nevertheless, there is no uncompromised manifestation of the divine on earth. Christianity unleashes centuries of aggression upon the world .The spirit rings through the French Revolution’s violence and barbarity, too. The earth has no nook or cranny in which perfection can dwell fully. The spirit will emerge, rather, in and through imperfection.

In Paris, the dove emerges from the whites of a black carnival worker’s eyes. The blackness here evokes, I suspect, European colonization and modernism’s connection to

it. West makes this affiliation apparent with the Parisian priest turned art dealer. Shortly before her vision, C.B. sits with friends for lunch. Unfortunately, for the rest,

Ambrose was rather happy, because he had long been toying with the idea of entering the Roman Catholic Church, and it has been a great shock for him to find on his arrival to Paris that the young priest who had been the special inspiration for his circle had had a little trouble and had stepped out of his cassock to become a dealer in negro sculpture in the Rue de Boétie. (210)

The verb “toying” evokes the lack of seriousness in Ambrose’s pursuit. Still, one notices that the troubled priest moves from the Holy Orders of the Church to sell the primitive sculpture so influential in modernist circles (Bell 20-25). This art stands in relation to a tradition of colonial oppression and to the carnival worker himself, an object of primitivism. West directly implicates C.B. in this violence. The day before, she found herself “running [her] hands over a Cambodian wall piece,” which “gave me such a sense of unity, of gathering up into a whole of such a myriad of the sculptor’s impressions, that

I thought of the vision, I imagined it must be like that” (201). The unity C.B. perceives will emerge like that: over and against social injustice. She will see this vision in relation to the “dark gestures” of her culture that have engaged in imperial conquest and created millions of stateless persons. Whether from Cambodia or somewhere in Africa, these riches and primitive pieces and laboring bodies pour into the West and support the visions of its artists and sages. As in Saint Augustine, West alludes throughout “A Letter to a Grandfather” to colonialism and forcefully censures the rootlessness and exploitation it engenders.

One will never know the “little trouble” the priest gets into before he becomes an art dealer. Yet West does specify the location from which he sells his art—la Rue de

Boétie—and it is worth noting that this street in the 8th Arrondissement of Paris leads

directly to (or from) L’Église de Saint-Augustin. Whether or not that street is a dead-end only time will tell: West decries both the conservative Anglo-Catholics of the right—

“those idiots … who declare that they want to submit to the authority of the Roman

Catholic Church, not because they believe in its supernatural revelation, but because they dislike the disorder of life lived without authority” (199)—and the communists of the left—“who have thrown the whole tradition of economic idealism out the window, and babble of nothing but Russia” (ibid)—because they all remain prisoners of a regressive ideology, one she roots in Saint Augustine. C.B. laments the fact that “they have not got out of the fateful ring-fence of primitive ideas where every good must be paid for by pain and sacrifice” (200; emphasis mine). One recalls West’s criticism of the ring-fence of dualism in Saint Augustine. Once again, she locates its continued presence in modernism and modernity alike.

Saint Augustine’s church literally looms over the ex-priest selling primitive art for a modern world in need of costly inspiration. “There is something regressive about it,”

C.B. notes, “for they do no work towards making the indigenous revolution for which we are all waiting; since there has died in nearly all of us who are literate, I think, the desire to protect order based on arbitrary social and economic privilege” (ibid). They address the symptom instead of the disease. They sanction the need to suffer, however surreptitiously, and refuse progress (perhaps because it would threaten their privilege and comfort as Western artists and scholars). Both right and left see matter as evil—and hence articulate the need for endless perfection and escapism—rather than as something in need of unification with spirit. Therefore, economic and social privilege blindly continues to animate the white art inspired and funded by darker gestures of colonial rule.

This art sustains “the cancerous human need to be cruel and to suffer” rather than working to abolish it (202). It turns a blind eye to the systemic oppression of which it is part and mistakes the blood on its hands for spilled paint. The intellectual elite literally cannot see their situation for what it really is.

At the same time, the revelation is itself simple and, paradoxically, timeless: the

“splendor that Philippe de Beauchamp saw, when he built his strong, his valid Abbey, must have been grim. In his faith he saw a gaunt figure extended on a cross. In my faith, which seems to some unfaith, so did I. I also saw a gaunt figure extended on a cross, and if the cross was mere existence the pattern was the glorious same” (207). The strain between the eternal and the mortal persists, and it sets boundaries. She notices the underlying pattern. “I felt,” C.B. describes, “time as a discipline, as a cross on which he and I and all the events we took part in were crucified. We might stretch as far as we could to right, to left, to the sky, to the ground, but we were bound to our place in this universe” (206). This realization does not precipitate despair; rather, it manifests courage.

It allows C.B. to see the world as it really is: “I exult in being just where I am, in an age where sweetness … is not imposed on eternal things that have no knowledge of it. The tragic spirit has come back into life. We feel under no necessity to sentimentalise it and pretend it is pleasanter than it is. We can embrace it in its completeness, we can accept the truth” (208). C.B.’s revelation permits her to return to the modern world and revalue its “tragic spirit” for what it is: not transcendent, not true, not perfect or perfectable.

She can confront the planet’s ordinary brutality with honesty: without utopian projects, without the romantic imperative to generate consolation. The truth is the truth, and she must know it. The letter generates a moral position not unlike the one posited in

The Return of the Soldier. And yet, the truth of the speaker’s situation is fully realized only in the letter’s reader who perceives the limitations of C.B.’s perception and historical location. In this way, the letter’s political implications reside in its temporality, while its ethics emerge from its epistemology. Politically speaking, C.B.’s account registers the oppressive backdrop to her privilege as a modern Western artist. In ethical terms, she witnesses her inability to perceive beyond her limited time and scope. C.B. need not continue, like T.S. Eliot, “muttering about my Waste Lands, moaning because it is Ash Wednesday,” because this vista is “almost intolerably without comfort or benignity” (207). She can accept reality for what it is. “My generation has long known it lived in winter,” she explains, “but it has deplored it. I no longer do” (208). Readers can recognize her privilege, politically, and know, ethically, that she cannot right the world with a finely wrought poem or verse. One realizes, too, that

some are born to be saved and some to be damned, that the pulse which is heard through time and space beats to some other rhythm than human justice. That I see the spirit not as holy or independent, but as the white product of dark gestures, the refined descendant of man’s primitive play, does not matter; I still revere the dove and its flight. (208)

The human mind cannot completely comprehend truth, and the world’s limits warp the spirit’s full expression in time.

Justice is a metaphor for perfection but a picture impossible to realize in practice.

To attempt the actualization of human justice is always to risk its degeneration—as in

Plato or Heidegger philosophically, or Mussolini or Hitler politically—into totalitarianism. Far from a spotless white dove, the spirit has a sanguine history and a sanguinary politics to match that “A Letter to a Grandfather” underscores as it also refuses to disclose fully. It is not simply that people cannot process the full truth. The

human creature also does “not want to know. When he knows very little he plays with the possibility of knowledge, but when he finds that the pieces he has been putting together are going to spell out the answer to the riddle he is frightened, and throws them in every direction” (174). Human beings actively avoid reality, and civilizations fall, West suggests, as a result of this drive toward ignorance. Truth asks too much!

The grandfather has bequeathed to C.B. a “hereditary faculty of vision,” and he taught her to see this insight “as a family glory, a sort of perpetual Crusade, an inalienable right of recourse to the Holy Grail” (170; emphasis mine). This mystical orientation is, though, a blessing and a curse, for “you are going to find out what’s what, and you feel as if you had realised all along that half the reasons you have given yourself for thinking this universe a safe place to be born are fraudulent inventions, and that this is the moment in which they are going to be exposed as frauds” (ibid). The psyche does not desire to realize its limitations. It much prefers, as West shows in The Return of the

Soldier and Saint Augustine, the comforts of juvenile amnesia. Augustine, for instance, forgets his ordinary human imperfections and sanctifies his ignorance. Jenny avoids the truth of war’s brutality and claims knowledge of the world. Modernists draw inspiration from African art and decry the barbarisms of colonization. There is no device more perniciously adaptive than the human consciousness and its ability to trick itself into believing it has figured everything out, tout court. Mysticism must push beyond this childishness to the paradoxical position of knowing one cannot know. For Rebecca West, this position of unknowing has extant political relevance.

A perpetually questioning stance is, for West, the mark of maturity. I have become question to myself denotes the end, not the beginning, of West’s moral

philosophy, since raw rationalism never suffices. As the letter’s interrogation of the

Enlightenment demonstrates, people possess only partial access to reason. The human subject lives most of her life in a clouded, forgetful fantasy. West’s inclusion of the clergyman’s widow speaks to this point. She is a “mystical” character of sorts; she crawls about “on all fours, to show her humility,” and wears “a coarse Holland shift” instead of

“the best of clothes hanging in her wardrobe” (184-185). Despite the Age of Reason’s dawn, she remains tied to faith and its most bodily exaggerations. She weeps and gnashes her teeth, as if granted the gift of tears. The waterworks result from the conviction that she has committed the sin against the Holy Ghost. C.B. insists that this crime is “an unthinkable sin. How can the peasant in the fields harm the dove? If he has a bow and arrow he can kill doves, but never the dove” (189). One can never maim the spirit with

“its power to raise up defenders, which is far more amazing than the persistence of brutishness, since it works against and not with the tendency to inertia” (ibid). The widow believes she can, with words or deeds, harm God. This irrelevant and false preoccupation keeps her from seeing the earthly injustices that surround and enable her hysteria. It bespeaks her pride doubly; she is of such worth that she might offend God, and she is of such interest that she cannot see the outside world. Meanwhile, a boy escapes from a work house and dies. She pays no attention to his suffering and fixates on her spiritual torment. The boy dies in vain.

The milieu’s insistence on reason alone not only produces the widow’s hysterical outbursts but supports them. The Age of Reason should have extirpated poverty; instead, it blindly maintains the injustice. C.B. records that,

In previous ages there had been poverty, but man could not be more blamed for it than a dog can be beaten for its mange. Since he had not learned to identify it, much less to analyse it, he could not be blamed for failing to cure it. But now that the poor had become articulate, now that literature and art were reporting their plight to the rich, poverty was as disgraceful to man as dirt on his hands when there is soap and water near by and he has learned to wash. (184)

Ethically, human beings can address the problem of poverty. West locates the source of their failure to do so, however, in the conflation of the spiritual and ethical realms. This confusion, C.B. argues, passively condones this-worldly oppression. It mistakenly identifies the “eternal factors of the universe … with the rules of human conduct that follow from recognition of these factors” (189). They see human volition as “able not only to choose or reject the knowledge of good and evil, truth and lies, but to work on the very existence of these entities” (190). The good life becomes one of orthodoxy rather than orthopraxis, wherein human-created rules come to possess an idolatrous divinity of their own accord. One must believe in the rules, and perhaps follow them, in order for the truth to exist. Hence the widow’s hysteria: as modern rationalism subverts the most mundane of gospel truths, faith becomes an issue of believing in spite of reason. On this watch, the ethical subject is one who guards her superstitions religiously. It is no accident that the boy drowns in a pool “useful in the past for ducking witches” (185). Superstition perseveres despite changes in its accidents, because the will’s role in ethical life is fundamentally misapprehended. The privileged now oppress materially rather than spiritually: that is all.

If human beings could see the world for what it is and their condition in its naked brutality, the ethical life would hold a very different flavor. The good life would be oriented toward the here and now, as in Marxism, but would be, in fact, good for nothing.

Human society can be made better but never perfect. Believers would not confuse moral maxims with Ultimate Reality, and they would not expect perfection on earth or in heaven. Goodness would simply place them in right relation to the pattern behind appearance, and this achievement brings pleasure and nullifies suffering. The conflation of spirituality and ethics leads romantics, however, to refuse religion and its pursuit of the unseen entirely. They reverse “the natural trend of self-consciousness” and remain trapped at the level of lurid “sensations” (194). The Romantic Movement seeks neither “a coherent vision of life” nor the candid “facts far more disagreeable than it had ever recognised under the blanket term of sin” (ibid). They make a spectacle of the self and its sublimity. Without proper attention to humanity’s overarching limitations, romantics then and now appear to extend liberty when they, more often than not, curb it (195). They promote and extend social injustice and do little to push back against it. Their creations and postulations distract from the business of making the world a more equitable, though never perfect, home. Modernists extend this tradition, West suggests, when they forget the obligation to harmonize body and spirit within the public sphere.

According to West, the nineteenth century commits two great sins: it bespeaks a

“preoccupation with the merely sensuous” and busies itself unnecessarily with “moral fussiness” (196). To move forward, the twentieth century must accept the fact that the widow “could not kill the dove however murderous she may be”; only this calming acceptance will impede her ability “to devise a flexible and aristocratic technique for treating the passing accidents of the universe in the light of its eternal factors” (196). This

“flexibility” allows flatfooted moralism to disguise and maintain aristocratic class privilege. Boys die in the interim like witches. Ancient traditions fall in the wake of

capitalist expansion like passing shadows. Ethics begins, then, when one separates the eternal from the contingent, once one refuses the consolations one has devised to avoid acceptance of contingency and real impotence. Morality witnesses pleasure and light, and, most crucially, looks “far deeper in the ground where the mad roots of human motive grow” (192). One can never slay the spirit, but one must not also forget the flesh and its tricks. Critics’ tendency to read West as a Manichean reflects this larger conflation of ethics and spirituality; to preserve their secular world of sensations divorced from the eternal, they interpret West as a thinker of “moral fussiness.” This tendency weakens the challenge inherent in her moral and political thinking. Organized religion is a lie but, West enjoins, so is secularization. West writes as a modernist believer, one for whom an incarnational mysticism bridges past and future. This stance is not pessimistic, then, but a mystical realism synonymous with ethics.

Undoubtedly West’s alter ego views an ordered truth behind quotidian flow.14

This letter is an attempt to capture that vision, just like the abbey, paintings, poetry, and science before it. Her modernist investigation of temporality and stream-of-consciousness technique prove contingent but somehow necessary. West—“compelled by [her] family destiny to believe in God” (190)—does not reject religion but virtuously reimagines it. In

“A Letter to a Grandfather,” modernist art still pursues the sacred. Modernism is simply, as Pericles Lewis maintains, this age’s particular method for approaching Ultimate

Reality. Secularization is irrelevant, because the spirit is eternal. Modernism does not merely provide a substitution for religion, as the secularists’ dogma has it; instead, West

14 Cecily Fairfield takes the nom de plume “Rebecca West” from a play by Ibsen. C.B. is an autobiographical gesture, with C for “Cecily” and B for “Beauchamp,” the French translation of “Fairfield.” 67

goes to great lengths to show that godlessness is, strictly speaking, impossible: the spirit to which religion and modernism attend exists regardless of human endeavor and whim.

Of course, I am not suggesting that modernists do not take issue with organized religion; they most certainly do. What West makes clear, though, is that religion’s core—that unseen order of which William James speaks—inspires modernists to chase after Mrs.

Brown’s inner life. West’s inspired epistle witnesses the material world in its real materiality but reaches beyond it to “the full life of which is lived only by certain human beings, and by certain parts of human beings” (176). In this sense, modernism is a devotional aesthetics with its ethics yet to be written. I will suggest that the Second

World War forces West to write a modernist ethics into being.

IV. “Superseding War by Law”: West’s Nuremberg Reports

Rebecca West actualizes the moral potential of the modernist aesthetic in her articulation of the limits of human rationality and the psyche’s unconscious violence. Her reports on the Nuremberg trials demonstrate the need for religion in a supposedly secular age. In this way, West refashions modernism’s engagement with the subject’s interiority and thinks through its political and legal implications. Marina MacKay rightly argues, then, that the Second World War furthers modernism’s concerns. My reading of West’s writing in the 1930s and 40s deepens Mackay’s account by underscoring the centrality of religious experience to her extension of modernism. Modernism’s interest in religious experience extends in and through World War II. Moreover, West’s movement toward the political is in line with Kristin Bluemel’s characterization of intermodernist writers as preoccupied by “their responsibilities, as writers, primarily to ‘the people’” (1). One sees

this responsibility to “the people” fully emerge in West’s journalism. In this section, I engage recent work in modernist studies that examines literary modernism’s relationship to legal justice, but I recover religious experience’s significance therein. I not only show how West’s modernism bequeaths her political response to the Nuremberg trials but also highlight how her mystical sensibility links her earliest feminist writing to this late modernist critique.

I once again find Arendt’s and West’s simultaneous turns toward Augustine tantalizing. Increasingly, scholars have identified the links between the two women’s postwar investigations of politics and ethics. Lyndsey Stonebridge’s The Judicial

Imagination: Writing after Nuremberg (2011) and Ravit Reichman’s The Affective Life of

Law: Legal Modernism and the Literary Imagination (2009) insist on the foundational role literary modernism plays in post-WWII trial reportage and its re-imagination of ethical subjectivity. While both monographs explore similarities between West’s and

Arendt’s postwar thinking, neither Stonebridge nor Reichman takes into account how religion informs these women’s assessments. This absence is palpable, for these two women cover infamous war trials and write on Saint Augustine explicitly. Stonebridge mentions the fact in passing, identifying in one clause “their joint fascination with

Augustinian love” (14), but she quickly moves on to bigger and better things. And yet, I suspect this “joint fascination” proves vital to their assessments of modern evil. From my perspective, Augustine enables Arendt and West to imagine a mode of political belonging that maintains subjective interiority while remaining cognizant of the subject’s inability to know himself transparently. One sees this twofold positioning—being, one might say, in the world but not quite of it—throughout West’s writings on Nuremberg.

When one accounts for West’s mystical sensibility, it becomes apparent that her reports—far from rehashing Nuremberg’s failure, which is to her obvious—in fact perform the very justification for the international tribunal. Reichman and Stonebridge read West’s articles as gesturing toward international law’s inability to articulate a crime beyond language, thus instantiating Nuremberg’s failure to capture Nazi wickedness.

West criticizes Nuremberg—that “citadel of boredom” (EE 34)—but she does so to build a case for its necessity. West’s mystical intuition of human limitation influences this appraisal. The subject’s inability to know herself is a theme running throughout West’s oeuvre. It proves foundational to her critique of Augustine and to her interrogation of

Jenny’s narration in The Return of the Soldier. It is precisely, too, what legitimates the separation between the ethical and spiritual in “A Letter to a Grandfather” to the extent that the human subject can also not know the divine. Human beings’ motives exist clouded and unhinged; therefore, one must construct a system of checks and balances to account for petty vice. As the two initial New Yorker articles and three versions of

“Greenhouse with Cyclamens” tirelessly proclaim,15 the human subject engages in multitudinous deceptions. Politics must take this truth into account.

A nation’s motives are no more transparent or pure than those of individuals. In this sense, a nation mirrors the individual psyche. West points to this national selfishness in her descriptions of the German “mystery” (EE 47), but she suggests that all states participate in this blind confusion. An international body is required, from West’s perspective, to impose order on the chaos of human perception. All the same, one must

15 Debra Rae Cohen has carefully demonstrated how West’s revisions of “Greenhouse with Cyclamens” reflect her increasing hostility toward the Soviet Union (161-162). This aggression toward communism created difficulties with later feminist critics hoping to find in West a progressive, socialist ally. I suspect West has largely, and regrettably, fallen out of the feminist canon because of her anti-communist stance. 70

never suppose that international law captures any finality or justice qua justice. Justice exists forever as a product of human volition; it is decidedly imperfect. West describes the tension in this sense: the “trouble about Nuremberg was that it was so manifestly a part of life as it lived; the trial had not sufficiently detached itself from the oddity of the world. It was of a piece with the odd things that happened on its periphery; and these were odd enough” (GCI 51). Nuremberg could never detach itself from the “oddity of the world.” It is part and parcel of it. Nuremberg is a compulsory failure, then, because human beings organize and lead it but need it. West’s trial reports go to great lengths to demonstrate just how unreliable, compromised, and imperfect any imposition of human justice will be. Still, West maintains that, despite its constraints, “the historic peep show” must bring its criminals to justice swiftly (EE 36).

West articulates her position on global justice first in “The Necessity and

Grandeur of the International Ideal.” She publishes this piece in 1935, two years after her visionary texts of 1933.16 She buttresses her defense, not surprisingly, with evidence drawn from that “genius named Augustine” (NG 44). West’s short essay opens with a prescient attempt to recover a Western tradition of internationalism, a history she sees originating in Augustine’s City of God. This politically minded, syncretic saint sought “to prepare … a guide for the new world he saw coming into being around him as a result of the fall of Rome and the rise of Christianity” (ibid). This guide, she suggest, is relevant once again. Augustine has theorized a system that will protect nationalism’s ancient equivalent with the necessary system of oversight and negotiation. Of course, his extraordinary understanding of human psychology—and its opacity—leads him to draft

16 West’s plea for internationalism finds its echo in the Bloomsbury writings of Leonard and Virginia Woolf. 71

this plan for the earthly city, for “[w]hatever our conceptions of heavenly peace may be, nothing seems more probable than that Augustine was right in prophesying earthly peace as its foundation” (NG 55). As such, West argues that

We must hand over our arms to a tribunal which is certain not to be perfect, to be frequently repellent in its indecision and timidity, and even from time to time break down altogether, but which offers nevertheless far more than the best possible manifestations of nationalism. For it will provide a technique for the mutual cancellation of greeds, the pooling of aspirations towards harmony, and the slowing down of aggression’s headlong pace by submitting it to a delaying critical process. (NG 53)

West sees much value in nationalism, but there ought to exist an international body to orchestrate the common good. While national pride springs naturally from the human being (NG 47), one must practice the skills of rationality and cooperation internationalism requires. Peace is the fruit of such virtue, so it is worth the effort.

West grounds this cosmopolitan claim in human psychology. Human behavior is, after all, puzzling. Modernity is lucky to understand itself better: “it is perhaps the most important contribution of our age to the understanding of human nature just how enormous is man’s power of self-deception. No State can be trusted always to judge objectively whether it has the excuse of a just cause and a right intention, or whether it is serving its own interests” (NG 51-52). Fascism has only underscored this reality. She repurposes the critique developed in Saint Augustine and condemns fascism’s “headlong flight into fantasy from the necessity of political thought” (NG 49), even as she endorses the City of God. For fascists commit the cardinal sin: they “act in disregard for reality because they wish to return to the psychological conditions of an ideal childhood, in which they will be given every provision and protection by an all-powerful father if only they are good and obedient children” (ibid). This “attempt to organise the State on

nursery lines” will surely fail, she maintains, but it will be incredibly popular since it

“gives people a degree of emotional satisfaction far greater than they would receive from participation in political activities, and puts them into an exalted state, comparable to that of a young person in love” (NG 49-50). Here, one hears an echo of Chris’s infatuation for

Margaret in The Return of the Soldier. Fascism feeds the emotions and appetites, but it does little to cultivate a mature morality and rational politics. One must grow up. The good soul ought to reject the fantasies of youthful dependence and face the world as it really is.

A full four years before the Second World War’s outbreak, West publishes her defense of internationalism. Touring the war’s wreckage in 1946, she finds remnants of its mongering fantasies. She writes in her first report to The New Yorker how “[t]here is nothing left of Nuremberg which makes a city” (EE 36), but on its outskirts one finds, as she notes in her second dispatch, the fantastic edifices of German excesses. This manor, in which the press is lodged, “stank of wealth, like the palaces of Pittsburgh, but it was the twice the size of any of them, and it had a superior, more allusive fantasy” (BLF 97).

This proto-McMansion has, in West’s words, “the unnecessary ambition of the larger intestine” (ibid). If this overbuilding did “much to bring the Nazis to power,” then West is quick to connect the dots. These elephantine constructions were the “curious results of an excessive preoccupation with fairy tales; for that was the dream behind this villa- building” (GC 24). They do nothing practical but point backward toward an idyllic childhood. “Its turrets were quite useless,” West continues, “unless Rapunzel was to let down her hair from them; its odd upper rooms, sliced into queer shapes by the intemperate steepness of the tiled roofs, could be fitly occupied by a fairy godmother

with a spinning wheel; the staircase was for the descent of a prince and princess that should live happily ever after” (ibid). In Germany, adults create rooms in which to house their life-sustaining fiction. The architecture is one of fancy—“the German imagination was at once richly fecundated and bound to a primitive fantasy dangerous for civilized adults” (GC 24-25)—but now it sleeps only the Germans’ grim nightmare.

Throughout her Nuremberg reports, West centers in on the everyday life lived outside the trial. She is continually distracted by “smaller things” (BLF 93), perhaps because the hearings are little more than “boredom falling drop by drop on the same spot on the soul” (GC 8). If one takes her journalism by its word, then one will fight the true fight against fascism outside the courtroom. West’s preoccupation with external minutia has led some scholars to criticize her reports as idiosyncratic; for others, the critique takes an even darker turn. According to these readers, her missives obscure the millions of

Jewish (and other) deaths. Margaret Stetz suggests that “a massive omission or even evasion” lies at the heart of West’s wartime correspondence, as the “voices of the Jewish dead go unheard in her reporting” (RWNT 234). Arendt, it is worth noting, received almost the exact same criticism upon the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem (Elon xx). Against this trend, I contend, echoing Stonebridge, that West decidedly sidesteps a preoccupation with the victim (WN 105). She does not seek to evoke sympathy. She attends, instead, to the conditions which produce and preserve sadism in the oppressor.17

West’s commitment to analyzing ordinary life outside the epic show trial—“daily reports inevitably concentrated on the sensational moments” (BLF 93)—bespeaks her feminist commitment to the value of personal experience, the neglected world of “smaller

17 Lyndsey Stonebridge is right to point out how aptly West and Arendt engage the honorable weapon of ridicule for which Muriel Spark advocates in “The Desegregation of Art” (WN 106). 74

things” beyond the “man’s world” of the hearing (BLF 94). More urgently, it charts the ambiguity attending any attempt to separate the victims from their persecutors. The victim does not rest in an unambiguous position of perpetual victimhood. This claim is especially poignant. It refuses the Allies the consolation that the Germans alone are responsible for the Holocaust. The cause lies, as West has it, “far deeper in the ground where the mad roots of human motive grow” (LG 192). Her intrepid exploration of the terrain surrounding the trials foregrounds precisely this murkiness, as the distinctions between victim and oppressor, woman and man, Jew and Christian, gay and straight fall away within her reports. She blurs lines in a much subtler and literary way than Arendt, but the spirit is shared. For there are now “ink-stained gipsies” touring the grounds and sleeping in the beds of the German manors (BLF 98): the winners have displaced the losers. In the dark that falls upon Germany, it is rather difficult to discern the heroes from the villains.

Time after time, West foregrounds the irony of her situation in Nuremberg. The fantastic walls holding up the German dream have fallen, and those whom they have attempted to keep out have crawled inside. “It would have been very hard for the builders of the Schloss to grasp the situation: to understand,” she reflects, “that these ink-stained gipsies had earned the right to camp in their stronghold because they had been on the side of order against disorder, stability against incoherence” (GC 26). The very people Hitler sought to destroy have become residents in, and overseers of, his fantastic state. In the

Schloss, there are French women, Jewesses, and negresses “with crenellated hair that spoke of North Africa” (BLF 98). They are all there to report, with West, on the

Germans’ failure; “and indeed it was ironical to cross a dreaded frontier in order to report

the last convulsion of a German crime and find oneself housed in a German fairy tale”

(GC 25). Quickly, one notices that these women have made their home inside the

Germans’ fantasies. The structure remains standing; it occupants have simply changed.

The ease with which this swap happens does not escape West’s notice, and, if the victims become the victors too quickly, does the ideological foundation of the Germans’ crimes persist intact?

I propose West’s reports enact the need for Nuremberg rather than make any attempt to speak with certainty about it. She writes the confusion and deception attending human life into the articles themselves. The instability of the articles themselves demand intervention on behalf of the human community. “How much easier,” she tellingly muses,

“would we journalists have found our task at Nuremberg if only the universe had been less fluid, if anything had been absolute, even so simple a thing as the sight we had gone to see—the end of the trial” (BLF 98). Nothing simple attends the trial’s end. There is constant smudging of the line between good and evil, between love and hate. Just as the women make themselves at home in disused German fantasies, so too do the guards become confused with prisoners. “It would not be easy,” an observation with which West closes her first report, “to tell that these guards were not the prisoners, so much did they want to go home” (EE 47). Likewise, she makes it perfectly clear that the Germans identify most strongly with the British and the Americans (EE 45), as only they can make the men in the docks feel shame. The Russian victors’ politics explicitly exhibit the same totalitarian tendencies as the Nazis, and here she finds yet again “a certain irony, and a certain warning” (GC 51). The male prisoners exhibit feminine features: “an air of pregnancy” here, a “madame of a Brothel” there (EE 35). Pansies pop up everywhere.

Nuremberg is not a space of continuity and clarity, only one of hope, and it blurs boundaries and knowledges.

Boundary-shifting and dis-identification attend the “man’s world” of law and reason in the Nuremberg articles and their revisions. There lies beneath these totalitarian allies and girlish men an undercurrent of confusion and difference. West finds this muddle outside the courtroom, too. In something akin to “Lear’s kingdom of loss” (GC

35), she encounters a German woman who insists that the British judge is Jewish. The woman says to West, “there is one quarrel I have with you. I am not against the Jews—of course it was terrible what Hitler did to the Jews, and none of us had any idea of what was going on in the camps—but to have a Jew as your chief prosecutor—really, really now, is that quite gentleman?” (GC 53). Of course, David Fyfe is not Jewish. The civilian will not listen to the protestations and insists otherwise. West records that

She could not contain her laughter; it blew away from her in a trail of shrillness. ‘Oh you English are so simple; it is because you are aristocrats. A man who would name his son David might tell you that he was English or Scotch or Welsh, because he would know that you would believe him. But we Germans understand a little better about such things, and he would not dare to pretend to us that he was not a Jew.’ (GC 53)

The woman’s inability to locate her own anti-Semitism is alarming. It is interesting to note West’s strategy here. She addresses the Jewish deaths not by focusing on their suffering but on ridiculing the ignorant. This strategy not only deglamorizes sadism but also underscores the human subject’s uncanny ability to lack self-awareness, even in the most dramatic sense.

In her analysis of the trials, West refuses the consolation of clear victory. Despite the Germans’ lingering anti-Semitism, goodness does not reside alone on the side of the

Allies. West pushes the instability farther along the path, as she proclaims the victors’ guilt, too. Discussing a moment in which both the Allies and the Germans broke international law, West underscores the central lesson one should learn from Nuremberg:

It was written down for ever that submarine warfare cannot be carried on without inhumanity, and that we ourselves have found ourselves able to be inhumane. We have to admit that we are in this trap before we can get out of it. This nostra culpa of the conquerors might well be considered the most important thing that happened at Nuremberg. But it evoked no response at the time, and it has been forgotten. (GC 49; emphasis mine)

Nuremberg teaches Europeans primarily not of deaths by the millions at the hands of

Germans. This crime is, as the judges at Eichmann’s trail will insist, one “‘beyond human understanding,’ a matter for ‘great authors and poets’” (E 211).18 The prime lesson is, rather, that Western civilization has discovered all human beings capable of great cruelty.

This sadistic streak runs throughout many cultures, and West traces its lineage throughout

Saint Augustine. What one does in response to this heady realization—“we ourselves have found ourselves able to be inhumane”—is the question that West asks repeatedly throughout her mid-century writing. It forms the foundation from which her ethics unfurls.

West drives this point home in the conclusion of her reports. There, she analyzes death by hanging and questions the goodness of its intentions. “No wise person,” she insists, “will write an unnecessary word about hanging, for fear of straying into the field of pornography. The strain of evil in us, which, given privileges, can take pleasure in the destruction of others by pain and death, takes delight in dreams about hanging” (GC 69).

One must remain vigilant, for the human desire to take pleasure in suffering is strong.

18 As West’s account confirms, Nuremberg coins the term “crimes against humanity” (GC 48). Hannah Arendt will later insist that the French prosecutor gives the more accurate version of the term: a “crime against the human status” (EJ 257). 78

Human beings will, however unconsciously, find ways to satisfy their cruelty. Even the

Nuremberg trial’s climax could provide the occasion for delight, one that “emits the strongest of all stinks that hang about the little bookshops in the backstreets” (ibid). West closes “Greenhouse with Cyclamens I” with this odor, that smell of “cruelty which is a waste product of man’s moral nature” (ibid). To anticipate Foucault and this chapter’s conclusion, human beings must move from an ethics of erection to penetration, because the inner life is hopelessly murky. One needs to orient oneself to a truth that exceeds the subject. West’s closing sentence—“[b]ut there are stenches which not the name of justice or reason or the public good, or an other fair word, can turn to sweetness” (GC 72)— announces the ambiguity surrounding the trial and its compromised justice. As Arendt will find later in Jerusalem, the resolution leaves much to be desired, as what the verdict makes apparent is the radical banality of evil itself.

V. In Conclusion: Modernist Ascetics

Most scholars see the distance between “The New God” (1917) and “Goodness

Doesn’t Just Happen” (1952) as evidence for West’s shift to a more conservative political position. They explain her conversion from radical feminism to religious conformity, first, with tales of her personal life. In 1930, West marries the wealthy banker, Henry

Maxwell Andrews, entering into a stable life of material comfort (Rollyson 147-148). She cements this bond shortly before she begins work on Saint Augustine, the first of West’s overtly religious texts (Orel 71). Scholars hence read West’s embrace of religion as symptomatic of a lost feminism. And yet, the turn to religion here is not only personal.

Scholars also underscore changes in Europe. The rise of communism in Nuremberg’s

aftermath precipitates a biting backlash in West’s writing, for she is, if nothing else, a virulent critic of communism. Even at Nuremberg, she notices “a certain irony … and a certain warning” attending the fact that “a Russian was reading the part of the judgment that condemned the Germans for their deportations” (GC 51). She sees little difference between the German Nazis and the Russian communists. Her attacks on the communists and her increase in financial security cements her position as a bourgeois thinker planted on the right. Thus confidently Bonnie Kime Scott asserts that “West’s politics after

World War II have been assigned fairly universally to a conservative category” (PI 199).

West moves from a pioneering feminist-socialist and subtle reviewer and composer of modernist fiction to a privileged, anti-communist reactionary.

For most modernist scholars, Rebecca West becomes more pious as she becomes more traditional. Moral fussiness and economic privilege blind her to the very issues of equity and justice for which she labored earlier in the century. In this concluding section,

I complicate this narrative. I do not take issue with West’s politics becoming more conservative after the Second World War. That trend is largely a matter of historical record. (Although it does strike one as an oversimplified account: West insists in her introduction to Emma Goldman’s My Disillusionment in Russia that “we must not shrink if our understanding leads us to the same conclusion as the Conservative Party regarding the lack of material for admiration in the Bolshevist Government. To reject a conclusion simply because it is held by the Conservative party is to be snobbish as the suburban mistress who gives up wearing a hat or dress because her servant has one like it” [vii]). I simply wish to disentangle her religious faith from her altering political loyalties. This dissociation allows one to witness how religion and the occult consistently inspire her

fiction and nonfiction. Religious consciousness informs her feminist polemic as much as her virulent anti-communist writing.

It is essential to underscore that West does not see secularization as inevitable. In fact, she sees secularization as impossible. West’s writing troubles arguments that conflate religion and conservatism; these rest, often enough, on the assumption of an axiomatic, progressive Western secularization. In this vein, I echo Pericles Lewis’ claim in Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel that modernists’ interest in religious experience makes it difficult to read their fiction as a solely secularizing discourse (24). I further Lewis’ account to indicate how early modernism’s investigation of spirituality inflects postwar representations of modern, ethical subjectivity. It is by light of Lewis’s position, then, that I stake a claim for West’s relevance to religion and late modernism.

To loathe the patriarchal old-man-in-the-sky god is not, after all, to reject wholeheartedly religion’s place in human affairs. One can reject God but maintain religion, and I believe

West does.

West has many thoughts on the matter. In 1917, for instance, she claims that “… the human will should [not] be degraded by bowing to this master criminal. One hates our fathers for having committed themselves to such a worship ….”19 In 1925, she continues that, “when Christianity is stripped of its doctrines that were created to serve a special purpose, but now serve none, there is no reason to suppose that it is the final revelation of the Divine to humanity” (25). In 1931, she writes that “I have no faith in the sense of comforting beliefs which persuade me that all my troubles are blessings in disguise. I do not believe that any facts exist, or, rather, are accessible to me, which give any assurance

19 Rebecca West did not print this essay in her lifetime, and it still remains available only in manuscript form. I cull this quotation from Bernard Schweizer’s Hating God (127). 81

that my life has served an eternal purpose” (321). And then, in 1952, she triumphantly avers that “I must orient my writing towards God for it to have any value” (41). Critics have long noted the jump from 1931 to 1952, and it is precisely within this space that scholars claim West’s conservative religiosity takes hold. She composes both Saint

Augustine and “A Letter to a Grandfather” during this period and reports dutifully on the

Nuremberg trials. I will argue, though, that the remarks listed above are actually quite consistent. They articulate a mystical mode of religious experience that grounds West’s feminist ethics and internationalist politics. She travels with this faith throughout the twentieth century.

West appears, in certain moments, to adhere to the conversion narrative. If one looks closely at West’s own memory of her seditious, youthful period, she seems to gesture toward a sea change. In the succinct essay, “Goodness Doesn’t Just Happen”

(1952), West reflects back on her unruly youth:

When I was young I understood neither the difficulty of love nor the importance of law. I grew up in a world of rebellion and I was a rebel. I thought human beings were naturally good, and their personal relations were bound to work out well, and that the law was a clumsy machine dealing harshly with people who would cease to offend as soon as we got rid of poverty. We were quite sure that human nature was good and would soon be perfect. (40)

At midcentury, West posits the centrality of love in private life and the necessity of law in public relations. For a pioneering feminist, it seems a rather conservative concession to bourgeois morality. She writes this piece, moreover, in the Second World War’s aftermath as she revises, to some controversy, her essays on the Nuremberg trials (Cohen

161). Many scholars read this essay, then, as reactionary, as a conservative byproduct of her Nuremberg reportage. For instance, in Rebecca West: Heroism, Rebellion, and the

Female Epic, Bernard Schweizer argues it concretizes “West’s detour through religious conformity (from about 1940 to 1960),” a deviation motivated by a “properly Burkian streak of political conservatism” (74). Still, one notes the existentialist emphasis of

Schweizer’s title. His focus on heroism and rebellion makes it difficult to reconcile

West’s embrace of obedience and love. This bias leads Schweizer to interpret the 1940s and 1950s as a religious “detour,” but it seems to me that the essay, rather than by- passing her youthful rebellion, captures its spirit and extends it.

In “Goodness Doesn’t Just Happen,” West explains that law and love are necessary, because laws enable, and protect, insurgence. West notes the tendency of freedom to expand and impinge on the liberty of others. This ego-expansion breeds injustices of every color and flavor. In short, human beings are not good but must become so. She defends love and law with pointed reference to social ills and injustices. She sees

“the main problem of my life, and indeed anybody’s life, as the balancing of competitive freedom” (40). One needs love and its “series of very delicate calculations” to live with others fairly; one needs “the Rule of Law” to act as “the Ready Reckoner” in the legal system and on the international stage (ibid). Submission is as just as it is crucial. We don’t need another hero, West enjoins, because love and law are extraordinarily difficult to practice, inhumanly tricky to maintain. Society needs more saints, who can model the proper exercise of reason and obedience. Love devolves into selfishness hurriedly; the law degenerates into dictatorship absolutely. One must remain vigilant.

West points toward religion as a set of practices designed to train the subject to live justly. Human beings are not “naturally good.” One cannot live in perpetual rebellion, because human beings do not rise from the ashes any better than when they

started the fire. Consequently, West understands that “what is good on this earth does not happen as a matter of course, it has to be created, it has to be maintained, by the effort of love, by submission to the Rule of Law” (41). As Nattie Golubov rightly notes, love and law remain, for West like Iris Murdoch after her, connected to the Good (216). Human beings are nasty; goodness takes work, toil, love. Religion, West writes, provides a means for attaining self-discipline:

As I grow older I find more and more as a matter of experience that there is a God and I know that religion offers a technique for getting in touch with Him, but I find that technique difficult. I hope I am working a way to the truth through my writing. I also know that I must orient my writing towards God for it to have any value. It is not easy but I remind myself that if I wanted life to be easy I should have gotten born in a different universe. (41)

West appreciates the need for something outside her own writing, a perfection toward which she can orient her thinking. This aim toward perfection is a product of her

Platonism, but it also rests on her subtle understanding of human psychology. She finds conventional religion “difficult” to practice but knows she must aim at truth and realism.

Religion’s difficulty, for West, lies in its patriarchal structure and legitimization of suffering. Nevertheless, she must “orient” her writing and soul “towards God” to actualize political justice and to acquire personal happiness.

Precisely this ambivalence—the need for spiritual discipline and the injustice of earthly institutions—animates West’s ethics. Transcendent truth must temper human volition. The need to link the human psyche to a truth outside it is, for West, hardly old- fashioned. It concerns Freud’s recent discovery of the unconscious mind and its continuous operation in human life. Human beings are not, on West’s count, fully rational. They fail, time and time again, to think clearly. Thwarted puerile passions,

barely recognized or recognizable, animate human behavior silently. Rationality, all too often, becomes a thin rationalization of repeated mistakes; reason alone fails to scratch the surface, because one must look, as West insists, “far deeper in the ground where the mad roots of human motive grow” (LG 192). An ethical, human life necessitates that one recognize the unconscious mind, but it is impossible to escape its mesmerizing hold. The only way to advance is to orient oneself toward perfection, which is to say that “faith should precede reason” (West SA 103). One must look for reality outside the narcissistic personality, a point West drives home in 1928’s “The Strange Necessity” and finds confirmed in her exploration of Augustine’s life. The rebellion of the early twentieth century leads to, not from, the incredible need to believe.

Drawing generously from Saint Augustine’s Confessions, West articulates modernism’s contribution to literature, as I have shown, while also identifying its all-too- easy degeneration into narcissism and cruelty. She identifies this moral erosion in her contemporaries’ writing and uncovers its roots in Augustine’s theory of atonement. Of course, Augustine is central to West’s thinking (Orel 71). He is, in her view, “the first modern man” (SA 159), and his problems are also those of her war-weary century. Posed as he is at the beginning of a civilization she now understands to be crumbling, Augustine colors West’s criticism of Christianity’s legitimized suffering. Against fascism’s rising tide, West posits with and against Augustine a mystical ethics of pleasurable encounter.

This mystical morality draws from Augustine’s understandings of memory and temporality but refuses his theory of atonement. West sharply criticizes Christianity’s glorification of redemptive suffering, a veneration that perverts even Christ’s crucifixion; she explains that, by way of atonement, “a crime which should have shamed humanity

into virtue is shown to be the contrivance of the highest good, and the criminals to have served the most mystical and exalted ends” (IB 33). This observation, however, does not lead West to dismiss all religious experience. In contrast, West believes good religion places the subject in relation to what remains, in the human condition, constitutionally ineffable but consistently operative.

Although she rejects the Christian tradition’s exaltation of suffering, West takes from Augustine an appreciation for faith’s regulatory function in the psyche. As she notes succinctly, “before we can think we must choose whether we wish to know truth or invent lies” (LG 189). One can hardly say that the will is “free.” If left to its own devices, the human mind will create ruthless fantasies that entrap the self within a bubble. These fantasies distort the will’s ability to make choices and to act in the world. In “The Strange

Necessity,” West attributes this creation of consolatory narratives to the infant’s entrance into the world, “because the situation of a new arrival in this universe is subjectively as desperate as that of any shipwrecked sailor, and he has nothing else to which he can cling” (61). The child creates the best narrative she can and attaches to it. The tendency does not eclipse with maturity. On the contrary, “[t]hroughout the whole of his life the individual does nothing but match his fantasy with reality and try to establish, either by affirmation or alteration, an exact correspondence between them” (62). This psychic distortion lies the subject’s core: “what matters,” West continues, “is that the human animal is put in possession of material which inevitably provokes it to construct a hypothesis covering the whole of existence at an age when it is bound to fall into every sort of error about it” (SN 61). This intuition leads West to religion and the mind disciplining functions of faith.

As this chapter’s third section has shown, Augustine fails to orient his mind toward truth. He remains, for West, a victim of unconscious craving. His writings on the mind do, however, articulate essential psychological observations. These form the basis of West’s endorsement of the religious life. As she underscores in her biography of the saint, Augustine

insists that faith should precede reason. At first this seems contradictory and lacking in faith, which surely should hold that since the truths of religion really are truths, reason is bound to lead to them. But, in fact, this proposition reveals Augustine’s astonishing power as an introspective psychologist. He perceived that reason, the working of the conscious mind, was not a mechanical process which inevitably turned out truth as its finished product. There was something else in the human being which decided what reason should work on, and how it should work, and unless this something decided that the finished product should be truth it might well turn out to be a mere rationalisation of error. (SA 103)

To approach reality, the human creature must subject himself to the Good. His reason will operate properly only then, for “unless the whole of a man gave allegiance to a theory of values which recognises knowledge of the truth as an essential good, he could not be trusted to use his reason with integrity” (SA 104). For Augustine, “Christianity was the means by which such a theory could be propounded to the whole of man,” and, on that point alone, West believes religion’s import “is not easy to dispute” (ibid). To exist in freedom, one must submit one’s consciousness to a transcendent truth that exceeds, precedes, and presupposes the subject. In this discipline, the subject will alone have access to freedom and independent volition.

As West makes clear throughout her voluminous writings on Augustine, the saint’s position at Christendom’s origin matters directly to one’s appreciation of Hitler’s ascension. Hitler is a manifestation, for West, of where Christianity went wrong: the glorification of suffering. She moves then, with Augustine, backward to an alternative

mode of subjectivity, one that places pleasure and faith at the center of subjectivity.

Augustine’s sublime intelligence provides West with no better guide. As she notes in

1952’s Saints for Now, “[m]any other people who have written of such relations have been weaklings who could not bear to look facts in the face and might be suspected of inventing a God to obviate the necessity of considering the universe a systemless chaos.

But Augustine is not subject to such suspicion” (61). He looks at the world candidly,

“and none of us can claim perceptions as delicate or intellect as strong” (ibid). Analyzing

Augustine as a turning point, she shows how Christianity borrows from ancient models to engender its own inwardly focused subject. It is Augustine’s brilliance that accomplishes this synthesis, and, in this retracing, she anticipates Michel Foucault’s investigations of modern power and subjection. In particular, her examination of Augustine overlaps with

Foucault’s late work on the history of sexuality, especially as it pertains to the rise of

Christianity. Foucault allows one to see how West brings pleasure and faith together without contradiction.

While it remains outside this chapter’s scope to explore the full breadth and complexity of this overlap, I point toward one commonality that highlights the larger context for West’s engagement with religion and ethics. In the 1980 lecture, “Sexuality and Solitude,” Foucault investigates Augustine’s centrality in Western ethics.20 He is particularly interested in Augustine’s role in the codification of sex as the subject’s core

“truth.” Christianity, Foucault insists, does not invent monogamy and “distress about sexual acts” (180). These concerns exist in pagan texts. What Christianity does change is what Foucault calls “the experience of oneself as a sexual being” (ibid). As a

20 This lecture forms part of the material associated with the unfinished fourth volume of The History of Sexuality, tentatively called “Confession of the Flesh.” 88

confessional religion, Christianity aligns truth, sex, and subjectivity in a way that produces a particular mode of being human. In the lecture, Foucault traces the movement from sexual ethics as concerned with the relations among citizens to sexual ethics as the inner discernment of “the set of internal movements that develop from the first and nearly imperceptible thought to the final but still solitary pollution” (183). The ethical dimension of sexual practice relocates from the public sphere to the private, inner self. In effect, Augustine ushers in a cultural transition from the Greek philosopher of eros to the

Christian monk of chastity. In this change, the subject’s orientation toward truth—and the very location of that truth—moves from outside the virile self to inside the subject’s troubled soul.

To exemplify this transference, Foucault distinguishes between sex in

Artemidorus, a third-century pagan philosopher, and sex in Augustine, the fourth-century saint. In the former’s case, sex bespeaks external relations: “for Artemidorus it is not important in your dream whether you had sex with a girl or with a boy. The problem is to know if the partner was rich or poor, young or old, slave or free, married or not” (180). In this sense, the bedroom underscores one’s lived interactions with fellow citizens, and its ethical import is found within social relations and their iterations of power dynamics.

Hence Artemidorus focuses exclusively on who penetrates whom: “penetration is not only a sexual act but part of the social role of a man in a city. I would say that for

Artemidorus sexuality is relational, and that sexual relations cannot be dissociated from social relations” (ibid). Foucault believes this penetrative ethics, with its social emphasis, gives way to an erective model with Augustine. Although he imagines perfect sex in

Eden, the unwilled erection becomes, for Augustine, the mark of human beings’

rebellion. One no longer controls the flesh, and it rebels against the subject. The truth lies inside.

For Augustine, sexual ethics do not concern bodily penetration. The moral life addresses, instead, the erection and the limits of one’s will. As City of God makes clear,

“the main question is not, as it was in Artemidorus, the problem of penetration—it is the problem of erection. As a result, it is not the problem of a relationship to other people but the problem of relationship of oneself to oneself, or, more precisely, the relationship between one’s will and involuntary assertions” (182). Shame marks one’s failure to remain whole, as one commits sin now even against one’s will. With Augustine,

Christianity invents an inward gaze that monitors the subject’s inner truth as revealed by his sexual failure. This concern with inner life eclipses the relations one has with others. I cite this observation from Foucault, because I am convinced it captures the spirt behind

West’s exploration of pre-Christian ethics as it also hints toward her criticism of modernism’s narcissism. While West is sympathetic to Augustine’s articulation of that which exceeds the rational will, she will depart from an ethical obsession with inner discernment. If the subject has truly become a question to himself, he will never find the truth within his soul. He must look beyond the ego.

For West, pre-Christian philosophers, like Plato, give one an alternative way to imagine the subject’s relation to truth. They allow one to turn outward. As Foucault himself notes:

Libido is the result of one’s will when it goes beyond the limits God originally set for it. As a consequence, the means of spiritual struggle against libido do not consist, as in Plato, in turning our eyes upward and memorizing the reality we have previously known and forgotten; the spiritual struggle consists, on the

contrary, in turning our eyes continually downward or inward in order to decipher, among the movements of the soul, which ones come from libido. (182)

West’s embrace of religious mysticism, I argue, is an attempt to reorient the subject’s gaze “upward” to “the reality we have previously known and forgotten.” Her embrace of

Platonic mysticism suggests, it seems to me, her desire to reposition truth outside the subject. Augustine locates the problem of libido inside the subject: the libido “is not an external obstacle to the will; it is a part, an internal component, of the will” (182). In contrast, West leverages transcendent truth to reposition ethics as, primarily, a question of penetration. Morality does not concern one’s relation to oneself—and the overarching anxiety of purity—but consists, instead, in relations among people. West’s investigation of this tension reveals how Augustine’s inward turn endorses suffering by way of his theory of atonement. Moving outside the ego, West desires a relational ethics grounded in the experience of pleasure.

This understanding endorses West’s spirituality. She believes religion might ground a relational ethics, because it tempers the ego’s narcissism. I use the word

“religion” deliberately, for it is my contention that West’s spirituality speaks to William

James’s generous definition of the term. “Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible,” James writes in 1902’s

Varieties of Religious Experience, “one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto” (53). This “unseen order” structures West’s aesthetics, ethics, and politics. It is that which remains external to the subject and takes the edge off her hubris. Nattie

Golubov has suggested that, “for West, at least in the period between the wars, God was

not understood within the strictures of the church but, rather, was equivalent to the secular idea of Good—that is, he was a symbol of perfection indispensable for orienting a rich moral life toward goodness and happiness” (208). While I agree with Golubov that

West is interested in perfection, that interest is not, strictly speaking, secular. In fact, I suspect that West’s subtle disentanglement of the belief in monotheism’s personal, paternal God from the pursuit of clear, cold truth—the true attempt, however difficult, to hear and respond to Ultimate Reality—sits as one of West’s lasting contributions to the spheres of theology and moral philosophy alike. West’s feminism relies on a decidedly religious transcendence of self-importance: and, consequently, of God himself.

In this way, West remains cognizant of her role as a feminist critic. She is aware that her record of the Nuremberg trials will shape the future of internal relations and human rights. She sees it as her duty to keep a record of a world caught between, in

Arendt’s phrase, past and future. As West writes toward the end of Black Lamb and Grey

Falcon,

If a Roman woman had, some years before the sack of Rome, realized why it was going to be sacked and what motives inspired the barbarians and what the Romans, and had written down all that she knew and felt about it, the record would have been of value to historians. My situation, though probably not so fatal, is as interesting.” […] So I resolved to put on paper what a typical Englishwoman felt and thought in the nineteen-thirties when, already convinced of the inevitably of the second Anglo-German war, she had been able to follow the dark waters of that event back to its source. (1089)

In her pursuit of “the dark water of that event back to its source,” West encounters Saint

Augustine and his theory of atonement. While she embraces much of his thinking, she rejects the exaltation of suffering and embraces instead an alternative mode of relationality anchored in pleasure. Religion is here imperative, because it allows the

feminist subject to discipline the unconscious drive toward childlike dependency and fantasy. It enables one to live in the world without being quite of it. It allows one to emerge, finally, as an independent adult.

* * *

Throughout this chapter, I have argued that Rebecca West’s excoriation of God supports her quest toward reality. The divine image must, in her truth-wielding exodus, dissolve. In this way, she funnels early modernism’s mutinous skepticism into the destabilization of traditional religion. She strips the altars in truth’s service. One views this practice early in West’s career, since The Return of the Soldier charts precisely this succession from deity to veracity. This quest proves vital to Saint Augustine and “A

Letter to a Grandfather” as well. The psychobiography, which West writes to process

Western civilization’s sadistic allegiance to suffering, throws illustrative light on her incorporation of Plato’s moral philosophy in service of feminist inquiry. This work extends into her reports on international crimes against humanity. Indeed, one can productively read The Return of the Solider and Saint Augustine together. In fact, this combination troubles narratives of West’s conservative conversion in the early 1930s and reveals, instead, a consistent network of ideas. These ideas remain anchored in West’s mystical sensibility, one that pushes back to Western civilization’s source. And, as we shall see, West’s mature writing continued to inform the theories of her youth.

CONTRA MUNDUM Evelyn Waugh’s Rebuff of Secularism

The Second World War’s atrocities and a mystical vision in France tempt Rebecca West to convert to Catholicism in 1950. She resists. "I could not go on with being a Catholic,” she explains in a letter, “I don't want, I can't bear, to become a Graham Greene and

Evelyn Waugh, and I cannot believe that I am required to pay such a price for salvation”

(L). The Catholic modernists’ particular variety of religious experience has, for West, pricey political implications. She sees their literary output as a conservative and decidedly treasonous attack on the British tradition, and she makes that assessment plain.

For in her measured estimation, Waugh “made drunkenness cute and chic, and then took to religion, simply to have the most expensive carpet of all to be sick on” (qtd

Glendinning 221). Waugh, in turn, launches a libel suit against West concerning not this line but another published in her revised 1954 edition of The Meaning of Treason. Waugh seeks reparation, West writes, “for no other reason than that … I pointed out that the people who have upset admiration for classic virtues are not all on the left but that

Graham Greene and Mauriac and Evelyn Waugh have done their share” (SL 316-317). I take West’s response to signify a telling rupture in how she and the Catholic modernists approach religion and its relevance to the public sphere. While West’s endorsement of mystical experience preserves the liberal subject’s individualism if not her indissoluble rationality, Waugh’s critique of Western secularism embraces an alternative mode of subjectivity, one rooted in England’s Catholic past. This subject remains one, rightly for

Waugh, thwarted by metaphysics.

Although Waugh’s critique of the burgeoning secular age has struck many readers, like West, as reactionary, as an “upset” to Merry England’s “classic virtues,” this chapter explores its relevance to recent critical conversations concerning secularization and ethics. Increasingly, philosophers such as Slavoj Žižek and Charles Taylor, albeit in different ways and for divergent purposes, question secularism’s axiomatic assumptions of rationality and progress. These contemporary conversations—what scholars have described as philosophy’s post-9/11 “return to religion”—not only engage the underappreciated religious inquiry of Waugh’s contemporaries like G.K. Chesterton and

Iris Murdoch but also free up, I argue, new space within Waugh studies, especially as they provide a fresh context within which to reassess his conservative politics. If one must question secularization’s premise and reassess secularism’s unspoken and thereby mystified political and ethical assumptions, as Taylor claims, then Waugh’s fiction provides a unique vantage point from which to track the decline of Christianity after the

Second World War and England’s fall into worldliness.

This chapter aims, in part, to isolate and thereby mobilize Waugh’s contribution to contemporary radical thinkers and anti-progressive politics, however unwelcome

Waugh might have found such usage. I argue that Waugh’s fiction has the potential to unearth and scold late capitalism’s tired, invisible platitudes. Novels that might at first read as deeply old-fashioned attacks on progress and equality appear otherwise when considered apart from secularism’s normative and all-encompassing framework. In

Waugh’s assessment of modern society, the distance between a religious and a secular mode of being emerges. For Waugh, the Catholic Church’s metaphysically anchored discipline—its ascesis—proves essential to the promulgation and protection of modern

liberty, but this freedom will look quite different from the stripped-down chucking about of will promulgated by liberal rhetoric. This contrast posits the religious mode as an alternative to imperial, capitalist subjectivity, one housed within the Western, British tradition. For this reason, one is not surprised to find Žižek entertaining the thorny ethical dilemmas of Bridehead Revisited in his recent Living in the End Times (2010) and God in

Pain (2012). As Žižek makes clear, the left needs a “theologico-political” interruption of the reality television show that is modern life under the liberal hedonistic regime (GP 36).

He locates such a break in Waugh’s religiosity.

In order to sketch Waugh’s sense of competing modernities, this chapter examines what critics readily identify as his “Catholic novels” (Lane 90) and thus his “moral center” (Crabbe 93): Brideshead Revisited (1945), The Loved One (1948), and Helena

(1950). I resist the tendency to posit a modernist Waugh against the Catholic one and do not read these texts as existing in contention with his early satires; rather, I see these

“Catholic novels” as the fruition of his early moral and political critique. This chapter builds on the consistency of Waugh’s position, then, as it develops through his early mockery to its acme in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. I open with an analysis of Waugh’s status as a Catholic writer to establish this arc as I also consider how philosophical explorations of religion’s supposed eclipse aid one in rethinking Waugh’s oeuvre. Next, I turn to a reading of Brideshead Revisited that considers secularism’s unspeakable moral assumptions. Waugh’s critique of the postmodern, Protestant empire becomes even more biting in The Loved One, which outlines Westerners’ postwar alienation from death’s sting. This discussion frames an examination of Brideshead Revisited’s controversial miracle and Žižek’s reading of its distinctly political efficacy. I conclude with a

comparison of Waugh’s Helena to West’s Saint Augustine in order to contextualize their contesting views of temporality, religion, and empire.

I. Happiness Is Not a Cage-Free, Organic Potato: Revisiting the Liberal Agenda

Scholars have conventionally read late Evelyn Waugh as a Catholic apologist

(Potter 55), whose criticism of Vatican II’s imposition of the vernacular mass strikes many as problematic in its fired refusal of modernity (Devereux 125). Critics have thus categorized Waugh’s fiction, especially “the Catholic novels” of the 40s and 50s, as aristocratic period pieces. “After World War II,” Michael Gorra suggests in a representative assessment, “Waugh fused his Catholicism with conservativism to produce a hatred of what he considered an atheistic and unbearable present” (202). Surely, Waugh eschews the modern age; he, like his literary self-portrait, Gilbert Pinfold, “abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing, and jazz—everything in fact that had happened in his lifetime” (10). And yet, I will insist Waugh’s prescient exploration of how “plastics,

Picasso, sunbathing, and jazz” bespeak a larger change in human subjectivity merits a closer examination. When considered as a documenter of British secularization, Waugh’s acerbic analysis provides the early twenty-first century with crucial tools to dissect the twentieth. In this opening section, I use Rebecca West’s criticisms of Catholic modernism to flesh out Waugh’s religious assault on Western secularization. Philosophers’ increased interest in, and skepticism toward, secularism suggests that literary critics have too quickly dismissed Waugh’s project. His portrait of the human condition does not simply refuse to modernize; it also resists global capitalism’s complete dominance. A comparison with West makes that difference pop..

With the 1945 publication of Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh emerges as a preeminent Catholic writer. The novel’s subtitle—“The Sacred and Profane Memories of

Captain Charles Ryder”—and Waugh’s expressed purpose, which he announces in the

1960 edition’s preface—to disclose “the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters” (qtd. Faulstick 173)—declare a religious preoccupation from the outset. Brideshead Revisited is, without doubt, a Catholic text. On 7 January

1945, Waugh writes to Nancy Mitford: “Lady Marchmain, no I am not on her side; but

God is, who suffers fools gladly; and the book is about God” (13). This definitive piety has, over the years, irked its fair share of readers. Scholars have not taken kindly to what many regard as Waugh’s postwar, heavy-handed Catholicism (DeCoste 160). Some, as

Joseph Hynes notes, even read the novel as a failure (234): its theme nostalgic, its politics reactionary, its religiosity forced. They insist the novel’s conclusion—with its ham-fisted miracles—only makes these flaws overt. Waugh thus loses his biting wit precisely, the critical story goes, as he accepts Catholicism and escapes into an idealized past (Corr

388). Moreover, a reactionary politics mars this unfunny escapism. In his review of the novel, Henry Reed laments the author’s “overpowering snobbishness” (239), for Waugh links Catholicism directly to the aristocracy (Cannadine 235). The novel proves not only doctrinaire but also quietist in its politics.

Critics since have reserved the novel for devout Catholics and anti-modern elitists

(Stannard 148). I will suggest, however, that the stakes of Brideshead Revisited’s claim for divine grace’s operative presence now extends far beyond its presumptive readership.

On my view, Brideshead Revisited clarifies how secularism threatens the modern subject with a new hegemonic discourse—precisely “the old concept of determinism in a new

form” (BR 129)—far more catholic than any bulls penned by prescient popes. Choose either “Celia’s Art and Fashion or Rex’s Politics and Money” (BR 276): both marshal an unquestioned secularization into Great Britain as base materialism dominates the social scene. While Timothy Sutton’s Catholic Modernists, English Nationalists (2010) places

Waugh squarely among those for whom “conversion to Catholicism provided … an answer to their desire for a return to Western hegemony, authority, and security under a justifying myth” (13), it seems essential to recover the extent to which Waugh resists the imperial narrative through his embrace of Catholicism. The issue, for Waugh, is not that the West has lost “hegemony, authority, and security” but rather that Anglo-American civilization has adopted an aggressively secular orientation toward the human condition and has therefore sacrificed its relation to a transcendent metaphysics in its espousal of a completely immanent materialism. This ultramodern view—only from a secular perspective not monolithic—expunges lived religion and remakes the world in line with an unacknowledged liberal Protestantism. As a Catholic, this loss of a metaphysical base concerns Waugh far more, I argue, than the wane of Britain’s imperial dominance, because that dominance holds stock in the secularism he despises.

On the surface, there is nothing new to the idea that Brideshead Revisited addresses the United Kingdom’s secularization. The novel announces its preoccupation with the novus ordo seclorum on its first page. There, the polyamorous protagonist,

Captain Charles Ryder, hesitates—“paused and looked back at the camp” (BR 3)— recalling Orpheus and Lot’s Wife. This fateful backward glance links Ryder obliquely to the pagan musician and the Jewish housewife, while introducing the novel’s preoccupations with memory, art, and sexuality. In this prologue, Charles is traveling

with the British army throughout the English countryside. It is, roughly, 1943. Notably, he glances backward at the army camp, where, Charles declares, “love had died between me and the army” (ibid). An inhospitable Sodom, it sadly sits on the edge of town,

“where, until quite lately, had been pasture and ploughland” (ibid). The secular appears first, as it did for many army men in the 40s and 50s, as an encroaching blob of suburbia.

“The place had been marked for destruction before the army came to it,” Charles records.

“Had there been another year of peace, there would have been no farmhouse, no wall, no apple trees. […] Another year of peace would have made the place part of the neighboring suburb” (BR 3-4). The countryside’s landscape changes quickly as modernization makes the world more convenient for shopping. The blue light above progress flashes on.

The rise, in and of itself, of the suburbs does not proclaim secularization, as many a Midwestern megachurch will attest. Adroitly, Waugh places this camp in proximity both to the suburbs and to a mental asylum. This holding pen for England’s irrational remainder signals the affinity between rationality and improvement: the secular world praises logic and fact. From their station, the men “could watch the madmen,” “happy collaborationists who had given up the unequal struggle, all doubts resolved, all duty done, the undisputed heirs-at-law of a century of progress, enjoying the heritage at their ease” (BR 4). Evolutionarily speaking, persons with mental illness are not fit for public life. These lunatics cannot participate in an enlightened society, and rational civilization cages them in turn. Still, they quietly witness the insanity and brutality of war. Hence the soldiers shoot requests to the inmates: “Keep a bed warm for me, chum. I shan’t be long”

(ibid). Their playful comments suggest England’s own bellicose decent into madness,

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undermining the values of rationality and progress they serve. The opening highlights this tension.

Charles’s lost love for the military is not without cause, as its hell is clearly one undeserving of a second look. The army fights a losing battle, as its interests serve paradoxically self-defeating purposes. New recruit Hooper, however, harbors more love for development and less tolerance for madness. As Charles notes, “Hooper, my newest- joined platoon commander, grudged them their life of privilege: ‘Hitler would put them in a gas chamber,’ he said; ‘I reckon we can learn a thing or two from him’” (BR 4). The inmates escape the military and fail to contribute to the cause. Hooper’s intolerance with regard to mental illness makes perfect sense given that, for Charles, “Hooper became a symbol to me of Young England, so that whenever I read some public utterance proclaiming what Youth demanded in the Future and what the world owed to Youth, I would test these general statements by substituting ‘Hooper’ and seeing if they still seemed as plausible” (BR 9). The madmen represent, for Youth, the state England ought to leave behind. Hooper’s rational reaction reflects liberalism’s impatience with the irrational, superstitious, and degenerate and connects it, implicitly, to modern totalitarianism.

A new, unromantic education cultivates Hooper, who “had wept often, but never for Henry’s speech on St. Crispin’s Day, nor for the epitaph at Thermopylæ. The history they taught him had had few battles in it but, instead, a profusion of detail about human legislation and recent industrial change” (BR 9). This progressive education does not glorify the past or its wars. It emphasizes the social sciences—what one can know exhaustively by data, analysis, charts— rather than humanist drivel. He thus “had no

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illusions about the army—or rather no special illusions distinguishable from the general, enveloping fog from which he observed the universe” (BR 8-9). It seems essential to underscore this “general, enveloping fog,” because, on my reading, Brideshead Revisited takes as one of its foremost purposes to clarify that fog under which progress makes gas chambers permissible. Hooper thus matters. “Though himself a man to whom one could not confidently entrust the simplest duty,” Charles notes, “he had an overmastering regard for efficiency and, drawing on his modest commercial experience, he would sometimes say of the ways of the army in pay and supply and the use of man-hours:

‘They couldn’t get away with that in business’” (BR 9). Practicality and materiality infuse his blood. Nevertheless, he proves dependable only in his faith in “efficiency,” and this precisely to the extent that it overmasters and thereby renders him incapable of “the simplest duty.”

After they arrive at their next camp, Hooper quickly ferrets out the “queer thing,”

“a sort of R.C. Church attached” to Brideshead Castle (BR 16). Not surprisingly, he dismisses it as a curious relic. “More in your line than mine” (RC 17), he rightly tells

Charles. For this Church and its creed undermines Hooper’s faith in progress and efficiency as it also problematizes his flirtation with genocidal cleansing, and this strain between the secular and the religious frames Charles’s memory. When the same tension appears later in the novel, one realizes the extent to which Charles himself has anticipated

Hooper’s modern belief system. In the early 1920s, Charles recalls that “Sebastian’s faith was an enigma to me at that time, but not one which I felt particularly concerned to solve.

I had no religion. I was taken to church weekly as a child, and at school attended chapel daily, but, as though in compensation, from the time I went to public school I was

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excused church in the holidays” (BR 85). Charles’s upbringing exposes him weakly to the white noise of British Anglicanism; it churns on in the background, but it demands little of the present. His tepid faith anticipates Hooper’s lack of it. Anglicanism has become customary, and religion’s public role in England only lessens as the sanguinary century chugs forward, always forward.

In his consideration of his past religious experience and how it compares to

Sebastian’s Catholicism, Charles outlines many of the dismissals of religion against which current scholars of secularization push back.21 Although “almost daily, since I had known Sebastian, some chance word in his conversation had reminded me that he was a

Catholic,” in 1923 Charles regards his friend’s religion “as a foible, like his Teddy-bear”

(BR 86). Sebastian’s Catholicism appears to Charles as prehistorical and preternatural. Its ornamentation marks Sebastian as unbearably adolescent, for, as Charles explains,

The view implicit in my education was that the basic narrative of Christianity had long been exposed as a myth, and that the opinion was now divided as to whether its ethical teaching was of present value, a division in which the main went against it; religion was a hobby which some people professed and others did not; at best it was slightly ornamental, at the worst it was the province of ‘complexes’ and ‘inhibitions’—catchwords of the decade—and of the intolerance, hypocrisy, and sheer stupidity attached to it for centuries. (86)

On this view, the faithful fail to launch themselves into the modern era. They remain children, attached to their Father up in heaven. Its exposure as a “myth” does not trouble their intellect, and henceforth the threat of irrational fundamentalism lies in wait. While religion may have lingering ethical value, it brings with it scores of “complexes,” all of which Freud’s taxonomy of neuroses documents fully. Charles’s ruddy rejection of

21 José Casanova provides a clear overview of these secular dismissals of religion, discussing how secularism itself has become “a modern doxa or an ‘unthought’”; which is to say, “the secular appears now as reality tout court” (55). 103

religion in early life thus marks him as a fledgling, healthy, liberal subject, a nonbeliever in whom modern secularists might place faith.

Clearly, Waugh foresees the very parameters of Brideshead Revisited’s dismissal as Catholic propaganda and incorporates them into his novel. He knows what he is up against, and this inclusion ought not to shock. Lest one forget, Rebecca West applauds

Waugh’s first book on Gabriel Rossetti and praises his rebuttal when the Times mistakenly refers to Evelyn as “she” (EW 79). West tires of Evelyn only after his

Catholic conversion in 1930 and swiftly rejects his misplaced desire for certainty in an uncertain, modern world. Her frustration with Waugh echoes her criticisms of other religious writers, whom she sees as choosing faith’s puerile consolations over confronting reality’s harsh landscape (IB 321). Waugh attempts to contain such criticism in

Brideshead Revisited, but it perpetuates. In the twenty-first century, Christopher Hitchens will dub West “a superbly intelligent woman,” who “found her natural intellectual home on the freethinking liberal left” (192), while describing Waugh as “the permanent adolescent,” one in whom what George Orwell describes as the “incompatibility of maturity and faith” manifests itself (255). Hitchens, like West, aligns childishness and anti-modernity with the Catholic modernists, yet he overlooks West’s own complex struggle with catholic temptations.

Hitchens’ desire to paint West as a secular heroine echoes a larger tendency within literary criticism to submerge twentieth-century writers’ multifaceted religious inquiry under the waves of secularization that evidently bring female liberation, economic equality, and racial justice to Anglo-American shores. Like Waugh’s early satire (Barnard 162), young Rebecca’s feminism aligns her with the forward march of

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progress until she complains about communism one-too-many times, and then the canon condemns her as a conservative (Scott 199). I have argued against this reading in the opening chapter, suggesting West’s engagement with mystical experience unifies her early feminist polemic and late postwar journalism. With this point in mind, one must approach the disconnection between West’s mystical protest and Waugh’s Catholic orthodoxy judiciously. West struggles openly with the Catholic modernists, but her interest in religious experience indicates that, while distinct, she and Waugh have more in common than meets the secular eye. This commonality, I contend, prepares one to register not only what literary critics have failed to recognize in Waugh’s Catholic fiction but also what liberalism fails to appreciate in the foundationally religious weltanschauung.

West rarely disguises her aversion to the Catholic modernists. She views their religiosity as a negation of adulthood and links this refusal, in Saint Augustine, to fascism. That many of these writers hold reactionary political views would not surprise her (Sutton 23). She censures the Anglo-Catholic’s retreat from actuality and its political implications directly in 1933’s “A Letter to a Grandfather.” In this piece, a fictionalized

West recounts the conclusion she draws from her mystical vision:

I feel that in my spiritual apotheosis the nice thing would have been for me to be like the clergyman’s mournful widow, muttering about my Waste Lands, moaning because it is Ash Wednesday, or to be a Romantic, melting and guttering with my own heat like a candle, or to be a simmering-pot of ethical activity. But that is cowardice. I am a fool to be ashamed of what I saw. It was almost entirely without comfort or benignity. (207)

As the recurring allusions to T.S. Eliot suggest, West believes these chic Catholic conversions bring nothing but delusional license. The Catholic modernists join the ranks

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of the Romantics, dripping with self-importance, and the benevolent do-gooders, busy distracting themselves with charity projects to avoid acknowledging the economic structure that maintains their wealth and privilege. Poverty remains in place, her analysis suggests, because religion veils it (LG 184). Institutionalized spirituality casts a mystifying shroud about truth, and, in religion’s case, truth is also a woman: it likewise veils her. Disavowal of modernization and its related liberations is, for West, abhorrent.

The Catholic Modernists’ conversions to Rome prove foolish, according to West, in yet another regard. “Can earth have seen such idiots,” she asks, “as those who declare that they want to submit to the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, not because they believe in its supernatural revelations, but because they dislike the disorder of life lived without authority” (LG 199)? West wisely points out that the Church’s authority rests precisely on the authenticity of its supernatural revelations. Roman converts void the very authority they seek to instantiate when they refuse the transcendent superstructure, but, she quickly adds, “they are not more fatuous than those of the Left Wing, who have thrown the whole tradition of economic idealism out of the window, and babble of nothing but Russia” (ibid). Both the religious right and the communist left choose to retreat into a comforting explanation for the whole of reality that obviates thinking for oneself and undermines the individual’s vision. West argues, instead, for each person to confront the human condition’s randomness and accept its bleakness: alone.

West and Waugh alike find Catholicism’s vast museum of human striving amenable. Catholic religion connects the disciple to a longstanding tradition, which West praises, as it also places the self within a metaphysical picture that gives her mucking about purpose. In many respects, they agree, and this commonality partly explains West’s

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flirtations with Catholicism. The central difference stems from larger ideological patterns, which shed light on secularism’s unshakable loyalties. West is, at base, a liberal feminist, and her stringent, Anglo-American commitment to individualism stands in conflict with

Waugh’s deeply Catholic sensibility. For West, the individual in his particularity matters

(MR 25). Mystical revelation connects the visionary to a larger tradition without complete self-erasure. While she embraces religious experience and sees it as essential to modernity and art, Waugh’s Catholicism posits a very different relation between self and

Other. This subject exists enmeshed in a tradition that contains and confines the individual. For Waugh, the Church is necessary both for its history and for the externalized discipline it imposes on the subject. Ecclesiastical restraint supports, in turn, true freedom. The Church recognizes the distinct, eternal nature of every soul, but modern individualism fashions its liberty as freedom from any institution that would make any a priori demands on self-actualization. West and Waugh’s religiosity parts, on my view, here.

In this regard, Waugh’s conversion to Catholicism is essential, because it imaginatively revisits a pre-Reformation England (Johnson 164). This departure from

Anglicanism matters not simply in its reaction against individualism, industrialization, and imperialism; it also marks a sharp break with secular England and its Protestant ethos. West, although religious, is not willing to go quite this far, as she remains faithful to England’s liberal tradition. In this sense, Waugh’s Catholicism provides a clearer picture of secularism and its discontents than West’s mysticism. His fictional representation of the religious subject over and against the secular, liberal one illuminates subtle distinctions in such a way as to make the ideological apparatus of the latter

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subjectivity visible, and, with this illumination, Waugh’s fiction enters into a post-secular discourse. Increasingly, scholars interrogate secularism and its unexamined claims to enlightened rationality and truthful objectivity. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan

VanAntwerpen, for instance, maintain that “[j]ust as, in an earlier period, feminists and other scholars raised fundamental questions about the meaning of the public and its relation to the private, today the very categories of the religious and the secular—and of secularisms and religion—are being revisited, reworked, and rethought” (1). This philosophical re-articulation of secularism’s particularity—its values, its assumptions— bears weight on how scholars conceive of the present global order and how they approach religiosity in the near and distant past.

The secular does not name the necessary divestment of superstition à la Freud’s

The Future of an Illusion. It denotes a bias-laden worldview. This Protestant trace frames my reading of Waugh’s Catholic conversion, but it also radicalizes his politics to the extent that he preserves an alternative to the prevailing dominant ideology. This radicalization does not make Waugh a progressive vigilante by any stretch of the imagination, and it does not make his conservative-leaning politics representatively or ideally Catholic; instead, it marks, by contrast, the politics of those around him as decidedly more Protestant and hence increasingly visible as such. Judith Butler underscores what I take to be the larger stakes of my second conclusion nicely. “If the public sphere is a Protestant accomplishment,” she suggests, “then public life presupposes and reaffirms one dominant religious tradition as the secular. And if there are many reasons to doubt whether secularism is as liberated from its religious foundations as it purports to be, we might ask whether these insights into secularism also

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apply, to some degree, to our claims regarding public life in general” (71). A certain blindness and bias persist, then, in Westerners’ faith in secularization as a fait accompli.

Rightly, in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, Waugh describes the politics of his

Catholic alter ego as a curious mixture of the old and the new. “He had never voted in a parliamentary election,” Waugh writes, “maintaining an idiosyncratic toryism which was quite unrepresented in the political parties of his time and was regarded by his neighbors as being almost as sinister as socialism” (5). If Iris Murdoch’s claim is sound that

England’s “traditionalists have not been metaphysicians, and neither have our progressives” (EM 69), then Waugh’s “unrepresented,” “idiosyncratic toryism” holds tight: both right and left toe the liberal, secular line, and the humanist “ideals which have inspired our society have been utilitarian ideals. And the utilitarians, when they wished to break down habit and custom by reflection, did not refer us to any metaphysical structure, but referred us to certain simple values and, above all, back again to facts” (ibid). Against this ubiquitous utilitarianism, Waugh holds metaphysics and ethics together, insisting on

God’s operative, graceful presence among human affairs. He responds to modernity and modernism not, strictly speaking, as a conservative but rather as a believing radical.

Waugh’s fiction helps readers, in this respect, think more charitably about what counts as superstition and reassess whom gets read, religiously, as backward.

II. “Some Pretty Queer Converts”: Brideshead Revisited’s Unnatural Vice and Virtue

I have suggested that Evelyn Waugh does not flee from the modern world as much as he insists on an alternative, within modernity, to Anglo-American civilization’s hegemonic vision of secular progress. In this section, I add to the philosophical

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investigations of secularism and secularization a discussion of queer temporality in order to complicate a rejection of Brideshead Revisited as misguided, anti-modernist wistfulness. Waugh’s investigation of sexuality and religion, in particular, contributes to larger conversations concerning secularization and ethics as it links Catholicism directly to male homoeroticism and contrasts it with a productive, Protestant orientation. From this angle, the secular realm reads not only as Protestant but also as straight. This position puts pressure on interpretations of the novel that argue Catholicism displaces the queer tendencies of Charles’s youth (Christensen 147), for I insist an allegiance to sacramental decadence unites the religious and the sexual in the novel. By the light of this examination of sex, secularization, and religion, I hazard the tentative hypothesis that, among other things, Western modernity views homo religiosus as a religious homo.

My reading of Brideshead Revisited locates Waugh, from the outset, as a writer within a grander tradition of Catholic decadence. As Ellis Hanson’s Decadence and

Catholicism (1998) has skillfully shown, Catholicism provides fin-de-siècle artists with an escape from the bourgeoisie’s vapid materialism and puritanical stuffiness (8).

Catholicism names, for these writers, a richly complex imaginative field where aesthetics, eroticism, and spirituality overlap in baroque folds of signification. Not surprisingly,

Hanson claims in the monograph’s conclusion that Brideshead Revisited “may be seen as a modernist classic of decadent Catholicism, with its homoerotic saga of a decaying aristocratic family given to Catholic guilt, fashionable poses, and sexual self-indulgence”

(368). The novel houses a lot of sin, and, with claims that “God prefers drunkards to a lot of respectable people” (BR 145), its debauchery harbors a palpable, palatable excess. In this regard, Waugh follows the Catholic decadents, who “cultivated a fascination with all

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that was commonly perceived as unnatural or degenerate, with sexual perversity, nervous illness, crime, and disease, all presented in a highly aestheticized context calculated to subvert, or at any rate, to shock conventional morality” (3). Waugh’s decadent inutility defends an anti-progressive position that directly criticizes liberal capitalism and its fabrication of abject waste. As a “modernist classic” interrogating modernism’s secular footing, Brideshead Revisited mobilizes a complex decadent tradition to launch a simultaneously aesthetic and moral inquiry into the possibility of puncture within this secular, bourgeois bubble.

To approach religion’s relation to non-normative sexual practices in Brideshead

Revisited, one must proceed with a capacious spirituality and a naughty imagination. For, as Hanson rightly insists, “Catholicism is itself a paradox. The decadents merely emphasized this point within their own aesthetic of paradox. The Church is at once modern and yet medieval, ascetic and yet sumptuous, spiritual and yet sensual, chaste and yet erotic, homophobic and yet homoerotic, suspicious of aestheticism and yet an elaborate work of art” (7). Most critical work on Brideshead Revisited neglects the decadents’ paradoxical sense of Catholicism and instead naturalizes a prudish image of

Waugh as a conservative aristocrat (Coffey 73). Considered either aesthetically in relation to literary modernism or historically in relation to Protestant England, modern

Catholicism is not a univocal tradition (Schloesser 14). It is a living and ancient institution, chock full of contradiction, violence, and debauchery. Furthermore, all religions prove incongruous to the extent that they both engage in oppression of minority

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populations and provide imaginative structures for their liberation.22 “Those who construe the relationship of homosexuality to Christianity entirely in terms of doctrinal denunciations,” Hanson avers, “seem to me to miss the point. Church rhetoric still leads a double life” (25). As Waugh’s characters navigate a modernizing world with their own fraught relationships to the divine, they necessarily navigate the “double life” of a double-bind.

By now, it is safe to say literary critics have spilled too much ink speculating on the veiled sexual practices of Charles and Sebastian.23 While David Leon Higdon claims that “it is impossible to regard Sebastian as other than gay” and that “Charles is so homoerotic he must at least be considered cheerful” (78), I agree with Tison Pugh that one must anchor the novel’s relationships to their historical context. Higdon suggests the

“binary opposition of homosexuality and heterosexuality that informs so much of

Western thought about male sexuality is clearly too simplistic a paradigm for the world that Waugh depicts” (87) and that the text encapsulates “a full range of human sexuality”

(79), but he nevertheless insists that Sebastian is gay. Pugh criticizes this imposition, because Waugh does not comment directly on Sebastian’s sexuality. The novel does indicate, however, that a romantic friendship exists between Charles and Sebastian, and, in the early twentieth century in England, “it is important to note that people who engaged in same-sex acts did not necessarily view themselves as homosexuals” (Pugh

65). As Cara explains to Charles, “I know of these romantic friendships of the English

22 A touchstone text in this conversation, John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (1980) has influenced many critical conversations surrounding Waugh’s engagement with Catholic, queer sexuality. 23 Peter G. Christensen provides a thorough overview of this criticism; for Christensen, Waugh’s novel embraces, against doctrinal rigidity, a “generous catholic spirit” that treats homosexuality sympathetically (138). 112

and the Germans. They are not Latin. I think they are very good if they do not go on too long” (BR 101). Taking worldly Cara at her word, Pugh argues the boys engage in some form of a rather common romantic friendship, much like Waugh himself did (68). “Gay” does not inexorably describe Sebastian’s sexual practices, and his sexual identity is, I suspect, rather beside the point.

For it seems to me that the novel concerns itself more with blurring identities, and the homosocial in Brideshead Revisited decidedly retains homoeroticism’s potential sin.

From the outset, the first book makes apparent the commonly perceived connection between Catholicism and homosexuality. “Beware of the Anglo-Catholics,” Charles’s cousin Jaspers warns him at Oxford, “they’re all sodomites with unpleasant accents” (BR

26). This affiliation is undoubtedly a matter of historical record as it reflects the conflation of homophobia and anti-Catholicism in England. “By the 1920s,” Ellis Hanson notes, “the notion of Anglo and Roman Catholicism as a magnet for homosexuals had passed from a running joke to a simple fact” (25). Rebecca West cites, for example, “too much contact with sexually repressed and homosexual priests” as a reason for her refusal to convert to Rome (Schweizer 144). There is good reason to believe that homophobia keeps West from the Church,24 and surely Brideshead Revisited pictures a world in which

Catholicism is queer. All too soon, Charles gets himself caught up with “the very worst set in the University” (BR 41). In Jaspers’ opinion, Sebastian looks “odd,” and “he gets himself talked about. Of course, they’re an odd family” (ibid). Jaspers immediately

24 Schweizer is quick to lessen West’s homophobia, claiming her reasoning is here “spurious” and that it “surely appears to be a smokescreen for her fundamental difficulty in achieving a genuine sense of religious faith and worship” (144). This reasoning seems to me, however, symptomatic of Schweizer’s need to equate West’s “hatred of God” with progressive liberal politics. She has a documented history of homophobic sentiment, as does Waugh. 113

connects Sebastian’s queer behavior to his “odd” Catholic family. They do not gel in this modern landscape. Lady Marchmain “is a Roman Catholic, so she can’t get a divorce—or won’t, I expect. You can do anything at Rome with money” (BR 40-41). Their religion marks them as queer to the degree that Catholicism thwarts their desires and impedes full-human functioning. Jaspers’ mix of anti-Catholic sentiment and homophobic rhetoric is not unique. Sodomy between men is simply the most outré exemplum of how

Catholicism distorts human sexuality and happiness.

“So through a world of piety,” Charles aptly recalls, “I made my way to

Sebastian” (BR 60). Charles is, indeed, “in search of love in those days” (BR 31), and

Sebastian wins his idolatrous gazes and zealous admiration. That summer with

Sebastian—“though its toys were silk shirts and liqueurs and cigars and its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins” (BR 45)—awakens a piquant desire for beauty and truth. As Charles reflects after his cousin’s reprimand, “I could have told him, too, that to know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom” (ibid), but certainly

Jaspers would not understand how Sebastian and his non-normative beauty prove a

“forerunner” for Charles and his amorous quest (BR 257). This queer affection inspires a desire for wisdom as it leads Charles from loneliness to God. Although the “naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sin” suggests the boys may have indulged in acute hanky panky, Sebastian and Charles do not necessarily make cattleya. Waugh’s portrayal of the romantic friendship signals, instead, the curious ways in which dominant culture codes any non-normative sexuality as queer and therefore potentially Catholic (or Catholic and potentially queer). Critics misread the relationship between Sebastian and Charles when they assume that mutual sexual intimacy would bestow upon their affection a greater

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purpose or meaning (Higdon 79). These arguments betray a liberal bias unsuited to

Waugh as they conceive of sex essentially as self-expression rather than as, within a

Natural Law framework, one activity, however sinful, within a larger moral landscape of messy human affairs.25

Within this fraught exploration of desire, Waugh carefully disentangles the knots of liberal rhetoric’s supposed permissiveness. On the one hand, Catholicism oppresses to the extent that it preserves and enforces (however shakily) ancient sex laws against homosexuality, divorce, adultery, etc. On the other hand, liberalism merely tolerates non- procreative sexuality (consider the children! the future!) and codes Catholicism, especially its non-secular, non-procreative aspects, as immature, retrograde, and selfish

(it pulls the you-wouldn’t-understand-because-you-don’t-have-children card). Within the world of enlightened hedonism, there is one good way to express sexual desire, and this state-sanctioned sex, as Leo Bersani has argued astutely, looks a lot like the pastoral sexual monogamy enjoyed by heterosexual married couples in the thralls of all- consuming bliss (215). Catholicism becomes, in Brideshead Revisited, the locus for queer sexualities, then, that the religion itself also condemns, and this censure matters. With its

Natural Law approach to ethics, Catholicism maintains the shamefulness of illicit sexual practices over and against the sex-as-self-fulfillment militantly demanded by the bourgeois media. It preserves, in short, sex’s decadence over and against liberalism’s glorification of it.

While perhaps Waugh scholars have wastefully gone back and forth as to whether or not Charles (or Waugh for that matter) is gay, it seems to me critics have, at the same

25 Gayle Rubin’s “Thinking Sex” outlines how bourgeois society has reduced the complexity and naughtiness of sexual acts, pairings, and potentialities. 115

time, underestimated the importance of non-reproductive eroticism in the novel. Pious readers tend to avert their eyes, explaining that Charles’s religion moves him past the decadent predilections of folks like Anthony Blanche; secular scholars, in contrast, note the importance of Waugh’s exploration of the full spectrum of human lust without grounding it within Catholicism as such.26 I want to suggest, however, that Catholicism is homoerotic in the novel from the outset, and that this coding contra naturam speaks volumes (Rambuss 56). Recusant Catholics, for instance, engender their own epistemologies of the closet as they seek to navigate a world in which it is impossible to be out. As Sebastian explains to Charles, Catholics in England are precisely not like other people, “particularly in this country, where they’re so few … they’ve got an entirely different outlook on life; everything they think important is different from other people.

They try to hide it as much as they can, but it comes out all the time” (BR 89; emphasis mine). One notices how the language used to describe the recusant Catholic mirrors modern discourses of the inevitability of sexual outing and the closet more generally. The open secret and counter-cultural knowledge attend each minority group. Waugh’s novel takes the sexual-religious outcast as its subject, but it seeks to preserve the closet, I argue, as the epistemological and political space from which to launch an alternative mode of recusant being. Liberation is a trap.

Anthony Blanche proves an important character in this regard. He is Catholic and a self-identified invert (BR 49). The discourses surrounding homosexuality and

Catholicism coalesce in this prophetic figure. He is the “‘aesthete’ par excellence’” (BR

32), one whose recitation of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land by megaphone aligns him with

26 Laura White sees Charles’s interest in Walter Pater as something he must learn to transcend (185), while Michael Gorra locates Waugh within a tradition of decadence while separating it from Catholicism (205). 116

blind Tiresias (BR 33). As one of ancient Greece’s most infamous soothsayers, Tiresias has lived in both sexes’ bodies. He advises Oedipus and warns Alcmena, mother of

Narcissus, that her boy must never know himself. In The Waste Land, hermaphroditic

Tiresias offers prophecies concerning desire’s modern ossification. A proto-Queer-eye- for-the-straightish-guy interlocutor, Anthony likewise offers warnings to Charles, pointing out the degree to which material interests corrupt his art and cautioning against the charms of Sebastian’s clan. “I was right years ago,” Anthony explains, “when I took you out to dinner to warn you of charm. I warned you expressly and in great detail of the

Flyte family. Charm is the great English blight … It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you” (BR 273). The Flyte family’s charisma threatens to mesmerize Charles and limit his vision. According to Anthony, Charles must escape their amorous, melodramatic grasp if his art is to approach its zenith. With this prophecy,

Anthony Blanche foretells the novel’s conclusion. Ultimately, Charles must transfigure the Flyte siblings’ fascination into something else, as he—spoiler alert—empties himself of enchantment to receive God’s realist grace.

Charles realizes rather quickly that Anthony Blanche is a sexual outcast,

“burdened with the experience of the Wandering Jew. He was indeed a nomad of no nationality” (BR 46). The pariah to Sebastian’s parvenu,27 Anthony suffers the quotidian violence of heteronormativity. The group of Oxford men who “ducked” Anthony do so by virtue of his degenerate status (BR 48), and “one of them, rather a juicy little piece” accuses Anthony of “unnatural vices” (BR 49). Surely, his plea must be guilty, but, as

27 Hannah Arendt’s discussion of Marcel Proust and his relation to the parvenu and pariah status in The Origins of Totalitarianism provides an excellent analysis of society’s eclipse of political responsibility and activity (80-81). 117

Anthony calmly explains to his assailants, “I may be inverted but I am not insatiable.

Come back when you are alone” (ibid). He manages to assert, at least, some control over the situation by mockery. “Dear sweet clodhoppers, if you knew anything of sexual psychology you would know that nothing could give me keener pleasure than to be manhandled by you meaty boys,” he promises. “It would be an ecstasy of the very naughtiest kind” (BR 50). And so, Anthony places himself into the fountain, but this action does not assuage the incident’s greater aggression. It has happened more than once, and, significantly, the scene introduces readers to Boy Mulcaster. He leads the group, presumably to assert dominance over Anthony, but as Anthony makes clear, the two share an economic past. Boy also has an economic future, as his sister will usher

Charles into marriage.

This virulent scene not only hardens the muscle endemic to heteronormativity but also inserts the Mulcasters’ reproductive imperative into the plot. As Charles will recount, Celia “had married me six years ago at the time of my first exhibition, and had done much since then to push our interests. Some people said she ‘made’ me” (BR 231).

Celia appears to harbor the agency here, as she marries Charles almost against his will and pushes their familial agenda. Her ease with society enables her, moreover, to develop their fiscal interests and simultaneously bear children. Charles benefits financially and socially by this marriage, even if it brings him little joy. Celia kneads his reputation and provides the home base from which he can create his art. She even has designs for him to work in Hollywood, for it “had occurred to her that, with my interest in architecture, my true métier was designing scenery for the films, and she had asked two Hollywood magnates to the party with whom she wished to ingratiate me” (BR 241). Celia and Boy

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Mulcaster embody the normative, reproductive agenda, and it leads to Hollywood and happiness. Boy himself accompanies Charles and Sebastian to the Old Hundreth brothel, which moves Charles swiftly from one of the “only fairies” (BR 115) to someone “raised

… in Julia’s estimation,” precisely because they had been “out with women” (BR 122).

The social benefits of reproductive heteronormativity proliferate. The Mulcasters know how to make men of boys.

The water-logged aggression toward Anthony crystallizes, then, a larger disavowal of the non-procreative and queer. This disavowal simultaneously speaks, in

Protestant England, to the Catholic and the holy. One must remember that, within the

Protestant imaginary, Catholicism’s history of aestheticism and chastity not only provides cover for homoeroticism (beware the gay priests and lesbian nuns! confess with caution!) but also endorses a Pauline mode of being in which reproductive sexuality is not the end or the ideal of Christian life (I Cor 7:9). Catholics create and validate non-procreative models of community. To put it plainly, Catholic priests do not marry while Protestant ministers do. In a Protestant sphere, the good Christian happily marries and bears 2.5 children (Gen 1:28). While most often assumed to liberate women and gay men to express sexual desire, secularization also, and more notably, makes the ordinary role of reproductive heterosexuality the chosen site in the West for Christian ethics. When one considers such papist homosociality in tandem with homoerotic kinship, it is not surprising to find discursive overlap in England surrounding the Catholic and the homosexual (Rom 1:27).

In this manner, it proves fruitful to evaluate Waugh’s commitment to backward- looking nostalgia and non-normativity sexuality alongside current work in queer

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temporality. As the home and hearth become the site for religious life—over and against

Catholics’ cloisters and monasteries—heterosexual reproduction takes on aspects of a sacred calling. The Protestant Reformation introduces, Charles Taylor argues, a new sensibility. Now domestic life epitomizes Christian devotion and good, clean living, since secularization in the West begins, historically, by Protestants making bare life sacred.

One’s spiritual heart is where the home is, and

This temper was strengthened by the cultural revolution which I have called the affirmation of ordinary life, which dethroned the supposedly higher activities of contemplation and the civic life and put the center of gravity of goodness in ordinary living, production, and the family. It belongs to this spiritual outlook that our first concern ought to be to increase life, relieve suffering, foster prosperity. Concern above all for the fullness of life smacked of pride, of self-absorption. (IM 6)

Taylor’s comments highlight how liberal Protestants’ values—to “increase life, relieve suffering, foster prosperity”—align with “ordinary living, production, and the family.”

The laity claim power on the grounds of equality—“the affirmation of ordinary life”— and take it from the religious eccentrics. After all, the New World requires republican freedom, and the ancien régime “was inherently not egalitarian, since the alleged ‘higher’ activities could only be carried out by an elite minority, whereas leading one’s ordinary life rightly was open to everyone [including monkeys]” (Taylor IM 6). This democratic merger of spirituality and domesticity recasts sexual reproduction as a primary mode of spiritual expression, anticipating the contemporary alignment of sex and identity.

Catholicism’s queerness crystalizes precisely as Protestant secularization embraces reproductive heteronormativity as missionary-style labor. It also, not without significance, recasts the Catholic as a backward elitist. To what extent does modern homophobia contain traces of this historical process? The entrenchment of sacred

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meaning in sexual reproduction devalues queer practices and alternative forms of kinship, but surely the Catholic Church has never embraced homoeroticism as such. What develops most clearly with the beatification of baby-making is, rather, a progressive vision of teleological progress. This fecund, forward-moving sense of time devalues both the queer and Catholic subject, for they are, in Heather Love’s sense, “intimately bound up with backwardness” (5). Modernity—“with its suggestions of progress, rationality, and technological advance” (ibid)—has little room for the homosexual, even though it theorizes the medical categorization that engenders her. Queer subjects do not, alas, fit.

“Whether understood as throwbacks to an earlier stage of human development or as children who refuse to grow up,” Love continues, “queers have been seen across the twentieth century as a backward race. Perverse, immature, sterile, and melancholic: even when they provoke fears about the future, they also somehow recall the past” (6). They impede progress as they refuse to reproduce secular, liberal optimism. Even as celibates, they fuck things up.

Optimistically, the secular realm demands this-worldly progression. It is reproductive and progressive: a change to believe in. Lee Edelman’s No Future therefore censures, from a queer slant, the pandemic figure of “the Child whose innocence solicits our defenses" (2). Whitney-Houston-like investment in the children who are our future figures temporality in terms of inevitable, rational improvement. Political change becomes boxed-in by the demands of the womb’s fruits and, in turn, privileges heterosexual coupling. Unreceptively, Edelman criticizes such “reproductive futurism,” which imposes “an ideological limit on political discourse as such, preserving in the process the absolute privilege of heteronormativity by rendering unthinkable, by casting

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outside the political domain, the possibility of a queer resistance to this organizing principle of communal relations” (ibid). In light of Taylor’s account of secularization, one sees how reproductive futurism propagates a humanist politics in which the reproduction of bare living appears not only admissible but holy. Repro-futurity—with its sense of dates, deadlines, benchmarks—etches a world within which milestones are millstones, grounding bodies into becoming normal. “Time, then, is not only of the essence,” as Elizabeth Freeman confers; “it actually produces ‘essences,’” since

“temporality is a mode of implantation through which institutional forces come to seem like somatic facts” (160). Queer theories of temporality witness how the clock produces certain norms of sexual behavior and gendered relations (cf. 9 to 5), but it also seems right to say, at this pass, that they also suggest how time reinforces certain norms of spiritual credence. Secularism has its etymological and historical roots in the language of time, and I contend this particular time reproduces a normative, invisible, liberal

Protestantism.

Contemporary queer theorists of temporality forward the reminder that unlimited progress closes forgotten backdoors. In addition, if readers of Brideshead Revisited take

Heather Love at her word, they will note how easily and how often secular liberals have used “[p]erverse, immature, sterile, and melancholic” to describe believers, if not to denigrate Waugh himself (Stannard 272). Brideshead Revisited reveals, then, the extent to which “reproductive futurism” also describes a foundationally Protestant relationship to time. It bears the imprint of the Reformation’s “affirmation of the ordinary life,” and, not surprisingly so, since sex sells. As Judith Halberstam makes plain, “success in a heteronormative, capitalist society equates too easily in specific forms of reproductive

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maturity combined with wealth accumulation” (2). The true subject of capitalism is the one who produces, succeeds, expands, and exploits. The bottom in his life is the line, and this delineation forecloses other erotic/spiritual possibilities in the name of true freedom, straightforward success, and unavoidable maturation. Accordingly, Halberstam insists in

The Queer Art of Failure that, “while the heteronormative political imagination propels itself forward in time and space through the indisputably positive image of the child, and while it projects itself back on the past through the dignified image of the parent, the queer subject stands between heterosexual optimism and its realization” (106). One can hazard the same assessment of Waugh’s Catholic penitents. Clearly, Charles stands in the way of the realization of Celia’s “heterosexual optimism,” just as Julia frustrates Rex’s notions of liberal flourishing. Indeed, Ryder’s intense disconnection with his own children only acts to highlight the point (BR 230): Waugh’s Catholic world is one in which reproduction fails.

Julia’s stillborn child merits pause on this account. Julia believes she has “been punished a little for marrying Rex” (BR 259). The child dies before she sees life (BR

257), and Julia blames herself. Despite her transgression, she views the world through the lens of her religious belief: “Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell, Nanny Hawkins, and

Catechism. It becomes part of oneself, if they give it early enough. And yet I wanted my child to have it …” (BR 259). Significantly, Julia wants to raise her daughter as a

Catholic. “‘That’s one thing I can give her,’” Julia had reasoned then. “‘It doesn’t seem to have done me much good, but my child shall have it.’ It was odd, wanting to give something one had lost oneself” (ibid). Obviously, Julia’s desire to baptize her daughter bespeaks the extent to which she has not lost her faith. The death of the child, though,

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does mark her as an outcast from liberal fecundity, as one whose future is dead on arrival.

This child’s death functions to isolate her, irrevocably, from Rex’s world of material production and pleasure. Thus, “poor Rex found he’d married an outcast, which was exactly the opposite of all he’d wanted” (BR 200), and this strain between the realm of transcendent belief and the world of immanent (re)production dominates the second book of Brideshead Revisited. Julia’s queer religiosity consistently interferes with Rex’s plans, and one rightly wonders if this child’s death is not so much a heavenly castigation as the sound of cacophonous worlds clashing.

III. Momento Mori: Welcome to the Desert of the Reel

Julia’s failure to birth healthy children and Sebastian’s inability to find lasting happiness complement Waugh’s critique of the secular obsession with mere life. To the modern age, enthralled by the general and generative hurly-burly of living, spiritual preoccupation may appear misguided, superstitious, or neurotic. And yet, a refusal of suffering and death does not, on Waugh’s watch, create a society where the living is easy.

On the contrary, secularism produces a deserted scene from which matter evaporates. In order to trace this eclipse of materiality and to anticipate the relation between Catholic morality and mortality, this section places Brideshead Revisited into conversation with the novel that immediately follows it: The Loved One. This text’s early exploration of

Hollywood’s hyper-reality and its euphemistic treatment of embodied passing contextualizes Waugh’s ultimate argument for Catholic conversion. Indeed, The Loved

One grounds the need for a religious dispensation and helps flesh out why Charles chooses Catholicism’s incarnational aesthetics over modernism’s puritanical bearings.

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Placed into conversation with postmodern theories of the simulacra, The Loved One demonstrates, contra Karl Marx, that it is not Catholicism that takes one away from the earth but secularism and its demand that heaven be found on it.

Waugh’s investigation of liberalism’s consumptive paradise underscores modernity’s ubiquitous avoidance of mortality: death flees from its sight. Secularism’s bright-sided investment in what Charles Taylor describes as “ordinary living, production, and the family” has for its dark-sided remainder the eclipse of a candid confrontation with actual death. Liberalism’s time-bound emphasis on life’s value and pleasures certainly demands it. Secular democracies call for an unspoken moratorium on all things hereafter. “To speak of aiming beyond life is,” in fact, “to appear to undermine the supreme concern with life of our humanitarian, ‘civilized’ world,” Taylor explains. “It is to try to reverse the revolution and bring back the bad old order of priorities, in which life and happiness could be sacrificed on the altars of renunciation” (IM 23-24). To claim meaning beyond this life is not only to devalue it—qu'ils mangent de la brioche—but also to challenge and thereby undermine the secular regime’s sublime benevolence:

“[h]ence, even believers are often induced to redefine their faith in such a way as not to challenge the primacy of life” (ibid). Contemporary American evangelical churches’ preoccupation with this-worldly (often corporate) success and better-home-than-garden sermons—not to mention their rock bands and vulgar gymnasiums—attest to Taylor’s intuition.28 Now comes first.

As the granola masses increasingly perceive religion as a violation of humanitarian principles, postmodernity recasts religiosity as a threat to progress and

28 Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America (2010) questions the shelf-life of American optimism. See, especially, “God Wants You to Be Rich” (123-146). 125

reason.29 The Loved One takes this threat seriously and opens with a stark warning. It promises, even before the plot begins, to reproduce “a purely fanciful tale, a little nightmare produced by the unaccustomed high living of a brief visit to Hollywood.” In sharp contrast to Brideshead Revisited’s aristocratic setting in the English countryside,

The Loved One takes place in Los Angeles, California, in the years immediately following World War II. The haut excesses of the Marchmains’ landed estate have nothing on the true “high living” jammed in between American highways. There, as the protagonist of The Loved One proclaims, quoting Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” human beings have fallen “[h]alf in love with easeful death” (LO 96). The quixotic founder of

Whispering Glades—the funerary theme park in which people live to die—insists that every detail surrounding a loved one’s passing must function “essentially as a reminder of life not of death; that was the crux” (LO 73). The Dreamer’s embrace of life over death serves as “the crux” here (LO 41). He dismisses crosses of the Christian variety—through which suffering promises new life—as morbid, reactionary, and unwelcome.

All things at Whispering Glades must reaffirm a natural joie de vivre, but this liberal tenant refuses, as Taylor cautions, “the insight that there can be in suffering and death not merely negation, the undoing of fullness and life, but also the affirmation of something which matters beyond life, on which life itself originally draws” (IM 20).

Again, secularism does not merely describe superstition’s effacement: it posits a particular orientation toward the human condition that forecloses alternative ways of knowing and being. From the outset, The Loved One questions the appeal of a world

29 In The New Religious Intolerance (2012), Martha Nussbaum argues that Americans “should be worried about the upsurge in religious fear and animosity” (19), because it poses a political threat to liberal, secular democracies. 126

lived without decay, without suffering, without shame. Along the way, Waugh’s portrayal of Whispering Glades makes the work it takes to live wholly and happily in the secular realm lucid. Indeed, the novel’s protagonist, a British expat named Dennis

Barlow, accepts a job at a pet funeral parlor, where he slowly learns the tricks of the

American trade for escaping the human condition immanently.

At the Happier Hunting Ground, animals receive the sort of burial worthy of princes, and, although their masters may not be “what you might call very church-going people,” they are open to receive “all the comfort” an easeful death can provide (LO 20).

This companion-species crematorium resembles Whispering Glades in its intent but is, of course, derivative. As Dennis figures, “it was in humble emulation of its great neighbour that the Happier Hunting Ground was planned. The language he daily spoke in his new trade was a patois derived from that high pure source” (LO 38). The Happier Hunting

Ground provides humbler services, because owners are unwilling to pay as much for pets.

As such, Dennis serves, six days out of seven, as a crematory-stuffer. He cannot compete with the refined artistry of Whispering Glades’ head mortician: Mr. Joyboy, that

“perfection of high professional manners” (LO 66), that “true artist” (LO 57). With his art, Mr. Joyboy creates; he also refigures and preserves, significantly, “the joyful smile for children” (LO 56). He, in accord with repro-futurity, specializes in youth. “There is something in the innocent appeal of a child,” he explains, “that brings out a little more than the best in me” (LO 71). As Mr. Joyboy’s name implies, he functions to keep the

American dream young and fresh. Dennis cannot vie.

In this undertaking, the Happier Hunting Ground sits in the shadows of the original’s “Golden Gates” (LO 38). Still, most things prove imitative in “the unpoetic air

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of Los Angeles” (LO 160). In this society of “healthy films” (LO 9), personas shift and reshape with might made bright. Producers create film stars’ identities from scratch: “a dynamite-bearing Maenad of the Bilbao waterfront” one day (LO 25), a new incarnation of script the next. Nothing sticks, yet roles become written onto and into the body. “In a world of competition people are taken at their face value” (LO 36), and so visages change with the dice’s roll. Quite literally, plastic surgeons save face as they reconstruct it. On this fake-it-till-you-make-it set called happiness, Sir Ambrose suggests to Dennis a shorthand for survival: “never do before the camera what you would not do at home and never do at home what you would not do before the camera” (LO 9). Enter reality television, social media, I am Cait. In California, the line between fantasy and reality grows terribly, anxiously thin. The neologism, “hyper-reality,” debuts to characterize precisely this anorexic metaphysics.

For, with his prescient description of Los Angeles, Waugh anticipates Jean

Baudrillard’s discussion of hyper-reality: the sort of authenticity a postmodern injection of fantasy produces. The Loved One reveals how, in the liberal imaginary of postwar

America, the real world dissolves under the stage lights’ arid heat. Dennis remembers, when he first visited a Californian film studio, the way “it had taxed his imagination to realize that those solid-seeming streets and squares of every period and climate were in fact plaster façades whose backs revealed the structures of billboards” (40). These “solid- seeming” edifices appear real but are, in truth, merely copies of an original. There is nothing behind them, but it requires determination to see them for what they are: imitations. Whispering Glades’ mass-marketed macabre takes the simulacra, however, one step further: for here, “the illusion was quite otherwise. Only with an effort could

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Dennis believe that the building before him was three-dimensional and permanent” (ibid).

Slavoj Žižek describes how eagerly people identify the studio façade’s fakeness, but they do so only to obscure the larger implication: “it is not so much that Hollywood stages a semblance of real life deprived of the weight and inertia of materiality—in late-capitalist consumerist society, ‘real social life’ itself somehow acquires the features of a staged fake” (WD 14). Now, actuality absorbs “the features of a staged fake.” In the Dreamer’s curated graveyard, the concrete buildings progressively resemble a fake, Burbank reproduction. There is something behind them, but it is extremely difficult to see that the solid objects before one, actually, are: substances.

Indeed, society in The Loved One feasts upon endless, “enormous gratification”

(LO 106), but it also peddles burgers where “not so much their nastiness as their total absence of taste … shocks one” (LO 137-138). This is the paradox Žižek describes in his

Welcome to the Desert of the Real: precisely as late capitalism insists on more efficient bodily pleasures from its de-spiritualized ambiance does its materiality disappear into images, replicas, and pastiches. These nutburgers remain constantly available and consummately cheap, but they lack taste. Particular flavor disappears. In turn, consumers internalize their consumption as they present themselves, like Aimée Thanatogenos,

“dressed and scented in obedience to the advertisements; brain and body were scarcely distinguishable from the standard product” (LO 134). As Sir Francis explains, postmodern subjectivity has morphed into a mode of survival like that of the

dog’s head severed from its body, which the Russians are keeping alive for some obscene Muscovite purpose by pumping blood into it from a bottle … It dribbles at the tongue when it smells a cat. That’s what we all of us are, you know, out here. The studios keep us going with a pump. We are still just capable of a few

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crude reactions—nothing more. If we ever got disconnected from our bottle, we should simply crumble. (LO 14)

Human beings escape from freedom as advertisements determine their choices and films script their “few crude reactions” in advance. In postwar America, cinema force-feeds an imagination detached from its material base.30 One notes how the dog’s head endures despite the fact that the Russians have discarded the body. Qu'ils mangent de la brioche, n’est-ce pas? Bodies cause problems. Liberal capitalist hedonism, quiet as it’s kept, rejects corporeality in its pursuit of perfection. This decapitated, dog-eat-dog society wags only fictional tails.

The Loved One doggedly explores how modernization reduces the material fullness of life in its reluctance to acknowledge death as real and meaningful. This type of

American “high living” empties life of its degenerative, undecidable content. Over relics, it opts for purer replicas. The problem is, for Waugh, that the removal of death and suffering lessens life itself, voids it of a necessary weight. Again, Žižek captures the gist of Waugh’s point: for “the ultimate truth of the capitalist utilitarian despiritualized universe is the dematerialization of ‘real life’ itself, its reversal into a spectral show”

(WD 14). The copy becomes the hyper-reality, as Whispering Glades creates a form that is a “perfect replica of an old English Manor … like all buildings of Whispering Glades,

[it] is constructed throughout of Grade A steel and concrete extending into solid rock. It is certified proof against fire, earthquake and … ‘nuclear fission’” (LO 40-41). These subsidiary reproductions are firm and built to last—solid as a rock—but they are extraordinary. “This is more than a replica,” the Dreamer promises, “it is a

30 Along this vein, Simone Weil argues that human beings “must become incarnate. Man has to perform an act of incarnation, for he is disembodied by his imagination. What comes to us from Satan is our imagination” (54). 130

reconstruction. A building again of what those old craftsman sought to do with their rude implements of by-gone ages. Time has worked its mischief on the beautiful original. Here you see it as the first builders dreamed of it long ago” (LO 78). Whispering Glades creates a better, newer earth—a more real than real “reconstruction”—by way of heaven’s original, lapsed intent.

In Whispering Glades, buildings take on the appearance of a fake as builders tune these copies to the pitch of Disneyland’s impossibly perfected efficiency. Perfection necessitates, though, the extraction of the imperfect. “On today’s market,” Žižek proposes, “we find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant properties: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol”; consumers want their cake and to eat it, too. Problems arise when these products do not end with Entenmann’s.

For Žižek adds to this list other saccharine treats: “the contemporary redefinition of politics as the art of expert administration, that is, as politics without politics, up to today’s tolerant liberal multiculturalism as an experience of the Other deprived of its

Otherness” (WD 10-11). According to Žižek, postmodern liberalism has removed the unpredictable agon from politics, replacing it with “expert administration” and public polls. The same holds true for EPCOT-inspired multicultural education—with its sanguine focus on “science and citizenship” (LO 139)—in which every culture has equally benign value as teachers celebrate inclusivity. Las Vegas, cyber sex, decaffeinated coffee, fatless breasts, nonalcoholic beer, e-cigarette vaporizers, online classes: one is tempted to include Kaiser’s Stoneless Peaches. While a pit may not be

“malignant,” it is certainly inconvenient. “When you buy a Kaiser’s Stoneless Peach,” rest assured that “you are buying full weight of succulent peach flesh and nothing else”

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(LO 144). You get what you pay for, and, with the heart of the matter removed, new markets rise organically: the natural is now what one purchases at Whole Foods, for a price.

Reality itself retreats into Whispering Glades, and the situation is, certainly, more complicated than the mere forfeiture of genuineness or genius. Waugh does not, with this description, merely disparage a civilization that has become fake or superficial, although critics often read him in this way (Todd 417). He takes one more step in his criticism of secularism: this material world has, in fact, lost touch with its material girls.31 As Jean

Baudrillard explains in the text from which Žižek takes the title of his monograph, one now enters the desert of the real (1733). Hollywood is a fake, and everyone knows it, but a fake maintained to pump blood into bodiless heads. Baudrillard uses the example of

Disneyland to reveal how fantasy upkeeps the greater fiction of truth itself. “Disneyland,”

Baudrillard argues, “is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’

America, which is Disneyland … Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but if the order of the hyperreal and of simulation”

(1747). The West has become as cultivated and controlled as Whispering Glades. The cemetery simply constructs a more overtly fictional version of this manicured milieu with its eerie edifies.

One might say that Whispering Glades performs, then, a similar function to

Baudrillard’s Disneyland: it “rejuvenates the fiction of the real” (1747). It helps people outside the Golden Gates believe that their lives have real meaning, materiality, and

31 Madonna’s video for “Material Girl” presents this tension as that between Madonna’s screen imitation of Marilyn Monroe and her “real” persona’s embrace of simple treats and humble, back-seat sexual delights. 132

purpose, when the truth is that they have become as tasteless as nutburgers and as pitiless as peaches.32 At this point, the sceptic will ask, but has heaven not always performed a similar function? For it would seem the fiction of heaven has enabled plenty of believers to find reason for good living. It promises the mansion just over the hilltop that makes the box in Levittown bearable. And yet, within a metaphysical approach to ethics, perfection transcends—exists apart from—human affairs. Whether Good or God, heaven is, pace

Belinda Carlisle, not a place on earth. The Dreamer’s revelation—“Behold I dreamed a dream and I saw a New Earth Sacred to HAPPINESS” (LO 39)—attempts to found perfection on earth and among earthlings. Death, disease, sex: all of these material realities immediately present themselves as problems. To gain this earthly paradise, one must extract materiality and chance. Embrace “the Egypt of the Pharaohs” (LO 46).

Construct a fabricated stage. Only then might one say, “ENTER STRANGER and BE

HAPPY” (ibid). The demand for earthly perfection and happiness is not a neutral or benign one. It commercializes the human condition until life and death become controllable objects of disinterested abstraction and transaction: what Waugh calls

“eternal salvation at an inclusive charge” (ED 336). The Protestant work ethic and the spirit of capitalism find their apotheosis here in this postmodern mortuary’s commodification of peace and well-being.

Hard work pays, and the forerunner of this world is, of course, Brideshead

Revisited’s Rex Mottram. Rex, who in “his kindest moments … displayed a kind of

32 Here, one notices the ideological work of “Material Girl.” It enables one to believe in a Norma Jean apart from Marilyn, and that, as Madonna has always known, is a profitable fiction. Madonna’s foregrounded artifice enables one to believe, for instance, that Mariah Carey is an authentic singer. Compare, though, the reality of Mariah’s “Fantasy,” which copies from “The Genius of Love” and finds its production in her agent-husband, Tommy Mottola. 133

hectoring zeal as if he were thrusting a vacuum cleaner on an unwilling housewife” (BR

165), believes wholeheartedly in the liberated society emerging from Europe’s dust. A vacuum cleaner saves labor and confines the “unwilling housewife” to her proper sphere.

Freedom is great. Gladly, he inhabits this “harsh, acquisitive world” (BR 175-176), and he feels justly entitled to “a woman; he wanted the best on the market, and he wanted her cheap; that was what it amounted to” (BR 176). Everything amounts to something within

Rex’s fresh capitalism. Even Sebastian’s alcoholism will disappear with the right investment. “Send him to Borethus at Zurich,” Rex cajoles. “He works miracles every day at that sanatorium of his” (BR 165). This-worldly miracles are possible, preferable.

No doubt, and as Rex quickly adds, Borethus “takes sex cases, too, you know” (ibid). The degenerate—the ill, the mad, the perverted—needs a swift dose of happiness and health to reorient him to whistle-while-you-work productivity. Secularism has discovered new cures; and, as Charles observes, “those were the sort of things he heard, mortal illness and debt” (BR 175). Money and lifecycle there reign supreme.

Rex’s venture into the liberal economy causes, however, the same sort of disassociation of the material and spiritual observed in The Loved One. Over the course of an expensive and self-indulgent dinner in Paris, Rex laments Lady Marchmain’s

“crack-brain religion,” which advises her “not to take care of the body” (BR 174). Still, as Charles observes at the exact same moment, the “sole was so simple and unobtrusive that Rex failed to notice it” (ibid). He cannot taste the simple sole’s flavors in front of him. If one accepts the pun, Rex exists entirely divorced from both soul and body. He does not appreciate religious discipline, but he also cannot enjoy a good meal’s pleasures.

He becomes not a materialist, strictly speaking, but “something in a bottle, an organ kept

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alive in a laboratory … a sort of primitive savage” (BR 200). His Canadian origins and progressive views will not save him: he resembles the Russians’ dog head, pumped full of optimistic fantasy. As Julia confesses, “he isn’t a real person at all; he’s just a few faculties of a man highly developed; the rest simply isn’t there” (BR 257). His emptiness strikes one, his missing link. Charles agrees that Rex “wasn’t a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed … something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of man pretending he was whole” (BR 200). Waugh aligns Rex, unmistakably, with the evolving secular order. He is a “ghastly” modern capitalist but not one so embodied. A sort of walking Tomorrow

Land, “Rex isn’t anybody at all … he just doesn’t exist” (BR 274), but he serves his hyper-real purpose all the same.

Rex’s humanism demands constant happiness—efficient, practical—and he believes he knows how to deliver it. At the same time, this pleasure forgets others as it ostracizes what it cannot absorb. While Rex promptly prepares to take “what he called a

‘penthouse’ at the top” of a demolished Marchers house (BR 219), Sebastian wanders the

Mediterranean trying to find God. His “holiness” simmers in this restlessness (BR 305), in this searching spirit. Many-arrowed Sebastian, despite his suffering, still yearns for happiness. As he explains to Charles,

we’re a mixed family religiously. Brideshead and Cordelia are both fervent Catholics; he’s miserable, she’s bird-happy; Julia and I are half-heathen; I am happy, I rather think Julia isn’t; Mummy is popularly believed to be a saint and Papa is excommunicated—and I wouldn’t know which of them was happy. Anyway, however you look at it, happiness doesn’t seem to have much to do with it, and that’s all I want … I wish I liked Catholics more. (BR 89)

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Catholicism does not deliver happiness like a head on a plate, but Sebastian also does not see his religion as negating it. On the contrary, “half-heathen” Sebastian pursues delight alongside his restive religiosity. Sebastian’s joy may, indeed, escape its actualization on earth, but that does not invalidate its pursuit. Rex’s liberalism forecloses this more arduous pilgrimage, though, as it insists on prepackaged pleasure here and now. In this sense, The Loved One and Brideshead Revisited reveal the limitations liberalism places on certain kinds of happiness and show, in turn, the effort it takes to keep the bourgeois fantasy of one-size-fits-all happiness alive and kicking.

Hollywood pictures this glee first and foremost, and for millions. In an anecdote well-known to literary history, Waugh finds inspiration for The Loved One on a trip he takes to inquire about a film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited (Stannard 188). In his accounts of this journey, one being the subtle “Why Hollywood is a Term of

Disparagement,” Waugh describes the film industry as a bunch of “monks in a desert oasis,” “where all is a continuous psalm of self-praise” (HTD 325). Religious language colors his assessment of “Holy Wood” (ED 331), for he emphasizes the spiritual importance American movies place on the viewing public’s innocence and on a movie star’s youth.33 The original Forest Lawn Memorial Park, upon which Waugh bases

Whispering Glades, promises to maintain youth and hope against the pessimism of antique ages. Abandon all despair, ye who enter there: “cemeteries of the world cry out man’s utter hopelessness in the face of death. Their symbols are pagan and pessimistic …

Here sorrow sees no ghastly monuments, but only life and hope” (ED 332). The cemetery

33 In fact, innocence suspends the production of Brideshead Revisited, because the censors forbid its racy subject matter (HTD 330). Hence the film does not materialize. Vanity and naiveté plague the journey from reel to real. 136

marmalades American innocence and vitality, for keeps. The values of American cinema thereby animate Forest Lawn Memorial Park’s love for easeful death. Indeed, one finds in the real-life cemetery’s fictional copy a statue where “a toddler clutched to its stony bosom a marble Mickey Mouse” (LO 80). These fairytale, fountain-of-youth mores run deep in California, but they lock out others. In this earthly paradise, notably, “[t]here is no room for the Negro or the Chinaman, however devout” (ED 336). It’s a white world, after all, and that bill some do not fit.

Rex Mottram and The Loved One together identify those who “must die to make a world for Hooper; they were the aborigines, vermin by right of law, to be shot off at leisure so that things might be safe for the traveling salesmen” (BR 139). Aimée

Thanatogenos, as her name’s etymology implies, is one such yearning for extinction:

“sole Eve in a bustling hygienic Eden, this girl was a decadent” (LO 54). She wants too hard, too much, and Los Angeles simply cannot accommodate her ontological overreaching. As she lets herself into “the concrete cell which she called her apartment”

(LO 144), Aimée hears an advertisement for Kaiser’s Stoneless Peaches echoing from her radio (ibid). She decides to die, to stop smiling. Perhaps her ancestors’ Grecian, pagan blood calls forth for a tragedy; perhaps she can no longer live as “a man who knows his own value” (LO 11). Regardless, she flees the mausoleum of “manifest destiny” (LO

111), with “no letter of farewell of apology. She was far removed from social custom and human obligations. The protagonists, Dennis and Mr. Joyboy, were quite forgotten. The matter was between herself and the deity she served” (LO 150). She attends, with finality, to the “matter” at hand. She terminates this vale of tears in search of a culture far more ancient, where “voices which far away and in another age had sung of the Minotaur” and

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“spoke of Alcestis and proud Antigone” (BR 149). She pursues, through expiration, a place where life had its meaning articulated only in relation to death’s material, tragic, august presence.

IV. “Living in Sin”: On Libertines, Liberals, and the Eclipse of Bad Behavior

Ellis Hanson has argued that, for the Catholic decadents, “Christianity was the last hope of paganism in the modern world” (7). One detects this paganism in Aimée

Thanatogenos34 as she rejects the embalmed happiness of Mr. Joyboy and accepts her ancient, “higher destiny” (LO 149). One glimpses it, too, in characters like Sebastian

Flyte and Anthony Blanche, who love the entire world’s beauty, down to the flowers, butterflies, and boys. Not for nothing does Charles remove his Roger Fry screen and set up a human skull “lately purchased from the School of Medicine, which resting in a bowl of roses, formed, at the moment, the chief decoration of [his] table” (BR 42). This skull— with “the motto Et in Arcadia ego inscribed on its forehead” (ibid)—witnesses a pagan, pastoral idyll as it also seizes upon impermanence. It faces death. Brideshead Revisited’s

“half-heathen” subtext hence supports Charles’s full acceptance of the earth’s beauty and death’s reality. Sin-infested decadence backs rather than precludes his conversion, and, as this section shows, Waugh’s “Catholic novels” pose a return to the earth and the acceptance of human imperfectability as the religious life’s proper end. Catholicism’s corporeal faith provides a sharp, sacramental retort both to Protestantism’s airy metaphysics and its secular instantiation. It also reveals secularism’s impatience with

34 Waugh names Aimée after Aimee Semple McPherson. Despite her distinctly American religious zeal, the renowned Hollywood evangelist, buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, leaves behind a few skeletons in her closet. 138

believing outliers and its reluctance to tolerate ontological difference. The secular is not as forgiving as it first appears. Thus paganism and mortality guide Charles to his spiritual conversion, because, even on “a sheep-cropped knoll under a clump of elms” (BR 24), death there, too, shall be.

Whispering Glades memorializes, I have suggested, the Protestant premise pushed to its secular conclusion. Here, liberal humanism not only enshrines reproductive heteronormativity but also engenders a communion from which substance and magic disappear. Taken together, these features of modernity create a disenchanted milieu hostile to otherness and resistant to change. In this regard, Waugh’s outcasts clear a recusant path to a rather different mode of being. They, more often than not, embody a metaphysical approach to morality in a Liberal-dominated world, but it proves surprisingly trying to do so. As secularism expands, so too does its hegemonic eclipse of possibilities to live and believe otherwise. This section thus traces two attempts at revolt:

Charles’s aesthetic turn toward the baroque and Julia’s death-bed sacrifice of Charles.

Although seemingly divergent in outcome—as one embraces pleasure and the other renounces it—they share a distinctly Catholic commitment to sacramentality over and against secular reason’s immanent reign. Both Julia and Charles find themselves stifled by liberalism’s puritanical disinterestedness and refuse its permissiveness. Their transgressions—the right to live in sin—effect a spiritually driven disruption of secularism and its politically correct effacement of politics. If Žižek is correct, then the miracle at Brideshead Revisited’s conclusion foregrounds a theological interruption of the “(post)political” condition (ET 118). In this interruption of everyday hedonism, I claim Waugh’s radical politics emerge with contra-natural decisiveness.

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Waugh’s religiosity sanctions a sacramental relation to creation, but Charles must learn how to see the spirit in flesh. Upon arrival to Oxford, Charles had “proudly hung a reproduction of Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ over the fire and set up a screen, painted by

Roger Fry” (BR 27). He adds Fry’s Vision and Design to his book collection, which includes Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians and Clive Bell’s Art (ibid). If these three texts and the screen were not enough to suggest his affinity for the Bloomsbury Group, then his delight at possessing “rooms of my own and my own cheque book” seals the deal

(BR 28). And yet, despite the intellectual freedom Virginia Woolf and Oxbridge afford,

Charles feels melancholy: he knows “at heart that this was not all that Oxford had to offer” (ibid). Charles has his eyes opened only after Sebastian disagrees with Bell.

Sebastian reads aloud from Art—“‘Does any feel the same kind of emotion for a butterfly or a flower that he feels for a cathedral or a picture?’”—and then answers: “‘Yes, I do’”

(ibid). This ability to feel emotion in response to “a butterfly or a flower” separates

Sebastian, “most conspicuous man of his year by reason of his beauty” (ibid), from

Bloomsbury.35 This world is, for Sebastian, truly charged with the grandeur of God.

Of course, Sebastian’s iteration of Catholic faith privileges the sumptuous over bare renunciation. His wine, strawberries, and “fat, Turkish cigarettes” unleash Charles’s decadent desire—“Sebastian’s eyes on the leaves above him, mine on his profile”—as they also reorient his adolescent aesthetics (BR 24). Charles remembers how he had, while a young student, “made that easy leap, characteristic of my generation, from the puritanism of Ruskin to the puritanism of Roger Fry” (BR 81-82), but now he dismisses

35 One must note, however, that Clive Bell praised the novel as a “masterpiece” and claimed it as the best in English (and most likely French) literature since, barring “family prejudice,” To the Lighthouse (qtd. Stannard 157). 140

this prudish stance in favor of one more “insular and mediaeval” (BR 82). When Charles removes the screen and foregrounds a naked human skull, he breaks with his own high modernism. Nothing screens the fire’s flames now. He feels, flaming, heat.36 Emblazoned across its forehead, the skull’s maxim functions, like The Loved One, as a momento mori.

The skeletal “Et in Arcadia ego” defends life’s attractiveness in the ossified face of its fantastic failure, its fleeting frailty; the skull itself, surrounded by flowers, is beautiful, like death in its black silence. Later, as he paints the fountain at Brideshead Castle,

Charles begins to accept and integrate the multilayered, melodramatic, emotional muddle of survival—“probing its shadows, tracing its lingering echoes, rejoicing in all its clustered feats of daring and invention” (ibid)—and enjoys it licentiously. Significantly,

Charles’s switch from parsimony to profligacy in lifestyle and artistry bespeaks the beginning of his “conversion to the baroque” (ibid), a decidedly Catholic (and Counter

Reformation) aesthetic.

Charles’s movement from Fry’s screen to the rose-circled skull reflects a turn away from the puritanical, disinterested detachment of the Protestant artist and toward the embedded, sacramental embodiment of the Catholic one. Waugh’s word choice suggests the importance of this artistic conversion, since Charles rejects the “puritanism of Roger

Fry” and gets “mediaeval.” Although a secular humanist, Fry endorses a “puritanism” that totes Kant and his liberal subjectivity into the twentieth century. This baggage is, if one follows Murdoch and Taylor, packed full of Protestant punch. Fry’s emphasis remains, in true Protestant style, on the individual and his time-bound perception.

36 Daniel Faulstick argues that Charles experiences primarily an emotional conversion as he learns to express his passion (176). While I see the importance of his desire, it remains on my reading embedded in Catholicism. 141

Engaging Kant’s Third Critique, Fry argues that good art effects a state of disinterestedness in the spectator; one’s individual contemplation of beauty lessens egocentric considerations of self and clan. Woolf writes in her own biography of Fry that his lectures “encourage the individual to enjoy the rarest of his gifts, the disinterested life, the life of the spirit, over and above our mere existence as living organisms” (236). This orientation “above our mere existence” flees the weight of materiality and the bulk of sin.

It thereby encourages progressive social change, because one can see reality apart from self-interest and backward prejudice. As Christine Froula rightly notes, the “First Post-

Impressionist exhibition—Fry’s single-handed intervention in British taste—illustrates the way art offered for no purpose but the disinterested contemplation of beauty can mediate transformation of the sensus communis” (15). Fry’s teachings on aesthetics galvanize for the collective Froula calls the Bloomsbury avant-garde a decidedly progressive but vaguely Protestant stance.

British modernism retains, to the extent that it emerges from the Bloomsbury

Group, a keen interest in religious experience and self-transcendence (Lewis 144).

Waugh highlights this spiritual commitment in his exploration of Fry’s puritanism. After all, Woolf insists that Fry’s aesthetics allow one to access “the life of the spirit,” and Fry defines this spirituality without hesitation: “I use the spiritual,” he avers, “to mean all those human faculties and activities which are over and above our mere existence as living organisms” (236). This modernist belief enjoins a spiritually motivated escape from messy existence and animalistic pleasures, simply without that imperative emerging from a transcendent personal God. Far from decadent in its tone, high modernist transcendence happens by way of art pondered chastely and individually. Catholicism, by

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contrast, foregrounds sacramentality, through which, as Stephen Schloesser puts it,

“created things are a visible ‘sign’ [sacramentum] which both bears within itself and simultaneously points beyond itself to an invisible ‘reality’ [res] which is, in the final analysis, the Creator” (6). Spirit is there mixed up in the matter, and Charles’s endorsement of the baroque marks him as a Catholic artist. He seeks, through creation, to unify flesh and spirit. Such artistry is, as Patrick Query has argued, foundational to

Catholicism’s Counter Reformation, “sacramental aesthetics” (43). Like Sebastian,

Charles wants to find beauty in all created things and not to have beauty remove him from those things. He yearns to taste all life’s sumptuous pleasures; this desire leads him, and others, toward goodness. This embroiled pursuit of beauty flirts with paganism and idolatry but abjures chastity and Neo-Platonic renunciation as it burns its thick, fat,

Turkish cigarettes. The Catholic artist gets her hands really dirty.

The modernist approach appears thin, starved of the mess of real living. Robert

Murray Davis captures a traditional reading of this modernist spirituality when he claims that “Bloomsbury was conceived in an age of faith—not of religious faith but of the secular humanist’s faith that by the efforts of man’s imagination, intellect, and good will, all could be made well” (76). To be clear, I am not suggesting that Fry’s aesthetic theory replaces or reimagines religion for a modern, secular audience; instead, I claim it harbors distinct religious prejudice in its supposedly secular embrace of liberal morality.

Therefore, Charles rejects a specifically religious and categorically moral outlook with his retreat from modernism, and this spiritual turn shapes his art and ethics. Modernism has deep roots in a long history of Protestant secularization, stretching back to the

Lollards and forward to the cannon-making practices of the postwar literary

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establishment. It is far too simple to claim Charles and Waugh reject the atheistic present; one must, rather, interrogate whether such a present has ever existed (Mandair and

Dressler 20). Modernism—especially its theorization as a “period” post-WWII—has biases rooted in Protestant-laden secularism and secularization, and it worships certain saints at the expense of others deemed heretical. The secular-religious dichotomy preserves as it also veils modernism’s religious neutrality.37 One ought to problematize this dyad.

Waugh’s a good place to start. With his Catholic novels, Waugh highlights modernism’s secular stain and its deeper Protestant dye. When Dennis bites into a stoneless peach, he finds, of course, “a ball of damp, sweet cotton-wool” (LO 86). Is this encounter with pure peach flesh not communion without transubstantiation? Not surprisingly, Whispering Glades’ perfected ambiance is one Protestants find accommodating, for, while Whispering Glades has “two non-sectarian churches in the park and a number of non-sectarian pastors,” “Jews and Catholics seem to prefer to make their own arrangements” (LO 44-45). The post-mortem society imagined by the Dreamer poses few ideological qualms for Protestants: not so much because they have stopped believing as much they have continued to believe but without knowing it (Žižek GP 28).

With this prescient illumination, Waugh embeds Protestantism into both the modernist savant’s puritanical restraint and the postmodern mortician’s eternal freshness. Like

Whispering Glades, high modernism assumes a roughly Protestant aesthetic that distances the subject from life and death. It’s no accident that substance and death

37 Jean Kane explores the strain between modernism and religion by comparing the panic surrounding Ulysses to The Satanic Verses. She argues that both reveal religion as a threat to liberal personhood and embodiment (437). 144

evaporate. Modernity claims objectivity, aloofness, perfection: a rational world without magic. Sola fide, secularism creates an empire compliant to liberal Protestants’ enlightened puritanism. Waugh’s converts, then, join the believing outcasts, those “Jews and Catholics,” who prefer to make their own private arrangements.

Approaching paganism in its license, Catholicism matters ultimately in the break it affords: it ruptures the secular sphere in order to reveal its unspoken Protestantism as well as its post-political hegemony. Brideshead Revisited does not, however, present

Catholic conversion as a onetime deal. Charles must learn, willy-nilly, how to live and believe as a Catholic, and scholars have questioned whether he ever truly converts in the novel proper (Faulstick 174). From my perspective, the precise moment of Charles’s conversion to Rome matters little. Brideshead Revisited appears to contain many moments of conversion (Johnson 171). This multiplicity makes perfect sense given the text’s complex aesthetic-religious backdrop. Catholic faith materializes here as a process, as a series of commitments and resistances. Religion is not an article of dogmatic rules to follow thoughtlessly; instead, it names a mode of living that challenges full commitment to the here and now. It declines to live this life alone. Only from the perspective of liberalism does Catholicism seem overtly doctrinaire and oppressive, and Waugh’s fiction attempts to subvert this perception decadently. Charles’s adoption of a baroque aesthetic declares his decision to live in, and among, sin. To admit mortality is, in some sense, to intuit morality, and sin one shall. In a humanist secular order, it proves increasingly difficult, however, to live in sin or, in fact, to sin at all.

For bourgeois society attributes vice to inner essences, to familial trauma, to social injustices, to self-expression, to self-hatred, to sex repression: it is very hard to do a

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bad thing without some past trauma or causal incident popping up to demand an occasion for compassion. In this social scene, Brideshead and his new wife Beryl’s condemnation of Julia’s affair strikes one as expressly ruthless. After all, Julia was not happy with Rex: the marriage kept her from pleasure. She and Charles—“orphans of the storm” (BR

261)—find at least some modicum of happiness on their love boat. Beryl fails, however, to tolerate her incumbent sister-in-law’s faults. Beryl not only shows her class here but also her bigotry, for she will not visit Julia and Charles at the estate. As Brideshead explains to his adulterous sister, “Beryl is a woman of strict Catholic principle fortified by prejudices of the middle class. I couldn’t possibly bring her here. It is a matter of indifference whether you choose to live in sin with Rex or Charles or both […] but in no case would Beryl consent to be your guest” (BR 285). Beryl’s severe Catholicism reveals itself as unaccommodating to sensuous indulgence. Brideshead’s words hurt Julia, deeply and instantaneously, but he refuses to apologize. Charles finds it “a bloody offensive thing to say,” yet, according to Brideshead, “[t]here was nothing she should object to. I was merely stating a fact well known to her” (BR 286). This “fact” is her sexual relationship with a married man, when she herself is also married. Adultery is quite wrong, and there is no need to candy-coat it. There is neither mystery nor need to call in the psychoanalysts.

The accusation of living in sin upsets Julia profoundly. I want to suggest, though, that the truly horrifying thing, for Julia, is not that she is “living in sin” but rather that it might be possible for her to continue her affair with Charles and not be living in sin.

Brideshead’s statement of “fact” rouses Julia: she witnesses the degree to which she has chosen sin. She has embraced a way of being for which she is paying a cost. Sin—this

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“word from so long ago” (BR 287)—slaps her across the face. “‘Living in sin’; not just doing wrong, as I did when I went to America; doing wrong,” as she explains to her illicit lover, “knowing it is wrong, stopping doing it, forgetting” (ibid). The “forgetting” is key, because it announces the possibility of the wrong turning quotidian and imperceptible.

Again, it is tempting to read Julia, like Charles does, as feeling guilty for her misdeeds:

“it’s a thing psychologists could explain; a preconditioning from childhood; feelings of guilt from the nonsense you were taught in the nursery. You do know at heart that it’s all bosh, don’t you?” (BR 290). On this view, religious instruction implants a hyperactive superego in her psyche that censures her at each and every turn. Julia replies, however, with the elusive “How I wish it was,” which provokes Charles to remember that

“Sebastian once said almost the same thing to me” (ibid). This awakening of moral conscience does not strike Julia as “bosh”; rather, it marks the disorder that has quietly consumed her life (BR 291). She figures, at this moment, that all she can do is try to make things right, “to put my life in some sort of order in a human way, before all human order comes to an end” (ibid). She has had her sin called out, and she must answer responsibly. She has the chance to make things right, which is to say the ability to respond.

The phrase “living in sin” does more than denote a lifestyle choice. It witnesses an inner spiritual state rather than a mere set of lustful actions. While Beryl’s use of the phrase already sounds, in the interwar years, like a Victorian anachronism, its salience for

Julia remains au courant. “Living in sin,” she openly muses, “with sin, by sin, for sin, every hour, every day, year in, year out. Waking up with sin in the morning, seeing the curtains drawn on sin, bathing it, dressing it, clipping diamonds to it, showing it round,

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giving it a good time, putting it to sleep with a tablet of Dial if it’s fretful” (BR 287).

Julia imagines her sin as a newborn child or a lover but also as a manner of living, a relation of loving. Sin makes demands and has needs, and here one recalls Murdoch and

Taylor and their analyses of religion and ethics. For they argue that ethics must attend to being as well as doing: “[i]f we give the full range of ethical meanings their due,” Taylor suggests, “we can see that the fullness of ethical life involves not just doing, but also being; and not just these two but also loving …. It is a drastic reduction to think that we can capture the moral by focusing on obligated action” (IM 15). Liberal morality homes in on the act, while a Natural Law approach considers the state of the doer’s soul. In this way, Julia’s existential crisis suggests how she continues to conceive of morality within a

Natural Law framework. She realizes that sin has become, not rule-breaking, but real- being.

When called out by buxom Beryl, Julia must heed who she is and what she loves, for “[t]hese are the essence of ethical life” (Taylor IM 15). Of course, Beryl is no saint.

Her moral censure focuses, as Brideshead notes, on a provincial narrowness. And yet, her critique opens up a wider ethical terrain within Julia. “‘Poor Julia,’” the gossips will espouse, “‘she can’t go out. She’s got to take care of her little sin’” (BR 287). She lives, literally, for sin, and this evil perverts her affection. In this respect, religion, with its expanded consciousness, helps one envision the moral life in excess of the moral choice.

As Murdoch notes, religion “normally emphasizes states of mind as well as actions, and regards states of mind as genetic background of action: pureness of heart, meekness of spirit. Religion provides devices for the purification of states of mind” (SG 81). As

Julia’s religious wakening witnesses, the “moral life … is something that goes on

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continually, not something that is switched off between the occurrence of explicit moral choices. What happens in between such choices is indeed what is crucial” (Murdoch SG

36). Secular liberalism strips morality of this deeper, richer context; it emphasizes choice and mistakes but not sin and sinfulness as such.38 Julia revisits the loss of this moral backdrop and reconsiders her orientation to the Good. The expression “living in sin” maintains, then, the sense of transgression essential to the misdeed’s subjective context. It places the act within a wider picture of haphazard misperception, misplaced desire, and selfish, human error.

Liberal permissiveness infuses both the moral and political domains of human experience and stops up fissures. Hence Julia’s inability, morally, to live in sin throws into relief the secular order’s eclipse of possibility, politically, to make change. Revolt is, therefore, necessary, and Waugh’s narrative brings the miraculous rupture. After years of religious rebellion, Lord Marchmain returns to the Church. In a moment of decision, “the hand moved slowly down his breast, then to his shoulder, and Lord Marchmain made the sign of the cross” (BR 338). This movement marks, for Charles, “the sign I had asked for”; it is “not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition,” but a renewed commitment to the Christian community (ibid). Charles has spent so much time and energy fighting off the priests bearing the last rites, but he fails to impede what appears in the text as

God’s divine intervention. This sign—for which Charles had “felt the longing … if only for the sake of the woman I loved, who knelt in front of me, praying, I knew, for a sign”

38 “Secular languages which only eliminate the substance once intended,” Jürgen Habermas cautions, “leave irritations. When sin was converted to culpability, and the breaking of divine commands to an offense against human laws, something was lost” (qtd in Žižek GP 110). I believe this loss—that Habermas here describes as the shift from sin to culpability—plagues Julia. It provides the theoretical foundation for Waugh’s apology for sin. 149

(ibid)—takes Julia from him. The Lord giveth and taketh away. She deserts him, as the sign contains the reality toward which it also points, and the “avalanche was down, the hillside swept bare behind it; the last echoes died on the white slopes; the new mound glittered and lay still in the silent valley” (BR 341). God washes the world whiter than snow as secular resistance falls to the inevitable: “You knew?” “Since this morning; since before this morning; all this year” (BR 340). God keeps open secrets.

Julia’s realization that she is living in sin anticipates her decision to leave Charles.

With the avalanche running down that hill, Julia makes her final deal with God: she will end her tryst with Charles. She issues the icy apology to her lover: “if I give up this one thing I want so much, however bad I am, He won’t quite despair me in the end” (BR

340). There is, of course, no guarantee that she will make it to heaven, and Julia makes no promises regarding moral rectification. She is upset after her father’s death but no fool. “I’ve always been bad. Probably I shall be bad again, punished again. But the worse

I am,” she maintains, “the more I need God. I can’t shut myself out of His mercy. That is what it would mean; starting a life with you, without Him” (ibid). Julia’s conclusive sacrifice of Charles—if it is a bargain—or her decision to live with sin—if it is a conversion—denotes the cessation of the secular life she had entertained. She decides, certainly against Beryl’s advice, to live in sin moving forward: “the worse I am the more

I need God.” Sin necessitates divine intervention. Before she and Charles simply fooled around; now she cannot “set up a rival good to God’s” (ibid), because to do so is to divorce herself from reality and truth. To serve the god of mammon is to become an empty, half-person like Rex. She rejects this prospect, breaks with Charles, and joins

“some women’s service” (BR 346). She inherits the Brideshead estate and sees to it that

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“a blitzed R.C. padre” has the opportunity to reopen the chapel (ibid). She believes in sin, and thereby goodness, anew.

Catholicism imposes limits on the subject, but its ecclesiastical restraint opens the subject up to new possibilities and freedoms. Clearly, the Church supports the well- disciplined sort of volition required for Julia’s decision. One sees this liberty in

Murdoch’s expanded sense of the term: “our freedom is not just a freedom to choose and act differently, it is also a freedom to think and believe differently, to see the world differently, to see different configurations and describe them in a different way” (250).

This latter liberty falls quickly out of secular cosmologies—because there is only one way to see the world there—but Julia’s decision certainly belongs to it. She hazards a resolution to live for goodness grounded in the ability “to think and believe differently” rather than to drift along and “choose and act differently.” For this reason alone, Žižek underscores the political significance of Brideshead Revisited. At the novel’s climax,

Julia realizes that her love for Charles “is not agape, but its blasphemous perversion” (ET

116). She cannot “privilege her only true love over her dedication to God, since there should be no competition between supreme goods” (ibid). She breaks free, metaphysically. This choice allows her to rejoin the Christian community, an alternative mode of being against the secular liberals and their (un)happiness. This community of resistance has, for Žižek, the poignancy of insurgence, for Julia manages, despite herself, to revolt against the overarching system. She takes a risk and recognizes the deep human need for sin and its transgressive imperative.

One might easily read Julia’s sacrifice as foolhardy. She leaves a satisfying erotic relationship behind for stale agape. She appears to renounce love for an empty, antique

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delusion of God. This undecidable remainder proves, however, essential. For Žižek insists that

This is why Julia’s choice at the end of Brideshead Revisited is properly religious … what matters is that she has confronted and fully assumed the paradox of human existence. What this means is that her act involves a ‘leap of faith’: there is no guarantee that her retreat into passing love affairs in not just that—a retreat …. We are never safely within the Religious, doubt forever remains, and the same act can be seen as religious [commitment] or aesthetic [indulgence]. (GP 177-178)

Julia has no guarantee that her life without Charles will profit her in the end. She simply acts according to a stronger intuition. Her action exceeds reason’s ability to account for it.

Even traditional morality fails; she makes it plain that, “once she drops Ryder, she will have numerous insignificant affairs” (Žižek ET 116). She will continue to live in sin, but that sin will have substance. It will, in turn, make the world in which she lives more substantial: sin and goodness uphold their truth, and death moves closer to home. Her sacrifice of Charles is not, then, a prudish retreat into chastity. Like Charles’s conversion to baroque, it signals her encounter with the real world of material, substance, pleasure, and chance. It entertains death and true love. To live without sin but with Charles would have proven insubstantial inconsequently, and this liberal disinterestedness must go.

Beryl, in this sense, was quite wrong: Julia was not living in sin until she dumped

Charles’s ass.

And so, Charles too moves past his sinful relationships with Sebastian and Julia but not because they are corrupt. In fact, the aberrant quality of these ménages make it possible for him to perceive divinity. Charles and the Flyte siblings do not reject homoeroticism and adultery from moral prudishness. Quite the opposite, they act to maintain sin as meaningful. The very profaneness of these liaisons lead Charles to God.

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They are queer, wicked, pagan, and separate from the secular hegemony’s acceptance; indeed, the proto-normative relationship with Julia proves an even bigger threat as it risks societal acceptance. Thus, Charles and the Flytes choose sin, to love in the sense of holiness as separation and exclusion. “Are you struggling against temptation? Charles asks Sebastian in their youth. “You don’t seem much more virtuous than me.” Beautiful

Sebastian “indignantly” replies: Charles, “I’m very, very much wickeder” (BR 86).

Brideshead Revisited protects sinfulness as such in order that it might exist in transgressive relation to the sacred. Its miracles, misdeeds, and conversions against nature function to disrupt the secular and its global dominance, wherein “Protestantism and the Enlightenment critique of religious superstition are two sides of the same coin”

(Žižek GP 173). It duly renders that coin to Caesar.

V. In Conclusion: Empires

I have argued that Waugh’s Catholic faith proves foundational to his sacramental critique of meatless, all-engrossing postmodern society. In particular, Catholicism’s marginalized position in England inspires Waugh’s endorsement of a recusant religiosity, a subjectivity in contention with dominant, liberal society. The historical and political context of Waugh’s personal conversion to Rome resonates fully in this regard, since disgust at the secular empire’s amorphous totality fuels, on my reading, Waugh’s queer,

Catholic resistance. By way of conclusion, this section sketches Waugh’s engagement with imperial discourses of secularization in order to underscore the counter-imperial stance of his fiction. Waugh insists on a society in which one can think and believe other than secularly; specifically, he advocates for a modern subject justly disciplined by

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Church authority. Given his ascetics, Waugh’s description of Christendom’s emergence in Helena reads very differently than Rebecca West’s account of it in Saint Augustine.

The variances between the two origin stories—largely reflected in Murdoch’s distinction between the Natural Law and Liberalism—highlight Waugh’s criticism of the liberal

Protestant empire and foreground his vision of ascetic, subjective opposition. For if

Waugh’s Catholic novels make anything clear it is this fact: secularism is, too, imperialistic.

Anglo-American civilization’s adoption of worldliness puzzlingly dissociates its global citizens from the heavens above and the earth below. As Waugh shows, secularism rejects both the material and spiritual realms in favor of a mummified image, but, as

Žižek maintains, this dreamscape might help others to believe that their lives have real material bliss. Following Žižek, one could argue that, as a novel, The Loved One rejuvenates the fiction of the real for Great Britain: it presents an artificial America that helps Europeans believe in their reality. After all, British Dennis, “who came of an earlier civilization with sharper needs,” seeks “the intangible, the veiled face in the fog, the silhouette at the lighted doorway, the secret graces of a body which hid itself under formal velvet” and not the vulgar “spoils of this rich continent, the sprawling limbs of the swimming-pool, the wide-open painted eyes” (LO 54). While many critics, such as Ian

Scott Todd, have read The Loved One in terms of the tension between British and

American value systems and claimed Waugh’s defense of the former (431), I argue, contrastingly, that England and America are happy, secular bedfellows. If one considers

The Loved One in conversation with Brideshead Revisited, then it is plain that Surrey is as surreal as Seattle. Modernity has gone viral.

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Secularism’s carpe-deist approach to reality propagates a dominant ideology with imperial intent and Protestant ambition. The Loved One claims this administration from the very opening chapter, wherein Waugh utilizes the language of empire to describe

California’s “neighbouring native huts” (LO 3). Dennis, “exiled in the barbarous regions of the world” (LO 4), must learn to live with the emergent lay order. If he stays in

Hollywood, the implication is he, too, will go “completely native” (LO 11). Waugh, of course, reverses the traditional narrative of colonialism, for here the barbarity of

Hollywood threatens to engulf civilization. Commercials enjoin herd mentality and threaten rationality with extinction. Indeed, as Aimée prepares for her date with Mr.

Joyboy, she covers herself in primitivism. To ready for her quaint “domestic evening,” she “brushed into her hair some odorous drops from a bottle labelled ‘Jungle Venom’”

(LO 111). This perfume promises a passionate, carnal affair. “‘From the depth of the fever-ridden swamp,’ the advertisement had stated, ‘where juju drums throb for human sacrifice, Jeanette’s latest exclusive creation Jungle Venom comes to you with the remorseless stealth of the hunting cannibal,’” and it is this scent that innocently marks

“an American girl preparing to meet her lover” (ibid). Waugh’s satire hits its zenith as it stresses the bloodthirstiness central to Anglo-American civilization, but it also suggests how Americans, starved for flesh, purchase their savage materiality in the form of prepackaged products.

For certainly the hungry cannibal takes less care in her physical appearance: what

Waugh reveals, instead, is the radical absence of feverish carnality. The capitalist scene is banal and vacuous; the real body and blood dissipates, and the postmodern cannibal is left doing yoga in a loft above Trader Joe’s. Om Shanti. Notably, a similar revelation

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occurs in Brideshead Revisited. After Charles returns from his painting trip to South

America, he laments a loss of refinement. “Here I am,” Charles thinks, “back from the jungle, back from the ruins. Here, where wealth is no longer gorgeous and power has no dignity” (BR 237). In England, wealth also accumulates without expressing beauty; power, in turn, rules without grace or distinction. Travel outside Western Europe allows

Charles to register, in fact, how uncivilized his homeland has become. As the art exhibit’s catalogue explains, by “focusing the frankly traditional battery of his elegance and erudition of the maelstrom of barbarism, Mr. Ryder has at last found himself” (BR 229).

He journeys to “lands where man has deserted his post and the jungle was creeping back to its old strongholds” (BR 227), yet he returns to the UK where there is “another jungle closing in” (BR 232). The vines of secularism and orchids of mass production characterize this wilderness, for by no means should one assume empire necessitates or bequeaths civility. The old civilizing mission of the West simply reinvents itself, apart from the Church, as sustainable development: the reverse-barbarity effect remains unaltered.

Rita Barnard has explored the significance of Waugh’s colonial writings, arguing that he displays “a surprisingly lucid understanding that modernism is best grasped as the culture of a wildly uneven but singular process of global modernity” (178; emphasis mine). I want to extend this claim with a brief examination of Waugh’s paradigmatic

Catholic text: Helena. The novel warrants a postcolonial reading for two reasons. First, I believe Helena is Waugh’s most important account of imperialism, precisely because it imagines Rome’s adoption of Christianity in order to illuminate its post-WWII decay.

Second, if one takes the “wildly uneven but singular process of global modernity” as

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wrapped up in secularization, as I do, then Helena reveals the Catholic artist’s counter- cultural vocation by way of its contemporary foil. In this sense, Waugh’s favorite novel challenges readings that dismiss him as nostalgic and reactionary (DeCoste 161), for his backwardness resists the prevailing globalizing creed .39 Helena does not, after all, join the imperial march of progress; in fact, she mocks it (Adcock 64). She satisfies her calling outside the bounds of secular authority. Her duty thus subverts the dominant milieu that, even if Christianizing, permits neither disagreement nor peace. She rejects this world of “Power without Grace” (H 166), although, as the emperor’s mother, she is entitled to inherit it fully. She instead pursues, from “the lowest place but highest by a hand’s breath” (H 22), a transcendent sphere of human experience on earth.

Helena narrates the journey of Constantine’s mother as she leaves Britain for love. After her son becomes the Roman emperor and adopts Christianity as the imperial religion, Helena soon converts to the faith herself. Years later, she finds the True Cross and is, later still, recognized as a Catholic saint. Helena has its roots planted deep in tradition and Christian legend. The novel is, as Waugh promises, fiction, “but there is nothing, I believe, contrary to authentic history (save for certain willful, obvious anachronisms which are introduced as a literary device)” (H x). Waugh’s text trades fairly in fiction and fact, just as its protagonist’s quest necessitates that she do the same.

For she is a searcher, negotiating between truth and lies in the real world: “despite her placid habit of life and her decisive manner, she was troubled always with the suspicion that there was still something to be sought which she had not yet found” (H 105). Her inquisitive nature leads her from paganism to Christianity and then to the cross, but she

39 Douglas Lane Patey discusses the disconnection between what Waugh perceived to be his “MASTERPIECE” and critics’ hostile reception of the “semi-historic, semi-poetic fiction” (289-290). 157

hardly swallows the Christian mythos whole. Helena is the sort of believer who causes

“offence to religious people by asking questions” (H 112). She yearns for the hard truth, for something demonstrable and factual, and for this reason critics have described her as a “British empiricist” (Potter 70). This empiricism—a distinctly British trait—leads her to the Christian truth but not, one must note, back to Britain.

The True Cross does not function here as a mere relic or, worse yet, an idolatrous object for Helena’s self-promotion. It bespeaks the simple reality of Christ’s life and death. Her pragmatic mind places its faith here. Jesus has lived on earth as a human being, and he dies a real death that the cross recalls. History rather than superstition composes the base plot. The narrator wonders if Constantine had “ever made a distinction between the stories that were told of Galilee and those of Olympus” (H 181), but Helena does. Tellingly, the novel opens against the backdrop of Homer’s Iliad. This fictional subtext permeates Helena’s quest as she goes in search of lost history. “Some of Troy’s bound to be there still, hidden underneath the tourist’s town. When I am educated,” she promises her teacher, “I shall go and find the real Troy” (H 7). This desire for the real prefigures her determination to find the True Cross. Her vocation takes shape decidedly in this pursuit of Christianity’s most basic, stripped-down material. As Helena glosses her mission, “I bet He’s just waiting for one of us to go and find it—just at this moment when it’s most needed. Just at this moment when everyone is forgetting it and chattering about the hypostatic union, there’s a solid chunk of wood waiting for them to have their silly heads knocked against. I’m going off to find it” (H 175). Obscure theology does not matter to Helena as much as the simple fact that Jesus has suffered a human life and death. Rome needs this “solid chunk of wood,” if only to reorient its knocking.

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Helena’s pilgrimage fully pictures the subject of metaphysics in the actualization of her vocation. For this reason, John W. Mahon rightly suggests that “Charles had only begun to identify his vocation at the end of Brideshead Revisited, and Helena completes his story by showing the effects of conversion. Helena achieves sainthood by doing the one thing God had created her to do” (70). She discerns the reality behind appearances and acts, seamlessly, in accordance with it. In pursuit of the True Cross, Helena has

“done what only the saints succeed in doing; what indeed constitutes their patent of sanctity. She had completely conformed to the will of God” (H 217). Helena does not seek power or praise. She aligns her will to the transcendent (rather than immanent, imperial) whole and moves with the current of goodness. “Most women would give their eyes to be Empress,” her husband notes. “Not me,” Helena responds. “No, I don’t think you would,” he concurs (H 53). She empties herself of solipsistic emotion and flees the worldly snares that would enchain her. As Christianity takes hold—after all, the “Church isn’t a hole and corner thing anymore” (H 127)—religion takes Helena farther away from

Rome and its splendor. She does not want her son to rule the world either, because the

“Emperor has all the enemies in the world against him” (H 77). Helena’s vocation keeps her determinedly outside the colonizing establishment.

As she allows the Church to discipline and reorient her desire, Helena escapes the empire’s seductions. “Oh, Chlorus has his own political wife and plenty of political children,” she promises. “Constantine and I are private” (H 92). Significantly, she remains an outcast from the court, and insists that “we Trojans are always in exile” (31).

In one of Waugh’s telling additions to the legend, she receives the location of the True

Cross from the Wandering Jew (H 206). Outcasts receive and transmit the truth, yet

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again. While many read Waugh’s fiction as advocating for a fusion of aristocratic rule and Catholic belief, Helena’s “insistence on the radical inclusiveness and equality posited by … Catholic faith” upsets the picture of Waugh as the “archconservative chronicler of

Christendom’s historic decline and fall” (DeCoste 160-161). Unlike capitalist civilization’s bloated cupidity devouring its civility, Helena’s mission forwards an alternative movement, one of grace. “Instead of the barbarian breaking in,” she wonders,

“might the City one day break out” (H 43)? Constantius sees “a natural division in the human race just where the present wall runs”; he insists that “beyond it they’re incurable barbarians” (H 44). Helena, however, asks: “couldn’t the wall be at the limits of the world and all men, civilized and barbarian, have a share in the City” (H44)? Of course, she finds this boundless city in Christianity (Gal 3:28). Its expansion necessitates, though, the relinquishing, and not the shoring up, of power. Christ’s incarnation fundamentally reimagines the way authority functions on earth, and Helena’s conversion, notably off- stage, bespeaks this realignment of desire.

In this way, Waugh’s Helena investigates religious vocation at the juncture between the ancient and Christian world. The change from paganism to Christianity certainly blows the roof off Western civilization: “from every altar a great wind of prayer gathered and mounted, lifted the whole squat smoky dome of the Ancient World, swept it off and up like the thatch of a stable, and threw open the calm and brilliant prospect of measureless space” (H 117). The world is born, in some sense, anew. And yet, the

“oblivious Caesars fought on” (ibid). For these men, Christianity merely serves as an excuse. The ontological reorientation fails to impact, or impress, them. “And now they talk as if our war in the East had been mixed up in it,” Helena’s grandson complains.

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“My men weren’t fighting for Christianity. They were fighting to put Papa on top. And we won and he’s on top and that’s all there is to it. It makes you feel such an ass being told afterwards that you were fighting for religion” (H 137). Constantine inaugurates

Christianity’s reign, but Waugh does not present it as a cause for celebration. Christianity finds itself quickly embroiled in the political battles of power-hungry dictators, and

Waugh suggests, by way of comparison, that one might say the same of the twentieth century and its patriotic piety. For like Rebecca West in Saint Augustine, the emergence of Christendom in the fourth century attracts Waugh for the light it sheds on its contemporary waning. As one empire falls, a new one emerges to take its place. History repeats, and the once sweeping difference between the City of God and the City of Men settles beneath the rug.

Unlike Waugh, West’s account does not focus on Constantine. She tells her story by way of Augustine. Particularly, she focuses on how this great individual creates a bridge between the old world and the new: a task, it seems, she also set for herself. She is caught at a metaphysical crossroad, too. On the one hand, West praises Augustine’s perception, which, although “too subjectively true to be objectivity true” (SA 14), sheds light on the human psyche in this moment of transition. His work belongs, in her opinion, to the modernists’ camp; it probes the soul exquisitely and illuminates the unconscious mind with refinement. On the other hand, she criticizes Augustine for his two chief failings: his “ill-timed garrulity about sexual matters” and his “inability to realise that other people also had tragedies and consciences” (SA 154). She censures the first weakness with special urgency, because she believes Augustine establishes, for Western civilization’s perpetuity, “the need to wipe out guilt by suffering” (SA 161). This notion

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undergirds the Western world’s current embrace of fascism and death. For Augustine believes that “matter, and especially matter related to sex, is evil; that man has acquired guilt from his enmeshment in matter; that he must atone for this guilt to an angry God; and that this atonement must take the form of suffering, and the renunciation of easy pleasure” (SA 159-160). He feels terror at the body and rejects the flesh’s pleasures. The good subject thus renounces the world and suffers his way to divine atonement.

According to West, Augustine rewrites the pagan Natural Law subject for Christianity brilliantly, but, in so doing, he ennobles suffering as redemptive act. War and legitimized violence result.

When one rereads Saint Augustine in light of Murdoch’s distinction between the

Natural Law and Liberalism, West’s liberal bias calcifies. She reads Augustine’s praise of ecclesiastical discipline as bare renunciation rather than as a determined effort to live well. West lauds Augustine’s investigation of consciousness, but she dismisses the consequences he draws from it. The muddled complexity of the human psyche suggests to Augustine the need to hamper the ego’s full self-expression. West, however, seeks to expand it and its access to pleasures unfound. As she explicates in “My Religion,” she finds “hope in the feeling of sacredness that I intuitively perceive in all efforts to extend the sphere of personal liberty. When we let people do what they like and say what they like we are giving the Divine a chance to express itself when it comes” (MY 25). West praises individualism and the triumph of self-assertiveness. In fact, the “spirit of tolerance represents the merciful hand of Christ thrust through the ages, saving the next Christ from crucifixion” (ibid). She advocates for cultural understanding and the proliferation of individual freedom. Religion ought to allow its practitioners to find their heart’s desire

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and release their subjectivity from society’s chains. West thus witnesses the sacred, but she does so as a Protestant looking for liberation from a newfangled Babylonian captivity. Hence West’s liberal individualism panders to the secular cosmologies that

Waugh loathes.

Consider the theological distance between The Return of the Soldier and

Brideshead Revisited, for instance. The narratives’ similarities strike one sure enough as do their principle themes: memory, love, truth. Robert Murray Davis notes how repeatedly Charles seeks to return, at Brideshead, to “a kind of postnatal womb” (IS 25), which is a central preoccupation, as I have argued, of West’s text. Tempted by Arcadia,

Charles manages to escape his escapism only with the jolt of a miracle: this twitch upon the thread. In The Return of the Soldier, Chris and Jenny access truth through memory without divine intervention. In this difference, the expanse between their approaches solidifies. Attentively, Žižek argues in God in Pain that

both paganism and Gnosticism (as the reinscription or the Jewish-Christian stance back into paganism) conceive the path toward truth as an ‘inner journey’ of spiritual self-purification, as a return to one’s true Inner Self, the self’s ‘rediscovery.’ Kierkegaard was right when he pointed out that the central opposition of Western spirituality is ‘Socrates versus Christ’: the inner journey of remembrance versus rebirth through the shock of the external encounter. Within the Jewish-Christian universe, God himself is the ultimate harasser, the intruder who is brutally disturbing the harmony of our lives. (GP 34)

The distinction between Socrates and Christ maps clearly onto the two novels. While

West’s text necessitates “the inner journey of remembrance” to perceive “one’s true Inner

Self,” Waugh’s novel presents God as an outside menace, breaking up liaisons and mucking up happiness. God interferes and disrupts. West’s religiosity remains, strictly speaking, pagan in its embrace of Socratic morality. Waugh’s novel engages paganism up

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till the moment when God intervenes. Conversion requires more than individual soul- searching. The outside must shatter the ego.

When West refers to Waugh as a “filthy little creature” (SL 316), her appraisal is, at least in part, based on what she perceives as his reactionary politics. He wants to turn back clocks and obligate “constant and degrading contact with priests who are homosexuals sublimating their troubles in intellectual pretentions” (qtd in Glendinning

221). For, against West’s individualism, Waugh endorses the Catholic curb Augustine advances, and here one must resist the temptation to condemn Waugh and Augustine as old-fashioned or apolitical. As Boris Gunjević argues, Augustinian discipline of desire just might hold the key for modern political revolution:

For ascetic exercise is not the destruction of desire as is suggested by various forms of Buddhism. Augustine’s understanding of ascetic practice begins with a voluntary renunciation of desire for glory and thirst for power. After that follows the renunciation of submission to pleasure, the renunciation of a weakening of the soul and body, and renunciation of the avaricious aspiration to greater wealth. (101)

As a liberal, West misreads the sociopolitical uses of Augustinian ascesis. It does not destroy desire; it reshapes it. Love’s primary object changes. This “voluntary renunciation of desire for glory and thirst for power” then challenges, for Gunjević, transnational capitalism. This discipline of soul and body, which I believe Helena models, provides religious subjects with a means of resistance. It counsels one to renounce deadening ambition and hold the liberal acquisition of endless pleasure advanced by West in suspicion.

From the perspective of the Natural Law, social justice might require an unfashionable, renewed commitment to ascetic restraint. Augustine and Helena both

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represent this sort of determined correction. Waugh, in this manner, presents Helena as the subject not of passionless renunciation but one of impassioned, radical revolt. She resists Empire. One might say, then, that Žižek engages religion to imagine the decisive rupture with secularism, while Gunjević uses religion to envisage a counter-cultural mode of discipline that will sustain the subject after that break in order that political change might occur at the root. For, Gunjević notes,

Ascetic exercise in ecclesial practices is a deliberately embraced discipline in terms of a goal that that surpasses us, yet is also a vehicle. This is an important statement because there is no cheap and certainly no free radicalism. To be radical means to be prepared to pay the price, it means to make sacrifices, and in this case it means to accept and adopt a disciplined asceticism as a way of life. Although the armchair leftists and liberals with generous academic salaries unanimously attacked him, I believe in this instance Slavoj [Žižek] was right. (101)

In a system as ubiquitous, potent, and hydra-headed as global capitalism, Natural Law morality provides a clearer picture for how social change might occur. To persist in endless liberations does little to challenge the capitalist regime, because, more often than not, the system absorbs these liberations and transmutes them into identities with credit lines. What one needs, categorically, is a way of being that refuses and negates the values and beliefs that inform and sustain global capitalism. One must render unto Caesar, and then get about the business of fulfilling one’s calling: wise as serpents, harmless as doves.

Helena asks God, for this reason, to shed his grace on the powerful. In an inversion registered by few critics, Helena prays not for the poor and the needy but for those with power and privilege. She asks the wise men, “patrons of all late-comers, of all who have had a tedious journey to make to the truth, of all who are confused with knowledge and speculation, of all who through politeness make themselves partners in guilt, of all who stand in danger by reason of their talents” (H 200-201), to pray with her.

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They will pray for those whose gifts keep them from truth: gifts of creativity, intellect, title, and fortune. They will pray for Helena’s “poor overloaded son. May he, too, before the end find kneeling space” (H 201). They will, most significantly, pray “for the great, lest they perish utterly.” Indeed, “pray always for the learned, the oblique, the delicate.

Let them,” Helena supplicates, “not quite be forgotten at the Throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom” (ibid). Waugh shifts attention from the simple and world-worn to the oppressors and co-conspirators. The meek will inherit the kingdom.

The complex and neurotic, the over-thinkers and the do-gooders, the elite and intellectual, the rulers and entrepreneurs—those whose privilege has made them forget the virtues of having less, knowing less, wanting less—they all must bend their knees in the ox’s barn and refuse the spoils of an empire that thrives precisely as its most gifted detractors play the game so well. She prays for their souls, since, in a secular world without God, everything is permitted but nothing really matters. The powerful need their sins recognized, refused, and forgiven.

To insist on meaning beyond the present is, Waugh insists, already to resist the system. To love this world in its brokenness and beauty is to frustrate empire, too.

Waugh’s fiction advances this antiquated opposition in a milieu desperate to leave the past behind. It witnesses, with its backward looks, the presence of feverish carnality and haphazard sin and, with Augustine, disciplines love. One recalls that at the center of his politics Augustine places desire; thereby he advances “a model that in a certain way would guide that love to an eternal and universal beloved. In other words,” Gunjević continues, “Augustine says that orderly guidance for desire is what matters” (91).

Waugh’s protagonists must learn to love well and truly. This education requires

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unsettling effort and endless reassessment. It questions anew. “I thought it wrong,” Lady

Marchmain tells Charles, “to have so many beautiful things when others had nothing.

Now I realize that it is possible for the rich to sin by coveting the privileges of the poor.

The poor have always been the favourites of God and His saints, but I believe it is one of the special achievements of Grace to sanctify the whole of life, riches included” (BR 126-

127). Although Lady Marchmain’s assessment may disturb with its seeming justification of earthly inequality, the invitation it presents to interrogate one’s affective relation to the victim rings true, especially for those concerned with social justice. In an era of political correctness, it is here that perhaps, as Žižek argues, “the reference to religion can play the positive role of resuscitating the proper dimension of the political, of re-politicizing politics; it can enable political agents to break out of the ethico-legal entanglement” (GP

36). It might criticize the compassion that enables. Then one might pray with Helena, whole-heartedly, for the powers that belong.

* * *

Charles puts his finger on the pulse of the Catholic tradition of deviance when he asks, “Who was it used to pray, ‘Oh, God, make me good, but not yet’?” (BR 86).

Sebastian cannot remember, of course, and returns “to the pages of The News of the

World,” which announce yet ‘[a]nother naughty scout-master’” (ibid). Certainly, sex crimes extend beyond Catholicism, but this particular faith recognizes sin and offers to the practitioner models for ethical discipline. Saint Augustine struggles with his own flesh, but it is only through it that God renders his conversion palpable. Therefore, he prays for purity but not … quite … yet. Waugh’s Catholic novels do the same, as they respect the flesh’s reality, its fragility, and do not flee earthly imperfections. For the

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transgressive and the sacred complement each other: they exist relationally in productive tension. The decadents find Catholic sanctity intriguing, precisely because it emerges in dialogue with sin. “The profane world is the world of taboos,” Georges Bataille has argued. “The sacred world depends on limited acts of transgression. It is the world of celebrations, sovereign rulers and God” (67-68; emphasis mine). The worst-case scenario is, for Waugh and Žižek, the tolerant liberal society, because this milieu normalizes sin.

Human creatures’ continued experience of God “depends,” however, on transgression.

This need engenders the taboo that, as this chapter has argued, gloriously precipitates its offence and the resultant cloud-burst of God.

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PAX AMERICANA Graham Greene’s Catholic Cosmopolitanism

In his 1948 review of Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, Evelyn Waugh insists that “no one knows the secrets of the human heart or the nature of God’s mercy. It is improper to speculate on another’s damnation” (FC 93). And yet, with Greene’s publication of A Burnt-Out Case twelve years later, Waugh finds himself on the verge of such impropriety. The novel’s portrayal—if not endorsement—of a “settled and easy atheism” disquiets Waugh, who is not surprised to learn that people “read the book as a recantation of faith” (qtd Devereux 121). In the fraught correspondence that follows,

Waugh explains to Greene why he has refused to review the novel: it glamorizes unbelief and, as he confesses in his journal, fails as art (775). “God forbid I should pry into the secrets of your soul,” Waugh avers; it is, he maintains, “simply your public performance that grieves me” (qtd Devereux 121). In response, Greene elucidates this public performance’s motive, one he characterizes not as a rebuff of Catholic faith but as a study of modern belief. Literary critics since have tended to side with Waugh, reading A Burnt-

Out Case as Greene’s loss of tenure as the world’s leading Catholic writer. The scholarly narrative hardens: Greene’s Catholic faith wanes as his political interest waxes (Gorra

122). This chapter puts pressure on this reading, however, and questions its epistemological assumptions as they pertain to faith and politics. I argue that, in the novels of the 1950s, Greene does not dismiss Catholicism; instead, he ascertains the weight of religious difference within a globalizing milieu. From this angle, I suggest that

Greene adopts the position of a cosmopolitan Catholic.

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Graham Greene held the designation—“Catholic writer”—in suspicion. It was, in his words, “the last title to which I had ever aspired” (WE 252). Still, the four novels published between 1938 and 1951—Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of the Affair—earned Greene the title from which he would henceforth seek ways of escape. With the publication of The Heart of the Matter, Greene found himself among the most famous of Catholics writing in English. The classification of “Catholic writer” would cast a long shadow on Greene’s career. Indeed, scholars have found it difficult to categorize the texts published after the aptly termed The End of the

Affair. These novels not only lack overt religious struggle but also include scant Catholic content. Some critics, like Timothy Sutton, argue that Greene adopts in his late fiction a postmodernist position, one that rejects the Catholic metanarrative but plays with

Catholic différance (170). Others, notably among them Waugh, contend that Greene abandons the Church altogether and investigates secular politics in a postcolonial milieu; on this view, the mature Greene is post-Catholic (Pendleton 5; Baldridge 129). This chapter claims that, while both the post-Catholic and postmodern responses to Greene’s later work register important shifts in his religious sensibility, they fail to capture how

Catholic faith continues to shape Greene’s response to postwar realities.

Through an analysis of texts published in the years between The End of the Affair

(1951) and The Comedians (1965), I argue that Greene embraces what literary critics might best describe as a cosmopolitan Catholicism. With the adjective cosmopolitan, I refer to moral cosmopolitanism, an ethical approach revived in the past twenty years by philosophers like Martha Nussbaum and Kwame Anthony Appiah. As Nussbaum and

Appiah note, economic globalization has renewed scholarly interest in this old idea, one

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with roots in the Stoic tradition of Ancient Greece. Stoic philosophy held formidable sway in early Christianity, and the Stoics’ formulation of a cosmopolitan ethos left its mark on foundational Christian thinkers, like Paul and Augustine, who sought to imagine a community in which there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither female nor male (Gal 3:28).40 Greene’s investigation of political ideology in The Quiet

American (1955) and religious faith in A Burnt-Out Case (1961) points decisively toward a cosmopolitan approach to the planet’s diversity, and at its center lie two ethical commitments. As Appiah suggests, cosmopolitans first inherit from “their Greek forebears a recognition of the fallibility of human knowledge—the recognition that we may be mistaken, even when we have looked carefully at the evidence and applied our highest mental capacities” (EGC 93). Second, cosmopolitans embrace “the idea that each human individual is charged with ultimate responsibility for his or her own life. The dignity of each human being resides, in part, exactly in in his or her capacity for and right to self-management” (ibid). In a catchphrase, Appiah describes cosmopolitanism as

“universality plus difference” (EGC 92), an ideal infusing the globalization of Greene’s fiction at midcentury.

By way of moral cosmopolitanism, Greene maintains the importance of what

Nussbaum calls the shared “community of human argument and aspiration” (7), without endorsing human beings’ ability to know truth fully and to choreograph justice terrestrially. Within a cosmopolitan framework, critics might account fully for what Neil

McEwan has described as Greene’s suspicion of earthly justice (49), a misgiving, I contend, that extends far beyond the so-called Catholic novels. Too often, scholars

40 Political philosopher Seyla Benhabib underscores this influence in “Cosmopolitanism and Democracy” (32), an essay that provides a helpful and succinct history of cosmopolitanism in the West. 171

suggest that Greene shifts from a fashionable, convert Catholicism to a fashionable, covert Marxism, but this reading places too much faith on either belief system’s ability to manage human life on earth. On my reading, Greene continues to engage with the

Catholic faith in light of the decline of the British Empire and the changes of the Second

Vatican Council. As Mark Bosco, S.J., has argued persuasively, literary critics must allow Greene’s creative engagement with Catholicism, especially in Vatican II’s wake, to reimagine the very terms that frame the designation “Catholic writer” (4). In 1951,

Greene’s affair with Catholicism has, I maintain, far from ended.

In order to capture Greene’s commitment to social justice, suspicion of political causes, and evolving religiosity, this chapter opens with an examination of belief in A

Burnt-Out Case and the ensuing scuffle between Greene and Waugh. I claim that A

Burnt-Out Case articulates a habit of faith that subverts suburban piety and embraces cosmopolitan diversity. This movement informs my take on Greene’s adoption of the world citizen’s outsider status and its attendant embrace of comedy. This ethical stance grounds The Quiet American’s critique of epistemophilia, and I argue that drag performance in the novel signals the violence inherent in any attempt to stabilize identity: political, religious, or gendered. In fact, The Quiet American’s queerness provides a lens through which to reread The End of the Affair’s controversial miracles. I suggest, by way of conclusion, that Greene links the ever-strengthening homosocial bond between

Bendrix and Henry to the unnatural coincidences Sarah’s faith enjoins. Catholicism’s queer take enables Greene’s outsiders to criticize the imperialist tendencies of secularism and cosmopolitanism alike.

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I. “Disbelieving the Calculus”: A Burnt-Out Case for Faith

Scholarly conversations concerning Greene’s fiction home like lesser doves to the issues surrounding Catholic orthodoxy. And yet, as Mark Bosco wisely notes, “Greene’s unorthodox treatment of orthodox ideas raised ambiguities and made it difficult to definitively clarify his attitude” (4). While Greene’s conversion to Rome in 1926 unites him to other religious converts in midcentury England, compatriots like Evelyn Waugh,

T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, Rex Warner, W.H. Auden, and Christopher Isherwood do little to categorize his religiosity (DeVitis 7). In salient ways, Greene stands apart. He shares these authors’ preoccupations with spiritual agency in the postwar period, but

Greene articulates, through his fiction, his own tortuous relation to religion. He avoids, for instance, the conservativism of Eliot and Waugh, while not quite gelling with the socialist set of Auden and Isherwood. In this opening section, I explore the response A

Burnt-Out Case engenders in the Catholic writer most often likened to Greene—Evelyn

Waugh—in order to underscore Greene’s unique relation to the Church. Far from an agnostic retreat, Greene provides his readers, in a text like A Burnt-Out Case, with a vision of midcentury Catholicism attuned to both the concomitant issues of secularization and the forthcoming reforms of the Second Vatican Council. The novel’s candid recognition of life’s bleak irrationality foregrounds a disciplined assertion of faith rather than the blithe dissolution of religion. In the modern world, meaning-making necessitates concerted effort, and Greene’s cosmopolitan faith stands in sharp contrast to Waugh’s tried-and-true belief.

Greene’s overt engagement with questions of belief and faith has not prevented readers from casting A Burnt-Out Case as the nail in the coffin of Greene’s Catholicism

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(Sherry 260-261). Notably, Waugh writes in his diary on New Year’s Eve, 1960, that the novel

emphasizes a theme which it would be affected not to regard as personal—the vexation of a Catholic artist exposed against his wishes to acclamations as a ‘Catholic’ artist who at the same time cuts himself off from divine grace by sexual sin. The hero of A Burnt-Out Case is a bored, loveless voluptuary who hides his despair in the most remote place he can find—a leper settlement in the Congo— recovers a spark of humanity but not his ‘faith’ and dies in an absurdly melodramatic way. (775)

A longtime friend and interlocutor, Waugh likens Greene’s theme to a personal attack.

With this publication, Greene flagrantly rejects the Catholic artist’s true vocation: to serve and praise God. The entry’s indictment of the voluptuary’s “spark of humanity” signals Waugh’s aversion to what he perceives as Greene’s embrace of secular humanism. He likewise censures the novel’s supporting characters, because the “efficient doctor is an atheist. The faithful missionaries have given up all attempt to impose the moral law and are interested only in building and finance” (775). The “efficient” physician’s atheism suggests a personal endorsement of rationalism on Greene’s part. As such, Waugh believes that A Burnt-Out Case is “the first time Graham has come out as specifically faithless—pray God it is a mood, but it strikes deeper and colder. What is more—no, less—Graham’s skill is fading” (118). Waugh finds little to praise in the text, and he thus forgoes the offer of £100 to review it (Stannard 444). Greene has apparently closed the book on the Catholic novel in the most public way and returns to the political thrillers upon which he forged his reputation. Waugh is not a fan.

Given this context, A Burnt-Out Case often functions as a dividing line between the religious and the political Greene (Smith 164). The Quiet American and Our Man in

Havana (1958) anticipate, on this view, the turn away from religion that A Burnt-Out

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Case concretizes (Gorra 146). Waugh’s refusal to review the novel simply evidences how far Greene has departed from the Catholic script; henceforth, Greene will flee from the faith and the fiction that bring him the certain success he abhors. As Waugh quips,

Greene’s “early books are full of self pity at poverty and obscurity; now self pity at his success” (775). Greene journeys to the Congo, erelong, to escape his own achievement

(O’Prey 95). The tide has turned, and Waugh recognizes, of course, the part he has played in placing Greene in the odious position of Catholic artist (Devereux 119). The friends exchange many letters attempting to rectify the disagreement that threatens to terminate their relationship. They reach a truce but fail to resolve the theological clashes

A Burnt-Out Case unleash, and Greene acknowledges that their “politics were a hundred miles apart” and that Waugh regarded his Catholicism as “heretical” (WE 263). Not surprisingly, the divide proves too difficult to cross. An unreconciled Waugh dies just over five years later—on the toilet, after Easter Sunday mass (WE 259)—never fully recovering from the twin blows of A Burnt-Out Case and the Second Vatican Council.

A Burnt-Out Case’s Catholic artist has lost belief but perhaps not, yet, faith. To appreciate this theological nicety, one must register the manner in which Greene’s faith differs from Waugh’s religion. Greene explains the dissimilarity in this way:

It was very true all the same that Evelyn Waugh and I inhabited very different waste lands. I find nothing unsympathetic in atheism, even in Marxist atheism. My waste land is inhabited by pious ‘suburbans’ … [Here] I [do not mean] the piety of simple people, who accept God without question, but the piety of the educated, the established, who seem to own their Roman Catholic image of God, who have ceased to look for Him because they have considered they have found Him. (257)

The steadfast belief that Waugh labels a virtue—a notch in faith’s belt—Greene views as a vice. According to Greene, certainty terminates the search for God: the zealous cease

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“to look for Him because they have considered they have found Him.” This certainty establishes, moreover, a pious sense of knowing it all. This sensibility belongs to the suburbs’ isolation and homogeneity, Greene avers, not to the diversity of metropolitan modernity. A cynical suspicion of conviction and perpetuity thus runs throughout all the novels. Those that doubt, search, and struggle evoke the gospels in Greeneland: not those who believe it straight. In contrast, Waugh desires a uniform truth to wrap up and keep on country house’s mantelpiece forever. This yearning for a definite waste land to excoriate places Waugh in an impossible position: he wants too hard. Greene describes Waugh as holding, for this reason, “too great expectations: too great expectations of his fellow creatures, and too great expectations even of his Church. I think the old expression ‘a broken heart’ near to the truth, when one thinks of his reaction to the changes in the liturgy of the Catholic Church” (WE 259-260). He yearns for a perfect world anchored in wholehearted conformity to the Church’s spiritual revelation and moral law.

Greene assures Waugh that A Burnt-Out Case’s pious Rycker—whom Greene describes as “like a wall so plastered over with church announcements that you couldn’t even see the brickwork behind” (BC 144)—is not a caricature of Waugh, his art, or his value system (WE 255). Greene does, however, claim personal affinity to his protagonist:

“in some of Querry’s reactions there are reactions of mine, just as in some of Fowler’s reactions in the The Quiet American there are reactions of mine” (ibid). Greene shares what he calls Querry’s “unsettled form of disbelief.” This faith continues to search in spite of unbelief, which is exactly what Waugh cannot bear. In his parable of the King,

Querry suggests to puerile Marie that unbelief might verify God’s existence, for the

“master-technician”—code for Greene the novelist—faces “moments when he wondered

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if his unbelief were not after all a final and conclusive proof of the King’s existence”

(158). This sort of faith, grounded in unbelief, differs from Rycker’s devout confidence; instead, it mirrors Querry’s inability to know God fully and reflects an ordinary humility.

This powerlessness to know but simultaneous desire for truth motivates the search that proves Querry’s namesake,41 and he continues this journey long after his doubts dominate. “You must have had a lot of belief once to miss it the way you do” (192), the doctor tells Querry late in the novel. Such missing compels him toward “the heart of darkest Africa” (106), where belief’s rationality breaks down and the faithful subject begins to walk alone in ignorance.

To be sure, Greene flees the label of Catholic writer. It constricts and confines; it, no matter his spiritual hunger, demands the steadfast satiation that Waugh orders. Greene confesses that “in the years between The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair I felt myself used and exhausted by the victims of religion. The vision of faith as an untroubled sea was lost for ever; faith was more like a tempest in which the lucky were engulfed and lost, and the unfortunate survived to be flung battered and bleeding on the shore” (WE 253). The fans of his religious novels, those “victims of religion,” ask too much; they seek a theologian’s answers rather than an artist’s inquiries. One notices, however, that Greene here mislays not faith as such but a certain “vision of faith as an untroubled sea.” This notion characterizes faith as smooth sailing rather than willed consent among manifest difficulties and doubts. This distinction between buoyant belief and adulterated faith holds water, since Greene claims, in the preface, to have written A

41 Frank Pisano offers a helpful exploration of the significance of names “beyond Querry’s searching” (177). He links Marie to the Virgin Mary’s amazing conceptions and Parkinson to the novel’s preoccupation with disease (178). 177

Burnt-Out Case "to give dramatic expression to various types of belief, half-belief, and non-belief, in the kind of setting, removed from world-politics and house-hold- preoccupations, where such differences are felt acutely and find expression” (5). Belief, for Greene, is not an on-off switch, an either/or construction; it matures, deepens, and alters. For his part, Waugh cannot forgive A Burnt-Out Case’s sympathetic portrayal of a

“‘settled and easy atheism,’” because, Waugh maintains, “an atheist denies his whole purpose as a man—to love & serve God. Only in the most superficial way can atheists appear ‘settled and easy’” (121). Greene disagrees and fathoms a faith that navigates its sea changes.

“Faith is above belief,” Greene insists in a late interview. “Belief is founded on reason. On the whole I kept my faith while enduring long periods of disbelief … My faith remains in the background, but it remains” (qtd DeVitis 22). The dissimilarity between faith and belief matters increasingly as Greene moves out into a postcolonial, globalizing context. One might read A Burnt-Out Case as an investigation of the distance between belief and faith in a modern setting, as I shall. Indeed, I want to preserve the possibility that Greene’s rebuttal to Waugh—“as a Catholic I consider myself able to treat loss of faith just as freely as discovery of faith” (WE 254)—does not confirm his agnosticism or unearth a latent atheism; rather, it insists on the complication and doubt attending faith itself. He may witness God in spite of, or because of, doubt, discord, and division. On this view, a novel like The Quiet American does not abandon religiosity but politicizes the humility Greene progressively understands as its point. Here, I build on the compelling account of Greene’s Catholic imagination offered by Mark Bosco; a religious outlook,

Bosco contends, shapes Greene’s entire oeuvre and not just the so-called Catholic novels

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(75). Extending his claim, I make the case that cosmopolitanism not only describes

Greene’s ethical attunement but also enables critics, following Bosco, to trace new lines of thought and commitment throughout all the novels. This approach, for example, eases the tension between religion and politics that the firm separation of the so-called Catholic and post-Catholic texts produces. It also enables one to view Greene’s Catholicism as a growing, responsive faith rather than as a belief system dropped like a hot potato after

The End of the Affair. Most importantly, it pushes back against those who expect, like

Waugh, the sole presentation of cloistered virtue and steadfast belief in the Catholic novel.

Once Greene falls under the tattered banner of the Catholic artist, his work and

Waugh’s fiction become entangled. This knot continues to obscure the salient differences between them. For instance, most scholars still endorse Waugh’s reaction to A Burnt-Out

Case. This move establishes Waugh as the gold standard of Catholic writer from which

Greene departs: it is Greene, and not Waugh, who distances himself from the call of

Christian faith. More often than not, literary critics’ need to canonize a secular Greene fuels this reading; in fact, it suggests to me scholars’ wish to align religion with anti- modern values. The reforms of the Second Vatican Council suggest the possibility, however, that it is Waugh who falls away from the Church and not Greene. Waugh’s recalcitrance evokes a Church that refuses to modernize rather than one that opens its doors to the vernacular mass, interfaith dialogue, and the struggle for social justice. These changes and the spirit that effects them salt and pepper Greene’s late novels, which suggests a continuity of Catholic concern (Bosco 78). To deepen this sense of continuity,

I closely examine A Burnt-Out Case and its investigation of belief’s loss in the next

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section. Religion provides no easy fix to modernity’s alienations there, but a secularizing milieu does invite the faithful to consider the work of good religion—its virtue, its movement against the norm—with greater discipline and specificity. Organized religion must, Greene suggests, reconcile itself to the fact that human beings cannot comprehend, but only laugh with, God.

II. “Suffer from Nothing”: Comedies of Humiliation

In The Man Within My Head (2012), acclaimed travel writer Pico Iyer highlights the angst of Graham Greene’s faith. Leveraging his own need for adventure, Iyer concludes of this wistful wanderlust: “Greene could not bring himself to believe in God and so, by his own lights, he was cursed. But he could not entirely believe in himself or his own positions, including his arguments against God, and so there was always a small clink of hope” (146). In this section, I liken A Burnt-Out Case to that small clink: against

Waugh who reads the novel as Greene’s recantation of faith, I demonstrate how A Burnt-

Out Case celebrates the comedy of human existence and reassesses faith’s grounding in ordinary practices. As Greene travels into the heart of his own darkness,42 he discovers laughter amidst the shadiest horrors. “Even my Marxist critics shared a characteristic with Waugh,” Greene records in Ways of Escape; “they were too concerned with faith or no faith to notice that in the course of the blackest book I have written I had discovered

Comedy” (259). The novel’s encounter with comedy has deep implications not only for

Greene’s Catholicism but also for his politics: for they certainly know not what they are

42 Robert Pendleton explores this quest in Graham Greene’s Conradian Masterplot (1996). A Burnt-Out Case significance lies, in part, in marking Greene’s return to Conrad after leaving him behind in 1929. Greene discusses Conrad’s influence at length in A Sort of Life (151). 180

doing. As such, I claim comedy crystalizes Greene’s latent Catholic cosmopolitanism in its humble acceptance of cognition’s extant limitations.

This discovery of humor plays a decisive role, as critics have noted, in Greene’s transition from the Catholic novels of the 1940s to the political meditations of the 1960s

(Baldridge 148). To the extent that faith transcends rationality, as Greene insists, so too does tragedy fail to account fully for the human condition. For Greene, comedy witnesses human absurdity and the futility of any rational attempt to assuage its recurrent bitterness.

Moreover, it engenders humility, and, as Neil McEwan suggests, the “Catholic reader may be reminded of the modern views on the nature of the comic which suggest that the most extreme point of comedy is not tragic but religious” (113). Greene’s protagonist,

Querry, moves toward comedy’s extremity as he travels up Conrad’s river to the origins of modernism and his creator’s art. Despite two world wars, little has shifted; change seems, if not impossible, intractable. Querry fumbles. All his calls for justice and mercy fall upon deaf ears of the pious and privileged. Querry flees. Everyone wants something from him that he cannot give. On his voyage out, he wonders “when it was that he had first begun to detest laughter like a bad smell” (15); but, by the novel’s conclusion, he can laugh at his own mortality. The horror, the horror that he encounters in the Congo provokes hilarity that trumps revulsion.

Grahame Smith has underscored the importance of fame and its attendant media spectacle to A Burnt-Out Case’s existential exhaustion (165), and Greene himself acknowledges how the novel echoes his personal flight from the celebrity his Catholic novels produce (WE 254). For, he recoils, “now I was discovered to be—detestable term!—a Catholic writer. Catholics began to treat some of my faults too kindly, as though

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I were a member of a clan and could not be disowned, while some non-Catholic critics seemed to consider that my faith gave me an unfair advantage in some way over my contemporaries” (WE 74). Running from popularity, pomp, and piety, Querry reconciles himself, like Greene, to a religious foreclosure and, ostensibly related, inability to love: “I am gone too far, I can’t feel at all, I am a leper” (31). Querry is, too, a burnt-out case, one of “the lepers who lose everything that can be eaten away before they are cured” (110).

This damage—the incapacity to feel with and for others, to touch their flesh’s heat— leaves him unable to love women or to worship God. “I’ve long ceased to have doubts,”

Querry explains; “if I must speak plainly, I don’t believe at all. Not at all. I’ve worked it out of my system—like women. I’ve no desire to convert others to disbelief, or even to worry them” (91). This recognition causes Querry to claim: plainly, “I don’t know that I would call myself a Catholic” (41). He has declared a moratorium on romance and spirituality. The novel takes as its starting point, against the colonial blackdrop, this statement of unfaith in Christian revelation.

It ends as darkly with two bangs from a jealous husband’s gun. The bullets pierce

Querry’s chest just before he makes an “odd awkward sound which the doctor by now had learned to interpret as a laugh” (195). The egoist screeches—“He laughed at me.

How dare he laugh at me?”—yet Querry, with his dying breath, clarifies that he has not, in fact, mocked the reverent Rycker (ibid). “Laughing at myself,” he insists. Doctor Colin promises Rycker that Querry does not “laugh easily.” Then, Querry giggles again.

Something has changed. “Absurd,” mumbles Querry; “this is absurd or else …” (196).

His life and thoughts trail off with that whimper, and, with this provocation, his life terminates. A senseless death sits there mute. Within the frame of this death’s

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melodramatic meaninglessness, Querry appears, however, to provide an exemplum: something sublimely funny counters existence’s tragedies. After all, he has not had sexual intercourse with that woman. He does not, and will not, father Marie’s child. She simply weaves a story, and self-protective fictions, like fame, kill. Her husband misplaces his rage, certainly, but does it really matter all that much? “I’d call her a liar,” Querry earlier admits, “if I thought she even knew what a lie was. She thinks the truth is anything that will protect her or send her home to her nursery” (195). An artist’s creation does not escape from preexisting reputation easily, and Querry dies enmeshed in the wildest dreams of another creative writer, the with-child Marie, who happens to be Catholic.

Spiritual resignation sets in—for fakers are going to fake, and haters are going to hate— but Querry shakes it off with a laugh. The situation hardly merits a tear, but that alone does not rid the novel of Catholicism’s relevance. For comedy is just the beginning, and fresh starts like these lie deep within the Christian experience. Far from tethering its charity to prolonged suffering’s tragic sense, Slavoj Žižek argues in God in Pain (2012) that “the Christian comedy of love can only occur against the background of the radical loss of human dignity, of a degradation which, precisely, undermines the tragic experience: to experience a situation as ‘tragic’ is only possible when the victim retains a minimum of dignity” (183). Querry’s fall is far from catastrophic.43 The soap opera serializing of his end ensures that death forgoes its tragic quality; instead, it manifests itself as a meaningless misunderstanding in the bush. The death is foolish, with its ultimate purpose veiled. Its senselessness further mocks Querry’s solipsism and the reckless pursuit of fame. Still, it redeems in a quotidian way. Querry’s search, while in

43 Peter Sinclair’s reading of tragedy in the Catholic novels remains rooted in vulnerability and the “suffering of others” (142), and it contrasts sharply with the comedic note Greene hits in his later texts. 183

some sense a failure, suggests its own merit: one must learn to love the human in its ignorance and absurdity. Tragedy, in the grandest traditions of ancient Greece, elevates the fated individual to the gods; comedy, in its Christian contrast, brings God to earth in all its humiliating humus (Žižek 164). A Burnt-Out Case’s embrace of the comedic brings

Greene, then, closer to his God in pain.

Drawing from Either/Or, Robert Hanlon, S.J., has outlined how Kierkegaard’s three stages on life’s way—the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious—illuminate A

Burnt-Out Case’s plot. Anticipating Žižek, Hanlon argues that Querry reaches the religious stage only through acceptance of human existence’s absurdity (25). This recognition occurs when he learns to admit how silly it all is, and this contradictory witness moves Querry beyond the tragic—with its egoism and heroism—to a truly religious, we-don’t-need-another-hero consciousness. As Žižek makes plain, the leap of faith requisite for religious sensibility demands that one reconcile herself to paradox, insignificance, and ignorance: life does not make sense, and it never will. The mystic will never have a guarantee that her faith is worthwhile.44 Faith’s a gamble. Religious vocation necessitates that the subject learns to live with contradiction and incongruity.

Žižek proposes, by this light, that “what makes the Aesthetic or the Ethical problematic,” for Kierkegaard, “is not their respective positive characteristics, but their formal nature: the fact that, in both cases, the subject wants to live a consistent mode of existence and thus disavows the radical antagonism of the human situation” (177). Waugh’s critique of

A Burnt-Out Case belongs squarely within the ethical, because it demands “the consistent mode of existence” that moral guidelines promise and uphold. The answer, though, to

44 Žižek uses Brideshead Revisited to cement this point: “what matters is that [Julia] has confronted and fully assumed the paradox of human existence” (177). See my reading of the moment in the second chapter. 184

Querry’s query into faith is the laugh itself: the recognition of life’s comic dimension and life’s “radical antagonism.” He yields to all that which is outside his control, and that includes the very promises on which faith rests.

And so, what’s love got to do with it? Jesus: Christ’s incarnation inaugurates the comedy of Christianity precisely in the absurdity of God assuming humanity’s horrid flesh. The Christian God abandons dignity in order that human beings might be kind to their mistakes (Php 2:5-9); and, as Žižek argues, the wise will hoot! The inability to know

God’s plan or the truth of revelation might “be viewed as condemning us to permanent anxiety, but also as something inherently comical. This is why,” Žižek continues,

“Kierkegaard insisted on the comical character of Christianity: Is there anything more comical than the incarnation, this ridiculous overlapping of the Highest and the Lowest, the coincidence of God, creator of the universe, with a miserable man?” (178). This admixture of lowest and highest bespeaks the ludicrousness of a survival that tragic suffering tries to quell with meaning. Clearly, A Burnt-Out Case imagines cures for white men suffering from nothing,45 but their redemption comes like a thief in the night: humor in the end. Designing the hospital, Doctor Colin believes that Querry has “learned to serve other people, you see, and to laugh. An odd laugh, but it was a laugh all the same.

I’m frightened of people who don’t laugh” (198). Grudgingly, Querry accepts his vocation and its good-for-nothingness. He realizes there is no making sense of it all.

Shortly thereafter, his death proves ridiculous and sublimely histrionic. He laughs at it as a good Christian must.

45 In the preface, Greene writes that this “Congo is a region of the mind, and the reader will find no place called Luc on any map …” (BC 5). All the same, the fourth section speculates on the thorny issues of colonialism, justice, and white privilege in Greene’s postwar adventure stories and offers a critical assessment of Greeneland’s efforts at promoting diversity and inclusion. 185

Querry dies illogically but not without his emotional leprosy’s cure. The tonic for this “burnt-out case” comes with the sort of hard work that cultivates humility and a requisite sense of humor. He takes himself less seriously. This shift resonates, since, throughout A Burnt-Out Case, Greene likens Querry’s spiritual malaise to leprosy (31).

The comparison blurs the material with the spiritual and not without consequence. Querry must accept the paradox of spiritual significance emptying itself of its own signification.

He approaches abject materiality in order that he might redeem himself spiritually. Terry

Eagleton has identified this paradox as vital to Greene’s protagonists: for, by “a curious irony, skepticism, dégagement, and disbelief furnish a more positive ethic than a committed faith in the possibilities of human good. The fundamental detachment from the mess of secular complexities which permits the Christian a deeper insight than the humanist also allows him to outstrip the humanist on his own territory” (356). Querry must live with his doubt and in his sin. This acceptance, following Eagleton, makes him all the more human.

The comedic emerges in a parallel movement: it denies human superiority but maintains human meaningfulness, in its meaninglessness. “Greene is able,” in this way,

“to dramatise two qualities of feeling which are everywhere deeply interrelated in his work: a pitying compassion which confirms a kind of value without thereby challenging the fact of human worthlessness, and a potentially heroic virtue which is at the same time fiercely or skeptically hostile to the notion of goodness” (ibid). Such parallax comprises

Greene’s viewpoint. The virtuous protagonist’s left hand must not know what the right hand is doing, because, as Eagleton insists, “it seems necessary to affirm and deny human value in the same moment” (ibid). Greene’s protagonist must not recognize his goodness;

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in fact, he must flee from it in order to maintain his humility. And yet, it is precisely this humility that returns to human beings the magnificence they have sacrificed in their egoistic chases.

At Querry’s funeral, Doctor Colin and the Superior agree that human beings

“analyse motives too much.” They speculate on moral laws, canonize their saints, and discern to death. “I said that once to Father Thomas,” the Superior states. “You remember what Pascal said, that a man who starts looking for God has already found him. The same may be true of love—when we look for it, perhaps we’ve already found it” (BC 198).

What you get is what you seek. To look is already to find; to doubt is always to acknowledge God. The workings of faith require the test of doubts, and this exercise in misgiving lends to faith its status as a virtue. Of course, the Superior’s remarks include two important names culled from The Quiet American: Pascal, the French philosopher of felicitous reservation, and Thomas, the doubting apostle and Christian name of Fowler.46

In this assessment, the Father Superior advises caution not only with regard to neurotic self-analysis but also with respect to theological argument itself. Querry does not rediscover faith, let alone does he recommit himself to the catechism; he simply finds, on

Doctor Colin’s take, “a reason for living.” Querry uncovers this motive in useful, unselfconscious service, in the quiet actualization of his vocation. Theology’s impulse to systematize and to solidify produces only narratives—like Marie’s, Rycker’s, Querry’s— that clog the arteries of God’s grace. The oceans of ink spilled in crafting dogma do little to stabilize, merit, or, on Greene’s watch, engender Christian faith.

46 On his confirmation as a Roman Catholic, Donald Greene notes that Graham “took ‘Thomas’ as an additional name, insisting that this mean the doubting apostle, not St. Thomas Aquinas, who was anything but a doubter” (8). 187

As A Burnt-Out Case moves toward its conclusion, Greene leaves the verbiage of religion behind.47 The novel opens, one recalls, with Querry’s “parody of Descartes: I feel discomfort, therefore I am alive” (9). The line equates existence with the protagonist’s suffering, and this pain bespeaks mere heroic egoism. Querry needs to forego this self-preoccupation through service that touches others, but he cannot know its true value. Traumatic tragedies make heroes of us all, when what goodness requires is the ignorance of the fool. Only this tomfoolery will save Querry from “Rycker’s hollow phrases: grace: sacrament: duty: love, love, love” (42). In this manner, Greene makes his questioning of the theological superstructure explicit. The natives in the Congo celebrate a “strange Christianity,” but one wonders “whether the Apostles would find it as difficult to understand as the collected works of Thomas Aquinas” (58). Christianity has, Greene hints, lost touch with practice. Unsurprisingly, Querry finds meaning apart from his civilization and its tenants, deep in the Congo where there “was little in the forest to appeal to the romantic. It was completely empty. It had never been humanized, like the woods of Europe, with witches and charcoal-burners and cottages or marzipan” (54).

Following Eagleton, he does so without totalizing comprehension. The spirituality he intuits in his African servant, Deo Gratias, pushes Querry beyond the rationalist believe/disbelieve dichotomy.

In his final days, Querry continues to identify with atheism, but Doctor Colin calls him out on it. “You are too troubled,” he insists, “by your lack of faith, Querry. You keep on fingering it like a sore you want to get rid of. I am content with the myth; you are not—you have to believe or disbelieve” (192). He hunts for, and is hunted by, God.

47 Douglas Kerr’s analysis of silence in The Quiet American is relevant here, for one might say that God, like Vietnam, proves also “a linguistically impenetrable hinterland that is beyond representation” (100). 188

Neither the Tradition nor the Scripture gifts faith to Querry; rather, communion with human beings, through harrowing humiliations, cuts through Catholicism’s smoke and the mirrors. For faith’s fruition, the protagonist must doubt yet search. As Eagleton acknowledges, “Querry’s deepest motive is a search for God, but its very unconsciousness prevents him from being in possession of his own experience and so running the contaminating risks of valuing himself highly” (365). A Burnt-Out Case skirts this narcissistic contamination and, I argue, this self-effacement brings him closer to Catholicism but in a cosmopolitan way. Comedy captures the paradoxical stance

Eagleton describes and bespeaks the ethical need, foundational to Catholic Christianity, to empty the subject of his conceit. With such kenosis in mind, I now shift to The Quiet

American. A text with less explicit Catholic content than its predecessors, it falls between

The End of the Affair and A Burnt-Out Case and bespeaks Greene’s shift from the tragic sense of the Catholic novels to the comic orientation of the cosmopolitan-yet-Catholic, midcentury texts.

III. “An Outsider at a Revolution”: Greene’s Cosmopolitan Cognition

Faith engenders humor in A Burnt-Out Case through its receipt of human beings’ earthen state. I have argued, thus far, that the correspondence between Waugh and

Greene concerning the novel sheds harsh light on their divergent approaches to religious life. On the one hand, Waugh insists that the good Catholic heeds orthodox teachings in order to live within the Body of Christ. On the other hand, Greene argues for faith that strengthens in orthodoxy’s absence: doubt fortifies faith through repeat application. A

Burnt-Out Case’s protagonist thus flees civilization’s panaceas to find the place where

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peace passes understanding. This holy space—“Pendélé” (BC 76)—toward which Deo

Gratias leads Querry reveals not God’s undeniable presence but instead life’s unknowing cloudiness. In this section, I explore further how such indefinite religiosity shapes

Greene’s politics with a close examination of The Quiet American. Greene’s deep distrust of human self-understanding but steadfast commitment to social justice leads him to assume the stance of the cosmopolitan outsider. In his infamous novel criticizing

American involvement in Vietnam, I claim Greene employs moral cosmopolitanism with his detached narrator, who, in the tradition of Immanuel Kant, is a world-spectator.

Fowler’s prescience in the novel is as ethical as it is comedic: his critically detached vision, precisely in its failure, moves the reader from mere empathetic connection with suffering others to an engaged involvement in their fate. In this pilgrimage toward humility, I argue, Greene’s religion matters, because his Catholic cosmopolitanism mobilizes religious guilt in order to take the egoistic edge off liberal humanism.

A Burnt-Out Case is not the first of Greene’s novels to cause a stir among its

Catholic readers (SL 58). Waugh had, in fact, come to Greene’s defense on multiple occasions, as Greene dodged Vatican censors and pious detractors.48 The Quiet American proved, in this sense, no exception (Sherry 13-14). The text offended the political sensibilities of American Catholics, who, as Robert Stone notes, read their favorite

Catholic as supporting communism abroad (ix). Published four short years after The End of the Affair, the novel recounts the arrival of a young American, Alden Pyle, to Vietnam in the time preceding U.S. intervention. Pyle seeks to establish a Third Force—national

48 Waugh’s notable defense of Greene’s Catholicism appears in “Felix Culpa?”, his review of The Heart of the Matter. There, he argues that critics ought to leave “the heart of the matter” to the judgment of “theologians” (95). 190

democracy—that will provide an alternative to both European colonialism and Soviet communism. Thomas Fowler, a British reporter stationed in Saigon, narrates the action that follows, and the plot thickens once Pyle falls in love with Fowler’s Vietnamese mistress, Phuong. Pyle seeks Phuong’s hand in marriage, because he believes fully in the

American future he can offer her. With adulterous love triangles, communist sympathizers, and booze to spare, The Quiet American has all the necessary ingredients of a classic midcentury Greene novel, save one: extended meditation on Roman

Catholicism. It is in this absence, however, that the presence of Greene’s Catholic cosmopolitanism first manifests.

Throughout the text, Greene juxtaposes Fowler’s European experience to Pyle’s

American innocence. Suffice it to say, Fowler’s time abroad has taught him to detach.

“The human condition being what it was,” he proclaims, “let them flight, let them love, let them murder, I would not be involved.” (20). Pyle, by contrast, arrives to Saigon and earnestly gets to the business of improvement; “he was determined,” Fowler records, “to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world” (10). In fact,

Fowler “never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused” (52).

This U.S. American innocence newly unleased upon the planet does not come, on

Greene’s watch, without dire costs. While it may bring “electrical sewing machines” to

Saigon’s “starving seamstresses” (33), it will do so by tailoring Vietnam’s reality to suit its own fancy. Even this fit seems innocent enough, in the beginning. “That was my first instinct,” Fowler recalls, “to protect him. It never occurred to me that there was greater need to protect myself. Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost

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his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm” (29). Idealistic Pyle, a very quiet

American, wants to make the world a better place, and he—and scores of unnamed others—die because of it. His ignorance enforces its bliss.

Against U.S. involvement, Fowler lauds his own continental detachment. “My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents,” Fowler explains; “I prefer the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action—even an opinion is a sort of action”

(20). He keeps Vietnam and the struggles of Indochina at arm’s length. This distance, at least in the outset, enables him to see clearly and to judge accurately, and it prevents him from the green disasters that dot Pyle’s path. “I was a reporter,” he maintains; “I had no real opinions about anything” (64). Cool objectivity and rational neutrality keep Fowler from getting his hands dirty but also from faith’s partiality; indeed, he “had never desired faith. The job of a reporter is to expose and record. I had never in my career discovered the inexplicable” (80). This refusal of position leads Paula Martín Salván to suggest that

Fowler does not represent old-fashioned colonialism as much as he captures the individual subject separated from the political morass. On her account, the character of

Fowler “resists this process of assigning ideological roles in a double way: first, through his refusal to become engaged in the struggle for ideological hegemony; second, through his resistance to the political discourses, which he calls ‘isms and ocracies’” (112).

Fowler belies affiliation with both old and new worlds, with both West and East. While

Martín Salván suggests this separation indicates Fowler’s refusal of any stable signification (115), I claim it points categorically toward his status as a world citizen.

As I noted in the introduction, Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism

(2006) underscores two commitments at the cosmopolitan’s core: first skepticism, the

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recognition of the limitations of human knowledge, and second pluralism, the acceptance of the dignity of human life and its variety (144). Fowler’s cynicism and its subsequent attention to pluralism pervade The Quiet American, reappear as Querry in A Burnt-Out

Case, and blossom most flagrantly in the protagonist of 1965’s The Comedians.49 I uphold, for this reason, that recognition of The Quiet American’s cosmopolitan sensibility allows literary critics not only to appreciate Greene’s deepening moral philosophy, one that is not divorced from his Catholicism, but also to acknowledge his debt to early twentieth-century cosmopolitans like Henry James and Joseph Conrad. With this twofold suggestion, I am attempting to forge new connections among early twentieth-century modernists, midcentury travel writers, and contemporary global writers.

In this connective spirit, I build on Rebecca Walkowitz’s Cosmopolitan Style

(2006) and mobilize its “critical” stance for the midcentury novel (2). For Walkowitz, critical cosmopolitanism owes a significant debt to early and high modernist fiction; its expression in the work of writers like Conrad, Joyce, and Woolf “emphasizes the analytic

(new ways of thinking and feeling) as well as the thematic (new objects of thinking and feeling) that brings together several gestures of critique—the progress of knowledge, the analysis of progress in history, the resistance to some forms of progress, and the dilation of knowing into feeling, partial knowing, knowingness, and refusing to know” (28).

Walkowitz focuses on modernism before turning to contemporary writers; it seems to me essential, though, to foreground Greene’s contribution to cosmopolitan thinking in British fiction. As I have suggested, Greene neither embraces the relative play of postmodernism nor rejects Catholicism outright; rather, he isolates and embraces an ancient cosmopolitan

49 Michael Larson explores the significance of The Comedians’ rootless protagonist Brown and his “detached understanding of the world and himself, which drives Brown to label life a comedy” (178). 193

thread, one woven into Christianity itself, and uses it to criticize political piety. His

Catholic roots enable his critical approach cosmopolitan ethics.

Central to Greene’s concern, of course, is the appraisal of knowledge that a cosmopolitan view affords. This epistemological critique motivates ethical rather than political intervention; it enables judgment in retrospect but does not delineate right action in advance. In this fashion, a cosmopolitan reading of Greene rests on the global citizen’s detachment from action that proffers moral spectatorship, a point central to Kant’s ethics.

In his “Perpetual Peace” (1795), Kant reimagines the cosmopolitan subject for modernity and reboots Diogenes for an expanding market. Kant makes it clear, however, that the world citizen does not belong to a single state (113). The cosmopolitan recognizes, instead, that she shares the planet’s surface with other human beings, who, in turn, share a common humanity. This commonality permits travel and trade, but it, more importantly, undergirds Kant’s moral thinking. Human beings, on this view, have “a right to the earth’s surface which the human race shares in common” (106). Global citizenship begins with an ethics of hospitality, with “the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility” (105). As philosopher Kelly Oliver notes, the “right to hospitality may facilitate commerce, but for Kant its source is an a priori principle of practical reason based on the limited surface of the earth” (46). There’s only so much ground to go around. From this initial insight concerning the earth’s limited surface and resources, the moral implications flow like untapped springs.

Significantly, Western rationality and liberal individualism—what Nussbaum describes as humanity’s “fundamental ingredients, reason and moral capacity” (7)— encompass this mode of belonging. It does not emerge from political membership in any

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particular state. One belongs to the group—the entire human race—by virtue of a shared humanity and common ground, but, to dip into this pooled moral capacity, one must dis- identify from local particularities, cultural signifiers, and distinct identities. These ties blind. Moral philosophy’s world citizen alternatively takes her bearings from the observation the outsider’s position affords.50 She unplugs. Exterior to the dominant narrative, she perceives the variation of human values and the limits to any particular belief system.

Kant emphasizes that his world citizen is, from the outset, a world spectator. She does not cause a, but instead resides outside the, commotion and looks upon it to hazard informed judgments. In her politicized reading of Kant, Hannah Arendt describes this stance plainly: “the standpoint of the spectator … in Kant’s own mind … was certainly the standpoint of the world citizen” (44). Kant’s onlooker immediately calls to mind the tension, in The Quiet American, between interest and disinterestedness, between action and detachment. Indeed, Kant argues that the cosmopolitan subject must disconnect from immediate political action if she hopes to render a sound moral judgment: the global citizen resembles Fowler in her skeptical inaction. “To be a citizen,” Arendt continues,

“means among other things to have responsibilities, obligations, and rights, all of which make sense only if they are territorially limited. Kant’s world citizen was actually a

Weltbetrachter, a world-spectator. Kant knew quite well that a world government would be the worst tyranny imaginable” (ibid). Seyla Benhabib seconds Arendt’s notion: “a kosmopolites is one who distances him- or herself either in thought or practice from the habits of his city and who judges them from the standpoint of a higher order that is

50 Appiah nods toward Virginia Woolf’s own riff on the world citizen. Her society of outsiders and the “‘freedom from unreal loyalties’” signal “the impartialist vision of the cosmopolitan creed” (xvi). 195

considered identical with reason” (33). This distance is presumed necessary to harness cosmopolitanism’s impartiality, and Fowler assumes it.

The global citizen belongs to the world not politically, strictly speaking, but in and through her imagination and reflection (Arendt 68). She travels mindfully and brings other perspectives to the table that then color her own judgment.51 The world citizen’s moral attunement demands, then, rigorous and vigilant critical thinking. Only thereby does one adopt, Arendt avers, “the position of Kant’s world citizen,” for to “think with an enlarged mentality means to train one’s imagination to go visiting” (43). This imaginative roving remains, for Arendt, linked to the right of hospitality. In this visitation and welcome, “impartiality is obtained by taking the viewpoints of others into account; impartiality is not the result of some higher standpoint that would then settle the dispute by being altogether above the melée” (42). In Arendt’s reading of Kant, the cosmopolitan achieves distance from positionality and politics but not total escape from them.

The world citizen travels in and through her imagination and has enough presence of mind to accept her ignorance and the social construction of her truth claims and identities. She considers the positions and viewpoints of others without pretending to capture or know them fully (Arendt 43). She extends the olive branch snatched from the rooted tree and foregoes the passionate pursuit of perfection. She wonders, in turn, what it must be like to experience the world from a different vantage point but does not escape her own standpoint and hence epistemological curb. This check, ideally, stimulates interest in other people and other ways of life. “Cosmopolitans think human variety

51 Similarly, Gayatri Spivak has argued for the imagination’s pedagogical centrality. In An Aesthetic Education in an Era of Globalization, she claims the need for “training the imagination” for epistemological performance (10). 196

matters,” as Appiah has it, “because people are entitled to the options they need to shape their lives in partnership with others” (C 104). These options emerge through conversation with and across difference, because no one person or group has a final handle on truth.

Tellingly, Pico Iyer has described Greene as “the patron saint of the foreigner alone”; he seeks “his territory is the small apartment in the very foreign town, the passion that is temporary, the border crossing that seems the perfect home for the man who prays to a God he’s not sure he believes in” (18). This saint searches widely but never finds deeply. Truth forever eludes this subjectivity. “Cosmopolitans suppose,” as Appiah explains, “that all cultures have enough overlap in their vocabulary of values to begin a conversation. But they don’t suppose, like some universalists, that we could all come to agreement if only we had the same vocabulary” (C 57). Travel and hospitable encounters with strangers only cement that fact. The global citizen must learn and listen to others without pretending to know in advance, “because cosmopolitanism is fallibist” (EGC 93).

One must talk, talk, talk. As such, Appiah argues that “cosmopolitan conversation across cultural and political and social and economic and religious boundaries is not about wholesale conversion: it’s about learning as well as teaching; it’s about listening as well as talking. Even when I am trying to persuade someone that what they see as right is wrong, I am also hearing arguments that what I think is wrong is right” (ibid). There is not one course to chart. Human beings are plural and their knowledge partial.

In significant and not merely perfunctory ways, this cosmopolitan witness stands distinct from that of Alden Pyle, who, as a quiet and un-talkative American, “never saw anything he hadn’t heard in a lecture-hall” (23). The preconceived notions in Pyle’s head

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determine his perceptions. He talks little, because he knows it all. And yet, Pyle had, in truth, “no more of a notion than any of you what the whole affair’s about,” and the West

“gave him money and York Harding’s books on the East and said, ‘Go ahead. Win the

East for Democracy’ (ibid). Pyle then sees in Vietnam what he has always-already read, what he most certainly knows; and, when “he saw a dead body he couldn’t even see the wounds. A Red menace, a soldier of democracy” (24). Pointedly, it is not that Pyle is uneducated and ignorant; rather, he has read and believes in the enlightened truth he has received from York Harding. He enters the world with, to take an example completely at random, Jeffrey Sachs in hand, in order to help, to make the world better. He has good intention and solid plans. He acts decisively. Fowler contrastingly hesitates and proclaims a need for reticence: “I know myself, and I know the depth of my selfishness. I cannot be at ease (and to be at ease is my chief wish) if someone else is in pain, visibly or audibly or tactually. Sometimes this is mistaken by the innocent as unselfishness, when all I am doing is sacrificing a small good … for the sake of a far greater good, a peace of mind when I need think only of myself” (105). Ever the Socratic devotee, Fowler acknowledges how selfishness and self-interestedness mar his deeds. He only knows that he does not know. Therefore, he detaches and judges skeptically.

This tension between theory and practice characterizes the exchange in one of the novel’s most heavily discussed scenes. On their return from the Caodaist festival in

Tanyin, Fowler and Pyle end up stranded in a watch tower on the road to Saigon; those

“bastards in Tanyin” siphon out the gas from their car’s tank (82), leaving them all but defenseless. They take shelter in the watch tower with two young Vietnamese soldiers, who leave them be. “I was glad,” Fowler remarks, “that the colour of my skin and the

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shape of my eyes were a passport—they wouldn’t shoot now even from fear” (84). This privilege frames the scene: white skin and Western eyes permit their stay in the tower and enable the conversation between them. Cynically, Fowler asks Pyle, “Do you think they know they are fighting for Democracy? We ought to have York here to explain it to them” (85). Pyle insists that the Vietnamese “don’t want Communism” (86), but Fowler rejects the statement. “You and your like are trying to make a war with the help of people who just aren’t interested,” he asserts. They do not want either democracy or communism. “They want enough rice,” he claims, and they “don’t want to be shot at.

They want one day to be much the same as another. They don’t want our white skins around telling them what they want” (ibid). Fowler not only displays skepticism but also defends plurality, the right of the Vietnamese to live as they see fit.

Despite maintaining that politics do not “interest” him and that he is “a reporter

… not engagé” (88), Fowler expresses a positive cosmopolitan position. He “doesn’t take sides,” but he tells Pyle, nevertheless, that “I’ve no particular desire to see you win. I’d like those two poor buggers there to be happy—that’s all. I wish they didn’t have to sit in the dark at night scared” (ibid). Fowler’s critique centers on the individuals, the fucked

“buggers,” in front of him. Pyle, however, thinks in global terms and “mental concepts”

(85). Abstractions pass his lips as effortlessly as 1955-franchise-founded Big Macs would have. He sees a generalized, serial progression toward a single reality. Against this

McWorld, Fowler’s rhetoric anticipates Appiah’s position on human dignity and its localized tastes. “It’s best,” Appiah argues,

when people live by ideals they themselves believe in. If I force a man to do what I take to be right when he doesn’t think it is right—or stop a woman from doing what I take to be wrong, when she doesn’t agree that it’s wrong—there’s a sense

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in which I am not making their lives better, even if what I take to be right or wrong really is right or wrong. Of course, if the wrong someone is doing harms others, I may have to stop her anyway [….] But if she is of sound mind and the wrong she is planning to do affects only her own fate, then the right way to express my concern for her is not to force her to do the right thing, but to try to persuade her that she is mistaken. (EGC 93)

As a world citizen, Fowler recognizes the right of the Indochinese to engage in self- determination and reveals the self-interested nature of the American experiment.

Intervention in Vietnam is distinctly self-servicing but veiled in “mental concepts” like love, liberty, and individualism. Still, love and liberty in Vietnam all too often resound, as they do in The Heart of the Matter, as “self, self, self” (237). The universal is, in fact, a disguised particular.

Fowler rejects Pyle’s master narrative of Communism’s threat to the individual and freedom. To respect individualism is to witness a particular person. In addition, it is to respect her right and ability to live as she sees fit. “Don’t go on in the East,” he tells

Pyle, “about a threat to the individual soul. Here you’d find yourself on the wrong side— it’s they who stand for the individual and we just stand for Private 23987, unit in the global strategy” (89). Pyle’s liberating quest denies, according to Fowler, the democratic right of others. “I’ve been to India,” he tells Pyle, “and I know the harm liberals do. We haven’t a liberal party any more—liberalism’s infected all other parties. We are either liberal conservative or liberal socialists: we all have a good conscience” (88). This ubiquitous, liberal desire for a clean conscience yields real damage when intervention occurs, and then the good liberal helpers promptly leave their “allies to be crucified and sawn in two” (ibid). Conservatives and progressives battle, without end, but the bellicose coin has two sides of the same face: they both enforce liberalism seeped in Western bias

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abroad. The fight for global liberty—axiomatic and sustainable development—protects

Western privilege. Rejecting this neo-imperialism, Fowler proclaims: “I’d rather be an exploiter who fights for what he exploits, and dies with it” (ibid). With some distance,

Fowler hits the moral quandary on its head. For liberalism to be consistent, it needs to make space for pluralism, for others to exercise their freedom. Otherwise, liberalism’s invisible hand simply twists brown arms anew.

In her vision for a cosmopolitan approach to education, Nussbaum underlines this point: [i]f we really do believe that all human beings are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights, we are morally required to think about what that conception requires us to do with and for the rest of the world” (13). At its base, the United States recognizes the rights all individuals share by virtue of their human status. Nussbaum insists, however, that U.S. American politics must take seriously the Kantian basis of its morality and globalize its precepts rather than those of a universalism grounded in corporate consumption. While Nussbaum correctly uncovers modern cosmopolitanism’s roots in Kant, readers of Greene must also reconcile the ethical system’s debt to secularization and its grounding in secularism. Kant steps back from 1789’s violence and helter-skelter and theorizes cosmopolitanism. In distant support of the revolutionaries’ efforts, he articulates a secular morality for a changing world. In the cosmopolitan milieu of the future, freestanding republics will interconnect through free trade and rational commerce. A secular moral compass is, on Kant’s clock, needed.

In historical perspective, Kant theorizes moral cosmopolitanism in response to the

French Revolution’s upsetting of religion and its enthronement of reason (Arendt 44-45).

He also does so expressly in favor of mercantile expansionism (Kant 114), although he

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criticizes the European imperialism that he describes as the “inhospitable conduct of the civilised states of our continent, especially the commercial ones” (106). These states,

Kant argues, visit to conquer and divide and thus inflict “the whole litany of evils which can afflict the human race” (ibid). One needs to globalize hospitably. Thus, Kant’s secularization of morality grounds cosmopolitanism in distanced, rational discernment, and Fowler’s rejection of religion as partiality and prejudice complements it. He forthrightly proclaims his cosmopolitan unbelief to Pyle in the tower. On the question of

God, Pyle maintains that “[t]hings to me wouldn’t make sense without Him”; in contrast,

Fowler proclaims that “[t]hey don’t make sense to me with him” (97). His disbelief complements his cynical morality.

If The Quiet American concluded in the tower, then Fowler would perfectly encapsulate Kant’s secular, world spectator. Things change, however, when the tower explodes: now, fate throws Fowler into direct relation with “that voice crying in the dark”

(105). He must recognize his responsibility. “Poor devil,” he muses, “if we hadn’t broken down outside his post, he could have surrendered [to the rebel forces], or fled, at the first call from the megaphone. But we were there—two white men, and we had the sten and they didn’t dare to move” (ibid). The whiteness of their skin acts as a passport and, here, as a death sentence. “Thought’s a luxury” (87), Fowler notes in the watchtower, and whiteness has permitted its fruition there; but here, with the explosion, it leads to the death of the Vietnamese boy. Fowler’s detachment and wisdom rest, explicitly, on the privileges afforded to him by skin color and political conquest. An interested and powerful political system protects and promotes his enlightened thinking. “I had prided myself,” he confesses, “on detachment, on not belonging to this war, but those wounds

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had been inflicted by me just as though I had used the sten, as Pyle had wanted to do”

(105). Fowler likens his cosmopolitan position, justly, to a thinly veiled expression of pride. Death follows, “just as though” he shot the native.

This recognition of egoistic embroilment only intensifies after the explosion in the square, where women and children die first. Pyle’s plastics enable a bombing in a central square in Saigon, and Fowler feels acute rage. It could have been Phuong. “You’ve got the Third Force and National Democracy all over your right shoe” (154), he snaps at

Pyle; but, ultimately, he lets well-enough alone. “What’s the good? He’ll always,” Fowler laments, “be innocent, you can’t blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity” (155). This explosion, that just misses Phuong, prods Fowler to take decisive action. He participates in the assassination of Pyle. He colludes with the communists to eliminate his frenemy: for political and, perhaps, personal reasons. If one stays the course with Kant, this action compromises his cosmopolitan objectivity. Fowler muddies his boots.52 Greene’s

Catholicism invites, however, another reading, and here the Catholic particularity of

Greene’s cosmopolitanism emerges: for cosmopolitan detachment is morally and politically impossible. Human beings exist always in relation and interconnection.

Furthermore, they know not what they are doing: the emotional muddle surrounding

Fowler’s motivation to see Pyle dead attests to this moral murkiness. The cosmopolitan’s skepticism must doubt the efficacy of human reason and will as well.

Kant is secular, sublimely so, and his rational capacity’s functioning requires distance and truth. Fowler falls from the heights of his watchtower—he becomes

52 The 2002 film version of The Quiet American represents this involvement—and its moral haze—through the un-washable blood on Fowler’s hands. His guilt seemingly soaks through the flesh. 203

involved—but this failure, I argue, makes faith defensible. Religion provides modes of interconnection and interaction that do not presume the authority or primacy of human beings’ knowledge and moral capacity. The disciplined unknowing promulgated by mystical and indigenous traditions, as Vandana Shiva upholds, models a mode of interconnection distinct from corporate globalization (126). This mystical epistemology destabilizes liberal humanism’s faith in humanity and suggests its Western, secular bias.

“The idea of truth developing through trial and error is alien to the African,” Greene maintains in Ways of Escape, and “one may say that he is nearer to the Catholic with his deposit of faith than he is to the scientific inquirer” (200). Catholicism offers an alternative to secularism, a religious difference.

Catholic faith remains distinct, according to Greene, from secularism’s imperialist project. In fact, colonization mobilizes a secular state that has colluded, as is evident in

Pyle’s tepid belief, with Protestantism. For the African, his “tribal framework with its elaborate customs gave him a sense of the unchanging,” but “the European had broken that up and had so far given little in return” (ibid). Greene scathes European colonialism for its conquest of faith. “It is not the European,” he laments, “who has brought God to

Africa; too often he has driven Him out” (ibid). Querry stumbles upon this realization in his pursuit of Deo Gratias, and it suggests globalization’s ambivalent faiths. Greene’s understanding of Catholicism develops in relation to faiths and belief systems he experiences in the Global South. In travel, he finds modes of spiritual unknowing more persuasive than the resurrection of Christian orthodoxy hoisted against a shrinking world.

Fowler’s secular detachment, cosmopolitan as it may be, still participates in this secularization process, and Greene criticizes it justly.

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Greene’s critique of Fowler’s version of cosmopolitanism crystallizes when contrasted with secularism’s rejection of the sacred and its imperialist unbelief. The tower scene opens, after all, with a visit to the Caodaist festival in Tanyin. Caodaism, “a synthesis” of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Christianity (75), would seem to model cosmopolitan interconnection. Indeed, in “the Caodaist faith all truths are reconciled and truth is love” (77). And yet, Fowler holds this religion, which takes “the best of all religions” and emphasizes expansive “love,” in suspicion. Like the American intervention in Vietnam, Caodaoism shrouds its self-interest; it marshals a vison of a united humanity that is universal, while all the time promoting “a globally imposed local interest” (Shiva

86). Not for nothing does General Thé set up camp at this Holy See. In the name of helping a global humanity, Thé and Pyle make plans to liberate Vietnam. This liberation results in the lethal explosion in the square. The Cadaoists’ insistence on love runs red with blood. They promote the best in religion—interconnection, love, enlightenment— but fail, in their fetishization of perfection, to reconcile themselves to Christianity’s specificity: its recognition of sin, attunement to suffering, and acceptance of human blindness. This refusal of darkness and particularity suggests that one ought, in the end, to detach first from ideals of human perfectibility. One must take the sweet with the, as it were, bitter queen.

IV. Saigon Is Burning; or, the Drag of Being Human

“You Kant always get what you want,” Hedwig maintains in her eponymous musical review, “but sometimes you get what you Nietzsche.” While The Quiet American shows the difficulties inherent in Kantian universalism, the posturing of the Übermensch

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rejects the solidarity with the least of these central to Christian ethics. In this section, I argue that Greene’s critique of secular cosmopolitanism charts a response that avoids

Nietzschean overreaching and instead makes difference central to critical cosmopolitan practice. In its investigation of moral detachment’s failure, the novel both validates the outsider’s vantage point and reveals its untenable privileges. It demands, in a secular world, an increasingly queer humility. Indeed, I argue that drag performance in The Quiet

American signals, most clearly, how religion engenders Greene’s critically cosmopolitan approach to a globalizing world. A close reading of drag in The Quiet American registers how sexuality shapes Greene’s investigation of innocence and experience; it also suggests why one must own her or his differences, whether they be religious, sexual, racial, or gendered. I place this exploration of drag into conversation with queer theories of performativity, using the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning as a touchpoint, in order to concretize feminist responses to drag culture. bell hooks’ critique of Paris Is Burning underscores, in particular, the dangers of an outsider’s view, and this assessment captures what I see as the essential benefit in approaching Greene as a critically cosmopolitan, rather than lapsed, Catholic.

In the reading of queer performativity that follows, I draw heavily from José

Esteban Muñoz’s conception of disidentification.53 Greene’s cosmopolitan narrators detach from identities and politics; they thereby assume the position of distanced observer. They mirror Kant’s world spectator to the extent that they observe human activity before them and confer judgment, often lucid, upon it; the wisdom of these pronouncements stands in direct relation to their detachment’s success. The inevitable

53 I owe thanks to my future colleague, Elizabeth Ann Mackay, for suggesting that I include Muñoz in this analysis. 206

botch of this rootless acumen, however, points not toward Kant’s cosmopolitanism as such but rather in the direction of a tactic of worldly disidentification. As Muñoz has it, disidentification is a

mode of dealing with dominant ideology, one that neither opts to assimilate within such a structure nor strictly opposes it; rather, disidentification is a strategy that works on and against dominant ideology. Instead of buckling under the pressures of dominant ideology (identification, assimilation) or attempting to break free of its inescapable sphere (counteridentification, utopianism), this ‘working on and against’ is a strategy that tries to transform a cultural logic from within, always laboring to enact permanent structural change while at the same time valuing the importance of local or everyday struggles of resistance. (11-12)

Greene’s cosmopolitan protagonists do not assimilate or revolt; they remain embedded within the cultural narrative: apart, but always a part. The same could be said, in fact, of

Greene’s relation to Catholicism. With this suggestion, I do not mean to claim minority status for Greene. In The Quiet American, a character like Fowler is aware of how racial and gendered privilege affect his relation to the world. I will argue, though, that Greene’s

Catholicism positions him as an outsider in Protestant England, and this stance, coupled with his travel, moves him toward Muñoz’s sense of “identities-in-difference” (6).

Greene’s midcentury protagonists dis-identify “to transform” dominant political and religious ideologies “from within.” Race, sexuality, gender, and religion infuse each other as Greene reimagines Catholicism’s relation to the modern world. It is important to remember, after all, that The Quiet American is a love story of innocence and experience.

On the night that Pyle meets Phuong, he has two decadent encounters with sexuality run amok that offend and then harden his idealized sense of romance. The night begins with a rather routine display of boys-will-be-boys masculinity. Granger, an unquiet American, proclaims that they are wasting their time discussing the reported violence in Phat Diem.

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“Break it up,” he shouts, “Can’t waste the whole night here. I’m off to the House of Five

Hundred Girls” (28). The House of Five Hundred Girls, a brothel on the outskirts of

Saigon, is a quite literal description. Pyle tries to deflect and invites Phuong and Fowler for an urbane dinner at the Chalet, but Granger again interrupts. “You can eat at the

Chalet … while I’m knocking the girls next door. Come on, Joe. Anyway you’re a man”

(ibid). This last comment merits pause. Granger enlists Joe to accompany him and throws shade at Pyle’s reticence. It silences Pyle. Fowler recalls, in turn, that “it was then, wondering what a man is, that I felt my first affection for Pyle” (ibid). This pondering of masculinity—and it is unclear who is doing the wondering here—leads Fowler to feel fondness for Pyle. He tells Phuong, on the way to the Chalet, “I like that fellow, Pyle”

(29). This affection also motivates him, soon enough, to intervene, protecting Pyle from the voracious House of Five Hundred Girls into which he foolishly stumbles.

The ambiguity and wonder surrounding masculinity sets the novel’s romance plot into motion, and the two encounters with exotic, erotic Cholon that follow this pondering flame Pyle’s passion for Phuong. He experiences a panic of sorts.54 First, Pyle encounters the House of Five Hundred Women in the flesh. There, a “triumphant” Granger takes the crowd of clamoring, desperate prostitutes “as a tribute to his manhood,” but they only cause Pyle to utter, “[i]t’s terrible. Terrible” (30). Later, he will tell Fowler that he wants to save Phuong from this fate. “You know,” he explains, “I think it was seeing all those girls in that house. They were so pretty. Why, she might have been one of them. I wanted to protect her” (49). Eventually, he will offer marriage as a safeguard, but not before the

54 Beth Kramer investigates The Quiet American’s love triangle and notes this tension between Pyle and Fowler that “borders on the homoerotic” (120). She does not, however, examine drag performativity in the text. 208

second event of that seedy evening. This “turn of the evening” impels Pyle to desire purity all the more violently.

After Fowler helps Pyle negotiate an exit from the brothel, they join Phuong and her sister for dinner. In the Chalet, Pyle has his first dance with Phuong, and her sister begins to calculate an American marriage’s benefits. Phuong’s not the only one in the family who knows how to wield a figure, but

Then came the turn of the evening: a troupe of female impersonators. I had seen many of them during the say in the rue Catinat walking up and down, in old slacks and sweaters, a bit blue about the chin, swaying their hips. Now in low-cut evening dresses, with false jewelry and false breasts and husky voices, they appeared at least as desirable as most of the European women in Saigon. A group of young Air Force officers whistled to them and they smiled glamorously back. I was astonished by the sudden violence of Pyle’s protest. “Fowler,” he said, “let’s go. We’ve had enough, haven’t we? This isn’t a bit suitable for her. (37)

The drag performers appear to Fowler “at least as desirable as most of the European women in Saigon,” but, for Pyle, they represent an attack on decency. His decision to up and leave marks his determination to protect Phuong—it’s not “a bit suitable for her”— from unsavory characters and characteristics, but surely he also seeks to protect himself.

Indeed, Pyle’s “sudden violence” matters (37). The drag performers’ confusion of sex and sexuality unleashes, in Pyle, a virulent desire to maintain purity, innocence, and distance. He will save Phuong from this fate by any means necessary. Although Pyle’s outburst ends the evening, Fowler will return to it soon enough in his memory. While the female impersonators represent for Pyle an indelicacy, something from which to shield

Phuong, they confront Fowler with the futility of the human quest to secure permanence.

Human beings change; their beliefs, identities, and appearances alter. One merely performs and parrots. Life’s a drag show.

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Before the drag queens take to the Chalet’s stage, Fowler meditates on his own desire for permanence and its relation to death. While Pyle dances badly with Phuong,

Fowler muses on his desire to put himself in dangerous, war-torn situations. The flashback at Phat Diem connects directly to this stream of consciousness:

Why should I want to die when Phuong slept beside me every night? But I knew the answer to that question. From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness. This month, next year, Phuong would leave me. If not next year, in three years. Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again forever. I envied those who believed in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God … (36)

Death brings a permanence that even belief in an unchanging God cannot offer to the earthbound creature. Fowler desires this stability but recognizes that he can access it only through death; and he is afraid. Pyle interrupts this internal monologue with his prophetic apology: “Forgive me for taking Miss Phuong from you” (ibid). Then the drag queens take center stage. Their performance of impermanence and gender instability underscores the desire Fowler and Pyle share for the permanent and the secure. For both men, this desire turns violent, but in different ways and to different ends.

Notably, Fowler flashes back to this moment of moral outrage when he reaches

Phat Diem a few days later. There, he stumbles across a massacre at a Catholic village.

Bodies fill the canal, like “an Irish stew containing too much meat” (43). This vision of dead bodies prompts his recollection. “For a moment I didn’t see what they had seen,” he recalls, “but when I saw, my mind went back, I don’t know why, to the Chalet and the female impersonators and the young soldiers whistling and Pyle saying, ‘This isn’t a bit suitable’” (ibid). Fowler’s mind draws a direct parallel between the bodies in the canal

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and Pyle’s violent reaction to the drag queens at the Chalet. At the scene of the massacre, the bodies overlap and bob indiscriminately; they mix and mingle like five hundred women desperate for one night’s hard-earned cash. “There was no blood: I suppose it had flowed away a long time ago,” Fowler documents. With hands clean, he had “no idea how many there were; they might have been caught in a cross-fire trying to get back, and

I suppose every man of us along the bank was thinking, ‘Two can play at that game’”

(43). Every “man of us” imagines retaliation: violence repaid, repackaged, repurposed.

Masculinity might assert some control over the seemingly uncontrollable and thereby erect permanence.

Fowler’s association of Pyle’s violent reaction with the canal of slain bodies makes sense, then, as it witnesses the violence inherent in seeking stability in identity and knowledge, especially when confronted with the human condition’s malleable impermanence. Human beings are matter and, moreover, matter little. Fowler instinctively averts his eyes: “we didn’t want to be reminded how little we counted, how quickly, simply and anonymously death came. Even though my reason wanted the state of death, I was afraid like a virgin of the act” (43-44). The “human clay” in the trough sparks Fowler’s wish to flee from the changing and imperfect world before him as it also captures his fear at doing so, because he, unlike Pyle, knows that the only escape from the muddle of human imperfection is death. He is, “like a virgin,” afraid to act in pursuit of life’s extinction. He harbors an innocence as well. Hence he continues living, like all human beings, against the current of his desire.

Queer theorist Judith Butler has characterized the relationship between drag culture and gender performativity as entrenched in both imitation and ambivalence. Drag

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is imitative to the extent that, “when a man is performing in drag as a woman, the

‘imitation’ that drag is said to be is taken as an ‘imitation’ of femininity”; and, Butler continues, “if one considers that gender is acquired, that it is assumed in relation to ideals which are never quite inhabited by anyone, then femininity is an ideal which everyone always and only ‘imitates.’ Thus, drag imitates the imitative structure of gender, revealing gender itself to be an imitation” (PLP 155). The drag queen foregrounds the possibility that all human beings perform their gender and that the ideal performance has no original or natural source. Along this line of thought, the ambivalence of drag emerges. For it is not enough to state that gender is illusory: all gender performance remains bathed in power and privilege. As Butler emphasizes in her reading of the film

Paris Is Burning, this imitation re-inscribes, through the recital, certain norms of gender, race, and class. Many of these ideals are harmful to the very people who perform them in drag; many of these ideals are harmful to those whose gender, race, or class position is cited. There is nothing inherently subversive about drag culture, and, as many feminist critics have argued, drag can portray women in a derogatory or superficial light. It repeats what some would rather forget. Drag performance is, therefore, a site of deep social ambivalence: it rehashes and lauds harmful norms as it also showcases their instability and potential for alteration.

Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning (1990) does not escape this uneasy incongruity. The documentary film follows the lives and performances of black and

Latina queens in Harlem. They often imitate the fashions and lifestyles of the white women downtown; they express, in this sense, a desire to escape the confines of their gender, race, and class by glamorizing and inhabiting the ideals that have excluded them.

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And yet, as Butler notes, their performances, to some extent, destabilize those very norms. Paris Is Burning documents more than “an appropriation of dominant culture in order to remain subordinated by it terms”; the film witnesses, she insists, “an appropriation that seeks to make over the terms of domination, a making over which is itself a kind of agency, a power in and of discourse, in and as performance, which repeats in order to remake” (137). Sometimes slight differences in these repetitions create the possibility for change, such as in the way Paris Is Burning makes over the family’s function. Drag’s ambivalent imitation bespeaks, in this fashion, the thin line between two social locations and the messy instability of all identities. One recalls how the female impersonators in the Chalet “appeared at least as desirable as most of the European women” (37). These men could not only pass as women; they could also pass as

European women. The instability and performativity drag culture captures concerns more than gender and sexuality; it speaks to relations of class, race, and politics, too.

Pyle’s violent reaction to the drag performance reflects his hostility toward both sexual aberrance and the political possibility encapsulated in drag’s ambivalence. Pyle’s black-and-white world does not allow for murkiness and realism. Pyle’s idealism needs to believe in his own authenticity and agency. He cannot see that, as Fowler notes, he uses the romance plot as an “elaborate and humorous disguise for his real purpose, for it was already the gossip of Saigon that he was engaged in one of those services so ineptly called secret” (65). Pyle’s disavowal of his own performance, his own drag, combined with his intense need to embody the right answer for the world’s future, engenders the violence that will reinforce his privilege and secure his identity. It is this violence he veils, because “he was as incapable of imagining pain or danger to himself as he was

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incapable of conceiving the pain he might cause to others” (53). Still, one heeds Virginia

Woolf’s plea in Three Guineas and remembers the “dead bodies and ruined houses” (68).

National democracy inflicts real violence in Vietnam, and the mutilated corpses in the canal must signify. Real consequences emerge from the hazy desire to enforce ideals and to secure labels: sexual, gendered, economic, and national. Woolf’s solution, not unlike

Greene’s, is to proclaim a version of cosmopolitanism (109), and Greene’s novel shows just how difficult the moral disinterestedness cosmopolitanism requires is to achieve in practice. “Sooner or later,” Fowler will learn, “one has to take sides. If one is to remain human” (166). The consequences of inaction are, all too often, category white savior realness.

Black feminist theorist bell hooks has criticized Paris Is Burning for the ways in which the director—a white lesbian—evaded candid interrogation of her racial and class privilege. According to hooks, Jennie Livingston adopts the “imperial overseeing position,” and, here, “the supposedly ‘outsider’ position is primarily located in the experience of whiteness” (152). The documentary’s assumed view from outside drag culture places black working-class experience on display for progressive white eyes to feast upon. “What viewers witness,” hooks argues, “is not black men longing to impersonate or even to become like ‘real’ black women but their obsession with an idealized fetishized version of femininity that is white” (147-148). The desire of black male performers to cite white culture reaffirms, on hooks’ count, the validity and attractiveness of white experience for the film’s white progressive viewers. Whiteness remains unquestioned and the norm. In this sense, the documentary serves to reinforce

Livingston’s racial identity and class position rather than to call them into question.

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Judith Butler offers, of course, a more ambivalent reading of Paris Is Burning and insists, as I have noted, on the documentary’s complex relation to cultural power. All the same, hooks’ comments ought to remind literary critics of the dangers lurking within the cynical detachment Fowler advances.

Is Greene’s narrator not adopting, in some respect, a version of the “imperial overseeing position” that hooks finds in Livingston?55 It does not seem to me so simple, and I will explain why. Fowler eventually falls into life. Fowler not only shows his cards but also plays them. He recognizes, by the novel’s conclusion, his similarity to Pyle.

“Must I too,” he wonders, “have my foot thrust in the mess of life before I saw the pain

(177)?” Fowler is always as engagé as Pyle. Furthermore, Greene makes his interestedness palpable. This recognition—and his subsequent immersion in life—anchor

Fowler’s so-called detached perspective to a particular viewpoint and underline the impossibility of achieving a pure cosmopolitan outlook. Attachments, loyalties, identities: no matter how constructed, they shape one’s experience of, and responses to, a world held in common. When not interrogated, the world citizen assumes, by default, the privileges and prerogatives of white European men. Greene makes Fowler’s embroilment clear, and, in this way, he succeeds where Livingston may not: he doubts the truth, and privilege, of his narrator’s vision. hooks notes that, by “shooting the film using a conventional approach to documentary and not making clear how her standpoint breaks with tradition, Livingston assumes a privileged location of ‘innocence.’ She is represented … as the tender-hearted, mild-mannered, virtuous white woman daring to venture into a contemporary ‘heart of darkness’ to bring back knowledge of the natives”

55 One might, in light of A Burnt-Out Case, also ask: doesn’t Querry use black Deo Gratias for his own spiritual enlightenment? 215

(151). Greene brings his narrator’s position into focus. Fowler’s implication in the plot absolves him of any such innocence, for there is blood in his vision and, by the novel’s end, on his hands: not to mention the Vietnamese woman in his bed.

The Quiet American leaves unresolved the degree of Fowler’s culpability, although by the novel’s conclusion he yearns “for someone to whom [he] could say that

[he] was sorry” (180). Fowler wants Pyle out of the picture to protect his hold on Phuong, and he knows it. The moments leading up to the text’s end highlight this guilt. While waiting for news and therefore confirmation of Pyle’s death, he wanders into a movie theater. In the midst of escapism,

Errol Flynn, or it may have been Tyrone Power (I don’t know how to distinguish them in tights), swung on ropes and leapt from balconies and rode bareback into technicolour dawns. He rescued a girl and killed his enemy and led a charmed life. It was what they call a film for boys, but the sight of Oedipus emerging with his bleeding eyeballs from the palace at Thebes would surely give a better training for life today. No life is charmed. Luck had been with Pyle at Phat Diem and on the road from Tanyin, but luck doesn’t last, and they had two hours to see that no charm worked. (173-174)

The contrast between Robin Hood’s fantasy and Oedipus Rex’s tragedy frames the final scene. This “film for boys” imagines a world in which the poor receive justice. Heroes get their girls, and they engage in dutiful redistribution of resources. Despite the incriminating tights, masculinity triumphs in its blessed masquerade.

Still, Fowler observes that, today, “no life is charmed.” Tragedy captures the turmoil and suffering of a fated, determined world. TV-set, One’s eyes bleed with senseless violence. The Oedipus Complex ensures, furthermore, that the rescued girl is a repetition of previous objects lost and found: the mother recast, repurposed. The mystery that structures romance has had the harsh light on scientific modernity cast upon it. The

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days of “simplicity” in “happiness or … misery”—of placing one’s “hand in a girl’s lap”—have vanished (ibid). The curtain has risen against the performance. And yet, The

Quiet American ends not with tragedy—it begins, after all, with death—but as comedy, with a marriage. Though not in the Chalet or within the House of Five Hundred Women, the novel gets its happy ending. The Quiet American concludes with Phuong back at the flat and Fowler’s wife filing for divorce.

With Pyle dead and a broken home, Fowler can now marry Phuong. She finds, in this moment, the happiness that the film she has just viewed had denied her. In the novel’s last scene, Phuong recounts this tragic film’s plot to Fowler. A woman ends up in jail during the French Revolution; “her lover tried to rescue her from prison,” Phuong relates. “He smuggled in boy’s clothes and a man’s cap like the one the gaoler wore, but just as she was passing the gate all her hair fell down and they called out “Une aristrocrate, une aristrocrate” (179). In drag, the woman reaches the gate; “just as she was passing,” truth intervenes, and her identity is called forth from the guards. She is an aristocrat, a woman: off with her head! Phuong believes this “was a mistake in the story.

They ought to have let her escape. Then they would both have made a lot of money … and gone abroad to America—or England” (ibid). The film should have allowed the lovers their prosperous escape to freedom. Phuong, however, mistakenly locates the fantasy in the romance plot, for, if we follow Butler’s logic, the true fantasy is that there is a true identity to have found out. A deeper fiction of gender identity precedes and makes possible the love affair. The slip of the hair, the revelation of class: the stability and knowableness of these markers forge the deepest fantasy in this film. The Quiet

American’s drag slays precisely this fantasy, because life is, at base, a senseless,

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indeterminate comedy. Fowler longs for someone to whom he might express regret, but that is because his secularism keeps him locked in the drama of life’s meaningful, and knowable, tragedy. His author refuses it.

V. In Conclusion: The Miracle of Love

The desire to know and to stabilize trades in violence. With drag performance,

The Quiet American articulates an ideal of critical cosmopolitanism, one that religion supports. Drag reveals the overlap between Pyle and Fowler and thereby interrogates the ethics of the distanced spectator’s vision. Greene’s protagonists remove themselves from identity’s naturalness and action’s impulsiveness, but The Quiet American insists that the privilege that attends aloof inaction must not remain unstudied. Indeed, the novel’s resultant embrace of interconnectivity’s mess foregrounds claims of social justice, for the cosmopolitan is not a cultural relativist. As Appiah makes clear, the global citizen pursues goodness and justice but does not believe that any one group or particular person possesses it. In this concluding section, I explore cosmopolitanism’s embrace of universality plus difference, especially as it pertains to Greene’s Catholic cosmopolitanism. Just as cosmopolitan commitments to fallibility and pluralism temper

Greene’s Catholicism so too does his faith inject difference into cosmopolitanism’s universalist base. In this way, Greene imagines a Catholicism amenable to the Second

Vatican Council’s reforms and a politics attuned to a postcolonial milieu. Religious difference here resonates and, as such, I read the miracles in The End of the Affair not as a display of overanxious piety but instead as a queer intrusion into a naturalized secularism.

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Literary critics have long recognized Greene as a novelist with global reach and ambition (Gasiorek 24). In this tradition, Karen Steigman has recently investigated The

Quiet American’s relevance to conversations involving U.S. nationalism post-9/11. She highlights the extent to which “global literacy is primarily concerned with national security” (4). The point sticks, since it situates Greene’s novel in a politicized debate surrounding the internationalization of higher education (2). It is surprising, however, that consideration of Greene as a cosmopolitan thinker is absent from internationally focused criticism of his work. At his career’s midpoint, Greene’s narrators assume the detached and cynical position more or less emblematic of the cosmopolitan. These characters reflect, furthermore, on their creator. “For Greene,” Andrzej Gasiorek avers, “the novelist’s job was to sympathize with dissidence from all quarters, and this precluded the writing of literature that sided with any particular political outlook. Greene’s participation in a literature of commitment was always going to be unlikely, but this does not mean that he refused to deal with social concerns” (23). Greene approaches social concerns with suspicion and hesitation but not with apolitical avoidance. He instead engages with them in the vein of the critical cosmopolitan, the one Walkowitz anchors in literary modernism. Greene’s protagonists do not presume to know, and this prudent humility brings to his fiction what Steigman describes as a “strategic attention to ‘reading the other’ that cannot be organized in advance” (21). Greene implements a strategic disidentification, one that embroils him in the master plot.

The Quiet American’s progression from impartiality to embroilment pinpoints

Greene as a critical, rather than straight-up moral, cosmopolitan. He analyzes power and privilege through a strategy of disidentification, and this analysis lends to his work a

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political valence. Muñoz insists, after all, that disidentification is not an “apolitical middle ground” between assimilation and refusal (18); rather, it expresses a global political analysis “within the flux of discourse and power” (19). In this sense, Greene approaches what Andrew Dobson describes as “thick cosmopolitanism,” where the “ties that bind are not […] best conceived in terms of the thin skein of common humanity, but of chains of cause and effect that prompt obligations of justice rather than sympathy, pity, or beneficence” (178). For Dobson, the recognition of interconnection at global citizenship’s heart must rest on the demands of justice rather than the empathy evoked from a common humanity. Not only does sympathy reek of “self, self, self,” but it also cloaks the culpability of the one benefitting by another’s suffering. Involved and interwoven, Fowler enters into the morass and takes a side. He accepts (some) responsibility, and, in so doing, he implicates Western readers in Vietnam’s carnage.

Instead of a diffuse sympathizing, The Quiet American calls for justice on a global scale: for to do justice is to atone for one’s implication in the system that benefits him.

A critical commitment to justice thus comes to color Greene’s Catholic, agnostic vision. Appiah describes this cosmopolitan pledge, in a slogan, as “universality plus difference” (EGC 92). This maxim claims a common humanity and certain joint aspirations, but it also insists on diversity’s place in human experience. “To insist on universality,” Appiah enjoins, “is only to say that every human being has certain minimum entitlements—many of them expressed in the vocabulary of human rights; and that it is also the obligation of every human being to do his or her fair share in making sure that everybody gets what they are entitled to” (EGC 94-95). The world citizen appreciates the boundaries to any one clan’s knowledge and metaphysics; he accepts and

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celebrates pluralism, since it provides hints for future flourishing. In hazarding moral judgments, the cosmopolitan will ask—“Am I doing my fair share to make sure everyone has the chance at the dignified human existence that we are all entitled to?”—and do something about it, if not (EGC 95). This dedication to universality plus difference,

Appiah continues, “means that cosmopolitans have two kinds of enemies: those who deny the legitimacy of university and those who deny the legitimacy of difference “(EGC

94). In short, he will run into trouble with both cultural relativists and religious fundamentalists.

Of course, Greene himself runs into trouble with fundamentalists and relativists, as he navigates the demands of Catholic orthodoxy and the allure of postmodern permissiveness. Again, it seems to me essential to emphasize how cosmopolitanism reflects the mores animating Greene’s Christian humanism. Pico Iyer suggests that the

“only sins in the Greene universe are hypocrisy and putting a theory—even a religion— before a human being” (34). Greene remains devoted to the individual and her humanity, and “his novels are unreliable gospels for those who can’t be sure of a thing” (Iyer 139).

In this vein, Iyer notes that the “people he most distrusted in his books were the one who seemed most sure of themselves” (161). This distrust extends to both Catholics and

Marxists, because the human condition demands humility and forgiveness. Still, forgiveness and humility are not enough. Greene’s sense of the universal—the right of every human being to live a dignified life—animates his pursuit of social justice, and it requires judgment and reconciliation. This pursuit extends to his cosmopolitan outsider, who must probe his difference and privilege. Human beings must work to ensure that the good life extends to all human creatures, without defining the shape or character of that

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life in advance. As Greene argues, the storyteller’s task is “to act as the devil’s advocate, to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of state approval” (qtd in DeVitis 10). One must move out into the world and remember those forgotten. This solidarity with the outsider infuses Greene’s fiction, and it evokes a tellingly queer sensibility.56

This solidarity proves especially rare in a world in which everyone wants to be normal. Back in the tower, Pyle confesses to Fowler that he’s “never had a girl,” at least not “what you’d call a real experience” (93). He blushes immediately. “You don’t think there’s anything wrong with me,” he pleads. “It doesn’t mean I don’t need it, Thomas, like everybody else. I’m not—odd” (94). Pyle promises that normalcy has knighted him and dismisses the queer possibility. He has had some experience, just not of True Love.

Fowler rejects this narrative. “Not one of us needs it as much as we say,” Fowler swears; on the contrary, one “starts promiscuous and ends like one’s grandfather, faithful to one woman” (ibid). Pyle worries that it is “pretty naïve to start that way,” but, again, Fowler rebuts him. The sole defense Pyle can offer for this naivety is that “[i]t’s not in the

Kinsey Report” (ibid). Here, Pyle betrays his desire for predictability. He wants to find himself reflected in the statistician’s report and refuses undocumented freedom. Although not as instinctively adverse to the queer, Fowler flees the unpredictable as well. He leaves the woman who has offered him his “deepest sexual experience” (ibid), because “I thought I saw her changing …. I don’t know if she really was, but I couldn’t bear the uncertainty any longer. I ran towards the finish just like a coward runs toward the enemy

56 In Graham Greene: The Enemy Within (1994), Michael Shelden proposes that Greene practiced an idiosyncratic version of bisexuality and, while in Anacapri, “Greene often had Italian boys staying with him …. Most of them appeared to be between the ages of fourteen and sixteen” (70). Greene’s sexuality is, importantly, contested, although Shelden is right to note homoeroticism’s significance in his fiction (65). 222

and wins a medal. I wanted to get death over” (95). The quest for permanence and solidity brings both Fowler and Pyle to Indochina. They seek the secure and comprehensible.

The injection of faith into a rationalist universe retains a queer stain. Joseph

Hynes has argued that Greene wanted, in a text like The End of the Affair, “to present a novel in the realistic tradition which would make plain or strongly urge the reality of

God’s becoming the crucial fact of life for some characters who appear indifferent to such a possibility, or who scoff at or resist any such notion” (234). In short, Greene attempts to introduce the uncertain and unknowable into a society obsessed with their abilities to predict and to contain. As Greene poses the supernatural against the natural, the religious blends with the queer. It emerges as “odd,” as unnatural, as against nature.

The miracles in the final book of The End of the Affair echo this queer presence, as they interrupt the normal flow of events and bring Bendrix and Henry closer together. Not for nothing does this book open with the sentence—“I stayed the night with Henry”—and not for nothing does that same opening paragraph end with the addition, “he begged me to” (110). I am not suggesting that Henry and Bendrix engage in a homoerotic tryst with

Sarah, in the guest room, dead stiff; instead, I am offering an explanation for why the

“house feels very queer these days” (138). Catholicism infuses the final book, and it is odd. As Sarah’s miracles permeate the conclusion, religion makes its presence felt as a queer possibility inherent in all things.

To dismiss the miracles as an “odd coincidence” (156), as the rationalist critic will, is to undersell their challenge, and threat, to the dominant secular paradigm. It is to simplify Greene’s political critique of economic globalization. Miracles work, after all,

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contra naturam, against the laws and norms of the natural. Religious wonder enters into the novel to upset the secular norm and to destroy the right and wrongs upholding the white-picket fences of suburbia. It demolishes. It destroys. Frances Restuccia has noted how The End of the Affair’s love “in the beyond” eradicates identity and agency, since “it is the failure of Love that produces subjectivity, and Love’s ‘success’ that leads to subjective obliteration” (382). This love transcends the material and makes light of what most consider the spiritual.

For Greene, religion enables a way of escape from normalcy, from the expected.

It protects freedom. “The saints,” Bendrix writes, “in a sense create themselves. They come alive. They are capable of the surprising act or word. They stand outside the plot, unconditioned by it” (EA 154). Only the saint stands external to the expected and observes the world judiciously; the rest remain “inextricably bound to the plot” (ibid).

The desire to detach from the morass is a dangerous though necessary one, and Greene hints, throughout his work, that religion’s discipline enables one to achieve a moderate amount of distance and degrees of freedom. He can neither know fully nor claim to have, by virtue of his Catholic conversion, access to the final truth. He must acknowledge the extent to which he is written into the plot as he also must hope, miraculously, to glimpses of a vision beyond it. Sarah provides a hint. As Greene’s description makes evident, the human capacity to break free from those discourses that contain and predict—those ubiquitous scripts and melodramatic scenes—is rightly termed saintly. He recognizes his conditioning and limitation but longs for a reprieve form the normative and the bare. For this reason, I believe critical cosmopolitanism captures Greene’s moral philosophy as it

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also helps explain why he increasingly describes himself as an “agnostic Catholic.”57 He has faith despite the plot.

Where does this miraculous conception leave one at The End of the Affair? While the disappearance of the rationalist Smythe’s scar is a miracle in the traditional sense, I claim that the truly modern miracle consists in the subtle shift the novel’s coincidences engender in Bendrix’s character. For, after learning about Smythe’s scar, Bendrix fears a new stream of miracles will flood the “pious” papers: “I could imagine the headlines, and the headlines would produce more ‘miracles.’ We had to kill this thing at the start” (EA

158). This anger leads him to refuse the possibility of Sarah’s metaphysical goodness: “I thought, in the morning I’ll ring up the doctor and ask him whether a faith cure is possible. And then I thought, better not; so long as one doesn’t know, one can imagine innumerable cures … I put my hand on Henry’s arm and held it there; I had to be strong for both of us now” (EA 160). Motivated in part by his reflections on Sarah’s creepy

“coincidences,” Bendrix places his hand on Henry’s arm, since from now on he will be

“strong for both.” In this moment, Bendrix moves beyond his own self-centeredness to think of another’s pain. This moment is the text’s miracle. Egoistical and hateful Bendrix gives Henry touch, the pleasure of an evening’s walk. This peace, Henry reveals, he looks forward to: “these evening walks of ours … They are the only things I do look forward to” (ibid). Bendrix has proven himself jealous and self-centered throughout the novel.

And yet, in this climactic conclusion, he gives, miraculously escaping his own plot. He has “become nearly human enough to think of another person’s trouble” (EA 31).

57 In August 1989, Greene writes to a Jesuit priest: “I would call myself at the worst a Catholic agnostic” (409). In reference to the Rushdie affair, he describes himself, in the same year, as “a very doubting Catholic” (407). 225

Bendrix revolts against his own secular self-interest. The veracity of Sarah’s miracles proves beside the point.

* * *

Catholicism reminds Greene of that which exceeds human comprehension as it also signals the deep ontological differences that circulate among human beings. Greene confesses his own similarity to Fowler (WE 255), of course, and Fowler’s character verifies, if anything, the failure of objective knowledge. Any human declaration of an unchanging truth is an idol or worse. Fowler’s aversion to reverent belief in an unchanging God and his untenable wish for detachment flow from this recognition; his cynical remarks echo cosmopolitanism’s skepticism, in turn, and make the case for its pluralism. Human beings never see themselves or their motives clearly. They will never grasp truth fully. Therefore, the cosmopolitan displays genuine interest in the myriad approaches human beings take to living a just and meaningful life. No one viewpoint wins out, and certainty is a mirage. Greene explores these themes in The End of the Affair and A Burnt-Out Case, further suggesting a common ethical pursuit. Graham Greene maintains, as the Catholic Church modernizes, a desire for goodness and upholds the paradox of universality plus difference. This cosmopolitan intuition inspires his troubled searching and shapes his modern, yet blessedly Catholic, faith.

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CONTRA NATURAM Iris Murdoch’s Streams of Conscience

Graham Greene criticizes the modernist novel for its failure to represent a visible, livable reality. With the death of Henry James, Greene insists that hard truth has dissolved into meager, modernist experimentation; now, “the characters of such distinguished writers as

Mrs Virginia Woolf and Mr E. M. Forster wandered like cardboard symbols through a world that was paper thin” (91). This thinness Greene attributes to the novel’s loss of “the religious sense” (ibid). Without animating religiosity, he argues, characters merely mosey about in a realm of one’s own; there is no transcendent signifier against which to measure their success or failure. The modernist novel thus records subjective impressions—and does so quite beautifully—but dissociates these streams of consciousness from moral evaluation. For this reason, “we protest: Regent Street too has a right to exist; it is more real than Mrs Dalloway,” heavier than the “current of air … touch of scent … sparkle of glass” to which Woolf has reduced her macadam (Greene 92). With its intense subjectivism, high modernism has lost touch with a shared world. In this criticism,

Greene does not stand alone. From a post-Holocaust view, goodness seems irreducibly connected to the real perception of others. The realistic pursuit of such vision drives Iris

Murdoch’s work as both a novelist and a moral philosopher. Like Graham Greene,

Murdoch links an encounter with reality to religion; she will depart from Greene, however, in her revaluation of the subject’s inner life. In what follows, I argue Murdoch’s stream-of-conscience approach clarifies religion’s centrality within late modernism’s moral aesthetic.

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Anxiously Graham Greene argues for an encounter with the real world, a reality that exists beyond any one person’s perception. There is, of course, the historical impetus. “Mrs Dalloway walking down Regent Street was aware of the glitter of shop windows, the smooth passage of cars, the conversation of shoppers,” Greene writes, significantly enough, in 1945, “but it was only a Regent Street seen by Mrs Dalloway that was conveyed to the reader: a charming whimsical rather sentimental prose poem was what Regent Street had become” (92). Greene implies that a solipsistic, “whimsical rather sentimental prose poem” is ill-equipped to catalogue the horrors of the Second World

War. To a crisp, down-to-earth description of Regent Street the post-war British novel must promptly turn, and this chapter maps Iris Murdoch’s endeavor to seize the reality after which Greene pines.58

Still, literary critics too often read Murdoch’s novels as if they wholeheartedly echoed Greene, as if they too reflected a realist’s rebuff of “Mrs. Dalloway walking down

Regent Street.” I will argue, however, that Murdoch is deeply interested in Mrs.

Dalloway’s “layers of personality” (Greene 91), because morality happens within these folds. Critics undervalue Murdoch’s formal innovation when they position her within a realist trajectory. They also underplay the importance of her queer critique. Murdoch’s investigation of characters’ inner streams of conscience reveals not only the extent to which value permeates cognition but also how the good life necessitates that one perceives against nature. Murdoch’s religious subject is, decidedly, a queer one. The saint discerns, disciplines, and loves in opposition to the natural order. He attends to the

Good, on Murdoch’s count, and this attention is decidedly unnatural. Inexorably queer

58 Judith Wilt’s “The Cave of the Body: The Heart of the Matter” clearly articulates Greene’s criticism of Woolf. 228

tendencies season Murdoch’s revision of high modernism, because to love the Good is to desire the aberrant eclipse of self.

Through an analysis of The Bell (1958), I will show how Iris Murdoch’s ethics of vision informs her transfiguration of high modernist technique. I claim that Murdoch’s narrative strategies place her in direct, though critical, relation to her modernist forbearers. In her formal adaptation, Murdoch both revises the modernist novel and theorizes a distinctly ethical mode of human subjectivity. Although many critics place

Murdoch’s work alongside the nineteenth-century realists, I will insist that Murdoch’s fiction does not resurrect the Victorian novel. Instead, Murdoch inhabits what Marina

Mackay has identified as an “amphibious” position between modernism and postmodernism (MT 506). My argument dilates upon this “amphibious” location in order to reveal how religion anchors its moral agency and inspires its aesthetic. Religion, for

Murdoch, trains human consciousness to face a reality external to the individual as it also witnesses the radical uniqueness of that person. This paradoxical subjectivity—that of a decentered yet unique individual—forms the root of what Maria Antonaccio calls

Murdoch’s “reflexive realism” (PH 116). This realism is not photographic; rather, it balances the psyche’s inner life with a truth that exceeds its anxious tentacles. The real world exists exterior to the self in Murdoch’s texts but only ever reaches the ethical agent through the medium of her unique consciousness. Murdoch’s formal strategies thus capture the subject’s inner life as it morally processes outer reality.

With these streams of conscience, I propose Murdoch fuses modernism and realism to chart her own stylistic path. In this fusion, Murdoch’s ethics of vision touches her stream-of-conscience method. Modernism tenders realism; metaphysics imbeds

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fiction. Murdoch transforms rather than trashes literary modernism. Her modernism thus resides largely at the level of her technique, and, when scholars read Murdoch as a realist, they overlook the most ethically relevant and tellingly modernist elements to her fiction.

To make this relation lucid, I first examine how religion informs Murdoch’s philosophy of conscience. Next, I reassess Murdoch’s symbolism, for it is around symbols that

Murdoch most notably mixes realism and modernism: the symbol is, after all, a real object that is subjectively perceived. With this relation sketched, I focus then on one symbol in particular—the mechanical cultivator—to show how concrete things morally impact subject’s inner lives. The mechanical cultivator’s decidedly queer eroticism also broaches important questions regarding sexuality’s relationship to consciousness—which is to say of eros and its relation to the Good. The argument closes with speculation on the politics of Murdoch’s position within twentieth-century letters.

I. Demythologization: Religion, Consciousness, and the Good

Murdoch’s late modernist revision emerges from her ethical critique, a criticism embedded in religious experience. Murdoch’s use of religion bears similarity to “the religious sense” that Greene attributes to Henry James, but, for Murdoch, it is not religion for tradition’s sake. Instead, religion re-links the self to a radically unknowable, twofold otherness; this ineffable alterity simmers both inside and outside the human subject. With this godless theology, Murdoch departs from high modernism’s earliest Catholic critics first to articulate and second to reassess the moral dimensions of human consciousness.

Literary modernism does not fail in its intense focus on inner life, as Greene’s criticism implies; modernism simply neglects, on Murdoch’s take, the ethical foundation of

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subjective experience. Murdoch’s late modernism attempts to redress this ethical oversight through its representation and clarification of human consciousness’ moral function. Religion is central to this clarification, as The Bell’s symbolism makes plain, since it bespeaks awareness’ irreparable relation to the Good. The Good informs as it also makes possible one’s perception of reality. The real world, then, is not objective or subjective, purely; it is not external or internal, completely. Reality is, rather, that toward which the inescapably moral act of perception moves.

Most scholars agree that The Bell is Iris Murdoch’s most significant early work.59

“The Bell,” Frank Baldanza avers, “is a rich culmination of all the promises inherent in

Miss Murdoch’s earlier novels; in being superior to any one of them taken individually, it also represents … the peak of Miss Murdoch’s early phase and one of her enduring masterpieces” (70). While she herself never claimed masterpiece status, Murdoch believed that The Bell was a “lucky” novel. A.S. Byatt explains that, in The Bell,

“everything had come together, had worked. There is a harmony, a balance, the ideas are both powerful and incarnate” (I xvi). The text achieves this “incarnate” harmony, in part, through its rich characterization and patient attention to moral indecision. In the narrative,

Murdoch mixes her nascent moral philosophy with good, solid storytelling. The Bell is also, as Byatt is quick to note, Murdoch’s “first directly religious novel” (I xii). While religious stirrings and metaphysical maelstroms appear in each of Murdoch’s twenty-six novels, The Bell is Murdoch’s initial and arguably most comprehensive meditation on faith and the spiritual life. The novel’s religious tension pulls its many onto-theological

59 In addition to its artistic merit, some—like Patricia O’Connor—have argued that The Bell is Murdoch’s first “truly … philosophical novel” (274). According to O’Connor, The Bell articulates the philosophical impetus for loving attention more definitively than Under the Net’s early existentialist idea-play. 231

threads together. Each of the text’s characters wrestles with piquant questions of devout urgency, with equal measures of success and failure.

To appreciate Murdoch’s fictional and philosophical use of religion, it makes sense to begin with The Bell. At base, The Bell traces a lay religious community’s effort to live the good life. In an Abbey’s shadow, Murdoch drops two innocents—Toby and

Dora—who slowly interrupt Imber Court’s stasis. Child-wife Dora Greenfield leaves her possessive husband only to return to him at Imber, where he conducts archival research on medieval manuscripts. Green-apprentice Toby Gashe plans to spend the summer in search of God only to leave for Oxford, “where he was due to go in October as an engineering student” (39). While Dora and Toby learn to enter adulthood, other characters—like Michael Meade—realize the almost inhuman difficulty of love. Michael, the community’s founder and leader, struggles with his own egoistic conflation of eroticism and spirituality; a yen for all-too-young acolytes only compounds this tendency.

Trouble looms. While Imber Court provides characters with a home away from home, it simultaneously proves impossible to escape the world as such. “Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed” (B 75); this botched escapism litters the landscape. Characters fall in and out of good, clean living almost as quickly as they fall feebly in love. Trouble remains.

All the same, the novel concludes with Dora’s brisk swim, in silky waters whose

“depths below affrighted her no longer” (295), and The Bell achieves its penetrative depth to a large extent through characters’ interactions with symbols. Not surprisingly,

Murdoch introduces objects’ import—and their thingy, symbolic weight—early in the

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text. On Dora’s first train journey to Imber Court, she overhears two men discussing the new bell. Both James Tayper Pace, a co-director of the alternative religious community, and Toby, the wide-eyed understudy, witness wholly the bell’s figurative import. While

Dora eavesdrops, James’s mini-sermon confirms that “symbols are important … Has it ever occurred to you,” James asks Toby, “that all symbols have a sacramental aspect? We do not live by bread alone” (14). James’s description of the symbol as sacrament attributes to the earthly object its heavenly meaning; the symbol’s interpreter lends to the mundane thing a connotation that transcends it. Human beings “do not live by bread alone,” because sometimes that bread is Christ’s broken body. In this particular case, the bell suggests a community’s restoration, its renewed strength and possibility. That this community has planned “a little ceremony, a sort of christening” only heightens the sense in which symbolization accrues sacramental meaning. This christening bespeaks the ways in which religious ritual and relic form as they also transform community and individual consciousness.

The Bell is, as its title clamors, a novel about the process of symbolization, the ways in which the anxious human creature layers his experience with ego-affirming meaning. Symbolic readings, and the things which particularly magnetize this energy, animate The Bell’s streams of conscience. The second section of this chapter will outline

Murdoch’s symbolic practices, but first, in order to fathom religion’s slippery salience in

The Bell, one must first delineate how Murdoch, as a moral philosopher, conceives of religious faith and practice. Her religiosity is, at the outset, less definitively political than the Anglo-Catholic modernists, more aggressively ethical. For Murdoch, religious practice necessarily implies moral assiduity, and it bears a puritanical stamp. “Religion,”

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Murdoch explains in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, “is a mode of belief in the unique sovereign place of goodness or virtue in human life” (426). It requires one to live with his attention oriented toward the Good, and the Good is rather iconoclastic.

Murdoch’s Platonism hence keeps her coolly distant from the Catholicism she otherwise admires.60 Still, Murdoch’s imageless religion decisively challenges the Anglo-

Catholicism of her midcentury peers.61

Murdoch’s emphasis on Good rather than God merits pause. With this Platonic term, she wishes to cleanse religion of its unhelpful images and icons. One of the least helpful religious images is, on her count, a personal God. Throughout her ethics,

Murdoch theorizes an imageless religion, what she also terms a Buddhist Christianity

(Miller 212). She links this purge to secularization, for modernity makes possible a more religious religion. “Any existing God would be less than God. An existent God would be an idol or a demon,” she explicates. “God does not and cannot exist. But what led us to conceive of him does exist and is constantly experienced and pictured” (MGM 508).

Influenced by Plato, Murdoch grounds this “constantly experienced” reality in the Good’s relationship to human cognition. As she memorably writes, “Good represents the reality of which God is the dream” (MGM 496). False pictures of divinity must go, but human beings remain religious. This play between God and Good demonstrates that religion, however godless, remains fundamentally tied to ethical discernment and right action. She recognizes spirituality’s tie to the subject’s the inner life.

60 Murdoch’s Oxford tutor, Donald MacKinnon, left an indubitable mark on her thinking. MacKinnon was “a passionate High Anglo-Catholic,” who labored restlessly to reunite philosophy and theology (Conradi I 123-26). 61 Warner Berthoff’s early take on Murdoch’s relation to Muriel Spark, for example, does not consider how their understanding of religion fundamentally differs. And yet, such a comparison would be of interest, especially to the extent that it would necessarily shed light on the theology behind their radically dissimilar narrative techniques. 234

According to Murdoch’s moral epistemology, human consciousness processes information with respect to the Good. Religion and consciousness share a striking, though critically underestimated, similarity: both orient the self toward perfection. For if “Good represents the reality of which God is the dream,” then Good, necessarily, “purifies the desire which seeks it” (MGM 496). As daily religious practices link one to a transcendent reality, human consciousness exists in direct and perpetual relation to virtue: one ought to see the world better. A mental picture can evoke the reality of a situation or distort it beyond recognition. A phrase like “the purification of consciousness” makes sense as a result: a perception can be more, or less, accurate. This value-laden experience of inner life, Murdoch assures, is quite ordinary, since some “cognitions are purer, truer, than others, one cannot separate cognition from some idea of truthfulness” (MGM 243). One may read a situation well; however, one can also imagine a situation in which anxiety disfigures observation. This insight remains indelibly connected to inner cognizance.

Philosopher Cora Diamond thus writes of Murdoch’s epistemology that, “in ordinary consciousness, in our desires, aversions, images, feelings, attachments and perceptions, values are at work, are being shaped and reshaped in ways which never lose their attachment to the common world but which are our own, and which give our awareness its own particular character” (103). Subjective interiority remains tied to value and perception.

The real world exists for Murdoch’s ethical agent only to the extent that she perceives it justly. This inner struggle to observe truthfully forms the good life’s challenge and foundation. The Good functions, in this manner, not only as a transcendent marker for Murdoch but also as a ground for the ordinary functioning of human

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cognition. The way in which one sees the world matters to the actions one takes within it; perfection supports, as it makes possible, perception. Murdoch thus argues that

“consciousness is a form of moral activity: what we attend to, how we attend, whether we attend” (MGM 167). Awareness is endless ethical discernment, a never-ending close- reading assignment. This engagement is the most basic sense in which the human animal is an ethical subject.

Consciousness ceaselessly struggles between good and better perceptions. Modes of sentience influence the ways in which one perceives the world. Inner ethical discernment therefore begins at a very basic level: “all awareness includes value as the

(versatile) agility to distinguish true from false” (MGM 221). It extends, however, to the most intricate and complex understanding; for instance, “we need the concept of consciousness to understand how morality is cognitive; how there is no ubiquitous gulf fixed between fact and value, intellect and will. Reflection on this concept enables us to display how deeply, subtly and in detail, values, the various qualities and grades between good and bad, ‘seep’ through our moment-to-moment experiences” (MGM 265). Value saturates one’s quotidian functioning. Reality thus presents itself to the human subject as an object in need of constant interpretation. There is no hard globe of fact separate from value (MGM 39), because to inhabit the earth is to perceive, interpret, judge conscientiously.

This effort, axiomatic to Murdoch’s moral philosophy, frames what I take to be

Metaphysics as a Guide to Moral’s central provocation: “can we really imagine morality without an intimate relation with consciousness as perceptions, feelings, streams of reflection” (222)? This question accomplishes two moves for Murdoch’s thought. First,

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following The Sovereignty of Good, it shifts ethical questions from the will to inner vision. Second, it links the ethical centrality of vision to streams of consciousness. If the first move is foundational, as many philosophers have noted, to Murdoch’s ethics,62 the latter is, I will insist, key to her metamorphosis of literary modernism. Morality’s irreducible fusion with “perceptions, feelings, stream of reflection” is precisely what I mean by the phrase “stream of conscience.” Murdoch synthesizes modernist stream-of- consciousness technique and ethical Platonism to produce her prose style. This narration has as its goal the elucidation of characters’ world-reading. It illuminates the moral consequence of a protagonist’s particular way of viewing the reality. Her narrative attempts to record the atoms not only as they fall upon human consciousness, à la Woolf, but also as they weigh down upon awareness as evaluative imperative.

This narrative shift from modernist stream of consciousness to late modernist stream of conscience mirrors in fiction Iris Murdoch’s prime contribution to twentieth- century philosophy: the move from the existentialist’s will to the mystic’s sight.63 Cora

Diamond cites this shift from volition to vision as philosophically groundbreaking (79), given that it puts pressure on analytical philosophy’s claim to disinterested objectivity.

Despite Murdoch’s training at both Oxford and Cambridge, this prodigal daughter believes ethics begins with one’s subjective merit-soaked vision: how one sees the world influences, if not effects, the action one thereafter takes. She grounds this ethical revision in a rereading of Plato’s allegory of the cave. She then uses the allegory to construct an

62 Maria Antonaccio’s Picturing the Human offers the most comprehensive account of Murdoch’s ethics of vision. Also see Martha Nussbaum’s thought-provoking assessment in “Love and Vision: Iris Murdoch on Eros and the Individual”; here she deftly distinguishes Murdochian love from Plato’s Greek and Dante’s Christian conceptions. 63 Iris Murdoch makes this distinction with respect to fiction in her influential essay, “Existentialists and Mystics.” 237

ethical argument in favor of what she calls “unselfing” (SG 86). This claim retains a

Buddhist sensibility despite its roots in Plato.

In The Sovereignty of Good, the moral life commences once one renounces the cavern’s shadows and ventures closer to light. The moral subject must see differently and reorient her vision. This pilgrimage is necessary because

By opening our eyes we do not necessarily see what confronts us. We are anxiety- ridden animals. Our minds are continually active, fabricating an anxious, usually self-preoccupied, often falsifying veil which partially conceals the world. Our states of consciousness differ in quality, our fantasies and reveries are not trivial and unimportant, they are profoundly connected with our energies and our ability to choose and act. And if quality of consciousness matters, then anything which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity and realism is to be connected with virtue. (SG 82)

One immediately notices the emphasis on consciousness as conscience. In this passage,

Murdoch shows how Plato allegorizes life’s central ethical imperative: to purify one’s consciousness of its falsifying egoism. One must learn to see the world clearly, which is to say less selfishly. This clarification jolts the ethical life into becoming. Selfish fantasy all too often adulterates the streams of our consciousness. One must disinfect subjective awareness.

Modern philosophy has tended to posit the will as ethics’ proper domain. With a turn to vision, Murdoch underscores morality’s spiritual dimension. “Religion,” she writes, “normally emphasizes states of mind as well as action, and regards states of mind as the genetic background of action: pureness of heart, meekness of spirit. Religion provides devices for the purification of states of mind” (SG 81). The religious subject cultivates habits of vision, mind, and body. Religious institutions are physical iterations of the endless psychic labors of human consciousness. One kneels. One memorizes. One

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prays. The clarification of one’s attentiveness through the extirpation of egoist fantasies calls to mind the sage’s religious practices for good reason: spiritual ascesis helps reorient the psyche toward truth.64 “We act rightly ‘when the time comes’ not out of strength of will but out of the quality of our usual attachments and with the kind of energy and discernment we have available,” Murdoch notes. “And to this the whole activity of consciousness is relevant” (SG 89). It is not volition but vision. It is not free will but disciplined awareness. Of course, one acts rightly when she has focused her entire attention on the Good. Prayer and rite help effect this refinement and openness to the world.

This psychic cleansing leads, paradoxically, to God’s dissolution. “Not only can we lose God, but if we are to retain Good, at some point,” Alan Jacobs reads Murdoch as claiming, “we must lose God” (4). Jacobs is correct: the good man demythologizes of necessity. When one concentrates on Good, deities disappear. Good transcends God, because when one attends to the idea of Good properly he unavoidably slaughters the ego-pleasing consolations of God the father figure. Murdoch argues, accordingly, that the war-weary twentieth century must empty its religiosity:

One may … say that religion involving supernatural beliefs (in a literal after-life etc.) was always partly a kind of illusion, and that we are now being forced by an inevitable sophistication to have a demythologised religion or none at all. In this time of deep change, it seems better to drop the old word ‘God’ with its intimations of an elsewhere, and of an omniscient spectator and responsive super- thou. Religion can exist without this western concept of a personal God, and does so in Buddhism and Hinduism. (MGM 431-432)

A “responsive super-thou” permits one to believe that the good-enough parent persists patiently laced among the constellations. This consoling false picture disfigures one’s

64 Maria Antonaccio’s recent A Philosophy to Live By examines Murdoch’s career-long emphasis on askesis (8). 239

perception of reality, though, and consequently blocks goodness. Murdoch thus rejects the personal God and moves instead toward Buddhism, which, as Anne Rowe points out,

“lends to her neo-theology … its lack of dogmatism[,] its demand for the destruction of the ego, and the fact that is not an ‘other-worldy’ religion” (146). Buddhism, like

Murdoch’s ethics of vision, takes as its foundation the “change of consciousness and its moral impact on the community” (Rowe 146). Murdoch incorporates this holy insight into The Bell’s investigation of community.

But being this good takes work. One endlessly labors to see the world better, to notice the bloated veins on the oak leaf, to attend to this migraine, that heartache: to view each as they are and not as one needs them to be. In his touchstone monograph, The Saint and the Artist, Peter Conradi rightly underscores that, within Murdoch’s fiction, “man is not innately rational or free. ‘Reason’ has to be earned, unendingly struggled for … there is in her work only ever the limited, very messy, imperfect and unperfectible task of love, and its failure. Society is not merely there outside us as a system of vulgar privations. Its nastiness begins in our heads” (21). Murdoch shows, throughout her oeuvre, how this

“nastiness begins in our head” with precise formal strategies. She narrates from within her characters’ living awareness to cast light on their external, contingent reality. Peter

Wolfe insists, therefore, that “Iris Murdoch has chosen the novel as her vehicle for philosophical expression because of its ability to convey various aspects of social reality

…. As a novelist, the stuff of her discipline is the individual minds of her characters” (5).

She approaches realism through the character’s conscience, “describing moral and political questions at their origin—the individual operating mind …. Her direct application of private commitment to particular situations, furthermore, rules out the

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constraints of determinism in the form of heredity, environment, or the will of the author and allows for the free flow of variegated life” (Wolfe 5). As Wolfe’s reflections make lucid, Murdoch’s narrative strategy remains linked to the preservation of human freedom as right vision.

This formal practice creates Murdoch’s realist revision of modernism. Maria

Antonaccio’s lucid explication of Murdoch’s ethics perhaps best captures the dynamic I see at work in her narrative form: “reflexive realism affirms the truth-status of moral claims by adopting a starting point internal to consciousness and looking for an objective standard through the medium of consciousness itself. That is, reflexive realists argue that the search for an objective standard of truth and value can only proceed by means of the first-person standpoint” (Antonaccio 119). Murdoch’s prose sits within each character’s consciousness and, from there, moves out into the world. Murdoch’s streams of conscience demonstrate that value permeates awareness. They subtly criticize, moreover, the ways in which high modernism misrepresents cognition. Any representation of consciousness will, on Murdoch’s count, necessarily involve ethics. With this assertion, I do not claim that the high-modernist protagonist never considers ethical questions in her stream of consciousness; rather, I believe scholars have overlooked this moral presence in favor of an ideal modernism which criticism has, all too often, represented as divorcing itself completely from an unfashionable bourgeois concern with morality.65 I will return to this critique at the end of the chapter. For now, suffice it to say that there are human limits to what can be made new, and Murdoch’s interest in consciousness and its thorny

65 Michael Bell’s “The Metaphysics of Modernism” explains that “the modernist period, in Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, was a turn not just against idealism, but against metaphysics as such” (19). This move separated fact from value in the analytical tradition as it also, more radically, undermined Western moral philosophy. 241

ethical dilemmas extends as it revises the formal innovations of Richardson, Proust, and

Woolf.66

II. “We are All Artists”: Of Symbols and Sacraments

Goodness is a sovereign moral concept, in part, because people differ one from another. There is a reality that exceeds subjective knowledge, but one remains bound to subjective experience all the same. The world appears different through other eyes. The good man, Murdoch boldly declares, “can literally see better … the selfish self- interestedly casual or callous man sees a different world from that which the careful scrupulous benevolent just man sees” (MGM 177). One needs a moral conception of consciousness to preserve the extant ways in which people and their alternatively colored perceptions diverge. Streams of conscience hence signify as they also defend the individual as such. “Our present moment, our experiences, our flow of consciousness, our indelible moral sense,” Murdoch wonders, “are not all these essentially linked together and do they not imply the individual” (MGM 153)? As a novelist, Murdoch grounds the individual in such a unique perception of reality. She throws the character’s distinctness into relief, moreover, through her use of symbols. People view the same object differently. This disparity in vision conceals as much as it reveals, but it manifests, all the same, a distinctly Murdochian subjectivity. This section builds on my account of

Murdoch’s ethics to weld her godless religiosity to her fictive use of symbols.

The interaction between symbols and characters’ imaginations grounds my argument for The Bell’s late modernism. In this regard, Dora’s psyche proves essential to

66 But perhaps not Joyce … he is, Martha Nussbaum argues, too Aristotelian for a goody-good Platonist like Murdoch (51). 242

how Murdoch imagines the merger of high modernism and realism. Indeed, the novel engages realism and modernism to produce something akin to what Frank Baldanza terms

Murdoch’s “transcendental realism” (21). Critics often label Murdoch a realist writer and then criticize her fiction, as Harold Bloom does in his introduction to a critical study of her work, for its lack of realism.67 Baldanza insists, though, that the “eruption of the unexpected” in Murdoch’s novels “is a testament to the richness of reality, and it is not an antireal element” (21). Within Murdoch’s investigation of the unconscious mind—its surrealism, its eroticism—realism mixes with the alienated protagonist-centered weltanschauung of the modernist text.

In light of this account, I maintain that Dora Greenfield’s name suggests precisely this Murdochian cocktail. As a child-wife, Dora Greenfield clearly evokes Dickens’

David Copperfield; naturally, scholars have documented this allusion. As a woman in search of her clapper, though, Dora’s name also points toward Freud’s infamous hysteric; scholars have not registered this resonance, perhaps because it challenges Murdoch’s place within the literary critical landscape. Nonetheless I will suggest throughout this section that, to appreciate The Bell’s symbolic mediation, one must think Dickens with

Freud. Good realism requires that one plummet to the depths of a character’s stream of consciousness, because, as Freud notes, “hysterical symptoms are the expression of … secret and repressed wishes” (2). Real things in The Bell also “involve the revelation of those intimacies and the betrayal of those secrets” (ibid). As streams of conscience flow about the symbol, so too do the storied revelations of psychoanalysis revolve about the

67 While Bloom lauds Murdoch’s “gift for plotting, including a near-Shakespearean faculty for intricate double plots” (1), he believes “what worked for [George] Eliot cannot work so well for Murdoch” (5). Murdoch’s prose fails to “persuade us that her judgments as a necessary part of the story (ibid). 243

symptom. As such, one should not repress Freud’s presence in the text, for I would argue that The Bell’s mediation of symbols and sacrament remains indebted to how Freud’s understands the symptom.

In Dora, a famous case study of hysteria, Freud explains that the “hysterical symptom does not carry … meaning with it, but the meaning is lent to it, welded on to it, as it were; and in every instance the meaning can be a different one, according to the nature of the suppressed thoughts which are struggling for expression” (34). To value

Murdoch’s symbols as both sacrament and symptom is to retain the importance of the individual consciousness viewing and interpreting the object. The analyst only clears up the symptom, to paraphrase Freud, by looking for its unique psychic significance (ibid).

He must interpret the analysand’s cathected signs, and this analytical interpretation is as matchless as that perceiving subject. It is essential to underscore, however, that Murdoch does not simply endorse psychoanalysis. She instead troubles it. The sign, in Murdoch’s fiction, is a genuine object, a thing heavily embedded in the community’s daily life and self-perception. Murdoch’s symbolism, in fact, problematizes a repressive reading of The

Bell, one in which characters merely drown their sexy urges; rather, it seems to me that her characters actively produce their truths through dramas of confession and subjection, a point which literary critic Tammy Grimshaw deftly drives home (124). Meaning extends, in Foucault’s terms, as power. Signification sticks, like glue. This pictured danger, which signs elicit, proves of direct moral concern.

I find it useful to think of The Bell as a hysterical text redressed. It does not have a secret to expose or one to confess; instead, the novel documents the process by which the human subject learns to live well with “the intimacies of … psycho-sexual life” (Freud

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2). Murdoch rewrites Dora: An Analysis of Hysteria, I suspect, as a moral analysis of hysteria. In the end, Dora Greenfield learns to live with the “depths below” (295). They frighten no longer. She exorcizes this fear with a turn toward the world. She is a modified

Dora Copperfield, the child-wife who successfully learns to see the world with greater realism and justice. Dora’s embrace of realism echoes Murdoch’s belief that

“psychoanalysis generated self-concern, gave too abstract and crude a picture to account for human variousness, [and] left the spiritual,” as Conradi’s summation emphasizes, “out of account” (IM 494). Dora’s movement is, then, one from puerile self-centeredness to the real world that exceeds her conscious grasp.

Dora’s spiritual conversion in the National Gallery exemplifies this progression from sign as mere representatives of the ever-glamorous ego to art as “something real outside her self, which spoke to her kindly and yet in sovereign tones, something superior and good whose presence destroyed the dreary trance-like solipsism of her earlier mood”

(175). This moment of unselfing complicates as it exposes the narcissism inherent to psychoanalytic method. Freud writes in Dora that

There is a great deal of symbolism … in life, but as a rule we pass it by without heeding it. When I set myself the task of bringing to light what human beings keep hidden within them, not by the compelling power of hypnosis, but by observing what they say and what they show, I thought the task was a harder one than it really is. He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his finger-tips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore. And thus the task of making conscious the most hidden recesses of the mind is one which it is quite possible to accomplish. (69)

From Murdoch’s perspective, Freud forgets that there are limits to what can become a symptom of self. Freud’s allusion to Christ—“eyes to see and ears to hear”—cements the thrust of Murdoch’s critique: psychoanalysis places too much focus on the egoistic

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dramas of inner life. The real object must disrupt the ego’s imaginative fantasy. The world just might interrupt the projective fantasies of self, after all. Dora learns this lesson in the National Gallery; here “was something which her consciousness could not wretchedly devour, and by making it part of her fantasy make it worthless” (175). The humbling movement outward is key: Conradi notes how, for Murdoch, our “energy should … be turned outwards towards the quiddity of the world, not inwards, which tend[s] to reinforce habitual pattern” (IM 494). The National Gallery’s beautiful picture is good and real and, definitively, not Dora.

The experience of art destroys Dora’s natural tendency to picture herself alone.

False pictures interfere with one’s ability to see the world clearly, but art can show the world in vivid contrast. If one has not worked to purge the representation of its selfish gratification or self-concern, one will not see reality at all. One will only see the self, looking back. At this point, one must heed the thorniness of this interpretative dilemma: to discuss symbols in The Bell is already to participate in the very representational projection that Murdoch, as a moral philosopher, finds suspect. Murdoch posits that, as human beings, “we are all artists,” but with this recognition comes the very real dangers of fantasy: the “human mind is largely and naturally given to fantasy. Vanity (a prime human motive) is composed of fantasy. Neurotic or vengeful fantasies, erotic or guilty or fearful fantasies can imprison the mind, impeding new understanding, new interests and affections, possibilities of fruitful and virtuous action” (EI 90). Human beings constantly create consolation and attribute this signification to signs. The critic is, most likely, to find in the text his own image. Personal signification saturates the communal and psychic imaginaries.

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It is noteworthy, then, that James’s early discussion of symbols and sacraments immediately flames Dora’s own psyche. In this moment, Dora realizes, with her

“imagination … reeling,” that “Paul had actually existed during the months of their separation”; her mind recognizes the painful fact, for fact it is, “that he had not existed alone” (15). This description introduces readers to the human tendency, foundational to

Murdoch’s ethics, to employ the imagination to protect one’s egoism (SG 77). Indeed, readers immediately learn that “Dora had a powerful imagination, at least in what concerned herself. She had long since recognized it as dangerous, and her talent was to send it, as she could her memory, to sleep. Now thoroughly roused it tormented her with pictures” (15). Kind images console the ego with self-affirming narratives; real pictures torment. In order to avoid painful recognition, Dora sends her awareness to sleep. At the precise moment when “the pain at her heart became more extreme” (ibid), a “Red

Admiral butterfly” nets Dora’s attention. It is easier to focus on the butterfly “walking on the dusty floor” than to imagine Paul’s life after she leaves him (16). Dora’s desire to protect the butterfly mirrors her effort to cup her own psyche, to shield her awareness from the world’s excruciating realities.68 “Every other thought left her head” once she glimpses the butterfly (ibid), and the careful reader notices that, in order to protect her psyche and the butterfly in tandem, Dora lays the thought that “Paul had actually existed during the months of their separation” to rest.

At Imber Court, the bell lets each character, as Deborah Johnson notes, project sacramental, symbolic meaning onto its objectivity (84). The bell never means the same thing; it signifies as it preserves, in its I-am-rubber-you-are-glue way, the integrity of the

68 Ancient Greeks represented Psyche as a butterfly. The chapter’s fourth section explores Psyche’s import to the novel fully, but it’s important to note the butterfly’s presence in the National Gallery picture as well. 247

individual viewer. An analogous movement occurs outside the text, too, as readers coat the bell with their own consolatory symbolizations. The symbolic object never denotes without muddle, because people are diverse. Symbols function, inside and outside the text, as an occasion for and provocation of streams of conscience. While I have suggested the bell speaks openly to the novel’s interest in community, critics wrestle endlessly to pin down the bell’s ultimate meaning. G.S. Fraser describes the bell as an “emblem of a lost order and faith” (48). A.S Byatt puts pressure on Fraser’s aboveboard assessment and notes how the bell is also, “through its history, associated with violent and disruptive passion, with sin and confession” (DF 83). Dorothy Winsor extends this repressive hypothesis and argues that the “old bell … is a symbol of forces which are potentially transformable but which the inhabitants of Imber Court have denied and buried” (150).

Critics realize the bell is a momentous emblem, yet it seems impossible to say just what the sign means. This opacity lays, I maintain, the foundation for Murdoch’s larger project. Her interest as a philosopher and novelist lies not in what the symbol means but in how it means. There is a sacrament to this symptom.

A careful examination of the novel’s dissonant symbolism enables one, I argue, to account for her modernist-realist hybridity. Symbols depend upon the imaginative capacity, for better and for worse, as the subject’s emotional residue sticks to them.69

Such stream of conscience is what marks humankind as an artistic and moral species.

Nevertheless, the ego is very likely to interpret a sign for vanity’s sake, as Dora and

Michael do repeatedly. A symbol all too often signifies the very thing its reader needs to

69 In her first published work, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, Murdoch discusses the importance of le visqueux to Sartre’s gluey conception of human consciousness (91). I think readers feel Sartre’s influence in The Bell, as signification becomes stuck to the objects characters uniquely and commonly perceive. She draws an ethics from this observation. 248

satisfy his own egoism. Murdoch accuses Freudian psychoanalysts of precisely this sin

(SG 26). They interpret symptoms in such a subject-centered way that their readings become symptomatic of their own personal egoistic desires and fears. This danger—one the literary critic and psychoanalyst share in common—does not, however, demand that one ignore the novel’s symbols or stipulate that one refrain from literary analysis. Not only is this abstention impossible—human beings perceive and interpret, ceaselessly—it is also to underestimate the scope of The Bell’s ethical vision. The Bell trains its readers to interpret more efficaciously, less self-centeredly. The text invites one to see the planet’s quiddity carefully. To this end, the remainder of this chapter focuses on one symbol in particular—the mechanical cultivator—and argues that the instrument condenses Murdoch’s early thinking on eros and its vital role in moral perception.

III. “That Gaily Coloured Toy”: The Bell’s Cultivating Intimacies

Harold Bloom ranks Iris Murdoch, as a student of Eros, just below Proust and

Freud.70 Murdoch intuits the ways in which sex infuses the psyche with energy; she also notes the myriad ways in which erotic fantasy clouds right vision. The Bell’s revision of modernism, then, is one that takes seriously eroticism’s moral charge. This ethical analysis of amorphous eroticism not only challenges the amoral representation of consciousness furthered by many modernist scholars but also refuses the reduction of human sexuality to, in Eve Sedgwick’s fabulous formulation, “the bare choreographies of procreation” (29). For Murdoch, sexual desire—in its glorious, thwarted tangle— infuses the very manner in which one sees the world. This insight connects sex to moral

70 Bloom first makes this comparison in his 1986 New York Times review of Murdoch’s The Good Apprentice. 249

consciousness: a queer-modernist merger. In this section, I make the case that the mechanical cultivator, as symptomatic symbol, functions to concretize Murdoch’s queer and ethically late modernism. Furthermore, I use this layered object to interrogate two problematic tendencies within contemporary Murdoch scholarship. These two critical interventions—one modernist, the other queer—urge scholars, ultimately, to reassess

Murdoch’s place within modern literature.

First, the cultivator will exhume Murdoch’s buried relationship to literary modernism. As Barbara Stevens Heusel has documented, most literary critics seek to gauge “how well her novels fit into the realistic tradition” and to determine just “what she means when she argues that realism is the style that best captures the individuality of human beings” (98). One wonders, all the same, just how Murdoch’s particular realism captures “the individuality of human beings,” just what critics lose when they make her novels “fit into the realistic tradition.” Bran Nicol has argued, in fact, that Murdoch’s realism is a “realism done to excess” and thus a sort of improvised postmodernism

(MMR 25). Murdoch’s dedication to meta-narratives—and metaphysics—makes her, I contend, an uncomfortable postmodernist. While Murdoch criticizes the modernist novel— notably in her oft-cited essay, “Against Dryness”—one mistakenly isolates, as

The Bell shows, Murdoch entirely from the modernist tradition. Her picture of human consciousness takes much, I will illustrate, from the modernist break with Mr. Bennett.

She is not a realist or postmodernist, on my view, but a late modernist.

My second intervention concerns more recent developments in Murdoch scholarship. Critics have long recognized the ubiquity of homosexual characters and homoerotic themes in Murdoch’s work, but I contend throughout this chapter that

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Murdoch makes a significant contribution to queer theory, one that exceeds her political advocacy for lesbian and gay rights.71 Given that her writing career begins before the legalization of homosexuality in England, the prevalence of a queer presence merits pause.72 Indeed, Peter Conradi claims that “it is a part of her unnoticed, unsung courage that she deals always with homosexuality as an unremarkable, general feature of the human scene (SA 376). Critics have not, however, illuminated the ways in which queerness actively shapes her ethical vision. Murdoch is a queer theorist of the deepest dye, although few scholars diagnose her as such. I suspect this occlusion has something to do with Murdoch’s obsession with Good, as many queer-identified folks feel the need to distance themselves from right behavior’s shackles. Indeed, W.S. Hampl argues that

Murdoch moralistically extracts the sex from her homosexuality, prudishly desexualizing her characters (659). It is a gaffe, though, to dismiss Murdoch’s contribution to queerness on account of her goodness. This dismissal dims the insights she might proffer to queer scholarship and, most importantly, to queer ethics.

To isolate the modernist from the queer critique is already to misrepresent their intertwined import: for, on my reading of The Bell, Murdoch’s engagement with and revision of high modernism remains directly related to her queer investments. These erotic energies permeate the psyche and pervade vision. The mechanical cultivator, I propose, objectifies this awareness. For this reason, it is surprising that critics have neglected the mechanical cultivator. This neglect arises, perhaps, from the more

71 For Murdoch’s take on lesbian and gays rights, see her “The Moral Decision about Homosexuality” (1964). Here, she ardently claims that “the problem of homosexuality is fundamentally a moral problem” (3; emphasis mine). It is also, as I hope to show, a problem of consciousness. 72 Peter Conradi’s The Saint and the Artist first champions Murdoch’s sympathetic portrayal of same-sex desire. More recently, Tammy Grimshaw explores the theme in Sexuality, Gender, and Power in Iris Murdoch’s Fictions. 251

ponderous bell’s overshadowing of it. Nonetheless, I will insist that the cultivator weighs heavily in The Bell’s symbolic and psychic economy. This object exemplifies the ways in which unnatural sex remains welded to the community’s good life. It signifies, in addition, the energy for and the dangers of moral betterment. Murdoch figures, throughout her oeuvre, just how eroticism functions in and through relational power mechanisms (SG 76). The mechanical cultivator, as a modern machine, marks a potent stage in Murdoch’s thinking on eros and goodness.

In The Bell, the mechanical cultivator purrs at the imagined center of the Imber community’s self-perception. This new-fangled rototiller is, objectively, “an all-purpose machine with a small engine which could be used for superficial digging, and also, with various appliances attached, for hoeing, mowing and spraying” (79). It seems innocent enough, but “the mechanical cultivator question” has, subjectively, unleashed a fierce debate. Like the bell, the mechanical cultivator functions as a symbolic keystone; unlike the bell, it engenders countless controversies. Some, like Michael Meade, feel that the cultivator would be “an obvious next step in the development of the market-garden” (79-

80). Others, like James, feel it is a luxury item. James’s battalion argues “that the community, having set themselves apart from the world to follow Adam’s trade of digging and delving, should equip themselves only with tools of minimal simplicity and should compensate by honest and dedicated effort for what they had chosen to lack in mechanization” (80). The religious community ought to “follow Adam’s trade of digging and delving” and suffer the consequence of the Fall. The hard labor will prove beneficial in the end. It will promote “simplicity” coupled with “honest and dedicated effort” and resist the urge to civilize with Cain.

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Figuratively, the mechanical cultivator evokes a departure from the antediluvian

Christian ideal, at least for James. According to Michael, it suggests a “natural” progress

(84). Divergent resonances stick, once again, to the same item, and, at Imber Court, toil itself proves sacramental. It cultivates the virtues necessary for Christian living. When one apes Adam’s practice, he comes to resemble Adam. Simplicity leads to simplicity; like naturally begets like. The text’s description of labor echoes James’s initial account of the bell. “It was the quality of work which mattered,” James’s camp declares, “not its result. As there was something symbolic, and indeed sacramental, in their withdrawal from the world, so their methods of work should share that quality. Honest spades were permitted. Even a plough. But none of these new-fangled labour-saving devices” (80).

The anti-mechanization faction prioritizes the quality of labor over the quantity of produce. The mechanical cultivator remains glued to the group’s moral self-perception.

The cultivator encapsulates hopes, fears, and moral maxims. The language of its symbolization is simultaneously sacramental and symptomatic. It never claims just one meaning, and the conversations the object inspires rightly spiral. “It was certainly a question with wide implications” (ibid), but I propose the most telling implications for

Murdoch’s moral fruition are the erotic.

The mechanical cultivator confuses the hallowed with the hellish. As with the bell, a very thingy object comes to suggest a very heavenly meaning; in the cultivator’s case, however, this divine signification also panders to the profane. This worldly meaning emerges, in a large part, through the cultivator’s and the garden’s trenchant eroticization.

When Murdoch initially introduces readers to the market-garden, she spares no sexual signification. Dora sees James teaching Toby “how to hoe between the rows of plants”

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(60). If one recalls James’s investment in ordinary tools, this instruction makes sense: he initiates Toby into the community’s simple, moral life. The labor also, though, induces

Toby into a value-system. “Hoeing is an unromantic activity,” Mrs. Mark tells Dora, “but it’s one’s daily bread in a market-garden” (61). The reference to “daily bread” recalls

James’s discussion of the bell as symbol; that Mrs. Mark characterizes this work as

“unromantic” reaffirms its ordinary simplicity. It also reestablishes the group’s traditionalism, and Dora is certainly not surprised to hear that the community members

“believe that women should stick to their traditional tasks. No point in making a change just to make a change, is there?” (ibid), Mrs. Mark asks. These tour-guide comments cement the point: the labor constructs as it also reinforces a system of moral, gendered value. Hoeing reduces, in short, the probability of hoes.

Murdoch’s narrator connects this orthodoxy directly to gender identity, as

Deborah Johnson has deftly demonstrated (79). It also carries, though, import for sexual practice. The text encodes eroticism within morality’s reproduction. After Mrs. Mark reiterates women’s subordinate position, the women enter a garden “tangled with fruit bushes” (61). Among the tangled bush, a “haze hung over the luxuriant scene, and it seemed hotter than ever within the garden. Disciplined fruit trees were spread-eagled along every wall, their leaves curling in the heat. Dora and Mrs Mark began to walk along one of the paths, the dried up spiky fingers of raspberry canes catching at their clothes” (ibid). Men’s hoeing effects this order, this output; the disciplined fruit trees lie

“spread-eagled” along the wall. They reproduce but perhaps not so innocently. The word

“luxuriant” evokes the Latin luxuria, the Catholic Church’s catch-all for sexual and not- so-sexual sin (Jordan 3-5). Precisely this excessive luxury produces a haze that overhangs

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the garden.73 Sexual heat interferes with right vision. Eroticism clouds, heats: mystifies.

Within this externally ordered sexuality, Dora first sees, mistily, Catherine Fawley.

“She’s picking the apricots” (ibid), Mrs. Mark notes. If she were not “going to enter the

Abbey in October” (62), one might have noticed the more obvious parallel to fruit- plucking Eve.74 But there’s that haze ….

In The Bell, narration troubles perception of the natural order. The oft-repeated emphasis on labor in the market-garden reveals the elephantine effort that the production of the natural entails. Readers learn that the “idea of the market-garden has arisen naturally enough,” but the narrator exposes this obviousness to be effected by constant moral edification; indeed, “the working of it would be the proper and primary activity of the inhabitants of the house” (72). The natural promotes goodness, but—make no bones about it—labor must first produce the natural as such. Good work engenders the normal, endlessly. This hazily perceived relation between the natural and the good instigates, of course, the pregnant problem of the mechanical cultivator. As James explains to Michael,

“they had all of them withdrawn from the world to live a life which was, by ordinary standards, not a ‘natural’ one in any case. They had to determine their own conception of the ‘natural’” (80; emphasis mine). The natural is not God-given but socially-enforced.

The community will decide what it means to be natural; then they will make it happen. In this case, the community will actualize a pastoral ideal. Here, the normative understanding of procreative “conception” must not escape one’s notice. James

73 As Mark Jordan shows in The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology, sodomy, as the vice “against nature,” falls within Aquinas’ taxonomy of luxuria (143-147). Jordan rightly cautions against hastily translating these scholastic classifications into modern English, but it does seem to me that Murdoch has these terms in mind. 74 Deborah Johnson does link Catherine’s initial appearance in the garden-market to Milton’s Eve (78-80). See also Miles Leeson’s discussion of the moment in Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist (106-107). 255

constructs his notion of good labor with an appeal to natural sexual fruition. Honest spades are to be preferred to the mechanical cultivator, because this work will create the correct “conception of the ‘natural.’” This conception is good and sublimely heterosexist.

Sexual labor is not, then, unrelated to Adam’s delving and Imber’s hoeing men. The mechanical cultivator disseminates seed in an unnatural way.

If James defends the traditional plough and honest-to-goodness spade, Michael argues for the mechanical cultivator with zeal. Michael “advocated mechanization because it was natural in that it increased efficiency” (84). Although the mechanical cultivator bypasses the God’s punishment in Genesis 3, it effects a good end—human flourishing—and does so speedily. What seems natural to Michael appears quite aberrant to James Tayper Pace. The stakes are erotic and, yet again, gendered. As Toby Gashe innocently intuits, there was something off with Michael Meade. Despite his importance in founding Imber Court, Toby felt “a little disappointed by Michael’s appearance. There was something tired and weedy about him, he lacked the conspicuously manly look of

James, and was not so obviously a leader” (40; emphasis mine). The descriptor “weedy” suggests that Michael may not till his backyard well; he may not, indeed, manage his inner garden properly, which allows weeds to spout this way then that. This weedy facade implies, additionally, a defective virility. Michael lacks “the manly look of James,” the confidence that marks James as a natural leader. James knows how to hoe; he takes the rake and ploughs forward with intrepid stewardship. Toby notes this strength, for he “was at an age when he needed to admire, and when admiration was absolute” (ibid). Youthful

Toby can narcissistically identify, manfully and wholly, with James’s pruned virility.

Michael’s nature lacks, in contrast, this generalized thrust of management.

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Unlike the groomed James’s walled garden, Michael’s inner sanctum encloses proliferating weeds and, perhaps, the stray pansy. He was, quite simply, “what the world calls perverted,” which is to say “he found himself unmoved by women” (88). This unmoved state would not have posed as much of a problem if he had promptly entered the Catholic priesthood. The opportunity for this withdrawal did not present itself, because young Michael was “a somewhat emotional and irregular member of the

Anglican church” (ibid; emphasis mine). In a congregation of avid breeders, he fancied men and, lecherously, “had while still at school two homosexual love affairs which remained among the most intense experiences of his life” (ibid). The intensity of these liaisons left Michael adrift. He was aware that he ought to give up “the practice of what he had come to regard as his vice,” and he sometimes did manage to abstain and regress

“to the practice of his religion” (89). Constitutionally, however, Michael had trouble disentangling the love of him from Him. “It scarcely occurred to him,” in his youth, “that his religion could establish any quarrel with his sexual habits. Indeed, in some way the emotion that fed both arose deeply from the same source, and some vague awareness of this kept him from a more minute reflection” (88). For adolescent Michael, religious devotion and sexual love usher from a similar font. This guiding energy is always, as

Peter Conradi insists, both sexual and religious (SA 146). Such torturous vigor tempts

Michael to love other men as it also leads him to devote his life to God, entirely.

The tension between Michael’s sexual predilections and his church’s injunctions haunts him throughout The Bell. The confused drive persists. For Michael Meade is not incorrect to assume that “the emotion that fed both arose deeply from the same source”: this source is eros. Erotic desire is the sexualized-spiritualized energy that prompts one,

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sparked by beauty, toward Good. This force is the potential for love. Murdoch proclaims, not surprisingly, that humankind needs “a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central” (SG 45). She makes love once again vital, I propose, with Michael’s drive to Swindon. He undertakes this journey, notably, to retrieve the mechanical cultivator. This drive therefore remains caught up with the unnatural machine. The journey highlights the salient ways in which eroticism fuels the cultivation of intimacy.

Innocently, Toby climbs aboard. The men enter the Land-Rover, retrieve the instrument, lock and load it, drink one-too-many ciders, and, when driving back to Imber,

Toby falls asleep. In this moment, “Michael drove on in a dream. He could feel Toby’s knee touching his thigh, the warmth of his lean body against his side, his hair brushing his cheek. The unexpected delight of the contact was so great that he closed his eyes for a moment and then realized that he was still driving” (141). Touch inspires, transfigures.

Michael, though ostensibly driving, could not realize in this moment that he was, in fact, being driven. Eros permeates his being, his vision. The source of his homoerotic longing and his God-fearing quickly merge, and his desire for the “unexpected delight” of human touch hazes his sight. The tickle touches. He acts without discrimination, sans discernment. The drive ends, scandalously, with a kiss. Maybe it was Swindon? Maybe it was southern, summer nights? Maybe it was “the cultivator bumping comfortably behind him, one soft rubber handle just touching his head” (139-140). Only God knows, but it sure felt right.

I have suggested that the drive for the mechanical cultivator condenses some of

Iris Murdoch’s moral thinking on eros. It prompts its fair share of streams of conscience,

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as Michael and Toby attempt to disentangle the moral aftermath. “After the apocalypse of the kiss,” Michael Levenson writes, “Toby and Michael each traverse long pathways of reflection, in which they overcome personal sensations (horror, suspense, shame) and being to ponder the mystery of the other. For Murdoch, this activity, not the dramatic

‘choice,’ is the true movement of freedom” (568). Rightly Levenson underscores how the process of freedom begins as one clarifies vision. These streams form, I claim, the moral thrust of Murdoch’s modification of modernism. Still, for now, simply keep in mind that it was not good for Michael to kiss Toby Gashe. Despite the emotional, religious-sexual conflation of his lust, Michael fails to consider how this action will affect

Toby as Toby Gashe: someone different, someone young. He does not act toward Toby with generous love. But I digress. Here and now, it is necessary to attend to the cultivator’s symbolic density.

Throughout the trip, the mechanical cultivator’s gendered meaning continues to grow in significance. In anticipation of the quest, Michael “felt good-humoured and excited. He had great hopes for the cultivator; it would save a great deal of hard work, and it was so light that it could be used by women” (136). Clearly, the cultivator will disrupt the gendered economy of labor. Women will now practice husbandry; men will enjoy, by way of the mechanical cultivator’s efficiency, increased leisure time. It will interfere, as James anticipated, with the cultivated natural order. It will allow men to escape the punishment of labor; it will allow women and men, if they engage in unnatural sexual acts, to escape from childbirth. It comes as no surprise, then, that “Toby, whose present ambition was to drive the tractor, seemed to share Patchway’s view that the cultivator was rather a sissy object” (137). The layers of symbolization emasculate the

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cultivator’s practical tillage. It is “a sissy object,” and it will aggressively sissify all who finger it. Buyer, beware. The contraption will convert men to women and women to men.

Intuitive recognition drives proto-butch Toby toward the tractor and away from

Michael’s “gaily coloured toy” (158). In fine, symbols represent as they also direct conduct. Toby forgets, though, that good girls never ride alone in cars with boys. This peccadillo is sealed with a kiss.

Objects nurture community, in The Bell, as they also ritualize behavior. They are magnets of thought, a possible force for right action. The tension between the garden- market’s naturalized purview and the outside world’s industrialized luxuries forms one of the novel’s central dichotomies. It is not for nothing, in this vein, that Nick works as

Imber’s resident “engineer” (105). He is a placeholder for Cain’s followers. He has no association with the garden but instead fixes engines, cars, water pumps. He fires them up, gets things moving. This labor affiliates Nick with the unnatural excesses of the mechanical cultivator. They are both motorized, mechanical, a stone-wall’s throw from cybersex. They promote luxury, flight from the human condition. Gossip too has whispered, “as a vague rumour, that he was homosexual” (97). The sexual tension glued to the cultivator therefore brings to mind, in routine excessiveness, Nick’s previous relationship with Michael. Michael’s relationships with engineers repeatedly foreground the human psyche’s mechanical, and decidedly unnatural, structure.

Yes, Michael shares kisses and whatnot with Toby and Nick. At the time of their

“complete and thoughtless happiness” (93), Nick was still quite young—only fourteen— and Michael the elder teacher. And yet, they fall thoughtlessly in homosexuality: “the touch of Nick’s hand had given had given him a joy so intense, he would have wished to

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say so pure, if the word had not here rung a little strangely … he understood that it was not in his nature to resist the lure of a delight so exquisite” (92). This early relationship marks Nick as yet another outlier. He also does not quite fit into society. Upon Nick’s arrival, James immediately notices something queer about Catherine’s twin-brother. “He looks to me like a pansy,” James proclaims. “I’ve seen plenty of that type. There’s something destructive in them, a sort of grudge against society” (104). As per James’s gaydar, Nick is clearly homosexual. By implication, Nick will plow with just about anything. He is “destructive,” unusual, queer. James’s homophobic rhetoric aligns the unnatural with the anti-social. The implication seems to be that Nick’s sexual behavior does not contribute to society, because he potentially practices a non-procreative sexuality. This refusal to propagate stems, notably, from a deep-rooted grudge against society.

The association between the unnatural and the anti-social is not, perhaps, as transparent as it first seems. The mechanical cultivator is, in fact, a piece of highly civilized technology. It may obfuscate the Fall’s taint, but it nonetheless pushes humankind forward. Michael continually notes the cultivator’s efficiency; it’s “an obvious next step in the development of the market-garden” (79-80). The object functions socially, and it produces more than backward hoeing. It is productive, in its way, and efficient. If one follows James Tayper Pace’s reasoning, how is this “unnatural” object also “anti-social”? The object is hyper-civilized, even dandified, but how is it unsociable?

The mechanical cultivator is anti-social, by Pace’s logic, to the extent that it disrupts the sexual imaginary. It introduces fluidity into sexual and gendered arrangements. These aberrations, though, do not have a place within Imber Court’s self-chosen traditionalism.

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The cultivator’s signification exceeds the thing itself, as it calls into question Imber’s sexual economy. It holds a place for the community’s embryonic psychic life.

Michael is correct, then, in his estimation that the community members “had set themselves outside the bounds of ordinary conventions, but without adapting any clear traditional mode of life. They had to invent their own norms” (80). Distanced from the work-a-day world, Imber Court makes visible how moral norms are constructed in ritual and through symbolic objects. Michael recognizes the moral invention at play in Imber but fails to detect the solipsistic danger in creating values of one’s own. Of course, this ethical failure is, in Michael’s case, partly a function of his passionate pedagogy. Like

Socrates, the community accuses Michael of “corrupting the young” (96). One must take the reference to the ancient Greeks—guilty of their vice but not necessarily their virtues—with a grain of salt. Although Michael’s narcissism echoes the imaginative excesses of Miss Jean Brodie in her prime, he is definitely not Socrates. His teaching proves his Achilles heel.

I will soon argue that the mechanical cultivator represents a concrete objectification of the Murdochian moral consciousness; it is a mistake, however, to identify Michael Meade as an unproblematic envoy of goodness. He endorses the queer cultivator but misunderstands its power. Michael’s inability to perceive others justly obviates ethics. An onanistic eroticism interferes with his very capacity to see Nick and

Toby. The fact that he has so solid a type—the hot adolescent, the male engineer— bespeaks the extent to which Michael blanches out particularity. He refuses, moreover, to witness his institutionalized power over these two impressionable youths; instead, he dimly perceives “a self-effacement which would be the highest expression of love” (94).

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He replicates. He repeats. He confuses the root meaning of pedagogy with pedophilia.

Michael’s psyche thereby misrecognizes the other’s “self-effacement” as love, because it naturally feeds his egoism and passion. Michael sows the seeds of his own destruction.

He mishandles the cultivator and sees the world through gaily-coloured lenses.

Michael’s oft-repeated trysts with engineers call to mind the ego’s ghostly appliance. The psychic is machinelike, in Murdoch’s ethic and Freud’s psychoanalysis, and it is an all-too-often self-serving one at that. It desires comfort and consolation. It will do what it takes to reach a state of pleasurable equilibrium. “The facts which have caused us to believe in the dominance of the pleasure principle in mental life,” Freud writes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, “also finds expression in the hypothesis that the mental apparatus endeavors to keep the quantity of excitation present in it as low as possible or at least to keep it constant” (5). The psyche seeks to settle down, to ossify.

What leads the soul beyond the pleasure principle is, for Murdoch and Freud, erotic love.

This force is spiritual; it is amorous. Jumpstarted by beauty, the human machine runs on eros, but this fuel is self-destructive. “Spiritual power was indeed like electricity in that it was thoroughly dangerous. It could perform miracles of good: it could also bring about destruction” (100). How one directs erotic energy proves foundational to one’s moral and sexual economy. Eros contains within its proper discipline the possibility for real love and genuine goodness: it turns the conscious gears beauty unconsciously greases.

IV. Unnaturally Good: Murdoch’s Queer Virtue

I have argued that the mechanical cultivator is a central, though often overlooked, symbol in The Bell. In this section, I establish that the cultivator’s messy sexual politics

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speak directly to Murdoch’s understanding of the psyche. Human consciousness ceaselessly interprets the world that appears before it. The mechanical cultivator suggests not only the difficulty of cultivating virtue after Eden but shows that this psychic labor is, inevitably, unnatural. The streams of a character’s conscience naturally lead to solace and ego reinforcement. Goodness requires, however, that reality interrupts these conscious flows; these psychic energies must redirect, against nature, toward that which destroys the ego. Consolatory identity must go. In this respect, Murdoch’s moral unselfing approaches, I propose, Leo Bersani’s queer self-shattering.75 The ego eroticized is, for both thinkers, the ego at its climax: for “the sexualizing of the ego,” Bersani writes with respect to Freud’s Three Essays, “is identical to the shattering of the ego” (66). Such is the cost of good intimacies, and it is with this provocation that we return to dig and delve and garden, gracefully.

Come what may, eroticism drenches the streams of conscience. Desire forces characters to glimpse a world outside the self, without guaranteeing that they will not revert back to their bubble of insipid navel-gazing. One notices this missed opportunity in the aftermath of Dora’s comical trip to the White Lion. After Mrs. Mark takes Dora on her garden tour, Dora slips away to the pub. On her return, she runs into Michael in

Imber’s woods. They stumble upon Toby, “dressed in a sun hat and holding a long stick, which he had thrust into the water and with which he was stirring up the mud from the bottom. Dora saw at once, sooner than her recognition, that except for his sun hat Toby

75 Bran Nicol argues that Murdoch’s “aesthetics of masochism” shares similarities with Bersani’s self- shattering. Nicol ultimately believes, however, that Murdoch conceives of “masochism not as a shattering of subjectivity, as Bersani does, but as a mechanism which sustains a particular egocentric view of oneself as a coherent subject” (152). I think that Nicol’s focus on masochism prevents him from seeing how, for Murdoch, eroticized morality shatters the ego; this religious ego-divestment finds its echo in Bersani’s recent work on mysticism and intimacy. 264

was quite naked” (66). This vision of Toby’s nakedness fills Dora with “an immediate tremor of delight” (ibid). Clearly, she experiences erotic attraction. One notices how

Toby disturbs, with his “long stick,” that which has settled to the bucolic puddle’s bottom. Toby’s body enacts what Dora’s desire for Toby’s body effects—disruption, murkiness, filth brought to the surface by sun-drenched naked bodies that ought to be more careful, that ought to be quite cloaked. Dora’s self-centered anxieties surrounding

Paul, his suitcase, and the community cease, momentarily. She pauses to regard the other.

She takes a good, long look. Beauty facilitates this witness.

And yet, Dora does not experience unselfing. She quickly begins to interpret the situation to her own benefit. Misrecognition bubbles forward in this stream of conscience:

She looked boldly now at Michael, feeling a complicity between them because of the pastoral vision which they had enjoyed together. Michael seemed to her all at once to have become delightfully shy. She remembered the touch of his hand upon her neck. Their strange experience had created between them a tremulous beam of physical desire which had not been present before. This secret homage was tender and welcome to Dora, and as they descended the path together she smiled to herself over her theory, apprehending in her companion a new consciousness of herself as incarnate, a potentially desirable, potentially naked woman, very close beside him in the warmth of the afternoon. (67)

Dora believes the sight of Toby awakens Michael’s desire; she may be correct. Dora quickly sees this situation through her own eyes, however, and believes Michael sees her as “a potentially naked woman.” Her consciousness apprehends an image of Michael that suits her egoism. Here, she is “potentially desirable”; she is hot, dripping with “the warmth of the afternoon.” Dora fails to see the possibility that Toby brings to the surface

Michael’s own filthy craving for Toby and, instead, interprets Michael’s gaze according to the logic of her natural desire. Dora misses the opportunity, then, to perceive Michael

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accurately, the hallmark of Murdoch’s moral virtue. The pastoral scene therefore teaches her nothing of morality’s unnatural landscape.

The mechanical cultivator represents, at start, the impossibility of the natural.

Human beings do not have access to a natural order. All reality is postdiluvian, hence fallen away from God’s plan for Eden. The Imber community’s desire to flee the world masks the very impossibility of such flight. One cannot re-find the Garden, because nature, like humankind, has fallen. More importantly, and as The Bell makes apparent, nature is itself an interpretation and therefore “the natural” functions as a radically unstable referent. To refer to “the natural” as if it had an obvious meaning is to occlude the labor that this transparency entails. Murdoch packages all of this erudition, I argue, within the “gazelle-like” horned cultivator. Such reliance on symbolism has led some critics to include Murdoch’s fiction within a larger tradition of symbolic realism. A.S.

Byatt argues that The Bell “could be described, as Howard’s End or A Passage to India could be described, as English symbolic novels, in which a powerful element is provided by the relationship of plots and characters to certain symbolic objects” (IM 22). Byatt highlights, not surprisingly, the unique relationship each character possesses to the bell to buttress this claim; but one might say she does the same with the cultivator.

To encounter the other lovingly, one must move against the ego’s natural selfishness. As a symbol, the mechanical cultivator points toward the ego’s machinery and the need to cultivate virtue contra naturam. Concretely, this object gestures toward sodomy—what the Catholics call the sin against nature—in its affiliation with Michael

Meade’s vice. Taken together, the symbolization reinforces the paradoxical sinfulness at the heart of Murdoch’s goodness. “The direction of attention is, contrary to nature,

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outward, away from self which reduces all to false unity, towards the great surprising variety of the world,” Murdoch notes in The Sovereignty of Good, “and the ability so to direct attention is love” (65; emphasis mine). Love’s true course is queer; it is, hopelessly, unnatural. Love, as kenosis, bespeaks a movement away from self and its dramas of personality. Concurrently love drains the self of its selfhood. In this self- emptying, Murdoch’s treatise on ethics evokes, consciously I would argue, classical discourses of sodomy. It links religiosity to perversity, knowingly, and not without historical precedent. Many mystics engage violent language of sexual possession to connote their bliss. Such rapturous religious life is not Edenic and crystalline, on

Murdoch’s view, but thorny and fallen. “Remember,” the Abbess enjoins, “that all our failures are ultimately failures in love. Imperfect love must not be condemned and rejected, but made perfect. The way is always forward, never back” (219). Imperfect love has its place, too. When God closes one door, he opens the back.

In this way, Murdoch’s prose ruminates on the thin discursive space between the unnatural and the supernatural.76 She culls this queer theology from Simone Weil, whom

André Gide memorably called the patron saint of all outsiders. As is well-known by now,

Murdoch borrows from Weil her ethics of attention. In Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil meditates on the ego’s imperial wont:

“Tradition teaches us that as touching the gods and experience shows us as regards men that, by a necessity of nature, every being invariably exercises all the power of which it is capable” (Thucydides). Like a gas, the soul tends to fill the entire space which is given it. A gas which contracted leaving a vacuum—this would be contrary to the law of entropy. It is not so with the God of the Christians. He is a supernatural God, whereas Jehovah is a natural God. (10)

76 Frances Restuccia explores queer theory’s interest in the overlapping discourses of aberrant sexualities and devout mysticisms in her “Queer Love.” She does not include Murdoch in this discussion, an absence I hope to redress. 267

As Weil makes clear, human beings use all the power at their discretion. They will, like a gas, inhabit the entire space afforded to them. The Christian God, however, practices the supernatural discipline of what Weil terms décréation: the annihilation of self. To thwart the ego is here to violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics: seemingly, madness. “Not to exercise all the power at one’s disposal is to endure the void. This is contrary,” Weil insists, “to all the laws of nature. Grace alone can do it” (10). The human subject must spoil its natural tendencies to ego-promotion, because “Grace fills empty spaces but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void”

(Weil 10). The Good positions itself contra naturam. Hence Murdoch’s moral philosophy builds on Weil’s décréation and underscores the ways in which it inhabits the same discursive location as the homoerotic. In fact, the supernatural touches the unnatural in

Weil’s account of the de-created subject’s unnatural penetration by Grace.

In the chapter’s second section, I suggested that Murdoch’s symbols coexist with her sacraments and symptoms. Murdoch’s understanding of signs, it seems to me, reflects her growing religious sensibility.77 Byatt notes that “Miss Murdoch … is aware, in a way

I think no other English novelist is aware, of the importance for our cultural life of the decay of believed Christianity, the loss of a sense of central authority, believed or opposed. She is aware of the importance of spiritual experience” (IM 28). Murdoch is a religious novelist, keenly cognizant of Christianity’s cultural dissolution. Byatt is correct, likewise, to argue that Murdoch relies heavily on symbols; she does not, though, connect

77 Mary Douglas, anthropologist and Murdoch’s peer at Oxford, likewise reaffirms this catholicity of things to belief: “it is a mistake to suppose that there can be religion which is all interior, with no rules, no liturgy, no external signs of inward states. As with society, so with religion, external form is the condition for its existence” (77). 268

Murdoch’s religiosity to her symbolic practice. Murdoch uses symbols, however, to show the ways in which human consciousness processes reality. This labor is incessant, ordinary, and saturated with moral value. The Good disrupts this flow and reorients it in opposition to the ego. Far from desexualizing queerness, Murdoch’s conception sexualizes the Good as queer. The mechanical cultivator highlights this practice of conscious virtue, one that symbolically couples the unnatural with the supernatural.

Those who regard the cultivator espouse sexual predilections as they also participate in erotically charged cognition, the queerest of which is best.

For good consciousness concerns itself with the pilgrimage from illusion to reality: one’s perception of the world ought to move away from self-serving, egoistic fantasy and focus instead on the clear, clean light of truth. This journey is one in the perverted path of goodness. “Life is a spiritual pilgrimage,” Murdoch instructs. “The good and just life is thus a process of clarification, a movement toward selfless lucidity, guided by ideas of perfection which are objects of love. Platonic morality is not coldly intellectual,” she maintains, “it involves the whole man and attaches value to the most

‘concrete’ of everyday preoccupations and acts” (MGM 14). One’s ritualistic actions and interactions—with people, with animals, with things—form the stuff of moral inquiry. As in Plato’s allegory of the cave, one must reorient vision away from the ego and toward external truth. One must learn to see the world without, rather than through, the subjective inner mirror.

At first glance, The Bell provides readers with two different models for this pilgrimage from narcissism to perspicuity. Imber Court’s two leaders—Michael and

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James—embody these disparate paths to goodness.78 The novel’s two formal sermons calcify these viewpoints. On the one hand, James believes human beings ought to practice simple living. His emphasis is on right action. What one does outwardly matters most. One hears the biblical echo in James’s Christian name: “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,’ and yet do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead” (James 2:14-17 NRSV). James’s “more orthodox and rigid moral conceptions” reflect his namesake (76). His devotion to simple tools and antiquated methods reaffirm his faith in the power of habits to engender orthodoxy. In contrast, Michael Meade preaches an internalized faith. What one feels inwardly matters most. It is not that Michael does not believe actions matter; it is, rather, that Michael preserves the space for individual expression and autonomy. Michael has an angel-sent vocation. He is secretly elect, tragically select. Michael’s accent is on the individual’s personal relationship to God, a relation that allows for slight improvisation. There is space for variation, for artistic license.

Murdoch first introduces the distinction between James’s and Michael’s approaches to God and goodness through the issue of truthfulness. One is not surprised to learn that Michael can keep a good, dirty secret: “Michael had declared that he had no taste, even in so would-be charitable an atmosphere, for washing dirty linen in public.

James had replied that the community was not likely to have any dirty linen, and if

78 These two modes of religious expression echo Matthew Arnold’s helpful distinction between the Hellenist and Hebraist. He posits this distinction in Culture and Anarchy (1869), and one rightly wonders whether Murdoch has this dichotomy in mind as she positions Michael, the Hellenist, against James, the Hebraist. 270

perchance it had it ought to wash it in public” (77). Unsoiled-do-gooder James makes two things apparent: the intertwined importance of publicity and action. Filthy-minded

Michael Meade chooses privacy and contemplation. Michael does not perceive the need for public bathing and reaffirms, as is in his character, the individual’s right to a clandestine life. His inner life is dirty but rich. For this reason, “Michael did not share

James’s view that suppresio veri was equivalent to suggestio falsi” (88); there are cogent reasons for tolerating unclean things, for keeping whispers hushed. And yet, one wonders if, perhaps, Michael should have listened more closely to James. Michael’s dirty laundry does end up going through the wringer, tragically, time after time.

The dissimilarity between Michael and James becomes even more pressing once

James offers his sermon on the bell. James’s sermon not only emphasizes the sovereignty of action but also cautions against falling into the abyss of self-reflection. His lecture begins with the pronouncement that the “chief requirement of the good life … is to live without an image of oneself” (119). It continues with the terse warning: the “study of personality, indeed the whole conception of personality, is, as I see it, dangerous to goodness” (119). He practically censures literary modernism outright. “A belief in

Original Sin,” he continues, “should not lead us to probe the filth of our minds or regard ourselves as unique and interesting sinners” (ibid). James rightfully warns against the temptation to hyper-cogitate. One all too easily takes pleasure in “the filth of our minds,” and this pleasure can stick. James offers, instead, the consolation of maxims. Christians do not need to over-think, because God has set boundaries on human freedom.

“Truthfulness is enjoined, the relief of suffering is enjoined,” and he continues, “adultery is forbidden, sodomy is forbidden” (120). The moral agent does not need to deliberate:

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“sodomy is not disgusting, it is forbidden. These are the rules by which we should freely judge ourselves and others too” (ibid). This emphasis on the deed frees the faithful from casting herself in the role of the “interesting sinner.” She can instead extinguish this personality. She can act, simply. “The good man does what seems right, what the rule enjoins, without considering the consequences, without calculation or prevarication, knowing that God will make all for the best” (120). The good person puts his faith in the moral maxim. He lives his life by the Book.

Such action incarnates a robust faith in God. It necessitates an ethereal innocence.

James makes this requirement plain. “How false it is to tell our young people to seek experience! They should rather be told to value and retain their innocence” (123). Good folks persist in their innocence. Experience adulterates. James thus seeks an exhaustive faith that translates free action into transparent obeisance. Here, he parts ways with

Protestant interiority. He also departs from the teachings of John Milton. James justifies this split with an appeal to blamelessness: “I cannot agree with Milton …when he refuses to praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue. Virtue, innocence, should be valued whatever their history. It has a radiance which enlightens and purifies and which is not to be dimmed by foolish talk about the worth of experience” (ibid). James believes that

Christians ought to return to Eden’s pure ease. James cites two exempla: the bell and

Catherine. The bell has “no hidden mechanism … it is plain and open; and if it is moved it must ring” (ibid). The bell is transparent and chaste. Likewise the about-to-be- cloistered Catherine has maintained her “innocence” until it has crystallized as

“knowledge and wisdom” (ibid). She acts obediently. She lives purely and acts simply, without sinful cogitation.

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James’s direct allusion to Areopagitica (1644), Milton’s infamous defense of unlicensed printing in England, has immediate implications for The Bell.79 James’s sermon dismisses Milton, to be certain, but it also suggests, by contrast, the extent to which this reference will find its full fruition in Michael’s address. As a result, the reference seems to me central to The Bell’s overarching negotiation of goodness. In this pamphlet, Milton’s morality concerns itself not with purity but rather with temptation.

For, in Areopagitica, Milton emphasizes the need for stringent moral examination: “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary” (350). Milton does not exalt clean innocence; instead, he argues that the human subject must exercise her virtue within an imperfect world.

“Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world,” Milton avers, “we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary” (ibid).

Milton’s stress is, like Murdoch’s emphasis some three hundred years later, on the process of purification. One must reorient desire, not extirpate it. Thus one displays virtue only in relation to sin and lure: “Wherefore did [God] create passions within us, pleasures round us, but that these rightly tempered are the very ingredients of virtue? They are not skillful considerers of human things who imagine to remove sin by removing the matter of sin” (356). Sin does not vanish from the human condition in a cloister or lay community. Transgression, for Murdoch and Milton, roots itself deep within the psyche.

When James snubs Milton’s refusal “to praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue,” he reaffirms his belief in obedient action. He also emphasizes external signs. “We should rather work,” James maintains, “from outside inwards. We should think of our actions

79 Here my reading complements as it also extends Deborah Johnson’s discussion of Catherine as Eve. For Nicol’s brief account of Milton’s importance, see “Iris Murdoch’s Aesthetics of Masochism” (155). 273

and look to God and to His Law” (130). Of course, Milton focuses more on human psychology than behavior. It is worth noting, however, the extent to which Milton also grounds his argument in Eden. In the paragraph directly preceding the passage to which

James alludes, Milton outlines his understanding of the Garden. “It was from out the rind of one apple tasted that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world,” Milton explicates. “And perhaps this is that doom which

Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say, of knowing good by evil” (350).

For Milton, one does not know the good until she also knows evil. They exist intertwined,

“as two twins cleaving together.” One cannot help but think of The Bell’s two tangled twins: Catherine and Nick, the good and the bad. To know one twin is to know the other, a serpentine sentience with “Byronic passion” (93). And yet, in the Areopagitica pure goodness’s radical impossibility leads Milton to conclude that the excellent person will

“apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better” (350). Presented with temptation, one must discern, identify, and refuse.

To take pleasure in the good, rather than thoughtlessly to choose evil, requires discipline coupled with the ceaseless purification of consciousness. The mechanical cultivator points down this doggedly spiritual path. With the cultivator, one practices ritualized psychic husbandry; one hoes, one sprays, one harvests. With the cultivator, one also recognizes the deep murkiness of the human soul. Adam’s “digging and delving” bespeaks a purity unavailable to ordinary persons. One never acts cleanly, and James’s emphasis on the external act simplifies morality. Humankind inhabits a fallen globe, but the moral subject also thinks with a fallen consciousness. Good does not exist

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unencumbered. With this point in mind, it is worth returning to Areopagitica.

Significantly, Milton also utilizes the language of cultivation to describe the moral life.

His garden imagery blends the spiritual with the erotic, the moral with the procreative:

Good and evil we know in the field of the world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed upon Psyche as an incessant labor to cull out and sort asunder were not more intermixed.

In “the field of the world,” blown, “confused seeds” spill and hopelessly intermix. Their fruits grow together, “almost inseparably.” One must therefore diligently isolate the better from the worse. This discrimination necessitates ceaseless, vigilant labor, because their “cunning resemblances hardly [can] be discerned.” The moral life requires love and, as Murdoch notes, “really looking. The difficulty is to keep the attention fixed upon the real situation and to prevent it from returning surreptitiously to the self with consolations of self-pity, resentment, fantasy and despair” (SG 89). Naturally, the self desires to misrecognize the bad for the good.

Within this passage, Milton also draws readers’ attention to Psyche, whose

“incessant labor” separates the good seeds from the bad eggs. The allusion evokes the human consciousness and its relation to eros. If one returns to the mythic register, the task of kernel division was imposed upon Psyche by none other than Venus, jealous of

Cupid’s love for Psyche (Rosenblatt 350 n.2). Milton’s reference is crucial given

Murdoch’s moral sensibilities, because it personifies the ways in which Eros motivates

Psyche to good labor. Likewise, Venus causes trouble as she muddles the lot. Human consciousness must engage in precisely Psyche’s sort of discernment. This labor connects to what Peter Conradi sees as The Bell’s meaning: “Eros is mixed and requires patient

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purification” (SA 152). This labor is morally axiomatic, and Milton helps one see how it is also the work of Psyche. Psyche’s mythic lepidopterological resonance further highlights this toil’s transformative character. One notes in Milton’s text how the presence of Eros fuels this psychic growth, even as she also witnesses Love’s venereal ability to befuddle, endlessly.

In the individual’s moral pilgrimage, Psyche has her work cut out for her. She must know and discern, identify and refuse. She must transform energy through conversion to the Good. Michael’s sermon picks up, as Bran Nicol deftly notes, where the Miltonic allusion leaves off and takes as its theme the oracular injunction to know thyself (155). “The chief requirement of the good life,” Michael opines, “is that one should have some conception of one’s capacities. One must know oneself sufficiently to know what is the next thing. One must study carefully how best to use such strength as one has” (185). The moral agent must know her particular strengths and weaknesses.

Such familiarity comes only as the result of ruthless self-examination. Michael thus praises Psyche. “Can we doubt,” Michael asks the assembled congregation, “that God requires of us that we know ourselves? […] As spiritual beings, in our imperfections and also in the possibility of our perfection, we differ profoundly one from another” (188). It is perilous to reduce morality to a series of transparent maxims, because, if one heeds that other fruit-loving Eve, “people are different from each other” (Sedgwick 22). The good life requires that each person understands the temptation most likely to eviscerate her moral becoming.

This agonistic attention will lead the believer to God’s purpose for each human being, which is, according to Michael, “to become more fully and deeply the person that

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we are; and by exploring and hallowing every corner of our being, to bring into existence that one and perfect individual which God in creating us entrusted to our care” (189).

Michael praises Psyche’s place in moral life and solidifies her import. Of course,

Michael’s emphasis on self-awareness contradicts James’s previous call for externalized obedience. This juxtaposition between self-reflection and obedience invokes a central tension in Murdoch’s moral philosophy.80 Murdoch describes this tension most fully in

“The Sublime and the Good,” where she identifies the “enemies of art and of morals, the enemies that is of love,” as one and “the same: social convention and neurosis” (216).

Following Michael Levenson, it is helpful to map these “enemies” onto The Bell’s principle sermons (574). Each lecture fails to capture “the chief requirement of the good life.” Although they chase after the Good, the sermons both re-value the two enemies of morality and art.81 They praise neurosis and convention in turn.

Michael, characteristic of modernism, extols as he also performs modernist neurosis. James, like the nineteenth-century novel, witnesses as he also sticks to realism’s social convention. Both responses are problematic. “One may fail to see the individual,”

Murdoch explicates, “because we are ourselves sunk in a social whole which we allow uncritically to determine our reactions, or because we see each other as so determined”

(EM 216). James is so uncritically sunk, and this deluge inhibits him from seeing

Catherine’s pain. “Or we may fail to the individual,” Murdoch continues, “because we are completely enclosed in a fantasy world of our own into which we try to draw things from outside, not grasping their reality and independence, making them into dream

80 For a philosophical account of this tension, see Margaret Holland’s “Social Convention and Neurosis as Obstacles to Moral Freedom.” 81 In her early Degrees of Freedom, A.S. Byatt identifies the rub in the novel’s good sermons (106). 277

objects of our own” (ibid). This failure characterizes Michael’s interactions with both

Nick and Toby. While Michael realizes that he has hurt Toby—Michael “had turned the boy from an open, cheerful hard-working youth into someone anxious, secretive, and evasive” (186)—he does not learn to see Nick until it is too late. It is a failure, as all such malfunctions are, to love.

The Bell offers two paths to goodness, but it does so in vain. Michael’s laud of self-knowledge too easily degenerates into neurosis; the robust action James praises adheres too closely to social convention. The two sermons fail to perceive the individual as other. As such, the community does not perceive either Catherine or Nick as individuals in need of real love and attention. “Nick had needed love,” Michael concludes, “and he ought to have given him what he had to offer, without fears about his imperfections. If he had had more faith he would have done so, not calculating Nick’s faults or his own” (287). Murdoch turns to religion, then, because it confronts the human psyche with real otherness. It breaks the ego’s natural state, which is one of equilibrium- seeking self-absorption. She also criticizes, with her queerly religious approach to consciousness, the neurosis of modernism and the convention of realism. Both literary modes fall short of approaching the other. They each fail, in divergent ways, to acknowledge the individual’s otherness.

Murdoch’s reflexive realism suggests the danger of enthroning the self and of worshipping social convention. She uses this reflexive realism to craft a new fiction, one that borrows much from the modernist experimentation that precedes its nineteenth- century instantiation. This fiction aims at love with its muddied streams of conscience. In this respect, the mechanical cultivator gives a clue not only as to how to nurture real love

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but also as how to write Good. Human beings cannot mimic Eden by following rules of behavior; they also cannot escape moral work through imagined development and progression. Since human beings exist in a postlapsarian state, goodness will not sprout with spit and a spade. The mechanical cultivator captures this tension between convention and neurosis as it also points toward Murdoch’s queer ethics of love. The cultivation of virtue necessitates a turn away from nature and the norm. This conversion is necessary, in part, because goodness is not innate, but it is also not conventional. With this queer-modernist insight, Murdoch provocatively suggests that the divine lies in the direction of the unnatural.

With this collusion Iris Murdoch’s ethics anticipates Leo Bersani’s sense of self- shattering, wherein the “similarities between the theological notion of ‘pure love’ and the dangerous sexual practice of bare-backing may not, to say the least, be immediately clear.

And yet both can be thought of as disciplines in which the subject allows himself to be penetrated, even replaced, by an unknowable otherness” (53). This “unknowable otherness” disseminates the ego—creams it, spreads it about town—whereas mysticism would simply annihilate it (56). Murdoch’s vision may have more in common with the latter technique, but I suspect it participates in the former as well. All the same, “as a mode of ascetic spirituality, bug-chasing and gift-giving among barebackers are implicit critiques of the multiple forms of ego-driven intimacy: from the most trivial expressions of sexual vanity … to the prideful exclusiveness of the family as a socially blessed, closed unit of reproductive intimacy” (55). Riding Murdoch’s coattails, queer theorists increasingly subvert the saddled-down ego. Consolatory identity must go, because of its political and ethical violence. Not surprisingly, bare-backing unceremoniously criticizes

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the neurosis of ego-preserving prudery and the convention of ego-replicating missionary men, in rank.

V. In Conclusion: Murdoch’s Mystical Modernism

Iris Murdoch’s late modernist fiction carves out a fragile space between Michael’s neurosis and James’s convention. It erects, moreover, a communicating room between

Freud’s hysteria and Dickens’ realism. Murdoch’s novels create this opening through their streams of conscience. This reflexive reflection balances the inner world of the psyche with the external world that provokes moral discernment. Readers access realism precisely through pictures the character’s mindfulness proffers. These streams of conscience are spiritual to the extent that they reflect religion’s emphasis on states of mind and clarity of vision. Realism thus meets Murdoch’s modernism as characters try to interpret the confusing world of signs that envelope them correctly. A thorough examination of these modernist traces cement, in the end, her contribution to the twentieth-century novel. This gift centers in her moral revision of modernist stream of consciousness. In this concluding section, my argument looks closely not only at

Murdoch’s stream-of-conscience technique but also at one of Murdoch’s own pictures.

This mid-century drawing, taken from the back of a letter to her friend Hal Lidderdale, telling illustrates the importance of religious consciousness for Murdoch’s ethics and fiction.

On my view, Murdoch’s modernist debt lies chiefly in her ethical conception of the perceiving subject. Her novelistic technique participates, as I have sketched, in her moral philosophy’s epistemological grounding. “What is distinctive about Murdoch’s

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theory of the novel,” Bran Nicol sympathetically asserts, “is that it is also a theory of ethics” (148). This affiliation becomes most fully apparent in Metaphysics as a Guide to

Morals. Still, this text arrives at the very end of Murdoch’s career; it is not published in its entirety until 1992. This late date perhaps explains the lag in literary criticism’s embrace of Murdoch’s modernism. There are, however, earlier clues in circulation. In the aforementioned letter sent to Hal Lidderdale in the late 1940s, Murdoch laments: ‘Sartre,

I gather, has no time to write his great book on morals, & has delegated it to Simone de

Beauvoir, who has bungled it thoroughly (so I’m told) under the title of ‘Une morale de l’Ambiguité.’ Heigh ho” (KUAS6/19/13/1-4). On the back of this letter, Murdoch has provocatively drawn one of the earliest representations of her nascent ethics.

In this picture, reproduced above, the postwar philosopher is flanked by the arid “Deserts of Logic” on the one side and the lush “forests of psychology ontology phenomenology” on the other. In its depiction of the tensions between analytic and continental philosophy,

I contend that Murdoch’s image suggests how Beauvoir botches Sartre’s book on 281

existentialist ethics as it clarifies the importance of religion to Murdoch’s re-conception of human subjectivity.

The Buddha-like figure at the center of Murdoch’s drawing clearly suffers from double-consciousness. As the run of letters to Hal Lidderdale manifest, this split exemplifies Murdoch’s own personal struggle to find a place within a philosophical tradition increasingly devoid of value. Analytic philosophy’s belief that “the world is the totality of facts” pulls the subject’s mind in one course. The continental tradition’s claim that “the world is the totality of cognitions” tugs in the opposite direction. Both traditions, however, separate fact from value. For Murdoch, both the analytical philosophers— committed to facts, logic, and objectivity—and their continental brothers—devoted to the will, choice, and Being—undervalue ethics and metaphysics. There is, for Murdoch, no objective world of facts; likewise, she argues that moral value saturates human cognition.

The world is, instead, the totality of value-cloaked facts and value-drenched cognitions.

She uses religion to support this critique, because she believes spiritual traditions refuse to separate fact from value. This turn toward religion informs her argument in favor of moral philosophy’s shift from an emphasis on will to a model that takes seriously inner vision. Value permeates human consciousness. Thus realism demands that fiction and ethics attend to inner life properly. This early sketch reveals how religion anchors her criticism of both modernism and modern philosophy and how it also supports her two- part revision.

When one wholly appreciates the role religion plays within literary modernism, one more easily sees how Murdoch’s novels, far from flat-footedly returning to Victorian realism, move instead beyond high modernism’s initial experimentation to clarify the

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ethical implications of high modernist subjectivity. From a Murdochian point of view, the modernists’ complex explorations of language and awareness reaffirm the ordinary religiosity present in the very ways in which individuals perceive reality. One sees this contribution in Toby’s psyche, hard at work after Michael forcefully kisses him. Observe how value permeates his awareness:

Like all inexperienced people, Toby tended to make all-or-nothing judgments. Whereas previously he had regarded Michael as a paragon of virtue and had not dreamt of speculating about whether his life could contain blemishes or failures, he now attributed to him homosexuality tout court with all that is involved of the unnatural and the nameless. At least this was his first reaction. He found that his thoughts moved fast and in the direction of greater complexity. His immediate emotion had been surprise. It was soon succeeded by disgust and an alarming sort of fear. He felt a definite physical repugnance at having been touched in that way. He felt himself menaced. Perhaps he ought to tell someone. Did the others know about it? Obviously not. Oughtn’t they to be told? Yet it was certainly not for him to speak. Besides, it was also a matter of protecting himself. He was thoroughly alarmed to find that he was the sort of person who attracted attention of that sort. He wondered if that showed that there was something wrong with him, an unconscious tendency that way which another person so afflicted would divine? (147)

It is not for Toby to speak the unspeakable. Nevertheless, Murdoch traces how Toby’s consciousness clumsily processes Michael’s intimacy. Moral judgments about homosexuality—it is “unnatural” and “nameless”—color his awareness. Toby works quickly to consolidate his ego, for “it was also a matter of protecting himself.” This thought justifies his silence and preserves his emotional status quo. So his mind reels.

Freedom begins as one clarifies vision. Toby moves from this understanding—

“that it was more proper to regard these persons as subjects for the doctor than as subjects for the police” (147)—toward a more loving acceptance of Michael’s radical opacity.

Eventually Toby is able to see the kiss as less about him, less there being “something wrong with him,” and more about the other’s inchoate desire—“for Toby the whole

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business was closed indeed” (285). Now he can send a letter to Michael and thank him for “his kindness” (ibid). Toby’s perception thus alters, even if not as radically as one might hope. What remains distinctive is that Murdoch’s streams of conscience preserve the individual’s liberty over and against the community’s pressures to conform. They point toward the moral imperative to attend to the other as other, for liberty does not emerge from the individual’s consciousness alone. Freedom “is simply a name of an aspect of virtue concerned especially with the clarification of vision and the domination of selfish impulse” (SG 97). Freedom is as reflexively balanced as is Murdoch’s fictive prose.

This defense of individual subjectivity grounds Murdoch’s ethics of perception. It finds its echo in the Christian tradition and within political liberalism. Murdoch will disagree with liberalism’s emphasis on the free will, because ethics begins with perception not volition; she will also criticize Christianity’s superstitious superstructure that, all too often, clouds one’s vision of reality with the pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die promises it can’t keep. Nonetheless, Murdoch’s late modernism remains committed to the individual as the center of a unique consciousness. As Maria Antonaccio describes it,

“Murdoch retrieves consciousness beyond the turn to language in order to avoid the loss of the idea of the individual person … a reflexive realist position retains the notion of consciousness while articulating the idea of a good that lies beyond the dominance of subjectivity (PH 166). Hence Murdoch preserves a notion of the individual agent that skirts the Scylla of bourgeois individualism and the Charybdis of postmodern performativity. This subject’s freedom emerges as she labors against natural tendencies in order to see beyond the ego and society.

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Naturally, “Toby was far from the sophistication of holding that we all participate in both sexes. He believed that one loved either men or women, and if one was unfortunate enough to develop homosexual tastes one would never be able to live a normal life thereafter” (158). The trouble with normal here is that it disguises the exceptional difficulty of, and the extreme discipline required by, the good life. Murdoch’s investigation of homoeroticism, especially male homosexuality, stresses the religious life’s divergence from the norm. Male homosexuality, in particular, exaggerates religiosity’s departure from normalcy. In an interview with Jack Biles, Murdoch elucidates her position vis-à-vis machismo: “Well, I don’t see there is very much difference between men and women. I think perhaps I identify with men more than with women, because the ordinary human condition still seems to belong more to a man than to a woman” (61). Murdoch dilates upon the male homosexual religious seeker throughout her oeuvre, it seems to me, not to desexualize homoeroticism but rather to emphasize religion’s queer departure from the norm, “because the ordinary human condition still seems to belong more to a [straight] man than to a [desiring] woman.”

Murdoch’s spirituality brims with erotic abominations of whatever flavor, but the good life is, somehow or other, queer.

With this push toward a godless theology, Murdoch clearly articulates not only modernism’s formal affinity to mysticism but also morality’s central place within human consciousness. The modernist novel seeks to present consciousness in its most immediate form. This modern, mystical account of the psyche’s immaterial operations underscores, for Murdoch, the unavoidable nature of morality. One sees the world always through a limited lens. Fears, phobias, and egoism distort vision. This deformation modernists

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knew all too well.82 Murdoch extends the modernists’ concern with perspective and awareness, though, to include a robust discussion of ethics. Consciousness is the space in which moral pilgrimage begins. “That place, where we are at home, which we seem to leave and then return to, which is the fundamental seat of our freedom, has moral colour, moral sensibility …. The consciousness,” Murdoch insists, “the stream of consciousness, is animated by indicating a moral dimension” (MGM 260). Morality is intimately related to perception, emotion, and those tortuous streams of modernist consciousness. Given her post-war social location, this ethical extension of high modernism makes sense, as it solidly grounds goodness in a seemingly godless realm.

It is no accident that Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals includes two chapters on consciousness: mindfulness sits at the center of Murdoch’s project as both a moral philosopher and late modern novelist. Spiritual practices are vital to Murdoch’s engagement with, and appreciation of, literary modernism. What at first appears as a pious resistance to modernism’s celebrated secularism, I maintain, is in fact Murdoch’s prescient understanding of modernist subjectivity’s moral implications. One notices this movement in her characterization of modern philosophy: “Post-Cartesian philosophers have usually been concerned with ‘immediate awareness,’ perceptions for instance, as bearers of knowledge rather than value, and have in this interest reduced the ordinary concept of ‘inner’ activity” (MGM 172). Most modernists read the inner life in precisely this way; it is a record of direct experience. “But something more radical is involved,”

Murdoch cautions. “The volatile variegated force, the ever-flowing energy, the temporal

82 Murdoch’s reading of Henry James’s The Golden Bowl usefully examines how James’s proto-modernist narrative necessarily evokes the subject’s moral life. This account appears in the late Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, in which Murdoch’s early antipathy to modernism has, I would argue, mellowed (170- 171). 286

pressure, the unfailing presence of what we call ‘the stream of consciousness’—surely this is something fundamental, surely if we are searching for ‘being’ this is it” (MGM

172-173). As a late modernist, Murdoch collects these forces and energies of value in her streams of conscience. Religion does not reject modernization, then, but instead clarifies the interpenetration of vision, ethics, and perception in human life. Spiritual traditions provide obliging pictures of the complex human condition; the best pictures, in so many of the world’s religions, highlight the need to move from illusion to truthful perception.

The Good is sovereign in these images, as it perches outside any one individual’s, or any one tradition’s, view. One perspective is, as modernism ceaselessly teaches, never good enough.

Murdoch’s work ultimately shows how the high modernists never escape morality but engage it from the beginning. Particles do not fall willy-nilly from the sky but respond to energies, forces, and bonds that, at first, appear invisible and random. The good modernist novel teaches its reader to pay attention to the pattern behind this chaos of limited perspectives, to heed the order beyond the flow of isolated human events. This tuition is a modern lesson in goodness. To illustrate this point, I hazard a quotation from

Woolf. Notice how Lily Briscoe describes her painting in To the Lighthouse: “Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly’s wings; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron.” The artwork’s surface should reflect the transient play of immediate perception, the hasty negotiations of human muddle; a stray breath could ruffle it. And yet, behind all of this fleeting beauty, there must lie something that not even a team of horses could dislodge: something solid, something real. This articulation of the

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high modernist aesthetic clarifies, I think, Murdoch’s modernist modification. For to desire goodness is to sneak beneath the flowing fabric of cognizance in pursuit of an iron- bolted reality: it is to venture beyond the psyche’s butterfly-colored perspective toward a more capacious sense of weighted order. The modernist novel’s muddled stream-of- consciousness narration moves readers to desire the design which the Good, of necessity, illuminates. Murdoch believes, for this reason, that “morality leads naturally into mysticism and has a natural bond with religion … there is a natural way of mysticism … which involves a deepened and purified apprehension of our surroundings” (MGM 301).

Goodness begins at modernism’s surface, as one learns to love the more beautiful pattern that eludes her.

Murdoch is best described, then, as a mystical modernist. The refusal of modernism’s secularization brings with it, for this reason, not only a lengthened modernism but also an increased relevance to Murdoch’s ethics and fiction. Recent work in modernist studies has indeed challenged those thinkers who wish, often on secular grounds, to dismiss Murdoch’s religious interest as politically reactionary and arcane. If

Murdoch is correct, then human consciousness remains forever related to an ever- mysterious Good. This condition demands that scholars take religion and the value of inner life seriously. As Elizabeth Dipple clarifies, Murdoch challenges “the strongly negative and basically superficial idea of the religious life that both the egotistically pious and the proudly rationalist hold—the idea that Christianity is perceived by its rules and behavioral exterior rather than in the hard-won life of inner discipline” (248; emphasis mine). Murdoch focuses on inner discipline for extant moral reasons. Her fiction manifests the manner in which value saturates all claims to truth. The image of the

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mechanical cultivator allows one to see this morality in practice. Her novels henceforth serve the Good, and the way there is always forward, never back.

* * *

At the twentieth century’s outset, William James defines religion as “the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto” (qtd in Lewis 51). Late in the century, Murdoch poses a similar definition, which highlights the moral consequence of modernists’ formal experimentation. By this light, the modernists’ effort to capture sacred experience is also simultaneously the attempt to narrate the psychic space within which moral practice occurs. The modernist novel is, on this count, hardly secular. It approaches the sacramental as it captures the essence of religious experience which is also, for Murdoch, essentially moral practice. The modern novel does not belong to the existentialist alone. It is only when the modernist protagonist becomes conflated with the existentialist hero that

Murdoch appears the outsider, for she has much in common with modernism’s mystics. It seems to me, after all, that deep concern with spiritual experience links the religious novels of the post-World-War-II era to the experimental texts of the early twentieth century. Of course, a reassessment of modernism’s religiosity comes not without its political resonance: for to problematize secularization is also to disavow, at long last, the hegemonic tale of a Western flight from enchantment.

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PAIDEIA Muriel Spark’s Pedagogies of Mass Destruction

Iris Murdoch makes a helpful if not steadfast distinction between two types of twentieth- century novels: the existentialist and the mystical. For Murdoch, the existentialist novel characterizes “freedom and virtue as the assertion of the will,” while the mystical novel

“shows us freedom and virtue as understanding, or obedience to the Good” (EM 223). In the existentialist novel, typified by Hemingway and Lawrence, a lonely hero carves out an existence of his own as he opposes the oppressive, antiquated forces of a society that he abhors. Liberation, sincerity, action: his integrity survives by sheer force of will. The mystical novel, by contrast, examines the life of a hero much less, for lack of a better descriptor, heroic; this protagonist attempts to live a holy life apart from the traditional supports for that life. Goodness, humility, obedience: her integrity survives by close attention to the unknowable. Murdoch is quick to note that both novels capture human

“consciousness without God,” with the existentialist novel being first “logically and chronologically” (226). This chapter will explore the second, mystical response— the fiction that follows the high modernists logically, chronologically, and formally.

Murdoch explicitly identifies the midcentury novels of Muriel Spark as representative of this modern, mystical consciousness. Like Graham Greene, Spark writes novels that attempt “to express a religious consciousness without the traditional trappings of religion” (225). In what follows, I will suggest that Murdoch’s distinction between the existentialist and mystical novels helps clarify what is at stake morally and politically in

Spark’s most famous novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961).

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Conventional religion traps less wholeheartedly after the death of God, and

Spark’s novel investigates the distance between the moral and the political in this context.

Scholars have long recognized the complex ways in which Spark’s text engages with political fascism.83 In the process, though, Spark’s moral intervention has become overshadowed, imagined as coextensive to the critique of European fascism, in particular, and authoritarianism, more generally. This conflation is a mistake, on my account, because it makes invisible the difference between the political and the ethical in Spark’s account of education. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie frustrates straightforward political condemnation; instead, it interpolates the good reader within a world in which continual ethical vigilance is necessary if one hopes to see right and wrong clearly … and, even then, one all too often falls shortsightedly. So, while the novel’s political critique jumps out—“Hitler was rather naughty” (131)—from the principal narrative, its ethical intercession remains tacit, tactile, transferred into the student’s consciousness if at all successful. In this incarnation, Catholicism’s necessity becomes palpable: it is to religious sensibility and spiritual ascesis that Spark appeals as she trains the good reader to see, and consequently act, well. With this moral consequence fleshed out, I argue, one sees that Spark’s novel functions pedagogically to censure the fascist latent not in its leader but rather in its reader.

Political action and ethical judgment mark different capacities of the human subject. In moral discernment, one can reasonably immolate the ego; in sharp contrast, the political realm demands a robust sense of selfhood. Spark minds this gap, separating

83 David Lodge offers one of the earliest readings of fascism in the novel. Judy Suh’s recent work has extended this conversation. She argues that Spark’s text “usefully shifts our attention from the regime’s culpable deception of the masses to the fascist subject’s motivations for shielding him or herself from the recognition of fascist violence” (89). 291

the novel’s political context from the moral practices it inculcates in its readers. The

Prime of Miss Jean Brodie illuminates the essential space between the ethical and the political, I argue, through its engagement with pedagogy. Forum and classroom demand divergent virtues. To this end, Spark’s novel investigates education writ large and takes for its influence none other than Socrates—the West’s prime, and arguably first, pedagogue. Socrates will show why education properly belongs to morality and not politics. Before I highlight the ways in which Spark’s text echoes Plato’s Republic, it will be necessary to nail down, though, what one means by pedagogy. Therefore, this chapter opens with a discussion of some modern didactic practices. This overview will allow one to attend to Miss Brodie’s pedagogy with nuance and to place it within a wider theoretical context. Accepting Murdoch’s invitation to view the existentialist novel as distinct from the mystical, I compare an existentialist account of pedagogy to a mystical one. This comparison maps onto Murdoch’s distinction, of course, and reveals, significantly, the existentialist’s investment in politics and the mystical text’s affiliation with morality. I hope this instruction proves efficacious, if not enlightening, because in

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie education is central to the good life.

I. Good Education: Between Conscientização and Catechism

A particular picture of the human being colors one’s vision of the good life. By this light, existentialist and mystical novels represent human consciousness differently and point toward divergent ideas of ethical existence. An image of goodness corresponds, thereby, to each type of twentieth-century novel. The good life, for an existentialist, might involve perfect self-fulfillment through artistic creation; a good life, for the mystic,

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might constitute contemplation of the natural world to perceive hidden ecological truths.

Questions of moral philosophy arise organically, in this way, from an inquiry into the modern novel’s representation of human consciousness. Each protagonist represents as she also enacts precise moral characteristics. Rightly, then, Iris Murdoch develops her distinction with a discussion of value. While the existentialist grounds her freedom in self-expression and sincerity, the mystic seeks self-purgation and necessity. The moral space between the two protagonists bespeaks two very different conceptions of what makes one human and good. Notice Murdoch’s attention to the ethics of each valor:

“[w]hereas the existentialist hero is an anxious man trying to impose himself or assert or find himself, the mystical hero is an anxious man trying to discipline or purge or diminish himself. The chief temptation of the former is egoism, of the latter masochism” (227).

These protagonists share a pervasive modern anxiety but diverge in how they manage these restless subjectivities. This management matters, because it forms a foundation for

Spark’s investigation of ethics and education.

After all, Murdoch’s distinction suggests not only two modes of consciousness but also implies two methods for instruction. An existential mode of educating appears quite different from its mystical counterpart. I draw my account of existentialist pedagogy from Paulo Freire’s hugely influential, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.84 Inspired by Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and revolutionary Marxism, Freire writes to expand consciousness and reveal that “reality is really a process, undergoing constant transformation” (75). His pedagogy promotes what he calls “the human task: the permanent transformation of reality in favor of the liberation of people” (102). Freire’s

84 Paulo Freire published this text in 1971. It became a touchstone for various liberation movements in the United States, proving a foundational influence to bell hooks’ own Teaching to Transgress (45-58). 293

innovative, consciousness-raising method contrasts sharply with the view of mystical education that I cull from Simone Weil’s “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God.” Weil, a contemporary of Sartre and schoolmate to

Beauvoir, writes to restrict fantasy and reveal that “the development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies” (57). For Weil, the student must heed a reality that exists apart from his own understanding. The

Pythagorean Theorem, for instance, asks no personal questions, just as a Latin translation follows rules. Education is therefore not about dialogue but discipline. Reality is not constructed but rather received. “Above all our thought should be empty,” Weil writes,

“waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it” (62). One learns best in silence. Weil envisions that a good student will accept given knowledge, while Freire applauds the student who changes his reality. This pedagogical difference necessitates further dilation, however, to avoid too sharp and facile a contrast.

A key word in Paulo Freire’s educational philosophy is conscientização. Freire uses this term to refer to the dialogical process through which human beings become aware of their ability to name and rename reality. Essence is not pre-given but instead waits for human formation. For this reason, Freire insists that human “existence cannot be silent, nor can it be nourished by false words, but only by true words, with which men and women transform the world. To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it”

(88). Change and revolution sit at the center of his teaching. In this way, Freire’s pedagogy emphasizes not only the importance of dialogue but also the power of language to alter and transform reality. Here, the connection between the existentialist novel and

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Freire’s educational philosophy becomes lucid. If one understands the human person as free to create and name her own reality—“the new version of the romantic man, the man of power,” the existentialist of which Murdoch speaks (227)—then one must recognize the prominence of language in, as Freire puts it, “the creation of a world in which it will be easier to love” (40). The truth is not given but created through speech. Students must engage in democratic dialogue together. Education is, in this fashion, a world-making and unmaking activity; l’existence précède l’essence, as Sartre avers and Freire later echoes.85

Human consciousness crafts worlds. Not surprisingly, Murdoch points out that, “[f]rom this point of view, man is God” (226). He creates reality as such.

Reality does not wait for our creation, according to Simone Weil, but rather for our encounter. From Weil’s perspective, one does not use language to change reality but to approach it. On this basis, the key word in Weil’s mystical pedagogy is attention. One must tackle one’s schoolwork with patience and close deliberation. This effort will function like a sacrament (63). “Students must therefore work without any wish to gain good marks,” Weil instructs, “without any reference to their natural abilities and tastes; applying themselves equally to all their tasks, with the idea that each one will form in them the habit of attention which is the substance of prayer” (59). One notices that schoolwork’s ultimate end is to improve one’s capacity for attention, a habit which will ultimately strengthen the student’s ability to pray. Prayer requires attention, as does

Weil’s moral philosophy more generally. Still, close reading is not enough. In addition to the cultivation of attention, Weil argues that one must also “take great pains to examine

85 Freire quotes the following observation by Sartre. “La conscience et le monde sont donnés d’un même coup: extérieur par essence à la conscience, le monde est, par essence relatif à elle” (81). As Freire explains, the “world which brings consciousness into existence becomes the world of that consciousness” (82). 295

squarely and to contemplate attentively and slowly each school task in which we have failed …without seeking any excuse or overlooking any mistake” (59). Failure reminds students of their inadequacy, their inability to know it all. Once the good apprentice learns to attend and has the strength to contemplate failure unblinkingly, then he will, of necessity, receive the gift of humility (60). With modesty comes the invitation to approach reality. The truth reveals itself only once the student is empty and patient enough to receive it. The same happens, more or less, with God.

Throughout her reflections on education, Simone Weil emphasizes the virtue of humility. School teaches students how to pay attention, how to empty their minds of ego.

“When we force ourselves to fix the gaze, not only of our eyes but of our souls, upon a school exercise in which we have failed through sheer stupidity, a sense of mediocrity is borne upon us with irresistible evidence. No knowledge,” she insists, “is more to be desired” (60). Thus failure is pedagogically essential. Weil’s schooling echoes, in this manner, the mystical novelists in their “uneasy suspicion that perhaps after all man is not

God” (Murdoch 226). Her mode of edification reflects this suspicion in its emphasis on daily and studious self-mortification. One notes, though, Freire’s own meditation on humility in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed. He maintains that “dialogue cannot exist without humility” and suggests that people “who lack humility (or have lost it) cannot come to the people, cannot be their partners in naming the world” (90). The relation between humility and genuine conversation seems obvious enough, but Weil’s ruminations do imply a potential danger. If I believe that I create reality, even co-create it with others, is modesty possible, tenable? How would one go about maintaining humility in light of such godlike ambition? Likewise, Freire shows the dangers in Weil’s reactive

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pedagogy. Is truth such a stable thing that we ought to stretch out and wait for it? Ought teachers to enforce discipline at the expense of dialogue and conscientização?

I ask these questions not to hazard answers; rather, I want these provocations duly etched on the blackboard of one’s mind as she approaches The Prime of Miss Jean

Brodie. As a modern woman, even a feminist, Miss Brodie has elements of the existentialist educator; she also, of course, flaunts an otiose egoism and an exhausting authoritarianism. Despite her professed religiosity, Miss Brodie does not have much of the mystical pedagogue about her, yet she does demand that her students empty themselves of ego to absorb her truth. It is not clear that Weil’s pedagogy, in light of

“Miss Brodie’s experimental methods” (49), proves an efficacious alternative. So, with

Weil and Freire, one turns to Miss Brodie’s classroom management. This examination will illuminate what is ethically and politically simmering in both Spark’s novel and

Murdoch’s classification. The existentialist and the mystical will guide the investigation as it will also illuminate the distinction’s blind spots. To this end, the chapter will study the political implications of the novel first; an examination of ethics will follow second; religion, third. To phrase, via Murdoch, the forthcoming investigation as a question: does

Spark’s text “silence and annihilate the self,” or is it “much closer to the spirit of Lenin, in that [its] aim is really not to explain the world but to change it” (228)?

II. Fascist Subjects: The Politics of Miss Brodie’s Curriculum

If 2 teach is 2 touch lives 4ever, then perhaps Miss Jean Brodie is better at math than Miss Mackay suspects.86 Certainly Miss Brodie knows how to make a big

86 2+2=4: “All of the Brodie set, save one, counted on its fingers, as had Miss Brodie …” (2). 297

impression. “Give me a girl at an impressionable age,” Miss Brodie opines, “and she is mine for life” (6). Miss Brodie’s authority transcends her classroom’s limits. Her students visibly adore her. They follow her lead, and some die under her influence. In this section,

I examine this transcendence in order to demonstrate how The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie enables one to articulate politics’ perilous relationship to pedagogy. These implications carry weight, because teaching matters deeply to Miss Brodie. Education is not her job; it is, rather, her vocation (22). She lives to teach, and, in her prime, Miss Brodie does practice what she preaches. As many careful students of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie have suggested, the best adjective to describe Miss Brodie’s method is “fascist”

(Whiteley 5). “Miss Brodie’s dedication to Fascism is at the heart of her educational philosophy,” Patricia Duncker declares, “where she plays the role of Führerin” (76).

Dialogue is here moot, and attention enforced. She rules, firmly. “Attend to me, girls” (8; emphasis mine). Her pedagogy does not come without mass destruction, as it mixes magnetic charm with idealistic politics. So, for now, make like Mussolini and bracket the ethical.

For in early twentieth-century Europe, liberation is not a question of yes or no: it is, strictly speaking, a question of how. Historians of fascism underscore the political movement’s revolutionary, modernizing, and anti-conservative character (Griffin SF 6).

Fascism does not seek petrification. Fascism does not stick to the status quo. Fascism revolts. It is a mistake to dismiss fascism as merely a conservative or traditional reaction against Marxism; rather, one must understand European fascism as a radical alternative to the materialism endemic to both socialism and liberalism (Sternhell 12). In its most distilled form, fascism is a populist, anti-materialist, anti-liberal revolution. This popular,

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consensual rebellion is directed, in almost all cases, against perceived social decadence

(Griffin NF 36). Decadence can include but is not limited to: the crusty bourgeoisie, greedy Jews, tricky gypsies, tramps, and thieves, and to all those who caught the reference. Once one destroys this materialistic, degenerate locus, the logic goes, the nation will rise again (Morrison 51-4). Revolution and rebirth thus sit at the fascist movement’s hub. In fact, the pervasiveness of social degeneration feeds into the rationale for the strong, central leader. As Roger Griffin explains in his influential The Nature of

Fascism, despite this emphasis on nationhood, the “fascist cannot leave revolution to the people because he sees the instincts of the mass of the population as contaminated by decadent forces … fascism must always in the last analysis be imposed by an elite in the name of a national community yet to be realized” (41). A strong leader is therefore in the masses’ interest, because the “Philistines are upon us, Mr. Lloyd” (51). They do not know better . . . yet.

Whereas Miss Jean Brodie’s career tragically ends as a schoolteacher, Signor

Benito Mussolini’s career tragically begins as one.87 Teaching school prepares Mussolini for his own prime, a prime by which Mussolini’s most famous student—Adolf Hitler— benefits. It is not for nothing that The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie places so much emphasis on education. As many historians have noted, mass instruction sits at the fascist project’s center. The twentieth century’s best dictators knew their way around a classroom, because it was precisely in and through schooling that they could first inspire the public. The masses had to be taught, inspired, led. “One thing was certain,” historian

87 For more on Mussolini’s early career, consult Zeev Sternhell’s The Birth of Fascist Ideology, especially “The Mussolini Crossroads.” It is important to remember that, like many schoolteachers, Mussolini began his career on the political Left (197). 299

Jan-Werner Müller notes, “in the fascist view of the world: ordinary human beings could not shape politics at all; they had to be mobilized (and regimented) by myths; they also had to act in conformity with a leader who embodied the collective subject” (113).

Müller’s comments suggest the strange admixture of mystification and enlightenment in fascist pedagogy; they also foreground the charismatic leader’s import. The youth, in turn, played a central role in various twentieth-century totalitarian regimes.88 They fantasized and then fought. One thinks of the Hitler-Jugend in Germany and, later, of the

Red Guard in China. They died. Wherever totalitarian ideology took root, leaders utilized the educational system to extend their chalky influence. The young learn to revolt then yearn for it.

Education’s political value remained axiomatic throughout the twentieth-century, and there are few today who would question what seems to be an unavoidable link between effective government and efficacious instruction. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie presents, I suggest, a sustained vision of a world in which statecraft and tutelage coalesce perfectly. Spark’s novel carefully constructs this undeniably public school space, and here the fascinating teacher and the charismatic leader bear much in common. The substance of Miss Brodie’s lessons makes this connection even more explicit. Time and time again, Miss Brodie teaches the girls about the importance of resisting the material world. In these lessons, she is decidedly anti-materialist. As she explains to Sandy, “I know very little of Miss Lockhart … I leave her to her jars and gases. They are all gross materialists, these women in the Senior school, they all belong to the Fabian Society and

88 Historian George L. Mosse captures this inexorable connection between youth and fascism in The Fascist Revolution. He insists that “fascism was based upon a strong and unique revolutionary tradition, fired by the emphasis on youth and the war experience ….” For this reason, “Fascism was a movement of youth” (13). 300

are pacifists” (114). Miss Lockhart, as the science teacher, signifies the allegiance between materialism, socialism, and the pacifist status quo; she belongs to the socialist

Fabian society, practices peace-making, and finds her truth contained safely sealed in a jar. In contrast, Miss Brodie sees reality through the lenses of perfect Beauty, which leads her to a keener appreciation of violence’s necessity.89 “Art is greater than science. Art comes first,” she professes, “and then science” (24). She, and not Miss Lockhart, is a woman of keen artistic temperament. Miss Brodie’s heart remains liberated and open.

“Art and religion first;” so the curriculum naturally goes, “then philosophy; lastly science. That is the order of the great subjects of life, that’s their order of importance”

(24-25). Much like fascist Ezra Pound and futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, fabulous

Jean Brodie understands art to be of prime significance to revolution. The materialism of both socialism and liberalism is, here, as there, anathema. After all it is through art that one rises above vulgar, materialist concerns; it is through ferocity that one births a better world. Art is armament and not ornament.

One need only glance at the historical documents behind Miss Brodie’s political curriculum to appreciate art’s primary role. For instance, Marinetti’s “The Founding and

Manifesto of Futurism” makes art’s modern function quite lucid. This manifesto glorifies war—“the world’s only hygiene”—but connects this purification to the aesthetic realm.

“Art,” he avers, “can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice” (42-43). Futurism, in this way, articulates the revolutionary potential of fascist aesthetics. Futurist art will not decorate the mollycoddled walls of bourgeois museums. “Except in struggle,” Marinetti

89 The inherent connection between fascist politics and art has been well-documented. As much as education, fascism depended also on aesthetics to mobilize the masses. David Barnes’s article “Fascist Aesthetics” and Paul Morrison’s monograph Fascist Poetics explore this connection at length. 301

declares, “there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man” (41). Here, poetry attacks; it is the weapon, for Marinetti, of mass destruction. Aesthetics can eviscerate the forces that contain the human race, force those forces to lie “prostrate” before their human creators. The removal of the past’s excessive abstraction engenders the beauty of this destruction. R. W. Flint has therefore claimed that “Futurism was the first collective effort to suppress history in the name of art” (8). This suppression of the past would happen through the radical annihilation of bourgeois “reality.” Art, rather than labor strikes or legal policy, will usher in a new, ahistorical age.

Meanwhile, at Marcia Blaine School for Girls, Miss Jean Brodie implements an anti-liberal revolution in the spirit of her fascist contemporaries.90 The front line is never far from her romantic, etherealized vision. “Safety does not come first” in Miss Brodie’s classroom. “Goodness, Truth, and Beauty come first” (7). Miss Brodie announces from the beginning that her pedagogy brings with it certain danger. This hazard, though, is certainly not that to be found in brute mathematics. (The Pythagorean Theorem asks no personal questions.) Miss Brodie crafts her own anti-materialist curriculum, one that departs from stale reading, writing, and arithmetic. Miss Brodie’s students were, of course, “aware of the existence of Einstein and those who considered the Bible to be untrue. They knew the rudiments of astrology but not the date of the Battle of Flodden or the capital of Finland” (2). One sees from the start that Miss Brodie advances a modern

90 Historian Eric Hobsbawm maintains that the threat to liberalism came not from socialism or revolutionary Marxism but exclusively from the anti-materialist Right (112). Naturally the Left, in Miss Brodie’s opinion, is pacifist, materialistic, and inept. 302

syllabus, one that acknowledges atheism and relativity. History, facts, and numbers have little relevance; instead, the little girls learn of Miss Jean Brodie’s personal preferences.

“I will tell you about my last summer holiday in Egypt,” she promises, “I will tell you about the care of the skin, and of the hands … about the Frenchman I met in the train to

Biarritz … and I must tell you about the Italian paintings I saw” (7). One dismisses this curriculum as eccentric and self-involved too quickly, for its aim is one shared with both futurism and fascism: the pure expression of immediate impressions.91 Her syllabus is a modernist crusade. In its description, Spark judiciously blends the personal and the immediate into Miss Brodie’s monologue concerning the Italian and the artistic. Italian art effortlessly flows from Miss Brodie’s personal experience, and this is as it should be.

These are her fascist-inspired lessons, and Italian art is the best.

In addition to her anti-materialist curriculum, Miss Brodie’s anti-liberal allegiance is betrayed by her revolt against social degeneration. As fascist scholar Roger Griffin has noted, fascism is at root “a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism” (NF 26). With his generic definition, Griffin draws attention to fascism’s rhetoric of national renewal. The nation, under fascist leadership, will rise like a phoenix from its ashes. This rebirth notably occurs always after “a period of perceived decadence” (36). So it is with Miss

Brodie’s set, a group within which each member is famous for something. “‘I am putting old heads on your young shoulders,’ Miss Brodie had told them at that time, ‘and all my pupils are the crème de la crème’” (5). This crème de la crème will whip the vulgar

91 Ezra Pound, and the modernist aesthetic he enjoins, insists on the “[d]irect treatment of the ‘thing,’ whether subjective of objective” (2). Miss Brodie seems to echo this sensibility in her stream-of- consciousness pedagogy. She peels off the layers of bourgeois hypocrisy to approach the beautiful thing in- and-of itself. 303

materialisms of the British empiricists—exemplified by the headmistress, Miss

Mackay—and prove urbane, gallant, delicious. “You are all heroines in the making,” she promises her set. “Britain must be a fit country for heroines to live in” (30). With this prophecy, Miss Brodie weaves nationalism, heroism, and Darwinism into a survival-of- the-fittest tapestry. Britain must be fit. It will rise again.

Readers quickly notice how solidly these teachings bring her girls together. The girls all become famous in the school, “which is to say they were held in suspicion and not much liking” (2). They form a set, a bundle, and Spark’s target is clear enough.

Undoubtedly she directs readers’ attention to Italian fascism.92 And yet, it is worth noting precisely what prompts these girls to cluster. On the surface, Miss Brodie praises individualism. “Where would the team spirit have got Sybil Thorndike?” (83), she asks.

Her teaching moves, audibly, against groupthink. Deeper still, it unifies. What leads the girls to cluster, then, deserves careful attention, and, on closer inspection, it is apparent that social cohesion only happens in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie once the girls learn to perceive social degeneration. Miss Brodie’s fascist lessons train the girls to identify and purge the decadence that surrounds them and to join forces against this encroaching bourgeois entropy. To effect the nation’s rebirth, one must first expunge the un-pretty. In this way, her progressive method initiates her girls into an anti-materialist way of seeing the world. From this perspective all must be, and all can be, beautiful.

Her engagement with the discourses of degeneration makes Miss Brodie a versatile fascist but also, and more immediately, a noteworthy modernist aesthete. She lectures on aesthetics but in a particularly modern way. She teaches, one might say, as the

92 The Oxford English Dictionary indicates that the word “fascism” comes from the Italian fascio, the word for “bundle” or “group.” 304

revolutionary modernist creates beauty.93 In her stream-of-consciousness method, she is pedagogically avant-garde. Here, Miss Brodie launches an artistic attack against all that makes the world less dreamy, against all that makes it viciously Victorian. Beautifully enough, the little girls’ first fieldtrip remains a lasting influence. Miss Brodie takes her students to the center of decadent Edinburgh. Edinburgh in the 1930s has suffered its share of financial setbacks, but it remains for Miss Brodie a noteworthy European capital.

This journey thus exposes the students to real poverty and urban decay—“[t]he smell was amazingly terrible”—as it also reminds the girls that they are “Europeans” (33). The contrast between decay and sophistication will reinforce the urgency of Miss Brodie’s poetic vision. To teach the girls to intuit this contrast between health and decay is her prime pedagogical goal. Goodness, Truth, and Beauty must come first. One should work to make the world more attractive, more sophisticated. The future lies, by not-so-subtle implication, in European beauty rather than empiricist handouts. This lie fuses her girls and hardens her Roman influence.

Naturally, this ambivalent perception first affects Sandy, the student soon to be famous for insight. Sandy’s acute vision links the economic hardships of the 1930s directly to social degeneration, with affective relevance. Looking at the unemployment line, “Sandy’s fear returned …. She saw the slow jerkily moving file tremble with life, she saw it all of a piece like one dragon’s body which had no right to be in the city and yet would not go away and was unslayable. She thought of the starving children” (40).

Sandy views this queue as a treacherous dragon, a romanticized demon that one must

93 Like the modernist artist, Miss Brodie seeks “through the capacity of art and thought to formulate a vision capable of revolutionizing society as a whole” (Griffin 15). For this reason, Roger Griffin argues that fascism constitutes “a form of political modernism in its own right” (17). See his compelling “Modernity, Modernism, and Fascism.” 305

slaughter. Its degenerative monstrosity has “no right to be in the city,” but still the

“squalor” stubbornly persists. Sandy’s dread leads her to bond with the other girls but not without unleashing its own fierceness. She wants to slay the dragon, like a fit heroine, but cannot. This dread-wrath must go somewhere. Quickly Miss Brodie offers Sandy the reassurance she desires. “Sandy stop staring at once. In Italy the Unemployment problem has been solved” (40). Sandy is not deluded. She can perceive how Miss Brodie functions in the scenario like Il Duce dolce: “Mussolini had put an end to unemployment with his fascisti and there was no litter in the streets. It occurred to Sandy … that the Brodie set was Miss Brodie’s fascisti … all knit together for her need” (31). Sandy connects the removal of litter, affectively, to the justification for Mussolini. Her “group-fright” keeps her attached, like the Italian subjects, to the leader. She needs Miss Brodie, too. Sandy consents to this mass instruction, actively.

Judy Suh argues, quite convincingly, that The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie focuses readers’ attention on the motivations for fascist subjects’ accord (87). The masses are not strung-out puppets; they desire, understandably enough, clean streets and stuffed children. Fascism is a means to that end. They consent to fascism with rigor and only consequent abandon. Fascist subjects consciously chose fascist rule. At no point, I contend, do readers see this assent to fascism more plainly than in downtown Edinburgh.

In this way, I extend Suh’s analysis to account fully for the importance of perceived social degeneration, as this acuity is central to fascist movement. This awareness of decadence motivates the students to sacrifice their individuality for the super-strong individuality of the group. The girls desire to join the set: it is beautiful in its own might.

Miss Brodie does not force or trick them. They agree, consensually participate in her

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bedazzlements. If she moulds as she models, so be it. Sanction flows logically from her selection, much like goodness from beauty. Miss Jean Brodie simply points out decadence, when she notices it, and models the new woman of spirited vocation. In this attractive image of the new woman, the frightened girls invest their interest. Considering

Edinburgh’s economy, this investment makes sense.

In text and context, perception of degeneration inspires regeneration of collectivity. The novel makes this affective dynamic keenly apparent when, at the end of the second chapter, Sandy falsely accuses dumb Mary Macgregor of pushing her. Sandy blames Mary only after “the snaky creature opposite started to shiver in the cold,” which makes Sandy “tremble again” (40-41). The shiver, then the question: who will feed the children? A self-centered fear leads Sandy from imagined to real cruelty. For Sandy,

Mary is now the dragon of degeneration, and she attempts to distance herself from the ugly, degenerate lump. Miss Brodie teaches Sandy to see the ugliness of Edinburgh’s poverty and the stupidity of Mary as one-and-the-same threat to Goodness, Truth, and

Beauty. There is real consequence to this sort of instruction. Sandy recognizes the ugliness and dissoluteness of Mary Macgregor—who wouldn’t?—and reacts against the mopey monstrosity. She lies; she blames. Of course, the world can be beautiful: Mary is an oddity, an abomination, a mistake. Goodness, Truth, and Beauty come first but not without hostility. Sandy proves, in this European capital, a model proto-fascist.

Any radical exploration of fascist pedagogy must begin at the root, for, as Miss

Jean Brodie teaches, “Radical is a word pertaining to roots—Latin radix, a root” (38).

While political fascism has a complex ideological genealogy incorporating elements of

French syndicalism and German Marxism, perhaps the question of how Miss Brodie

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teaches is best left to Miss Brodie herself. When called upon by headmistress Miss

Mackay to defend her unorthodox modes of instruction, Miss Brodie takes her stand:

“The word ‘education,’” she enjoins, “comes from the root e from ex, out, and duco, I lead. It means a leading out. To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil’s soul” (36). Good education matters, on Miss Brodie’s watch, because it redirects the students’ soul-power. Edification concerns “the pupil’s soul” rather than his mind or, forsooth, body. This tutoring leads outs something that preexists the teacher’s influence. Education raises one’s consciousness in this hands-off, immaterial manner.

Miss Brodie’s pedagogy is, by her definition, progressive, spiritual, and insightful. It makes visible the before unseen but always already there.

Obviously, Miss Brodie does not ascribe to blind regurgitation. Her pedagogy is visionary, is best suited for a “progressive school” (6). She teaches to transgress, well before multiculturalism makes this labor fashionable. She is “an educational reformer”

(118). Her pedagogy is insurrection. Still, these dangerous life lessons are neither for the oppressed nor for the masses; they belong to the select. Understandably, her nontraditional approach puts her into conflict with her conventional colleagues, but she can defend her vocation. Miss Brodie demonstrates the truth of this method with an appeal to classical etymology:

To Miss Mackay [education] is a putting in of something that is not there, and that is not what I call education, I call it intrusion, from the Latin root prefix in meaning in and the stem, trudo, I thrust. Miss Mackay’s method is to thrust a lot of information into the pupil’s head; mine is a leading out of knowledge, and that is true education as is proved by the root meaning. Now Miss Mackay has accused me of putting ideas into my girls’ heads, but in fact that is her practice and mine is quite the opposite. Never let it be said that I put ideas into your heads. (36-37)

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Such an erudite explanation exceeds the modest capabilities of Miss Brodie’s colleagues at Marcia Blaine, but those proficient in ancient tongues will savor the taste of Miss

Brodie’s piquant traditionalism. She does not force feed nor is her enlightenment spoon- fed. Never let that be said! She guides. Miss Mackay and the middle-school minions that follow her tastelessly push information down their students’ throats. They thrust. They lie. Their students regurgitate, memorize, recite. Miss Brodie’s pedagogy has nothing to do with this black-boarded-up banking method, where one makes deposits and withdrawals. This economy has, thankfully, collapsed. In sharp contrast, Miss Brodie opens the space for students’ unmediated, true self-expression. Miss Brodie leads knowledge out of her students’ souls. Forward it marches, freely.

“Radical is a word pertaining to roots,” and radical is also a word pertaining to

Miss Brodie’s pedagogy and politics. It is radical in the same way fascism is radical. It is fervent motion, movement: it is a “leading out” of what is assumed, by the leader, to be already there in the individual’s soul. Miss Brodie’s description of true education merits pause, because it paradoxically forces hard authority to cohabitate with soft liberation. Is

Miss Brodie’s pedagogical practice “quite the opposite” of Miss Mackay’s intrusion? Is it transparently the same? Miss Brodie’s definition asks the loaded question and waits patiently for the answer it knows to be coming of divine inspiration. Her method is as

Socratic as it is slippery. She leads out, always; through it, she also underscores a paradox at the heart of feel-good education and progressive politics: how do we freely lead those who so desperately desire to be led? Miss Brodie’s brand of political education may seem much too close to hegemonic “intrusion,” but is there a way to educate radically without

“trudo, I thrust”?

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Take note(s), though. In her definition, Miss Brodie aligns herself explicitly with

Socrates. She is a teacher of this noble mien. In his famous “Allegory of the Cave,”

Socrates explains that “education is not what some people boastfully declare it to be.

They presumably say they can put knowledge into souls that lack it, as if they could put sight into blind eyes (518d)” This sophistry is not proper pedagogy. True education, according to Socrates, “takes for granted that sight is there, though not turned in the right way or looking where it should look, and contrives to redirect it appropriately” (ibid).

Teaching redirects, and it reorients. Good education is, therefore, metanoia. Miss Brodie is a self-proclaimed master of such insightful redirection. She does not thrust but trusts that honest-to-goodness sight is already there, deep within her pupils. Hence Miss Brodie is not only a good teacher, but she also allusively uses the Socratic Method to bring her students to a vision of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty. She poses good questions, permits the students to formulate their own responses. Is Sybill Thorndike a good actress? She advances a passionate pedagogy with a view to the proper edification of her girls in her prime. Is Charlotte Brontë a good author? The correct answer sits at the base of students’ spines. Her pupils reflect this insight. One need only wait. “There needs must be leaven in the lump” (6), Miss Brodie tells her students, and it would seem correct to leave that leaven to spiritual education. This redirected education will, for Plato and Miss Jean

Brodie, forge a better republic.

Miss Brodie’s fascist pedagogy remains, at root, revolutionary and anti- conservative. It seeks not to constrict or restrain but to motivate, to liberate, to enthuse. It will change the world, like fascism. Wait for it: a change to believe in. When one examines Miss Brodie’s political instruction with freedom in mind, though, it becomes

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clear that Miss Brodie’s students only ever express one self, and that self belongs to Miss

Jean Brodie in her prime. As a good teacher, true insight resides in her pupils. Her teaching aims at beautiful self-expression but, like fascism, consolidates that self- expression in the charismatic leader alone. It is smoke, and mirrors: Miss Brodie, in the end, only frees her students to be liberated like her. Superficially, Miss Brodie praises the virtue of free individualism but values freedom solely to the extent that it echoes her own need. Tellingly, Miss Brodie insists, “I am not saying anything against the Modern side

… You must make your free choice. Not everyone is capable of a Classical education.

You must make your choice quite freely” (64). Miss Brodie believes, of course, that there is only one possible correct choice, so “the girls were left in no doubt as to Miss Brodie’s contempt for the Modern side” (ibid). Freedom of will exists, in this emotional manipulation, egotistically constrained. It goes without saying that Miss Brodie reinforces the importance of a classical, golden age in order to combat the degeneracy of the modern one. This “contempt for the Modern side,” which she makes plain to her students, paradoxically finds Miss Brodie at her most modernist.

Miss Brodie’s bellicose instruction is not an end in itself. It seeks to raise a brave new world from its bourgeois ashes. When Sandy decides to betray Miss Brodie, she tells

Miss Mackay: “you won’t be able to pin her down on sex” (134). Pregnant pause, and then she coyly asks. “Have you thought of politics?” Miss Mackay’s intense focus on

Miss Brodie’s sexual behavior makes it impossible for her to perceive the political resonance of Miss Brodie’s pedagogy. Here, the novel’s only direct reference to literary modernism proves telling. Miss Brodie claims that “Rose … is like a heroine from a novel by D.H. Lawrence” (117). The scant allusion to Lawrence matters, because it

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suggests how moralists have mischaracterized modernism’s danger in terms of its liberated sexuality alone.94 Sex, though, will never pin down Miss Brodie, and it seems very much beside the point. What matters first is the political impact of the modernist- fascist aesthetic and its attendant pedagogy. “She’s a born Fascist, have you thought of that?” (134) Sandy puts it plainly enough. When Sandy reframes the threat, Miss Mackay can easily dismiss Miss Brodie “on the grounds that she had been teaching Fascism”

(ibid). Through Miss Brodie’s teaching methods, Spark makes the modernist aesthetic a political issue. This shift then reframes Spark’s ethical critique. Sex is a distraction: modernism’s politics demand a nuanced, ethical re-viewing.

I have been arguing throughout this chapter that Miss Brodie’s fascist pedagogy gives patient readers a lens for this revision. Whether in Nazi Germany or Liberal

Edinburgh, one learns to live well. “All education,” Iris Murdoch notes, “is moral education.”95 As readers familiar with her moral philosophy know, Murdoch reaches this conclusion by way of Plato. The ethics and politics of the teacher-student bond are, after all, woven deeply into Plato’s Republic. Plato’s moral philosophy is best described as an erotic, spiritual, pedagogical relationship. In a gloss: do stand so close to me. This frisson initiates the student into life’s moral pilgrimage. Given that readers find this instruction within the Republic, this quest also disseminates political energies. With her own allusion to the allegory, Miss Brodie necessarily relates as she also separates herself from Socrates the teacher. She is a bad practitioner of this good education; she implicates herself in

Plato’s elitist politics as well. Therefore, one must carefully study how the ethical leads to

94 D.H. Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod (1923) makes Lawrence’s own interest in fascism explicit. First, the Lawrence-like protagonist is an artist. Second, he eventually finds himself in Italy, where he is swept up into a Fascist rally. 95 Iris Murdoch, “Some Notes on the Teaching of English in Schools,” unpublished manuscript. 312

the political in both The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Plato’s Republic. Good teachers are certainly pedestrian moralists but not necessarily effective political leaders. All in all: you’re not just another brick in the wall. To the cavern’s shadows, one returns.

III. Shadows and Light: An Ethics of Miss Brodie’s Instruction

Charismatic figures prove problematic, generally speaking, because they detract attention from where it might otherwise be placed. Reflection on the Second World War, in particular, tends to congeal about the name Hitler; his charismatic evil makes it easier to digest the horror, as his nefarious influence, now obvious, consoles. (Hitler is evil so we do not need to be.) Something similar happens in Spark’s novel. Charismatically,

Miss Brodie comes to dominate the picture of the novel that bears her name. This command is problematic, because the political censure of Miss Brodie, as a fascist, substitutes for the necessary ethical work that the text seeks to engender. Miss Brodie demands our attention, in part, because she is indelibly engaging and, in part, because her malignity consoles. (Brodie is fascist so we do not need to be.) Miss Brodie’s authoritarianism governs criticism of the novel to such an extent that outright political censure displaces patient, progressive, ethical illumination.96 In these readings, Miss

Brodie functions as a transplanted dictator, an evident wrong: “a free-wheeling Justified

Sinner in the tradition of Calvinist mythology,” as Garry Laffin has it (214), a “self- proclaimed heretic,” according to Benilde Montgomery (5). A sole focus on fascism’s charismatic politics, however, reduces morality to a puerile matter of finger-pointing. I

96 See, especially, Brown’s recent “‘There’s Something about Mary’: Narrative and Ethics in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” and Dorenkamp’s classic “Moral Vision in Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.” 313

want to resist the collapse of the ethical into the political in order to trouble the consolation this conflation affords.

This resistance will demand that readers insulate the novel’s political agenda from its expansive moral exercise. My argument does not reject the many wonderful fascist readings of the novel or insist that politics has no relation to ethics; rather, it seeks to return government to its proper place, one that follows moral education logically and chronologically. Miss Brodie is, after all, more than a political tyrant; she is also, allegedly, a teacher in the tradition of Socrates. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie invites readers, in this way, to consider the complex ways in which education speaks to political and moral practices. It also hints at the possibility that politics demands different virtues than learning well. The habits we cultivate in the classroom need not be the same virtues that liberal subjects practice in the political sphere. One rightly acts agonistically in the political forum, but, as a student, this behavior seems unsuitable. Authority functions differently in the lecture hall than it does in the campus rally, even if separated by a thin windowpane. Perhaps education ought, then, to concern moral instruction rather than political action. I chart this course at the chapter’s close, but first we must return to Plato.

Spark’s allusions to his cave concretize, I believe, the compulsory affinity between education and the good life.

For even the staunchest Nietzchean, goodness comes first in education. Morality infuses standardized curriculum. Teachers make thousands of ethical decisions, and compromises, in a single day. How one teaches matters, as humanists know, far more than what one teaches. Furthermore, the ethics of education exceeds teachers’ quotidian technique. In an ordinary sense, students are perennially aware of education’s attachment

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to optimism, that affective investment in the desirability of and possibility for the good life. There is a futurity built into education that is not always or only a matter of effective government. Which picture of the good life am I projecting to my students? What sort of life do they wish to live? Ethics will never be far from schooling for this reason: one ceaselessly appeals to brittle tomorrows in the day’s sturdy benchmarks. Beyond teaching practices, scholarship also asks countless questions of one’s moral philosophy. How does one write with grace and generosity? Am I being fair to that critic, to his formulation? Is this logic clear? One puts in effort to write well. Goodness, Truth, and Beauty apply necessary pressure to all academic work, and rightfully so.

Schoolhouse merits—patience, attention, respect, quietness—form the basis, remember, for Simone Weil’s ethics. The essential link between pedagogy and moral practice does not, for this reason, escape Weil. Notice how she appears to agree with

Miss Brodie when she writes, in Gravity and Grace, of the chronological preeminence of

Goodness, Truth, and Beauty:

The authentic and pure values—truth, beauty and goodness—in the activity of a human being are the result of one and the same act, a certain application of the full attention to the object. Teaching should have no aim but to prepare, by training the attention, for the possibility of such an act. All the other advantages of instruction are without interest. (120)

With characteristic decision, Weil extols the didactic advantages of moral attention.

When one studies an object without self-interest and apart from her egoistic fantasy, the

Brodie triumvirate—“truth, beauty and goodness”—emerges of its own accord. Good education prepares the mind for this sort of scholarly reception. Education and morality, on Weil’s count, find themselves necessarily embroiled. To teach well is necessarily to teach Good. Truth follows from method.

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Around the time of her own conversion to Catholicism in the early 1950s, Muriel

Spark studied Simone Weil and met with others to discuss Weil’s work (Stannard 155).

Like Spark, Weil struggled on the margins of Judaism and Christianity and experienced an oft-cited, unconsummated conversion to Rome. Regardless of how direct Weil’s influence on The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, one should not underestimate the importance of attention to the novel’s ethics. Dutiful vision is central, I argue, to Spark’s exploration of pedagogy, government, and goodness. In addition, Spark makes subtle references throughout the novel to Weil’s own teacher, Plato. With Plato’s Republic, I argue, one appreciates Spark’s shift, by way of education, from politics to ethics. Good students move, with Socrates, from the shadows to the Light of Goodness, Truth, and

Beauty. This spiritual pilgrimage does not happen quickly; rather, it demands, like a good book, patience and endless reassessment. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie cultivates precisely this moral discipline in its reader. The “Allegory of the Cave” is central, then, to how we read, and un-read, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. The allegory reminds readers that they first see the world and only thereafter act within it.

Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” captures a subject’s progressive pilgrimage from illusion to truth. Simply, it is a tale of vision. At first, chained prisoners recognize the shadows projected on a wall as ultimate truth. They cannot see these projections for what they are—airy, fantastic, futile—because these images are all that these prisoners have ever known, seen, loved. “They are like us,” Socrates promises (515a), and, with this statement, Socrates places his interlocutor in the position of a slave. Liberated, the prisoner can turn around at will, but such volition does not necessitate real, truthful vision; instead, “he would be pained by doing all these things and be unable to see the

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things whose shadows he had seen before, because of the flashing lights” (515d). Once the prisoner turned student has “time to get adjusted,” he notices both the fire within the cave that casts the shadows and the sun outside the cave which “is the cause of all that is correct and beautiful in anything” (517c). When one stares down the sun, she inexpressibly encounters, according to the allegory, the Form of the Good. All else—the fire, the shadows, the prisoners’ imaginations—is derivative imitation. The good student sees this truth clearly and redirects her behavior toward piecemeal illumination.

Plato’s parable emphasizes, however, the difficulty and pain that awaits this journey. It is not easy to perceive goodness, especially in a world of muddle. With knowledge, comes much vexation. Moreover, this spiritual-philosophical quest has no end. One does not achieve enlightenment and sit, Buddha-style. One returns, always, to the muck, mess, and pain of human existence. A fall from the sun is inevitable, where the initial glimpse is not. Notably, Socrates reminds Glaucon that “anyone with any sense … would remember that eyes may be confused in two ways and from two causes: when they change from light into the darkness, or from the darkness into the light” (518a; emphasis mine). The movement from sunlight back into the cave hurts as much as the liberating journey upward. The examined life is, therefore, one of endless revolution, but these revolutions are circular and, perhaps, vain; one moves from darkness to light and back to darkness again. The philosopher returns inevitably to his cave. There is no escape from this obligation. One is forced to agree with Murdoch that “virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is. It is an empirical fact about human nature that this attempt cannot be entirely successful” (SG 91). Never- ending failure haunts moral existence. Plato’s allegory captures the potential for, and

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futility of, human betterment. Goodness is impossible in the strictest sense. Knowing suffering is inevitable, too.

One must remember that Plato defines good education within his discussion of the cave allegory (518d). In his Republic, education is the name given to the process of learning to see beyond one’s preconceptions and consolations. One turns and begins to view another world; sight remains constant but is redirected by proper instruction. It is, notably, to this edifying process that Miss Brodie alludes. One must learn to see beyond the shadows; one must be guided toward truthful, painful perception. This progress is, for

Plato, radical education. As I have suggested, Miss Brodie fails, though, to lead her students to true perception. She entangles them, instead, within her own political net, of which personal fantasies and happy-making illusions compose the threads. They find themselves attracted, stuck, entwined. The little girls give their consent to these fascist romances, because they bring comfort to an unstable and ugly globe. Within Miss

Brodie’s orb, each girl can imagine herself a fit heroine. In this mythology, she is famous for at least something. Readers see this hard-won solace in even the dullest of the set.

Lumpish Mary Macgregor, dumped by a boyfriend, remembers—“she thought back to see if she had ever really been happy in her life; it occurred to her then that the first years with Miss Brodie, sitting listening to those stories and opinions which had nothing to do with the ordinary world, had been the happiest time of her life” (13). Miss Brodie’s projections bring joy to a lackluster planet. Her education sugarcoats as it sweetens a raw reality.

Miss Brodie does not thrust facts into her little girls’ minds, but she certainly engages them in her myths. Narratives, even the most liberating, can be deadly.

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Imagination can collude with fancy to produce perilous consolations, hazardous abstractions. Historically, the charismatic fascist leader disseminates beautiful myths to energize and congeal the masses (Müller 113). One sees this myth-making, too, in the pedagogy of Jean Brodie. Many scholars have demonstrated how Miss Brodie’s strong leadership mimics the fascist dictator (Dorkenkamp 4), yet they undervalue the centrality of myth to her fascist method.97 To be clear, fascism is not the novel’s prime fantasy, as many scholars have, understandably, assumed (Laffin 218); fantasy is rather the pedagogical method that effects the political reality of fascism. A conflation of politics and ethics leads to the first critical perception. The extraction of ethics from politics, however, suggests a second interpretation, the argument I have been advancing here.

From this view, education is properly demythologization.

One must draw direct attention to the concrete ways in which Miss Brodie’s pedagogy engages insubstantial daydream. After all, education is her (aesthetic) vocation.

It is this artful myth-making that, ultimately, leads her students to action, because “it was intolerable to Miss Brodie that any of her girls should grow up not largely dedicated to some vocation” (65). It is also what attracts them to the set. Her stories transfigure ordinary students into the political agents capable of heroic action and spirited rebellion.

These fables of dedication and leadership provoke dumb Mary Macgregor to join the

Wrens at the outbreak of World War II (13). Fancy leads another student, rebellious

Joyce Emily, to die in route to fight for Franco (113). Mary remembers these wonderful stories as “having nothing to do with the ordinary world” for a reason; these myths are long-range missiles fired against a harsh, un-pretty reality. As such, they are deadly;

97 Anne L. Bower and Mary W. Schneider provide rich readings of Miss Brodie’s use of fantasy, and I draw on their accounts here. Still, they do not connect this use of myth to fascist politics or to Plato’s Republic. 319

“myth is always more important as a persuader,” George L. Mosse cautions, “than the sober analysis of reality” (39). They are linguistic weapons.

Miss Brodie shares the strategic use of myths with her fascist contemporaries.

One of Mussolini’s prime influences, Georges Sorel was famous for myth-making.98 The true socialist revolution, on Sorel’s count, would happen through engaged mythical stories and not through unfashionable proletariat uprisings (Griffin NF 28). “We do nothing great,” Sorel lectures, “without the help of warmly coloured images which absorb the whole of our attention” (qtd. in Müller 98). Images, rightly used, effect revolution.

They absorb the attention, blob-like, and inspire greatness, rebellion. This absorption, tellingly, overwhelms the moral capacity for attention. In his insistence on myth-making as revolutionary weapon, Sorel’s anti-materialist revolution effects an aestheticization of political life, and Miss Brodie’s pedagogy rests on the same mythic foundation. Like fascism,99 she too aestheticizes politics. She accomplishes this beautification through the stunning myths she impresses upon her students’ souls. She wields these fantasies like a

“warmly-coloured” bludgeon. One need only study her lesson-plans. These lessons betray how Miss Brodie uses anti-materialist, self-created fictions to stimulate hope and cohesiveness with scant regard for the vulgar demands of veracity. This stimulation gives her students what the teachers in the senior school will not. “They are all gross materialists,” bear in mind. Miss Brodie is not so quietly materialist.

In fact, her lessons loudly transcend the demands of reality. During “the hour for

English grammar” (9), Miss Brodie teaches the subject and objects of her love life. She

98 Zeev Sternhell emphasizes the importance of myth in Sorel’s anti-materialist account of revolutionary action (36-91), a mythology Mussolini shares (204). 99 Walter Benjamin has influentially argued that the “logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life,” an “introduction” that leads, for Benjamin, to just “one thing: war” (1185). 320

tells the little girls a story about Hugh, her forbidden lover and “a hard-working and clever scholar.” She continues the saga. “He said, when he asked me to marry him, ‘We shall have to drink water and walk slow.’ That was Hugh’s country way of expressing that we would live quietly. We shall drink water and walk slow” (ibid). Miss Brodie’s lessons prove the pedagogical equivalent of a telenovela. She mixes outlandish fantasy—

“hard-working … scholar”—with a strong dose of the bucolic—his “country way”—to garner support for her handsome cause. She deploys emotions by way of myths and stories. She piquantly pushes buttons. Not surprisingly, the students cry when they learn that “Hugh was killed . . . a week before Armistice” (10). The lesson is simple, though quixotic. In the instruction, she displays complete mastery of Brontë-sister realness, and one can almost hear Hugh call across the moors: it’s me, Jeanie. The story displaces the need for rudimentary instruction. Obviously this fictionalized romance has nothing to do with English grammar. It does, however, have deadly political implications, a consequence which Sandy discerns only later when Miss Brodie teaches the same lesson again.

In the “newly embroidered” lesson, Miss Brodie reframes her picture-perfect relationship. “Sometimes Hugh would sing,” she insists, “he had a rich tenor voice. At other times he fell silent and would set up his easel and paint. He was very talented at both arts, but I think the painter was the real Hugh.” (75). Notice the alteration. Hugh was first a working-class scholar; now he is a musician turned painter. “This was the first time the girls had heard of Hugh’s artistic leanings” (ibid), which indicates how Miss Brodie changes the hues of her warmly-coloured myth to fit the pattern of her life. These pedagogically-inspired tales are an art form as they also form her curricular foundation.

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As an artist in her prime, Miss Brodie repaints her own self-portrait, since “pictorial art is my passion” (69) … currently. Caught between two lovers, Jean Brodie uses romance to rationalize her affection for the art master, Teddy Lloyd. Miss Brodie renews optimism— mostly her own, but the girls’ hopes, too—in and through the fiction she creates. She was

“making her new love story fit the old” (76), Sandy sharply discerns; and, by this method,

Miss Brodie’s madness recreates.

“Truth is stranger than fiction” (133), Miss Brodie would later tell Sandy

Stranger. Still, now-young Sandy, soon-to-be famous for moral perception, identifies this romanticized invention straightaway. She also begins to understand how deeply Miss

Brodie believes her own inventions. Miss Brodie bends history to her story—“those of

Miss Brodie’s kind were great talkers and feminists” (44)—in an attempt to force a perfected future, a past perfect. The order behind this sanguine artistry suggests to me that Miss Brodie is best described, politically, as a fascist mythologist. She wages war against the ordinary with myth, echoing Sorel and later Mussolini. She fashionably moves, like many other European revolutionaries, from Hugh the proletariat to Hugh the aesthete. She will engage artistic creations and inspire passions to transform the world’s canvas. Reality is a problem to destroy and remake; it is not a dead thing to witness. Her fascist pedagogy is thus not only avant-garde but also avant la letter. Miss Brodie heeds the transformative potential of romantic aesthetics, as she sharpens her pen-knife.

I claim that readers see, in the aforementioned lesson-plan, how Miss Brodie’s myths mobilize her set. “Where there is no vision,” Miss Brodie instructs on the first day of school, “the people perish” (4). Visionary romance appeals, throughout The Prime of

Miss Jean Brodie, to the students’ adolescent emotions. These stories also encourage the

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students’ sense of election, as they become privy to the intricacies of Miss Brodie’s imagined love affairs. Fancy unities, mobilizes, and makes “them feel chosen” (84). It provides an alternative universe, as Mary W. Schneider has suggested: “Jean Brodie, through her double lives, has shown Sandy how to escape the everyday world, the dreariness of the school, of the thirties, of life itself” (430). Fiction is woven as a means of escape. It creates distanced, starry universes. Consequently, Sandy Stranger is “never bored, but she had to lead a double life of her own in order never to be bored” (20). She too creates substitute selves, other worlds. Sandy is, like Jean Brodie, a hero-artist who engages myth to combat an unhappy-making reality. The consequences of such play are, however, real.

To the extent that political fascism relies on myth employed as arsenal, to that same extent does Muriel Spark launch a Platonic attack on fancy. Miss Brodie’s fantastic pedagogy is, after all, a problem for ethics as much as it is an issue of fascist politics. The moral problem lies in the seemingly endless human capacity for fantasy. This capacity is of course related to the political problem of fascism but is not, nor should it be seen as, reducible to it. For this reason: human beings ceaselessly craft self-protective illusions that shield them from true confrontation with reality, with or without fascist motivation.

Human beings are quite selfish, and the moral life begins as one distances himself from selfish preoccupation. One sees this recognition allegorized in Plato’s description of the moral life as a voyage from egoist fantasy toward real-world truth. Human beings first see shadows; only later is it possible for the human animal to glimpse Goodness, Truth, and Beauty as separate from good (for me), true (according to me), and beautiful (like me). Significantly, Socrates insists that the “power to learn … is present in everyone’s

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soul” (518d). And yet, one must practice endless discernment, nurture what Simone Weil calls attention, until he “is able to bear to look at what is and at the brightest thing that is—the one we call the good” (ibid). Careful attention and good education lead one to see realistically. The ethical life, for Plato and Weil, is one in which the subject attempts to view the world for what it is rather than for what one needs it, selfishly, to be. The good life is a mode of realism. When one boils The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie down to its critique of extremist politics alone, one distances oneself from one’s own moral obligation to attend to reality and the veils of fantasy that cloak it.

I borrow this formulation of the good life, once again, from Murdoch. Murdoch, as a student of Weil, updates Plato’s allegory for the war-weary twentieth century. In her moral philosophy, she places the Platonic moral pilgrimage into direct dialogue with modern conceptions of subjectivity. Spark’s allusions to Plato’s allegory—yes, there is a second allusion on deck—suggestively bring the two mid-century novelists into conversation.100 As literary scholars have noted, Murdoch and Spark both share a keen sense of the ethical resources religion brings to a secular age. They also write for a postwar era. The central difference: Spark is Catholic, while Murdoch remains a committed atheist. Nevertheless, there is valuable overlap between The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Murdoch’s own The Sovereignty of Good. There, Murdoch endlessly clarifies the moral stakes of Plato’s allegory. She also speculates, tellingly, that the ethical might be best thought detached from the political (SG 79).

In this context, it is worth noting that Murdoch insists throughout her moral philosophy that the ego is, at base, irreducibly selfish. The self preserves its narcissism

100 For more on Spark’s literary relationship to Murdoch, see Warner Berthoff’s early take on the two premiere mid-century novelists, “Fortunes of the Novel: Muriel Spark and Iris Murdoch.” 324

with the fantasies that it engenders. With these images, one imagines oneself to be heroic, beautiful, all-powerful, even, if not especially, selfless. “The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion.” The ego is, for Murdoch, like the fire in Plato’s cave (SG 98).

It sheds warm, comforting light, of which it is not the true source. “Goodness,” she contrastingly insists, “is connected with the attempt to see the unself, to see and respond to the real world in light of a virtuous consciousness. This is the non-metaphysical meaning of the idea of transcendence to which philosophers have so constantly resorted in their explanations of goodness” (91). The ethical agent reaches transcendence when she encounters a perspective other than the one which brings narcissistic consolation.

This transcendence is still worldly and remains quite ordinary; one does not ecstatically fly off to the heavens, thank God, but instead quietly empties the self of its festering self- interest. This earthly rootedness allows Murdoch to rethink religion’s role in the moral life. Religion, through discipline and ritual, trains the subject to perceive and, accordingly, act better. This revision can happen with or without a transcendent, personal

God. In this ethical training, moreover, religion and education have significant overlap, as they both mortify the ego’s wont to know and harbor it all.

Muriel Spark alerts readers to the problems of fancy with a second reference to

Plato’s foundational allegory. This allusion concerns students rather than teachers. While

Miss Brodie knowingly appeals to Plato’s definition of education, the little girls find themselves unconsciously thrust into fantasy’s shadowy realm. In this space, they first write, create, love. Throughout The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Sandy and Jenny compose narratives to rationalize their adolescent feelings. An early fiction, “The

Mountain Eyrie,” reflects this sustained engagement with fantasy. The imaginative title

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evokes Jane Eyre, the romantic novel Miss Brodie reads during sewing class, and suggests audibly the airiness of Miss Brodie’s own life and work (17). At Marcia Blaine, it is true that, often enough, “Miss Brodie’s brown eyes were fixed on the clouds” (121).

Likewise in “The Mountain Eyrie” all is romance and heights of true feeling. In these stories, Miss Brodie is a disciplined heroine, a woman of noble mien gifted with “a certain deep romantic beauty” (91). She is mountainous, yet ethereal. She is, geographically, “above all that” sexual stuff (19). The narrative suggests an innocence which is, the meta-text soon unearths, never truly innocent. Value follows, however, from vision: Sandy and Jenny see Miss Jean Brodie as heroic to the extent that they imagine her to be such. Consciousness creates, as it mirrors, these worlds. Casual narratives craft the girls’ consciousness and consequently color their moral vision. Of course, such a beautiful world is never without violence, a principal lesson of Miss Brodie’s prime.

Spark’s political implication is, seemingly, that Jane Eyre’s romance participates in Mein

Kampf’s revolt. This airy commonality appears to reside in a certain Olympian rejection of the material, a prettified revolt against flesh and imperfection.

It is not until the girls decide to recreate Miss Brodie’s romantic correspondence with Mr. Lowther that fantasy’s full moral significance clarifies. To make sense of Miss

Brodie’s art-room embrace, Jenny and Sandy compose imaginative letters. In the fictive exchange, Miss Brodie congratulates Mr. Lowther “warmly” for his “sexual intercourse, as well as [his] singing” (78). One notes, however, that Sandy and Jenny write these letters “at the mouth of a cave” (76), in part because Jenny’s aunt is rightly “suspicious of their notebook” (ibid). Here, Spark reminds readers a second time of Plato’s cave, for it is within this allegorized space that human beings give shape to their comforting (and

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entertaining) illusions. This cavern-composed creative work romanticizes reality, once again, and the consequences are as moral as they are political. The moral of the story:

Miss Brodie’s instruction does not encourage her students to turn away from the cave and its projections; rather, she cultivates this myth-making ability, especially when she is too in one of her “prophetic moods” (113). She sees romance as the equivalence of art: not black or white, but many shades of grey. That the little girls bury these notes in “a damp hole half-hidden by a stone at the back of the cave” (78) solidifies the association of these fantasies with Plato’s projections. These letters cloud reality and conceal good light. Case in point: innocently Sandy and Jenny are able to imagine that their teachers are mere

“platonic acquaintances” (77), as the letter duly inscribes. They love above that. But surely this Platonism is fiction!101

Miss Brodie’s reality follows from her fantasy, as Sandy perceives later into her prime. In a sense, Miss Brodie forges a reality of her own; or, perhaps better, she enforces it. She leads out truth from fiction all the more violently as she ages. “All at once Sandy realised that this was not all theory and a kind of Brodie game, in the way that so much of life was unreal talk and game-playing … the woman was obsessed by the need for Rose to sleep with the man she herself was in love with; there was nothing new in the idea, it was the reality that was new” (128). The world one wishes to see has a strange way of becoming the world one does, in fact, observe. This mystification leads people to envision false worlds, and, in a theme park, it is difficult to exercise freedom. Spark’s descriptions alerts readers to this word-world-deed relation when she compares the

101 Not to pry, but Miss Brodie does leave her nightdress under Mr. Lowther’s pillow. It’s crêpe de Chine (99), and while the Unemployed go hungry! The nightdress suggests that Miss Brodie and Mr. Lowther committed intimacy outside the bonds of holy matrimony. See Exodus 20:14 KJV. 327

“unreal talk and game-playing,” cited above, directly to “the prospects of war” (ibid).

This war does happen. Sandy squashes the Rose-Teddy liaison and sleeps with the art master instead. “Yes, of course, it’s inevitable” (ibid ): well, not quite. Good, clear vision is connected to freedom for reasons like this: a “short-sighted” teenager is always free to bed her teacher. Free will follows clear vision and fittingly foils Miss Brodie’s plan-of- attack.

Plainly, Miss Brodie’s prolific imagination solidifies her charismatic control over all her girls. Fancy generates the romance necessary for unification and revolt. This artistry rightly astounds: Miss Brodie can reweave history. “Sandy was fascinated by this method of making patterns with facts,” Spark tellingly has it, “and divided between her admiration for the technique and the pressing need to prove Miss Brodie guilty of misconduct” (76; emphasis mine). Spark’s use of the word “fascinating” is significant. It calls strategic attention to the etymological similarity between fascination and fascism.102

Miss Brodie’s fascinating myths bundle her students together, as they also push Sandy to her ultimate rebellion: she needs to put a stop to Jean Brodie’s art. Miss Brodie must be quelled precisely because her myth has no basis in reality; it can reshape facts into patterns, at will. This dangerous spark of the imagination—her art of changing hues— establishes Miss Brodie as separate, as elect, as divine. Her mythic teachings leave moral responsibility behind. “All the time they were under her influence,” Sandy later recalls,

“she and her actions were outside the context of right and wrong” (91). Beyond good and evil, Miss Brodie’s schooling leads out what it needs to hear.

102 The Oxford English Dictionary does not indicate that the two words have a single common ancestor. “Fascination” comes from the Latin fascinum, meaning “a spell.” “Fascism,” however, comes from the Italian fascio, the word for “bundle” or “group.” 328

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie thus illustrates the deep-seated propensity to illusion not only in and through Miss Brodie’s lessons but also in the girls’ own fantasies.

They craft narratives to describe Miss Brodie’s love affairs of course, but they also spin tales to account for the policewoman, for their parents’ sexuality, for each other. Fantasy and the consolation it affords provide the raw material for Miss Brodie’s pedagogical interventions. This capacity—the imagination—is already present in the human soul.

Miss Brodie simply appeals to the human predilection for unreality and misdirects her students’ imaginations in the process. The ethical life, which Murdoch plainly describes and Plato famously allegorizes, consists in the attempt to redirect the heated mind's eye.

As students of the Good, human subjects must learn “to see and respond to the real world.” Imagination is not ruined but redressed. Ethics leads the imagination toward reality. Education is similarly enjoined. True instruction moves the soul from projection to affliction, toward that blank vision which offers no consolation. The good pupil averts from the cave. Not for nothing do Jenny and Sandy bury their story of Miss Brodie’s love affairs in a cave; that they do so mid-novel and at the end of their time with Miss Brodie is significant. Spark primes her readers, with this reference, to the process by which one moves from hollow fancy to humble sight.

It is a gross mistake to gloss the ethical movement from the cave to grave as mere biological maturation. As Spark’s famous flash-forward method makes clear, maturity— like goodness—bears no inherent necessity.103 One can remain, quite contentedly, unbearably adolescent. As such, interrogation of the imagination is necessary for moral

103 For a concise description of the flash-forward technique and a smart reading of its relationship to Miss Brodie’s romanticism, see Anne L. Bower’s “The Narrative Structure of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.” Patricia Waugh connects this technique directly to “Spark’s rejection of sentiment and empathy” (88). 329

growth. “Fantasy is one way of ‘transfiguring the commonplace,” as David Lodge notes; for this reason, “Miss Brodie’s sympathy for the Fascist movements of the thirties is not a reasoned political attitude, but an extension of her egotism and romantic sensibility”

(247). Fascism feels good. It seems right. Clear moral instruction and the capacity for attention it cultivates thwart, however, the romantic ego. Even goodish religious instruction can provide human beings with an opportunity for “unselfing,” the ego- divestment at the center of Murdoch’s moral philosophy. They might, there, learn to see the world in “the absence of the anxious avaricious tentacles of self” (SG 101). Still entangled, Miss Brodie and Goodness cannot both come first. Until Miss Brodie disabuses herself of her existentialist narcissism, she will only ever read and therefore see what she desires.

IV. Catholic Schooling: On Sandy; or, Miss Stranger, If You’re “Nesty”

As J.H. Dorkenkamp has aptly argued, proper ethical discernment is The Prime of

Miss Jean Brodie’s fundamental concern (3). The novel pictures a world in which one must hazard moral decision. As I have suggested throughout this chapter, readers must understand right vision in terms of its endless progression and not as an orthodox achievement. One never conquers truth. The good student merely learns to see, progressively, better. In this section, I will establish the centrality of this progressive moral instruction. On my reading, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie echoes Simone Weil and functions didactically to coach its readers to attend faithfully to a reality distant from self. This edification is simultaneously religious, ethical, and pedagogical. In the final analysis, Spark’s novel argues against Miss Brodie’s lesson and places God rather than

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“Goodness, Truth and Beauty” first. The text instructs as Socrates teaches—with repeated questions, unsettling ignorance, a dab of authoritarianism, and much beauty—but makes of this method something material, too. Spark’s “post-realist” education is markedly different than Miss Jean Brodie’s fascist approach (Wickman 64). Ultimately, Miss

Brodie misunderstands Plato’s allegory, but I argue one sees how Spark redeems, through her novel, the use-value of Plato’s moral syllabus.

In this redeeming vein, Spark’s instruction also reassesses religion’s significance.

Religion, like good reading, trains the practitioner to pay attention, to see more clearly, to pause in awe of the un-self. Religion is moral practice, at best. Sandy’s later writings echo this preoccupation, and her conversion implicates the Church in the process. After she leaves Teddy Lloyd and extracts “his religion as a pith from a husk” (132), Sandy

Stranger produces the widely influential and notably “odd psychological treatise on the nature of moral perception, called ‘The Transfiguration of the Commonplace’” (35). This book addresses the intersection of psychology and morality; it concerns consciousness and apprehension. To observe the world is, in some sense, also to alter it. Readers should not blindly applaud Sandy’s moral perception, though, just because she wrote the book, as Joseph Hynes and Patricia Waugh have duly cautioned (172; 89). Slow down, first: this section will approach the issue of moral discernment with a view toward religious pedagogy; only then will it evaluate the canonization status of Sister Helena. In this final assessment, Catholicism’s particularity will materialize. There, I will articulate Spark’s

Catholic intervention and show how it relates to our opening distinction between the existentialist and mystical novels. There will be more to say regarding fantasy, especially to the extent that pure fancy dematerializes.

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Ere purity, it will be necessary to get nasty. For, as Miss Mackay reminds the

Brodie set on the page before the impending indecent exposure, “[c]ulture cannot compensate for lack of hard knowledge” (69; emphasis mine), and this hard knowledge one comes, so it seems, by only in the real world. There, “Jenny, out walking alone, was accosted by a man joyfully exposing himself beside the Water of Leith. He said, ‘Come and look at this” (70). With this pointed vision of a real “thingummyyig” (19), Jenny finally “perceived the truth” (70). A hard knowledge, indeed! This perception launches the girls into a stunning creative period. They willfully rewrite; they narrate. They chew it over; they cogitate. The little girls discuss the “the man himself and the nature of what he had exposed to view,” anticipating Judith Butler’s groundbreaking work of the early

1990s; they interrogate, more importantly, “the policewoman” and her modern profession. Jenny’s description of the officer, a new woman of Miss Brodie’s progressive stamp, leads Sandy to ditch “Alan Breck and Mr. Rochester and all the heroes of fiction for the summer term”; she then falls promptly “in love with the unseen policewoman who had questioned Jenny” (70-71).104 Sandy’s imagination christens her Sergeant Anne

Grey, and the “rest brought nothing but good” (70); i.e. nothing but good fiction. The actual woman persists unseen, unheard, and without flesh.

One should not pass over this piggish interlude too fast. The episode exposes readers to an essential character trait that Sandy Stranger and Jean Brodie share. They both hold a certain commitment to airiness, euphemism. The precise nature of Sandy’s conversation reveals what I have in mind here. When the policewoman asks Jenny what she truly witnessed, Jenny is speechless. To prompt her, the officer says: “You saw

104 Patricia Duncker provides a much needed queer reading of the novel that oddly underestimates this love. 332

something nasty?” (71). She agrees that IT was nasty. Jenny, however, pronounces “the word ‘nasty’ as ‘nesty,’ which was unusual for Jenny” (ibid). Sandy cannot idly bear the queer intonation. When Jenny insists that Sergeant Grey did say “nesty,” the word itself

“gave rise to an extremely nasty feeling in Sandy and it put her off the idea of sex for months. All the more as she disapproved of the pronunciation of the word, it made her flesh creep, and she plagued Jenny to change her mind and agree that the policewoman had pronounced it properly” (ibid; emphasis added for comic relief). In this exchange,

“nesty” augments something “nasty,” and this emotion pushes intercourse out of Sandy’s mind. Her flesh creeps with recognition. This uncanny knowledge prompts further narratives, because now “she had to invent a new-speaking image for the policewoman”

(71-72). Soft-core fantasy quickly displaces hapless “hard knowledge.”

Obviously, Miss Brodie emphasizes elegant elocution, and Sandy is famous, early in the novel, for her vowel sounds (3). Sandy’s obsession with “nesty” has its textual precedents. Nonetheless, it seems essential to underscore the ways in which this exchange denotes a rejection of the sexual and of the grossly material. When the policewoman allegedly pronounces “nasty” as “nesty,” the law-enforcement officer draws oral notice to the fact that one does not get “nesty” without committing THE BIG NASTY. The cold, hard truth: it takes a thingummyyig, nakedly drawn, to make love and engender babies.

The word “nesty,” though domestic, implicitly implicates sex in procreation. Sandy wants a little love nest, but sex is too messy. Sandy’s desire, like Miss Brodie’s affections, is

“above all that.” With the female officer, she creates an alternative narrative. There, she and Anne Grey dedicate themselves “to eliminate sex from Edinburgh and environs”

(72). This noble labor brings them beautifully together, platonically: “Sergeant Anne

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pressed Sandy’s hand in gratitude; and they looked into each other’s eyes, their mutual understanding too deep for words” (72-73). This pure, visionary eros is juxtaposed to the assault of “nesty” boys, whom, for Sandy, don’t mean a thingummyyig. She takes control, creates, instead, a pure romance from whatever scraps fall in her path, much like

Jean Brodie, who spends the same holiday weekend “at the little Roman village of

Cramond” (73). Did I forget to mention that all this consciousness-raising happens during

“the Easter holidays” (70)? Perhaps the connection is immaterial.

As students of Miss Jean Brodie, Sandy and Jenny struggle to accept the brittle material realm. They constantly engage in rewriting, fiction that attempts to unstiffen facts. Jenny learns the taut truth only because her idealism seduces her. She believes that the gentleman caller has “picked up a fallen nestling from the ground or had discovered a strange plant” (70) and wants to show it to her. She discovers not “a fallen nestling” but something “nesty” nevertheless! Of course, in a Judeo-Christian sense, Jenny does experience a fall after she witnesses IT. With this vision, she has left the nest of her innocence. Taken together, the whole encounter solidifies the fallen relationship between

“nesty” and “nasty,” which completely turns Sandy off to the idea of sexual intercourse.

She later converts to Catholicism and takes a vow of chastity. And yet, even this postlapsarian turn-off is not quite true: she rather sublimates her sexual feelings into her fantasies via clean scientific discourse, since surely “intimacy took place” (72). This hygienic impulse pushes her farther into Miss Brodie’s dreamscape. It is orderly; it is sparkling. To keep it decent, she advises Jenny not to tell Miss Brodie. Thereby, she participates in maintaining her own fantasies and in protecting Miss Brodie’s immaculate conceptions. No doubt, the little girls “forgot the man by the Water of Leith and

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remembered the policewoman more and more as the term wore on” (74). Such displacement preserves the romance plot in which they have so deeply invested. They need their heroine fix.

And so, Sandy advises reticence: preserve the illusion. Miss Brodie should not know about the man and his TRUTH. This decision was “connected with something that had happened in the morning,” eavesdroppers learn, when Jean Brodie sends Rose, instead of Monica, to Teddy Lloyd’s art room (73). Miss Brodie discharges Rose to the art room, because she needs Rose to attract Teddy Lloyd and his attention. That, and

Monica is famous for calculating not painting. This mission officially launches Miss

Brodie’s quest to seduce Teddy by way of Rose. Both Sandy and Miss Brodie fantasize in order to protect the decent design. The main difference: Sandy invents heroines, while

Miss Brodie forms them. Nonetheless, they manage, manipulate, and malign. In Miss

Brodie’s classroom, mind hovers over matter. The material realm is not jettisoned, however; it is rather employed, frustrated, rewritten. Anti-materialist fantasy disrupts its standard economic functionality. Miss Brodie, to stay with this example, renounces

Teddy Lloyd, “the great love of my prime,” because he was married (58). Using Rose’s

“merry carnality” instead, Miss Brodie flirts and seduces separate from the muck and mire of adultery. She hence satisfies “her sexual feelings,” according to Sandy, “by proxy” (120). She is removed, still, self-possessed. She loves purely and in and through her prime renunciation.

A pure existence requires Olympian mental gymnastics. Narrative serves this purpose. It cleanses and repackages. It revises and touches up. Miss Brodie shares this sin-free “artistic nature” with Teddy, of course, but not with those other brutes (58). She

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is disinclined to stoop. She has no interest in Rose’s very attractive father, since she

“thought him rather carnal” (127). Miss Brodie is a woman of spirit. She thinks for others. The Stanleys exist simply, bodily, rosily-skinned. They stand to be used by the elect. She is mind; they are matter. Society’s base populace, cobblers and those folks driven by “instinct” like Rose (114), wait for a spirited leader. Her insight leads their instinct. The Brodie set is, equally, “a body with Miss Brodie for the head” (30). This headiness keeps her “an innocent in her way” (136), but it condemns her to be a ghost always in search of its machine. She needs bodies even though she cannot inhabit her own fully. She is a teacher, then, always in need of new material.

This heady asceticism puts Miss Brodie in an awkward position. She is sex without body. One observes the paradox physically in the art room, where “Miss Brodie seated herself nobly like Britannia with her legs apart under her loose brown skirt which came well over her knees” (50). Her skirt is “loose” even as it falls “well over her knees.”

Prudery and wantonness live together openly in sin. She skirts this eroticism decently enough, though she keeps her possibilities, like her legs, open. Thus, she artfully seduces the male faculty, “for they found in her the only sex-bestirred object in their daily environment” (ibid). To cover her “sex-bestirred object,” Miss Brodie embroiders an illusive narrative of purity and respectability. This narrative makes her even more attractive to men. She cloaks possibility, without closing doors. Her sense of superiority, which follows from this patchwork pulp fiction, makes it unfeasible for Miss Brodie to inhabit her flesh honestly, although, on the plus side, it permits her “to smile back as would a goddess with superior understanding smile to a god away on the mountain tops”

(52). Miss Brodie elevates herself to such great heights that human interaction translates

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to mere mythology. This remove appeals to Sandy Stranger, too. The imagined encounter with the policewoman, I would suggest, outs Sandy as a similarly “Unconscious Lesbian”

(129), a zombie-ascetic desperately in search of raw flesh. She cannot handle substance, cannot touch materially. That, and she fucks Teddy Lloyd on principle alone.105

In “My Conversion,” Muriel Spark explains that she found a healthy and welcoming materialism within the Catholic Church. “One of the things which interested me particularly about the Church,” she writes, “was its acceptance of matter. So much of our world rejects it. We’re not happy with things. We want machines to handle them”

(28). I claim this world-ridden rejection of matter appears in the life-aesthetics of both

Miss Jean Brodie and Sandy Stranger. Miss Brodie refuses the flesh in her lessons and love life. Sandy, in a similar vein, escapes “nesty” stuff through her imagination. The two women float unconsciously. They equally flee all that is nasty, ignoble, and fragile.

Scottish Calvinism’s extreme spiritualism, and its attendant individualism, provide no model for engagement with materiality, especially the corporeality of others. Calvinism demands complete spiritualization and transparent self-knowledge. The Catholic Church offers an alternative possibility: transfigured flesh and communal accountability.

Conversion becomes, in Spark’s view, a rejection of the immaterial world outside the

Church. Religious vocation is the embrace of a real world that is, paradoxically, in the world but not of it.

Miss Brodie’s Roman nose sniffs out the limits of Catholicism quickly enough.

Miss Jean Brodie, in her prime, wants nothing to do with a penitentiary-like Catholicism,

105 As I mentioned before, Sandy becomes Teddy’s lover to frustrate Miss Brodie’s plan. Both women’s attraction seems to lie, however, in the fact that Teddy Lloyd “had lost the contents of the sleeve in the Great War” (50). Unfortunately a Freudian reading remains outside the scope of this project. 337

because “it was a church of superstition … only people who did not want to think for themselves were Roman Catholics” (90). Without a doubt, Miss Brodie values her individual relationship to God. God knows she is right. She answers, therefore, to her conscience and not to papal hocus pocus. She is a divine creature, a free woman made in

God’s image. She has no need for a collar. This divine election does leave her, however, alienated from community and human frailty. Holiness does not come without separation.

Not for nothing does she die “suffering from an internal growth” (58). In fact, she grows increasingly self-centered and interiorized as the novel progresses. Her relationship to

Calvinism, moreover, functions primarily to increase her own solipsism and sense of election.106 It also increases her paranoia, as she later obsesses over the identity of her betrayer. “She thinks she is Providence,” Sandy laments late in the text, “she thinks she is the God of Calvin, she sees the beginning and the end” (129). In Miss Brodie’s case, religion feeds fantasy. Faith justifies her illusions and enhances her desire to see those tales fully actualized. She does not doubt that “God was on her side whatever the course

…” (90), and this fearlessness is as dangerous as it is fascist.

Calvinism justifies her insubstantial curriculum, no matter the course. Therefore, the role of religion in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is far from simple. Sister Helena admits afterward that she found within “the Catholic Church … a number of Fascists much less agreeable than Miss Brodie” (134). Fascism appears in a variety of forms and contexts. Religion, of course, does not escape its reach. History teaches that religion dabbles in totalitarianism as often as it actively resists it. It is essential to remember, then,

106 The novel’s references to James Hogg evoke his Gothic classic, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. This masterpiece of Scottish literature explores the darkness of Calvinist religious fanaticism. Miss Brodie recites Hogg’s poem “Bonnie Kilmeny” to the class, which again prompts her to euphemism (38). 338

that Spark’s novel revalues spiritual instruction for very particular reasons. Faith is not forever efficacious. It does not unfalteringly lead the soul toward Goodness, Truth, and

Beauty. As in Miss Brodie’s case, it can increase one’s narcissism and short-sightedness exponentially. Religion can indeed cause as much trouble as it mollifies. Miss Brodie’s invocations to the renowned actress, Sybil Thorndike, add weight to this point. During the 1930s, Sybil Thorndike played the lead role in George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan. In fact, he wrote the play for Thorndike.107 Miss Brodie’s repeated references to Thorndike thereby function also as allusions to Shaw’s text, a play in which the protagonist’s relationship to God is endlessly interrogated. The issue of whether Joan’s voices come from God or Satan sits at the work’s imaginative center, and Shaw’s unconcealed praise of individualism casts further suspicion on the depth of Miss Brodie’s religious orthodoxy, too.

It is therefore necessary to admit that, in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,

Catholicism’s specificity matters. This particularity is especially meaningful with respect to the fascist 1930s. To be clear, the text values Catholicism, on my count, for its embrace of matter and for its rejection of predestination. Both of these characteristics undermine fascist politics and pedagogy. Matter counters political fascism’s anti- materialist core, while Catholicism’s emphasis on individual free will tempers fascism’s reliance on mass devotion. Faced with the extent of fascist violence, Catholicism offers a means of didactic escape. It disciplines. The individual remains free but not ultimately responsible for divining God’s will. These Catholic traits likewise put pressure on the

107 Judy Suh draws attention to the allusion and compellingly suggests it indicates that “the act of submitting to destiny may be performative” (96). I would only add that religion is central to Joan’s and Jean’s performances. 339

efficacy of Miss Brodie’s fascist instruction. The revaluation of substance undercuts the primacy of fantasy. It stipulates real encounter with materiality. A notion of free will also questions Miss Brodie’s sense of election and her practice of selection. Good teaching must recognize the particular humanity of each human being; one is a complete person and not simply famous for x. In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, to turn to Catholicism is to return to the real world and existent people with actual goodness.

With its defense of materialism and free will, the Catholic Church may have even found a way to temper Miss Brodie’s excesses. The narrator holds out the possibility that the Church “could have embraced, even while it disciplined, her soaring and diving spirit” (90). Miss Brodie may have found a home in Catholicism. She may have taught happily at a parochial school. She may have been schooled. Devotion to the Church would force Miss Brodie to lessen her self-reliance, her will to know it all, but it may have saved her in the end. She had, after all, “elected herself to grace in so particular a way and with more suicidal enchantment than if she had simply taken to drink like other spinsters who couldn’t stand it any more” (116). This election is deadly, even “suicidal”; it destroys the very self that, on face value, it seems to support. The elevation to spiritual grace mirrors, additionally, the election to political grace characteristic of fascist dictators. There is a danger in extreme permissiveness, for just “as an excessive sense of guilt can drive people to excessive action, so was Miss Brodie driven to it by an excessive lack of guilt” (90). Divine election mischaracterizes freedom while negating, in tandem, one’s responsibility to the human community. As such, Spark suggests that it is better for spinsters to take their spirits in a tumbler than to imagine them as a function of unmediated, predetermined grace. Catholics often take relief in spirits, I am told.

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Spark’s text thus re-imagines ethical education through its materialization of

Plato’s moral allegory. The turn toward religion is, on my reading, an active embrace of the ethical obligations one has to material humanity. Catholicism offers transubstantiation in addition to its transfiguration. It is spirit and matter, mixed together. This Catholic discipline of spirit is, it seems to me, an embodiment of ascesis: an incarnational return to earthliness, an obligation to flesh and bone. A conversion to Rome marks a step toward truthful vision and a lived encounter with corporeality. Its intuitional breadth also limits the ego’s ability to chart its own salvation. It teaches one to destroy the ego rather than to revere it. That visitors encounter Sandy as Sister Helena of the Transfiguration forever

“clutching the bars with both hands” (35) suggests the mortification of her own fantastic failures. As a student of Miss Brodie, Sandy needs to find a way to limit her attraction to fantasy. This curb is her particular religious instruction’s objective. She must break free from the influence of a woman devoted to beauty alone, a woman who considers herself, like Rose with her instinct, “an exception to all rules”; “she was,” treacherously, “the exception that proved the rule” (117). Egoism always creates exceptions. Miss Brodie is wrong when she claims that Sandy is “short-sighted,” and Sandy is correct when she says that “it only seems so” (114). In her conversion to Catholicism, Sandy tempers her momentous airiness and begins to see farther. Cloistered, Sister Helena reenters the world and envisions therein a new way to learn.

Sandy is, after all, very much like Miss Brodie. She takes Miss Brodie’s man for her own lover and uses their time-tested “economical” method against them. Before her conversion, she learns from the best. “In amongst her various bewilderments Sandy was fascinated by the economy of Teddy Lloyd’s method,” yes, fascinated again, “as she had

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been four years earlier by Miss Brodie’s variations on her love story …” (108). Teddy’s economical method reproduces Miss Brodie’s image at the center of every portrait he paints. Miss Brodie’s economical method is similar in that it maintains her ego at each lesson’s center. The method merely reproduces Brodie over and over. When Sandy acts

“on this principal” in her betrayal, she reproduces Miss Brodie. Sandy’s betrayal implicates her in the very same “unreal talk and game-playing” that Miss Jean Brodie engages in time and time again. From this angle, Sandy is also “obsessed with that woman” (131). Her methodical betrayal simply marks Miss Brodie’s absolute dominance over her consciousness. Sandy acts in her treachery like the romantic artists she proposes to spoil. She takes matter(s) into her own hands, but Sandy’s method participates in the same quixotic game as Miss Brodie and Teddy Lloyd.

The egocentric, economic method Miss Brodie, Teddy Lloyd, and Sandy Stranger exercise complicates a straightforward assessment of Sandy’s virtue. Sister Helena has not achieved goodness; she has merely, I believe, taken a step toward it. Sandy is a woman of many sins. She has clearly meddled in Miss Brodie’s life, played the role of

God, lied and seduced. Sandy is, in fact, a mirror-image of Miss Brodie. Sandy’s “evil” is problematic, Joseph Hynes argues, because it attempts, like Jean Brodie’s charisma, “to take over human beings, to manipulate … personhood” (172). Sandy calls explicit attention to the ethical ambiguity surrounding her own interference when she quibbles with the word “betrayal” (135). Here, she is utterly like “Miss Brodie, who always made difficulties about words when she scented heresy” (65). Sandy evokes her own guilt through this meditation on the word. It is far from self-evident that Sandy has escaped the charms of Miss Brodie, but her conversion to Rome does mark an attempt to quell her

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ego. It is a humble stride. Miss Brodie and her Calvinism have given Sandy, after all,

“something definite to react against” (34). This reaction leads her to her renunciation of the world, a world that rejects matter, and to receipt of the Church and its law. This conversion is pedagogical progress rather than spiritual achievement; it is initiation rather than born-again blamelessness. As her own fame increases, Sandy clutches “the bars of her grille more desperately than ever” (137), precisely because her conversion marks mere advancement and not total accomplishment. It is almost as if her narcissism presses against that which ceaselessly limits it.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie presses against its reader’s egotism, too. In this containment, the novel’s mystical form proves essential. As Matthew Wickman has argued, Spark does not fit comfortably into either the modernist or postmodernist camps.

“When we think of Spark’s work relative to literary and cultural history,” Wickman deftly declares, “we are thus placed in the strange position of desiring one of her famous narrative intrusions, if only to tell us where she, and we, are going” (73). As Wickman highlights, Spark leads her acolytes to desire God-like intervention and then withholds its final manifestation. If, however, one shifts focus from traditional literary classification— modernism, postmodernism—it becomes clear that Spark’s novel is more comfortably held within Murdoch’s existentialist-mystical classification. The Prime of Miss Jean

Brodie is a mystical novel for this reason: it is a text designed to humble readers’ fascist inclinations. It confronts the reader’s ego with a radical inability to know for certain. It teaches goodness well with its mystical pedagogy.

As a modern mystical text, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’s central concern is virtue. It keeps religion, ethics, and education at its center. It seems to me that the barbed

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question of politics functions for Spark, as it did for Miss Brodie, as “a side line … that served as an excuse” (130). Far from revolutionary upheaval and pointed political critique, the novel quietly coaches its bibliophile to picture a larger moral landscape. It departs with the politicized pedagogy of Freire and adopts that of Weil. The text cultivates mystery and intrigue, like Miss Jean Brodie, but then withholds crystalline lucidity; instead, it prompts further, patient contemplation. The truth exists outside the text, as it were, and opaquely. The novel thus reorients right vision, while thrusting nothing. It teaches well in and through its loving portrayal of a beloved teacher. It becomes that good, mystical teacher. Like Socrates, the text claims to know nothing: the novel upsets, significantly, any attempt to identify a hero or villain. Its enclosed, tightly crafted form paradoxically resists closure. Its narrative dashes in and out of the present and exasperates expectations. It cultivates attention. Therein awaits its mystical virtue.

In this didactic intercession, the novel incorporates both modernist and postmodernist elements without committing wholeheartedly to either mode. The Prime of

Jean Brodie escapes both categorizations by means of its mysticism. It engages religious discourse to teach the reader to see the world apart from illusion, to mingle material instinct with spiritual insight. It frustrates the ego and bathes it, instead, in the ineffable.

This is, strictly speaking, an ethical, rather than political, end. Allan Massie says it well when he insists that the “heresy with which Muriel Spark peculiarly concerns herself is solipsism. The solipsist places himself at the centre of the universe; its only meaning emanates from his perception and his consciousness. Nothing but that consciousness has an assured reality” (100). One sees this solipsism in the romantic, economical method

Miss Brodie, Sandy, and Teddy Lloyd share. Spark, as a novelist, proceeds by means of

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very different devices. These techniques serve, at every turn, to thwart the reader’s illusions of grandeur. Two structural elements accomplish this mortification particularly well: the stark refusal of individual perception and the callous use of prolepsis. Through these stylistic devices, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie breaks with modernist poetics and fascist politics and insists that there is a there. This instruction shifts emphasis from revolution to revelation.

Significantly this revelation does not illuminate a personal, knowable god. God exists external to Spark’s narrative as inexplicable fixity. This transcendent reality calls into question each character’s actions and every reader’s interpretations. God preserves the reality of the thing by shedding light on the unreality of human consciousness. Reality is outside individual awareness. Truth is over there: out of sight, out of mind. Spark’s transubstantiated method makes the deep infirmity of solipsistic perception, in this way, apparent. Spark does not record the streams of her characters’ consciousness alone; instead, she bounces characters’ perceptions off one another to show the degree to which fantasy and narcissism saturate them. Perception is not morally neutral or politically innocent, nor is it centered, as Malcolm Bradbury points out, in one protagonist’s psychology (246). The novel’s “reality” does not exist within one privileged center of nervous angst. This dispersal forces the reader to recognize the otherness of others, their impenetrability, as it also frustrates any attempt at emotional identification with a modernist prophet-hero.

On this reading, Muriel Spark’s prolepsis does not reveal her authorial investment in playing God, as critics interested in her Catholicism have often enough maintained

(Bower 489). From a technical viewpoint, it seems to me that Spark flashes forward not

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to imitate but rather to disclose God. Her novels are mystical, and of the deepest dye. I agree with Bran Nicol, then, that one must “begin with her practice of writing, how it forms and discourses relate to Catholic ones, rather than try to find evidence of the author’s underlying beliefs” (127). In textual practice, Spark’s novel exposes the reader to divine time. Her temporality is closer to Augustine than Bergson. As such, I disagree with Martin McQuillan’s recent claim that “[w]riting is not a theological activity” (4), because Spark’s novel performs what must be termed a sacramental function. Writing

“purposely undermines essential and stable meanings,” as McQuillan notes, but it does not follow that such disruption of stability works against the Church. Spark’s narrative intrusions do not limit freedom, as some have insisted, but capture a mystical understanding of the future’s and past’s contemporaneous existence in present experience. Effect permeates cause. Consequence precedes action. A humble response to such an enlarged temporal understanding seems appropriate, if not necessary.

Meek acceptance of one’s own inability to control a reality that streams within and without the individual consciousness constitutes virtue. In this manner, The Prime of

Miss Jean Brodie functions as moral primer. It subjects the reader to a mystical worldview in which how one sees that the world matters. It matters, of course, to freedom. Illusion and vanity obscure accurate vision; when politically actualized, they usher deadly consequences. An opaque future rushes toward awareness; when politically ossified, human freedom withers. Learning is fundamental, then, because one must be educated to observe the world well. One must remember what one has forgotten, because memory is futurity. In his teaching, Plato describes this sort of knowledge as anamnesis; it is the awareness that precedes individual earthly existence (253a). Sight is already

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present in the learner’s soul, remember: right action follows, of necessity, from keen attention. One already knows the truth; she just needs to see it clearly in order to remember it again. Cultivated remembrance and virtuous vision are therefore simultaneous, and compulsory. The moral life begins when one breaks free from one’s own narcissism, if only for a moment, and sees the other as real. Education teaches morality, if one heeds Socrates’ instruction, since its proper sphere is truthful perception and right remembrance. Good art, like strong teaching, can effect this ethical transfiguration.

“The poet,” as Simone Weil memorably has it, “produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real. It is the same with the act of love. To know that this man who is hungry and thirsty really exists as much as I do—that is enough, the rest follows of itself” (GG 119). Learning teaches the soul to perceive the particularity of the brittle human condition as really there; right action flows, hence, from good vision. Spark makes of this insight aesthetics, and with this form she challenges high modernist and existentialist orthodoxy. She shows, through her mystical prolepsis, how moral value colors the present tense precisely because the present contains both future and past. She thus interrupts perception, defies linearity, and annihilates sentimentality, all of which prove foundational to “The Desegregation of Art.” She does not seek to liberate her characters or chart social injustices, as a modernist existentialist might. Instead, her attention to ethical ambiguity—no one character is evil, even “Miss Brodie’s defective sense of self-criticism had not been without its beneficent and enlarging effects” (91)— challenges students to think with and through ethical shadows. This challenge prompts thoughtful consideration of motivation, responsibility, and goodness. The political

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domain remains in the distance, in the yet-to-be-realized, exterior to classroom and text.

Idealism can guide moral inquiry in a way that, as fascism shows, is deadly in politics.

“Thinking about politics is in certain special respects different from thinking about private morals. One may be ruthless with oneself,” Murdoch cautions, “but not with others” (MGM 368-69). Education must proceed separate from the desire to change the world. Spark adds a catholic corporeality to this ethical edification. She anchors, as I have shown, her Platonic intervention to the Catholic Church’s materiality and freedom, a root as radical as it is Latinate.

V. In Conclusion: Pedagogy of the Depressed

I have suggested that The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie uses pedagogy to make a case for mystical, moral instruction. This sort of education limits the ego’s fantasy, by the light of Plato’s allegory, as it also forces the self to encounter material flesh. In fact, by now it is clear that Spark redresses Platonic idealism with an appeal to Catholic practice.

While Plato’s ideal city exists as a thought experiment alone, Spark’s materialist reassessment of Plato’s moral philosophy calls into question the fascist politics of his

Republic, a government notoriously hostile to liberalism and materialism. Spark’s religious instruction values the earthly importance of the ethical movement from shadows to light but does so without the sacrifice of corporeality and brittleness. Catholicism is a model for this particular sort of pedagogical instruction. Hence Spark argues for Catholic conversion. This religious intervention is, ultimately, what makes Muriel Spark a writer in mystical tradition. She tears apart the fantasies that inflate the ego’s self-satisfaction.

She forces the self to confront its consolation and to recognize the founts of its fancies.

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As a mystical modernist, she returns to the flesh for inspiration, for realism, for all that which humbles existentialist excess.

Spark’s investigation of education’s relationship to ethics and politics is not without contemporary resonance. Queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has suggested that a correlation exists between first-class teaching and affective depression. Drawing on the theories of Melanie Klein and Silvan Tomkins, Sedgwick argues that the depressive personality (Tomkins) and the depressive position (Klein) lend themselves well to efficacious instruction. For Tomkins, the depressive personality is one that seeks

“relations of mimetic communion” coupled with “an intense susceptibility to shame when such relations fail” (TD 2). This intense communication is a “recipe,” Sedgwick explains,

“for overachievement in general and for pedagogical intensity in particular” (ibid). In a distinct yet similar vein, Klein suggests that the depressive position, unlike the alternative paranoid/schizoid mode, is a shaky psychic location from which one can recognize “that good and bad tend to be inseparable at every level” (TD 4). The depressive keeps good and bad together and in view. Sedgwick is quick to point out that the depressive is not reducible, in either Tomkins or Klein, to states of clinical depression, although the depressive character may include what is commonly referred to as depression. What matters pedagogically is the larger sense of how the depressive views reality. For

Sedgwick, good education emerges from the depressed soul’s ability to maintain paradox within relation to others.

I introduce Sedgwick’s depressed pedagogy because it explores many of the educational issues this chapter has examined: the relationship between teacher and student, the motivations for pedagogical performance, the intersections of politics and

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ethics. Of particular interest here is Klein’s distinction between the paranoid/schizoid and depressive personalities. The depressive position gels, Klein claims, when the ego escapes the dramas of the paranoid/schizoid position, if only temporarily. Depressive describes “a relation that is conceived as virtually intersubjective, profoundly ambivalent” (MK 629). The paranoid/schizoid location, in contrast, cannot tolerate ambivalence and responds by “splitting both its objects and itself into very concretely imagined part-objects that can be only seen as exclusively, magically good or bad” (MK

633). This need for moral purity leads to what Klein diagnoses as “projective identification,” a more violent form of Freud’s projection. One projects onto (or, because this is Melanie Klein, into) the other the evil or goodness the ego needs to preserve one’s own self-lucidity. This projection is violent, fantastic. Klein’s description of the paranoid/schizoid mode provides, for Sedgwick, “a good way of understanding … the terrifying contagion of paranoid modes of thought—and certainly seems indispensable in understanding political dynamics as well as many a small-group interaction, including those in the classroom” (MK 636). The paranoid teacher and activist share a militant need for certainty. This aggression ultimately leads to pedagogical collapse.

The political weight of Sedgwick’s analysis should not escape one’s notice. In fact, she extends her critique of paranoid reading habits, advanced in Touching Feeling, to encompass paranoid pedagogy. After all, activism relies too on charismatic inspiration, extrinsic motivation: “as I understand my own political history, it has often happened that the propulsive energy of justification, of being or feeling joined with others in a right cause, tends to be structured very much in a paranoid/schizoid fashion, driven by attributive motives … collective fantasies of powerlessness and/or omnipotence …

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purism and schism” (TD 5). The energy for political movement comes, often if not always, at the expense of the depressive’s complex ethical vision. This point recalls Miss

Brodie’s own fantasies of omnipotence and blamelessness. She is nothing if not paranoid in theory and schizoid in action. The calm clarity with which she approaches Goodness,

Truth, and Beauty motivates her girls to political action. She launches, in addition, plenty of projectile identifications at Miss Mackay. She divides her students into good bits, as each girl is now beautifully famous for something. She divides to conquer. She projects blindly. The emotional and political violence of Miss Brodie’s refusal to attend to the

“good and bad … inseparable at every level” condemns her to a politicized pedagogy of paranoia.

The politics of Miss Brodie’s paranoia call for attenuation. I would suggest, though, that existentialist pedagogy risks participation in the very same paranoid/schizoid model. At worse, existentialist instructors project badness onto the world only to re-find it endlessly. This pedagogy’s emphasis on heroic consciousness-raising places its faith, to borrow Sedgwick’s terminology, in exposure. The teacher needs students to understand their oppression, to witness their privilege, to analyze their illusion. “Whatever account it may give of its own motivation,” Sedgwick explains, “paranoia is characterized by placing, in practice, an extraordinary stress on the efficacy of knowledge per se— knowledge in the form of exposure” (TF 138). Their truth will set students free. They teach liberation, and effective students learn how to be liberated like them. The existentialist pedant thus saves, and, as Murdoch insists, moderns “know this novel and its hero well. The story of the lonely brave man, defiant without optimism, proud without pretension, always an exposer of shams, whose mode of being is a deep criticism of

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society” (EM 225). The existentialist teacher, like the existentialist hero, is often enough an “exposer of shams”: the maverick truth-teller in a sea of doctrinaires. The existentialist detective relies—heroic instructor that she is—on an unstated hermeneutics of suspicion.

He criticizes society, reveals its flaws; and, once students recognize x, the logic goes, x will vanish. For, as Sedgwick puts it, “paranoia for all its vaunted suspicion acts as though its work would be accomplished if only it could finally, this time, somehow gets its story known” (TF 138). Attend to me, girls! Society has the masses fooled. What students need is another hero … another story.

There is an extant political danger in existentialist, paranoid education. In its refusal to entertain ambivalence, the paranoid/schizoid thrusts the good, the bad, and the ugly onto the world with one hand as it exposes Goodness, Truth, and Beauty with the other. It is us; it is them. The instruction simplifies ethical discernment, in short, and this refusal conceals the fact that the “motives that underlie political commitments have much more to do with the complex, mature ethical dimension of the depressive,” as Sedgwick states (TD 5). Education needs to recognize the ordinary ambivalence of the world. It ought to embrace its muck and mire as part-and-parcel of its beauty. Good teaching should therefore move toward the depressive position and away from schizoid paranoia.

This labor is one of love and right perception. Sedgwick’s pedagogical argument does have its ethical edge, for “the depressive position involves the endless, heroic but discouraging attempt to turn bad karma into good karma” (TD 7). Holistic instruction transmits good energy. To think is, as Buddhism teaches, already to act. This transfiguration does not come without moral and religious resonance, and with this timbre one once again approaches mystical metanoia.

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Sedgwick does link her depressive pedagogy to Buddhism, after all. This spiritual pedagogy of the depressed helps the ego to contemplate moral muddle as it also

“functions as a mysteriously powerful solvent of individual identity” (TF 160). The ego must go. With her biting accuracy, Sedgwick suggests that “lifelong depressiveness … endeared to me the idea of nonbeing” (MK 640), which made it easier for her to let go of self. Even before her illness threatened death, depression modeled this pedagogical, moral unselfing. In its emphasis on decreation, Eve Sedgwick’s depressed pedagogy approaches, I insist, Simone Weil. In both pedagogies, one attends to a reality that remains separate from and other to self. This realization decreases the ego’s need to know, and to be, all. This education is, foundationally, iconoclastic. It robs the world of its false idols and promotes more accurate pictures of the human condition. With clear vision, one may detach from false images and act wisely: “it’s the figure without karma,”

Sedgwick instructs, “who is able to perceive and be perceived clearly enough that the things they do are efficacious—and no more than efficacious” (TD 8). Good, clear perception concerns the pedagogy of the depressed, because with awareness of moral ambivalence comes clarification of motivation and effect. Morality is a matter of really looking, and so is good pedagogical karma.

When I claim that The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a mystical novel, what I mean to say is that the text pushes readers to examine virtue’s complexity. One appreciates the centrality of morality through the text’s examination of pedagogy: education rightly concerns endless ethical reviewing. There is a danger is politicizing education, Spark shows, in the paranoid extremes to which Miss Brodie pushes her students. Spark suggests, in fact, that the mixture of education and politics begets

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fascism, and here Hannah Arendt would agree: “the belief that one must begin with the children if one wishes to produce new conditions has remained principally the monopoly of revolutionary movements of tyrannical cast …. Education can play no part in politics, because in politics we always have to deal with those who are already educated” (173).

Pedagogy must remain sternly isolated, Arendt maintains, from the public, democratic sphere (192). “The Crisis in Education,” an essay published the same year as The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, echoes Spark in this foundational though simple way: “the word

‘education’ has an evil sound in politics” (173). To avoid this resounding evil, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie redirects education to goodness and, thereby, refocuses the reader’s attention to insight, reality, and truth. Good pedagogy teaches moral discernment, as human beings must learn to perceive the world apart from egocentric fantasy. Here,

Plato’s cave acts as a central metaphor. The pedagogical practice Plato foregrounds promotes an honest, depressive love for reality. Truth matters, for weapons of fantasy promote mass destruction, too.

* * *

“My mummy says Miss Brodie gives us too much freedom,” Jenny reports.

Sandy responds, severely: “She’s not supposed to give us freedom, she’s supposed to give us lessons” (24). The tension between freedom and lessons has framed this inquiry into the ethics of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’s instruction. I have argued that the text shows morality to be education’s proper concern, its central lesson. Freedom follows anon. Spark’s novel therefore conducts a crash course in moral discernment; this training leads to liberation elsewhere. To thrust freedom into the classroom is not only precocious; this intrusion is also, if one continues along with the novel, pernicious.

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Education ought, as moral discipline, to mortify the ego’s potential, its narcissism, while emphasizing a love of truth and a desire for accuracy. Politics ought, thereafter, to advance the ego, solidly protect her rights, loudly sound the individual’s blazoned trumpet. Politics is egocentric and revolutionary in ways education can, and ought, never to be. This distinction matters, as I have demonstrated, because the freedom the political animal depends upon has its roots in the human soul’s ability to receive its moral lessons faithfully. Goodness, Truth, and Beauty come first, after all.

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CONCLUSION Moses and Modernism

At this point, it is worth remembering that Sigmund Freud hazards not one but two theses in Moses and Monotheism. Moses, on Freud’s reading, is not only an Egyptian; he is also two different men whom the biblical writers conflate into one Übermensch. There is

Moses the Egyptian, who liberates the Hebrews from Egypt. There is also Moses the

Midianite, who founds the religion of Yahweh in the desert. The first Moses worships an omniscient God, a deity “as all-loving as he was all-powerful”; he brings this god, Aton, from Egypt. The second Moses worships a local deity, the fiery volcano god, Yahweh, whom Freud describes as “probably in no way a remarkable being” (61). One God is catholic and universalizing; the other is local and unimpressive. Freud’s distinction between the two men and the two gods matters, because it imagines two different modes of religious practice. In the first, the All-Powerful God liberates a people to a promised land. In the second, religion makes demands on the subject and compels obedience to a lesser deity. Freud’s isolation of Moses the liberator from Moses the religion-founder harbors important relevance, it seems to me, for late modernists’ conception of faith and ethical agency. When Freud splits Moses, he imagines two different modes of subjectivity: the ego liberated as God and the ego humbled by Good.

* * *

If the early twentieth century gave the West a psychoanalytical framework with which to name primary narcissism, the British novel at midcentury provided readers with ethical strategies to temper it. It is this subject—at once narcissistic and ethical—that

Rebecca West, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Iris Murdoch, and Muriel Spark address.

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This subject’s self-investment is taken for granted as endemic to its libido. Desire does not naturally develop away from the self, as Freud suggests in the early Three Essays in the Theory of Sexuality, and toward a member of the opposite sex. It remains rather embroiled in egoism and projected affectations. For the authors I survey, the subject must learn to live with its vanity; and, by vanity, I mean both his solipsism and finitude. These writers use their fiction to imagine a redistribution of desire and affect, if not of money and power. In this manner, they construct a moral response to late capitalism. They posit a self that must confront the broken reality of the world as it is, not as it is imagined.

Their mystical narratives accord, in this sense, with the mystical Moses of obedience rather than the existential Moses of liberation. They invite one, in their religious writing, to rethink the received canon and the privileges of the secular.

Study of secularization necessarily transforms literary history and its attendant canonization. While 11 September 2001 and, more generally, corporate globalization have fueled a much-needed reevaluation of the secular, it is just as correct to say that a similar rethinking occurs in the wake of the Second World War. There, philosophers and creative writers return to religion after two world wars, a financial crisis, and genocidal crimes against humanity to consider afresh the efficacy of the West’s embrace of a new, secular, capitalist order. These conversations of the 1940s and 1950s have—in the wake of Second-Wave Feminism, the Civil Rights Movement, and the student protests of

1968—been dismissed as old-fashioned, proto-Thatcher harbingers: stuffy, bourgeois distractions. And yet, a new financial crisis in 2008, continued warfare in the Middle

East, and religiously motivated terrorisms cast new light on secularism’s assumptions.

For one must theorize belief afresh, as the editors of 2011’s Rethinking Secularism insist,

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rather than merely accept its disappearance as inevitable and, worse, civilized: for,

“although secularism is often described negatively, as what is left after religion fades, it is not itself neutral. Secularism should be seen as a presence. It is something, and it is therefore in need of elaboration and understanding” (Calhoun et al. 5). The secular, as

Charles Taylor documents expertly, names a particular orientation toward the earth (WS

33). It is a positive, productive, producing ideological force. Its lineage stretches far back into the Western tradition, yet it remains also, strikingly, novel.

* * *

As early as 1957, Iris Murdoch discusses how secular assumptions distort ethics and, more urgently, limit goodness’ scope in the modern milieu. The shift in Anglo-

American moral philosophy from the question—“what is goodness?”—to the inquiry—

“what is this activity of ‘valuing’?”—bespeaks, she argues, a sea change in human self- conception (60). This shift points, as she documents in “Metaphysics and Ethics,” toward

“the elimination of metaphysics from ethics. We are certainly now presented,” she argues, “with a stripped and empty scene” (63). Human beings no longer search for a

Good that transcends the self; now the philosopher clinically describes how language lends to certain things, somewhat arbitrarily, moral value. The ethical agent appears alone without a larger background of transcendent meaning and purpose. The metaphysical no longer signifies. She acts and chooses in a spiritual vacuum. This stripped-down emptiness arises, in part, from the dominance of post-Kantian liberalism and its secular picture of the moral agent. Indeed, she diagnoses the central problem of the twentieth century’s moral landscape as the eclipse of the metaphysical view as philosophically tenable. The post-1945 era lacks an alternative picture of the human condition.

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To clarify this revolution in ethical thinking, Murdoch distinguishes between the

Liberal and Natural Law account of ethics. As she emphasizes, the contrast is not simply

“between two philosophies; it is a contrast between two types of moral outlooks” (70).

The difference between the two positions is salient, with the Liberal view in play since the seventeenth century and the Natural Law perspective for much longer. She asserts:

On the Liberal View we picture the individual as able to attain by reflection to complete consciousness of his situation. He is entirely free to choose and responsible for his choice. His morality is exhibited in his choice, whereby he shows which things he regards as valuable. The most systematic exposition of modern liberal morality is existentialism. Contrast the Natural Law picture. Here the individual is seen as moving tentatively vis-à-vis a reality which transcends him. To discover what is morally good is to discover that reality, and to become good is to integrate himself with it. He is ruled by laws which he can only partly understand. He is not fully conscious of what he is. His freedom is not an open freedom of choice in a clear situation; it lies rather in an increasing knowledge of his real being, and in the conduct which naturally springs from such knowledge. (70)

The Natural Law view forms the basis for much moral thinking since classical times.

There is a transcendent reality—Good, God—that animates human behavior and sort of magnetizes it. The Liberal subject appears later with the European Enlightenment and the attendant political revolutions, but, “if we can come out of the trees and see the wood for a moment, it is clear that this is only one type of view of morality—roughly a Protestant; and less roughly a Liberal, type of view” (68). The twentieth century has lost touch with the Natural Law picture of the human condition to such an extent that, Murdoch declares, the Liberal position appears now as the only viable option. It thereby makes its own values and philosophical assumptions ineffable.

Murdoch aims in her moral philosophy and fiction to uncover these unclaimed secular tenants. What, then, does she mean by the proposition that the Liberal approach is

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“roughly Protestant”? Liberalism emerges from Kant—“who says that the moral will is autonomous, and that morality cannot be founded on anything else but itself” (68)—and who also places his interest in, and focus on, human affairs. Kantian morality not only begins with the individual rational will but also imagines this volition squarely within the secular realm. Moral questions exist in real time and lack an otherworldly frame of reference. This temporal placement recalls the historical meaning of “secular,” and here the Protestant resonance fully distills. Charles Taylor notes that historically, for the

Catholic Church, “secular had to do with ‘century’—that is, with profane time—and it was contrasted with what related to the eternal, or to sacred time” (WS 32). The secular realm exists in the lives lived by the laity and parish priests who minister to them (ibid).

It differs from the eternal sphere to which monastics have devoted themselves.

Originally, secularization captures the movement of the Church’s interests into the workaday world. Its meaning “dates from the aftermath of the Reformation. It refers specifically,” Taylor argues, “to when certain functions, properties, and institutions were transferred from church control to the layman” (ibid). Secularization has a long history, one that has shaped the English tradition in literature. Indeed, a largescale process of secularization characterizes the Protestant Reformation, which means secularism has roots in, and is a product of, Western Christendom (Calhoun et al. 8). By this light, the

Liberal view of morality is “roughly Protestant” in the sense that it precipitates from the reformers’ secularization efforts, and it persists thus embroiled. One is less surprised to hear George Orwell claim, then, that

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose; and above all is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature. How many Roman Catholics have been good novelists? Even the handful one

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could name have usually been bad Catholics. The novel is practically a Protestant art form; it is the product of the free mind, of the autonomous individual. (qtd Woodman ix)

Liberal morality teaches one how to be good, certainly, but it does so within and for the secular world of Protestants.

* * *

The death of God has not welcomed in a more accepting and generous and objective civilization; rather, it has birthed one, curiously, intolerant of intolerance. Its

Protestant cards show, and the writers in “The True God Slay” show its invisible hand.

For God’s shadow dies hard, and Žižek vows

The modern atheist thinks he knows that God is dead; what he doesn’t know is that, unconsciously, he continues to believe in God …. What we have today is a subject who presents himself as a tolerant hedonist dedicated to the pursuit of happiness, but whose unconscious is the site of prohibitions—what is oppressed are not illicit desires or pleasures, but prohibitions themselves. (GP 28)

The liberal subject represses the fact that rules persist ubiquitously limiting the ego’s enjoyment. She blocks, in the name of hedonistic optimism, candid recognition of all the petty rules and social expectations that contain and restrict her joy even without religion.

Hence secular hedonists “become obsessed with the idea that, in pursuing their pleasures, they may humiliate or violate others’ space, so they regulate their behavior to avoid

‘harassing’ others, not to mention the no less complex regulation of their own care of the self (bodily fitness, health food, spiritual relaxation …)” (GP 44). Tolerance of others’ lifestyles often enough signals an inability to live freely and pursue happiness unrestrained. Quite simply, “the more you perceive yourself as an atheist, the more your unconscious is dominated by prohibitions which sabotage your enjoyment” (GP 28). As

Žižek argues persuasively, liberals’ inhibition is, in practice, a ruse, for “nothing is more

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oppressive and regulated than being a simple hedonist” (GP 44). The modern atheist disavows not only belief but also represses his unhappiness.

This restrictive reality, for Žižek, remains far from idiosyncratic and personal.

The dominance of politically correct, multicultural hedonism permits legitimate social injustices to flourish. “This point is crucial to understanding the cynical functioning of ideology,” Žižek insists; “in contrast to the period when religious-ideological sentimentality covered up the brutal economic reality, today, it is ideological cynicism which obscures the religious core of capitalist belief” (ET 130). Recall Rebecca West’s criticisms of the Catholic modernists. She claims piety veils the truth of economic exploitation and refuses confrontation with reality. Žižek turns the tables here. The cynical atheists’ “disbelief” maintains the system, because they believe themselves to exist above superstition and faith. They see and respect cold facts. Their tolerant, skeptical understanding fuels, though, capitalist exploitation’s fires. Capitalism is, like religion, a system of belief that requires faith in tolerance and progress and essential human goodness. It makes, in turn, some thoughts unthinkable.

“Why are so many problems,” Žižek wonders, “today perceived as problems of intolerance, rather than as problems of inequality, exploitation, or injustice? Why is the proposed remedy tolerance, rather than emancipation, political struggle, or even armed struggle” (ET 5)? These questions foreground how secularism’s rhetoric of diversity and inclusion functions to mask capitalist exploitation. Liberalism values open-mindedness, but this good feeling fails to imagine “directly political solutions” (ibid). It tolerates petty differences but endorses ruthless capitalist behavior that furthers a globalized totality— coded community—and this expansion, often enough, by faith alone. God’s shadow

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remains cast on the cave’s wall, but increasingly philosophers demand an account of it.

Those who teach the children, who are their futures, the virtues of multicultural tolerance and lifestyle sensitivity may be surprised to find themselves the true reactionary vanguard of a bourgeois hedonist militia.

* * *

To the extent that spirituality is caught up with narcissistic libido, as for Freud it is, religion participates in the mobilization and redistribution of autoeroticism. If Moses the liberator mirrors the emancipated secular subject—significantly Freud identifies this

Moses with Hitler—then perhaps Moses the law-giver provides a model for a different mode of the subjective. The brokenness of this reality links the believing subject to

Freud’s other Moses. This believer obeys and worships a god of no obvious power, of no obvious substance. The faithful subject encounters reality and does not imagine liberation or otherworldly consolation. Here, all is vanity. Narcissism, in its advanced condition, is not a stage to escape but a cross to bear. I argue, for this reason, that Freud’s Moses and

Monotheism anticipates late modernism’s religious sensibility and crystallizes that ethical response in and through his second Moses. “The True God Slays” explores this other response to modernity, for attention to metaphysical law preserves an alternative to capitalism’s liberal economy. In an era of economic globalization, to preserve an alternative is to resist.

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VITA

David J. Fine was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. As an undergraduate student, he attended the University of Scranton, where he studied philosophy, theology, and English literature and participated in the Special Jesuit Liberal Arts Program. Since leaving

Scranton, David has received a master’s degree in Education from Bloomsburg

University and a master’s degree in English literature from Lehigh University. David has served, while completing his doctoral dissertation in English, as the assistant director of

Lehigh University’s Global Citizenship Program. His research and teaching interests focus on twentieth-century British literature, with particular emphasis on queer theory and post-secularism in the midcentury novel. He has published on Virginia Woolf, Muriel

Spark, and cosmopolitanism, and he is working on a monograph exploring sex and secularization in the fiction of Catholic converts. In August 2016, he will join the faculty of the University of Dayton as Assistant Professor of English, with specialization in literature, culture, and religion.

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