Introduction: Twentieth-Century Angelology
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Notes Introduction: Twentieth-Century Angelology 1 D.H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), p. 83. 2 Wallace Stevens, ‘Angel Surrounded by Paysans’, in Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Knopf, 1997), p. 423. 3 Djuna Barnes, Nightwood, in Selected Works of Djuna Barnes (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), p. 307. 4 Virginia Woolf, ‘Professions for Women’, in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1942), pp. 149–54 (p. 150). 5 HD, Tribute to Freud / Writing on the Wall / Advent (Manchester: Carcanet, 1985), p. 55. 6 H.D., ‘Narthex’, in The Second American Caravan: A Yearbook of American Literature, ed. Alfred Kreymborg, Lewis Mumford and Paul Rosenfeld (New York: Macaulay, 1928), pp. 225–84 (p. 243). 7 See David Albert Jones, Angels: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 54. 8 Ibid., pp. xi–xii. 9 The figure of 50 per cent is for the number of female respondants who claimed to believe in guardian angels. This compares to 31 per cent of men. Ipsos MORI and Schott’s Almanac, ‘Survey on Belief’, 31 October 2007, http://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/poll. aspx?oItemId=246 [accessed 11 June 2010]. 10 The figure of 68 per cent is for the total number of respondents in the US who claimed a belief in angels according to The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, ‘U.S. Religious Landscape Survey: Religious Affiliation: Diverse and Dynamic’, February 2008, http://religions.pewforum.org/pdf/ report2-religious-landscape-study-full.pdf, p. 172 [accessed 11 June 2010]. These figures are similar to those reported by Harold Bloom in the 1900s, though he does not reveal his source: ‘Polls, which are very American, tell us that sixty-nine percent of us believe in angels, while only twenty-five percent of us do not. Forty-six percent among us have their own guardian angels; twenty-one percent deny that anyone has a guardian angel. We are rather more divided on the nature of the angels: fifty-five percent say that angels are higher beings created by God as his agents, but fifteen percent identify them as the spirits of the dead. Eighteen percent reduce angels to mere religious symbols, and seven percent insist that angels are nonsense. Experientially, thirty-two percent of Americans have felt angelic presence, just short of the thirty-five percent who have not.’ See Bloom, Omens of the Millenium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams and Resurrection (London: Fourth Estate, 1996), p. 42. 11 ‘Host of books appear as angels become theme of new teenage reading cult’, The Observer (4 April 2010), http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/apr/04/ 182 Notes 183 teenage-fiction-cult-angels [accessed 17 May 2010]. See also Sarah McInerney, ‘Angels set to be the next big thing’, The Sunday Times (14 September 2008), http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/ireland/article4749548.ece [accessed 28 March 2010]. 12 ‘Angels are the New Vampires, says Anne Rice’, Guardian (26 October 2009), http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/oct/26/angels-vampires-anne-rice [accessed 28 March 2010]. 13 According to the admittedly biased source of the local government website. See http://www.gateshead.gov.uk/Leisure%20and%20Culture/attractions/ Angel/Home.aspx [accessed 17 February 2011]. 14 Wallace Stevens, ‘Two or Three Ideas’, in Opus Posthumous, ed. Milton J. Bates, rev. edn (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), pp. 257–67 (p. 259). 15 See Max Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation’, in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 129–56 (p. 155); James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A New Abridgement, ed. Robert Frazer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (London: Allen and Unwin, 1976); and Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, in Mass Psychology and Other Writings, trans. J.A. Underwood (London: Penguin, 2004). 16 Georg Lukács, ‘The Ideology of Modernism’, in Realism in Our Time: Literature and the Class Struggle, ed. Ruth Nanda Anshen and trans. John and Necke Mander (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), pp. 17–46 (p. 44). 17 George Orwell, ‘Inside the Whale’, in The Complete Works of George Orwell, Vol. 12, A Patriot After All 1940–1941 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1998), pp. 86–115 (p. 97). I am indebted to Pericles Lewis for this second refer- ence. See Pericles Lewis, ‘Churchgoing in the Modern Novel’, Modernism / Modernity, 11 (2004), 669–94 (p. 687). 18 Robert Alter, Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 119–20. 19 Massimo Cacciari, The Necessary Angel, trans. Miguel E. Vatter (New York: State University of New York Press, 1993), p. 22. 20 Frederick Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (New York: Mondial, 2006), p. 9. 21 Peter Berger notes that ‘the “secularization theory” was coined in the 1950s though its core idea has older antecedents’. See Berger, Religious America, Secular Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), p. 141. 22 Hugh McLeod, Religion and Society in England 1850–1914 (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), p. 5. 23 See Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 17 and McLeod, Religion and Society, pp. 211–12. 24 See Berger, Religious America; Grace Davies, Europe: The Exceptional Case: The Parameters of Faith in the Modern World (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2002); and David Martin, On Secularization: Towards a Revised General Theory (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. 20. 25 Martin, On Secularization, pp. 18, 22. 26 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2007), pp. 12–13, 26. 27 Ibid., pp. 727, 598, 676. 184 Notes 28 Postsecularism seems to have two contradictory meanings in contemporary theory. First, it appears as the religious dimension of postmodernism. Slavoj Žižek is the pre-eminent critic of this kind of postsecularism, although confusingly his theory is also hailed as a theology for our postsecular times. Robert A. Segal offers a useful summary of this first meaning of postsecular in The Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), p. 316. Žižek’s critique of the postsecular turn in religion is found in The Fragile Absolute or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London: Verso, 2000) and On Belief (London: Routledge, 2001). The second, more unusual use of postsecularism is to mean a new era of faith and certitude that has succeeded and triumphed over postmodern relativism. See for example Philip Blond, Introduction to Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology, ed. Blond (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 1–66. 29 Michael Warner, Introduction to Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, ed. Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen and Craig Calhoun (Cambridge MA: Harvard, 2010), pp. 2–25 (p. 16). 30 Martin, On Secularization, p. 4. 31 Peter J. Bowler, Reconciling Science and Religion: The Debate in Early-Twentieth- Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 3. 32 Stevens, ‘Angel Surrounded by Paysans’, in Collected Poetry, p. 423; and Carl G. Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 13, ed. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, Gerhard Adler and others (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 82. 33 For a comprehensive description of some of the occult interests and invest- ments of writers in London in the early years of the twentieth century, see Leon Surette, The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats, and the Occult (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University, 1993); James Logenbach, Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats and Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Tom Gibbons, Rooms in the Darwin Hotel: Studies in English Literary Criticism and Ideas 1880–1890 (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1973); and Timothy Materer, Modernist Alchemy: Poetry and the Occult (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). Helen Sword suggests that over the course of the last decade there has been an explosion in the number of books considering modernism, spiritualism and the occult. She lists some of what she considers to be the most important publications in Ghostwriting Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 160. 34 Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism, see e.g. pp. 3, 7, 13; and Pamela Thurschwell, Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 35 See Daniel Albright, Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot and the Science of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Daniel Tiffany, Toy Medium: Materialism and the Modern Lyric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); and Jeff Wallace, D.H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 36 Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004), pp. 12–13. 37 Pericles Lewis, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 22, 38. 38 Ibid., p. 25. Notes 185 39 Gregory E. Erickson, The Absence of God in Modernist Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), especially pp. 3–4; and Vincent P. Pecora, Secularization and Cultural Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 173. 40 See Owen, The Place of Enchantment, p. 12; Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism, pp. xi–xii; Jean-Michel Rabaté, The Ghosts of Modernity (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1996), p. xvi; Lewis, Religious Experience, p. 25; Erickson, Absence of God, p. 3; and Philip Weinstein, Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 2005), pp. 2–3. 41 The first two terms from Joyce and Woolf are well known. The best point of reference for the ‘epiphany’ is Stephen Hero, ed. Theodore Spencer (London: Cape, 1944), pp.