Consciousness, History, and Nation in the British Novel, 1926-1932

CONSCIOUSNESS, HISTORY, AND NATION IN THE BRITISH NOVEL, 1926-1932

JONATHAN GOODWIN

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2005

JONATHAN GOODWIN

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many people have aided me in the completion of this project. Friends too numerous to name encouraged me throughout. My parents worked very hard to support my education at all levels. Librarians at the University of Florida, Georgia Tech, and Emory have helped me locate materials. My hound Speckleford stressed the necessity of walks.

The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida awarded me a fellowship. I especially wish to thank my committee. George Esenwein saved me from making several historical overgeneralizations and provided detailed and helpful comments throughout. Brandy Kershner helped me see what was clear and what was not and advised me well throughout my long graduate school career. Jim Paxson maintained such enthusiasm for the project and my ideas that I can only hope this dissertation is worthy of it. I could not have completed it without the benefit of our many long conversations. And I am especially grateful to Norm Holland, who agreed to direct what was an unusual dissertation proposal, dispensed much patient and wise counsel, and remained a constant source of material and moral support throughout.

Finally, Clancy Ann Ratliff's support and love came at the perfect time.

iii TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... iii

ABSTRACT...... vi

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 1

2 BRITISH NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS, 1926-1932 ...... 14

The General Strike...... 14 Background to the Strike...... 14 The Revolutionary Aspects of the Strike...... 18 Ronald Knox's Alternate History...... 39 Rationalization and Nationalization in the Wake of the Strike ...... 43 The Financial Crisis and British Nationalism...... 46 British Nationalism after the Crisis: The Case of John Buchan's The Gap in the Curtain...... 54 Imperial Unrest and Internal Unease ...... 60

3 CONCEPTUAL ANACHRONISM, SMALL WORLDS, AND THE FLIGHT FROM HISTORY IN VIRGINIA WOOLF'S ORLANDO ...... 68

Conceptual Anachronism...... 69 Small Worlds of Narrative and History...... 79 The Flight from History...... 89

4 NATIONALISM AND NARRATIVE FORM IN WYNDHAM LEWIS'S THE CHILDERMASS ...... 93

5 OLAF STAPLEDON'S LAST AND FIRST MEN AND COSMIC HISTORICISM...... 126

6 RE-ENCHANTMENT OF MIND AND PLACE IN JOHN COWPER POWYS'S A GLASTONBURY ROMANCE...... 152

7 CONCLUSION...... 171

LIST OF REFERENCES...... 174

iv BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 189

Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

CONSCIOUSNESS, HISTORY, AND NATION IN THE BRITISH NOVEL, 1926-1932

Jonathan Goodwin

December 2005

Chair: Norman Holland Major Department: English

In this dissertation, I argue that a major transition in the development of the British nation-state occurred between 1926-1932, a process uniquely reflected in the attitudes taken towards history in four novels written during the period: Virginia Woolf's Orlando,

Wyndham Lewis's The Childermass, Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, and John

Cowper Powys's A Glastonbury Romance. Bracketed by the General Strike of 1926 and

the electoral crisis of 1931, these years showed the resiliency of British nationalism in the

face of periodic disruptions. The combination of social experience and individual

psychology necessarily leaves traces of these upheavals in the novelistic imagination.

Each novel examines how an individual mind becomes part of national

consciousness through history. After a detailed overview of the historical moment, I

explore the question of historical perspective in Woolf's Orlando. Conceptual

anachronism is the tendency to interpret historical events through the lens of the present.

Since Orlando ages so slowly and maintains a unified consciousness for such a long

vi historical period, Woolf playfully recreates the central problem of historicism. Lewis's

The Childermass also represents this moment of national transition through temporal displacement. His imagined afterlife is the distilled nightmare of the dulled revolutionary potential of the General Strike. Through his sporadic satires of important cultural figures and trends, Lewis aims to identify and correct what he sees as the dangerous manifestations of the Time-Cult. And Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men expands into cosmic horizons. Stapledon's projection of the far-future relies intensively upon his view of the near-present, and his perceived Americanization of the world reveals substantial anxieties about the development of the British nation-state. Finally, I describe how

Powys's epic A Glastonbury Romance, written in upstate New York, diagnosed a spiritual decay within the heart of one of the peculiarly British centers of national consciousness. Glastonbury, with its Arthurian aura, presents a psychic portrait of a group mind in tumult.

vii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

In the period from the end of the General Strike in 1926 to the abandonment of the

Gold Standard in 1931 the British nation-state evolved much closer to its present form than in any other five-year span in the twentieth century. This study analyzes the novelistic representations of this national transformation in four works written during the period: Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Wyndham Lewis's The Childermass, Olaf Stapledon's

Last and First Men, and John Cowper Powys's A Glastonbury Romance. Aldous Huxley,

describing late 1920s Britain, wrote that "a reaction had begun to set in--away from the

easy-going philosophy of general meaninglessness towards the hard, ferocious theologies

of nationalistic and revolutionary idolatry. Meaning was reintroduced into the world, but

only in patches" (Huxley 274 qtd. by Hynes 63). The Empire began to implode; America,

with its film and gold, was emerging as a rival financial and cultural center. Even the

Book of Common Prayer was revised. Huxley's competing ideologies struggled against

the backdrop of Britain's transformation into a state-interventionist economy. The global

financial collapse of 1929 precipitated this transformation, and John Maynard Keynes--

Woolf's fellow Bloomsbury intellectual--was its chief architect. Each novel represents

this national transformation through an individual consciousness struggling to transcend

the passage of time. They seek, through the exploration of nationalism, to unify

consciousness and history against the fragmentation of modernity.

Several recent critical studies have focused on the literary representations of British

nationalism during the transformative moments of the 1920s and 1930s. One prominent

1 2

example is Jed Esty's A Shrinking Island. Because of the imperial contraction begun in

1930, the "potential energy" released results in the reformation of a particularly English

national culture (8). Importantly, Esty recognizes that the imperial contraction influenced

John Maynard Keynes's development of an interventionist model of state capitalism

(174). Esty's work considers the thirty year period between 1930-1960 to be Britain's

"late imperialist" stage. The development of a particularly "late" modernism is the focus

of Tyrus Miller's Late Modernism. Miller reads the work of Wyndham Lewis, Djuna

Barnes, Samuel Beckett, and Mina Loy as composing a late modernist avant garde.

Lewis's declaration in Blasting and Bombardiering that he had "disinterred himself" in

1926 provides the starting point for this fundamental change in artistic expression (27),

and Lewis attributes this change to the General Strike, the proto- or pseudo-revolutionary

moment in British national consciousness.

Miller's study covers roughly fifteen years, and Esty's sixty. The present study

focuses on a six-year period, which begins with an important historical event (and the

beginning of the composition of Wyndham Lewis's The Childermass) and ends with the

publication of John Cowper Powys's A Glastonbury Romance in 1932. Several important

modernist studies have been even more specific: Thomas Harrison's 1910: The

Emancipation of Dissonance, Bonnie Kime Scott's Refiguring Modernism: The Women

of 1928, and Michael North's Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern all focus carefully on milestone years in literary and cultural history. Hans Ulrich

Gumbrecht's 1926: Living at the Edge of Time takes what he considers to be a year unremarked upon by previous historians, which I think is somewhat overstated, and creates a fascinating cross-section of its world-picture. Outside and bounding the century

3 are James Chandler's England in 1819 and Friedrich Kittler's Discourse Networks

1800/1900. When considering these and other studies, Michael North suggests that the

Y2K historical moment creates a "technological immediacy signified by that date read back into earlier years, where the very strangeness of the machines allows us to see more clearly the mechanical context that includes us" ("Visual Histories" 420).

Consciously, at least, this study does not take the five (or six)-year plan as its determining model. Philip Williamson's important political history, National Crisis and

National Government, chooses to cover the years 1926-1932, though the cultural and literary history of that particular period has not, to my knowledge, been covered specifically. All of the novels I consider here were written between 1926-1931. Issues important to the historian in retrospect are not necessarily even noticeable to contemporary writers. Some create private anachronisms while paying little, if any, attention to what surrounds them. In fact, this was a common criticism of Virginia Woolf, not to mention of fantasists such as Powys and Stapledon. Lewis, however, was a self- conscious public intellectual, despite not having very much attention paid to him by the public, and explicitly conceived of The Childermass as part of a larger work which would justify the ways of capital to man.

As Alastair Fowler notes, "anyone who studies literature finds it to consist mostly of exceptional cases" (487), and my thesis might seem to call for precisely typical novels for the best evidence. A sample size of four also creates problems, though not unfamiliar ones to literary study. Some works, such as Franco Moretti's Atlas of the European Novel and "Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History" have acknowledged sample size as a problem and have surveyed large numbers of fictional works to discern

4 broad patterns. Some critics have argued that the complexity of the novelistic form itself entails a unique form of social imagining. A traditional defining criterion for a novel, attempted realism in individual psychology, might only sporadically apply to the texts under consideration. However, each of the texts I examine fulfills Bakhtin's three distinguishing characteristics of the novel as genre: having stylistic three-dimensionality, effecting "radical change in the temporal coordinates of the literary image," and creating a zone of "maximal contact with the present" (11).

Each novel examines how an individual mind becomes part of national consciousness through history. Woolf's protagonist is born under Elizabeth I and turns forty at the moment Woolf finishes the book. Her consciousness remains unified despite the immense historical change she experiences--whose only outward manifestation is sex- change. Satters and Pullman in The Childermass have been removed from time into

Lewis's purgatorial imago of the present. Stapledon begins with a version of what can happen in European politics over the next ten years, and then extrapolates two billion years into the future, with every future transformation being constrained by his imagination of the present. And Powys attempts to re-enchant a secular Keynesian present with Britain's mythic Arthurian past.

These writers are tied to the national consciousness through not only the art work itself, which always must be a work of social imagining, but through their ideas about mind, which I argue are influenced by psychologists and philosophers, often reacting against nascent behaviorism, whose work anticipates the later development of cognitive science. Some of these thinkers were the "emergent evolutionists": of whom C. Lloyd

Morgan, Alfred North Whitehead, C. D. Broad, and Samuel Alexander were the most

5 well known. Their work has significant parallels with both the sciences of complexity and evolutionary psychology, disciplines which are now also being incorporated into literary and cultural inquiry. One of the most important British literary critics, I. A. Richards, attempted to develop a scientific psychology of criticism in works such as Science and

Poetry and Practical Criticism, written during the time of this study.

The question of the relation of artistic production to social circumstance is perhaps the most difficult problem in aesthetics and the main problem of Marxist aesthetics. I aim to avoid narrowly economistic determinisms. Few critics have started with the aim of embracing economic determinism, however. As a brief introduction to the ideas about literature and history that I will develop in this work, I invite the reader to consider the conceit of the perfectability of narrative. I borrow this analogy from optimality theory in linguistics, which postulates that the language faculty (as distinct from the performance of language, which is, as we know, not perfect) ranks a series of structural performance choices according to preselected constraints. If the narrative property has significant homologies with the language faculty in terms of degrees of grammaticality and structural function, there follow provocative interpretive consequences. The concepts of

"constraint" and "optimality" are analogous to the creation of literary narrative.

In short, the system of constraints is analogous to ideology. Out of the capacity for narrative imagining which is universal, certain constraints develop in the representation of lived experience. Some choices have to be made out of the discrete infinity of possible narrative imaginings, and the contours of these choices can then be analyzed to determine, at least in outline, the nature of the original constraints (which do not, unlike the language faculty, get set at a developmentally programmed early stage and become

6 incredibly hard to reorganize after). The constraints are themselves as fluid and permeable as history itself, which we only know from its narrative imaginings and, consequently, from the universality of this narrative property. So while individual writers can have imperfect and limited understandings of social reality, when they attempt to recreate it within the novel form, the inevitable structural homology between the large- scale narrative structure of the nation-state (considered synchronically, history at a moment) and its development (considered diachronically, history as movement) in the novel shows that the actual process of social change is contained within every literary artifact. This representational necessity distinguishes, as Bakhtin argues, the novel as a literary narrative form--and particularly from other forms of art, whose encapsulated perfectability or totality varies with the modality in question.

Marshall Brown suggests that "chronology is also a psychology, [which yields] a historical narrative inevitably modeled on some kind of punctuated equilibrium" (313).

Brown finds that any historical narrative that proceeds chronologically must represent brief moments of rapid change surrounded by long periods of near-stasis. To extend

Brown's evolutionary metaphors, the development of the Keynesian state and the fascist state are both speciation events that occur in this six-year period. The novels themselves are hopeful monsters. Understanding how national developments relate to narrative production is a difficult problem. Some novels, such as those I consider here, take, in some direct way, history as their subject. When you have an individual consciousness that transcends the passage of time, such as in Orlando, or consciousnesses distinctly removed from time to a place entirely determined by previous conditions, as in The

Childermass, there is a direct concern with historical process. In these cases, also, there is

a subsidiary interest in national formation. Similarly, Stapledon’s cosmicism and Powys’s

attempt to freeze and revert the passage of time share a common concern with the

determinative and transformative aspects of history on national character. No narrative

production of sufficient complexity to be readily identified as a novel, however, can

avoid having some theory of these processes and their interrelation. It may be an overt

system, such as seen in Lewis’s companion volumes of political philosophy, or Woolf's

unsystematic and refined sensibility. But it is always present in some form. If there is to

be an individual mind who records or moves through a sequence of events, in order to be

read and understood, the reader must place that mind in relation to a narrative of history

and place. The reader must have a theory of consciousness for the novel, and the literary

creation of such a theory contains a developmental snapshot of the general social

relationship between the novelist and his group identity.

The critical literature on Virginia Woolf and, to a lesser extent, Wyndham Lewis is

voluminous. Olaf Stapledon and John Cowper Powys have received less attention, though

the works that I consider, Last and First Men and A Glastonbury Romance, have been written about the most. Of the major works of Woolf's mature period, Orlando has traditionally been treated least seriously, though the relative number of articles on it has increased dramatically over the last twenty years. Political interpretations of Lewis's novels have tended to follow Fredric Jameson's influential analysis in Fables of

Aggression. A recent volume edited by David Peters-Corbett, Wyndham Lewis and the

Art of the Modern, wants to revise Jameson's "libidinal apparatus" conceptualization of

Lewis's politics by providing more detailed historical overviews of the development of his ideas. The essays, by such noted Lewis scholars as Paul Edwards and Alan Munton,

do not treat The Childermass at length. In fact, the work has always received less critical

attention than its importance to Lewis--and its essential mysteriousness--would seem to

warrant. Lewis thought the work important enough to attempt to finish nearly thirty years

later, while near the end of his life and blind. Satires in some ways more accessible such

as The Apes of God and Snooty Baronet were also written during the time-period of this

study, and they have more direct representations of Lewis's attitudes towards

contemporary political developments. Alan Munton even observes that "Snooty Baronet

is in thrall to behaviorism" ("Wyndham Lewis" 17). But the essential strangeness of

Lewis's "theological science fiction" (Jameson 16)--its removal from any recognizable

national reality--reveals more about Lewis's developing sympathy for violent political

change (Symons 141). One reason is the simple liberation of the fantastic, another is the

increasing abstraction of The Childermass's representational landscape lays bare its

conceptual and ideological apparatus.

Critics have examined the effects of events such as the General Strike on British

writers of the late twenties and early thirties. One recent example is Morag Shiach's

Modernism, Labour, and Selfhood in British Literature and Culture, 1890-1930. Its final

chapter, "The General Strike: Labour and the Future Tense," discusses works which

represented or were influenced by the strike: H.G. Wells's Meanwhile: The Picture of a

Lady, Woolf's To the Lighthouse, John Galsworthy's Swan Song, Harold Heslep's The

Gate of a Strange Field , Ellen Wilkinson's Clash, and Lewis's The Apes of God (230).

The works I consider here, however, have their ideological horizons constrained by the memory of the strike. It affected how they thought of themselves as part of a British national community, as their respective distortions of time show. Shiach also describes

John Waugh Scott's Syndicalism and Philosophical Realism's effect on the political strategy of the Strike (216-17). This effect, while small, was greater than that had by

Georges Sorel, who, while greatly influential to Wyndham Lewis (and, earlier, T.E.

Hulme), was not a thinker who much influenced actual British politics. Through Lewis and others, however, he was very influential in the intellectual reaction to the strike.

Whereas Lewis, influenced by Sorel, interpreted the failure of the strike to produce a widespread revolution as evidence of a sublimated apocalypse, Woolf celebrates the elasticity of the British national genius in Orlando. For Stapledon and Powys, the national crisis of the early 1930s has eclipsed the General Strike in their social imaginations.

In my treatment of the historical background of the General Strike, I focus to a large extent on how it was perceived at the time, particularly by members of ideological extremes. The communist left saw it a as a moment of revolution and often construed the governmental countermeasures as explicitly fascist. Many on the right, some of whom had at least some sympathy for Italian fascism, thought that insufficient brutality in quelling the strike might very well lead to revolution. Subsequent historical inquiry has tended to view the strike as having had little actual revolutionary potential. Lewis in particular overemphasized the significance of the event because of his interest in theories of regenerative violence.

Chapter 2, "British National Consciousness, 1926-1932", outlines relevant high political, social, and intellectual events during the period. I begin by discussing the sociopolitical causes and effects of the General Strike in 1926. The government's use of

propaganda in the Strike, particularly through the medium of the BBC, marked a turning-

point in the use of mass media for social management. Closely related to these emerging

concepts of social energies were Georges Sorel's influential theories about the

revolutionary potential of the myth of the general strike. Sorel's theories drew on Gustave

Le Bon's arguments about the evolutionary regression of the group mind. I explore how

the group mind was conceptualized in the national imagination through an analysis of an

alternate history of the Strike written by Ronald A. Knox.

The next section analyzes industrial rationalization and its relationship to economic

nationalism in the years after the Strike. Like the theorists of the crowd and the mythic

revolutionary potential of the General Strike, the rationalizers often conceived of industry

organically. An organism has developmental constraints, and the rationalizers' utopian

plans for the "nondestructive elimination of the weak" attempted to realize those

constraints in such a way as to unify the national consciousness within the corporate.

Given that many Labour party leaders accepted rationalization as a necessary measure,

the project had considerable success.

The third section reviews the British reaction to the worldwide financial crisis of

1929. I explore how the world of international finance was conceptualized in the popular

imagination, particularly how abstract "risk" related to everyday life. Oswald Mosley's

nascent British fascism embraced both rationalization and the early formulations of

Keynes's interventionist, managed economy. Finally, the last section explains how British

nationalism consolidated itself in reaction to the financial crisis. John Buchan's novel The

Gap in the Curtain, with its invocation of recovered time and national essence, illustrates this national transformation.

"Conceptual Anachronism and the Flight from History in Virginia Woolf's

Orlando," Chapter 3, explores the question of historical perspective in the novel.

Conceptual anachronism is the tendency to interpret historical events through the lens of the present. Since Orlando ages so slowly and maintains a unified consciousness for such a long historical period, Woolf playfully recreates the central problem of historicism.

Traditional forms of anachronisms in the novel regarding displaced phrases and objects are signs pointing to the more fundamental (and inevitable) conceptual anachronism of any attempt to integrate the past with the present.

Orlando was begun in 1927, a year after the General Strike, and its aftereffects lingered in Woolf's consciousness. Vita Sackville-West, to whom the book was described as a long love letter, figures in Woolf's imagination as a symbol for the entrenchment of

English cultural aristocracy, whose excesses both attracted and repulsed her. Hereditary aristocracy was becoming an anachronism, as the photographs of Sackville-West in period dress reveal. Finally, the airplane imagery at the end of the novel, where Orlando has merged into the present, displays the tension between history as surveillance and history as lived experience.

Chapter 4, "Nationalism and Narrative Form in Wyndham Lewis's The

Childermass," describes how Lewis also represents this moment of national transition through temporal displacement. His imagined afterlife is the distilled nightmare of the dulled revolutionary potential of the General Strike. Through his sporadic satires of important cultural figures and trends, Lewis aims to identify and correct what he sees as the dangerous manifestations of the Time-Cult. Time exists only as mediated subjectivity within the purgatory outside Lewis's Magnetic City. There are time-sinks, spatial zones

of anachronism, through which the protagonists journey; but their experience of them is

only recreated from their dim memories of the past. Control is wrought via debating ideas

and winning the penitent population's minds. The parallels to contemporary propaganda

and the engineering of consent envisioned by Edward Bernays are not difficult to see, but

Lewis sees a propagandistic function in intellectual culture as well. He distrusts ideas

about the plasticity of culture and of human nature, seeing them as tools of domination, a

distrust in curious tension with his developing fascist sympathies. And this tension is

negotiated in the dialogue between the Bailiff, representative of the Time-Cult, and

Hyperides, revolutionary protofascist, which ends the book.

As Lewis's narrative removed itself from time altogether, Olaf Stapledon's Last and

First Men, which I analyze in Chapter 5, expands into its cosmic horizons. Creating a controlling intelligence that would be able to communicate with the present from the far future is a problem parallel to immersion in the distant past. Stapledon's projection of the far-future relies intensively upon his view of the near-present, and his perceived

Americanization of the world reveals substantial anxieties about the development of the

British nation-state. Americanization, for Stapledon, consists of fundamentalist capitalism, technocracy without the humanizing influence of rational science.

Stapledon received his doctorate in philosophy a few years before writing Last and

First Men, and his ideas about teleological ethics, strongly influenced by the emergent evolutionists, shape his future history. His lifelong enthusiasm for eugenics and the moral choices it imposes are represented in future generations' decisions to exterminate Martian and Venerian lifeforms. Consistent with the metaphysics of J. W. Dunne's theory of the future being able to be glimpsed through dream experimentation, Stapledon's narrator has

13 an isomorphic view of the progression of intelligence. Thus, the narrative of the two- billion years is not filled with the recounting of literal events but of myths expressing symbolic truths.

Finally, Chapter 6, "Re-enchantment of Mind and Place in John Cowper Powys's A

Glastonbury Romance," describes how this epic work, written in upstate New York, diagnosed a spiritual decay within the heart of one of the peculiarly British centers of national consciousness. Glastonbury, with its Arthurian aura, presents a psychic portrait of a group mind in tumult. Powys, who seemed to cultivate the image of writer as magus, was successfully sued for a libel by a local factory owner who did electrify the caves at

Wookey Hole. The long pageant-play results in a transition to a local and communal form of governance in Glastonbury, an essentially anarchist reaction to the consolidating nation-state.

Throughout the novel, Powys develops the metaphor of Glastonbury as an aquarium. The epiphanic vision of a tench swimming within the waters of the Holy Grail symbolizes the transcendent word within. Afterwards, Glastonbury's political and spiritual experiment is washed away in a flood, a pat narrative device rendered minatory by the strangeness of Powys's imagination.

CHAPTER 2 BRITISH NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS, 1926-1932

The General Strike

Background to the Strike

"When it comes to the practice of politics, anyone writing about his life in the years

1924-1939 must answer the critical question: 'What did you do during the General

Strike?'" (qtd. in Lucas 218) was Leonard Woolf's well-known historical judgment. The

remark suggests a revisionist interpretation of an event which failed to impress many of

the nation's intellectuals at the time. His wife, who was writing To the Lighthouse at the time, expressed interest in recording the events in her diary along with considerable displeasure at the inconvenience of it all. A book dedicated to her by Clive Bell and inspired by the Strike suggested that "far from discovering amongst them any will to civilization, I am led to suspect that the British working man likes his barbarism well enough. Only he would like a little more of it" (Bell 255-256, qtd. in Flint 325). Her husband, perhaps more politically sympathetic and aware, was astounded at the lack of guidance shown by the strikers. Some had colorful reactions to what they perceived as the Bolshevikization of the nation in the strike. Frederick Edwin Smith, the Earl of

Birkenhead, was roused to ire by a protester's threat to man barricades: "Barricades! You dare to talk to me about barricades!--we've beaten you with brains, and if it comes to fighting two can play at that game! Put up your barricades, and we'll slit every one of your soft white throats!" The jeering resulting from these remarks he dismissed as the howling of "wolves from Moscow" (Florey 113). Birkenhead's outburst was addressed to

14 15 a disorderly crowd after the Strike had ended, and the anxieties about class war and manhood should not conceal his bare declaration that the miners and allied workers' interests were beaten by the ruling class with "brains." Not only reactionary elements of

British society agreed with this conclusion.

How the strike came about and how it ended so ignominously matters profoundly to the four novels of this study. Various pressures brought to bear on British industry in general and coal in particular caused the owners to demand longer hours and lower wages from the workers to compensate. Perhaps the most important of these pressures was increased European competition, particularly after the French withdrawal from the Ruhr in 1923 (Middlemas 197). The weakening of the Empire and the strengthening of the

United States were also significant. Trade union membership had increased dramatically after the war. There were four million members in Britain in 1914 and double that by

1920 (Laybourn 13). When the Baldwin government restored the gold standard in 1925, employers attempted to reduce wages, as unemployment was increasing rapidly. The miners felt this was unbearable. Serious unrest began in 1918, and increased until 1921, where it steadily decreased until the strike of 1926. The miners' strike of 1921 was not given the expected supported by the Triple Alliance of railwaymen, transport workers, and dockers, an event that came to be known as Black Friday (Laybourn 13).

The publication of the Samuel Report on March 10, 1926 signaled the likely beginning of the strike (Roberson 376). Appointed after the failure of the earlier Sankey

Commission, which had equal representation among miners' representatives and owners, the Samuel Commission comprised Sir William Beveridge; Gen. the Hon. Sir Herbert

Lawrence, G. C. B; Mr. Kenneth Lee; and the chairman, Herbert Samuel (Arnot 88). Far

16 from being representatives of miners' interests, these gentlemen were former colonial administrators and financiers, several of whom had a direct financial stake in the coal industry (Arnot 89). Samuel in particular was no stranger to Royal Commissions, having been the High Commissioner of Palestine and a strong advocate of British acceptance of

Zionism (Wright 399). The Report found that no nationalization of the mining industry was necessary, contrary to the wishes of the Miners' Federation. It did, however, recommend further consolidation within the mining and closely allied industries, a proposal well suited to the financial interests which the commissioners represented.

Finally, and most significantly, the report concluded that a decrease in miners’ wages was unavoidable. Laybourn observes that the report was not popular. Its "policies embarrassed the Government, offended the miners, and aggrieved the mine owners" (37).

Government subsidy of the coal industry was set to run out in May 1926. The nine- month agreement established after a crisis in July 1925 was expected to end in conflict.

The mining industry announced that the wage agreement heretofore established would run out by the end of July. After the workers threatened to strike, a court ruling and intervention by the prime minister implemented a stop-gap nine-month measure whereby wages would not decrease and the industry would receive a subsidy to offset the cost

(Hewes 3). The coal industry was facing grave difficulties and attributed them to labor reform measures. The metric ton output per year per worker per shift had fallen in Great

Britain from 1.031 in 1913 to .928 in 1924 whereas the same output for American workers had risen to nearly 4 metric tons during the same period (Hewes 5). The Coal

Mines Act of 1919 had established a seven-hour working day, as opposed to the eight-

17 hour day in the United States and Germany.1 On July 29th, the Trade Union Congress decided to embargo the movement of coal unless a suitable settlement were reached

(Arnot 34). The settlement emboldened some within the TUC, who even thought that capitalism was to be replaced with socialism (Laybourn 31).

The formation of the Organization for the Maintenance of Supplies2 in 19253 was an important development in British national reaction to the industrial unrest. By the time the General Strike was called, this volunteer organization offered the government over

100,000 members ready for service (Crook, "Social Security and the General

Strike" 419). Existing British Fascist organizations were split over whether to integrate with the O. M. S., as they were pressured to do (Benewick 35). William Joyson-Hicks used the O.M.S. to weaken the British Fascists, the most well-organized group of existing at the time. He had spent the previous year prosecuting communists under the "ancient

Incitement to Mutiny Act of 1797" (Webber 31 n36). And the Communist Party of Great

Britain equated the formation of the O. M. S. with state-sanctioned fascism (Arnot 52).

Because of hostility to the Soviet government, steel and iron exports, which would have increased the demand for coal, to the Soviet Union had stopped. Robin Page Arnot, a communist actively involved in organizing the miners, thought that the Foreign Policy elites in the Samuel Commission, including most certainly its chairman, whose last job was arguably the most important British post in its region, were chosen for their willingness to naturalize the--in reality quite malleable--geopolitical constraints affecting the coal industry and to thus accept them as givens (92).

1 The West Virginian mines had superior reserves of coal which were more easily mined, so the discrepancy is by no means only a matter of increased industrial efficiency. 2 That the initials were shared with "on majesty's service" was not accidental (Arnot 50). 3 Its existence was made public on September 25, 1925 (Roberson 376).

The Revolutionary Aspects of the Strike

The Strike was declared at 2:30 PM on May 1 (Arnot 141). The negotiations up to

that point had been exceptionally contentious, with the mine owners refusing to budge on

the issue of extending the work-day to eight hours (contrary to the Samuel Commission's

recommendations). The Morning Post that morning had as its headline "Zinovieff Wins" before the Strike was even called (Florey 128). The reference was to the infamous letter allegedly written by the president of the Third International, Grigory Zinoviev, which was published in the Times on October 25, 1924. The letter, which suggested that the

British working classes planned to overthrow existing institutions and subvert the armed

forces, had been sent by uncertain means to the offices of the British Communist Party,

and the British Foreign Office decided that it was genuine and published it (Crowe 407).

Forgery was immediately suspected, and it has been the subject of much historical

argument. The best evidence suggests that it was a forgery,4 and a motive is not hard to

discover. Financial interests within the country feared very much the possibility of a

general revolution being caused by labor unrest, but even more than that they feared that

the government would become more sympathetic to the working classes' increasingly

dire work conditions. Labour's defeat was commonly attributed to the scandal

surrounding the letter.

When the motion to strike was brought before the membership of the General

Council on the morning of May 1, the total vote was 3,653,527 for, 49,911 against--a fair

4 The secondary literature on the Zinoviev literature is copious, though it was all rendered obsolete by the publication in 1999 of The Crown Jewels: The British Secrets at the Heart of the KGB Archives, whose previously unknown archival evidence established conclusively that the letter was forged. The letter was written by Ivan D. Pokrovsky, a White Guard agent working under Vladimir Grigorievich Orlov, and was intercepted by British police monitoring the mail of a known communist. The police then turned it over to the Foreign Office as an authentic document (West 33-43).

19 plurality (Florey 129). May Day celebrations were jubilant that Saturday, as others geared for apocalypse. Alan Ian Percy, Duke of Northumberland, wrote to the Morning Post warning of the "coal war plot [. . .] miners under thumb of Moscow [. . .] vanguard of revolution," a series of stark phrases that revealed not just anxiety or hysteria, but also a shiver of anticipation. Percy, Homeland Secretary William Joynson-Hicks, Winston

Churchill, and many others seemed not only to prepare for but perhaps to relish the strike as a means towards ending the class war. In terms of historical parallels, it is interesting to compare the case of Violet Gibson, who on April 7 had shot Mussolini in the nose.

With considerable brio, Mussolini advised the crowd, "Don't be alarmed. It is nothing. I strictly forbid any reprisals" ("Attempt on Mussolini").5 Gibson was by many accounts mentally unstable, and she was found unfit for trial by the Italian authorities and returned to Great Britain.6 The Times reported in its coverage that Gibson had attempted to kill herself in February of the last year because "she wished to sacrifice her life for the glory of God." An Anglo-Irish woman of means, not much is known about Gibson, but it is instructive to compare this apparently mad aristocrat's actions with those of her peers, many of whom, far from wanting to kill Mussolini, wished to emulate him.

5 This grace is mildly tempered by the fact that Anteo Zamboni, aged 15, was strangled and stabbed to death by the crowd after he attempted to shoot Mussolini on November 1 of that year. His family was arrested the next day ("The Attempt on Mussolini"). 6 A fascinating document of the mentality of Italian fascism at the time was published by The Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology. A translation of the defense summary presented to the military judge by Enrico Ferri, a founder of the positivist school of Italian criminology, the document read Gibson's mental state in such a way as to suggest that only a deeply disturbed individual could ever consider harming Il Duce. The other assassination attempts were not so easily explained, but these were generally carried out by those with a more easily recognizable motive. The fact that Gibson was an Anglo-Irish aristocrat, a constituency positively disposed towards Mussolini at the time, was also significant (210).

Celebrations on that Saturday did not pass without incident. Millionaire Battersea

Communist MP Shapurji Saklatvala was arrested three days later and eventually

sentenced to two months in jail for giving a speech in which he suggested that the army

must refuse to fight striking workers (Arnot 147). The seeds of the eventual betrayal by

the TUC leadership were planted when they visited with Baldwin at 10 Downing Street

without direct notification of or consultation with the membership. Despite the evident

collusion of the TUC representatives, the more militant members of Baldwin's cabinet

threatened to resign if talks continued (Florey 134). These talks, however ill regarded by

both sides of the dispute, led to no immediate settlement. The justified fear of incitement

from spies led to language such as this message posted in the Daily Herald, "Any who try to sow distrust are the worst foes of Labour, worse than any capitalist. For the Capitalist can be recognized and fought with. These other foes are in disguise. If they seek to exert their sinister influence, deal with them, too" (Arnot 171). On Tuesday, May 4, work had stopped.

The following day, the London taxi-drivers joined the strike. The government seized the Morning Post and began publishing the British Gazette under the direction of

Churchill (Arnot 177). The tenor of this propaganda is on display here:

While, therefore, there is plenty of room for negotiation and a spirit of compromise about the coal trade, there can be absolutely none about a General Strike. That is not a dispute between employers and workmen. It is a conflict between the Trade Union leaders and Parliament. And that conflict must only end, and can only end, in the decisive and unmistakable victory of Parliament. This victory his Majesty's Government is definitely resolved to secure. (Arnot 178)

It is no small rhetorical feat to persuade an audience that the culmination of at least

seven, and possibly one hundred thirty-four years, of conflict between the coal owners

and labor should be viewed as a random outbreak of lawlessness among their elected

21 representatives. The author of this passage is careful to label the Trade Union leaders, who were themselves conciliatory to a degree that compromised their constituents' interests, as radicals separate from the common laborer, while also managing to refer to both the constitutional basis of the British Government and its monarchical residue. It would come as little surprise to the participants that the "decisive and unmistakable victory" to which it refers attempts to lay the ground for the planned suppression of the striking workers.

The paper continues with a section headed "DANGER OF RUMOURS":

Nearly all the newspapers have been silenced by violent concerted action. And this great nation, on the whole the strongest community which civilization can show, is for the moment reduced in this respect to the level of the African natives dependent only on the rumours which are carried from place to place. In a few days, if this were allowed to continue, rumours would poison the air, raise panics and disorders, inflame fears and passions together, and carry us all to depths which no sane man of any party or class would care even to contemplate. (Arnot 179)

There are a number of anxieties about the nature of the British nation revealed in this paragraph. Foremost among them was the fear that the General Strike had brought

Great Britain to a state of savagery resembling that of her colonial possessions (or, perhaps worse, those of the Belgians). The author of this passage is clearly aware of the importance of information-control, a tool used by the British quite effectively in colonial governance, and the lack of a message filtered through the daily newspapers thus had the potential to incite anarchy. "Only the rumours carried from place to place" suggest that the word of the man on the street cannot be trusted, for without the imprimatur of newsprint (especially government-sanctioned newsprint), there is no means of verification. Without the cleansing government voice, the rumors will poison the vox populi. "Depths, which no sane man of any party or class would care even to contemplate" were in fact accessible during the General Strike, but not in the way

22 imagined here. There was, however unlikely, the possibility of true revolution during these nine days. Even if this were manufactured hysteria, the traces of the language used to describe reveal the very real anxieties upon which it was based. The lack of control of the daily newspapers struck directly to the core of the center of the nation-state's power over its subjects, and this explains the images of darkness, savagery, and the unconscious.

Similarly, the official Trade Union Congress and Communist Party statements on the strike recognize the utopian potential of the moment.

Therefore the third essential slogan of the General Strike must be:

"RESIGNATION OF THE FORGERY GOVERNMENT--FORMATION OF A LABOUR GOVERNMENT!"7

The Communist Party continues to instructs its members and to urge the works to take every practical step necessary to consolidate our positions against capitalist attack [. . .] But the Communist Party warns the workers against the attempt being made to limit the struggle to its previous character of self-defence against the capitalist offensive. Once the battle has been joined, the only way to victory is to push ahead and hit hard. And the way to hit the capitalist hardest is for the Council of Action to throw out the clear watchwords:--

NOT A PENNY OFF THE PAY! NOT A SECOND ON THE DAY!

NATIONALISE THE MINES WITHOUT COMPENSATION, UNDER WORKERS' CONTROL!

FORMATION OF A LABOUR GOVERNMENT! (Arnot 180–81)

Compare this to the statement also released on May 5 by the TUC:

The General Council wish to emphasise the fact that in all the instructions they have sent out to the unions on questions of organisation, discipline, and finance, it is made clear that this is essentially an industrial dispute.

The Council have issued very explicit instructions to all trade union members taking part that they must be exemplary in their conduct and give no opportunity for any police interference. They have also issued instructions to the pickets that

7 The "forgery government" refers to the widespread belief that the Zinoviev letter was a forgery (which it was) and that this forgery was responsible for Labour's loss in the 1924 election (probably not).

they must avoid obstruction and confine themselves strictly to their duties and act in a constitutional manner. (Arnot 181–82)

At first glance, the TUC would want to separate itself from the immensity of what had been undertaken. By emphasizing that the General Strike was an "industrial dispute," it would distance itself from the blatantly revolutionary rhetoric of the Communist Party statement. But even that document calls for nothing more than following the recommendations of the Sankey Commission (some of which were echoed by the impeccably establishmentarian Samuel Commission Report). It is debatable whether the

British CP believed that the Labour party would ever be a tool for socialist revolution, as what it became would seem to leave little room for that interpretation. After reading the apocalyptic rhetoric from the Communists and coupling it with the equally millenarian pronouncements from the more reactionary elements of the Baldwin administration, the apparent moderation sought by the TUC would seem unlikely. The fact remains that the strike lasted only nine days, however. Yes, the miners held until November, when the threat of winter and starvation drove them back to work for reduced wages and with considerable punitive measures; but in the strike itself, no lives were lost.

Why is it not possible to imagine a General Strike affecting so many workers lasting only nine days and causing no loss of life (though there was considerable violence employed against picketers by the O. M. S. and regular police forces) in any other industrialized country in the mid-1920s? What was it about that British nation-state that produced and adapted to so readily a potentially destructive and revolutionary moment?

Why did the myth of British national character and unity so completely override what

Georges Sorel saw as the myth of the general strike?8 The events that led to the end of

the strike provide some insights into these questions.

On May 7, steamship communication between Great Britain and Germany was cut

off. The Anglican Church, in the person of the Archbishop of Canterbury, issued a call

for unity, which neither the British Gazette nor the BBC would publish or broadcast

(Arnot 188). In an additional sign of the government's anxiety about controlling the

means of communication, all paper supplies were requisitioned. The British Worker was thus forced to print only four pages per day. Broadcast the same day on the BBC was what Arnot hyperbolically refers to as the government's "pogrom announcement": "All ranks of the Armed Forces of the Crown are hereby notified that any action which they may find necessary to take in an honest endeavour to aid the Civil Power will receive both now and afterwards, the full support of His Majesty's Government" (189). Since, in this context, "honest endeavour" is a phrase subject to considerable leeway of interpretation, it is not altogether surprising that labor leaders reacted to this announcement with considerable alarm. Whether it was a signal intended to intimidate the strikers, or carte blanche granted to the armed forces to squelch civil unrest, the willingness of the state to use violence to suppress any uprising was clear. Over the protests of the British Communist Party, the next day it was announced that the TUC representatives were prepared to accept Birkenhead's proposal which would necessarily involve the reduction of miner's wages.

8 Cf. "In employing the term myth I feel that I have made a happy choice because I thus put myself in the position to refuse any discussion whatever with the people who wish to submit the idea of a general strike to detailed criticism" (Sorel 21).

Despite these ready signals of capitulation among the strikers' leadership, Baldwin continued to use suggestive rhetoric in his public comments:

Can there not be a more direct attack upon the community than that a body not elected by the voters of the country, without consulting the people and without consulting even the Trade Unionists, and in order to impose conditions never yet defined, should dislocate the life of the nation and try to starve us into submission? (Arnot 194)

This statement distorts in interesting ways actually existing conditions. Were the owners of the mines elected by the voters of the community? Had they not twice rejected the findings of governmental commissions? The fact that Baldwin could say that the strikers were arguing for "conditions never yet defined," when they had been defined quite clearly from the onset, suggests that he and his government sensed that the power had shifted so firmly to their side at this point that even cursory adherence to easily verified facts was no longer important. Baldwin's concluding comments provided further proof of the triumphalist and minatory turn in his thinking: "I am a man of peace. I am longing and working and praying for peace, but I will not surrender the safety and the security of the British Constitution" (Arnot 196).

The larger question that Baldwin raises here is a simple one: was the Strike legal as defined under current British law? Sir John Simon had roundly declared in the House of

Commons on May 6 that it was not and that the leaders were "liable in damages to the utmost farthing of [their] personal possessions" (Goodhart 465). The legal precedent was provided by Justice John Meir Astbury in the case brought by the Firemen and National

Sailor's Union who wanted to restrain one of their branches from joining the Strike without permission (not forthcoming) from their Executive Leadership. Counsel was not provided in this case, and Astbury ruled in favor of the injunction on the basis of the

Strike being illegal. No significant legal grounds were offered for this interpretation,

26 however. The Trade Disputes Act of 1906 held that declaring the actions of a trade union illegal by being against the welfare of the state was only permissible if the trade union's actions did not serve in a labor dispute. Thus, to declare the General Strike illegal was to claim that it was an action that had nothing to do with labor conditions. The only cogent interpretation of Astbury's ruling was that only the miners were involved in an industrial dispute and for any other group to join, they must have only an arbitrary attack upon the state in mind.

Examination of this ruling suggests that Astbury's legal reasoning may have been politically influenced. As A. L. Goodhart notes in an article published the next year about the question of the strike's legality, "Sympathetic strikes have been in existence for more than fifty years and to hold them illegal at the present time would constitute a revolution in what had been universally held to have been the law" (471). The Trade Disputes Act of

1927, the fruit of this brand of reasoning, was motivated by four direct goals: to declare that general strikes, or any form of "coercion" against a community should be illegal; to declare that intimidation should be made illegal; to declare that no one should be made against his will to contribute to the funds of any organization; and to declare that civil servants should be entirely loyal to the state (Mason 144).9 There are clearly authoritarian elements within Hogg's litany. In particular, the reference to the nation as a

"community" whose unity cannot be disturbed by those who labor to make it whole, and the demand for loyalty to the source of power--not mutual interest--from those who serve the state, emulates the Italian model.

9 These statements were so proclaimed in Parliament by attorney-general Sir Douglass Hogg. Mason, above, is confused about why the debates were so contentious about these so "harmless, so fair, and so justifiable" statements.

Further evidence of the authoritarian tendencies within some segments of the

British government at the time comes from a pronouncement by Lord Grey of Falloden in

British Gazette of May 8:

The General Strike has raised an issue in which the question of miners' wages is submerged. The issue now is not what the wages of miners should be, but whether the democratic Parliamentary Government is to be overthrown. It is by this democratic Government that liberty has been won and by this alone can it be maintained.

The alternatives are Fascism and Communism. Both of these are hostile and fatal to liberty. Neither of them allow a free press, free speech, or freedom of action, not even the freedom to strike. (Arnot 197)

The right of workers to free association is not deemed worthy of notice here, nor is the fact that the government had attempted to curb the right of freedom of press by stockpiling the available paper. Through the statements of government organs, through both Hogg and Lord Grey, the government wishes to save democracy through authoritarianism.

A new tactic was adopted by Herbert Henry Asquith a couple of days prior to

Baldwin's announcement. In a signed statement published in the Gazette, he opined that the common people, not the "capitalists and the plutocrats" (Arnot 198) were those who really suffered during a general strike. The latter had the resources not to be disturbed by lack of transportation, for they have "at their command the whole apparatus of opulence"

(Arnot 198). What Asquith does not emphasize is that the common people did not have at their command the whole apparatus of a now-dormant industry and thus had different immediate financial interests at stake. The Liberal governing elite recognized that, in

Lloyd George's words, that "in our opinion we are [the TUC's] mercy. If a force arises in the State that is stronger than the State itself, it must be ready to take on the functions of the State, or withdraw" (Renshaw 694). The statement issued by the Lords attempts to

28 manage and divide the social forces that were seen as, plausibly, potentially capable of overwhelming the existing order. Whether it had any significant effect is doubtful, given the transparent self-interest, but it is a revealing symptom.

The Catholic Church dissented slightly from the Archbishop of Canterbury's position when Cardinal Francis Alphonsus Bourne declared in the May 9 High Mass at

Westminster Cathedral that the General Strike was a sin against God (Arnot 201). Since the Cardinal construed it as disobedience against a lawfully constituted authority, it was therefore disobedience against the God which provided that authority (Arnot 203). The correlation here was between "lawfully constituted authority" and the duty of Christians to obey it, especially since it suggested that the law was autotelic but still under the authority of God. Similar reasoning undergirded the concordat between Mussolini and the

Holy See in 1929. As long as authority remains within the structure of the state and is not dispersed among those who compose it, the natural sympathy between hierarchies will manifest.

Samuel returned from Italy and delivered the memorandum to the TUC representatives which led to the Strike being called off. He had no special interest or expertise in the coal industry, as he told Baldwin (Samuel 183). Furthermore, chairing a commission on the coal industry would obviously disrupt his vacation plans. Baldwin's reasoning was that "fresh minds were to be brought to bear" on the situation. Samuel's prestige and imperial reputation were likely also important factors. He was proud to note in his memoirs that his commission's report was unanimous and was the best-selling document of its type until fellow committee-member Beveridge's social security report in

1943 (184). Key to Samuel's exculpatory claims is the closing of the Ruhr coalfields by

29 the Germans in 1923 with its attendant drop in worldwide coal supply. Thus the wages that were fixed in 1924 were at a level of "temporary prosperity" and could not be legitimately maintained (186).

When the strike occurred, Samuel was in San Vigilio in the Italian Lakes

(Laybourn 81). His impression of Mussolini, met when visiting the Vatican while governor of Palestine, was not favorable: "Rather short in stature but broad-shouldered, with a low forehead, large glassy eyes, a cruel mouth, and a defiant and mistrustful manner, Mussolini was a man to whom one took an instinctive dislike" (174). "One" does not apparently include here many members of Baldwin's cabinet and of the press. The

Times, to give just one of many examples, was to declare in the next year that the British and Italian empires were in "complete harmony" (qtd. in Bosworth 170). Samuel was concerned about the Strike from abroad. He telegraphed an unidentified member10 of the government when he learned that it had become serious. He reached England on May 6 and had to telegraph the Postmaster-General to arrange transport from Dover to London

(187). Samuel was to meet in considerable secrecy for the next four days with members of the "Negotiating Committee" of the TUC, at the house of Sir Abe Bailey, a South

African mining magnate (188). Bailey11 was a well-connected figure in governmental circles; the Prince of Wales especially thanked him for his service during his first tour of

10 "I have no record and forgot who it was," he notes somewhat mysteriously (187). 11 Some flavor of this man is provided by the memoirs published upon his death by the Royal African Society: "I was by no means a tame bird in those days, and had many adventures, especially with my fists, including a scrap with Halifax, the champion boxer of the Cape Mounted Rifles, whom I laid out" ("Passing" 347). The braggadocio on immediate display is tempered by the sensitive assonance of "scrap with Halifax," which would befit a man who was also a noted art collector, having in his possession Sir Thomas Lawrence's portrait of Southey, among other worthies ("The Abe Bailey Collection" 73).

Africa at a meeting of the Royal Africa Society the following July ("Dinner of the

Society" 462). And in July, he purchased over a million acres of land in Rhodesia from the British South African Company (Bowman 647). Samuel's negotiations with the TUC were, in every way, done under the aegis of governmental and monied elites who sought only for a way to quell the strike without causing undue disruption.

The important part of Samuel's memorandum was that there was to be "no revision of the previous wage rates unless there are sufficient assurances that the measures of reorganization proposed by the Commission will be effectively adopted" (Robertson

391). The "measures of reorganization" were the partial nationalization of the Coal

Industry, which the Miners' Executives strenuously opposed. The miners themselves felt no security in the obviously vague and unbinding language of Samuel's proposal, and they thus rejected it as well. The TUC, on the other hand, had to accept the Samuel

Memorandum as a compromise sufficient to end the strike. Pressure exerted by the government had forced their hand. At 12:30 on May 12, the TUC representatives told

Baldwin that the strike was over.

The key trope in Baldwin’s valedictory address was triumphal forgiveness. He sought to minimize the numbers of people who had participated in the strike, calling them misguided by a handful of negligible miscreants, who themselves should now be neglected (Arnot 220). Again, the democratic Constitution, or at least an obiter dicta interpretation of it by Astbury, had prevailed--not the Mining Executives or other monied interests. While this was predictable, the BBC valedictory address was perhaps not.

In going back to work tomorrow, or the next day, can we not all go as fellow- craftsmen, resolved in the determination to pick up the broken pieces, repair the gaps, and build the walls of a more enduring city--the city revealed to the mystical

eyes of William Blake when he wrote that [Blake’s "Jerusalem" follows] (Arnot 228-29)

The fact that the government organ, on occasion of the ending of the strike, would have recourse to one of the most radical utopias imagined in Britain’s national history shows clearly the transformative energies that were in play. Not only was "Jerusalem builded here/among those dark satanic mills," but it will be reborn and unified after this fissure between the owners and denizens of the dark satanic mines seemed ready to gape beneath the streets of London and swallow them all in the national imagination.

According to Robert O. Paxton, there are seven motivating forces behind the development of fascism:

Perhaps the first four of Robert O. Paxton's seven motivating forces12 behind the development of fascism were apparent in the reaction of the British national government to the General Strike. The first force has clear resonances with the appeals to unity and

"democratic Constitution" seen within the British Gazette, though they were themselves framed in terms of appeals to rights. Herbert Henry Asquith adopted the second in attempting to persuade the middle-class that they were the group most victimized and that

12 " 1) The primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether universal or individual. 2) The belief that one’s group is a victim, which justifies any action against the group’s enemies, whether external or internal. 3) Dread of the group’s decadence under the corrosive effects of individualism and cosmopolitan liberalism. 4) Closer integration of the community within a brotherhood (fascio) whose unity and purity are forged by common conviction, if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary. 5) An enhanced sense of identity and belonging, in which the grandeur of the group reinforces individual self-esteem. 6) Authority of natural leaders (always male) throughout society, culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s destiny. 7) The beauty and violence of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success in a Darwinian struggle" (Paxton 6–7).

they had to take action to restore their lost rights. Rather than appeals to decadence,

individualism was what was appealed to in order to foster dread of a faceless collectivity

within the strike. The utopian rhetoric of the new Jerusalem after the strike appealed to

common conviction and a transformation of national identity.

A literal illustration of the immediate perceptions of this aborted transformation

was published in Punch the week of May 21. A tattered figure labeled "TUC" holds a lever entitled "General Strike," which clearly will break if it attempts to move the rock of

"constitutional democracy." There's nothing especially novel about the message, which comes straight from Churchill's British Gazette propaganda. But the fulcrum is not

labeled. What might it represent in the national unconsciousness? I think the best

explanation is that it represents the press, mass communications being the only thing that

would give sufficient leverage to even begin to make such a large-scale change in social

organization. The importance of media control and the perceived threat from the lack of

production of media were great concerns to the British government during this crisis.

Baldwin told his official biographer to "not forget the cleverest thing I ever did. I put

Winston in a corner and told him to edit The British Gazette" (Young 116). There is little

doubt that Churchill had the most literary talent in Baldwin's cabinet, but what might be

at first surprising about this statement is how much recognition it shows on Baldwin's

part of the importance of winning the propaganda war during the Strike. Baldwin also

implies that he kept Churchill from mischief.

There is more than just the surface symbolism of the fulcrum to consider here. The

carefully cut groove into which the lever of the General Strike fits is precisely the correct

size; it was thus designed for it. Had the lever the necessary stretching strength and had

33 there been sufficient force to move it, the great rock would have moved. The cartoon's caption seems to suggest that the wooden lever of the Strike itself was not strong enough, not that organized mass labor, represented by the shabby TUC figure, lacked the strength to move it. And the reason, thus inferred, is that the fulcrum, as mediator between revolutionary force and constitutional republic, necessarily shapes the message that wishes to move. The Punch cartoon's latent political content underscores the importance of mass media control, which was to become increasingly sophisticated in

Britain in the late 1920s and 1930s.

Keith Laybourn observes that "in no significant way could the General Strike be considered a turning point or watershed in British industrial history" (103). It has at least symbolic significance in the development of the British nation-state, however, at least as much for what did not happen as what did. National development mediated the social energies that produced the strike. Any attempt to assess the importance of the General

Strike in the national unconscious would do well to pay close attention to those who supposed it might have succeeded.

Georges Sorel was the main prophet of the concept of the general strike. Among the leadership of the TUC, it was doubtful that Sorel's ideas had any direct influence.

Tom Mann's Industrial Syndicalist League, formed in 1910, and Noah Ablett and A.J.

Cook's book The Miners' Next Step both advocated syndicalist ideas influenced by Sorel

(Laybourn 10). Their influence waned after the war, however. G.D.H. Cole was the main theoretician of Guild Socialism, which became the most influential political philosophy among the trade unionists after the war. Though it was more influential than syndicalism, this is not to say that it was influential. The actions of the Strike were directed by

34 seeming necessity and pragmatism rather than political ideology. Guild Socialism advocated a humanistic Marxism, heavily focusing on the renewal of society through the improvement of workers' status.

For Sorelians, however, the General Strike "was a social myth, useful to stir the mass emotions of workers in the perpetual class struggle" (Crook, "Revolutionary

Logic" 656). Sorel's ideas had more influence on the novelistic reactions to the Strike as a potentially revolutionary event than to the Strike itself. Sorel, who thought of himself as inheriting the mantle of Marx, inherited at least Marx's vituperative style. In the early pages of Reflections on Violence, we find, "Belgian socialism is best known in France through Vandervelde, one of the most useless creatures that ever existed" (44 n9) and

"The author was not one of those vulgar members of the Bloc whose intelligence is hardly superior to that of a Negrito" (43). A bit later, Sorel observes that "Sydney Webb enjoys a reputation for competence that is much exaggerated; he had the merit of wading through uninteresting documents and has had the patience to produce one of the most extremely undigestable compilations on the history of trade unionism that exists; but he has a mind of the narrowest description which could only impress people unaccustomed to reflection" (114). More significantly, Sorel derived from a Marx a classification of two distinct revolutionary systems that could be labeled under the term "general strike."

Those which had occurred up to present and which were most likely to occur at any given point in the future were what Sorel called "political" general strikes: "the only aim of the popular insurrection must be to pass power from one group of politicians to another--the people still remaining the passive beast that bears the yoke" (148–49). This was opposed to the proletarian general strike, which was "the myth in which socialism is wholly

composed, i. e., a body of images capable of invoking instinctively all the sentiments

which correspond to different manifestations of the war undertaken by socialism against

modern society" (118).

Under what category did the General Strike in Britain fall in Sorel's scheme? The

answer would clearly seem to be the "political," particularly in the manner in which it

ended. But is there for Sorel no myth of the political general strike? Of what might it

consist and in what way might its "body of images" relate to those of the proletarian

strike? The idea of the myth of the British state had much managerial utility for

Baldwin's government during the strike. Sorel believed that socialism, for which he was

describing the necessary conditions, entailed a necessary degree of the mystic, whereas

the progression of capitalism and democracy lacked this anagogy. In fact, this was the

key difference between them: "Socialism is necessarily very obscure, since it deals with

production, i. e. with the most mysterious part of human activity, and since it proposes to

bring about a radical transformation of that region which it is impossible to describe with

the clearness that is to be found in the more superficial regions" (139).

Sorel had a strong opinion of the spiritual readiness of the English worker: "We

therefore say that the aversion felt by England for the general strike should be looked

upon as strong presumptive evidence in favour of the latter [acquiring legal privileges] to

all those who look upon the class struggle as the essence of socialism" (114). The reason

for this aversion is that in England the "guild, privileged or at least protected by law, still

seems to them the ideal of working-class organization; for it is in England that the term

working-class aristocracy as a name for trade unionists was invented" (114). Though the apparent collusion of J. T. Thomas with monied interests was widely regarded as a signal

36 example of "working-class aristocracy," there was in fact a general strike of a magnitude that Sorel does not seem to be capable of imagining in Great Britain just twenty-five years after he offered this acerbic opinion of the viability of the British working class. I find the distinction between the mass motivation of the political general strike and that of the myth of the general strike to be unsatisfactory, but I believe Sorel's ideas about group psychology can be profitably explored to develop a theory of how the social energies leading to the Strike in Britain were eventually managed.

Sorel's ideas about group psychology were derived from Gustave Le Bon's. Le Bon developed a theory of the behavior of crowds, a subject which was of increasing interest to thinkers in the nineteenth century. Le Bon regarded with considerable horror the influence of crowd psychology in the development of nations--seeing within it the demise of hereditary rule. Crowds embodied the basest instincts of their members, and any sufficiently organized entity, unless given strong guidance from above, would be subject to this inherent degradation. Thus, any form of socialism or anarchism which de- emphasized hierarchical methods of governance heralded disaster for Le Bon. The organismic metaphors which he used to describe the behavior of crowds were derived in part from Spencer and his Social Darwinism. I also find a likely influence in the development of statistics in the late nineteenth century, particularly with Francis Galton’s principle of regression towards mediocrity.13 Le Bon wrote that "an individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will" (53).

His ideas about the behavior of crowds drew upon Ernest Haeckel’s principle that

13 Galton coined the term in his 1886 paper, "Regression Towards Mediocrity in Hereditary Stature." The connotations of "mediocre" have led it to be replaced by "mean."

37 ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. An individual descended steps on the ladder of civilization by becoming part of a crowd, and took on the primitive behaviors Le Bon thinks characteristic of earlier stages of development. The mind of the crowd is only capable of thinking in images and thus is susceptible to ready manipulation (89).

Controlling the imagination of the crowd makes a leader like a god in his power and in their collective imagination, and the implications for nationalism are seen in this quote from Le Bon’s The Psychology of Peoples: "The dead, being infinitely more numerous than the living, are infinitely more powerful. They reign over the vast domain of the unconscious, that invisible domain which exerts the sway over all the manifestations of the intelligence and the character" (qtd. in Bosanquet 523).

Sorel responded to Le Bon’s ideas in Reflections on Violence as follows: "Gustave

Le Bon says that it is a mistake to believe in the revolutionary instincts of the crowd, that their tendencies are conservative, that the whole power of socialism lies in the rather muddled state of mind of the bourgeoisie; he is convinced that the masses will always go to a Caesar" (124). A footnote further clarifies the importance of Le Bon in Sorel’s thought: "[he], who a few years ago was treated by an imbecile by the little bullies of university socialism, is one of the most original physicists of our time" (124 n27).

Though this is not the controversy that Sorel refers to, Le Bon did claim to have discovered relativity before Einstein (Nye 155-158). But Le Bon, for Sorel, failed to recognize the potential of the class struggle. For Sorel, the transnational character of the class struggle would transcend any national atavisms. The form that the general strike might take would be constrained by the nationality (and thus by the collective racial

characteristics that form it) of the struggle, but this was a preliminary necessity for the

inevitable transcendence.

Freud, in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, cites Wilfrid Trotter’s

Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War as providing the "valuable remark [. . .] that the tendency towards the formation of groups is biologically a continuation of the multicellular character of all the higher organisms" (19). In a footnote added after the original publication, in response to an article by H. Kelsen,14 Freud wrote that he did not agree that presenting the group with "organization of this kind suggests a hypostasis of it-- that is to say, implies an attribution to it of independence of mental processes in the individual" (19 n2). Freud claims that there is no emergent behavior within the mass- organization that is independent of mental processes of the individual. That is a different claim, however, than that there is no behavior in mass-organization which is beyond the ability of the individual, for the crowd overcomes inhibitions. Freud defined a primary group as one which had placed "one and the same object in the place of their ego ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego" (48). This type of group does not have the secondary characteristics necessary to acquire individual attributes. Freud distinguishes the herd instinct, which does not allow for individual differentiation, from the horde instinct, which he feels more accurately describes the dynamic of group psychology. Since the "deification" of the horde-leader can be transformed, there must be a way to transform individual psychology to group psychology through "deification." When imagining what the conditions for such a transformation must be, Freud uses the analogy of bees being able to change a larva into

14 "Der Begriff des Staates und die Sozialpsychologie," Imago.

a queen instead of a worker (56). The mana or taboo force that surrounds a chieftain or

leader is a projection of the psychic energy of identification (57). He links hypnosis with

this lure of group identification, both essentially a management of latent energies. To

exist, nationalism must also progressively manage latent social energies.

Ronald Knox's Alternate History

Along with those who contemplated what form a general strike might take and the

social forces it might unleash, there were those who imagined what would have happened

had its British manifestation succeeded. One fascinating case of this is Ronald Knox’s "If

the General Strike Had Succeeded." Knox, a polymath who once translated

"Jabberwocky" into Classical Greek, is best known for one of the most public

conversions to Catholicism during the period and for his frequent apologetics. He was the

chaplain of Trinity College, Oxford, from 1926-1939, when this piece was written.15 It

takes the form of excerpts from an edition of the Times from June 31, 1930. The extra

day in the calendar suggests an arbitrary break with established tradition that is one of

many parallels with Orwell's later 1984, though the mood is considerably less

apocalyptic. There many hints in the article about the decline of British glory: the

conservatives who write to the Morning Post do so from the Riviera, thus depriving the island of valuable intellectual resources; Britain is seeking "naval parity with Holland";

15 His general political outlook during the time is outlined by this excerpt from a St. James’s Day sermon in 1937, quoted approvingly by Waugh in his biography: "During the last year Catholic Spaniards, invoking the protection of St. James on their banners have not been content to ask whether they should call down fire from heaven; they have rained down fire from heaven on their fellow countrymen [. . .] Was General Franco justified in [. . .] taking upon himself the gravest responsibility that can be imagined, in plunging his country into the certain horrors of civil war to avoid the possible horrors of a Communist or anarchist dictatorship? For myself, I don’t think there was any doubt that he was" (321).

40 there’s a proposal for the "registration of gipsy encampments"; and a writer is reminded of a "relic of fox-hunting days" (278).

The mock-articles Knox populates his imaginary paper with are longer arguments about what the state of the world and British nationality would have been had the Strike succeeded. The first is "The Cardiff Appeal," which argues that the mine-owners now are in such financial straits as to require charitable relief. They have gotten this way through compulsory employment, and in the background of this and other of Knox’s pronouncements is the idea that charity which is enforced by the government is incompatible with Christian charity, which must be voluntary. The second article is more systematic in presenting what Knox thought was at stake with the General Strike. Entitled

"The Rationalisation of the Universities," it argues that there still might be some place for the traditional university despite the increasingly powerful movements, for example, to have each university specialize in one given discipline. The OED gives 1926, the year of the Strike, as the first use of the word "rationalization" in an economic context. Knox uses the apparently ridiculous example of redbrick universities studying classics as being analogous to the proposal to use Oxford and Cambridge housing units for industrial workers. The soul of the people is represented via the elite educational institutions, for

Knox; and to be rationalized is to be deprived of it, a subversion of the natural order.

The next two articles, "Authors’ Profits" and "Pigs as Water-Finders," explore further anti-democratic sentiments and the cultural logic of socialism as degradation. The first imagines that the "super-taxation" which extends to the "first 500 pounds of non- manual income" (282) has been proposed to extend to writers. Shaw is imagined as saying that every Englishmen has the right to be tried by a jury of his peers, and that there

41 was no jury capable of understanding literature (283). He also claims that the publishers’ advance should be regarded as a retainer fee for the author not to spend his time more profitably, such as in politics (283). All of this is very jocular, but it conceals a slightly more ominous point: Knox conceives of the writerly class as alien from and indispensable to the imagined ruling proletariat. For having taxed the writers out of existence, they will weep "at the tombstone of the goose that led the golden egg" (283).

"Pigs as Water-Finders" takes up the possibility that pigs could be trained to locate alcohol, thus enabling a much-needed export market to be opened to the still-under prohibition and economically powerful United States.

A series of humorous letters to the editor follow, on such subjects as the utility of the milk pool in Hyde Park and whether there should be mandatory inoculations against psittacosis. Knox apparently believes that such inoculations against influenza, which he says were implemented and ineffectual, as "para-influenza" infections have risen in greater amounts than incidences prevented by the inoculations, according to a letter- writer (286). Psittacosis, or "parrot-disease," is an exceedingly rare pneumonia spread from human-avian vectors and popularly thought to be caught from parrots. Knox seems to regard such public health measures, which he imagined would be expanded to absurd lengths under the imagined socialist government, as a further subversion of the natural order.16

A letter from a mine-owner uses the metaphor of an incubus to describe the mines which cannot be legally be removed from their custody (287). Capital is now static, and labor is fluid. The use of the word "incubus" is not accidental. It means "nightmare," or

16 The influenza virus was discovered in 1933, probably shortly after Knox wrote this article.

42 something conjured from a dream or incubation. Since miners are now tied to their property in the same manner that laborers were tied before, their obligation is regarded as an intrusion of the dream-world into the real. Within the phrase is a recognition of the social conditions which led to the Strike in the first place.

The penultimate letter in Knox’s fantasy comes from a correspondent who quotes most, but not all, of Horace’s first ode.17 He was prompted to do so by the recent account of the first "speed trials" in America. Horace’s ode begins by talking about the different modes of glory individuals and nations can take. The modern chariot races of the Romans are contrasted with the "noble palm" symbolic of victory at the Olympics. One form of technology has eclipsed a more direct form of athletic competition, one more personal and fulfilling. As Knox has the letter writer omit the "palmaque nobilis" from his quotation, it emphasizes that not only is there a soul-deadening technophilia associated with socialism, there also is an envy of a more free society which has, because of its freedoms, already surpassed it technologically.

The final section of Knox’s imagined newspaper deals with what the BBC, founded in 1926, has become under the control of the Workers’ Council. The idea most reminiscent of Orwell is that listening to its programming is now mandatory. Wittier is the notice that the children’s listening hour might not be best devoted to the recitation of a "rather technical" biography of Karl Marx. There are further suggestions of immense propaganda abuse of the medium by the presumably socialist government, which reveals that perhaps Knox was unaware of the extent to which the government actually employed

17 See also "in 1920 there appeared a spurious book of Horace Odes V (Horati Falcci Carminum Librum Quintum a Rudyardo Kipling et Carolo Graves Anglice Redditum which hoaxed some critics. Ronald contributed Odes 3, 4, 5, 7, 14, 15, and Appendices 1, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13 to this" (Waugh 285).

propaganda during the Strike--on occasion, as I have described, taking liberty with facts

not far removed from the excesses he imagines. What distinguishes Knox’s alternate

history and imagining of a future is his insistence on the disappearance of the soul under

socialism. The imagined nation, for Knox, permits men to live, sin, and die without

undue influence. He was blind to the massive apparatus of the actually existing state. The

possibility of a transformation, however, inspires anxiety that the illusion of the state will

be revealed for what it is.

Rationalization and Nationalization in the Wake of the Strike

A further anxiety about the changing nature of British nationality is revealed in the continuing negotiations between the TUC and employers’ groups in the years immediately after the strike. The term "rationalization" was adopted by labor interests in their demands from industry, as they had realized that nationalization was no longer even a possibility. But what was the actual content of "rationalization" as it applied to industry? "Once created, industries do not, like any organism, die without a struggle" wrote one of the participants in the Mond-Turner talks, which led to the new economic cooperation in Britain, in a paper devoted to the subject of international cartels (Mond

278). Rationalization of industry was a reaction to the crises of world capitalism and was an attempt to insulate businesses from risk through more scientific methods. Its spiritual father was Frederick Taylor, whose micromanagement of employees at a factory enabled what seemed to be miraculous gains in productivity over short time-periods, although the long-term effects on employees of Taylor’s system were often disastrous. His rhetoric about his motivation was forward-looking: "Scientific management, on the contrary, has for its very foundation the firm conviction that the true interests of [employers and employees] are one and the same; that prosperity for the employer cannot exist through a

44 long term of years unless it is accompanied by prosperity for the employé and vice versa; and that it is possible to give the workman what he most wants--high wages--and the employer what he wants--a low labor cost--for his manufactures" (Taylor 10). The word

"rationalization" thus came to be used by both labor representatives and business to represent their basic goals and anxieties about the changing nature of the British nation- state.

Impatience with the term was already apparent in 1927, just a year after it was granted official recognition in its economic sense by the OED (though it seems to have been used earlier than that). Writing about the international Steel Cartel, D. H.

MacGregor observes that it was a form of agreement between Germany and her former enemies and that the secret negotiations and agreements which led to its formation were justified with the term "rationalization" and that "the iteration of this term has become tiresome" ("Cartels" 247). One of the volumes he reviews notes with resentment this

"lourd neologism importé par l’Allemand" (249). Among rationalization’s many purported benefits, none was more directly related to the tensions of British nationality than "the non-destructive elimination of the weak" (MacGregor "Rationalisation" 524).

The conventional view of the actual motivation for rationalization was that it was an attempt to socialize risk while maintaining private control of profit. But the crucial point about the public attitude towards rationalization is that "Democracy likes at any rate to think that it understands how it is governed" (MacGregor "Rationalisation" 535). The tangled web of interrelated interests which characterized the rapidly advancing capitalist organizational system had to develop a myth with which to explain and justify itself to the public whose complicity its existence demanded.

Charles Maier describes the promise of rationalization and why it was, mysteriously, accepted by the labor movement as a necessary reform, an escape from the zero-sum conflict between labor and management. Its rhetoric of optimality had a utopian dimension (Maier 30-31). In actuality, however, it and other vogues of scientific management were used by business interests to profit from the productive but oversaturated labor market of the late 1920s (Maier 54). The competing interests that were managed in the three major British political parties at the end of the 1920s each expressed itself in three distinct ways. The Conservative party, with Joynson-Hicks as the main ideologue, favored an expansion of the imperium combined with strict protectionism to force open markets for British produce. The Labour party advocated widespread nationalization, and the Liberal party began to offer various "loan-financed public works" (Williamson 54).18 The Liberals thought that this tactic was compatible with free-trade at the time, as did Labour their proposals. Only the Conservatives consistently rejected free-trade as a matter of principle during the era. Both Labour and

Liberal parties had promoted rationalization as an economic principle while the

Conservatives had soundly rejected it in spite of the fact that "by 1900, finance had replaced landowning as the most important business interest of Conservative and

Unionist MPs" (Boyce 21). Though it is a mistake to consider rationalization in the managerial and economic sense to be directly correlated with rationality of thought in general, there is consistency between the decidedly irrational appeals to tradition, prejudice, and patriotism that the Conservatives made and their rejection of rationalization. Rationalization lacked a national aura.

18 Williamson's National Crisis and National Government is the most detailed high political history of the period, and subsequent references to it will be abbreviated NC.

The Financial Crisis and British Nationalism

At the very beginning, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 had a positive effect on the

British economy. London as a financial center had faced increased pressure from New

York and Paris and, by October 1929, had raised interest rates to the highest point in recent memory, 6.5% (NC 59-60). At first, the Crash reduced the pressure on the London banks, but this soon reversed when the enormous aftershock hit the world financial markets. This chaos would eventually dissolve completely the various anachronisms that had allowed many members of the elite community to pretend that the post-war world was the same as it had been before: the gold standard and free-trade being foremost among them. The reaction of the body of the nation, as it were, to these developments was mediated through the media and even more direct propaganda arms, such as the party platforms.

The specifically novelistic reaction to this change in the composition of the

British nation-state is my main focus of analysis in this work, and what immediately follows seeks, as much of the preceding has, to describe the macroeconomic developments as understood by contemporary and current historiography.

Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England from 1920-1944, was analyzed by Jung in 1913 and found to have the general paralysis of the insane (Boyle

92).19 Norman was very much a representative of all that the general British populace distrusted and feared in the image of the banker. He was immune to academic discussions of economic policy and could be most inarticulate in public, easily suggesting a man whose concerns and interests were on a plane far removed from your own, whose perhaps

19 Boyle adds that "the suspicion did cross his mind, however, that Jung rather than himself might be a raving lunatic" (92).

47 more direct contact with the collective financial unconscious explained why adherence to the gold standard was necessary. As Norman was the public face of concentrated capital and the financiers, his reception revealed how the everyday British citizen thought of the machinations of high finance. As finance had then, as it does now, its main interest in the insulation of itself from the risk of investment and the market, mysterious descriptions of its stochastic doings had to be presented to the public. The risks involved in finance had to be thought to be great, and the men involved in taking them brave beyond imagination, for the system to continue. Men like Norman were selected as a public face precisely it seems for their lack of expressibility. The ineffable was woven into the fabric of market finance.

Among workers and others who did not have the resources to participate in the world of the financiers, gambling fulfilled the role. The steady rise of gambling in the

1920s reflected in part the popular imagination of the power of concentrated finance.

New forms emerged, such as dog-racing (McKibbin 102). As McKibbin makes clear, the crucial interpretive point in understanding the British working-class attitude toward gambling is that it was a matter of skill, not chance. Betting on football or horse-racing has enough informational texture that it can easily give the illusion of containing enough relevant information with which to pick winners reliably, if you are clever enough. The obvious existence and prosperity of bookies could be countermanded by the observation that not every punter possessed the requisite skill. That financiers rarely, if ever, lost their shirts seemed not to be a fact worth extending to the metaphor of small-stakes gambling, but the comparison of the informational richness of the stock market, dimly perceived,

48 and the quotidian track was more than enough to justify the existence of this elusive and mysterious group among them.

And the fact that there was an increasing and blatant use of newspapers as propaganda for their owner’s financial interests contributed also to the working-classes’s attitude towards financiers. As a new generation of owners took power after the first

World War, notions of constraint and objectivity increasingly vanished among newspapermen (Boyce 24). Just as extended scientific principles of management could alleviate any economic crisis, so also could popular opinion--which might be thought to object to the increasingly dehumanizing effects of rationalization--be managed through the careful application of media. Not that there existed conscious intent among the newspaper owners and other members of the financier class to thus manage popular opinion, but the ideas evolved in reaction to the same historical developments.

Perhaps the most salient point to consider about the effects of the world depression on Britain was that it was not as bad as in most other industrialized countries. Joseph

Schumpeter wrote that "the outstanding fact about the English depression is its mildness which makes it doubtful whether that term is applicable at all" (2: 917). Since unemployment never reached the levels that it did in Sweden, Australia, Canada, or the

United States, the effects of the slump were not as severe, though the British economy did not perform as well during the mid-1920s as did these others (McKibbin 207). The hardships, though not as comparatively bad as they were in other countries, were still quite severe; and the growing consensus among the economic elite was that some type of drastic measure had to be taken to alleviate the crisis.

The solution which ultimately prevailed, Keynesian interventionism, was greeted with immense skepticism by the financial community and was also, as McKibbin argues, almost impossible for a Labour government to implement for structural reasons (227).

The Keynesian model emphasized reflationary policies as opposed to the deflationary orthodoxy, which Britain actually implemented to a lesser degree than did other industrial states in the aftermath of the crash. It also was the logical extension of the rationalization and scientific management metaphors, though with considerably more practical success and with far less clear ideological motivation. The primary difference is that, rather than claiming to be a mechanism through which industry could increase efficiency by exercising total control, a government could manage its economy through broadly conceived stimulatory measures. The promise of Keynesian interventionism is that it could protect the economy from risk, from the unpredictable business cycles whose orthodox response, in the form of deflationary measures, caused such intense misery and havoc among the working-class population. The financiers almost always, except in extreme cases, had managed to protect themselves from the vagaries of the market, but

Keynesianism, as an idea, sought to extend this protection to those traditionally without it, and thus protect the financial classes from the far more threatening danger of revolution.

Events leading up to the Wall Street crash began to affect the economic climate in

Great Britain. Relations between the United States and Britain had been strained for many reasons, the aggressively protectionist policies of Hoover’s administration foremost among them. Though not entirely in reaction to those policies, the economic unsettlement caused by the crash set in motion the series of events which was to lead to the end of the

long-standing British commitment to the doctrine of free trade. There was also the

prospect of vast amounts of American and Canadian wheat from the 1929 harvest

flooding the market (Boyce 259). By October 1930, the long-term effects of the Wall

Street crash were clear: exports had fallen by 26% in value and by 20% in volume since

the equivalent period the previous year (NC 60). "Wholesale prices had fallen 17% and

the cost of living 6%, but wage rates remained virtually unchanged. Industrial production

had fallen by around 10%, and profits had taken a ‘marked downward movement’ by

around 7%" (NC 60). The various concentrations of power affected by these developments were increasingly unlikely to see political parties as having the ability to alleviate them (NC 61). Of the many reactions to this perceived failure of currently

existing parties, one emphasized the weakness of the current political structure and the

failure of democracy to make changes within it.

Oswald Mosley held strongly to Keynes’s ideas of state intervention, but the

aftereffects of the crash led him increasingly to believe that they had to be combined with

stronger centralization of state power to be effective. He and his circle began to advocate

the "restoration of unemployment insurance to an actuarial basis and reduction of income

tax. There was to be ‘Caesarism’ in India, and at home massive ‘State action’ through a

small ‘executive Cabinet’ armed by a ‘General Powers Bill’ with all legislative power on

economic matters, confining Parliament to a right of veto and involving a ‘certain

surrender of political liberty’" (NC 147, 148 n70).20 Today one can see the lurking danger within these proposals, obviously based on the Mussolini model. Mosley, however, undoubtedly saw these ideas as the only resolution of a potential and looming

20 Williamson cites Mosley's "Private and Confidential Memo" of Oct. 1930, copies in Garvin and Astor papers and Beaverbrook Papers C/254.

51 national crisis. Mosley left the Labour Party on March 1, 1931 (NC 149). By then, he was not the only figure seeing a crisis in British nationalism. He wished to persuade Lloyd

George of the necessity and rightness of his cause, and it is frightening to speculate what might have happened had he succeeded (NC 149). The list of names sympathetic to

Mosley’s cause and who may have been adherents in the event of an actual collapse is worth listing: Lloyd George, Churchill, Garvin, Beaverbrook, Rothermere, Sinclair,

Cook, and Keynes (NC 149). Mosley had earlier in his career leveled the charge at the government that they "would like to be Fascists but have not the courage; they have not the courage to wear the black shirts." Britain would need to "transform a nineteenth- century debating chamber into a twentieth-century business assembly" (Benewick 57,

65).

Mosley invoked rationalization in his retirement speech from the Labour party on

May 28, 1930. "I have always made it perfectly clear that, in my view, rationalization was necessary and inevitable. It has to come in the modern world. Industries which do not rationalize simply go under" (Mosley 34). He did not feel that rationalization, however necessary, could compete with the problems raised by "price fluctuations from the rest of the world which can dislocate your industry at every turn, and to the sport of competition from virtually slave conditions in other countries" (Mosley 38). Mosley here advocated a public loan program to fight unemployment, an idea that he had borrowed with modifications from Keynes and that was to serve as the eventual blueprint for

Britain’s recovery (though not in the form he proposed). His main concern, however, was with the apparent indifference towards the British nation shown by orthodox economic policy. What he truly fears, he says, is "a long, slow crumbling through the years until we

52 sink to the level of a Spain, a gradual paralysis beneath which all the vigor and energy of this country will succumb" (52). He concludes by begging the government to give the

"vital forces" of the country the support that they need. Mosley is a difficult figure to assess. His concern with British unemployment and the strength of his suggestions that something must be done to alleviate the problem seem to be genuine at this point; but he has also clearly begun the descent into nationalist mysticism.

After the formation of the National Government in 1931, Mosley realized that his ideas were not going to play any significant role in British parliamentary politics. He certainly had followers, however, who agreed with his conception of corporatism and its relation to British nationalism. He thought that fascism in Britain was inevitable and that it "was better to be built by me than by some worse kind of lunatic" (NC

470).Corporatism’s relation to fascism is complex. It is a synthesis of state and industry and relies on organicist metaphors of development and organization to justify itself.

Mosley thought that a state could be made authoritarian by adopting business methods

(Carpenter 4). The hierarchical organization of the modern corporation would thus impose itself on society. There were not differences of kind between a corporation and a state, just of degree. They both managed scarce resources, and their management could both be improved by the adoption of scientific methods. The details of how this was to be done did not interest Mosley, who thought them better left to technicians (Carpenter 4).

The government having the absolute power of stockholders was the only part of the analogy that interested Mosley. His analysis failed to consider, among other things, that the stockholders never held absolute power within a corporation, that power generally being held in the modern corporation by the executive management (Galbraith 52). The

53 basic utopian motivation of corporatism is that the fusion of state and business would completely insulate each other from risk. The age-old problems raised by protectionist desires conflicting with economic orthodoxy would no longer be applicable.

Among the main proponents of British corporatism, Mosley, Lord Melchet, Lord

Eustace Percy, Basil Blackett, Arthur Salter, Roy Glenday, Leo Amery, and Hugh Selton, there was little actual sympathy for the militarist and anti-semitic aspects of fascism

(Carpenter 5). In general, these currents were regarded as not so much unsavory on principle--though this was an element-- but unnecessary in Britain. The preexisting national unity, once the problems of class conflict were resolved, would mitigate the need for more authoritarian measures, and the empire would provide all of the new state’s necessary territorial and market opportunities. Some of the more pessimistic of the corporatists believed that considerable force might be required to get the lower orders to accept their unmoving place in the coming society, but not all varieties of corporatism presupposed absolute feudalism. Economic historians argue that

Britain’s poor industrial performance [is attributed] to institutional rigidities that blocked the replacement of an atomistic economic structure exhibiting a multiplicity of highly specialized family firms with oligopolistic economy in which a small number of large-scale, hierarchically organized, and functionally diverse enterprises exercised the share of economic power. (Dintenfass 434)

What they were unable to do, in this analysis, is to rationalize; and corporatism envisioned a state-supported, state-enforced rationalization. Furthermore, it recognized the factors responsible for the British failure to compete according to its potential means.

In order to change it, wholesale change in the relation of the social classes to one another would be required. And this would not just mean eliminating the intractability of the laboring classes; the business owners, given to hereditary management and gentlemanly disdain of competitive practices, had to alter their perspective on life as well. The

interpretation of economic history that stresses the lack of competitiveness and general

reactionary incompetence of British industry and business is not, by any means,

uncontroversial. But the ideas had taken hold of the managerial and political elite during

the time of the failures then, and thus it is important to consider them as an important

factor in the development of British corporatism and its attitudes towards nationalism.

British Nationalism after the Crisis: The Case of John Buchan's The Gap in the Curtain

There were two phases of what was considered a crisis in Britain in the early

1930s. The first began to take hold in late 1930, caused by the financial turmoil after the

Wall Street crash. There were two distinct meanings of this word: the first descriptive, the second prescriptive (NC 133-134). It was clear that the aftereffects of the world-wide

financial slump were having profoundly negative effects on the British economy, and it

was unclear whether the current political system was able to deal with them. The second

sense was intended by people who had thought for other reasons that the political system

was not viable, and that the current conditions could be described as a crisis in order to

heighten the existing tensions and make national change easier. Among conservatives,

Labour radicals, and nascent fascists, the call for action was strong. Churchill wanted to

expand the power of the empire; Bevin argued for socialism; and Mosley, as I have said,

thought that "modern minds" applying themselves to "modern problems" would settle on

some version of a strong corporatist state (NC 135). Baldwin touched on an important

aspect of the problem when, noting the existing impatience with democratic institutions,

said that the problem lied in a lack of "faith" (NC 137). Coming from a political figure

who strongly advocated the necessity and utility of existing arrangements, the word

"faith" seems to suggest that those existing institutions only existed by the grace of those

whose lives were constrained by them and, if they began to think about those constraints

in a perhaps more rational manner, the entire edifice would collapse.

John Buchan was a MP at the time, though he was not offered a position in the

1931 national government, and his novel The Gap in the Curtain presents a roman à clef

of contemporary events (NC 150 n84). The novel, written in 1930-1931, was influenced by J. W. Dunne's ideas about in time-travel presented in An Experiment with Time.

Edward Leithen, like Buchan a lawyer and MP (and protagonist of several of Buchan’s other works), visits a country house at Whitsuntide. While there, a Germanic physicist and mathematician named Moe selects Leithen and several other guests for an experiment. They will be asked to abstain from foods "in the Professor’s words,

‘possessing automobility’" (Buchan 55) and exercise for a period of days. With the benefit of a drug, which worries the narrator (45), they are asked to engage themselves in a series of visualization experiments. The Times, since it was well known to them and

since its form remains constant as it content changes, was chosen as the vehicle for their

projections. They are first asked by Professor Moe to anticipate what will appear on a

given section of the paper a day and then--with much more foreboding--a year hence. Our

narrator’s vision fades when he saves the fainting Lady Flambard, host of the party; but

he comes to know what the other five guests saw and what became of them over the next

year.

Buchan’s liberal use of contemporary sources for his conceit is clear. Early on, Ned

mentions that he has been reading about "telegnosis," a word that Buchan may have

acquired from C. D. Broad’s Tarner Lectures, published in 1925 as The Mind and its

Place in Nature.21 When Ned relays what Professor Moe has been telling him about the

time-instinct and the primitive neurological organ that is sensitive to it, he uses the

example of explaining sound to a man born "stone-deaf" (38). Dunne begins his book

with the same example, but he’s attempting to explain "seeing" to a "visitor from some

country where the inhabitants are all born blind" (13). Dunne’s ideas did not just resonate

with Buchan. Eugene Jolas reports that James Joyce "was very much attracted by Dunne's

theory of serialism, and I read to him the author's brilliant An Experiment with Time which Joyce regarded highly" (Jolas 19). Mary Butts, reminiscing about Bloomsbury, wrote "yet now, looking back on those years, one is reminded--one was even dazed at the time--was it a sequence, what was once called a Signature, an example out of Mr.

Dunne?" (35). And Auden’s third "1929" poem closed with "not helplessly strange to the new conditions," a line taken straight from Dunne (Mendelson 75). J. B. Priestley wrote a favorable review of Dunne’s book, and his play We Have Been Here Before also showed

its influence (Wagenknecht 432).

Buchan’s combination of political roman à clef, imperial adventurism, and

conventional moralizing in each of the five chapters of his book are worth exploring for

the perspective he provided on the political situation as a participant, however modest, in

the events being described here. What I find especially interesting, however, is the way in

which the framing conceit of the narrative, with its relation of future time being contained

within this time and perceivable by atavistic organs within the brain, is combined with

the narrator’s and others' incessant thoughts about recapturing a lost England. The

opening chapter is entitled "Whitsuntide at Flambard," and Leithen tells us that "at

21 Broad distinguishes between "telegnostic" and "extraspective" encounters of minds, in that the former would involve only the objective perception of another mind (328).

Whitsuntide you can recover an earlier England" (14). The use of the pagan

"Whitsuntide" has several meanings, with the hubris of the experiment and how it does not, in the end, allow man to dispose, being foremost among them. Goodeve, a doomed character, offers a different view early on: "Because you cannot walk backward. It is too easy, and the road leads nowhere. A man must keep his eyes to the front and resist the pull of his ancestors. They’re the devil, those ancestors, always trying to get you back into their own rut" (25). But Leithen repeats that "thank God I could still get back when I pleased to the ancient world of pastoral" (30).

The tensions between the desire for recovery of the essence of a disappeared

English state of being (and of nationality) are mostly clearly displayed in the novel’s fourth chapter about Mr. Reginald Daker. This rather hapless young man sees in the

Times a year from now that he will be traveling to Yucatan, a place he knows nothing of, and he resolutely declares that nothing will get him there, thus affirming his free will.

During the year, he meets and courts Miss Verona Cortal while at the Welsh country estate of a Mr. Tallis, who happens to have a collection of Mayan antiquities. Daker had taken some time to find his way in life and had only recently devoted himself rather amateurishly to rare book collecting. Cortal and her family decide, after she and Daker get engaged, to rationalize his amateurish seventeenth century antiquarianism and market the magic of England. "In a word, it would ‘rationalize’ and make available to the public the antique glamour of these islands" (199). Previously, Cortal had asked, "who was it called it ‘Merlin’s isle of Gramarye?" (185). The line, from Kipling’s "Puck’s Song," calls attention, in Cortal’s rationalized form, to the shared etymology of "grammar" and

"glamour." In trying to provide the more vulgarized version of the latter, she and her

58 enterprise have bleached the magic from the former. Leithen regards the "Interpreter’s

House," as the venture is known, with horror: "the magic of England was ‘rationalized’ with a vengeance" (205).

As might be expected, these horrors force Daker to appeal to Tallis for help, and that gentleman of an older and more virile stock offers to take Daker with him on an archaeological expedition to the Yucatan. The presentiment which most directly seems to mirror experiences of Buchan’s in parliament is provided in the novel’s third chapter,

"The Rt. Hon. David Mayot." Mayot was the Home Secretary in the 1929 Labour government in Buchan’s fictional world, an honor held by J. R. Clynes in real life, who had opposed the general strike and denied Trotsky the right to settle in Britain (Dalton

219). Unlike the other participants in Moe’s experiments, Leithen has to present Mayot’s story completely through inference and indirect observation. He guessed what the details of Mayot’s revelation had been and then was able to confirm them in a conversation after the fact (181). Mayot saw an article that summarized a speech by the Prime Minister on

India. The name of the Prime Minister was Waldemar, the current head of the Liberal party. As this would imply a tremendous upheaval in political circumstance, Mayot decides to position himself to take advantage of it. This ambition, mere desire for power for its own sake, leads to his downfall, of course, and gathers substantial gentlemanly disapproval from Leithen (and, the reader suspects, from Buchan) along the way. The current Prime Minister for Labour is Derrick Trant, "the most English thing God ever made, and like most typical Englishmen, [. . .] half-Scots" (136). He had the "secular antipathy of a nationalist for an internationalist" for Waldemar, who is described as a

"free-trade fanatic," who made an "international reputation for his work on world peace"

(135-136). A bit later we learn that Trant was a "simple Englishman, who disliked a grandiose Imperialism run for the benefit of the Jews," unlike the conservative leader

Geraldine, who proposes a resuscitation of the Hudson Bay and East India companies combined with policies designed to encourage emigration to the Dominions (143). It is difficult not to see Samuel, Lloyd George (and Churchill), and MacDonald in these portraits, and one of the book’s commercial appeals was Buchan’s insider status.

When the pressures of the financial crisis produce ‘a new prophet, too. It is curious how throughout our history, whenever there is a strong movement from below, the names of the new leaders are usually queer monosyllables" (150). As the "racial maelstrom at the foot of the ladder had thrown up remnants of a long-hidden world," the prophet

Chuff, who seems to be a monosyllabic Mosley, preaches the necessity of national action now. As unemployment and India threaten the stability of the government, Mayot starts to position himself for Chancellor of the Exchequer in the emerging coalition government which he predicts that Waldemar will head. But Waldemar has caught a new religion in the ideological chaos of the election, and has begun to endorse loans for public works.

Mayot had too strenuously attacked this newfound position, on which Waldemar was able to gain coalition support, and thus was able to find no place in the government.

Trant, disposed and happy, tells Leithen at the end that Mayot’s problem consisted in being too clever, a problem he himself never had (164).

Though the novel was published in 1932, the manuscript was written in 1930-1931.

The "Mayot" chapter seems to anticipate current concerns, but it differs from reality in a number of key ways. It was of course the Conservatives who won a devastating majority in the election with a liberal constituency that had given up on Protectionism. The left

wing of Labour and Labour in general had been defeated terribly. Buchan, knowing

where the wind listed here, might have been using the chapter as a type of wish-

fulfillment about the types of government policies that he wished to be enacted. He had

aligned himself with Mosley's resignation speech (Skidelsky Mosley 233).

Imperial Unrest and Internal Unease

Part of the burden that seemed to precipitate a national crisis was alleviated in the

spring of 1931 when the tensions with India and Palestine seemed to be settled. The

Irwin-Gandhi pact of March 1931 succeeded in "obtaining an end to civil disobedience

and the boycott of British goods, and Gandhi’s acceptance of British ‘safeguards’ in any

federal reform" (NC 170). Reinterpretation of existing agreements concerning Palestine

and East Africa had settled, temporarily, the tension in those areas (NC 165-166).

Beaverbrook and other conservatives saw the apparent capitulation on Indian autonomy

as an issue that could be used against the alliance forming between Labour and the

Liberals. But it was Churchill who realized the most political capital from the Indian

situation. He wrote that "the Indian political classes were a tiny minority, whose gloss of

Western ideas had no relation ‘whatever’ to the real life of India, and among whom the

extremists were, and would remain, the dominant force." Churchill presented the

consequences of British withdrawal as "Hindu despotism" or "ferocious internal wars"

(NC 181). Though Churchill’s animus against protectionism weakened his potential influence in the party, others, including most significantly, Austen Chamberlain, took advantage of his attacks on Baldwin to consolidate their own power. Churchill's paternalist colonialism reveals anxiety about the seeming changes in the structure of

British nationalism. The "Western ideas" that Churchill thought were alien to the Indian population perhaps are transferable to the evolving Western ideas about socialism and

61 workers’ rights which Churchill also seemed to find alien to the consciousness of the

British working-class. The consolidation of imperial power would mirror the consolidation of national and industrial power.

Churchill’s concerns about the natural order of finance and rule being tampered with were reflected in the business community’s increasing venom against what they saw as artificial wage increases caused by governmental unemployment programs (NC 194).

Britain’s economic problems were thought to result from high standards of living relative to competitors, standards of living caused by social service expenditure. The TUC reaction to this was not to dismiss rationalization as a process, but to demand that it be implemented through the nationalization of industry. Therefore, the losses and, more importantly, profits of the process would be distributed publicly, rather than kept in the hands of a relatively small number of owners (NC 195).

Montagu Norman took a very activist role in preserving the financiers’ orthodoxy against what he perceived to be encroaching nationalization. He threatened Phillip

Snowden with market reaction to any type of socialist legislation and warned that he would raise interest rates in retaliation (NC 200). Though Norman’s isolated threat does not prove the truth of an actual "bankers’ ramp," widely believed to be a conspiracy among bankers and financiers to manipulate the financial crisis into a justification for eliminating unemployment insurance and other government subsidies, it certainly suggests that he and likeminded others would not object to that outcome.

The long-term effects of the idea of the "banker’s ramp" should not be underestimated. The Labour Government’s nationalization of the Bank of London in

1946 is often attributed to it (Williamson "Bankers' Ramp" 770). Philip Williamson

62 argues that there is no evidence to support an interpretation of an actual conspiracy, that is, one that would have left direct documentary evidence: "What then did Bank of

England directions say about expenditure cuts in their initial interviews with the Labour,

Conservative and Liberal leaders in mid-August? MacDonald noted that Peacock suggested ‘some saving, though not exactly on May lines.’ No minister or opposition leader recorded anything more specific being mentioned about economies at this point.

Yet if the bankers had called for--or insisted upon--something so important as cuts in unemployment insurance expenditure, this would almost certainly have been recorded"

("Bankers’ Ramp" 793). Williamson further argues that Snowden and other Labour leaders had long been concerned with the macroeconomic effects of the social benefits system, and that it was unnecessary to assume conspiracy when long-established convergences of interest and recognitions of necessity were apparent.

The apparent preconditions set by J. P. Morgan on providing much-needed loans to the Bank of England in August of 1931 compose the primary evidence for a bankers’ ramp (Skidelsky Keynes 2: 395). Throughout the year, British gold supplies had been raided by other banks. The Daily Herald first reported that the American banks had required that unemployment insurance had to be cut as a precondition for getting a loan; and officials of the Federal Reserve ordered that the claim be denied in London newspapers (Williamson 803). Curiously, the Morgan partners were "puzzled" by the allegation but "thought better of calling attention to themselves by publishing a formal denial" (Williamson 803). The Morgan partner apparently charged with responding to these infra dig allegations, Thomas Lamont, made an "informal denial" in August, but wrote a letter five months later, which Williamson quotes: "We did make a condition that

63 the budget be balanced, but the methods were quite outside our province" (Williamson

803). It is not difficult to speculate that the concerned parties were unwilling to consider other forms of budgetary restraint or even, at this time, question whether maintaining balanced budgets was an acceptable prerequisite for the loan. Williamson concludes his analysis of the situation by arguing that "moreover, in the context of a world-wide decline in financial confidence, the London and New York bankers were hardly likely to have risked causing international financial chaos by indulging in merely political maneuvers"

(806). Given that many observers attribute that very "international financial chaos," as far as it obtained in August of 1931, to the "merely political maneuvers" of New York bankers, I am not as confident as Williamson of their probity.

There is a problem of intention in determining whether the bankers, as individuals, wanted to "[bring] the government down" (McKibbin 219). Did they have these thoughts and not express them? Were they able to express such thoughts within their world-view?

Such an ideological approach has much to suggest it, of course, when assessing the behavior of historical agents, but it always runs the risk of oversimplification. Snowden was telling reporters from the New York Times in 1934 that Norman was a man whose

"nature was essentially democratic. He hates snobbery and class distinction" (Kuhn, Nov

4, 1934, E1). The difference between the amount of credit the New York banks were willing to offer and the amount of expenditure Labour was willing to cut was only twenty million pounds.22 Given the intractability of the banks in the face of such relatively small sums, I find the reasons given to be unsatisfactory. Norman may very well have presented himself as a man of the people, in Snowden’s quaint and quite possibly ironic phrase, and

22 This is approximately a billion dollars in current money, a pittance in these terms.

64 he very well may have believed this to be true. As McKibbin argues, the structural consequences of the international economic system only permitted certain types of economic ideas and proposals to be actuated in this period of cyclical decline in the

"advanced capitalist economy" (227). As A. J. P. Taylor suggests, there was a bankers’ ramp, but without the participants' knowing it (296).

Many of the main political actors were unusually frank about the difficulty of the choices before them. Herbert Samuel, for instance, regarded as a proponent of Liberal orthodoxy, wrote that it would be best for a Labour government to enforce the necessary cutbacks, as the "masses" would thus find them more palatable, but had realized, by the summer of 1931, that this was no longer possible and that responsibility had to be divided among the three significant political parties as equally as possible (NC 335-336). The resentment of those masses was being used by the Labour opposition, which the coalition government feared, and also by Mosley and his circle, which the coalition government did not (NC 388). In a remarkably short period of time, less than a month after the formation of the National government, the pressures that it had hoped to contain forced a radical reorganization of the collective, national attitude towards financial management: the abandonment of the gold standard.

In the governing elements of the Liberal Party, Keynes’s influence had almost been erased in autumn of 1931 (NC 396). An indication of the severity of the ensuing crisis in

September was when some Navy personnel in the Atlantic Fleet refused to participate in a scheduled exercise as a result of the cuts in their wages (NC 402). When the most prestigious and powerful branch of the military engaged in what was only, in retrospect, a mild act of passive disobedience, revolution might seem a possibility. But the National

Government never was seriously threatened by the financial crisis or the chaos surrounding the abandonment of the gold standard.

Among the general reasons, there were worries about the possibility of revolution.

The Invergorden Naval protest, mentioned above, was thought to damage British control over its main source of military power. After the gold standard was abandoned, in anticipation of worsening conditions, the admiralty was expecting the protest to widen, for even the Fleet to be "completely out of hand" (NC 423). Within the domestic intelligence service, there were threats of communist saboteurs exacerbating the protests.

The Viceroy of India, Willingdon, considered resigning because he was so late to know about the abandonment of the gold standard. And the consequences for the Indian economy were profound. The Labour party was quick to take advantage of the political weakness of the coalition government. Furious still at MacDonald for his supposed treachery, radicals within Labour saw an opportunity to remove the "MacDonaldite" wing from the party--an insult as it consigned them to the status of the Mosleyites--and to attack the "accident" of the capitalist system, which was "breaking to pieces before their very eyes" (NC 430, 432-433). All elements of the National government feared that having an election in the midst of price increases and general turmoil could very well lead to a Labour victory and, at worst, to the potential for a revolution. But given the prevailing conditions and Samuel’s acquiescence in imposing some limited tariffs as a means of price-control, an election was called. Then, too, there was pronounced fear of a forced election after the radical wing of the Labour party had retrenched. They had to be opposed while they were still sufficiently weak to be beaten, and they faced an anti-

socialist coalition as strong as ever had been assembled in British politics. The election

was the most lopsided victory of modern times.

In the unlikely alliance between free-traders and protectionists which had handed

the Labour party a crushing electoral defeat, it was easy to see "a desperate and all too

repeatable contrivance by the propertied classes to prop up a tattering economic system

and its vested interests." Phillips Price described it as "an English form of a Fascist coup

d’état" (NC 458). In industrial areas and other places with high unemployment, Labour’s

popular vote, unsurprisingly, had been the second highest of any election previous

besides 1929 (NC 459). The Webbs, Maxton, and Strachey all began to believe that there was a bipolar world emerging, and that the Soviet model offered the only feasible alternative to the United States model of capitalism. Maxton compared the ILP-Labour dispute to that between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks (NC 467).

Keynes was emboldened by the abandonment of the gold standard and published

his Essays in Prophecy, later renamed Essays in Persuasion (NC 470). He discouraged

the 1931 election, fearing that there would be no stability and no platform for his ideas,

which he had begun to rework into the form that appeared in The General Theory of

Employment (NC 470). Williamson and others have conjectured that the specific political

events of the crises in 1931 led Keynes to formulate his interventionist program in a way

that would ultimately become applicable in practice, as it was not during this period (NC

530). In particular, Keynes had noted that his ideas for public works were better suited as a "tonic to industry" in a country such as the United States, which was not as dependent on the fluctuations of gold as Great Britain was before the demise of the gold standard.

With Britain’s dependence on gold, any time interest rates were lowered as a stimulatory

67 measure, the subsequent run on lending deprived the banks of their reserves. The removal of the gold standard as an instrument of financial policy led to a management or dirigisme method of economic policy, of which Keynes would become the main architect, though this was not to take full effect for several years. After it did, however,

Keynes began to argue that any type of steered economy had to have mechanisms through which to take into account the "psychological factors behind market behavior by supplying the market with securities of different types and maturities so as to allow it to satisfy its preferences" (Moggridge and Howson 238). Keynes recognized that any type of planned economy had to be able to manage the psychological perceptions of its workers and participants. The mass mind had to be engineered through the mechanisms of market manipulation and through the developing propaganda organs. In order to isolate the system from catastrophic risk, its essential energies and tensions have to be balanced against each other.

CHAPTER 3 CONCEPTUAL ANACHRONISM, SMALL WORLDS, AND THE FLIGHT FROM HISTORY IN VIRGINIA WOOLF'S ORLANDO

In his review of Orlando: A Biography, Conrad Aiken wrote that Virginia Woolf had too often avoided the "chaos that yawns under Bloomsbury" (226). The novel attempted, however, to look into that abyss. More than a tribute to her lover and friend

Vita Sackville-West, Orlando is Woolf's exploration of the contradictions of

modernization and culture in the rapidly changing British nation-state of the late 1920s.

The chaos of this change both excited and frightened her, and Orlando is an attempt to

understand the immanent logic of the social transformation. For Woolf, the subject's

consciousness of her historical moment was the most valuable evidence of social

transformation; but she is aware that the "time-spirit" shapes as it is shaped, that it works

within a social framework. The tension between the aristocratic Orlando and the

intellectual narrator shows this dialectic, which unifies the past and present at the novel's

end.

The major problem Woolf attempts to answer in Orlando is that of "conceptual

anachronism," or how the understanding of the past is always influenced by the concerns

of the present. By deliberately creating an anachronistic narrative situation, Woolf tests

her own ideas about the historical-situatedness of subjects and the analogical processes of

social reasoning. The merging of the aristocratic subject shows that the Sackville-Wests

and their class would be caught forever between an unreachable past and an inescapable

present because of the evolution of the British nation-state during the 1920s.

68 69

Conceptual Anachronism

Orlando exults in anachronism. The protagonist, after adolescence, seems to age at the rate of a year-per-decade, maturing from Elizabethan birth through Restoration young adulthood (and sexual transformation), Augustan maturity, Victorian maternity, and a symbolic 20th C return to her past. Orlando is thus a walking anachronism for most of her1 life. Coupled with this fantastic plot device, the reader is presented with both a narrator who is privy to many of Orlando's private thoughts and recollections, and photographic illustrations of Orlando at different points of her mostly pre-photographic life. The former has often been explained as Woolf's comment on the psychologism inherent in the genre of biography, and I will return to this point in the second section of this paper dealing with Woolf's ideas about mind, history, and language. But the photographs, whose place within the logic of the narrative Helen Wussow has likened to

Freud's concept of scopophilia (4), are immediate anachronisms. In addition to making a direct connection between Orlando and a somewhat well-known society figure,2 the photographs share the manifest anachronism of Orlando's continued existence and of the occasional etymological anachronisms which dot the narrative.

More important, however, to the underlying logic of Orlando is what Herbert

Butterfield would refer to a few years later as "conceptual anachronism." For Butterfield, conceptual anachronisms are misleading analogies between past and present, and he categorized three types of historical projects as being particularly susceptible to them: 1)

1 Determining the correct pronoun gender is difficult with Orlando. I use the feminine to refer to Orlando in general, and the masculine if referring to the character before the hermaphroditic transformation. 2 "It is no secret that Orlando is a portrait of Mrs. Harold Nicolson, who writes under her unmarried name, V. Sackville-West," wrote Raymond Mortimer in his 1929 Bookman review (241).

70 attempts to explore the general character of an era 2) tracking the origins of modern phenomena, and 3) trying to determine whether historical actors or events were moral

(Poe 352, 354). Orlando attempts all three of these historical explorations, and Woolf was quite aware of the problems of anachronism, as her foregrounding of it shows. She was also aware of its possibilities: Orlando's scenario tests the usefulness of analogy in historical reasoning. Though I will leave the second category until the final section of this paper, I will now look at some of Orlando's explorations of "time-spirit" or the "general character of an era" and conclude with an analysis of Woolf's thoughts about the historical morality of Vita Sackville-West and the class she represented.

The "cardinal labor of composition is excision" (Orlando 71), and excisions leave traces. Orlando is a narrative of transformation, sexual and historical. It is remarkable that

Orlando's consciousness maintains continuity. This is not to say, however, that it remains unchanged. Orlando retains her memories from the Elizabethan birth to the aeroplane and wild goose on Thursday, October 11, 1928 (329). Woolf's excision of historical details, details which distinguish the past from present, reveals the reasoning of an organizing consciousness. The pattern of these excisions recapitulates Woolf's ideas of historical change, and they demonstrate her evolving political awareness of the "spirit of the time."

The rough schema of the novel follows each of the standard periodizations of

British history since the Elizabethan era, with the Victorian and Modern (contemporary) brought together in the last chapter. In each section, there are anachronisms--some gaudy and playful, some obscure. The narrator's shifting degree of situatedness blurs the boundary between present and past. Woolf advises us "to shape our words till they are the thinnest integument for our thoughts" (Orlando 173), and the anachronisms scattered

throughout Orlando are holes through which the present shines. Each anachronism is shaped through her periodizations of British history, and their traces reveal the origins and boundaries of her historical position.

The concept of anachronism has held a major place in historicist thinking since

Vico. For Srinivas Aravamudan, Vico's "taxonomy of anachronism came on the heel of a sophisticated historicism that investigated errors associated with chronology" (331).

Vico's four categories of errors, those of periods mistakenly regarded as uneventful or eventful and mistakenly regarded as unified or divided, are all displayed in Orlando. The

immediate sense of "anachronism" is an object or reference outside the given time frame

of a narrative. With a narrator situated in the present narrating the present, there are

inevitable anachronisms of language and thought--the concepts and words used to narrate

a transhistorical life. These fundamental anachronisms of the historical narrative belong

to Vico's third category, the unity of periods which should be separated. Vico, in what

Aravamudan notes is also frequently described as an anachronistic gesture, argued that

"poetry itself [is] the philosophical prism through which everything is refracted."3

Anachronism in this sense is a consequence of historical situatedness, and readers must

construct a mental map between their own historical circumstances, those of the author,

and those of the events being described. Orientation within a historical narrative derives

from the signposts left by the narrator and the tricks or heuristics that compose our

cognitive architecture. Ray Jackendoff, in his review of Jerry Fodor's The Mind Doesn't

Work that Way, outlines such a view:

3 Aravadmudan quotes Giuseppe Mazzota's The New Map of the World and Susan Stewart's "Preface to a Lyrical History" as examples of this argument (347).

Consider first theory of mind. Fodor takes it that our (and his Granny's) innate intuitions about how the mind works are basically a correct account of how the mind works; he has repeated this assertion endlessly over the past twenty years. But then, why do so many people have the intuition that language isn't innate, why do so many cultures believe in a soul, why is cognitive science so hard, why do we over-attribute mental lives to animals and computers, and above all, why do we make so many mental mistakes in assessing the thoughts, opinions, and motives of others on the basis of their behavior? More plausible to me is that the "theory of the mind" is another set of good tricks rather than a set of true beliefs. Like good visual tricks, these evolved to provide a more flexible and nuanced behavioral repertoire, this time in a social context. (168)

In Orlando, the overt unifications of different historical periods provide immediate

examples of the imperfection of heuristic orientation in narrative.

The novel is full of them. Most recognized is the Dome on St. Paul's Cathedral in

Elizabeth's era (60), an example of anatopism or spatial misplacement. Woolf was

sometimes inattentive to historical details; her diary of December 15, 1928 records her

unflattering impression of George V at a performance of Edgar Wallace's The Calendar: he "goes straight back, this heavy bluff grumpy looking man, to Elizabeth & the rest"

(274).4 If, "you can only explain the past by what is most powerful in the present"

(Nietzsche 40), then anachronisms are contingencies of the present.

Other, less-noticeable anachronisms, include the use of "negus" around the Civil

War (the drink was invented by Colonel Francis Negus in the early 18th C) and probably

"antimacassar" (first recorded use in 1852 [OED]) at the beginning of Victoria's reign

(128, 228). Woolf was very interested in etymology; her diary records her disappointment

at not finding the origin of "aftermath" in Richard Chevenix Trench's A Select Glossary

of English Words Used Formerly in Senses Different from the Present (201).5 Her

4 Anne Oliver Bell notes that "this suggests a rather inattentive reading of [Lytton Strachey's] Elizabeth and Essex by V. W." (274 n8) 5 The sense of "math" is "mowing," and "aftermath" refers to the grass which grows afterwards, a meaning still current for Trench in 1859 (OED).

parenthetical comment about crinoline "(for the word had reached Blackfriars)" (234)

suggests self-consciousness of the anachronistic tendency; and her misdating of upper-

class intoxicants (first mention of "negus" in the OED is from Horace Walpole's

Etoniana) and the "counter-offensive" to one of Britain's first heavily advertised products,

the Rowland and Son hair oil said to be derived from the island of Macassar (Williams

173), reveals the dialectic relationships within their history. Grog--cheap rum and water--

corresponds to the opulent sherry, spices, and sugar in negus. The antimacassars, which

would later be a metonymy of Victorian middle-class society, were an attempt to save the

most venerated objects of craft, furniture, from the oleaginous mass-market. The great

market for macassar oil was a necessary consequence of the East India Company's

conquering of Java in 1811. Bill Brown states that "we should recognize how various

aesthetic practices work to compensate for that loss" of the "thingness of things," (4)

following Georg Simmel's analysis of modernity and mass manufacture. Constructing our

reading of Orlando is an aesthetic practice that recapitulates Woolf's literary production;

and the anachronisms bleach the specificity from her historical recreations, bringing them

increasingly closer to her (and our) present. If, "like all classic comedy, Orlando educates pleasure and wild imagination to the reality principle while simultaneously instructing reality in the pleasures of fancy and the imagination" (DiBattista 113), then Woolf also tests the ability of her fictive world to reincorporate an epic past, a past in which the glory of her aristocratic subject had not yet faded.

Laura Marcus notes that "transformations in Orlando, and indeed in Woolf's work

in general, tend to be represented as oscillations and vacillations from one state of being

to another. The finality of change is thus re-figured in states of flux and in repetition"

(121). Woolf's moral attitudes towards Vita Sackville-West and the effete aristocracy she

represented caused such a generative flux. Though not "a brilliant race" (Diary 125), the

Sackville-Wests, and Vita in particular, certainly entranced Woolf. Her affair with Vita is

only elliptically mentioned in her diaries and letters. Orlando, written in four months in

such a hurry that "the canvas shows through in a thousand places" (Diary 176), is Woolf's

treatment of the romance and the political problems on which it supervened.

The schema for Orlando, preserved in the manuscript copy on display at Knole (the

famous English country house recreated in the novel) reads

To tell a person's life

from the year 1500-1928

changing its sex

taking different aspects of the character

in different centuries. The theory being

that character goes on underground

before we are born and leaves something afterward

also. (qtd. in Moore 98)6

The most provocative statement is that "character goes on underground" both before birth

and after death. Vita Sackville-West's poem "The Land," upon which Orlando's life-work

"The Oak" is modeled (and quoted directly) won a Hawthornden Prize in 1927. West's

Knole and the Sackvilles, a history of her hereditary country house, was Woolf's major

source, and West's later Pepita detailed the illegitimacy scandal that led to a lengthy (and

ultimately lost) legal battle over her rights to Knole. James Naremore argues that Orlando is a parody of West's memoir (202-203).

6 I have preserved Moore's line-breaks, which match the copy in Knole.

Why did Woolf think that "Vita [was] like a lamp or torch in all this petty

bourgeoisdom?" (Diary 204) Woolf, who subscribed to the Morning Post (to her

husband's distress, Diary 156), was certainly aware of sentiments such as the following,

taken from a letter from Sackville-West to her husband Harold Nicolson on February 7,

1945:

I hate democracy. I hate la populace. I wish education had never been introduced. I don't like tyranny, but I like an intelligent oligarchy. I wish la populace had never been encouraged to emerge from its rightful place. I should like to see them well fed and well housed as T. T.7 cows, but no more articulate than that. (It's rather what most men feel about women!) (qtd. in Trautmann 117)

Woolf enjoyed the "complete arrogance and unreality of [aristocrats'] minds" (Letters,

371-382, qtd by Love 198), and she did not so much agree with sentiments such as West's as find them symptomatic. The parenthetical remark in Vita's letter suggests a self- mockery appropriate to having stumbled upon an amusing but harmless hypocrisy.

Perhaps in Orlando Woolf sought to recreate her lover in a more palatable form. She

wrote to her shortly after completing the book, "Do you exist? Have I made you up?"

(Letters 474) Through her narrative recreation of Vita's life across a centuries-long tableau, Woolf dialectically tested her husband's claim that "letters and autobiographies are the fascinating road by which alone it is possible to enter the aristocratic mind unless you happen to be born with one" (225).

Jaime Hovey argues that Orlando "critiques whiteness and heterosexuality

ambivalently and unevenly" (398), and that even Woolf's feminism is bounded by the

imperial constraints of her class. And she was certainly class-conscious: shortly before

the novel was finished, she wrote in her diary that "we don't belong to any class; we

thinkers: might as well be French or German. Yet I am English in some way" (203)--

7 Trautmann explains that these are "tuberculosis tested" cows (117).

English, that is, both in the tradition of her grandfather who drafted the bill that outlawed

slavery in the British Empire (Zwerdling 3) and also in her Bloomsbury morality, "rooted

as it was in endless concern for the private individual" (Blythe 104). Whereas Woolf was

content to observe that "psychology would seem to hint that history is not without its

effects upon mind and body" (Three Guineas 18), Hovey extends the observation to

Benedict Anderson's Foucauldian formulation that "discursive practices constitute the

imagined community of the nation" (397); and I will particularize how Woolf employs

these discursive practices in Orlando by examining the imagined community of Britain in the late 1920s.

"The spirit of the time" occurs throughout Orlando as a descriptive device. Werner

Heisenberg, himself engaged in important work during the period, believed that the zeitgeist "forces itself upon us when we are proceeding as conservatively as possible"

(qtd. in West 98). Woolf was, of course, very aware that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." (Room 2), even if she was not "secreted by

the Timespirit," as she gnomically wrote of Beatrice Webb (Diary 74). A standard view is

that Woolf's generally progressive social views were in constant tension with her

snobbery. After telling the biting story of Judith Shakespeare in A Room of One's Own,

Woolf quickly reminds us that "genius like Shakespeare's is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people [. . .] It is not born today among the working classes" (Room

53). And this was not a passing whim--in 1929 she wrote of her servant Nelly:

She is in a state of nature; untrained, uneducated, to me almost incredibly without the power of analysis or logic; so that one sees a human mind wiggling undressed-- which is interesting and then, in the midst of one's horror at the loathsome spectacle, one is surprised by the goodness of human nature. (Diary 241)

Woolf may nod here at Eliot's "sprawling on a pin/When I am pinned and wriggling on a

wall"; and she emphasizes the contact of minds, the faculty of empathy which both

horrifies and simultaneously delights in its ability to model the object of its horror. The

"goodness of human nature" and how empathy could reach into the distant past and

unknowable future became her major problems in Orlando. Woolf recognized the

standpoint problem as central to artistic understanding: "those webs are not spun in mid-

air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached

to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in" (Room 45).

But what was the nature of the suffering that Woolf and her fellow English in the

"educated classes" endured, even with 500 pounds a year?

More than a decade after finishing Orlando, Woolf wrote that while the 30s

generation of politically committed writers had failed, "the world after the war will be a

world without classes or towers" (Woolf Folios 30 qtd. in Hynes 392). Though unfailing in her support of the thesis that material conditions were what enabled literary production, Woolf had failed to see the possibility for transcendence in the decade where it may have been most evident. The reasons for her eventual reaction against the radicalism of the 30s can be traced in the formation of her political attitudes during the

20s.

After the Great War, Britain began an unintentional period of largely self-imposed imperial collapse. As Keynes clearly foresaw in The Economic Consequences of the

Peace, the crippling sanctions against what had been Britain's largest export market had a

predictably devastating effect. Germany "is to be stripped naked and then told to turn out

her pockets," suggested the Daily News (qtd. in Branson 48). The economy became

increasingly reliant on American investment, and the Empire, while greater than ever,

began to implode.8 The General Strike of 1926, of which Woolf recalled the "gloom"

while writing Time Passes (Letters 374, qtd. in Moore 94-95), was just the most

prominent consequence of the increasingly laissez-faire climate. And the Labour Party,

whose 1918 constitution mandated no less than "common ownership of the means of

production" (Branson 249), settled for rather less. Keynes, Cassandra of the impending

crash and architect of Britain's (and the industrialized West's) eventual recovery, also

indulged in a mad eugenic search for "the two royal stocks in England from which all

intellect descends. He will work this out as if his fortune depends upon it" (Woolf Diary

181), which in a way it did. Keynes wanted very much to believe that "the government of

Britain was and would continue to be in the hands of an intellectual aristocracy" (Harrod

192 qtd. in Zwerdling 92).

Also a firm believer in intellectual aristocracy was the 8th Duke of

Northumberland, owner of The Morning Post, a dependable voice of reaction Woolf took

while writing Orlando. "The only cure," thought Northumberland, "for present day evils

is to go back to that freedom in private enterprise and to that individual liberty for which

our party has always striven" (qtd. in Webber 82). Welfare and labor reform, with their

shortened work-weeks and rising standards of living for the working-classes, were deeply

troubling developments whose economic consequences were frequently abjured in

Spencerian tones: "Likewise, W. R. Inge, Dean of St. Pauls [. . .] believed that the

8 One of the best examples of this was the furor surrounding General Dyer, whose crowd control methods resulted in nearly four hundred deaths in Amritsar in 1919 (Branson 66). The kernel of the incident was the Indians' stubborn refusal to crawl through a street where a lady British missionary had been insulted, as Dyer had ordered (Blythe 29). Gandhi later named this incident as a cause of his radicalism.

Welfare State [. . .] had resulted in a 'suspension of natural selection' by subsidising the

incompetent at the expense of the industrious" (Webber 83). On behalf of the hereditarily

competent, Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England, one of the "three august

pilgrims" who argued for a reduction in U. S. rediscount rates to help dam the torrent of

British (and, to a lesser degree, French and German) gold flowing into American markets,

got what he wanted; and the ensuing capital overflow and consequent speculative orgy

are the widely acknowledged causes of the Great Crash (Galbraith 15). Woolf wanted to

"saturate every atom" and "eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity" (Diary 209) in her next project after finishing Orlando, as the logic of transformation would demand after

her immersion in this profoundly wasteful historical moment.

Small Worlds of Narrative and History

Sometime during the novel's fecund mid-Victorian period, an increasingly intrusive

narrator writes, "For it has come about by the wise economy of nature that our modern

spirit can almost dispense with language" (253). The entire paragraph, concerning

Orlando and her husband Shelmerdine's conversation, expatiates upon the

interrelationship of history, language, and consciousness. Coming shortly after a mutual

revelation of transvestism and/or hermaphroditism and Shelmerdine's subsequent

confession that he has to leave for Cape Horn, where "his life was spent in the most

desperate and splendid of adventures" (252), the conversations would have "no lustre

taken from their setting, yet are positively of amazing beauty within it" (253). Because of

modernization, Woolf writes, "the most ordinary expressions are often the most poetic,

and the most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written down" (253). Words

become the direct reflection of thoughts. They can lay bare the interrelationship between

thought and history. Orlando has progressively dulled because of the pageant of historical

change; and, as a woman in the Victorian era, her thoughts have thinned to the point that

their expressions have become consubstantial with the commodities that surround her:

"where to buy the best boots in London" and "how to cook an omelette" are now major

concerns. Shopping and reading have begun to merge in a process of identity-formation.

In her fascinating essay, "How Should One Read a Book?" Woolf states that there

are two processes involved in reading, the conscious act and the unconscious permeation

or digestion (Essays 397). Only the latter brings out the true joy of reading, the moments where some sensory or emotional association will reveal the entire essence of what was read. The reader should "give the writer the benefit of every doubt; the help of all his imagination; will follow as closely, interpret as intelligibly as he can" (398). Woolf's psychology of reading and, conversely, of writing thus relies on the gestation of lived experience. One type of experience is required to produce a narrative, and another is required to reproduce its effects. She is sensitive to the problem of how literature transmits mental states across spatiotemporal vectors, and answers Eliot's "objective correlative" (48) with a focus on the psychological production of reading. There are no

"objective correlatives," but there are correspondences between particular mental states.

These correspondences have to be effected by a transformative process in the reader's mind that reproduces the transformation of lived experience in the writer's. Such a view is quite compatible with a cognitive model of reading, and Orlando has more references to

the word "reader" than all of her other novels combined (21 to 18, in fact [Benzel 181]).

Its narrator "is virtually a parody of a reader responding" (Little 182).

The concepts of the reader, the text, and the degree of agency assigned to each are

critical evaluative issues for the epistemology of literary theory. In different ways,

Wolfgang Iser, Stanley Fish, David Bleich, Norman Holland, Louise Rosenblatt, and others have focused on the increased role of the reader as an agent in contrast to an active text. Bleich and Holland specifically hold the position that there is no, and can be no, meaning "in" a text; rather, all of the meaning is created in the process of reading.

Whatever sense made of the narrative is determined by the individual identity, itself an infinitely complex set of sociohistorical vectors. The author read, thus posited, is arrived at via a consensus of interpretation. The redirection of agency here is significant; rather than texts doing things to readers, texts are themselves the written records of writers' identities, identities which can only be understood in relation to the reader's culture.

Discussing "The Journal of Mistress Jean Martyn," Karin Westman writes, "[it] argues explicitly and also performs what Woolf's early essay reviews implicitly advocate for the writing of history: a theory of historiography that can acknowledge and value the fiction which constructs material facts into a historical narrative to which the reader can then contribute" (13). The notion of the reader's "contribution" is what I am most concerned with here. Westman's example of such a narrative is Woolf's story of Judith Shakespeare in A Room of One's Own, and Orlando extends the concept of the participatory narrative.

An important part of Woolf's own culture was the decidedly small-world network of Bloomsbury intellectuals and their ideas about identity and ethics. Ann Banfield's The

Phantom Table traces the history of Woolf's epistemology and aesthetics through

Bertrand Russell and George E. Moore's theory of mind and Roger Fry's Post-

Impressionism. Banfield, describing her critical method, states that "because the logic knitting together the parts of the vision scattered throughout the works is our goal, any chronologic will be ignored, any differences between the individual works. The repetition

82 of themes, of images, makes the oeuvre, in this conception, like the unconscious in its ignorance of time" (xiv). There are at least two possible axes of the small-world networks of narrative: time/history and experience/knowledge. The former concerns the degree of separation between writer and reader, and the latter orders the narrated events, with knowledge emerging from the pattern of connections. The merger of these two axes is analogous to Bakhtin's concept of the "chronotope," which defines generic distinctions

(85). Banfield's approach is similar to the inevitable clustering effect of narrative, which reduces the time-distance between creating and perceiving minds, and is thus particularly useful to the study of Woolf's writings.

The primary element that Banfield chooses to analyze in the Cantabridgian epistemology of primarily Russell--but also Moore and Alfred Whitehead--is the concept of atomicity, which details the relation of entities in any given frame of reference

(Banfield 81). In contemporary cognitive science, there is a split between atomistic (or computational) and associationist (or emergent) theories of mind. For Russell, atomicity prevents the combinatorial explosion of entailed meaning, which came to be called

"meaning holism." At root is the question of identity: can it be procedural and rule- bound, or is it necessarily historical contingent? The answer, such as it is, probably lies in a synthesis of the two views--a conclusion I believe Woolf reached; and a conclusion that seems to prefigure many of the synthetic movements of the recent philosophical interpretations of cognitive science.

As a research program, cognitive science's dominant metaphor has often been the computer. The mind is thought of as having mental representations upon which operations are performed or "computed." The connectionist models of cognition rely on

83 the metaphor of the brain as a parallel computer rather than a sequential rule-based system, and this complicated dialectic between mind, brain, and computer has generated a considerable amount of inquiry. The main critique of cognitive science from phenomenology--briefly, that by ignoring the embodied nature of cognition, it cannot hope to explain the essence of human thought--is answered by George Lakoff and Mark

Johnson's claims of an embodied "second-generation" cognitive science (78). John Locke does not figure in Banfield's analysis, but Christy Burns has convincingly argued for the parallel between his use of a chopped oak to show that variation in matter does not alter identity and Woolf's use of "The Oak" as Orlando's life-work (348). The unchanging personality through historical change in Orlando has also been denounced by Fredric

Jameson twice as an example of an ahistorical genre in Marxism and Form and The

Political Unconscious (Burns 343). Jack Stewart describes Woolf's historical representations as "a quixotic venture to give history a impressionistic sense of movement by transvaluating it to the flow of consciousness" (71). The apparent substrate- neutrality of Woolf's representation of Orlando is not ahistorical nor is it quixotic: the transvaluation that Stewart describes is the clustering effect of situatedness and relation, and I will now examine how the novel directly addresses and answers the problems of conceptual anachronism.

Woolf's famous comment about Roger Fry's Post-Impressionist exhibition, "On or about December 1910, human character changed," had already signaled her interest in the radical discontinuity of social consciousness. Though one senses that it is a private joke-- much like many of her others--it reveals her concern with the fundamental problems of historical representation.

Some critics used the apparently private systems of reference in Orlando as a good reason to ignore it.9 Nigel Nicolson's frequently quoted description,"[the] longest and

most charming love letter in the language" (Nicolson 218), misinterprets them. The

conversation between Shelmerdine and Orlando comments on the self-referential nature

of this particular private reference, reminiscent of James Ramsay's "private code [and]

secret language" in To the Lighthouse (10), and the ultimate incommensurability of

language and history:

And so they would go on talking, or rather, understanding, which has become the main art of speech in an age when words are growing daily so scanty in comparison with ideas that "the biscuits ran out" has to stand for kissing a negress in the dark when one has just read Bishop Berkeley's philosophy for the tenth time. (And from this it follows that only the most profound masters of style can tell the truth, and when one meets a simple one-syllabled writer, one may conclude, without any doubt at all, that the poor man is lying). (259)

Jaime Hovey reads this passage and the one before it, where Orlando affirms that

"negresses are seductive, aren't they?" (258) as a coded response to Shelmerdine's

comment about the lack of biscuits, and as representing a racialist expansion of their own

illicit desire into a figure of the colonized other (402). For her, the passage illustrates

Woolf's own perspective as an upper-middle class British subject malgré lui: "The

domestication of an imperialist national history into an individual sexual history

forecloses the revolutionary possibilities of lesbian desire suggested in the novel" (402).

The situational connections between Orlando and Ann Radclyffe Hall's The Well of

Loneliness, prosecuted for Sapphic indecency the same year that Orlando was published,

have also been noted by many scholars; and Woolf wrote in its defense. Hovey

9 As many have commented, the novel was comparatively ignored in Woolf criticism until the 1970s and probably still is not written as much about as the other novels of Woolf's maturity.

85 recognizes the primacy of Orlando's immanent logic, and I read the "foreclosure" of lesbian desire here as a consequence of Woolf's rejection of conceptual anachronism.

When Shelmerdine told Orlando that he went on shore and was "trapped by a black woman," his next comment about the biscuits having run out seems to be misdirection.

The narrator's elaboration, however, suggests differently. The apparent non-sequitur of

"when one has just read Bishop Berkeley's philosophy for the tenth time" (259) followed by the parenthetical note about mastery of style being a precondition for truth-telling both increase the complexity of the conversation. Shelmerdine had spent some time reading

Pascal on his shipwreck experience (258). I find it unlikely, however, that Woolf would introduce both the preeminent philosopher of irrational faith and the most famous radical idealist randomly here. Pascal's cultural associations include desolation and deprivation, with a possibility of erotic spiritual renewal. Berkeley's philosophy is conventionally misrepresented as solipsism, and the impossibility of communication (a logical consequence of solipsism) is one of the narrator's concerns as Orlando grows into the late-Victorian era. "Tenth" may very well suggest Berkeley as an irrationalist oppositional figure to Enlightenment thought; it was the National Assembly in 1790 who first mandated the use of a decimal measuring system as a means to standardize and thus distribute knowledge among the entirety of "la populace", as Vita Sackville-West uncomfortably called them.

The allusions to these philosophers, who if not irrationalists, are certainly figures opposed to systems of prevalent rationality,10 support the narrator's claim that "only the

10 Berkeley denounced one system of prevalent rationality, Newton's calculus, as irrational itself, referring to Newton's concept of "fluxions" as "the Ghosts of departed Quantities" in The Analyst.

86 most profound masters of style can tell the truth" (259). Woolf seems to advocate here what might be called the "rhetorical might makes right" position--that truth is not available to the simple and "one-syllabled" (259). Recall that this is the mid-nineteenth century (in the next paragraph, the narrator tells us of the daily dinner invitations Orlando receives from Lady Palmerston), and Woolf was likely thinking of the aggressively voluminous styles of Victorian writers such as Carlyle, Macaulay, Pater, and Ruskin.

Though many critics have noted that she seems to aim intermittently for the same effect that Joyce sought in the "Oxen of the Sun" chapter of Ulysses, I do not believe any have argued that Woolf attempted to parody systematically the prose styles from the different eras. Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, a series of lectures from 1840, was likely a major influence in content as well as style. Orlando directly counters Carlyle's thesis about the ablest of men arising organically throughout time to be heroes, both in terms of gender and as a theory of political power. Rather than "Find me the true Kön-ning, King, or Able-man, and he has a divine right over me" ("Heroes" 198, emphasis in original), Woolf explores an able woman's erotic hold over her historically.

With her satirical comment about truth being constructed through style, Woolf rejects

Victorian pretensions of historical objectivity. Her own reasons for doing so, however, are situated in an interpretive heritage traceable to Carlyle. Orlando answers his assertion in "Biography" that "For the Past is all holy to us; the Dead are all holy, even they that were base and wicked while alive" (35).

For Carlyle, the act of writing is itself a "chief agent of anachronism" (Gilbert 436).

He distinguishes between anachronisms which resist the tyranny of time and those which set themselves against change (Gilbert 440). Anticipating phenomenological history's

concern with the perspective of the historical actor and the integration of this perspective

into consciousness, Carlyle is aware of the dangers of the human tendency "to seek out

affinities in disparate experiences and to discard the rest" (Gilbert 437). This tendency,

which is precisely the conceptual anachronism that Woolf's historically situated narrative

attempts to counter, Carlyle attributes to the indistinctness of the present compared to the

past. Mircea Eliade, whose ideas parallel Carlyle's in many ways, thought that what he

referred to as the "thinning of modernity" signaled an ensuing, revolutionary change

(similar to Vico's ricorso). He argues in The Myth of the Eternal Return that anachronisms signal the devolution of history into epic, myth, archetype (40). Though it was not widely known until after his death, Eliade was an enthusiastic Fascist intellectual in the 1930s (Volovici 37); and his alarm about the lack of vital energy in modernity is consistent with J. P. Stern's explanation of the desire for transcendence in Nazi neo- paganism: "Since they [the German intellectuals] are seeking a single, 'total' thing, their

'idealism' appears wholly compatible with material satisfaction. What they are looking for is in fact not a solution but a salvation [. . .] And they find the embodiment of that salvation in the messianic leader" (79). Woolf does not succumb to the worship of the individual or of a mythical past. Historical understanding only comes through the immersion of the individual consciousness into the totality of social history--only through the rapid accumulation of points of contact between the subject and history can the degrees of separation in the conceptual network be reduced.

In his essay "Biography," Carlyle, no stranger to quasi-mystical oratory, is provoked 11 by a passage from Boswell's Life of Johnson about Dr. Johnson declining a prostitute's advances one evening (35) into obscure parable about the "Stupidest of

London men," whose "wooden head", could it be traced and explored, would be considered a "genius or Friar Bacon's Oracle" by some. ("Biography" 31). Carlyle believes that even the most inconsequential aspect of reality has far more affective force than the grandest fiction. Woolf, by substituting a living consciousness for a bounded historical narrative, argues the opposite. According to legend Bacon's magic head of brass--which he thought could conjure a brass wall around England--when questioned, spoke only "Time is, Time was, and Time is past" before disintegrating (31). The work of artistic biography or history is itself always a head of brass that speaks to the reader and attempts to maintain the continuity of identity. The actual effect, however, is that the created object cannot bear such scrutiny and raises instead the brass wall of incommensurable time. It becomes a part of the reader, of the reader's historical situation.

This is the fundamental problem of conceptual anachronism, and in Orlando Woolf argues that only immersion in the elements of brass--or historical situatedness--can transmute it. The test of Woolf's ideas comes at the end of the novel, in Orlando's eventual dissolution.

11 "That unhappy Outcast, with all her sins and woes, her lawless desires, too complex mischances, her wailings and her riotings, has departed utterly; alas! her siren finery has got all besmutched, ground, generations since, into dust and smoke; of her degraded body, and whole miserable earthly existence, all is away: she is no longer here, but far from us, in the bosom of Eternity,--whence we too came, whither we too are bound!" (Carlyle "Biography" 35).

The Flight from History

Most of the sixth and final chapter is still set in the Victorian era. Orlando even visits "Carlyle's sound-proof room at Chelsea" and wonders that genius which needs such

"coddling must be growing very delicate" (291). The transformation into the present occurs abruptly; "Orlando was safely delivered of a son on Thursday, March the 20th at three o'clock in the morning" (295). Looking out her window onto Park Lane, she sees an

"absurd truncated carriage" move about of its own accord and King Edward "stepping out of his neat brougham to go and visit a certain lady opposite" (296). As March 20 was a

Thursday in 1902, this is the date if Woolf was attentive to calendrical detail (though it is certainly sometime in the decade regardless). Her immediate impression is that

There was something definite and distinct about the age, which reminded her of the eighteenth century, except that there was a distraction, a desperation--as she was thinking this, the immensely long tunnel in which she seemed to have been traveling for hundreds of years widened; the light poured in; her thoughts became mysteriously tightened and strung up as if a piano tuner had put his key in her back and stretched the nerves very taut; at the same time her hearing quickened; she could hear every whisper and crackle in the room so that the clock ticking on the mantelpiece beat like a hammer. (298)

As Woolf approaches the horizon of the present, she again emphasizes the tautness and thinness of lived modern experience. The tunnel of Orlando's historical exploration has widened, and her senses have sharpened. As a metaphor for this increased awareness, piano tuning suggests that the organizing consciousness has become harmonized with its originating environment. Again, her increasing awareness of modernity and contemporaneousness is associated with decimalization:

And so for some seconds the light went on becoming brighter and brighter, and she saw everything more and more clearly and the clock ticked louder and louder until there was a terrific explosion right in her ear. Orlando leapt as if she had been violently struck on the head. Ten times was she struck. In fact, it was ten o'clock in the morning. It was the eleventh of October. It was 1928. It was the present moment. (298)

This otherwise arbitrary time of the morning is another example of her linking of decimalization and rationality. Woolf's attitudes towards modernity communicated via

Orlando's reactions to the present are further expressed on her shopping trip to Marshall

& Snelgrove's Department store:

Then she got into the lift, for the good reason that the doors stood open; and she was shot smoothly upwards. The very fabric of life now, she thought as she rose, is magic. In the eighteenth century, we knew how everything was done; but here I rise through the air; I listen to voices in America; I see men flying--but how it's done, I can't even begin to wonder. So my belief in magic returns. (300)

Again, there is an allusion to the Enlightenment and 18th C rationality. The narrator argues that technology, despite being applied rationality, has become an inaccessible part of life in modernity. All of the technologies Orlando experiences are mobile: elevators, radios, and airplanes. Whether these developments move attributes of people or people themselves, they have shrunk the world considerably. Thirty-six, in the middle of life's journey (302), and despite her immense spatiotemporal voyages, Orlando is only now ready to descend into the depths of modernity:

"Time has passed over me," she thought, trying to collect herself; "this is the oncome of middle age. How strange it is! Nothing is any longer one thing. I take up a handbag, and I think of an old bumboat woman frozen in the ice. Someone lights a pink candle, and I see a girl in Russian trousers." (305)

Commodities now trigger associations of Orlando's epic Elizabethan youth. As Sharon

Stockwell notes, "images of flow in the twentieth century describing time, flux, or consciousness are distinctly different from the violent ice-flow of the Renaissance" (246).

For Orlando's narrator, the earlier epoch was close to the epic, "the national historic past" that "is a world of 'beginnings' and 'peak times' in national history" (Bakhtin 12). Now, things are diffused by the democratizing forces of technology and industrial production.

Where once only she and others of her birth and rank could enjoy the sensuality offered

by candles and Russian princesses, such pleasures are now available to all in an

adulterated form via the department store or cinema. The experiential transformation is

consistent with Eliade's notion that the "the inability of collective memory to retain

historical events and individuals except insofar as it transforms them into archetypes"

inevitably leads to a desire for an anarchic return to a mythical period before the Creation

of the existing order (46). Eliade notes the "carnivalesque" inversions of such periods,

and Woolf shows the same psychological process occurring in Orlando's consciousness.

Her personality fragments: "For it is probable that when people talk aloud, the

selves (of which there may be more than two thousand) are conscious of disseverment,

and are trying to communicate but when communication is established there is nothing to

be said" (314). Two thousand voices within the mind are the voices of the

democratization of political discourse that Mannheim describes in Ideology and Utopia:

The emergence of the problem of the multiplicity of thought-styles which have appeared in the course of scientific development and the perceptibility of collective-unconscious motives hitherto hidden, is only one aspect of the prevalence of the intellectual restiveness which characterizes our age. In spite of the democratic diffusion of knowledge, the philosophical, psychological, and sociological problems which we presented above have been confined to a relatively small intellectual minority. This intellectual unrest came gradually to be regarded by them as their own professional privilege, and might have been considered as the private preoccupation of these groups had not all strata, with the growth of democracy, been drawn into the political and philosophical discussion. (30)

The unification of Orlando's personality, a unity which survived through history, divides:

"Braced and strung up by the present moment she was also strangely afraid, as if every time the gulf of time gaped and let a second through some unknown danger might come with it" (321). Her fear is heightened when she sees a workman, Joe Stubbs, missing a finger nail on his right hand. The "raised saucer of flesh" causes her to faint momentarily, and "when her eyelids flickered, she was relieved of the pressure of the present" (322).

Orlando, certainly accustomed to impressive degrees of violence (we are introduced to her as a boy slicing a sword at the detached and swinging head of a Moor), seems an unlikely candidate to be affected so strongly by the sight of a minor (if uncommon) injury.

Leaving the carpenter's shop, she thinks "I am by the Serpentine [. . .] the little boat is climbing through the white arch of a thousand deaths. I am about to understand." The nail-less finger has given Orlando a glimpse into her unconscious, a "pool where things dwell in darkness so deep that what they are we scarcely know" (323). Each thing that she sees in this reflecting pool is a "union of itself and something not itself," whether

Mayfair houses or "gentlemen sitting with card cases" (323). The recognition of progress through contradiction initiated by the sight of an injured worker's hand reflects the integration of her personality. She ultimately finds this integration within her poem, "The

Oak Tree." Walking on the grounds of her ancestral home, she comes across the oak tree which inspired her to begin writing the poem in 1588; and she is similarly inspired to bury the poem so that it might grow like the tree. There are no interpolations in this series of thoughts. When she hears the voice of Rustum the gipsy, it admonishes her "What is your antiquity and your race, and your possessions compared with this?" (326) Just as she questions, she sees a phantasm of the dead Queen and welcomes her in. Shortly thereafter, Shelmerdine arrives in his aeroplane; and the moment of doubt and identity is over. The present has thinned and become one with a timeless aristocratic past. The aeroplane becomes the heraldic wild goose, and the narrator and Orlando's consciousness have merged into a flight from history.

CHAPTER 4 NATIONALISM AND NARRATIVE FORM IN WYNDHAM LEWIS'S THE CHILDERMASS

Novels have often been regarded as the impressions of a roving consciousness,

their organizations of the chaotic material of history presenting a fantasy of organization

that particularizes the reactions of the population to large-scale social change. Most

novelists, however, have not written about their method and goals in critical works,

unlike Wyndham Lewis, who elaborated upon his sociopoetic method at great length. I

place Lewis’s The Childermass within a series of novelistic reactions to the changes in the British nation-state in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Lewis illustrates his specific thoughts about history and temporality through his theory of mind and narrative logic.

The final section of the paper synthesizes the preceding textual and extratextual analysis into a discussion of The Childermass's historical moment.

Wyndham Lewis is still the least read of his self-described "men of 1914"

(Blasting 249). Fredric Jameson, whose study Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis,

The Modernist as Fascist, is probably the best known work on Lewis, notes from the

beginning that "Lewis is the most unfamiliar of all the great modernists of his generation"

(1). Lewis regarded The Childermass as the book he "set the most store by"

(Bridson 238). Hugh Kenner, an early and important critic of Lewis’s work, argues that

The Childermass is only Lewis’s earlier political work, The Art of Being Ruled,

“dramatized” (Kenner 97), and it seems at first sight to be a narrative synthesis of the

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overt sociological commentary of The Art of Being Ruled and the philosophical program

presented in Time and Western Man.

Many very disciplined readers have admitted intense frustration with The

Childermass. Hugh Kenner, canny exegete of difficult modernist texts, has comparatively

little to say about it. William H. Pritchard notes that the two sequels written in the 1950s,

Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta, "have only the flimsiest relation with The Childermass"

(151). I. A. Richards lamented that "to an agonizing degree, we are not allowed to know what this is all about" (Friendship Documented 60). A passage illustrative of the

difficulties that readers have with the text is

A new voice hails him of an old friend, spanking noisily the opaque air, at his back. The maternal warmth of early life gushes unexpectedly from a mouth opened somewhere near him in the atmosphere.

"Pullman? I thought so! Well I'm damned!"

The guttural cheery reports stop. A pink young mask flushed in welcome, the blue eyes engagingly dilated, comes smiling round, working from the rear uncertainly, not certain of Pullman, yet claiming him as a pink fragment of its past. Pullman reddens. The wellimedammd falls like a refreshing rain: his tongue, suddenly galvanic, raps out its response:

"I hope not!" The nondescript brevity of clattering morse hammers out on his palate message and counter-message, in harsh english. Eye in eye they dart and scent each other's minds, like nozzling dogs. (Lewis, Childermass 3)1

This is the meeting of Pullman and Satterswaithe, who is soon revealed to have

been Pullman's fag in school. This passage is distinguished through its constant use of

what Kenner calls the "documentary present tense" (Kenner 217). The first sentence

1 All quotations will be from the 1928 edition of The Childermass (henceforth abbreviated CM). Lewis made some minor textual revisions to the edition republished in 1955. These included regularizing Pullman's name to "Pullman" throughout instead of the often-used "Pulley" in the original text, changing his religion to Catholicism from Anglicanism, and adding a transitional paragraph to the next two volumes. He also dropped the definite article from the title. I choose to rely on the original text because it reflects Lewis's historical observations more directly.

95 quoted provides ample evidence of the tortuous Lewisian syntax, and the "voice hails him of an old friend" is an example of hypallage, the inversion of an expected phrase, which

Jameson notes is one of Lewis's favorite rhetorical figures (27). The reader is then, already more than disconcerted, left with trying to picture how the air is opaque, and how

"spanking noisily" is either an intrusion into the mind of Pullman (or Satters) or a realistic description of the different properties of sound in the supernatural realm they now inhabit. The next sentence, speaking of "maternal warmth," still describes the complicated effect that Satters's speech is having on Pullman, all well before we learn the content of that speech. "Atmosphere" again calls attention to the fact that air is present--a necessity for sound--but its perceptual discontinuities may suggest that their sensory modalities have been transformed. Sound has become tactile and perhaps olfactory for

Pullman; the warmth of breath would only gush if it were constant, and Satters utters only a few syllables.

The "Well I'm damned," repeated as one word and emphasized in the next paragraph, calls attention--somewhat ominously--to the ontological situation within which the characters find themselves, a situation of which Satters seems completely unaware. A "pink young mask flushed in welcome" is what Pullman sees ("mask" is one of the most repeated words in The Childermass, occurring at least once on no fewer than twelve separate pages [Wagner 288]) with the "blue eyes engagingly dilated," another image suggestive of a sexual history. Satters, who "works from the rear uncertainly" but is "not certain of Pullman," also is "claiming him as a pink fragment of its past." The pronoun "its" instead of "his" or "their" means that Pullman (through whom this scene has become increasingly focalized) does not regard Satters as human. "Pink fragment" is

Satters' response to and recognition of Pullman's earlier use of the word, both of which acknowledge, through the feminine associations of pinkness, their earlier homosexual relationship. Homosexuality is an obsession of Lewis's throughout the text; the character

Alectryon refers to it as a "branch of the Feminist revolution" (CM 312), which indicates how Lewis's attitudes towards it derive from his misogyny.2

Pullman, before responding, "reddens" in yet another embarrassment of recognition. Satters' last words, rendered together to indicate his accent and the reification of their sound as a natural force, refreshes Pullman because the possibility that he (and Satters) are damned distracts his conscience from the disturbing memories of their sexual relationship. His tongue becomes "suddenly galvanic," and it "raps out his response": "I hope not!" The sound of this response is likened to a telegraph, "clattering morse hammers out on his palate message and counter-message, in harsh English." Luigi

Galvani, as "an obstetrician, had good reason to be interested in muscle contractions," and he produced the "first widely publicized evidence that the nerves and muscles of animals used their own electricity" (Otis 107).3 When Lewis calls attention to the electrical basis of material existence in his description, he is alerting the reader to a paradox of Pullman and Satters' existence: they have passed into the afterlife, and their corporeal forms are no longer available to them. The instantiations of their souls, however, are governed by the same types of processes that their material bodies were;

2 See I. A. Richards on homosexuality in The Childermass: "the homosexual fashion of the mid-twenties is a rather large-scale feature of the book. You have to remember what the fashionables were like in the mid-twenties if it's not to seem excessive. [. . .] it will seem overdone--till you see that it was the fashion, the thing, of the Proustian hour of the book's creation; it is drawn from and to the life, no more" (Friendship Documented 62–63). 3 Laura Otis refers to Marcello Pera's The Ambiguous Frog: The Galvani-Volta Controversy on Animal Electricity (64).

97 and the awkwardness with which speech is produced is a result of relearning those now subtly modified properties. The comparison of Pullman's speech to a telegraph highlights a further development in the theory of materiality: not only are animal bodies electrical, but the human mind had harnessed electricity as a system of artificial communication.

Within just two paragraphs, Pullman's ontogeny recapitulates the phylogeny of electrical technology.

The final sentence of the quoted passage describes Pullman and Satters examining each other. While looking, "they dart and scent each other's minds." What is it that darts?

Their bodies, whatever we are to think of them at this point, are obviously not moving about so quickly. And what sense is available that can scent minds? In the action of this sense, which is to be understood as olfactory only metaphorically, what is described as

"darting?" The final clause, "like nozzling dogs," describes not so much the literal behavior of canine greeting, but rather the intense scrutiny required of each to know the other, as recognition of what passes for the body is immaterial in this shifting timescape.

"Nozzling" is better understood here as describing interlocking parts, such as the projected minds of the two characters. It is not a matter of their afterlife existence being more mechanical, but rather a reaffirmation of materiality because their minds have to relearn the machinery of their new existence.

I present this reading of the above-referenced passage in order to illustrate some of the text's immediate interpretive problems and also as a sample of its unrelieved density.

Before discussing the state of being that Lewis describes outside the gates of the

Magnetic City--and the implications this has for his ideas about history and nationalism--

I will describe in more detail the genre of The Childermass and in what meaningful sense

it could be referred to as a "novel." The question of generic definition is important

because Lewis wants to communicate ideas in the book not expressible in his earlier

works on the general theme.

In a dedication to Lord Carlow in his copy of the first edition of The Revenge for

Love in the Lewis collection at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Lewis noted that The Childermass was not a novel (Munton, “Reading” 121). Lewis was

comfortable with the autobiographical genre and in A Rude Assignment, he suggested

that the "novel---if you can call it that [. . .] has no place in this survey" (214). Before

discussing the definition of the novel that I will use to examine this issue, it is important

to note that Lewis consciously moved away from his earlier, Russian-influenced style in

the works of the late 20s and early 30s, and later explicitly named the reason for this

change as the General Strike of 1926 (Jameson 102). He originally planned a six-volume

work entitled Man of the World which would include The Art of Being Ruled, The Lion

and the Fox, Time and Western Man, The Childermass, Paleface, and The Apes of God

(Meyers 105). As the first three of these works are critical in orientation and the last three are fictional, the logic of Lewis's plan seems evident. It does not imply, however, that the form of The Childermass is itself novelistic.

An important question in the theory of the English novel is whether the

representation of psychological reality arises during the seventeenth century, and why, if

so. Ian Watt argues that "it surely attempts to portray all the varieties of human

experience, and not merely those suited to one particular literary perspective" (11). M. M.

Bakhtin offers in his essays "Epic and Novel" and "The Prehistory of Novelistic

Discourse" an argument that extends the definition of the novel much more widely than even other European commentators, whose use of the word "roman" for the genre tended to emphasize continuity with the romance tradition more than its novelty (Kershner 4).

Bakhtin's method is diachronic; he seeks to determine what separates the novel as a genre historically from others. He also recognizes that the novel is a continuously evolving genre, and that it would be useless to compare a text written in the late 1920s with something from the Renaissance or Classical Greek era in order to determine whether it possesses the novel-property. While Bakhtin's criteria describe the emergence of the novel as a genre, they also serve as--historically contingent, but determinable-- evidence of whether a given text operates within the parameters of novelistic discourse.

Bakhtin distinguishes "natural languages" from language itself as a communication system. There are different languages within the same natural language, each dependent upon the context of the utterance in order to be fully understood between communicants.

The first criterion he lists refers to what he elsewhere calls the "essential heteroglossia" of novelistic discourse. The novel, commonly held to possess an unprecedented degree of psychological realism, is able to do so because of its increased sociological fidelity, its

"three-dimensionality." Mere attention to social reality does not confer novelistic status, not even in Bakhtin's inclusive definition. In fact, the dominant generic classification of

Lewis's novel has been "satire," particularly "Menippean satire."

Northrop Frye's definition of the form, which in its "short form [. . .] is usually a dialogue or colloquy, in which the dramatic interest is in a conflict of ideas rather than character" (39), seems particularly appropriate to The Childermass, as many critics have reiterated. Frye notes that a further characteristic of the Menippean satire is the

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"exuberance in intellectual ways, by piling up an enormous mass of erudition about his theme or in overwhelming his pedantic targets with an avalanche of their own jargon"

(39). Alan Munton cites Frye's definition in classifying the narrative (Munton,

“Reading” 121). Fredric Jameson argues that the works of the post-1926 period are all

"satires" (102). In his study of the affinities between Joyce and Lewis, Scott Klein sees a satire of Vico in particular (191), while David Ayers accepts the definition on some levels but rejects it on others (106). The dialogue form of the latter section of the book, and Lewis's prolific use of rare words and jargon throughout support Frye's definition.

The "conte philosophique," which is how the anonymous TLS reviewer described the book when it first appeared (53) and which is what Maurice Shorder defines as the record of a "process of disillusionment" caused by trying "to apply systems to the unsystematic realities of life" (16) is a category that also would apply. Texts also frequently considered

"contes philosophiques" include Candide and Gulliver's Travels, which also fit Frye's definition of Menippean satire.

Elaborating upon Jameson's description of the allegorical structure of Lewis's narrative (Jameson 66), Ayers writes that the switch in Lewis's style (and in The

Childermass) is that from a "humanistic narrative to that of a surface world of the visual mediated [. . .] by the quasi-allegorical, in which lies the difference between Lewis's satire and the novel, Modernist or Victorian, to which it is opposed" (Ayers 110). I agree with Jameson (and Ayers) that there is a self-conscious change in Lewis's narrative style in the post-1926 works, one which, as I have noted, Lewis made explicit, but I do not accept Ayers's description of the "Modernist or Victorian" novel as a humanistic narrative to which it is opposed. The second of Bakhtin's definitions of the novel, "the

101 radical change which it effects in the temporal coordinates of the literary image," helps particularize my objection to Ayers's distinction.

Lewis's comment about needing a new literary form after the General Strike of

1926 is a rare instance of a writer openly detailing what he perceives to be his own ideological motivations for his art. Though no more reliable than the testimony of a writer who professes to be completely uninterested in politics, nationalism, or any of the rest, these comments lend themselves to historicization. The fact that Lewis aggressively resisted historicization in his theoretical writings (Ayers 102) creates a tension between stated intention and actual effect. Bakhtin uses "radical change" to describe both the historical emergence of the novel and its continued evolution. For Bakhtin, the novel must continue to advance in the interpretation of history just as history itself progresses.

In fact, because of the restriction of "temporal coordinates," it must do so. Lewis, who was concerned with his ideological impact on the "few people who really matter in the whole affair" (Ayers 99), attempts something distinct in his representation of the "literary image"; and the earlier description of this representation as being "visual" and "mediated by the quasi-allegorical" captures both the formal innovation, in his representation of the time image, and the ideological, in his transformation of the political abstractions of his world into the realities of an afterlife.

The afterlife itself, comprising "time flats" outside of the "Magnetic City," is

Lewis's "zone of maximal contact" with contemporary reality. Ayers sees the work as a dystopia in that it rejects the very structural possibility for social change present in utopian vision and that it denies the utility of materialist and historical attempts to come to terms with the nature of existence (Ayers 106). The Menippean satire as described by

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Frye seeks to deflate certain local debates and arguments; in its more generalized "conte

philosophique" form, it denies the ability of systematic thought to represent reality. The

Childermass is inspired by these motives but also engages directly in a desire to instruct--

not purely by negative example--by transforming the narrative space into a "zone of

maximal contact" with the present.

The value of Bakhtin's elastic definitions is that they call attention to progressive

pressures on form exerted by changing historical circumstance. They also point to the fact

that the degree of "novelness" a given text has is proportional to the methodologies or

formal effects chosen by the writer. Questions of response and contextualization are

always complex, and I seek to reveal Lewis's attitudes towards the evolution of the

British nation-state and how his narrative choices reflect national anxieties and hopes.

The evidence of the reaction of contemporary reviewers and intellectuals to the work4 is

of obvious historical relevance, especially when, as in Yeats's case, they seem to be based

upon the same nationalist anxieties that motivate Lewis. The reactions of individual

readers, while nearly infinitely variable, mirror the process of artistic creation. There is a

symmetry between the processes that is unique to the "fictional" form. The previously

mentioned critical view that The Childermass dramatizes the arguments of Lewis's two

earlier philosophical and sociological works, The Art of Being Ruled and Time and

Western Man, ignores Lewis's plan to conceive of the works as a summa. It also does not explain the use of narrative form to repeat himself. Simplification for a different audience is not a satisfactory answer, as Lewis conceived of his audience as the elect.

4 Both W. B. Yeats and H. G. Wells praised the book. See Jeffrey Meyers's The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis (143, 157).

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This recognition that a different form was required to represent adequately the

historical forces Lewis sought to analyze is why The Childermass should be thought of as

a "novel" in Bakhtin's historical sense. It certainly has the elements of satire, and Frye's

definition of the Menippean genre seems especially apt. If, as Paul Edwards notes, the

narrative provides "exposure to the ways the modern states enforce ideological

oppression through the 'society of the spectacle'" and that this constitutes its "genuine

resistance to totalitarianism" (Edwards, Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer 324), then

the specifically narrative and novelistic experience thus attained differs in degree from

that of the non-narrative expositional form.

The argument that The Childermass only dramatizes Time and Western Man and

The Art of Being Ruled derives its considerable force from not only the development of

themes in the first part of the book, but also from the notably dramatic dialogue form of

the second. The history of the "realist" novel contains few examples of the narrative form

being broken up into a long play-form such as this, though interspersed elements are

more common; the "Circe" episode of Ulysses is a frequent comparison (Russell 57). The

change in narrative form may simply arise from expediency, as dialogue is most easily

written this way; and dialogue does begin to predominate. To further analyze this

narrative device and to explain some of the reasons why I think the text offers an

expansion on the arguments presented in the earlier books--an expansion only

communicable within the narrative form of the novel itself--I will discuss how the

transitional scenes between the earlier narrative and the dialogue show that Lewis is

beginning to engage in issues that transcend those offered in the previous texts.

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Satters first mentions the Bailiff, often taken to be the spokesperson for everything

in the "Time Cult" and modern politics in general that Lewis detests, early in the

narrative, just after Satters and Pullman's first encounter:

"Most! I told the old Bailiff off. He must have thought--He didn't seem to mind though as a matter of fact. It seemed rather to amuse him." At the word Bailiff Pulley withdraws into a hypnotic fixity of expression, as if something precise for him alone had been mentioned under an unexpected enigma.(CM 5)

The Bailiff is not mentioned again for nearly forty pages (CM 44), and Pullman's reaction

to the name signals his affinity to him. The Bailiff has become more real in Pullman's

consciousness, despite this step being neglected in the narrative, and is next mentioned in

the discussion of the "Bailiff's Paper," a survey apparently given to each new arrival.

The two questions that puzzle Satters in the survey are "Have you been inclined to

say--There is no Judgment and there is no Judge? What is your opinion at present on this

point? Is or is not?" and "State whether in life you were Polytheist, Pantheist, Atheist,

Agnostic, Theist, or Deist" (CM 45). Pullman advises Satters to answer "is" and "none of

these" to the questions with certainty, which is another indication of his familiarity with

the Bailiff. Satters begins to wonder at Pullman's change of identity:

Satters looks at Pulley, camped sphinx-like in front of him, with suspicion. This spaewife he has met is not the old Pulley. Not the Pulley he first supposed he was with. He has been deceived. It is Pulley, good old Pulley, and it isn't. At the start it was. (CM 45–46)

"Spaewife" suggests that not only has Pullman, through his identification with the Bailiff,

achieved seer-like powers, but also that he has become feminine as a consequence. When

Satters next reads the questionnaire, "whether you bring with you any subversive designs

upon the celestial state. If so, of what nature are those designs," Pulley's answer is "'put

that down, then,' rattles Miss Pulley, as quick as thought" (CM 48). Whether this is an

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instance of focalization on Satters' perceptions or a more general narrative comment is

difficult to determine (Lewis's narrative techniques present special challenges to many

narratological concepts.) For Lewis, the feminine is regarded as a sign of weakness,

malevolence, and decay, which are also all qualities associated with the Bailiff.

Pullman goes on to clarify some of the Bailiff's characteristics for Satters:

"The Bailiff encourages jokes," mildly expansive, he proceeds, warming to this congenial instruction. "If you want to get into his good books you will find that that's the way. He's really not so black as he's painted. Haven't you ever gone down there and listened to him? I mean for a whole morning, say? When I feel a bit under the weather I go there. He cheers me up remarkably. I was very surprised at first to find--you can hardly expect to find a sense of humor in such a person. He really can be extremely entertaining at times. He says himself that people come there as if he were a music hall." Pulley indicates the paper with his stick. "That particular question he expects you to take as a joke. He put it on account of that faction--you know that sort of bolshie crowd that lives in an enclosure away from the rest." (CM 48)

This is the first mention of the Hyperideans, the "classical" faction that is often taken to represent both Fascism and Lewis's endorsement of its creative force as a counterweight to the Bailiff. Pullman's reference to them as a "sort of bolshie crowd" is ironic. Readers are confronted by Lewis's experiments with time in the narrative. Pullman has grown into these memories through the development of his self; he is becoming a representative not of a character but of an ideology. The figure of the Bailiff, not yet met or described, draws Pullman to him through his narrative gravity.

After an interlude in which Satters' increasing frustration with Pullman is enacted in a sadomasochistic fantasy, Pullman diagnoses what has happened to him as hysteria and again invokes the Bailiff's authority to support his conclusions (CM 61). As Hugh

Gordon Porteus observes,

The mind, it would seem, is able to impose its own image on the frailest actual point. The whole process of vision is half-composed of such self-trickery. The imagination plays a very considerable part in the act of seeing. Such deceptions

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occur everywhere in ordinary life, just as they are the basis of modern "conjuring,'" and of much that passes for genuine magic. In The Childermass Mr. Lewis makes a very interesting use of the phenomenon: the characters create imaginatively out of the substance of their own needs and appentencies, all the furniture of their existence, changing it as their changing minds dictate. (80)

Satters is unaware of this mechanism of the afterlife, but there is also more to it than

Pullman realizes. Satters next reveals that he has only been there for ten days, about

which Pullman is skeptical. Pullman reminds him that, according to the Bailiff, Satters

shouldn't be alarmed that his reason's going, because he doesn't have any. A bit later,

Satters admits his fear of the Bailiff, to which Pullman responds

"You're not the first person to say that. He's the best-hated man anywhere I should say--in this world or out of it. I don't agree with you that's all--I like the beggar!"

"I know I can see that you do, there must be some good in him I have no reason: he just terrifies me."

"Lots of people say that. I don't experience anything like that at all I can say no more."

"Who is he has he ever lived?"

"How can anybody say: some say he is Jacobus del Rio some a Prince of Exile. I have heard him called Trimalchio Loki Herod Karaguez Satan, even some madman said Jesus, there is no knowing what he is. I believe he's just what you see, himself, he is the Bailiff, simply, I don't understand the insistence on something factitive behind him or why he is not accepted as he is." (CM 66)

The names are of interest. Jacobus del Rio was an abbot in Ghent during the Thirty-

Years' War, but Martín del Río was a well known Renaissance demonologist. Karaguez is a trickster-figure from Turkish folklore. Herod's slaughter of the innocents--"then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently enquired of the wise

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men" (Matthew 2.16)--was commemorated as the "childermas" and celebrated on

December 28.

The other figures are well known along similar lines, though the inclusion of

Trimalchio from Petronius's Satyricon seems to be a metacommentary on Lewis's chosen

genre. Pullman's insistence that the Bailiff has nothing "factitive" behind him suggests

that Satters was attempting to analogize him to something from his memory. For

Pullman, the Bailiff is a representation of force--in particular an ideological force, and his

understanding of the Bailiff suggests that he is an aspect of this force. Satters' narrative

function is increasingly becoming that of the naive outsider common in speculative

fiction: his constant questions about the world around him allow for Lewis both to give

exposition and maintain a narrative sequence.

Pullman and Satters now decide that they should see the Bailiff and his court and

make the necessary journey (CM 74). An important interlude on the way involves their transposition into what seems to be an seventeenth century landscape painting, which

David Ayers refers to as the "most brilliant in a series of bizarre incidents" (101).

Pullman uses this incident to describe his theory of their present existence, one which he says he learned after he got the "Bailiff-habit" (CM 93). He then tells Satters that he has

learned from the Bailiff that they are at present only the memories of what they once

were, and that they have to develop a "method" in order to come to terms with this. Their

journey to the Bailiff's court involves a recognition of the extreme relativity of their

present surroundings; they move back and forth in perceived time by travelling through

the "magnetic time flats."

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The entry to the "Yang Gate" and the Bailiff's court effects a shift in the narrative focus to a long description of the Bailiff's entrance (CM 123). It is no longer clear who is seeing the Bailiff, as Pullman and Satters now become participants who merge with the rest of the court. A roving camera occasionally focuses on Pullman and Satters in the audience as first one appellant is dealt with then another. The beginning of the shift in narrative occurs with the entrance of Hyperides. The Bailiff has been explaining the coextensive nature of space-time to the "Carnegie batch" when he is interrupted by "a voice so deep that it seems to fill the air with some thickening oil as it rolls out, begins tolling: a shudder of scandal at its alien contact shakes the assembly" (CM 149).

Hyperides's voice, which claims that the Bailiff speaks only of "time," is "a hail from a contrary pole." The Bailiff and Hyperides are "the oldest opposites in the universe, they eye each other: all this has been enacted before countless times, on unnumbered occasions all these things that they are now about to say have been uttered, under every conceivable circumstance" (CM 150).

At this point, the narrative becomes a dialogue and remains so, with interpolated descriptive sequences, until the end. Satters functions throughout as the naive character who needs things explained to him by the wiser Pullman, but his naivete also allows

Lewis to show his deep skepticism of all that Pullman--and the Bailiff--appear to stand for. Satters' slow realizations after listening to Hyperides are meant to recapitulate the progress towards understanding of Lewis's imagined reader. Satters is our guide to this underworld, for he is most like us in his lack of awareness. Having brought Satters (and us) to a basic glimpse of reality and growing skepticism towards his own putative guide,

Pullman, Lewis now leaves the audience passive before the Bailiff's court. Because of the

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narrative form, however, there is always difficulty in determining which voices should be

identified with the attitudes of the author. Though it seems that Hyperides will clearly

outline the arguments Lewis made in his earlier critical works, the narrative form's

constant questioning of meaning mirrors the ambiguities of reading. The novelistic form

of The Childermass is itself a comment on Lewis's theories of history and time, a

dialectical and self-critical artistic exploration.

Lewis prefaces Time and Western Man with an appeal to the "general reader"

(Lewis, Time vii). This preface is, even by Lewis's standards, an extraordinary document.

Lewis notes that

Everyday life is too much affected by the speculative activities that are renewing and transvaluing our world, for it to be able to survive in ignorance of those speculations. So every one, I think must be prepared to sink to the level of chronic tutelage and slavery, dependent for all he is to live by upon a world of ideas, and its manipulators, about which he knows nothing: or he must get hold as best he can of the abstract principles involved in the very "intellectual" machinery set up to control and change him. (Lewis, Time vii)

There is a uniform contempt for audience here. You, reader, must try as best as you are able, which is not terribly so, in order to understand what I am presenting to you; for otherwise you will continue to be manipulated by ideas you will never grasp. At least the reader's might be forgiven for thinking so, but it turns out that the argument of Time and

Western Man is much more subtle, even the opposite of what it first appears. As Paul

Edwards has noted, the "great dilemma of Lewis's thought about the personality" is how the "sacred prostitute" of the artist can remain uncontaminated by the "alien realities" of ideology. Edwards believes that Lewis's proposed solution to this problem in Time and

Western Man is a simplistic form of mysticism, an "Upanishadic belief that one cannot go behind oneself, as it were, and 'know the knower of the known'" (Edwards,

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Afterword 462). In The Childermass Lewis has engaged the problems of

contextualization, history, and the artist's representation of it in a way that goes beyond

the arguments presented in the critical texts.

Lewis's theory of the artist is dependent upon the artist being able to see things as

they are. The various time-philosophers--a category that he never defines rigorously--

seek to deny the ability of the mind to perceive reality in itself. If human cognitive

abilities are themselves subject to change over time--rather than the sensory data they

perceive--then the ability of the artist or anyone else to penetrate the veil of historical

conditions would be nonexistent. Lewis sees most of the time-philosophers (and their

artistic incarnations) as fighting a philosophical battle with Kant (Edwards,

Afterword 468). There are apparent connections between what might be called Lewis's rationalist epistemological leanings, and the later development of cognitive science as a research program. One of the founding documents of that discipline, Noam Chomksy's

"Review of Skinner," would have been appreciated by the fiercely anti-behaviorist

Lewis.5 At first glance, Lewis would seem to endorse a radically anti-historicist view of

artistic production. The idea that an artist is inextricable from his historical circumstance

motivates his polemic; and, if this is what is meant by historicism, Lewis is definitely

opposed: "in stepping directly into the world of art we shall fall upon a great deal of

politics, too, as elsewhere, or the reflection of politics. To attempt to get rid of these

politics, or shadow politics, is one of my reasons for undertaking this difficult analysis"

5 See the following passage from Time and Western Man: "In setting out to give even the briefest account of behaviourist theory, the first thing you become aware of is the slenderness of its material, and in the sense that it reduces itself to a simple negation, and to an account of a series of not very satisfactory experiments on dogs, chickens, and rats, and a few on men" (325).

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(Lewis, Time 23). At the same time, however, Lewis is working out a more complex, dialectical view of the relation of the artist to historical circumstance, a view which is more clearly articulated in the following draft passage from The Childermass:

Every theory whatever means dialectical [words indecipherable] another & ever technical invention even, must be regarded as the invention of certain types of mind. Every thing that offers, directly or indirectly, a picture of the universe or suggest implies or otherwise necessitates a certain response to it, its author must be personally responsible for; or it must at least be interpreted as an experience of that type of mind to which it belongs. There is no possible exception to this. Even an inventor of motor-car bodies or engines sees the world driving about in motor-cars to start with hopes[?] he invents or wants to ride about himself. Ruskin, even had he been a mechanical genius, would not have been interested in locomotives. Or if you like, he was not a mechanical genius because he was not interested in locomotives. All beauty, all ideas are the expression of a particular need. Their acceptance & popularization in no way depends upon their general desire for what they imply--generally the contrary--but on the will of the people who at the moment are the real powers in the community. (qtd. by Edwards, Afterword 500n17)

Jameson devoted a book-length study to Lewis because he found him the most radical of the modernist writers malgré lui, and passages such as this offer intentional evidence to support his claim. What Lewis sees as the "great man" theory of history, the ability of the true artist to be able to see through the time-veil of ideology, is a permutation of a dialectical theory of cultural production: ideas result through need, and power-relations determine their acceptance within a particular community. In art, as in everything else, Lewis writes, "the revolutionary impulse comes from the strongest individual" (Lewis, Time 26). Strength is defined here as expressive capacity. The artist does not statically transform the material of life and history, but instead is continually influenced by the commercial pressures of production. To give in to the relativism which seeks merely to represent rather than to transform--or which naively seeks to transform existing society by the influence of the representation without realizing the much stronger transformative pressure exhibited by society on that which seeks to transform it--is part

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of what Lewis was criticizing Joyce, Pound, and Stein for in Time and Western Man's

first section, "The Revolutionary Simpleton."

E. W. F. Tomlin notes that the "Punch and Judy" booth of the Bailiff is decorated

with a Maha-Yuga symbol, which in Vedanta doctrine signifies the complete cycle of

history (26). As both the sections in Time and Western Man and many separate passages

in The Childermass show, one of Lewis's many preoccupations was Joyce's Work in

Progress, which he spends much time satirizing (Klein 191). The primary object of

Lewis's ire in Joyce's writing was what Lewis perceived to be Joyce's attitude towards

history (and thus, time), particularly his appropriation of Vico in the work that would

become Finnegans Wake. Peter L. Caracciolo notes that one of Lewis's motivations for expanding The Childermass was the appearance of Joyce's work in transition (225).

Lewis's idea of the "revolutionary simpleton" was one who "accepts the eternal

recurrence, implicit, according to Lewis, in General Relativity, or the 'homology

principle' espoused by Spengler and Ezra Pound" (Edwards, Wyndham Lewis: Painter

and Writer 336). A narrative exposition of Lewis's argument about how the cyclical view

of history imprisons time comes as Satters and Pullman are making their way to the

Bailiff's court.

Suddenly, instead of the alien and desert landscape outside of the Magnetic City,

"there is a wide view stretching as far as the eye can reach across flattish country. It is

bounded by rain-clouds, they block the horizon. Then, there is snow" (CM 82). Satters

suggests that "it's like a picture," to which Pullman testily agrees before noting that "this

is nothing. This will not detain us long--though it's a bore--It is a large-scale

hallucination." The "time-hallucination," as he subsequently clarifies it for Satters, is

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something Pullman has encountered before and recommends that they must walk

through, not around. The time-sink is "musty" and "like a damp vault" (Lewis, CM 84).

As they continue to walk inside the landscape painting, as it comes to resemble, they find

that they are being observed by some upper-class figures--not the peons they saw from

their previous vantage point--standing where they once stood at the entrance to the time

sink. The entrance is now raised into a veranda enclosed by an iron railing. Satters

realizes that they are somehow in England, to which Pullman responds that "it's supposed

to be, no doubt." Who would suppose is unclear. As they proceed across the landscape,

they see and hail a ploughman and his horse. Both are immobile, flesh-like, though not of

the same substance of Satters and Pullman. The ploughman is described as having

features that "are in the frowning sleep of an occupation that requires no consciousness

above the animal" (CM 85), and a "painful lethargy" takes over Satters' limbs as he

stands and contemplates the scene.

The lethargy afflicting Satters does not seem to affect Pullman, and he says that it

is an effect of an "auto-suggestion," being "the opposite of insomnia" (CM 86). This

"fear-complex" that Pullman describes is a manifestation of his own anxiety about the relationship of the present to history and the mediating effect of time between them.

Satters next remarks upon the emptiness of the area, telling Pullman that his "voices sounds awfully far away" (CM 87). Pullman "glanc[es] with contempt at the naughty

lying alter-ego detected within Satters to whom he is signaling peremptorily that the

game is up." Pullman then asks Satters if he sounds as if he is speaking within a jug, and

Satters answers that he does not. The next line is "that's another one for the untruthful

child within who at last takes the hint." This line focalizes on Pullman's consciousness,

114 and the syntax helps explain something of what is happening here. Why is Satters described as an "untruthful child?" What does the phrase itself mean? An untruthful child is not particularly ill-equipped to take a hint about something, unless the implication is that the child is being disingenuous. The "naughty lying alter-ego" of Satters is far different than his preceding characterization as a simple buffoon, and it is not an accident that this greater malice and awareness come as they have entered the time-sink. Is it only idiom that compels Lewis to write "within who at last takes the hint" instead of "who at last takes the hint?" The "untruthful child within who" refers to the segmentation and regression of Satters' ego reflected in the temporal projection of "Old England" they have found themselves within.

Pullman officially recognizes this shortly thereafter, as he exclaims "the emphasis is on the Old!" in response to Satters' announcement that "this is Old England we're in"

(CM 87). Pullman refuses Satters' commonsensical spatial explanation of where they are—a bubble or contained space they are moving through--because he believes the true nature of the area is that it is a temporal location through which they travel psychologically. It is the relation of their minds to history that provides their sense of movement, movement not contained by exterior space. As they further encounter a cottage with a couple, she in "quilted petticoat and arch rustic bonnet" and he "in gaiters"

(CM 88), Pullman attempts to determine the exact era, noting that "It's quite likely. Late

Seventeenth Century. Several things seem to indicate it!" When Satters expresses his unease at moving through the timescape, Pullman answers "when you say you feel you're trespassing it's some infantile fixation, I suppose. It's the out-of-bounds feeling don't you know--it refers to a time when you were caught stealing apples, I expect. You feel the

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farmer's in ambush somewhere behind the hedge!" (CM 89). Pullman believes that the

process of time-travel thus described is primarily historical through the boundaries of the

individual consciousness, and the primitivism of the landscape recapitulates the

development of the individual psychology. Pullman also recognizes these impulses from

the ego, but he is able to resist them in a way, he implies, that Satters cannot.

Pullman, after noting again that "the air of Old England suits me--I should say the

Old English air," informs Satters that he was "evidently built for Time-travel" (CM 90).

He is "in his element, that's what it amounts to. It's most unexpected." Pullman, as an avatar of a Lewis's version of Joyce and of the Time-cult in general, "consciously develops his glee":

I know now what it is, one thing about myself I've got wise to that's puzzled me quite a lot from time to time and I'm glad to be privy to. I like other dimensions! That, I'm afraid, has to be taken as proven it's strange, isn't it? I feel as much at home as possible in all this it's childish, I feel ridiculously at home! I could howl for joy--why, I haven't the least idea. (CM 91)

Pullman's ecstasy increases until he feels that "this two-hundred-year-old air is like

an ancient vintage. I feel positively screwed. It is the identical nephalios methe--the

drunkenness that is abstemious I've caught it." "Nephalios methe" means a measure

without wine; "nephalios" is used in several places in the New Testament to denote

sobriety. Lewis seems to imply that the desiccation of time has, by deprivation, rendered

Pullman ecstatic, whereas it is only having a nepenthean effect on Satters, not a time-

man. An early reviewer, J. D. Beresford, noted that the "adventurers are liable to step into

other time systems in which they may encounter the appearance of frozen altitudes," and

he relies on an essentially spatial metaphor to describe what is a temporal and

psychological process. Only Pullman is immune to the effects of the "frozen altitudes"

because of his own degree of immersion in the time-sick present. Beresford also believes

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that The Childermass presents "evidence of greater art than Ulysses" (174), an opinion

not widely shared.

The problem of what might be called "conceptual anachronism" is addressed by

Lewis throughout The Childermass and in microcosm in this section. Pullman's caricature

of Joyce fades in and out due to authorial expediency, and Lewis exaggerates it towards

the middle of the time-sink episode. "I consider the father a side-show a mere bagatelle--

they are like the reason, overrated and not essential at all, that is the fathers--the male at

all if it comes to that" (CM 92) is a deliberately obtuse parody of "paternity may be a legal fiction" and Stephen's other meditations on the subject from Ulysses (170). Joyce's

Viconian explorations being published in transition, were, as I have noted, a source of

anxiety for Lewis; and the interrelationship of cyclical history, anachronism, and

historical process are all addressed in both the narrative technique of this scene and in its

dialogue.

Vico's theory of history was part of what Srinivas Aravamudan has called a

"taxonomy of anachronism [that] came on the heel of a sophisticated historicism that

investigated errors associated with chronology" (333). "Anachronism," particularly the

"conceptual anachronism" diagnosed by Herbert Butterfield in The Whig Interpretation

of History, is an inextricable feature of the time-cult practiced by Joyce, as Pullman's

comfort with the illusion of the past into which he and Satters have entered reflects. For

Butterfield,

It is nothing less than the whole of the past, with its complexity of movement, its entanglement of issues, and its intricate interactions, which produced the whole of the complex present; and this, which is itself an assumption and not a conclusion of historical study, is the only safe piece of causation that a historian can put his hand upon, the only thing he can positively assert about the relationship between past and present (19).

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Pullman's comments indicate that the personality can be transported to the past, that the past can be recreated out of assumptions derived from the present in sufficient detail to be able to generalize about conditions in the present, a type of historical thinking that

Lewis regards as an instrument of control. Lewis believes that the past is available--that historical truth is available-- to those who seek it, and that the idea that the present must always contaminate historical observations is a source of grave error. Outlining how such historical truth may be revealed is quite difficult, and I think the narrative argument of

The Childermass presents several examples of Lewis working through this problem in ways that expand upon the previous arguments in Time and Western Man. The key problem for Lewis's version of historicism is that of the nation and national consciousness, and this is most directly addressed in the second section of the novel, which is a long dialogue between the Bailiff and various interlocutors.

Lewis's most detailed expository comments on the relation of nationalism to literature and consciousness are in Time and Western Man. Lewis argues that Joyce has

"the most studied contempt for his compatriots--individually and in the mass--whom he did not regard at all as exceptionally brilliant and sympathetic creatures (in a green historical costume, with a fairy hovering near), but as average human cattle with an irish accent instead of a scotch or welsh" (Lewis, Time 77). He suggests that Joyce was indifferent--even hostile--to nationalism but not adverse to nationalist interest in his works and the political positions (or lack thereof) to be found therein. Joyce's perceived indifference to nationalism and the problems it represents was disturbing for Lewis:

"What makes the question [of nationalism] of capital importance is the problem set

118 throughout the world today by the contradiction involved in (1) a universal promotion of

'nationalism,' which seems to take, even in great cosmopolitan states, an ever more intolerant form, and (2) the disappearance of national consequences altogether as a consequence of technical progress" (Lewis, Time 77). Before discussing this idea further,

I should point out that Lewis's criticism of Joyce here is tendentious and not widely shared by subsequent critical work.6 The primary curse of modernity for Lewis is that while people have become ever more similar, they have "ideologically grown more separatist, and conscious of 'nationality'" (Lewis, Time 78). The notion of "technical progress" as being responsible for the eradication of individuating aspects of nationality-- those which Lewis approves of for various reasons--may provide some of the representational impetus for The Childermass's mimetic sympathies towards cinema and radio. Marshall McLuhan noted that the book "is concerned precisely with accelerated media change as a kind of massacre of the innocents" (16).

Lewis argues that "the time-fanaticism is in some way connected with the nationalisms and regionalisms which are politically so much in evidence, and so intensively cultivated seems certain--since 'time' is also to some extent a region, or it can be regarded in that light" (Lewis, Time 83). As I have outlined, the "time-sink" represents time as a region. The connections between "time-fanaticism" and nationalism that Lewis

6 The attacks that Lewis made on the works of his contemporaries, combined with his personality, did not make him terribly popular. Hemingway wrote that Lewis's "eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist" (Hemingway 109); Joyce noted in 1934 that Lewis and Pound might soon be among the last men in Europe still to admire "Hitler- Missler" (Selected Letters 369); the otherwise gracious Eric Hobsbawm described him as "a bad-tempered man with a notably retreating chin" (Hobsbawm 126); and D. E. Richards noted in her diary after a meeting with Lewis in 1953 that "like an old frog the feeling he leaves you with. He seems to be totally lacking the milk of human kindness" (Friendship Documented 43).

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adduces are presented as being a logical consequence of the inevitable situtatedness of

the "time-mind," to which Lewis offers an oppositional "non-nationalist, universal mind

(whose politics would be goethean, we can say, to place them, and whose highest

tolerance would approximate to that best seen in the classical chinese intelligence)"

(Lewis, Time 83). Lewis has sympathy for Confucian authoritarianism, and he later

criticizes Oswald Spengler for wanting to make "Buddha swallow his words, and

Confucius learn to play the ukulele" (Lewis, Time 223). Despite having such authoritarian sympathies, Lewis's doubts about the manipulative tendencies of contemporary democracies and his belief in the power of human reason to determine truth place him within the anarchist tradition of political thought. Alan Munton states that

Lewis's prime objection to capitalist democracy was that it "countenanced the politicization of art and thought" (“The Politics of Wyndham Lewis” 35), and an often- remarked tendency of fascism--a political tendency that much excited Lewis--is to aestheticize politics. Munton further argues that there is a difference between the politics of Lewis's prose works and those of his fiction (Munton, “The Politics of Wyndham

Lewis” 35); and the narrative form heightens Lewis's contradictions, an effect I will explore in the long dialogue with and characterization of Lewis's nemesis-figure, the

Bailiff.

The Bailiff's appearance and first comments heavily emphasize his hieratic nature and Oriental appearance, facts from which some commentators have plausibly inferred an anti-semitic bias.7 Immediately a retinue of Cockney clowns and harlequins attends the

Bailiff's court; their speech rendered phonetically. There are a number of important

7 See (Edwards, Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer 335) and (Ayers 104) for two examples.

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incidents immediately prior to the entrance of the Hyperideans, which signal both the

transformation into a dialogue-form and the beginnings of the overt philosophical debate

within the text. The Bailiff, addressing some recent dead who claim allegiance to

Andrew Carnegie, elaborates upon an anatomical metaphor of the area outside the

Magnetic City, saying that the dead are in a predigestive state and that the Yang Gate is

round because it symbolizes the anus through which they may pass. The assembled

crowd is subject to a mass hallucination, cinematic in its form if stronger in intensity.

They see a large bird circling the arena, which first appears as two because it has

something in its beak (CM 136). As the bird lands, "two ponderous sounds enter the

atmosphere along with the image. They are Bab and Lun, of the continuous Babber'ln.

The tumultuous name of the first giant metropolis echoes in the brains of the lookers-on.

Heavily and remotely its syllables thud in the crowd-mind, out of its arcanum--the Lon as the lumbering segment of the name of another nebulous city, and the mysterious pap of

Bab that is the infant food of Babel" (CM 136–37). Peter L. Caracciolo refers to this as

"mock-Joycean paronomasia" (220), which accurately describes Lewis's specious

etymologizing of "Babylon" but does not consider his reasons for wanting to separate the

Hebraic "Babel" from the Greek and Latinate version of the word, which is likely a

consequence of the anti-semitic portrayal of the Bailiff and the time-cult. Lewis

incorporated, as Caracciolo has shown, a large amount of the prolific turn-of-the-century

archaeological scholarship surrounding Babylonian fertility cults into The Childermass;

and he seeks to associate the Hyperideans with what might be termed, following the

Arnoldian analogy, the Hellenic aspect of the Magnetic City: "the Jews of the

lamentation should be somewhere upon the plain of the eclipse, gazing with passionate

121 envy from their latifundia upon this splendour, willing a jewish Babel, stirred up by their prophets, like an infant ravening for the moon" (CM 137).

The Bailiff mocks the appearance of the Hebraic Phoenix, which is described by

Lewis as having the physiognomy of a "solemn sly-eyed yiddischer child" (CM 142), and gives a preliminary lecture to the assembled Carnegie crowd about the nature of Space-

Time before being interrupted by the booming voice of Hyperides. This interruption begins the major stichomythia that engenders the switch to dialogue format in the narrative. Representational tensions of this transitional period between "a voice so deep it seems to fill the air with some thickening oil as it rolls out, begins tolling: a shudder of scandel at its alien contact shakes the assembly" (CM 149) and the beginning of the dialogue reveal Lewis's attitudes towards nationalism.

The oppositions between Hyperides and his followers are established in the outline, then detailed in the following dialogue. Not merely a summary, the prologue conversation provides a set of constraints within which the subsequent dialogue transforms its basic themes. The description from a distant level of focalization of the two is "they are the oldest opposites in the universe, they eye each other: all this has been enacted before countless times on unnumbered occasions all these things they are now about to say have been uttered, under every conceivable circumstance" (CM 150). This archetypal invocation places the narrator squarely in the camp of Hyperides, for whom there are eternals in human history and thought unmolded by temporal localities; and the critical consensus has been that Hyperides represents Lewis's own counterattack against the time-cult represented by the Bailiff. There is much to suggest that this is the case, certainly, but I also question that reasoning by showing how the representation in the

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dialogue section (and the exordium to it) manifests a narrative logic of incompleteness--

that the form is a dialectic properly speaking and that Hyperides is as much of a

dramatized figure as the Bailiff.

Hyperides next compares the Bailiff to a magician and claims that his "mechanical

subtlety" is "profounder than that of Protagoras that it took the greatest intellect of the

Greek World all his time to refute" (CM 150). The reference is not entirely clear;

Protagoras's relativism is debated in a fashion in the eponymous Platonic dialogue,8 but the phrase "man is the measure of all things" appears only in the Cratylus, Theaetetus, and Laws (386a; 152a, 160d, 161c, 166d, 167d, 170, 178b, 183b; 4.716c). The Bailiff answers him by appealing to the assembled crowd, claiming that he is most worried about their "time" (CM 151). There is a cut to Pullman and Satters, the latter mesmerized by

Hyperides and his followers whereas Pullman remains unimpressed, noting that "a man

called Dixon calls him the loud-speaker" (CM 152). Hyperides condemns the Bailiff's

"physics of 'events' and the cult of the 'dynamical' that substitutes for the antique repose

an ideal of restless movement" (CM 152).9 After the Bailiff responds with an appeal to

"Science," Hyperides, becoming more excited, remarks "that Time-factor that our

kinsman the Greek removed and that you have put back to obsess, with its movement,

everything--to put a jerk and a wriggle, a tie and a grimace, everwhere--what is that

8 Scholars debate the degree to which Socrates's position coincides with that of Plato in this dialogue in particular. See Michael Gagarin's "The Purpose of Plato's Protagoras" (133) for a representative example. 9 Lewis was advised by readers of the Time and Western Man manuscript to revise his criticisms of Einstein because of the experimental confirmation of relativity, and he manages to shift his attack primarily to Einstein's popularizers (such as Moszkowski) and the popular perception of relativity (Lewis, Time 138–43).

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accomplishing except the breaking-down of all our concrete world into a dynamical flux,

whose inhuman behests we must follow instead of it waiting on us" (CM 153).

The Bailiff responds with a mixed metaphoric attempt at humor: "we promise

nothing that we are not fully skilled to accomplish. We hand over the goods, as Joan of

Arc remarked when she kissed the cow! (heavy and spontaneous applause)." The usual phrase preceding this is "to each his own taste," and it usually a farm woman, not Joan of

Arc, who is the speaker. The Bailiff indicates that the time-cult, which he represents, has commercialized the religious impulse; the figure and associated energy of the visionary saint being cathected into a consumerist society, one dominated by a Protagoran relativism. The next accusation offered by Hyperides is that the Bailiff is "reducing all these creatures to the dead level of some kind of mad robot of sex" (CM 154). The

Bailiff's response, "what else is there but sex in life that is worth while, to be candid?"

elicits a remarkably misogynistic reply: "you mean that you refuse to admit, old despot,

that your human slaves shall have any more ambitious interest--oh, unbecoming in a

humble subject!--than the smelling and sucking propensities whose embodiments we see

here, all garnished and dressed for the monotonous feast in the sickly finicks of the

female pantry" (CM 155). Other than Pullman's brief hermaphroditic transformation

(which is more of a perception), there are no women in The Childermass. The Bailiff then intimates that Hyperides and his followers are homosexuals, a charge to which Hyperides responds by noting that the Bailiff is only interested in power and that sex is a means of exercising it, "like money [it] is merely a congenial instrument in its service" (CM 156).

The Bailiff, challenged again by the Hyperideans, steps down from his pulpit and addresses the crowd at their level: "'If you'd heard as much hyperidean invective as I have

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in my time you'd think me the most patient of men. What a chap what a man! I had his

head cut off once. But he was back here in a couple of months--after a short stay as an

apparition at his old home on earth. He was very indignant. He was superb. I wish you

could have heard him. Twice he has escaped from over there.' He jerks his head towards

the city" (CM 157). The "short stay as an apparition" refers to Hyperides being a force of

history, the spectre perhaps that was once and currently (for Lewis) is haunting Europe.

Furthermore, this revolutionary force the Bailiff admits cannot be exiled or defeated; he

is as much of a force as the Bailiff himself. The apparition thus introduces the figure of

haunting into the narrative structure. Lewis has detailed his theory of the relation of form

to content in Time and Western Man, claiming "there is an organic norm to which every form of speech is related. A human individual, living a certain kind of life, to whom the words and style would be appropriate, is implied in all utterance" (Lewis, Time 113); and

after the establishment of the interrelationship of the forces that the Bailiff and Hyperides

represent to each other and to Lewis's political representation of the actual world, the

form of the narrative itself has to change to accommodate them.

There is a brief interlude in which the focalization returns to Pullman and Satters.

The latter is depressed by the exchange, and he asks Pullman why Hyperides was so

quarrelsome. Pullman's response is "only to advertise himself! You can see the sort of

person he is. Look at the way he dresses! He's one of those people who must be in the

limelight else they're utterly wretched" (Lewis, CM 158). Satters notes that Hyperides

must be a "frightful poseur," which causes Pullman to snap at him because "it's what my

aunt calls me!" Pullman then admonishes Satters not to say "right ho" because it's

"stupid." A questioner begins, and Pullman and Satters revert to passive spectators. The

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"organic norm" that Lewis needs to represent his subject matter has changed. A pragmatic explanation of the beginning of the dialogue form is that Lewis simply felt it more convenient to write out the passages this way, but this does not explain why the remainder of the book has to be presented in dialogue format. Another explanation is that the dialogue format is inherently more objective, as it gives the illusion of not being mediated by a narrator. This theory is undermined by the long interpolated passages of narrative description that punctuate the remainder of the text.

I have argued that this "diremptive break," which is of the same type that Lewis was quick to reject in Georges Sorel's revolutionary theory (Ayers 132), is itself reflective of the fundamental historical schism that Lewis was seeking to represent. It has a mimetic function and is an adaptive narrative strategy. The emergence of the dialogue form in The Childermass signals a recognition of the need to incorporate a synthesis of these modes of perception in order to represent the post-General Strike political climate.

The aftereffect of this "revolutionary dud," as he called it, left Lewis much inclined to try to counteract the manufactured consensus he saw emerging in the forging of a British national identity, a consensus he sought to disrupt through his cooptation of mass media in narrative form. Since the novel form itself is bounded by the sociological imagination of the nation, as Benedict Anderson has argued at length (30), Lewis's formal experiments struggle to change the very historical processes they represent.

CHAPTER 5 OLAF STAPLEDON'S LAST AND FIRST MEN AND COSMIC HISTORICISM

An axiom of futurological speculation might be that the further the projection, the more constrained by the present it is. Some earlier periods of history are better known than later periods because of the uneven survival rate of documents, but the future is equally opaque. The speculative mind underestimates the combinatorial complexity of the near future and extrapolates broad trends from local details that will not support them.

If the writer has anticipated this problem, his vision may be purposefully didactic. I argue in this chapter that Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men demonstrates this instructive

tendency in futurological narrative. His theories of mind and time combine to warn the

present of the consequences of its predicted historical development. Finally, I examine

the local details of British nationalism that concerned and constrained Stapledon.

Olaf Stapledon, in his two-billion year vision of the future, Last and First Men, imagines a future generation of humanity that would be to the current one as a map is to a mountain (211). They have undergone autotelic evolution. The Third Men, some forty million years distant from 1930, begin to experiment with the germ plasm and amuse themselves with the creation of new life. In the beginning, their experiments only seem to be accelerated breeding. The Third Men, however, realize that the next logical step is to experiment upon and improve themselves. The vital art, as it was called, had developed complex aesthetic rules. One emerging theological fashion was that there was a gulf between two worlds, the current and the eternal, which could be bridged via the breeding of telepaths. Consequently, the Third Men realized that perhaps the physiological

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limitations of the human germ plasm could be overcome via radical selection. Those who

sought to breed "communicants" and those who wished to create the "great brains"

disagreed. Great wars raged. "The body politic was torn asunder" (Stapledon Last and

First Men 188).

The great brain itself required a mechanical heart and lungs, as it was only brain, eyes, and large six-fingered hands (the extra fingers having been a quality of the Third

Men, though I am not sure that polydactyly necessarily increases manual dexterity). With its increased cognitive capacity, the great brain soon mastered the behavioristic psychology of its creators, whom it tended as sheep.

The development of the digital computer and information theory led to many imagined attempts to construct and communicate with a intellectually superior life form. I will consider of these many "Golem XIV" from Stainslaw Lem's Imaginary Magnitude.

"Golem XIV" is an imaginary book, like all the rest introduced in the volume, that deals

with the history and conversational record of the so-called supercomputer. This machine

was designed by the U. S. military as a way of mechanizing its decision-making process.

Lem takes from Turing and Shannon the idea that a computer of sufficient complexity

would be self-programmable. In other words, it would be able to develop its own

intelligence. And with superior storage and retrieval facilities, it would quickly overtake

human cognitive capabilities. Golem XIV has no direct malevolent intent towards its

human creators, but Lem does take advantage of the experiment in perspective in ways

that bear direct comparison with Stapledon's. Lem's Golem, in one of the presented

lectures, describes the effects of DNA's metalanguage, its code, on the shape of human

history:

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I believe--in fact, I am sure--that you will release [the genie of omnicausation] bit by bit. I am not going to urge you to autoevolution, which would be ridiculous; nor will your ingressus result from a one-stage decision. You will come to recognize the characteristics of the code gradually, and it will be as if someone who has been reading nothing but dull and stupid texts all his life finally learns a better way to use language. You will come to know that the code is a member of the technolinguistic family, the causative languages that make the word into all possible flesh and not only living flesh. (163)

Lem's discussion seems indebted to Jacques Monod's Chance and Necessity and

also seems to have parallels with the gene's-eye view of Richard Dawkins's The Selfish

Gene. Even without the benefit of the discovery of the genetic code, however, Stapledon also has his mechanical creation discuss the limitations of its substrate in terms of a universal code. Stapledon's great brains create artificial languages for the purposes of concealment, as it least as it is relayed by the narrator, but they could equally be for the possibility of advancement. Another quote from the Golem's same lecture invokes the venerable Eskimo-snow canard: "the vocabulary of Evolution is like the Eskimos' vocabulary--narrow in its richness; they have a thousand designations for all varieties of snow and ice, and consequently in that region of Arctic nomenclature their language is richer than yours, though this richness implies poverty in many other realms of experience" (164). There are two likely interpretations of this passage. The first is that

Lem is simply unaware of the falseness of this strong claim for linguistic relativism, which greatly exaggerates its usual form. Second, and more likely, is that Lem is deliberately using hyperbole to show the limitations of the computer's reasoning. It is an interpretation of the world suitable to its own prejudice.

The great brain of Stapledon's novel conducted intricate archaeological, cosmological, theological, and ethical queries, answering each of the perennial human questions to its satisfaction. At the same time, it used a divide-and-conquer strategy with

129 respect to his human flock, creating a diverse bureaucracy to systematize and record the results of his experiments. But they were inscribed in an artificial language of its devising, and each scholar was only able to understand a small fraction of the great brain's total knowledge. The possibilities of a synthetic knowledge as opposed to the chaos of hyperspecialization are recognizable from the intellectual debates about the reducibility of knowledge and positivism that were very prominent when Stapledon was writing.

The Third Men's obsession with harmony and music as applied to their breeding aesthetics and the great brain's qualitative leap in cognitive ability required to synthesize existing knowledge are strongly reminiscent of the far more local future projection of

Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. The Castalian culture, centered on the synthetic glass bead game, whose origins are musical, looks with tremendous disdain upon what they refer to as the early twentieth century's "Age of the Feuilleton," a kind of generalized intellectual miscellany caused by the failure to perceive the connections between spheres of knowledge previously thought separate.1 In order to be able to make these necessary connections, the great brain literally required new organs. They realized that, even after winning various skirmishes with the rebellious sensitives of the Third Men population, their current mentality was stagnant, the source of that stagnancy was organic, and to transcend it would require the creation of a new species. The sensitives bred by the Third

Men relied upon, as did the Great Brains, germ plasm imported from the conquered

Martian races, who communicated via radio waves. The narrative suggests that the sensitives in their isolated culture only are able to communicate with their unconscious

1 See the first section, "The Glass Bead Game: A General Introduction to Its History for the Layman" (7-44).

130 fantasies. After a prolonged war against the remnants of the sensitives and rebellious elements among their tenders, the great brains realize that they must create new life to advance.

"The activity of an artificial machine, certainly, is purely mechanical; yet it is a case of 'external teleology'; but this simply means that the form of the machine is to be explained by referenced to another and internally teleological system, namely, the engineer" (Stapledon "Ethics" 245). This passage, from an essay adopted from

Stapledon's dissertation and first book, A Modern Theory of Ethics, is part of a larger argument that the good is part of the fulfilment of purpose, a purpose inhering within each object and manifest psychologically. This is a complicated philosophical position.

Leslie Fiedler suggested that three chapters of Stapledon's book "contain images and insights that strain the limits of philosophical discourse" (47), an opinion apparently not widely shared by Stapledon's contemporaries, as his academic career in philosophy faltered.

Stapledon argued for a type of substrate dependence in his systems of ethics and in

LFM that is of considerable interest to the later artificial intelligence debate, and it is also notable how easily much of the above description would fit into contemporary narratives of genetic engineering, with the substitution of "DNA" for "germ plasm." Eugenics fascinated Stapledon his entire life. He published a short article in his boarding school alumni newspaper entitled "The Splendid Race" while an undergraduate at Oxford that opens, "Columbus found a new world; but Francis Galton found a new humanity" (145).

Galton, not Darwin, comes in for this praise because it was he who has discovered, according to Stapledon, the principles of human hereditary breeding through statistics.

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The key goal of this autotelic evolution is intelligence augmentation.2 What more

concerns Stapledon here, however, as it continues to disturb the contemporary inheritors

of Galton's mantle, is not the improvement of human potential through selective

breeding, but rather dysgenia. Some marriages, Stapledon observes, should be regarded

as a kind of incest (147) if they involve families with hereditary moral weaknesses.

Already in his thought there is a readiness to recognize morality and its lack and ascribe it

to a purely materialist origin--namely the germ plasm of combining generations.

It is hardly fair to make much of anyone's undergraduate writings, as I suspect most

who have retained them would agree. Still there is a remarkable consistency in

Stapledon's interest in and thoughts about eugenics throughout his intellectual life. Many

of the most prominent intellectuals of his culture also regarded eugenics as a fascinating

and wholly respectable subject, of course, with Keynes being perhaps the most well

known. Aside from religious opposition, it took the horrors of Nazi medical experiments

and racial purity policies to turn Western scientific and public moral opinion against the

practice, and the psychometric industry has almost never waned. A phenomenon which

interests many at present is the "Flynn effect": an inexplicable general rise in IQ.3 This

seemingly counterintuitive psychometric development would lend itself to a teleological

interpretation consistent with Stapledon's ideas, but it was not observed or expressed until

2 Two of Stapledon's later books, Odd John and Sirius, deal with human and canine intelligence augmentation, respectively. Stapledon wrote that the latter "originated in Waddington's story of experimentation on rats," which Robert Crossley suggests must refer to Waddington's article in Nature "Some Biological Discoveries of Practical Importance," which argued that hormone injections could stimulate brain growth and hence perhaps intelligence in rats ("The Idea" 38, 38 n24). 3 See J. R. Flynn's "The Mean IQ of Americans: Massive Gains from 1932-1978."

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considerably after his death, though he maintained a considerable interest in paranormal

research, specifically in its quasi-scientific forms, throughout his life.

The European war which Stapledon envisions (with an accuracy reminiscent of

Brigadier Pudding's Things that Can Happen in European Politics from Thomas

Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow [77]) starts with an "idle and neurotic Englishwoman in the south of France, craving the embraces of a 'cave man,' [who] had seduced a Sengalese corporal in her own apartments" (LFM 5). This was no great matter until later, when the

corporal grew bored, the Englishwoman accused him of raping her. In Stapledon's

imaginary politic, the racial tensions of the black man attacking a white woman are

magnified by the fact that he was a colonial possession of the hated French, with whom

tensions had been high after France had conquered continental Europe after a short war

with Italy. The subsequent details of Stapledon's imagination of the near future I will

examine in detail in later sections, as they present in microcosm his ideas about both

political present and the far future. Race continues to be significant: after the chaos of the

first war, the world will become Americanized, and the Americans will develop a "cult of

the Negro spirit" (LFM 67), which it uses to compensate for its history of slavery.

Though Stapledon does not specifically link this sociological observation to the racial

tensions that precipitated his imagined great European war, he continues to discuss the

effects of racial categorization on the subsequent development of humanity.

After the great European wars, United States and China dominate a bipolar world

order. Stapledon contrasts a fundamentalist American capitalism with a Confucian

authoritarianism, arguing that the former in most cases treats its workers better at the

expense of a lack of insight into the true nature of things. In one of the text's most overtly

133 symbolic scenes, two planes converge by night on a remote Pacific island, depositing a representative of each civilization for a secret rendezvous. Having agreed that world financial interests were threatened by the continuing conflict, each agrees that the current systems of government should be overthrown and replaced with a World Finance

Directorate (LFM 48). As they are negotiating the spoils, there "occurred one of those incidents which, minute in themselves, have disproportionately great effects. The unstable nature of the First Men," the narrator adds, "made them peculiarly liable to suffer from such accidents, and especially so in their decline" (49). A "bronze young smiling woman," the "delicious daughter of Ocean," appears on their island. The Chinese, more sensual in Stapledon's orientalist imagination, appreciates her considerable charms and begins to seduce her to the best of his ability. The reverted American Puritan, on the other hand, is scandalized by such nakedness, especially as there is important business to be conducted. Of uncertain provenance, the undine claims to be have been the descendant of the many races of humans who have scattered their seeds on this remote island and to have been raised by a hermit who retreated there at the end of his two-hundred year life.

She queries each conspirator, while growing increasingly dismissive of the Chinese official. Astonished to learn that the Americans worship energy where the Europeans worshipped love, she asks the American businessman to explain his religion: "God is the all-pervading spirit of movement which seeks to actualize itself wherever it is latent. God has appointed the American people to mechanize the universe" (52). Both enraptured and perplexed, she decides that she has found a worthy mate at last and embraces the

American businessman and his dominance of the World Finance Directorate. The

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Daughter of Man, as she calls herself, with her dark skin and Asiatic features enrages the puritanical population of the United States when their new leader reveals her:

But by a stroke of genius the President saved both himself and the unity of the world. Far from denying the charge [i. e., that he had mated with a "coloured woman"], he gloried in it. In that moment of sexual triumph, he said, a great truth had been revealed to him. Without the daring sacrifice of his private purity, he would never have been really fit to be President of the World; he would have remained simply an American. In this lady's veins flowed the blood of all races, and in her mind all cultures mingled. His union with her, confirmed by many subsequent visits, had taught him to enter into the spirit of the East, and had given him a broad human sympathy such as his high office demanded. (55)

There are number of details operating here in Stapledon's assessment of the metaphysical importance of Americanism. To what extent is the contrivance of the plot device of the

Daughter of Man an aesthetic flaw as opposed to a symbolic truth? Already at this point in the narrative, Stapledon has projected far into the future. The narrative itself is being communicated from distant eons. This distance renders events unavoidably symbolic.

How did the Daughter of Man survive? Where was this island located? Did it sustain a native population beyond the hermit and the apparently steady supply of pirates and the shipwrecked? Who was her mother? Her title obviously recalls the "Son of Man," and she seems numinous. Genetic evidence also supports Stapledon thinking of her as an archetypal figure; he deleted several manuscript passages describing her individual personality (Smith 267).

Since the event as recalled has a clear narrative and symbolic purpose but is literally incredible, is the reader to assume that this mythic account is shorthand for a long series of geopolitical developments? The global sweep of the rest of the narrative would seem to belie this, instead indicating a magnified instance of future history. A more practical explanation is that Stapledon's art and imagination are simply lacking. The most likely way to assess this would be to compare his treatment with similar narratives

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and see if they also are guilty of such apparent lapses in judgment. With Last and First

Men, however, there is nothing that is directly comparable to the scope of its future

historical imagination.4 This complicated aesthetic problem can be answered to some

degree by paying specific attention the types of intellectual problems that Stapledon was

engaging in the writing of this scientific romance.5

Robert Shelton has observed that Stapledon's primary intellectual influences when

this work was composed were the emergent evolutionists: C. Lloyd Morgan, Samuel

Alexander, C. D. Broad, and Alfred Whitehead ("Moral Philosophy" 8). After the

publication of his dissertation, Stapledon corresponded with Morgan (Crossley Speaking

170) whose 1922 Gifford Lectures were published under the title Emergent Evolution.

Though the ideas circulated by these writers are complex and are in many ways

precursors to the current study of nonlinear dynamic systems and general complexity

theory, I will here discuss one important aspect of their arguments.

An emergent category is one that has properties that could not be predicted from

any information contained in prior configurations. The fact that emergence may occur at

some given point is distinct from describing the properties of that emergence, which

result from a transcendent moment of self-organization, or nisus, to use Samuel

Alexander's technical term borrowed by Morgan.6 In "Thoughts on the Modern Spirit,"

4 Two works of future history by scientists that were published when Stapledon was working on the book have been pointed to as possible influences: J. D. Bernal's The Word, the Flesh, and the Devil (Rabkin 246) and J. B. S. Haldane's "The Last Judgment" (reprinted in Possible Worlds) (McCarthy Olaf Stapledon 32). 5 See Brian Stableford, Scientific Romance in Britain, 1880-1950. 6 See Alexander's Space, Time and Deity. For Morgan's use of the word "nisus," see Emergent Evolution (11). Reuben Albowitz notes that the "theory of emergence caused a minor philosophical furor between 1926 and 1930" (1). For a recent survey of the concept, see Timothy O'Connor and Hong Yu Wong, "Emergent Properties."

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unpublished during his life, Stapledon wrote "there is then at least some reason to think

that in this unique ecstasy of disinterested admiration something is apprehended which is

only to be attained by an 'emergent' activity of developed minds" (162). The disinterested

admiration in question is what Stapledon terms an intellectual sensation that is unknown

to primitive experience, the "detachment not merely from private desire but from the

whole endeavour of humanity" (162).

We must assume that the controlling narrative intelligence of Last and First Men possesses similarly emergent intellectual habits and disciplines far removed those of the readers in the present. Stapledon of course is only imagining what these advances might be, not recreating them himself, but it does suggest that the overt symbolism of the Last

Man's account is purposeful and reflects an account of far more and complex matters retrofitted so as to be able to be understood by those whose minds were not yet capable of it.

Another characteristic of emergent thought that interested Stapledon was its apparent teleology of social consciousness. If the primitive mind was unable to engage in abstract speculation upon the human condition, the current human mind might equally be unable to grasp historical speculation about the diachrony of consciousness. Stapledon had a lifelong interest in telepathy, and it features prominently in Last and First Men

(Branham 252). The term was invented by F. W. H. Myers to describe the

communication of thought or feeling (the lesser-known teleaesthesia) at a distance

(OED). The emerging mass media, particularly in radio form, also had a strong influence

upon Stapledon's attitudes towards telepathy. Its disembodied voices seemed to be as

effective an organ of centralized control as had ever been created. Stapledon despised

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John Reith, head of the BBC, for his Toryism (Fiedler 196). He also gave a radio address warning of the dangers of radio and other mass media for propaganda purposes (Fiedler

208-09). The Second Men, who have arisen from the fusion of the feminine principle and the worship of energy in Stapledon's dialectic, yearn to achieve a racial unity extending through telepathic communication (127).

The Second Men's encounter with the Martians is their crisis. Because of the difference in planetary dynamics, life has evolved in a far different form on Mars. Rather than each individual Martian organism's having a central nervous system, there is a collective organization of the species enabled by their sensitivity to "aetherial vibrations."

The typical Martian organism "was a cloudlet, a group of free-moving members dominated by a 'group-mind'" (136). Thus, the Martians could serve as free-floating and self-organizing "mobile 'wireless' stations" (136). The Martians' communication technology reflects their alien and malignant-seeming system of cultural values. Also equally significant in that context, however, is Martian reliance on decentralized communication. Stanislaw Lem's essay on LFM notes that Stapledon correctly perceived that human language would be incapable of articulating the nature of such a panpsychozoic community (6).7 The Martians regarded the extermination of other races as a sacred duty (LFM 145) and worshipped precise configurations. Diamonds, being one of the most perfect molecular forms, were venerated by the Martians, who were unable, in their invasion of Earth, to understand why they were being used to decorate cattle-- their best guess at the Second Men's function. The Second Men, for their part, were

7 Lem's novel Fiasco presents his most extended analysis of this idea.

138 unable to perceive the Martians at all, at least initially. The Martian organism displayed an alien form of the emergence of intelligence, and it shows Stapledon's recognition of the contingent nature of evolution.

Subsequent parts of the narrative detail how the Martians were unknowingly invaded, how they retaliated, and how the Second Men finally eradicated them. They were not completely eradicated, however, as their telegraphic cells were incorporated into future generations of humanity, lending them the telepathic ability that they had yearned for originally. The final section of the book continues this examination of the consequences of communication-at-a-distance by describing the motivation of the communicating intelligence from the distant future. The time of men has run out, and they are seeking ways to re-seed the cosmos with their stock. The narrative itself is part of this dissemination, perhaps the key part. Of the two temporal modalities of their plan, one concerns the future and one the past. The Second Men plan to use radiation to emanate biophilic configurations to distant planets and stars. An idea similar to this seems to be discussed in Lem's His Master's Voice, in terms of the neutrino transmission which has a carefully hidden biophilic property. In language which may allude to the parable of the sower, Stapledon writes "But if any of this human seed should fall upon good ground, it will embark, we hope, upon a somewhat rapid biological evolution, and produce in due season whatever complex organic forms are possible in its environment"

(LFM 294). Stapledon does not always seemed to have realized the contingent nature of biological evolution, however, and here its conceptual framework would have contrasted with his more teleologically oriented thinking. More curious is the Last Men's interest in changing the past: "We have long been able to enter into past minds and participate in

139 their experience. Hitherto we have been passive spectators merely, but recently we have acquired the power of influencing past minds" (294). After noting that this would seem to be impossible, they continue, "now it is true that some past events are what they are irrevocably; but in certain cases some feature of a past event may depend on an event in the far future. The past event would never have been as it actually was (and is, eternally), if there was not going to be a certain future event, which, though not contemporaneous with the past event, influences it directly in the sphere of eternal being" (294-95).

Causality, then, can be linked across great sections of time, and the past can hold the key to future events once the relation between them is determined, as it can once you have sufficient information to provide the necessary and relevant context.

Stapledon's ideas here rely on a theory of consciousness which assumes that it is a continuous property of certain organizations of matter. "Our historians and psychologists, engaged in direct inspection of past minds, had often complained of certain 'singular' points in past minds, where the ordinary laws of psychology fail to give a full explanation of the course of mental events" (295). This passage suggests that the science of psychological causality that the Last Men have developed is incomplete by its very nature and must always remain so. Since there has been a teleological movement towards the integration of minds physically, there is now a destined evolution towards their composition temporally. There are physical limitations on the complexity of a physical brain, as Stapledon was aware ("The Remaking of Man" 168). His conceptualization of these limitations and of possible methods of transcending them was possibly influenced by his reading of J. W. Dunne. Crossley's biography reports that he read Dunne's popular and influential An Experiment with Time in 1927 (Speaking 190), and he wrote a review

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of Dunne's later work, The New Immortality. Fiedler suggests that Stapledon was clearly

influenced by Dunne and says little on the topic in the final chapter that Dunne did not

already cover (58).

A good overview of Dunne's intellectual temperament is provided by the responses

he provided to his critics in the third edition of An Experiment in Time, published in

1939. Responding to Wells, who had complained that Dunne's description of "English

materialism" requiring the "eternal extinction" of every individual was a question-

begging and generally puzzling phrase, Dunne wrote that Wells must have never heard of

"Nietzsche, the arch-apostle of that brand of materialism which permeated German Court

and military circles before the war of 1914" (213). Leaving aside this curious bit of

intellectual history, Dunne then goes on to state that Nietzsche's idea of the eternal return

was based upon certain configurations of atoms repeating themselves over a sufficiently

long period of time. With more than a dash of impatience, Dunne states that "Nietzsche

was completely ignorant of science and did not know that the Second Law of

Thermodynamics expressly forbids any such repetition of a past state of the material

word" (214). Dunne's emphatic intolerance for metaphysical argument may have

contributed to his popularity. Though he touches upon an important debate about the

interpretation of the Second Law, the statistical interpretation was scientifically accepted

when he wrote. Though an exact repetition would increase entropy, those

indistinguishably close would occur many times over a sufficiently long period of time.8

Contrary to Fiedler, I believe that Stapledon's treatment of the paradoxes of future minds communicating with the past is treated in both a briefer and more sophisticated

8 I am grateful to statistical physicist Cosma Shalizi for clarification of this point.

141 way than Dunne's. J. B. Priestley, who described Dunne as "the regular old officer type crossed with a mathematician and an engineer" (ODNB), was one of several writers to employ his ideas in a fictional treatment. Dunne's intellectual style reveals much of the stereotypical engineering mindset, especially as it tirelessly pursues logical implications without regard to metaphysical plausibility or nuance. The book begins by recounting several of Dunne's dreams which seem to involve premonition. Several of them involve predicting the contents of newspaper headlines, and he is worried by and then dismisses what he calls "identifying paramnesia," the false idea that something had been encountered before, perhaps in a dream (44-45). After further deductions and ruminations upon his odd experiences, Dunne suggests that dreams are equal parts of the past and future mixed together (59). The technical exposition of his philosophy of serialism is quite involved. Its main ideas are taken from relativity and completely ignore quantum mechanics. Dunne starts with his folk psychological introspection about the network of associations or "memory-trains" that everyone has. One thing will remind you of another, etc. From this, he proposes that each individual mind is part of a perceiving essence of which it is a differentiated species. The associational network links all things, but each individual observer only has a limited perception of it at any given time because of the fog of consciousness. In dreams and in other moments of distraction, the fog can be lifted.

Since the network of past events is isomorphic to an extent with memory, it is more likely for past experiences to be recalled from dreams, but it is just as probable for the much more difficult to ascertain future experiences to be mingled within them as well.

Only some observers lucky enough to remember and match their perceptions of future

142 events will notice the effect, through careful recording of dreams and comparison of them with an visually paradigmatic and ever-changing medium such as a newspaper. This aspect of Dunne's experiment is fictionalized in John Buchan's A Gap in the Curtain. His ideas lend themselves to the analysis of the more liquid medium of television. Dunne develops this model through another dimension of time which maintains endurance, or persistent states. It would seem to function much like the mind of God, but in a secular context.

Stapledon's Last Man reflects on return and recurrence:

Everywhere within time's cycle there is an endless passage of events. In a continuous flux, they occur and vanish, yielding to their successors. Yet each one of them is eternal. Though passage is of their very nature, and without passage they are nothing, yet they have eternal being. But their passage is no illusion. They have eternal being, yet eternally they exist with passage. In our racial mode we see clearly that this is so; but in our individual mode it remains a mystery. Yet even in our individual mode we must accept both sides of this mysterious antinomy, as a fiction needed for the rationalizing of our experience. (LFM 282)

The indvidual mode and the racial mode have a perceptual difference similar to Dunne's observer-distinction. The racial mode would seem to invoke an idea similar to Jung's collective unconscious, which Dunne does not seem to have been aware of and whose structuring function he likely would have regarded with skepticism. Instinct transmitted via heredity (and the mechanism of the genetic code itself) is a type of racial memory.

The Last Man here is developing an idea of temporal homology, that an event once occurred does not repeat itself but exists in perpetuity due to its enforced similarity in a chain of contingency.

Optimality theory in contemporary linguistics argues from the principle that the language faculty is, in a technical sense, perfect. Noam Chomsky was responsible for the change in linguistic understanding which led to the development of this idea, and both he

143 and skeptics found antecedents in the work of the Modistae, who believed that human languages were imperfect reflections of the perfect divine language (an idea with antecedents in Genesis, clearly). Literary theorists such as Mark Turner have argued that there is a homology between narrative and grammar, and Stapledon adapts Dunne's ideas about the perfectability of the associational network of the prime observer of consciousness into an argument for the apparent optimality of narrative in LFM.

A consequence of both Dunne's and Stapledon's ideas is that human consciousness will always distort the truth it can perceive, a central tenet of both Judeo-Christian metaphysics and philosophical idealism. Stapledon differs from Dunne, however, in that he regards the narrative property--the ability of the mind to impose order on the chaos of sensory impressions--has the ability to transcend its inherent imperfection through its inevitable symbolic nature. Stapledon uses the rhetorical trope of anachronism, or temporal displacement, to demonstrate this in the last section. Anachronism is inevitable in a narrative that seeks to recount the two-billion year future of humanity through the consciousness of one of its last descendants speaking to the present, because the nature of the events described in the future and the language used to describe them must inevitably be changed to fit the present understanding. The problem of writing history so that it is something more than merely the history of the present is amplified tremendously by writing the history of the future. Lem accuses Stapledon's rather primitive-seeming depiction of the Chinese culture of the twenty-first century of being "anachronistic"

("Stapledon's" 275) but in a different sense. Lem means that Stapledon's grasp of the present is lacking and that his projection of the recognizable future is thus based on outdated conceptions. The inevitable anachronism, however, results from the attempt to

144 view the history of the future as the present could see it. It mirrors in a very direct way the mechanism that Dunne thought was being activated through dreams.

Robert Waugh examines the dialectic patterns through which Stapledon develops his historical projections, arguing that LFM is organized into the image of a "spiral"

(208). The logarithmic spiral is one of the recurring sequences in nature which, like the

Fibonacci sequence, is used as an example of the archetypal or inevitable patterning of physical processes. Waugh quotes Aquinas's Summa Theologicae: "We understand the essence of God to the degree that it is represented in the perfection of creatures" to substantiate this point (217). Since the spiral is cyclical without being repetitive, Waugh uses it to describe the narrative structure of LFM. Historical change occurs within a regular pattern that can be determined mathematically but remains unbounded. There are homologies in the curves of the spiral which correspond to the laws of historical development and transcendence, what Stapledon sees as the dialectic process of history.

Waugh argues that the spiral signifies both the mathematical repetition and regeneration of universal pattern (which recalls the idea of fractal structure--Waugh also notes that

Jacob Bernouilli has "Eadem mutata resurge" ["I will arise again changed"] inscribed on his tombstone [213]) and the doctrine of conation or volition which Stapledon wrote about in A Modern Theory of Ethics. Bendetto Croce regarded Giambattista Vico's cyclical theory of history as a spiral, a conclusion disputed by Pitrim Sorokin, among others, who argued that the spiral form imposed a teleology upon the goal-less Viconian cycles that they did not possess (Sorokin 35). Stapledon's conception of the present did require teleology, a teleology made inevitable through narrative extrapolation.

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Fellow science fiction writers Stanislaw Lem and Gregory Benford, starting from directly opposed political perspectives, agree that the opening section of Stapledon's imaginary history is the worst part of the book.9 Certainly, Stapledon got the facts of the near future spectacularly wrong. He was wrong in an interesting way, however.

Furthermore, the details how exactly he was wrong constrain his subsequent interpretation of world-historical events. Patrick A. McCarthy has noted that Stapledon's cosmic perspective is indebted to early twentieth century astronomy and physics (246).

How did this cosmic perspective translate into a perception of political reality in 1928 and 1929 when Stapledon was writing?

In the beginning of the book, from the Last Man's perspective, Stapledon describes the First World War as resulting from a difference in temperament between Latin France and Nordic Germany, where each side believed that it alone stood for world civilization

(LFM 2). After the end of the war, Stapledon declares that Germany had become the

"stronghold of Enlightenment" (3). In retrospect, it is difficult to think of Weimar

Germany this way, but Stapledon was looking ahead past the twenties when making this statement; and he does not give the chain of reasoning that leads to the conclusion. For reasons of national pride, the first war of the coming era is between France and Italy.

Stapledon has this to say about Mussolini and fascism: "The whole movement was engineered chiefly by a man whose genius in action combined with his rhetoric and

9 Benford writes that "virtually everything he says about America and Germany is startlingly off base" and that his Marxism was the one "irrational faith" he retained his whole life (ix, x), and Lem suggests that Stapledon would be much more respected today had he excluded the specific details of his near-future prognostications, which of course completely fail to predict the rise of fascism (275). It is worth noting here that Stapledon inexplicably does not have an entry in the recently released Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

146 crudity of thought to make him a very successful dictator. Almost miraculously he drilled the Italian nation into efficiency" (4). Plausibly enough, Italy, hungry for French- controlled African territory, initiates a war. The French, numerically superior, beat them back, and Italy sues for terms.

After the racially charged incident involving a Sengalese corporal and an English lady, war breaks out between England and France. After generalized aerial bombardment, a member of the Cabinet proposes sending a message to the French saying that, although they have the material and will to retaliate against this bombing of their country, the horror of it has made them all realize that they are one people with two different national spirits and do not need to slaughter one another. Somewhat improbably, this message is leaked throughout the country and finds great resonance everywhere, though the as-of-yet undamaged industrial North is still more eager for revenge. The French hear the message of peace and are also moved, but a straggling bomber ends up killing a beloved princess; and peace is averted yet again. Though a peace party had ascended in France, the subsequent British bombardment destroys them, exhausts Britain's own war-fighting capacity, and leaves both sides along with the rest of Europe in complete ruin. After the downfall of the two countries, which have contributed most to the rational worldview, according to Stapledon, Europe is now dominated by Germany, with its "romantic temperament" (13). The Russians were too prone to self-contemplation, having too much of the mystical temper. Stapledon suggests that communism, with its insistence on materialism, was foreign to the Russian national mind and thus could not persist. How the previously described German romantic temper produced communist materialism is not explained, but this could be a dialectical by-product. American commercialization, being

147 the necessary opposite that the Russian national spirit would require, soon gains hold, which leads to a conflict over oil supplies with Germany. There is a formation of an alliance of all the nations of Europe and China, America's enemy. Russia alone does not join. In the ensuing Russo-German war, Stapledon does predict German national contempt for Slavic Uentermenschen (19).

Stapledon introduces this sadly prophetic idea by attributing it to "one of those brilliant but extravagant works in which a whole diversity of experience is interpreted under a single formula, with extreme detail and plausibility, yet with amazing naïveté"

(19). This imaginary book seems somewhat consistent with Oswald Spengler's The

Decline of the West, often cited as a source of Stapledon's ideas about historical process.10 The use of chemical weapons in the Russo-German war had a profound impact on the intelligence of subsequent European generations. The Americans, through providing aid to reconstruct Russia, gained a financial foothold over the entire continent.

(This line of criticism was actually repeated about the Marshall Plan in some quarters, though any other resemblance is purely coincidental.) Meanwhile, the "American press, gramophone, radio, cinematograph, and televisor ceaslessly drenched the planet with

American thought" (22-23).

As tensions rise between Europe and the United States, a young Chinese scientist presents a most impressive scientific discovery at an international gathering in Plymouth,

England. He has discovered a manipulation of subatomic energy that allows energy to be concentrated at any remote point in effectively limitless amounts. The gathered assembly of scientists, including a profane Englishman and a wise Frenchman, realize with horror

10 See Charles Elkins "'Seeing It Whole': Olaf Stapledon and the Issue of Totality" (56) for one example.

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how this discovery will be used in warfare. After the "Mongol" demonstrates his

technology, the company retires to a chapel for further discussion. "For though the early

and spiristic interpretations of relativity and quantum theory had by now accustomed men

of science to pay their respects to the religions, many of them were still liable to a certain

asphyxia when they were actually within the precincts of sanctity" (29). This shows a

degree of prescience, in view of the later works of Heisenberg, Bohr, and Schroedinger.

The Frenchmen says that humanity is not yet advanced enough to be able to use this gift

wisely, and he begs the young scientist to destroy his work. Before he could adequately

consider the request, however, they see that an American air raid against Europe has

begun. The young scientist, fearing what is to come, commits suicide by exercising the

control over his autonomic system that is, in Stapledon's imagination, the legacy of his

race (31).

Stanislaw Lem has persuasively argued that the subsequent lack of recoverability of

this technology demonstrates Stapledon's ignorance of the mechanisms of scientific

discovery ("On Stapledon's LFM" 274). Lem, writing with knowledge of the massive state apparatus that was required to harness atomic energy, is undeniably correct here; and Stapledon probably had the evidence available to him to realize that the harnessing of nuclear power was not going to be done by one man alone. Another possibility, however, is that Stapledon has his narrator chose to recount the event this way in order to arrive at a more important symbolic truth. As with the earlier incident of the Daughter of Man

Stapledon chooses a more symbolic and mythical narrative. This interpretation spares

Stapledon from being accused of any lack of insight or art, however. One way to test the

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idea is to examine Stapledon's political thought as he was writing the book and as it

progressed in the subsequent years for evidence of potential allegory.

Leslie Fiedler, who maintains an uneasy fascination and contempt for his subject

throughout his book-length study, suggests that Stapledon failed "to foresee that

nationalism would prove the most dynamic political force of the near future" (156).

Stapledon seems to emphasize biological determinism and national character, however

(Elkins "The Worlds" 147). Several critics have described Stapledon's view of history as

cyclical, though it is not clear which historiographical speculation he prefers. Charles

Elkins also sees parallels with Ernest Bloch ("'Seeing It Whole''" 61-2). Louis Tremaine

sees a more directly dialectical pattern, further substantiated by the view of European

history presented in his next major non-fictional work, Saints and Revolutionaries (134).

Lem also invokes Spengler and mentions Pitrim A. Sorokin as another potential influence

("On Stapledon's LFM" 279). Robert Waugh compares the spiral form of Stapledon's

historical imagination to Yeats's gyres (213). John Huntington argues that the far-future

narrator makes the dialectic method a necessity (352).

Stapledon's cosmic historicism, the projection of the contemporary onto the infinite

horizon of the future, conceptualizes rapid national and economic change. The narrative

envisioning of a future written during such a period will be inevitably constrained by

such rapid changes. For example, a key recurring symbol in the book is the airplane. Its

ability to overlook and transcend is limited. In Stapledon's imagination, nearly four

hundred years after 1928, the American mixture of behaviorism and fundamentalism has

conquered the world. Then, it was regarded as a pregnant coincidence that the form of the

airplane resembled that of the cross, and the act of flying inherited a taboo. Infants were

150 dropped out of airplanes, and those "who retained the increasingly defunct simian grasping reflex tended to survive" (LFM 66). As this is sufficiently far in the future that the likelihood of direct reporting of events by the Last Man narrator is diminished, this bizarre ritual directly reflects the present. The entire Americanized population strives ever upward and loses sight of all Earthly wisdom, their civilization falling in time. The current audience of the present are the infants in this historical projection. And the overtly symbolic image reveals that the far-future narrator shapes his thought to attempt to control the present. In the genre of future history, there is no difference between parable and exposition because the extension into the future occurs inward through the mind.

In A Modern Theory of Ethics, Stapledon is clear about what he sees as the

"impending failure of nationalism" (7). "Fascism," nationalism's "most modern and extravagant phase, may be regarded as a final, though long drawn-out paroxysm, the last and hopeless protest of barbarians, who at heart find themselves to be mentally outdistanced" (Modern Theory 7). LFM was written after this work, and it recognizes that nationalism is a more potent and long-lasting force than he had earlier believed. Its goal, however, is not to predict but to warn. At each stage in the future progression, the struggle between the local and the universal recapitulates what Stapledon saw as the crisis of the present. Nationalism is the inertia of primitive organization. "The ultimate physical units (whatever they be), we must say that the ideal (utterly unrealizable, no doubt), is that they should all, through cosmical organization, assume the nature of a cosmical organism" (Modern Theory 213). Though this is the tendency or even goal of existing physical units and societies, their assumption is not inevitable. The dialectical

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progression of Stapledon's future humanity in LFM has led to ultimate stasis, a stasis implicitly identified by the far-future narrator as having begun in the present. This emphasis on the sensitivity of the world-system to initial conditions suggests that

Stapledon thought of the present as a crisis, and his cosmic historicism developed in reaction.

CHAPTER 6 RE-ENCHANTMENT OF MIND AND PLACE IN JOHN COWPER POWYS'S A GLASTONBURY ROMANCE

Powys believed that literature was consciousness, and his A Glastonbury

Romance1 attempts to imagine the "collective surface of history where psychic events

become visible, legible, figured" (Duncan 79). The statement, "literature is

consciousness," is vague, and so often is Powys's novel. Most critics would agree that

literature has some relation to consciousness, and perhaps exploring that relation is the

limit of what critics can do. In some form, literature is a written record of a

consciousness, or a series of everchanging records, and a reading consciousness activates

the literary artifact. Critics disagree about the extent to which socialization constrains this

activation, and much of the reading process remains a mystery. Literary creation is also

mysterious, and not much progress has been made on the consciousness problem, either.

Nationalism, the consciousness of a group that imagines itself in unity, would be,

for Powys, the product entirely of a national literature. For him, literature shapes the

popular and the political imagination. More importantly, it structures the collective

unconscious from which all sense of group identity springs. People do not think about

literature; it thinks about them. Powys's diary noted that he was not writing AGR, "it was writing him" (Petrushka xxi). Compare Rimbaud's "C'est faux de dire: Je pense. On

devrait dire: On me pense."2 Literature constrains the range of possibilies of the human

1 Subsequent references abbreviated AGR. 2 From a letter to Georges Izambard of May 13, 1871, written when Rimbaud was sixteen (302).

152 153 social imagination. In AGR, thoughts become eidola and impose themselves upon the fictive reality. For Powys, this fictive reality imposes itself upon him or any writer who considers the nature of social being or who merely thinks about the world around him. It is inevitable. The infinite regression thus implied has severe consequences for a materialist understanding of the world, and AGR argues that escape from the vicious circle is possible. The mirror in the mind of the divine reflects the thoughts of the human; the resulting mise en abyme constitutes literature.

As a psychology or a philosophical understanding of literature, the ideas outlined above will not satisfy many. They provide a framework for thinking about Powys's literary method, however. His ideas about mind reflect, in both conscious ways, caused by his voracious reading, professional reviewing, and lecturing and unconscious ways enabled by the general intellectual developments which he learned about through many diverse sources, the evolution of mental understanding in the early 1930s. Contemporary cognitive science has discussed the idea of a narrative property, with a primitive syntactic structure, being anterior to the more complex language organ. Powys's nebulous notions may have parallels with this idea.

Before adopting an overtly skeptical tone towards Powys's many supernaturalist affectations, I should note that some of those who knew him considered him to have a considerable presence, a quality that might be described in other contexts as mana. He was a mesmerizing lecturer, though the poorest-paid in the U. S. due to his complete lack of business sense (Krissdottir and Peers xvii). He astrally projected himself to Theodore

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Dreiser one evening on a dare,3 an event that, perhaps coupled with untold others, made

an impression on Dreiser's wife, who wrote in her memoirs that "I felt that sometimes his

spirit was familiar with much that was evil, and that no order of black magic existed that

had not been open to him" (58). Powys reports in his autobiography that he placed a curse

"upon an arrogant Brighton bookseller that apparently resulted in his death" (qtd. in Cook

32 n7). At least there seems to be little doubt that he actually believed that he could do

and had done feats such as this, and his view of the writer-as-magician was a direct result.

Nabokov, for instance, may have also believed in the magical power of literature without

believing in the literal magical abilities of the writer. Surrealism, and many other

movements roughly contemporaneous, shared a fascination with the origins of magical

thought. Part of the power of Powys's writing is that he seemed to believe in the idea.

His belief in magic and its relation to literary creation, overtly incorporated a

scientific vocabulary. And this is not unusual. Most prominent among the scientific

concepts metaphorically used in AGR is magnetism. Powys seemed not to have much direct interest in Einstein's theories, unlike Wyndham Lewis, for instance; but magnetism as a metaphor for psychic energy fascinated him. "It is doubtless these violent storms of intense feeling in great magnetic human personalities that are responsible of many of the supernatural occurrences vouched for by history and so crudely questioned by scoffing historians" (AGR 359). In this quote, from the chapter "King Arthur's Sword," Powys reveals his synthesis of scientific imagery with an occultist, magical system of thought.

Human emotions and thoughts must produce magnetic currents which interact with invisible forces that guide history. What supernatural occurrences are "vouched for by

3 This story is cited by G. Wilson Knight, who cites W. E. Woodward's The Gift of Life (III, 65) (128).

155 history" while remaining "crudely questioned by scoffing historians" is the type of logical question to which Powys is uninterested. Even so, it is a mistake to confuse the narrative voice which makes this interjection with Powys himself. In a Bakhtinian reading of the story, Charles Lock argues that the narrative voice which makes these extradiegetical statements should be regarded as merely another character within the romance, "another zany fascinated by Glastonbury" (277). Not every reader might agree with Lock about the style of the novel's infamous first paragraph, described by Jocelyn Brooke as the

"Becher's Brook of English fiction" (45). The general point that we cannot accept the novel's many voices as being merely Powys's authorial voice is sound, however.

"It was one of those moments that are apt to occur in the most carefully regulated communities. My Lord was no longer under the protection of an invisible network of magnetic wires" (AGR 570). Lord P, the titular ruler of the lands surrounding

Glastonbury is the "lord" in question here, and his magnetic network of authority dissolves in the novel's well-known pageant scene. Tradition, in the form of hereditary rule, is here represented as an invisible and yet scientifically measurable and predictable force. The chthonic forces unleashed in the Pageant have dissolved this "arterial or nerve- like net-work of property" (Coleridge, from OED). There are many direct references to

Coleridge throughout AGR,4 and Powys may certainly have known this quotation. Laura

Otis argues that there was a consistency between the development of electronic communications systems and the discovery of animal nervous systems in the nineteenth century (106). Communication networks were a technological instantiation of the

4 W. J. Keith's "John Cowper Powys's AGR, A Reader's Guide" lists several references to "Christabel" and "Kubla Khan."

156 previously imaginary relationship of owners to land, and, for Powys, these technological developments mirror eternally existing psychic energies.

The fact that Powys was successfully sued for libel for his portrait of the industrialist Philip Crow in the novel has been sometimes taken as evidence of his precognitive abilities, for he apparently did not know anything about Sir Gerard

Hodgkinson, the decorated war hero who, like Crow, electrified the Wookey Hole Caves.

Powys visited Glastonbury in July 1929, and he very likely would have known that the

Caves had been illuminated in 1927 (Rands 43). The book created such a scandal in

Glastonbury that Hodgkinson felt that he had to sue, according to Rands, and English libel laws reverse the burden of proof from the American laws, putting it on the defendant.

Powys lost, and subsequent editions of the novel had redactions to the "Wookey

Hole" chapter. Rands asks, "How did Powys create a character so like a real person in so many details of character and fate? Either he had amazing psychic powers or someone had sent him a great deal of local material" (51). She notes that there is no evidence of the latter and concludes, facetiously, that precognition is the only remaining answer. The tin mine that Crow (and, later, Gerard) was to build at Wookey Hole became the logical goal of the process begun with its electrification. Once the Druidic mysteries were illuminated by the false light of man's technological prowess, the next goal would be for the wellspring of its magic to dry up and to be replaced by the mundane tin, the "diabolous metallorum" (AGR 316).

Though Powys had no specific metallurgical expertise; when he described a tin mine being built in Wookey Hole, he was in touch with a deeper metaphysical

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progression of the world-spirit. Once the mines were lit, tin would have to be found there.

While this is a difficult idea to credit, it seems that Powys himself seemed to believe in it

to some degree; and certainly the narrative voices of AGR manifest it. Wookey Hole is

just one of the cracks through which the reservoirs of world-magic in Glastonbury seep

through. As this place transformed by man's labor into abstract economic value, it so

changes them. The genius loci of Glastonbury permeates every human effort. Through

the means of the Pageant, the vision of King Arthur's Sword, the Grail, the World-Fish,

and the final Flood, the spirit of the place both shapes the cyclical movement of history

and promises transcendence to those who perceive its power.

Powys's attitude towards history was essentially cosmicist in orientation. It is both

vast and beyond human perception, but it is also precisely ordered--the opposite of

Carlyle's "chaotic" (OED). When Powys writes that "thought is a real thing" (AGR 457) and that "all thought-eidola are not of the same consistency or of the same endurance. It is the amount of life-energy thrown into them that makes the difference" (AGR 500), he

is claiming that human-thoughts have a reality that their thinkers do not as of yet possess.

These thoughts enter into a realm of timelessness, and the dimly grasped perceptions of

those eternal movements of time manifest themselves in human destinies. What are the

particularly national character of those destinies, however? Jed Esty writes that Powys

recreates a "properly and native form of English primitive resistance to modernity" (64)

in AGR as opposed to a Celtic pan-Nationalism.

Though one meaning of "cosmic" is orderly, as I have noted above, the retreat from

the cosmic forces represented in AGR is a retreat into a stultifying order and regularity.

The chaotic passions which govern life and which themselves are reflections of a larger,

158 more complete order, have been eliminated in the progressive rationality of existence.

Man's technological achievements, his electricity, tin mines, and, significantly, airplanes, are only the outward manifestations.

The chapter entitled "The Pageant" resolves this tension. The brainchild of mayor and wandering itinerant preacher Bloody John Geard, the pageant is a combination of

Passion Play and revival of the Arthurian myths that govern the town's psychic energy.

The revival of the pageant-play in Britain was primarily the responsibility of Louis

Napoleon Parker, who launched the genre in 1905 with his Sherbourne Pageant. He called it an "historical folk-play" (qtd. in Esty 57). There were earlier pageants in

Glastonbury, on a smaller scale, which Powys may have attended when he was younger

(Rands "Topicality" 42). Parker's theory of the historical significance of the pageant was that it should blur any sense of historical distance; it should be "designed to kill [. . .] the modernizing spirit" (qtd in Esty 59). Esty sees the modernist appropriations of the pageant in Powys and Woolf's Between the Acts as appropriating their interest in ritual acts of consciousness (61), and this idea is especially apparent in Powys's treatment.

Nicholas Birns attempts to account for an often-noted feature of AGR's composition:

It has usually been seen as an anomaly that John Cowper Powys composed AGR, a book seemingly intense in its British setting and identification, during his residence in America, more specifically at Phudd Bottom5 in Columbia County in upstate New York. The circumstances of the book's composition, though, become less anomalous when it is realized that Powys's Glastonbury is not the locus for a nostalgic or mythic Arthurianism. It exists as a synthetic and hybrid set of spiritual and material resonances. (43)

5 "Phudd Bottom" was the name of the farmhouse he and Phyllis Playter lived in, not the town itself.

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Bernard Maxwell suggests that AGR and other books might be written about England specifically for Americans (103), an idea that also stresses the importance of Powys's

American experience for his social imagination. Powys did not view America as an ahistorical land, but the art of the pageant made British history new and alive in the same way that he perceived it to be for the Americans. When Philip Crow discusses the upcoming pageant with Mr. Stilly, the teller of the Glastonbury bank, Stilly says that it reminds him of what he reads about America. When Crow, irate at this answer, demands clarification, Stilly stammers "They perform...performances..a good deal...don't they..in the...open air?" (AGR 549). When Birns writes that Glastonbury exists "as a synthetic and hybrid set of spiritual and material resonances," he seems to suggest that Powys sets

Glastonbury in an aquarium outside of any particular time-frame6 or even spatial location. Though there is much support for this position within the novel, a closer examination of Powys's attitudes towards the psychology of the crowd will help refine that claim.

"Every audience, however hurriedly collected, quickly takes to itself a queer identity of its own and becomes a living organism whose reactions are as spontaneous and incalculable as those of a single human being" (AGR 340-41), Powys writes in the

"Dolorous Blow" chapter. The idea of the crowd as an organism which takes on the atavistic characteristics of its members was popular in the early decades of the twentieth century. Herbert Spencer, Gustave Le Bon, and Georges Sorel were just a few of the writers who promulgated the idea, and Wyndham Lewis, whose Time and Western Man

6 It is surprisingly difficult to pinpoint what time the events in the novel take place. The Great War is never mentioned, but civilian aviation seems to be in a post-War stage.

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Powys reviewed,7 overtly discussed the ideas in his fiction. For Powys, the crowd's reversion to ancestral characteristics is not a sign of degeneration but of transcendence.

"In all human communities--indeed in all human groups--there are strange atavistic forces that are held in chains deep down under the surface. Like the imprisoned Titans, these

Enceladuses and Sisyphuses and Briareuses, dwell in the nether depths of human nature ready to break forth in blind scoriac fury under a given touch" (569). Powys, who preferred Jung to Freud, invokes the collective unconscious here, and this passage, which is from "The Pageant" chapter, suggests that the "strange atavistic forces" manifest in the group possess a creative energy similar to that of the Titans. The Olympians of the present world-order have harmonized that creation, but the pendulum has swung too far in their direction.

Mayor Geard's anarchistic commune, hostile as it is to the "Jacobin" Red

Robinson's visceral communism, is a direct result of the social forces unleashed by the pageant. While composing AGR, Powys wrote that he was fully in sympathy with the

Communist Party and that he lacked the courage to join it (Petrushka 54, 57). Dave

Spear, the theoretical communist in the novel, suggests that "communism is the destined next phase of evolutionary, planetary life [. . .]. We can afford to be what one else can afford to be; for the simple reason that we are the solidifying of the intention of evolution" (AGR 200).

Powys does not seem to be able to "create in terms of a political society" (Collins

82). His political imagination is not limited by the possible, certainly. Political systems of thought are for Powys indistinct eidola of the primeval forces that surround and shape the

7 "The God of Time," Dial, 1928.

161 human imaginary. Communism and anarchism are significant in so far as they exist in dialectical opposite to the type of rugged industrialist individualism embodied by Philip

Crow. Crow argues that "it's always been by the brains and the energy of exceptional individuals, fighting for their own hands, that the world has moved on [. . .] We have the future to think of, or, as I say, Nature has the future to think of" (AGR 61). Political systems arise in opposition to each other as a means of re-enchanting the world they inhabit. The genius loci acts as a constraint on political development pathways. When

Spear suggests that "to be rich is to be a moral leper. To be rich is to be on the side of

Cancer!" (AGR 268), he is echoing a debate about the relationship of capitalism to the progressive ordering of human existence. Cancer is here a metaphor for entropy, the progressive disordering of the universe which may result in its ultimate heat-death.

Contemporary transhumanists celebrate personal enrichment beyond all other and view it as a bulwark against encroaching entropy, even referring to themselves as "extropians."

For Powys, the increasing complexity of social organization will reflect the accumulated psychic energies of a place, permeating even the most trivial of human affairs and causing them to repeat homoeomerously. Only a crack in the world-system can transcend this process.

The chapter "Mark's Court," which introduces Powys's apparent creation of the story of Merlin pulverizing the fell King Mark,8 describes Philip Crow's plan to manufacture figurines of Arthur and Merlin (AGR 430). William Zoylad, a materialist, believes that this is only fitting for a town like Glastonbury at this point, but the Marquis of P then challenges him to sleep in the room of his castle, where, according to Powys's

8 Keith's comprehensive "Reader's Guide" finds no source for this.

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legend, King Mark was reduced to a handful of dust (AGR 431). As in John Buchan's

The Gap in the Curtain, Britain becomes re-enchanted through mass production. Unlike

Buchan, however, Powys does not see this a violation of the British national-spirit.

Rather, the repetition and mirroring is an inevitable consequence and a sign of subsequent

transformation. Geard, who will pass the test of Mark's chamber, later states that

Little inanimate things [. . .] can become great symbols and symbols are--No! [. . .] bugger me black! That's not what I mean at all! I mean something much deeper, much more living than symbols. [. . .] Certain material objects came become charged with supernatural power. That's what I mean. They can get filled with the electricity that's more than electricity, with a kind of magnetism that's more than magnetism. (AGR 436)

The aura, as it were, of the putative Merlin and Arthur dolls would exert a far greater influence than the energy contained within their matter. Their psychic resonances can tap into and control great regions of collective memory. Precisely because of their mass production, their similarity repeats itself and is not diffused by the individual craftsmen.

For Powys, nationalism is the management of repetition in the consciousness of a given people, and it has its own internal logic.

Geard later comes to the realization that "I know now what the Grail is. It is the desire of the generations mingling like water with the Blood of Christ, and caught in a fragment of Substance that is beyond Matter! It is a little nucleus of Eternity, dropped somehow from the outer spaces upon one particular spot" (AGR 457-58). The phrase

"nucleus of Eternity," which Esty uses as the subtitle of his chapter on Powys, is another

image of latent energy that grows via developmental constraint, homoeomerous on every

level and guided by the spirits of the place. Wolfram Von Eschenbach's story of the Grail

referred to it as a stone dropped from outer space, and the ability of such an object to

exist and distort earthly time is a constant theme in science fiction imaginings. The

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probability distortions of the alien trash discarded in Andrei and Boris Strugatsky's

Roadside Picnic is one prominent example of the reality-distorting encounter with the other. Powys explores the ability of this space-born object to transcend the repetitive structures of human existence.

Owen Evans, the scholar whose life-long project has been a new biography of

Merlin, is also imprisoned by a series of sadistic fantasies. Powys himself was an admitted sadist, though he was disturbed by this aspect of this nature (and claimed never to have read de Sade, though he was fond of more contemporary French sadomasochistic pornography) and scolded Henry Miller for what seemed to be an overt celebration of it, though the context is unclear:

And when you think that these infernal cruelties weer [sic] done not from any particular sadistic mania but from--so the books seem to suggest--some desire to gain wizzardry [sic] and Black Magic powers for himself--his cult it appears to me ought not to be encouraged as people who have more personal sadistic tendencies than this monster had might easily get the feeling from your word 'glorious' that after all if to cause extreme anguish to a helpless person gave them extreme pleasure that pleasure is justified. (Letters to Miller 65, letter dated August 14, 1952)

Powys rejects the ethos of necromancy here. Had his motivation been simple sadistic

mania, however, that would have been at least understandable. In any event, Powys

recognizes that sadism should not be encouraged. His characterization of Evans, however

unreal it seems, reveals considerable thought about its psychological origins.

The inner life of the sadist is repetitive. Sadism itself is a series of repetitions on a

theme. Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle contains one of the most famous

discussions of sadism and repetition: "From the very first we recognized the presence of a

sadistic component in the sexual instinct. As we know, it can make itself independent and

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can, in the form of a perversion, dominate an individual's entire sexual activity" (621).

Repetition is an "expression of inertia inherent in organic life" (612). For Powys, the

structure of the sadistic repetition repeats the psychic structure of the communal mind of

Glastonbury and, by extension, of Britain.

[Evans] was disturbed by a particular sadistic urge he had not been troubled by since he saw John Crow embrace the Hêle Stone at Stonehenge. This image was concerned with a killing blow delivered by an iron bar. Mechanically he closed the street door; mechanically he lit a candle; mechanically he met the marble gaze of an alabaster bust of Dante; mechanically he ascended the flight of narrow stairs to his room above. (AGR 150)

Crow's embrace of the "sun" stone represents a union with a mythic and more real past

that provokes Evans's fit of impotent rage. "Dolorous blow" is the title of a chapter and

the description given in the medieval romances of Balin's murder of King Pelles with a

spear.9 Now it is Evans's imagined exit from his mental labyrinth. The repetition of

"mechanically" suggests a mind stuck in its tracks, and the "alabaster bust of Dante" is a

reminder that the ascent to his bedroom is actually a descent to Avernus.

A troika of Red Robinson, Dave Spear, and Paul Trent, the solicitor anarchist, plots

to wrest the recently deceased Canon Crow's bequest away from "Bloody Johnny" Geard.

They decide to eliminate John Crow, whom they perceive as being the motivating power

behind Geard's communal experiment. Finn Toller, who is enthralled by the madwoman

Bet Chinnock, is enlisted. He decides bashing Crow in the head with a heavy iron bar is

the most humane way of murdering him, and Evans learns of the plot from the beginning

and hears of its manner of execution later. His utmost wish seems to be granted; rather

than reading about such deeds in volumes such as The Unpardonable Sin, he will have the opportunity to see a man's skull crushed. When the moment is near, Evans thinks "'I

9 Powys describes the spear which Balin used to wound the guardian of the Grail as that of Longinius, the spear that pierced Jesus' side according to legend (AGR 342).

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must go through with this, though I get no pleasure from it.' The curious thing, in the

mind of this slave of the iron bar, was that it was the iron bar itself that now excited in

him this relentless, pleasureless necessity to go on" (AGR 1019). Through transference,

the object itself has acquired sadistic agency.

As Evans plans to meet Toller on the designated killing grounds, the narrative

explains the origins of his compulsion. The sadism is now described as a "worm-snake":

"whatever this worm-snake--which kept emitting a poisonous froth, like a snail that has

been wounded--ordered this corpse-man, this homo mortuus, to do, the corpse-man

obeyed" (AGR 1020). Evans, the homo mortuus enthralled to the snake, the sex-nerve,

might have become this way "from his father's forcing his mother to let him enjoy her

long after the child's conception had begun" (AGR 1020). The dolorous stroke falls not

on John Crow's head but on his walking companion, Philip Crow's manager, Tom Barter.

With the "punctual, mechanical precision of a consummate actor performing a long-ago

perfectly rehearsed part," Evans find the murderous iron bar and wipes it clean (AGR

1053-54). The "nerve-worm" of his sexual excitement has been severed by his disgust at viewing Barter's shattered skull. The shock of his guilt over the enactment of his sadistic fantasy turns his hair white. Evans continues to work on his Vita Merlini, and, if any

passers-by would see him reading a volume of Malory, the narrator informs us, it would

be because he was looking for the real meaning of the word "Esplumeoir" (AGR 1056).

The best philological explanation for this mysterious word used to refer to Merlin's final resting place is that of a mew, a cage where falcons were kept while they were mottling. Both in this sense and in the mythical context, there is the clear suggestion of removal from this time and place into a stasis, a stasis where, after a transformation, the

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world will be reentered. Powys describes Evans as a homo mortuus, a reference to the

frequently used description of Arthur as rex mortuus or rex semi-mortuus. The "Dolorous

Stroke" was "termed one of the Three atrocious Slaughters of Britain" (Rhys 258),10 and here it represents how the cycle of history and repetition has been transcended in the individual mind. Freud represents the mind as a system in circuit in Beyond the Pleasure

Principle, and the self-regulating nature of Evans's fantasy has been severed by contact

with reality. His personal transcendence is a reflection of the larger renewal of the genius

loci, and the novel's imagery of mirrors, fish, and aquariums shows this most directly.

There are two later works whose exploration of the relation of mirrors to historical

process and the nature of reality have similarities to Powys's. One, which also shares

AGR's obsession with time is Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun.11 Set in a what is

either a far-future or a completely different time-line altogether, the novels depict a

formerly technologically advanced society which has fallen into decay and ignorance. A

spaceship grounded far before any living memory serves as a tower for a secretive group

of torturers, one of whom disobeys the most sacred code of his guild and allows a "client"

with whom he has fallen in love to kill herself rather than endure her determined

torture.12 Exiled for this transgression against his guild's code, he wanders the desiccated world, eventually learning of the existence of the Autarch who governs his country and

10 Powys read Rhys's Studies in the Arthurian Legend nine times or more in the years before writing AGR (Krissdottir "Introduction" xx). 11 Comprising four novels, The Shadow of the Torturer, The Claw of the Conciliator, The Sword of the Lictor, and The Citadel of the Autarch. 12 A device from a forgotten alien technology called the "revolutionary," which arouses the death-instinct within its subjects, causing them to gouge their own eyes, attempt to strangle themselves, etc. The process is supposed to last for months, but Severian gives Thecla a knife with which to slit her throat shortly thereafter.

167 who fights against invaders from the north and rebellious elements within the genetically engineered aristocracy (called "exultants." Thecla was one of these). Thecla, while

Severian was ministering to her before her torture, told him about Father Inire, the alien advisor to the Autarch, and his mysterious mirrors.

Her girlhood friend Dominina, was caught by Father Inire looking too closely into the mirrors that lined the walls of their residence. Accusing her of vanity, she says that she thought she glimpsed something else within them. He asks her to come visit him alone later. Father Inire takes her into an octagonal room with a blue-white lamp that burns as brightly as a sun (Wolfe 127).

In the center of the enclosure, just under the lamp, was a haze of yellow light. [. . .] It did indeed remind her of a fish. Much more than the faint flagae she had glimpsed in the mirrors of the Hall of Meaning ever had--a fish swimming in air, confined to an invisible bowl. [. . .] In the center, the fish flickered to and fro, a thing formed, as it seemed, by the convergence of light. (Wolfe 127)

Father Inire tells her that "the ancients [. . .] considered the Fish the least important and most common of the inhabitants of the specula" (127). When explaining the mechanism of the mirror to Dominina, Inire says

If the light is from a coherent source and forms the image reflected from an optically exact mirror, the orientation of the wave fronts is the same because the image is the same. Since nothing can exceed the speed of light in our universe, the accelerated light leaves it and enters another. When it slows down, it reenter ours-- naturally at another place (129).

Dominina then asks him if the fish is just a reflection. Inire replies "eventually it will be a real being, if we do not darken the lamp or shift the mirrors. For a reflected image to exist without an object to originate it violates the laws of our universe, and therefore an object will brought into existence" (129).

Wolfe's description of this catoptromancy is indebted to Borges, who in The Book of Imaginary Beings, has a section on "Fauna of Mirrors." In characteristically elliptical

168 style, he notes that Father Fontecchio of the Society of Jesuits noted the existence of a

Fish that lived in mirrors among the superstitions of the people of Canton. A later researcher took up Fontecchio's research and discovered that the legend goes back to the time of Yellow Emperor, where "the world of mirrors and the world of men were not, as they are now cut off from each other" (105). Though the emperor banished these forms, they will one day reawaken. The first to do so will be the Fish. And "side by side with these mirror creatures, the creatures of the water will join the battle" (106).

Both of these treatments of fish in mirrors evoke without mentioning directly the icthus symbol of Christ. Wolfe does so because his fictive world knows nothing of him

(and yet he appears), as Borges does so playfully. The mirror is the ultimate representation of repetition, and the appearance of the fish symbolizes a transcendence, an escape from the pendulum of world history. In AGR, the fish appears in "The Grail" chapter in the form of a tench, a small chub invested with healing properties in local folklore.

Sam Dekker, who has abandoned the theological studies that his father has pressed upon him, with his face turned towards the "three eminences of the Isle of Glastonbury,

Wirral Hill, Chalice Hill, and the Tor," (AGR 938) sees the "earth and the water and the darkness cracked" (AGR 938) and sees a vision of the Grail. He feels a gigantic spear

"struck into his bowels and struck from below," a spear that echoes that of the similarly world-turning13 "Dolorous Blow." He has been sitting in a barge, not like a burnished throne, and looking into the water, seeing himself darkly. When wondering if it could be the fish of healing that he saw within the chalice, he thinks (or a narrator thinks) that

13 Yeats's gyres in "The Second Coming" and "Leda and the Swan" are a different manifestation of this essentially conic image of the transcending moment in history.

169

"something somewhere hid perhaps in the twisted heart of the cruel First Cause itself and

able to break in from outside and smash to atoms this torturing chain of Cause and

Effect?" (AGR 940). Before he had his vision, he thought of "Aquarium-Grail...Grail- aquarium" and his "icthyological mind visioned a Fish that was a real fish and yet something more than a fish shedding a mystic light out of an enchanted vessel" (AGR

910). Powys uses the aquarium image throughout the novel to describe how the tutelary

spirits of Glastonbury view the terrene inhabitants. The humans are like animalcules to

them, and, by the mise en abyme that the mirror suggests, so they too are viewed by other

beings looking into the sea as if it were glass. After his vision, Sam Dekker goes to

administer an enema14 to an elderly man in need, a man who notes that the backside is a

"turble squeamy" place (AGR 947). As the spear struck into him from below, so Sam is

reconciled both to this ministration and to his wife's adultery with his father. For he has

seen the Grail.

The vision of the Grail heralds the flood which drowns nearly all of Glastonbury.

Philip Crow's constant drumming airplane, which is the Glastonbury embodiment of "the

conquest of the air is such an enormous event in human history that it is probably

responsible for these reckless and chaotic impulses which we will all feel

nowadays...strange spiritualistic occurrences that we hear so much about are the result of

Man's having to found how to fly" (144), has foundered. The tench in the grail has

brought itself into the water, because a historical object cannot exist without a reflection.

14 Powys had digestive problems that he treated with constant enemas, a process recorded with enthusiasm in his diary. For instance, the entry for Bloomsday, 1934 begins "Up at 8. Enema!" (Dorset Year 5).

170

The flood has brought renewal in the form of a surging tide of place. For Powys, this inevitable re-enchantment constitutes the essence of the nation.

CHAPTER 7 CONCLUSION

The four novels I have analyzed treat historical process differently. Orlando compresses lived time and expands the individual consciousness's ability to experience it.

The Childermass removes itself from contemporary time and local space to a purgatory

haunted by both. The two-billion years of future history in Last and First Men are

narrated by a consciousness much concerned with how the contemporary mind should

understand this cosmic span. And A Glastonbury Romance seeks to recover the British

genius loci by transcending time. Nationality mediates each novel's conception of time,

and it is through nationality that each develops a theory of history. The major

developments in British national consciousness permeated each novelists' social

imagination. And often each work illustrates one of these national developments.

The first two novels were written immediately after the General Strike. Both were

influenced by the discrepancy between what seemed possible--genuine revolution--and

its subsequent peaceful resolution. Orlando's life recapitulates much of British national

development, and the conceit emphasizes the inevitability of history, or at least its inertia.

There is a tension within Orlando's consciousness. It both changes to reflect what Woolf,

often playfully, regarded as the spirit of the age and persists in essential outlook and

personality. Though changes accelerate with the approach of the present and modernity,

there is both dissolution and integration at the end, when the novel's account has reached

the present. Woolf's meditation on personality and its relation to social consciousness

thus reflects the elasticity of British nationalism. Though the unmentioned General Strike

171 172 had the potential to stretch the nation-state to its breaking point, it reverted largely to its prior form.

Lewis, on the other hand, was overtly alarmed by the General Strike. He named it as his motivation to plan the epic multi-volume work that eventually resulted in The

Childermass, and it, along with the other works he wrote in the next four years, constituted one of the most far-ranging and productive periods of any writer. The culmination of Lewis's increasing interest in fascism as a necessary countermeasure to the various elements of decay he diagnosed in the "Time-Cult" and elsewhere was his disastrous encomium to Hitler, published in 1931. Proto-fascism circulated as a possibility in Britain in the mid- and late-1920s, but it did not emerge as a significant social movement. The tensions that could have led to its development were exacerbated by the quasi-revolutionary movement of the Strike and particularly in the government's reaction. The Childermass's Hyperideans represent revolutionary potential, and they clearly are fascist. But they also clearly are powerless to overthrow the existing order represented by the Bailiff. All these hordes of the dead are exiled from the Magnetic City, however. Despite their dialectic struggles, they remain in stasis--Lewis's judgment of his historical moment.

The next two novels were written slightly before or during the electoral crisis of

1931. Ronald Knox's imagined British nation if the General Strike had succeeded contrasts with Stapledon's Last and First Men in revealing ways. Knox's newspaper is a detailed and imaginative exercise in alternate history. Stapledon's novel is a future history on a cosmic scale. While it does not mention directly the General Strike, or any contemporary British political developments except in the broadest terms, its narrative

173 conceit presupposes that the narrating intelligence is engaging in speculative alternate history. That is, it seems to wish to exercise control over the near history of its audience by selecting certain details from eons of time and presenting them symbolically. Knox warns what might have been; Stapledon's narrator hints at what must be. But both react to the national chaos.

John Buchan's The Gap in the Curtain shows one comical interpretation of the consequences of attempting to bottle and market the mystic essence of British nationality.

Buchan, directly involved in the political crisis of 1931, was directly aware of the continuing debates about economic rationalization. Conservative reactions to rationalization's extension into traditional domains of life, such as Buchan's, focused on rejection and denial. John Cowper Powys's A Glastonbury Romance, however, argued for a dialectical reversal of rationalization through re-enchantment. Like Stapledon, Powys, immersed in Arthurian legend while writing in upstate New York, was greatly influenced by the cultural energies of the United States. Unlike Stapledon, however, Powys thought that the destructive energies of American "fundamentalist capitalism," to use Stapledon's phrase, had considerable utopian potential. Glastonbury's "reservoir of world-magic" can be activated through only one mind, but one prepared by a revolutionary social experiment. Mayor Geard's anarchist commune removes the town from history. A flood's creative destruction then restores it.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Jonathan Goodwin is currently a Brittain Fellow at Georgia Tech. He was born in

North Carolina and attended the University of North Carolina at Wilmington before coming to the University of Florida for graduate study.

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