THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO WAR, CITIES, TRASH: SOME MIDCENTURY PASTORALS A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE BY HANNAH BROOKS-MOTL CHICAGO, ILLINOIS AUGUST 2019 Copyright Hannah Brooks-Motl 2019 “All these possibilities are present in the Arcadia— romance and realism, poetry and psychology.” —Virginia Woolf, “The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia” Table of Contents List of Figures……………………………………………………………………………………..v Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………………..vi War, Cities, Trash: Arcadia & Utopia at Midcentury ……………………………………………..1 World War Pastorals……………………………………………………………………………..29 Coda: Mood……………………………………………………………………………………...76 Cosmopolitan Pastorals…………………………………………………………………………..85 Coda: Method…………………………………………………………………………………...132 Trash Pastorals………………………………………………………………………………….139 Coda: Mosaic…………………………………………………………………………………...184 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………195 iv List of Figures Figure 1, from London Illustrated News………………………………………………………....52 Figure 2, from London Illustrated News…………………………………………………………52 Figure 3, from Gestalt Therapy………………………………………………………………...100 Figure 4, from The Exploding Metropolis……………………………………………………...103 Figure 5, from Communitas…………………………………………………………………….105 Figure 6, from Gestalt Therapy and Communitas………………………………………….......109 Figure 7, from Communitas…………………………………………………………………….117 Figure 8, from The Digger Papers……………………………………………………………...148 v Acknowledgments My thanks to Deborah Nelson and Maud Ellmann for their years of insight, care, and support. Thanks to Jennifer Scappettone, Lisa Ruddick, Debra Rae Cohen, Christopher Bush, and two anonymous readers at Modernism/modernity for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of some of this material. Thanks to the English Department and the Humanities Division of the University of Chicago. Thanks to my original cohort: Matt Boulette, Bill Hutchinson, Lauren Jackson, Steven Maye, Max McKenna, Mabel Mietzelfeld, Michelle Skinner, Jean-Thomas Tremblay. Thanks to my fellow Debbie-students: Vinh Camh, Dave Thieme, Carmen Merport, and Ingrid Becker. Endless thanks to Ingrid Becker. Thanks to Chicago Review. Thanks to Jennifer Sprowl and Duncan Dance Chicago. Thanks to Caroline Heller. Thanks to Sally Carton. Thanks to Margaret Hivnor, Alan Thomas, and the University of Chicago Press. Thanks to my parents, my siblings, and my grandmothers. Thanks to Caitlin Spies, Emily Hunt, Michele Christle, Stacy Jo Scott. Untold thanks to Dan Bevacqua. vi War, Cities, Trash: Arcadia & Utopia at Midcentury In the early 1950s, W.H. Auden considered two “dream pictures of the Happy Place,” a world in which suffering, duty, and the ravages of time do not exist. Auden says we imagine such places as Edens (Arcadia) or New Jerusalems (Utopia). The differences are temporal— Arcadias are past, Utopias are future—but it’s clear that, for Auden, Utopias entail actual danger since they necessarily include “images of the Day of Judgment,” visions of the cleansing and purifying rites by which worthy Utopian wheat is separated from unworthy chaff. Hitler, Auden observes, was a Utopian and utopia, Auden claims, is thus “serious.”1 By contrast, Arcadia was psychological or technical, a problem of representation rather than an attempt to recreate reality. The writer of Edens “has to devise a way of making outward appearances signify subjective states of innocence and happiness to which, in the real world, they are not necessarily related”; such writers fabricate a “wish-dream which cannot become real.”2 Rather than a fact that might (is intended to) destroy the world, Arcadia exists in the space of the writer’s head, in her poems or tales, as a fantasy or wish disconnected from the claims of that world. Utopia was serious for Auden and it has been serious for literary studies as well. Utopian thinking, utopian plans, utopian movements, even the word itself, have occupied an outsized role in literary and cultural studies over the last decades. The “states of innocence and happiness” Auden ascribes to writers of Edens, meanwhile, have remained more or less identified with 1 First delivered as a lecture, the essay “Dingley Dell & The Fleet,” can be found in W.H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1962), 409. Auden writes of Utopia’s frequent coincidence with aggressive fantasies: “Even Hitler, I imagine, would have defined his New Jerusalem as a world where there are no Jews, not as a world where they are being gassed by the million day after day in ovens, but he was a Utopian, so the ovens had to come in” (410). 2 Ibid., 414, 410. 1 pastoral—and pastoral with them.3 Theorists, critics, and historians know a lot about utopia in the twentieth century: as programs orienting diverse populations and political movements; as texts (mostly novels) and aesthetic practices; as “a way of thinking, a mentality, a philosophical attitude” for groups ranging from urban planners to drug developers.4 This dissertation began with my sense that critics, scholars, and general readers know less, or don’t believe it is particularly important to know more, about pastoral in the mid-twentieth century, years when utopian projects and rhetorics were in full flower and pastoral criticism proliferated. Yet Auden’s essay, with its reference to World War II, to concentration camps, to Hitler himself, flags the possibility of highly specific incarnations of both imaginaries. Arcadia and Utopia, utopia and pastoral, accrue qualities, habits, landscapes, and emotions contingent on historical events, real- world rhythms. Dream-pictures suggest ways of being, doing, moving, creating—world-making on the one hand, world-retreating on the other. Auden’s account of mental retreat cannot itself be extricated from what George Orwell would call, in another essay written during World War II, “world processes.” But the world is most often the condition or climate from which pastoral shrinks, or shies away. Pastoral has seemed to propose the psychological subject Auden sketches, one committed to devising alternate realities that soothe, placate, restore “subjective states” in a purely mental or fictional realm. Auden describes a model of self-regulation familiar from Freudian psychoanalysis: pastoral is one mechanism by which an individual seeks pleasure at the expense of reality. Best known for his work on the historical avant-garde, Renato Poggioli also contributed to midcentury 3 In terms of modern and contemporary aesthetic production, “pastoral” has tended to attach narrowly to poetry and verse traditions. The prevalence of anthologies of pastoral poetry suggests this trend: see most recently The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral, editors Joshua Corey and GC Waldrep (Boisie, ID: Ahsahta Press, 2012). 4 Rosemary Wakeman, Practicing Utopia: An Intellectual History of the New Town Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 4. 2 debates about pastoral. His historical study of “The Pastoral of the Self” likewise suggested that from depictions of the world “out there,” Renaissance and Romantic pastoralists turned inward, creating a garden “in here,” free from external control and social bonds. By the late eighteenth century, Poggioli claimed, pastoral became a vehicle for narcissistic introspection and autobiographical musings, a space in which one devised a world to one’s liking—a dream, or a wish, of newly emancipated Enlightenment individuals for and about themselves.5 Poggioli’s portrait didn’t just historicize pastoral; first published in 1959 in Daedalus, the journal of record for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, his article simultaneously inscribed pastoral in midcentury’s literary-critical field. In the mid- and late-twentieth century, that field was increasingly consumed with interpretative procedures determined to hoist the “repressed” ideological content of a work into view.6 Under these conditions, certain critical commonplaces developed that extended a longer tradition of considering pastoral as deceptive cover for social realities on the one hand, private fantasy on the other. As critics brought to the surface its unconscious desires and ideological complacencies, Arcadia regularly failed to offer politically useful models of social organization let alone transformation.7 Or the pastoralist’s longing after innocence and happiness conjoined with mass culture industries excoriated by 5 Renato Poggioli, The Pastoral of the Self,” Daedalus, Vol. 88, No. 4, Quantity and Quality (Fall 1959), pp. 686-699. 6 Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). Felski describes critique as the literary critical paradigm of the twentieth century; critique prizes looking “behind the text—for its hidden causes, determining conditions, and noxious motives” (12). 7 In “Varieties of Literary Utopias” (The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society [London: Methuen, 1970]), Northrop Frye opined that continuing to nurture the utopian imagination augured well for potentially penetrating social critiques. Since utopias are premised on what current social conditions lack, developing speculative and constructively imaginative projects allows writers to communicate both the limits and potentials of existing social norms to readers. Pastoral by contrast strips down or pares away social bonds. Rather than Utopians’ desire to construct and overlay new conceptual terms, to create