fflGH MODERNISM AND THE HISTORY OF AUTOMATISM By ALAN RAMON CLINTON I 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 2002 Copyright 2002 by Alan Ramon Clinton TABLE OF CONTENTS page ABSTRACT vi CHAPTERS 1 CONSERVATIVE MODERNISM AND THE AUTOMATIC RESPONSE 1 Introduction 1 Flournoy and Smith 16 Automatism as Automation 20 Uses of Automatism 28 Conductivity 28 Power 29 Artificial Talent 37 The Beyond of Automatism 57 Work 61 Speed 65 Disruptive Potential 68 The Network of Fragments 69 2 THE MECHANICAL OCCULT 72 Oriental Specters 72 The Rhetoric of Occultism 82 The Case Against 94 Occult Following 99 Rogues Gallery: Marilyn Manson and Aleister Crowley 106 What Now? 121 3 HIGH MODERNISM AND HOLLYWOOD IN DEEP FOCUS 128 Introduction 128 Ezra Pound: Cinematic Matching and Economic Coverage 145 Zero Point of Cinematic Style: Yeats’ Spectatorship 172 iii How Eliot Froze the Dialectics of Chance and Control 184 Conclusion 196 4 TWO CAGES: SECOND THOUGHTS AT PISA 199 Introduction 199 Canto LXXIV, I-Ching toss; The Well 205 The Winding Road of Precision 205 From Precision to Mathematics 210 Two Terms Equal a Third Meaning 212 Chasing Wood and Water 215 Canto LXXVI, I-Ching Toss: Army 217 Canto LXXVII, I-Ching Toss: View 220 Canto LXXVIII, I-Ching Toss: Gentle Wind 223 Canto LXXIX, I-Ching Toss: Modesty 226 Canto LXXX, I-Ching Toss: Obstruction 231 Canto LXXXI, I-Ching Toss; Repairing Decay 234 Canto LXXXII, I-Ching Toss: Revolution 236 Canto LXXXIII, I-Ching Toss: Provision 239 5 SHUFFLING ELIOT’S CARDS 246 Introduction 246 Eliot’s Reading 249 Basis of the Question 249 The Center Cards 266 The Action Cards 274 6 REVISIONING THE ROUGH BEAST 285 Introduction 285 The Devil 293 Queen of Cups 297 Ace of Disks 302 Ace of Wands 303 Two of Wands 305 Michael Robartes and the Dancer 311 The Universe 317 The Magus 318 Four of Swords 322 Six of Wands 325 Princess of Wands 329 The Hanged Man 333 IV 7 REAWAKENING THE UNBORN: A SEANCE 334 APPENDIX: THE FUNCTIONS AND RULES OF DIVINATION GAMES 353 REFERENCES 357 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 374 V Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Ciraduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy HIGH MODERNISM AND THE HISTORY OF AUTOMATISM By Alan Ramon Clinton May 2002 Chair; R. B. Kershner Cochair: Robert B. Ray Major Department: English This dissertation describes the aesthetics and politics of Ezra Pound, T .S. Eliot, and William Butler Yeats by placing their work in the context of automatism. The choice of these writers is not arbitrary: these three are the most famous poets who expressed conservative or even fascistic political views. As opposed to studies which tend to use this fact as a justification for finding conservative tendencies in their poetic output, I show how their poetry is conservative in aesthetic and psychological terms, but also progressively Utopian. While this latter tendency may be repressed or largely unrealized in these writers, its traces suggest how political views correlate with aesthetic choices. One of the major aesthetic choices to be made concerns the amount of control an artist exerts over his or her work. Thus, the dialectical relationship between chance and control acts as a guideline by which I read the three poets. In the end, I suggest that their work VI often possesses a high level of complexity that is tamed through repressive controlling mechanisms. After presenting the major issues in modernist aesthetics, I explain how the political and aesthetic paradoxes of High Modernist poetry make more sense when read in relation to the history of automatism. I argue that automatism, once thought to be a marginal element of certain avant-garde movements, actually engages many of the historical operators that dominated the twentieth century. More specifically, I show how the various manifestations of automatism in fact combine the spiritualist and technological discourses that contemporary studies of Modernism tend to bifurcate. Finally, I explore how these discourses suggest ways of incorporating automatic procedures into critical practice itself Vll CHAPTER 1 CONSERVATIVE MODERNISMS AND THE AUTOMATIC RESPONSE Introduction If one were pressed to name the most persistent structuring opposition in Modernist studies, the opposition between science/technology and spirituality would definitely contend for top honors. Ezra Pound, who played an important role in setting the stakes for Modernist artists, publicly tipped the artistic scales in favor of technology. His soberly titled essay "The Serious Artist," published in 1913, declares that the "arts, literature, poesy, are a science, just as chemistry is a science" (42) . The overt goal of art, in this formulation, is to investigate those elements of humanity that fall outside the scope of other sciences. Pound's unstated aim, as we now understand it, was to grant the arts a status equal to the newly valorized discourses of science and technology. T.S. Eliot, with his description of art, in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," as a process of depersonalization analogous to "the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide" (30) , seems to concur. As much as the poems 1 . 2 of these two figures resist formal analysis, their critical writings helped legitimize the scientific ideology that informed the minute dissections of the New Criticism. In this version of Modernist history, W.B. Yeats is viewed as a great (many would say the "greatest") poet whose lifelong interest in Occultism renders him marginal to the general thrust of the Modernist "international style," which has come to be defined rather unequivocably as "the marriage of art and technology" (Guillory 165). Futurism, by contrast, may not have produced as memorable a body of art, but was more central to modernism in its investigations of societal mechanization that "had captivated most of the European artistic community" (Theall 4). And there has been little, on the critical front, to change this state of things. If New Critical methodologies were challenged by structuralist methods in the 1950s and then the deluge of so-called "literary theory" that entered the English speaking world in the 1970s, the scientific ideologies of the New Criticism were actually reinforced by these imports. The ready incorporation of linguistics, psychoanalysis, and philosophy by English departments, while it inarguably resulted in a number of illuminating collaborations, also signals a desire for the humanities to adopt the systems of highly specialized language one associates with "hard science s 3 Somewhat ironically, it was the return of the very historical approaches originally displaced by the New Criticism that enabled the dominance of the "international style" to be questioned. Although inspired by an interest in such unabashedly Occult figures as Yeats and Strindberg, contributors to the New York Literary Forum of 1980 began to argue for Occultism' s centrality based upon its ubiquity in turn-of-the-century culture. If "around 1900 Satanism became a European craze" (Gerould and Kosicka 33), then it is the duty of historically-minded critics to investigate such Black Mass appeal. Of course, interest in spiritualities of all kinds had swept through Europe, and so it was only a matter of time before such avatars of the international style as Pound and Eliot were also implicated with the Occult. This turn in Modernist Studies allowed James Logenbach to look with renewed vigor at the time Yeats and Pound spent together at Stone Cottage, while in The Birth of Modernism Leon Surette made the controversial claim that Eliot sought Pound's help in editing The Waste Land due to Pound's expertise in Occult literature! Of course, the New Historicism gave even more ammunition to the technological side of the debate, as evidenced in such encyclopedic works as Cecelia Tichi's Shifting Gears and Lisa M. Steinman' Made in America: Science. Technology, and American Modernist 4 Poets . What neither of these two approaches acknowledged was the truly uncanny nature of nature of science and technology itself, those elements of technology that allowed for spiritualist apprehension at the turn of the century. In Chapter 1, I hope to address this disparity which, although it has received some attention in works such as Avital Ronell's The Telephone Book . R.B. Kershner' s work on spirit photography, and Helen Sword's forthcoming Modernist Mediumship , is worthy of further elaboration. I will do so by focusing on what Gregory Ulmer calls, in "The Miranda Warnings," a "switch word," which is a word that paradoxically moves between two series (360). For purposes of bridging the gap between technological and spiritualist approaches to Modernist Studies, I find the word-concept of "automatism" to be the most illuminating. Although automatism was once thought to be a fringe element of certain avant-garde and spiritualist circles, the word's roots actually render it equally at home in a Taylorized factory, a seance, or the office of Friedrich Nietzsche, the first philosopher to own a typewriter. Chapter 2, "The Mechanical Occult," examines the history of Occultism's claims to be both a scientific discipline and a politically subversive practice. While its associations with charlatanism and Orientalism complicates these claims considerably. Occultism's persistence in . 5 popular culture demands its enlistment in any comprehensive program of cultural studies. In its investigations, this chapter guides the reader through topics such as historian Carlo Ginzburg' s investigations into witchcraft and leprosy, French literature's ongoing fascination with all things Satanic, and such popular figures as Aleister Crowley and rock star Marilyn Manson.