RE-IMAGINING THE JEWELLED ISLE: ENGLAND AND CROSS-MEDIA PROJECTS IN THE MID-TWENTIETH CENTURY By Chu-Jiun Alice Chuang Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in English August, 2010 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Professor Mark Wollaeger Professor Paul Young Professor Vereen Bell Professor Marina MacKay ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the Vanderbilt University Graduate School and English Department for the financial support they have provided these five years and for the Dissertation Enhancement Grant, without which much of the archival research in my dissertation would not have been possible. I am also indebted to the British Film Institute and its dedicated librarians for guiding me through the special collections archives and allowing me to spend a week examining the Carol Reed Papers and the London Film Production Papers. I would also like to thank the members of my Dissertation Committee for their support and advice through the dissertation process. In particular, I am grateful to my dissertation director, Professor Mark Wollaeger, for all the time he put in to reading and commenting on my work—his invaluable guidance throughout this process is much appreciated. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………………………… ii Chapter I. INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………...…. 1 Defining the Nation: Empire, World War II, and English Culture………………………. 3 Photography, Radio, Film, and Modernism………………………………………………8 Chapters Overview……………………………………………………………………….13 PART 1 II. RADIO, CINEMA, AND THE BODILY SENSORIUM IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S THE YEARS……………………………………………………………………………………. 18 ! Woolf and Late Modernism……………………………………………………………. 18 ! Modernism and Media…………………………………………………………………. 21 ! Woolf’s Participatory Communalism………………………………………………….. 26 III. PHOTOGRAPHIC AND CINEMATOGRAPHIC VISION IN ELIZABETH BOWEN’S THE HEAT OF THE DAY………………………………………………………………... 43 Late Modernism: Media, Vision, and Community…………………………………….. 44 “Recent Photograph” and Visual Filtering…………………………………………….. 49 The Heat of the Day and Public Vision………………………………………………… 53 Vision and Plots of England’s Future…………………………………………………… 61 PART 2 IV. W. H. AUDEN, AURALITY, AND THE ASSIMILATION OF THE MACHINE IN NIGHT MAIL……………………………………………………………………...……… 70 The Auden Generation, Modernism, and Political Engagement……………………….. 72 Auden’s Essays, Early Poetry, and Spoken Language…………………………………. 75 Night Mail and Aural Montage………………………………………………………… 84 iii V. THE THIRD MAN AND THE “NEW” POSTWAR REALIST NOVEL………………… 98 Cultural Politics in the Postwar………………………………………………………... 100 Greene’s “The Third Man” and the Utilitarian Purpose of Prose…………………….. 106 Conradian Influence…………………………………………………………………... 110 The Third Man and Fantasies of Cultural Authority…………………………...……… 113 British Film in Postwar Europe……………………………………………………...… 123 AFTERWORD………………………………………………………………………………… 134 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………………...… 137 iv CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION With the contraction of empire and the threat of fascist powers on the continent, 1930s and 1940s Britain saw both modernist and new-generation, realist writers address the immediate political condition around them. Prompted by an impulse more pressing than merely recounting their observations of war, these writers sought to define the nation and imagine what a postwar, post-imperial nation would look like. In his pamphlet “The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius” (1941), George Orwell begins with an arresting sentence: “As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me” (138). Describing the Blitz bombing of London, Orwell conveys the urgency of his goals: defining England and national feeling, for “[o]ne cannot see the modern world as it is unless one recognizes the overwhelming strength of patriotism, national loyalty” (138). Sardonic—yet earnest about the ties that hold the nation together—Orwell writes, England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare’s much-quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow- towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control—that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase. (150) 1 Orwell is deeply bitter about the inequality of power and wealth in England, held by those whom he calls “irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts.” Yet, he shifts to a poignant expression of loyalty to the nation: he emphasizes the fact that, in spite of the skeletons in the cupboard, England is still a “family” with “its private language” and “common memories” that cannot be discounted. Significantly, this passage points to the way “language” and the written medium, “Shakespeare’s much-quoted message,” “the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels,” and the tropes that become epithets for England, help determine the way people conceptualize their relationship, belonging, or lack of belonging to a community and nation. This study will look at the way novels, poetry, and film 1) define the nation, whether as a “family,” community, organic entity, or governing state, and 2) the way their self-conscious invocation of other media shapes these definitions. By the 1930s, writers could not ignore the impact of mass culture and new technology. Recognizing and borrowing from the power of these other media—film, photography, and radio—writers such as Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, and W. H. Auden used them as sources of metaphors for England and as lenses through which to scrutinize the political condition. Visual and aural media that became dominant forms of mass culture by the 1930s and 1940s affected how writers thought about sensory experience and perception. This interest in the senses, in turn, provided new ways to think about individuals’ relationship with each other and the nation. Instead of surveying the texts written during this time period, I look closely at shared impulses to imagine the nation from the perspective of citizens, rather than of rulers and lawmakers. I define communalism in terms of the idea that the nation is built from the bottom-up. Writers, such as Woolf and Auden, while working for the BBC or the British government’s propaganda projects, were also deeply interested in the way individuals make up communities. In diverse ways, the texts I examine 2 turn to the strikingly visual and aural dimensions of other media and their implications on writing in order to raise questions about what England could become. This introduction will place my discussions of these authors in two large contexts: debates about the nation in the 1930s and 1940s and the significance of cross-media work during this period. The questions that drive my project are: in what ways does the notion of nation building matter in the 1930s and 1940s? In what ways do film, radio, and photography help writers articulate their anxieties about war and a post-imperial England? And what do these media say about shifting definitions of culture? Defining the Nation: Empire, World War II, and English Culture In A Shrinking Island, Jed Esty focuses on modernists, such as T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and E. M. Forster, and the way their works reveal a turn to culturalism in the 1930s.1 Esty rightly criticizes readings that equate the loss of empire with literary decline. Instead of evaluating aesthetically the “provincialism” of post-imperial writing, Esty traces an “anthropological turn” to Englishness: “Taken together, their [Eliot’s, Woolf’s, and Forster’s] works of the thirties and forties begin to deemphasize the redemptive agency of art, which, because of its social autonomization, operates unmoored from any given national sphere, and to promote instead the redemptive agency of culture, which is restricted by national or ethnolinguistic borders” (3). Esty argues that modernists, such as Woolf, who were rooted in cosmopolitan notions of art as experimentation, turned to examining the historical roots of a specifically English culture. Thus, Esty looks at Woolf’s Between the Acts and Eliot’s 1930s plays in terms of their interest in communalism and twentieth-century revivals of the pageant 3 play as a local English rite. Marina MacKay’s Modernism and World War II, too, looks at the particular ways in which modernists during the war turned away from the perceived inwardness of high modernism to more public modes of writing. MacKay brings to the foreground the wartime writing of modernist writers, which has often been read as inferior to their 1920s works. Like Esty, rather than evaluating the aesthetics of texts during this period, she looks at how modernism responded to changing social conditions. But where Esty focuses on the notion of culture, MacKay throws into relief the importance of war, the “primacy of the civilian experience” (6), and the way earlier modernist aesthetics paved the way for the more politically