Neohelicon (2016) 43:251–278 DOI 10.1007/s11059-015-0320-y Modernism and the antimodern in the ‘‘Men of 1914’’ Kevin Rulo1 Published online: 23 December 2015 Ó Akade´miai Kiado´, Budapest, Hungary 2015 Abstract The modernism of the ‘‘Men of 1914’’—that group of writers so named by Wyndham Lewis that includes himself, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce (and to which is added here T. E. Hulme as one in total continuity with its orien- tations)—has long posed a conceptual challenge in that an aesthetic praxis of radical experimentation prevails in their work, but alongside a socio-cultural positioning often thought to be ‘‘reactionary’’ in the extreme. There have been many attempts throughout the history of modernist studies at reconciling these two apparently contradictory tendencies, with varying results, none of which could be considered definitive. The present article seeks to bring to bear the theoretical model of the ‘‘antimodern’’ articulated by Antoine Compagnon in his study of post-Revolution French literary history as a framework for re-conceiving modernism’s relationship to modernity. Understanding the ‘‘Men of 1914’’ to be a manifestation in the Anglophone context of Compagnon’s ‘‘antimodern’’ enables us to see, without oversimplification or unnecessary politicization, how the modernist aesthetic of these authors, far from contradicting, actually follows from their socio-cultural attitudes. This analytical lens can also provide a richer account of the unity of the ‘‘Men of 1914’’ as an authentic literary group largely by demonstrating more pro- found connections (on this very question of modernity) between Joyce and the other members. Keywords Modernism Á Antimodern Á ‘‘Men of 1914’’ Á Compagnon Á Tradition Á Satire ‘‘How can we reconcile an experimental aesthetic with a politics of the extreme right?’’ (Patke 2013, p. 61). This question, posed by Rajeev S. Patke in his recent & Kevin Rulo [email protected] 1 The Catholic University of America, 620 Michigan Ave., Washington, DC 20064, USA 123 252 K. Rulo book Modernist Literature and Postcolonial Studies, has been asked by scholars of modernism many times before, a fact which suggests the difficulties that have been had in arriving at a satisfactory answer. Patke’s question—centered on the ‘‘seeming paradox’’ of ‘‘writing [that] is radical, experimental, and revolutionary’’ composed by authors with ‘‘views’’ that are ‘‘extremely conservative and reactionary’’ (2013, p. 60)—fits very well the identikit of the ‘‘Men of 1914,’’ that group so named by Wyndham Lewis that includes himself, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce (I add T. E. Hulme here as one close to the others both in terms of association and overall spirit).1 In general, answers have come in one of two variations. One possibility has been what I call, borrowing a turn of phrase from Shakespeare, the ‘‘mingled yarn’’ hypothesis, where two contrary phenomena—aesthetic leftism and cultural rightism—find themselves somehow yoked together, for some reason.2 Charles Ferrall’s study (2001) of ‘‘reactionary modernism’’ could be put in this category.3 Ferrall (2001) emphasizes how authors like Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Lawrence, and Lewis ‘‘combined a radical aesthetic modernity with an almost outright rejection of even the emancipatory aspects of bourgeois modernity’’ (pp. 9–13).4 The other possibility, not completely unrelated to the first, sees a much more 1 Lewis coined the term in his 1937 autobiographical work, Blasting and Bombardiering. Secondary literature on the ‘‘Men of 1914’’ is substantial, and expanding. See, among others, Symons (1987), Svarny (1988), Brown (1990), Scott (1995), Trotter (2001), Nicholls (2009), and Sicari (2011). 2 Much of the scholarship on the ‘‘Men of 1914’’ at least brushes up against these questions. A general progression can be discerned in the evolution of this scholarship from the radical side of the binary to the traditional. Once thought revolutionary, the ‘‘Men of 1914’’ are now often couched in terms of conservative social categories, mores, and attitudes, or as preservers of (masculine) tradition (Trotter 2001; Nicholls 2009). This view can be seen in Nicholls’s impressive guide (2009) when he notes, if only in passing, that for this ‘‘Men of 1914’’ modernism ‘‘the ‘new’ was a highly equivocal category, since cultural renovation was frequently projected as a return to the values of a previous age’’ (p. 163), and again when he writes that this type of modernism ‘‘issued a call to order in the name of values which were explicitly anti-modern, though it did so by developing literary forms which were overtly modernist’’ (p. 164). Exactly how the new is placed in the service of a return, or if it is truly a return or merely the ‘‘projection’’ of a return, is not directly pursued. The ‘‘antimodern’’ approach advocated for in the present essay conceives of these dynamics as decidedly not those of a return. As will be seen, the antimodern is an antimodern precisely by recognition of the impossibility of temporal reversals. For Sicari (2011), who deals less with the question of modernity as such, another layer of bifurcation is added to the mix diachronically with the positing in the larger oeuvres of the ‘‘Men’’ of an early 1920s blasting phase and a later phase of redemptive humanism (my argument here questions whether there might not be redemption in the blasting critique itself). 3 Also relevant to this category is a very interesting and worthwhile study by Louise Blakeney Williams (2002) arguing that Hulme, Yeats, Ford, and Pound were ‘‘radical conservatives’’ who ‘‘opposed democracy and wanted to return to a preferable system that existed in the past’’ (pp. 75–76). Although an important contribution to modernism’s views of history, Williams’s analysis fails to resolve the tensions at work in writers like Hulme. The idea of a radical conservatism expresses well the yoked polarity but her analysis leaves the matter just there (and again with the idea of a return prominent but largely unexplained in its relation to radical revolutionary aesthetic strategies). 4 Ferrall presents these modernists as charmed by fascism but yet different from it on the basis of their ‘‘assertion of aesthetic autonomy’’ (Ferrall 2001, p. 2). But if he is right that modernism rejects Enlightenment values, and if as he himself points out fascism seeks the collapse of those boundaries so central to the Enlightenment project, and if again modernism ultimately rejects fascism in favor of aesthetic autonomy, then to what extent are the ‘‘reactionary’’ politics of reactionary modernism compromised? That is, to what extent does ‘‘reactionary modernism’’ uphold the paradigm of modernity, the critique or rejection of which is supposed to be its defining characteristic? 123 Modernism and the antimodern in the ‘‘Men of 1914’’ 253 harmonious relationship between the writing and the views of modernist authors. For Frank Kermode (2000/1967), Hayden White (1999), and Roger Griffin (2007), this type of modernism’s supposed ‘‘totalitarian’’ inclinations are carried through in one way or another in aesthetic practice. According to Kermode (2000/1967), the ‘‘traditionalist modernism’’ of the ‘‘Men of 1914’’ is said to exhibit ‘‘totalitarian theories of form matched or reflected by totalitarian politics’’ (p. 108). The spatial, mythic aesthetic serves a proxy for Hitlerian fixations.5 While the ‘‘mingled yarn’’ approach falters in its accounting for the relationship between the reactionary and the revolutionary, ‘‘fascist modernism’’ runs the risk of conflating the two halves, with the result that what is conceived as reactionary and revolutionary seems no longer altogether intelligible.6 And just as important, as Gerald Gillespie and Virgil Nemoianu have labored to emphasize, such an approach fails also to consider the bare fact that the aesthetic of modernism has hardly been the sole property of the political right (Gillespie 2010, pp. 8–9; Nemoianu 2000, pp. 41–57). And if Patke’s own answer to the query on reconciling modernism with itself does take the complexity of modernism into account, sensitive as he is to its deep engagement with its own historical situation, his focus on aesthetics as ‘‘coping mechanisms’’ (2013, p. 74) for the culturally frustrated similarly leaves much unsaid about the nature of the duality and its more foundational interrelations.7 Laudable as such efforts are, useful as they are in illuminating various dimensions of modernist literature, they ultimately fall short of providing definitive conclusions about modernism’s unity (or lack thereof). The reason why may very well lie not in the analyses themselves, but rather in the deep structures of our intellectual frameworks. It may in fact be that we do not presently have at our disposal the thought categories necessary for capturing and comprehending what can appear to us now only as a kind of socio-aesthetic schizophrenia or internal self- 5 Griffin’s work (2007) is a much broader historical attempt at contextualizing modernism’s potential for fascism in a vast array of cultural activities, including politics. His reading of literary modernism, however, relies heavily on Kermode’s argument. These writers, Kermode (2000/1967) argues, ‘‘retreated into some paradigm, into a timeless and unreal vacuum from which all reality had been pumped’’ (p. 113). Their work is imbued with the ‘‘formal elegance of fascism’’ (p. 114). From a much different theoretical perspective, Hayden White (1999) comes to many of the same conclusions, arguing that the modernists’ experiments in form amounted to an escape from ‘‘historical reality’’ that enacted the politics of fascism on the aesthetic plane (p. 22). An understanding of our authors in light of the concept of the ‘‘antimodern’’ offers quite a different picture: not a modernism of aestheticist withdrawal but instead a modernism of critical engagement and genuine interest in the world. 6 The ‘‘reactionary’’ for a fascist reading ends up being mostly about an obsession for ‘‘order,’’ which seems a rather narrow definition for what is often meant in describing these authors as reactionary.